Carlos Caballero, “Mystics and Conquerors: Cioran and the History of Spain” (1988)

Provisional translation of “Mystiques et Conquérants: Cioran et l’histoire d’Espagne,” Punto y Coma 10 (1988). The present translation was made from Nicole Bruhwiler’s French version in Orientations 13 (1991) as it appears at http://www.archiveseroe.eu/. Quotations from Cioran are my own translations, and will therefore differ from Richard Howard’s authoritative versions. I have not located every quotation, and have left Caballero’s citations untouched.

PDF of this version:

https://www.academia.edu/43108599/Carlos_Caballero_Mystics_and_Conquerors_Cioran_and_the_History_of_Spain_1988_

Original:

http://planetcioran.blogspot.com/2006/10/mystiques-et-conqurants-cioran-et.html

http://www.archiveseroe.eu/cioran-a48271323

Section 18 of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

(I just found this little note I wrote in May 2019, when I was at university studying Nietzsche. B.T. 18 struck me as a germinal microcosm of much of F.N.’s mature philosophy—including his ideas on cultural-historical cycles, underplayed in Nietzsche scholarship, but a special interest of mine.)

“Voracious” creators fuel their activity with illusion, one of the three principal kinds, which correspond to types of society, themselves fuelled (?) by that type of illusion:

Kind: Illusion: Society
Apolline: Veil of beauty: Hellenic
Dionysiac: Undercurrent of “eternal life”: Indian
Socratic: Knowledge as salvation: Alexandrian

At the end of this Socratic cycle, we are in a time of Alexandrianism. Such a society requires a slave-caste to survive: the properly Socratic element is a flower of the culture, a luxury, and consequently fragile. Cf. F.N.’s essay “on the Greek State.”

There is a danger from below in the form of this slave caste grown discontent; and in this is the germ of his insights into resentment become fertile. This class “learn[s] to consider its existence an injustice,” the mere rhetoric of human rights (e.g.) having ceased to “console.”

There is a danger from above: elite disillusionment; critical philosophy; “the blight that lies dormant in the womb of theoretical culture.” The Alexandrian fears the consequences of his form of life and lacks his former confidence. No longer wanting “anything whole,” he doesn’t plunge but dithers on the shore: “at bottom a librarian or a corrector of proofs,” impotent.

But there is also a way onward and upward: a new “tragic man” of “proud audacity” who would live tragically, wean himself off the “art[s] of metaphysical consolation” and train himself for “seriousness and terror.”

Guillaume Faye, “Finishing with Western Civilisation” (1980)

My translation of Faye’s “Pour en finir avec la civilisation occidentale,” Éléments 34 (1980). This text distinguishes and advocates Europe (or Hesperia) over-against “the Western system.” The nouvelle droite-period Faye (before 1987), whom we see at work here, is quite different from the post-hiatus Faye (1998–2019) known to the Anglophone world. Note the apparently positive assessment of political Islam (p. 5) and the opposition to the identitarianism with which he came to be associated (pp. 6–7).

French original:

http://www.archiveseroe.eu/occident-a49054848

PDF of this translation:

https://www.academia.edu/42174979/Guillaume_Faye_Finishing_with_Western_Civilisation_1980_

Related texts on rival strains in European thought and deed:

https://ferguscullen.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-clash-of-world-conceptions.html (Faye)

https://ferguscullen.blogspot.com/2020/01/giorgio-locchi-nietzsches-rescuers-1972.html (Giorgio Locchi)

Guillaume Faye, “The Clash of World-conceptions” (1993)

My translation of Guillaume Faye’s “Le choc des conceptions du monde,” Vouloir 97–100 (January–March 1993). Faye was a political scientist associated for a time with Alain de Benoist and the semi-legendary nouvelle droite. As this interesting essay shows, Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s rereadings of the philosophical tradition made a great impression on his thought.

The original French text is available at Archives EROE:

http://www.archiveseroe.eu/hellade-a48655302

A PDF of this version is available here:

https://www.academia.edu/41616916/The_Clash_of_World-conceptions

Ezra Pound on France, Italy and Sacred Empire

More from the F.B.I. file on Pound. The Bureau’s translation of a wartime broadcast made in French, aimed at Vichy. I haven’t found the original document; but Feldman reproduces it.

Begins with an interesting statement of his Europeanism; collapses into the usual invective; then ends with “Rome was reborn. The Sacred Empire was reborn”; i.e., the empire of antiquity was reborn in the Holy Roman Empire; and the H.R.E. was reborn in Mussolini. More of Pound’s modernist Ghibellinism. So I think anyway.

Source: Matthew Feldman, “The ‘Pound Case’ in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview,” Journal of Modern Literature, 35.2 (winter, 2012), p. 93 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.35.2.83).

Related to Pound’s Ghibellinism:

Contributions by Guy Davenport and Boris de Rachewiltz to Eva Hesse (ed.), New Approaches to Ezra Pound (London, 1969);

Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Ezra Pound, the Last Ghibelline,” Journal of Modern Literature, 16.4 (Spring, 1990), pp. 511–533 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831417);

Robert Casillo, “Ezra Pound, L. A. Waddell, and the Aryan Tradition of ‘The Cantos,’” Modern Language Studies, 15.2 (Spring, 1985), pp. 65–81 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3194433).