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.”

Aleksandr Dugin, “Evola’s Conservative Revolution in Metaphysics” (1994)

My provisional translation of Dugin’s 1994 address to the Fondazione Julius Evola. These fifteen pithy theses expose the bare bones of Dugin’s reading of Evola. Dugin’s political preoccupations at the time are present in the emphasis on Evola’s “metaphysical leftism” and the possibility of an at once spiritual and political “third way” (as in terza posizione, etc.). Printed in Orion 9 (1994) in Italian. This translation was made from a French version in Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes 6 (1994).

Of Dugin’s trip to the West, the editor of N.S.E. reports that

In June of this year, Aleksandr Dugin visited France, Spain and Italy. Accosted by the police at the moment of his landing in Paris, Aleksandr Dugin was interrogated for three hours by the boorish rozzers, and was made to hand over issues of his journal, Elementy (so that he was subjected to censorship!), thereby depriving a number of official French institutions (the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, etc.), who had requested review copies, of these texts! Does the police have the right to prohibit researchers from accessing documentation? In Italy, he was received triumphantly at the Institute of International Relations in Milan, by General Jean at the Italian Ministry of National Defence, and by numerous cultural organisations. Our readers will appreciate the difference between a country governed by regular politicians, and a country governed by uncultured thugs, by boors and by scoundrels.

Armin Mohler, “Zeev Sternhell, New Historiographer of Fascism” (1986)

My translation of Armin Mohler’s “Zeev Sternhell, nouvel historiographe du fascisme,” from Généalogie du fascisme français (Geneva: Idhuna, 1986). Mohler gives an excellent review to Sternhell’s study of the birth of fascism out of French socialism and nationalism. Mohler finds in Sternhell a kindred spirit. Of particular interest is the “conceptual rhyme” between Sorel’s account of myth and Sternhell’s account (per Mohler) of historical realities.

French original:

http://www.archiveseroe.eu/sternhell-a48288056

PDF of this translation:

https://www.academia.edu/42202245/Armin_Mohler_Zeev_Sternhell_New_Historiographer_of_Fascism_1986_

Evola and Italian Philosophy, 1925–49: Three Biographical and Bibliographical Essays

The following essays all appeared in Vouloir 119–121 (1996), the supplement to the revue Orientations, edited by Robert Steuckers. They centre on Julius Evola’s relations with the two major figures of Italian philosophy in the interwar period.

In “Evola, ultime tabou?” (pp. 1–3), Gianfranco de Turris asks if the rehabilitation enjoyed by such philosophers as Giovanni Gentile, previously denounced as Fascist, might be afforded to Evola. He briefly sketches the case in his favour: unlike the marginal crank of post-War imagination, Evola seems to have maintained relations with such figures of the first rank as Gentile and Benedetto Croce. In “Gentile/Evola: une liaison ami/ennemi…” (pp. 3–5) Stefano Arcella examines Evola’s fertile collaboration with Gentile and Ugo Spirito on the Enciclopedia Italiana. And in “Quand Benedetto Croce ‘sponsorisait’ Evola” (pp. 5–7) Alessandro Barbera investigates the Croce connection, looking in some detail at the correspondence between Evola, Croce, and the publisher Laterza.

French originals:

1—http://www.archiveseroe.eu/evola-a48672110

2—http://www.archiveseroe.eu/gentile-a126198308

3—http://www.archiveseroe.eu/croce-a126196870

PDF of this translation:

https://www.academia.edu/42191919/Evola_and_Italian_Philosophy_1925-49_Three_Biographical_and_Bibliographical_Essays

Armin Mohler, “Homage to Oswald Spengler” (1982)

My translation of Mohler’s “Hommage à Oswald Spengler,” Orientations 1 (1982). Mohler presents Spengler as aligned with the Conservative Revolution, emphasising his Nietzschean aspects, and placing him in a tradition of implicitly anti-Platonist and “nominalist” thought (in Mohler’s special sense of the term).

French original:

http://www.archiveseroe.eu/spengler-a48363374

PDF of this translation:

https://www.academia.edu/42178159/Armin_Mohler_Homage_to_Oswald_Spengler_1982_

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)

Dominique Venner, “Julius Evola: Philosophy and Direct Action” (2008)

My translation of Dominique Venner’s short editorial, “Evola: Philosophie et action directe,” Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire 37 (2008). By 2008, Venner was known as an historian; but signs of a sympathy born of youthful activism (in French analogues of the Italian movements he describes) remain. The text is still a good introductory overview.

But the following texts go into greater depth:

Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World (Oxford: O.U.P., 2004), prologue, pp. 11–2; parts II.5, III.9 and IV.11.

Franco Ferraresi, “Les références théorico-doctrinales de la droite radicale en Italie,” Mots 12 (March 1986), pp. 7–27.

—, “Julius Evola: Tradition, Reaction and the Radical Right,” European Journal of Sociology 28, 1 (1987), pp. 107–51.

French original:

http://www.archiveseroe.eu/freda-a108281026

PDF of this version:

https://www.academia.edu/42160976/Dominique_Venner_Julius_Evola_Philosophy_and_Direct_Action_2008_