Some Maxims and Missiles of Rivarol

A few “maxims and missiles,” or “pensées et paradoxes,” by the Comte de Rivarol, translated from Rivarol: avec une notice et une portrait (Paris: Mercure de France, 1906), pp. 351–9. For something similar, see “Selections from Vauvenargues” (this blog, 17 September 2020) and “Steps upon the Sand,” Azure Bell (20 October 2020).

Men are not as wicked as you say. Twenty years it took you to write a bad book; and but a moment it took them to forget it.

“You spoke a lot with some rather annoying men.” “I spoke for fear of listening.”

Golo Mann on the Conservative Revolution in Germany

Golo Mann’s discussion of the Conservative Revolution in The History of Germany since 1789 (Penguin, 1985) begins with Oswald Spengler, whose positions (anti-Hohenzollern, socialist, anti-progressive, militarist…), mark the beginning of a novel movement, “overthrowing conventional ways of thinking in politics.” For Mann, the C.R. is “confused,” a “strange combination of words,” and yet somehow, perfectly simple: Conservative Revolutionists “rejected not certain aspects of the Republic but the whole of it, and the whole present; they […] wanted to ask completely new questions and offer completely new ideas” (p. 620).

Their temperament was unsuited to parliamentarism or the new international order, though suited to poetry and the formation of groupuscules (pp. 620–1). Mann provides a perfect, lapidary, aphoristic précis of “the conservative-revolutionary attitude” (Mohler): “They wanted a new Reich without party squabbles, a Reich of the young and of masculine virtues, a great, proud gathering around a camp-fire instead of the capital Berlin. They expected much more from the modern state than it can give them at the best of times” (p. 621). Here we have their anti-parliamentarism, the spirit of the Freikorps (“the Ideas of 1914”), the bündisch spirit. And of course “the best of times,” measured by “quality of life,” which strikes them as the coming of the Last Man: see Leo Strauss on “German Nihilism” Interpretation, 26.3 (spring, 1999), specifically p. 360.

Kondylis on Conservatism with Notes on Conservative Revolution

Notes on Panagiotis Kondylis, “Conservatism as a Historical Phenomenon.” This is to my knowledge the only substantial excerpt from Kondylis’ Konservativismus (Stuttgart, 1986) available in English. The translation is by “C.F.” from “Ὁ συντηρητισμὸς ὡς ἱστορικὸ φαινόμενο,” Λεβιάθαν, 15 (1994), pp. 51–67, and remains unpublished, but discoverable in PDF format online. Page references below are to that PDF. I have altered the translation very slightly in some places.

Kondylis aims to understand conservatism not as a “historical” or “anthropological constant,” but as a “concrete historical phenomenon” bound to, and thus coterminous with, a time and a place (pp. 1–2). But even such historicist scholarship often takes too narrow a view, according to which conservatism is a reaction against, and thus “derivative” of, the Revolution, or, at best, against Enlightenment rationalism (pp. 2–3).

Stefan Breuer, Panagiotis Kondylis and the Question of “Conservative Revolution”

Alain de Benoist, “Intervista sulla rivoluzione conservatrice,” Terra Insubre (2007):

Stefan Breuer disputed that one can speak of “conservatism” or of “neo-conservatism” when it comes to the Conservative Revolution. He depended for this purpose upon the works of Panagiotis Kondylis, who, in a large work published in 1986, declared that conservatism, entering into an irreversible decline in the second half of the nineteenth century, was unable to rejuvenate itself in Germany on account of its historical links with the Ancien Régime. For Kondylis, the progressive elimination of the nobility, the caste that sustained historical conservatism, doomed political conservatism, which could not survive on its own, except by accommodating liberalism, or by “aestheticizing” certain of its foundations.

Selections from Vauvenargues

Clarity beautifies deep thoughts.

There are no errors that, rendered clearly, would not erase themselves.

That a thought is too feeble to bear simple expression is the sign to reject it.

Courage is better armed against disgrace than reason.

Reason and liberty are incompatible with weakness.

War is not as onerous as servitude.

Notes on Ezra Pound (3): Epic and/or Propaganda

1—Poetry and/or Propaganda

David Barnes, “Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy,” Journal of Modern Literature, 34.1 (autumn 2010), pp. 20–1:

For the purposes of this article, it suffices to say that there is some critical debate as to whether or not the two “Italian Cantos,” 72 and 73, represent an attempt at Fascist propagandizing by Pound. Patricia Cockram takes this view, seeing the Italian Cantos as esthetic [sic] failures on Pound’s part, driven by political and economic desperation (535). Bacigalupo, however, views these Cantos as both a return “to the ‘visionary’ structure attempted…in the ‘Three Cantos’ of 1917, and an anticipation of the autobiographical Pisan Cantos” (“The Poet at War” 71). Bacigalupo argues that the poems should not be seen as aberrations, but as crucial staging posts in the development of Pound’s writing.

Barnes’ references: Massimo Bacigalupo, “Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation,” Paideuma, 20 (1991), pp. 10–41; Patricia Cockram, “Collapse and Recall: Ezra Pound’s Italian Cantos,” Journal of Modern Literature, 23.3–4 (summer 2000), pp. 535–44.

Notes on Ezra Pound (2): “eternal war” and “Sagetrieb”

(My intention in the following is mainly to collect citations, drawing together a few threads through Pound’s Cantos on “the eternal war between light and mud.”)

 

1—Fango

In Canto 72, an “I” (Pound?), says to Marinetti’s unquiet spirit (who is eager to return to life and to war—“seule hygiène du monde”): “Lascia a me la parola. | Lascia a me ch’io mi spieghi, | ch’io faccia il canto della guerra eterna | Fra luce e fango” (which E.P. translates as “leave the talking to me. | And let me explain, | sing of the eternal war | between light and mud”).

The briefest of allusions at the incipit of Canto 87 suggests who the combatants in this eternal war are: “…between the usurer and any man who | wants to do a good job | (perenne).”

That this is indeed an allusion to the “guerra eterna” is confirmed in the following Canto 88, of which a passage begins, “Bellum perenne,” which goes on to cite a few significant dates (1694, 1750, 1878) in this apparently economic war. Then again a page later, in a very delicate epic allusion: “one, eight, seven, eight, | Mencius on tithing, | PERENNE. | Cano perenne.” “Arma virumque cano” (Aen., 1.1): eternal war, eternal song (see §3, infra).