#antimoderne

[nunc2020]

Les antimodernes

[d-e-r-n-e-b-e-l]

🖤 🖤 🖤 🖤 🖤 . . . Chiaroscvro - Aux Confins . . . @domino_black_metal_cat 🖤 🐱 . . . #chiaroscvro #auxconfins #atmosphericblackmetal #blackmetal #frenchblackmetal #metal #rawblackmetal #death #solitude #antimodernism #afterlife #ombra #metalheadsofinstagram #metalhead #metalheads #instametal #stupormentis #cdcollector #cdcollection #metalcollector #metalcollection #musiccollection #musiccollector #recordcollector #recordcollection #blackmetalcat #cat #blackmetalmusic #blackmetalband #cdjunkie (à Strasbourg, France) https://www.instagram.com/p/Co4b0JDI1ew/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[b2krw3nsx]

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[sharpened--edges]

[M]odernity as a concept (or, in Raymond Williams’s sense, as a structure of feeling) has never attained complete security. Indeed, the contemporary cultural landscape is littered with antimodern protests and in particular with instances of ideological resistance to natural science and to the politics of 1789. Consider, on one educational level, the persistent campaigns against evolutionary biology in the public school curriculum, or, on a somewhat different educational level, the journalistic acclaim often granted to any treatment of the French Revolution that recycles neo-Burkean platitudes (for example, Simon Schama’s Citizens [1989]). Such attacks are generally made from the political right, as these examples suggest, though more complex variations on the antimodern thesis have sometimes been attempted from the left (by far the most powerful such attempt being Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment [1947], which identifies Auschwitz as the culminating and paradigmatic project of enlightened modernity). There would seem, then, to be something in the very nature of modernity with which the modern world is never completely comfortable, and which can hardly be satisfactorily explained as mere regressive nostalgia (as though the actual restoration of a Catholic feudal past were an even apparently viable option).

Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), p. 7.

[philoursmars]

Marseille, le MuCEM et sa nouvelle collection permanente (à mes yeux, bien plus intéressante et mieux présentée que la précédente…)

Suite (et fin ?)

statue de sorcier ou de guérisseur...aux pieds fourchus !, sans doute utilisée pour des rituels de désenvoûtement - Nivernais, 1900-50

"L'Homme- Eléphant du cirque Landri" - France, fin XIXe s.

vase - Calabre, avant 1970

Sainte Marguerite sortant indemne du Dragon - Pornichet, "Bretagne", XVIIe s.

culot - Poitou-Charentes, XIIe s.

bascule, Molla Nasreddin the Antimodern - Pologne, 2012 ; automate femme-chat - Belgique, 1890; sujet de manège, Sirène - Neustadt en der Orla, Allemagne, 1900

voir 1

[naipan]

Es entsetzt uns, dass Teile der radikalen und feministischen Linken nicht in der Lage sein wollen, Islamismus als das zu begreifen, was er ist: eine faschistische, antimoderne, patriarchale und imperialistische Ideologie, die jeder emanzipatorischen Kritik grundlegend gegenübersteht. Ihn zu relativieren oder gar zu verherrlichen heißt, sich mit Juden_Jüdinnen zu entsolidarisieren und ist zugleich eine Absage an die Solidarität mit jenen, die dieser Ideologie ausgesetzt sind: Kurd*innen, Jesid*innen, Afghan*innen, Iraner*innen und allen Muslim*innen, die sich nicht rigiden islamistischen Wertevorstellungen unterwerfen wollen.

We are horrified that parts of the radical and feminist left do not want to be able to understand Islamism for what it is: a fascist, anti-modern, patriarchal and imperialist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to any emancipatory criticism. To relativize or even glorify it means to lose solidarity with Jews and is at the same time a rejection of solidarity with those who are exposed to this ideology: Kurds, Yazidis, Afghans, Iranians and all Muslims who do not want to submit to rigid Islamist values.

[philippesollers]

Le divin Philippe Sollers

Par Alexandre Folman (La Revue des Deux Mondes)

MAI 18, 2023

Avec la disparition de Philippe Sollers survenue le 5 mai 2023, c’est une certaine idée de la littérature qui s’en va. Philippe Sollers y voyait une affaire  à prendre très au sérieux, même la plus importante qui soit.

Il tenait la littérature pour la plus secrète matrice de notre monde, celle qui transcende les contingences du présent et éclaire les mystérieuses ruelles escarpées et zigzagantes de l’esprit humain, forcément vénitiennes pour cet amoureux de la Sérénissime et du Tintoret. Sollers considérait que « l’existence est une illusion d’optique : la littérature est là pour la renverser. »Il avait compris mieux qu’un autre la valeur heuristique du roman. Elle l’habitait. Il y a consacré sa vie.

C’est-à-dire qu’il considérait vraiment la littérature comme le lieu de la vérité de l’être, au sens le plus heideggérien du terme qui soit, absolu, sans voile, tel qu’à lui-même. En ce sens, Sollers était donc déjà d’une certaine façon à lui tout seul un personnage de roman, parlant depuis et avec les livres.

En y repensant, c’est d’ailleurs l’impression fascinante qu’il pouvait donner parfois par son style extrêmement libre, d’une virtuosité constante dans son usage du langage. L’air madré et exégète, il semblait en permanence être détenteur d’ésotérismes jubilatoires ou d’apocryphes précieux. Il paraissait appartenir à un infra monde et arpenter ses lignes de force en voyageur du temps.

Joueur et rieur, il aimait les masques

Sollers naquit Joyaux, ça ne s’invente pas.Il incarna cinquante ans durant, en tant qu’écrivain et éditeur, la figure radicalement solaire de l’homme de lettres germanopratin, érudit en diable et à l’élan vital débordant. Deux traits de caractère foncièrement imbriqués pour celui qui s’était choisi pour pseudonyme quasi homophonique « tout entier art » en latin. Cela annonçait donc la couleur : chatoyante et intelligente, celle d’Éros et d’Hermès, des Lumières étincelantes du XVIIIe sa seconde patrie. Sollers ou le perpétuel hymne à la joie, donc Mozart. Sollers ou le gai savoir, donc Nietzsche. Et tant d’autres : Dante, Voltaire, Casanova. Joueur et rieur, il aimait les masques et être où on ne l’attendait pas.

Cela avait démarré avec ses deux improbables parrains à tout juste 20 ans, et pas des moindres, Mauriac et Aragon, pour Une curieuse solitude, premier roman qui marqua son entrée en littérature. L’Église et le Parti. Sollers d’emblée Janus, tout à tour maoïste puis ultramontain. Brouiller les pistes, toujours. L’art de la dissimulation, de l’esquive, du clair-obscur était chez ce lecteur averti des Jésuites, une seconde nature. Sa profession de foi. La guerre de Sollers, celle du goût comme il l’avait nommée, se voulait souterraine et subversive, à la fois patiente à travers l’édition dont il fut le condottiere au Seuil puis à « la Banque centrale » Gallimard, soudainement éclatante et gentiment machiavélique à travers les médias dont il fut l’enfant chéri (Apostrophes, Le Monde des Livres).

Mais une guerre qui était aussi et surtout exigeante. Sollers a été un véritable stakhanoviste. Et pour cette raison, son œuvre restera. Il a publié et fait publier plusieurs centaines de livres. Il y eut bien sûr aussi les revues, fondamentales. D’abord Tel Quel avec Jean-Edern Hallier au Seuil. Haut lieu expérimental de rencontre entre l’avant-garde et les classiques qui fédéra notamment Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Francis Ponge. L’époque qui s’y reflétait était au maoïsme, à la psychanalyse et au structuralisme. Puis vint L’Infini chez Gallimard avec ce même souci d’exploration esthétique, frondeur et précurseur au risque de fréquenter les infréquentable. La moraline ce n’était pas le genre de Sollers. Il eut le courage de regarder en face certains astres noirs de la littérature, qu’il s’agisse de Céline, de Sade, d’Artaud, de Bataille et d’autres antimodernes. Certainement pour mieux voir le monde ? Pari réussi.

Sollers fut à lui seul le centre de gravité de la vie littéraire et des idées des cinquante dernières années. Ce n’est pas rien et ce n’est pas si fréquent. Vite, la Pléiade pour le divin Sollers !

[ribbitrrrbitxhs]

access to higher education is so limited in america so I'm gonna make a google drive full of the resources I'm given at my university I still have access to. For what I no longer have access to, I'll just post a list of books, articles, poems, ect from the course. Granted it's gonna be a lot of political theory and history but like its some cool stuff.

starting off,

A Brief History of Fascist Lies by Federico Finchelstein (my actual professor. this book is fantastic)

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin Burrows

No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 by T.J. Jackson Lears

City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 by Timothy Gilfoyle (literally so fascinating)

Myth and Thought among the Greeks by Jean-Pierre Vernant

Mortals and immortals by Vernant

Moon, Sun and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru by Irene Silverblatt

Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York by M.H. Dunlop

Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City by Carla Peterson

[shape]

Wenn man eine Antimoderne mit modernen Mitteln erwirken will, dann ist man bei der Hamas, sagt Leon Kahane Foto: Piotr Pietrus

>> [...] Das Problem fängt dann an, wenn die Widersprüche der Welt, in die wir auch alle selbst verstrickt sind, simplizistisch gelöst und externalisiert werden. Das ist ein typischer Moment, wo der Antisemitismus sich bis zur Gewalt richtig entfesselt, denn Antisemitismus ist eine Kulturtechnik. Auf dem Banner von Taring Padi war dann der Jude der Urheber alles Bösen. Er steht noch hinter dem Teufel und manipuliert ihn.

Wie verbreitet ist dieses Weltbild in der Kunst?

Wir sehen einen enormen Zuwachs an essentialistischer, identitärer Kunst. Oft wird das Indigene zum Gegenstand von Projektionen. Das geht einher mit der Überhöhung einer Idee von Ursprünglichkeit und Authentizität. Sehr viel wird über die Kategorie des „Volks“ verhandelt. Anstelle des Individuums tritt das Kollektiv: Wir sind, was wir sind, und das ist ungebrochen und unhinterfragbar. Ich glaube, das ist das, was gerade Deutsche attraktiv finden am Postkolonialismus, weil sie sozusagen ein Verantwortungsverhältnis nach außen verschieben.

Gerade im Kulturbetrieb kam es aber auch zu einer vermehrten Aufarbeitung der Kolonialgeschichte, der Hinterfragung der Provenienz von Ausstellungsstücken.

Ja, richtig so! Aber warum leitet sich daraus die Idee, die Überzeugung ab, man müsse den Holocaust in die Gewalttradition des Kolonialismus stellen?

Was meint das?

Dass Deutschland mit der Aufarbeitung des Holocaust einen zu eingeschränkten, „provinziellen“ Blick habe. Nun: Deutschland muss in der Aufarbeitung seiner Kolonialverbrechen einiges nachholen. Aber es gibt darüber hinaus die Forderung, den Holocaust nicht mehr als präzedenzloses Menschheitsverbrechen zu sehen, sondern als einen Genozid von vielen. So wie Antisemitismus dann auch zu einer Spielart des Rassismus erklärt wird. Da steht Auschwitz dann neben empörend falscher Migrationspolitik und neben dem Krieg in Gaza. In dieser Logik wird Geschichte umgeschrieben. Wie sich das auf die Gegenwart und sie Zukunft auswirkt, können wir gerade live miterleben. <<

[nicklloydnow]

“This indestructible youth lived another eighty years, outlasting both the Weimar Republic, which he loudly opposed, and the Nazi regime, which he quietly disdained. Germany was split in two, then reunified; Jünger was still there. By the time he died, in 1998, at the age of a hundred and two, he had found a tenuous, solitary place in the German canon. He published more than a dozen volumes of empirically acute but emotionally distant diaries, starting in 1920 with “In Storms of Steel.” He wrote sci-fi-inflected novels, fashioning allegories of the terror state and spinning out prophecies of future technology. And he produced far-right political tracts that have inspired several generations of fascist rhapsodists, antimodern elegists, and élitist libertarians. (Peter Thiel is a fan.) All of this was filtered through a terse, chiselled literary voice—coolly handsome, like the man himself.

The four-year orgy of violence from which Jünger emerged mysteriously intact grants him unimpeachable authority on the subject of war; when he inserts scenes of stomach-churning gore into his fiction, he is not relying on fantasy. Recent reporting on the desperate mind-set of soldiers in Ukraine gives his diaries a haunting currency. At the same time, his mask of insouciance—he was indeed reading “Tristram Shandy” just before a bullet tore through him—makes him an infuriatingly detached witness to the suffering of others. One notorious passage in his journals evokes an Allied air raid on German-occupied Paris, in May, 1944: “I held in my hand a glass of burgundy in which strawberries were floating. The city, with its red towers and domes, was laid out in stupendous beauty, like a calyx overflown by deadly pollination.”

(…) Jünger’s writing gives off an odor of hypermasculine onanism; there are almost no women, and there is almost no sex. Among his more grating qualities is an inability to admit his mistakes: the steely aesthete is also a chameleon, adjusting his positions to the latest political circumstances. But that shiftiness exposes a weaker, more vulnerable figure—and also a more interesting one. His stories generally do not tell of war heroes; rather, they dwell on ambivalent functionaries and complicit observers. We like to think that novelists possess a special ethical strength, yet the morally compromised writer can project a strange kind of honesty—especially when his society is compromised to the same degree.

(…)

The German scholar Helmuth Kiesel, in his 2007 biography of Jünger, observes that the nineteen-year-old soldier exhibited few signs of gung-ho patriotism. His original war diaries, which Kiesel has edited for Klett-Cotta, give a clinical picture of the chaos of battle and the omnipresence of death. When Jünger arrives at the front, at the beginning of 1915, he takes in the destroyed houses, the wasted fields, the rusted harvesting machines, and writes that they add up to a “sad sight.” Later, he asks, “When will this Scheisskrieg”—“shit war”—“have an end?”

Jünger could have gathered these entries into a blistering denunciation of war, preëmpting Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.” But he had convinced himself that the Scheisskrieg had a higher meaning. As he prepared “In Storms of Steel” for publication, he threw in all manner of sub-Nietzschean soliloquizing and militarist posturing. Senseless brutality was recast as a salutary hardening of the soul. The Scheisskrieg remark was cut, and passages like this set the tone: “In these men there lived an element that underscored the savagery of war while also spiritualizing it: the matter-of-fact joy in danger, the chivalrous urge to fight. Over the course of four years the fire forged an ever purer, ever bolder warriorhood.”

(…)

Nevertheless, Jünger stopped short of direct involvement with the Hitler movement. In his eyes, the Nazis were idiot vulgarians, useful mainly as cannon fodder in the wider assault on democracy. Antisemitism surfaces in his writings, yet Nazi race theory held no interest for him. As Kiesel points out, Jünger rejected the stab-in-the-back legend that blamed Germany’s collapse in 1918 on the skullduggery of leftist, Jewish politicians; he readily admitted that his country had lost to superior forces. You could classify him as a cosmopolitan fascist, one who saw war as essential to the development of any national culture. All the bloodshed served no real political purpose; its ultimate virtue lay in making men into supermen. During the First World War, Jünger had enjoyed occasional courtly chats with English officers, whom he considered equals.

In the mid-twenties, intermediaries sought to arrange a meeting between Jünger and Hitler. Autographed books were exchanged, but no personal encounter took place, apparently for scheduling reasons. Jünger proceeded to browse among extremist alternatives, taking particular interest in Ernst Niekisch’s National Bolshevism. In the essay “Total Mobilization” (1930) and in the treatise “The Worker” (1932), Jünger envisions a fully mechanized totalitarian state in which workers serve as soldierly machines. Spurning the bourgeois ideal of individual liberty, he proposes that “freedom and obedience are identical.” The concept aligns with the anti-liberal thought of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, both of whom were devoted Jünger readers.

Impeccably fascistic as all this was, the Nazis could not accept any hint of Bolshevism. Furthermore, Jünger had begun ridiculing the Party for its hypocritical participation in the democratic process and for its reliance on gutter antisemitism. Goebbels, who had praised “In Storms of Steel” as the “gospel of war,” now labelled Jünger’s writing “literature”—in his mind, a grave insult. When the Nazis came to power, in 1933, Jünger backed away from public life, refused all official invitations, and buried himself in, yes, literature. In the late twenties, he had published a volume of short prose pieces, titled “The Adventurous Heart,” in which bellicosity still prevailed. In 1938, he issued a drastically revised version of that book, now offering a curious mixture of nature sketches, literary meditations, and dream narratives.

Jünger was a lifelong Francophile, and the revised “Adventurous Heart” is drenched in the decadent visions of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans, and Mirbeau. (…)

“Violet Endives” is manifestly ironic—but toward what end? It depicts a society that accepts ghastly events without comment, or with only the twitch of an eyebrow. The narrator himself makes no protest, even if he conveys to us his private unease. His closing remark carries a tinge of arch critique, yet the salesman is free to ignore it. We see the emergence of the mature Jüngerian hero: outwardly bemused, inwardly fearful, terminally uninvolved. This macabre little tale captures in miniature the strategies of rationalization and normalization that make up the banality of evil. As it happens, Hannah Arendt read Jünger closely, and credited him with helping to inspire her most celebrated concept.

(…)

When the Second World War began, Jünger did not exactly disavow the company of the “triumphant and servile.” Resuming military service at the rank of captain, he went to Paris and joined the staff of Otto von Stülpnagel, the general in command of Occupied France. One of Jünger’s duties was to censor mail, although he proved ineffectual at the task, quietly disposing of letters that contained negative remarks about the regime. He also monitored local artists and intellectuals. Picasso inquired about the “real landscape” of “On the Marble Cliffs.” Cocteau, who called Jünger a “silver fox,” gave him a book about opium. Louis-Ferdinand Céline wanted to know why Germans weren’t killing more Jews. Jünger spent his off hours visiting museums, browsing bookstalls, and romancing a Jewish pediatrician named Sophie Ravoux. His wife, Gretha, was back in Germany with their two sons.

Jünger’s Second World War journals were published in 1949, under the peculiar title “Strahlungen,” or “Emanations.” (Thomas and Abby Hansen have translated them into English as “A German Officer in Occupied Paris,” for Columbia University Press.) These diaries are the most stupefying documents in a stupefying œuvre. The episode in which Jünger watches a bombing raid while sipping burgundy has been so widely cited that German critics have given it a name: die Burgunderszene. No less dumbfounding is a passage that recounts, in obscene detail, the execution of a Wehrmacht deserter. Jünger was assigned to lead the proceedings, and, he tells us, he thought of calling in sick. He then rationalizes his participation as a way of insuring that the deed is done humanely. Finally, he admits to feeling morbid curiosity: “I have seen many people die, but never at a predetermined moment.”

(…)

“Emanations” is not all heartless stylization. The book records Jünger’s dawning realization that a new kind of evil had permeated Nazi Germany. (He refers to Hitler by the code word Kniébolo—apparently, a play on “Diabolo.”) When he sees a Jew wearing a yellow star, he is “embarrassed to be in uniform.” When he hears of deportations of Jews, he writes, “Never for a moment may I forget that I am surrounded by unfortunate people who endure the greatest suffering.” And, when precise reports of mass killings in the East reach him, he is “overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much.” Even if none of this is remotely adequate to the reality of the Holocaust—stop everything, Ernst Jünger is embarrassed!—it does show traces of remorse. The émigré writer Joseph Breitbach reported that Jünger had warned Jews of imminent deportations.

Jünger’s façade of disinterest eventually collapsed. In early 1944, his older son, Ernstel, was arrested for saying that Hitler should be hanged. Jünger pulled strings to have him released. Later that year, Ernstel turned eighteen and joined the Army. He died in action in November, 1944, in Italy. For years, Jünger was haunted by the thought that the S.S. had punished him by having his son killed. (There is no evidence that this was so, but the idea was not irrational.) The entries that follow Ernstel’s death are wrenching, although anyone waiting for a grand moral epiphany will be disappointed. It takes a certain kind of grieving father to write, “We stand like cliffs in the silent surf of eternity.”

The second half of Jünger’s immense life was calmer than the first. In West Germany, the ultra-militarist reinvented himself as an almost respectable, and avowedly apolitical, figure. From 1950 on, he lived in Wilflingen, in southern Germany, occupying houses that were lent to him by a distant cousin of Claus von Stauffenberg’s. He kept up his entomological pursuits, building a museum-worthy library of specimens. He dabbled in astrology, explored the occult, and took LSD under the tutelage of Albert Hofmann, who discovered the drug. Telos Press recently published Thomas Friese’s translation of “Approaches,” Jünger’s 1970 drug memoir. His stories of getting high are just as tedious as everyone else’s, but they include unexpected touches, such as quotations from “Soul on Ice,” the autobiography of Eldridge Cleaver.

For many critics, this elder-hipster pose made Jünger all the more dangerous. Although he had retreated from his high-fascist phase, he had not renounced it, and his skepticism toward democracy never wavered. When, in 1982, he received the Goethe Prize, one of Germany’s highest literary honors, left-wing politicians staged furious protests. Helmut Kohl, a Jünger admirer, had just become chancellor, and the veneration of a martial icon was seen as a sign of political regression. Indeed, a stealthily resurgent far-right faction hailed Jünger as a forebear—attention that he did not always welcome. Armin Mohler, a founder of the so-called New Right, served for several years as Jünger’s secretary, but when Mohler criticized his mentor for concealing his archconservative roots Jünger broke off contact for many years.

There is no such thing as an apolitical artist, Thomas Mann once said. The postwar Jünger adhered to a philosophy of radical individualism, which ostensibly bars ideological commitments. In his novel “Eumeswil” (1977), he theorizes a figure called the Anarch, who rejects the state yet also takes no action against it. The book’s narrator, a crafty fixer in service to a tyrant, articulates the ethos: “I am in need of authority, even if I am not a believer in authority.” This is a feeble form of opposition, bordering on the nonexistent, and it is pitted against a generalized conception of the state that elides the huge systemic differences between, say, a republic and a dictatorship. Social-democratic programs are equated with totalitarian control. You can understand Jünger’s appeal to the modern right when you read him complaining, in the 1951 treatise “The Forest Passage,” about liberal health policy: “Is there any real gain in the world of insurance, vaccinations, scrupulous hygiene, and a high average age?” Somehow, Jünger’s fiction avoids being trapped by the poverty of his political thinking. So profound is this writer’s detachment that he manages to remain aloof from his own beliefs.

(…)

Underneath the carapace of Jünger’s writing was an obscurely damaged man. Even before he entered into the torture chamber of the First World War, he had undergone a kind of psychic dissociation, perhaps related to bullying he had suffered as a boy. He wrote of his childhood, “I had invented a mode of indifference that connected me, like a spider, to reality only by an invisible thread.” According to the literary scholar Andreas Huyssen, Jünger was always trying to compensate for the fragility of his own body—to “equip it with an impenetrable armor protecting it against the memory of the traumatic experience of the trenches.”

The Second World War inflicted a different wound, one that cut deeper. The leaders of the plot against Hitler were nationalist conservatives, often fanatically so. The author of “In Storms of Steel” was a hero to them. Jünger’s inability to support their cause, and thereby live up to his own legend, troubled him for the remainder of his life. In “Heliopolis,” Lucius leads a commando raid against a murderous medical institute that recalls Josef Mengele’s laboratory at Auschwitz. The scene reads like a fantasy of what Jünger might have done if he had joined Stauffenberg, Trott zu Solz, and company. Lucius presses a button and the facility goes up in flames: “Dr. Mertens’s highbrow flaying-hut had exploded into atoms and dissolved like a bad dream.”

In “The Glass Bees,” that self-serving fantasy is revoked. As a soldier, Captain Richard witnessed Nazi-like abominations, including a human butcher shop—a nod to the gourmet cannibalism of “Violent Endives.” Yet, when Zapparoni lures him back into the zone of horror, he capitulates. Not only does he need authority; he makes himself believe in it. Zapparoni, he claims, “had captivated the children: they dreamed of him. Behind the fireworks of propaganda, the eulogies of paid scribes, something else existed. Even as a charlatan he was great.”

Jünger described Hitler in similar terms, as a “dreamcatcher,” a malign magician. What might have happened if the two men had come face to face? In a 1946 diary entry, Jünger assures himself that a meeting with Hitler “would presumably have had no particular result.” But he has second thoughts: “Surely it would have brought misfortune.” The ending of “The Glass Bees” may be an imagining of that disaster. As such, it would be Jünger’s most honest confession of failure. When the great test of his life arrived, the warrior-aesthete proved gutless.”

“Could he have moved in another direction? He was an elegant dandy, a ladykiller, a man who could display acute sensibility and lucidity (notwithstanding his obtuseness in large areas), a penetrating observer of human conduct, especially his own. As a schoolboy of fifteen he had spent some time in England, where he was swept off his feet by Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero-Worship. Indeed, he knew English and English literature well: he translated D. H. Lawrence; he was friendly with Aldous Huxley and wrote about his work. Notoriously, he always followed English sartorial taste. Moreover, he had served as an interpreter with the United States Expeditionary Force in 1917. In contrast, he was not well versed in German.

Drieu went on to Moscow from Germany. It did not take him long to see through the bureaucracy, militarism, and uncontrolled despotism of the Soviet police state. He wondered how French liberal intellectuals could ignore Stalin’s “Asiatic dogmatism,” and he called them guilty men. Here they were, face to face with a flesh and blood hangman, and they worried about “the specter of Fascism,” as he called it. Why did he not realize that his own choice was equally ghastly? As the Latin has it: those whom a god wishes to destroy, he first makes mad. Many reasons have been adduced for this kind of blinkered selective judgment, including self-conceit and weakness, rationalism and anti-rationalism, the desire to be modern and hatred of modernism.

One important element in Drieu was an aesthetic and moral current of emotional responses and notions concerning the decay and death of civilization. This current flows broadly from the nineteenth century, from Carlyle and Nietzsche, to name two of the equivocal forebears deeply admired by Drieu. Moreover, the modern mechanistic forms of destruction employed to such terrible effect in the holocaust of the 1914-18 War, in which he was wounded, left an indelible imprint on Drieu’s sensibility. Surprising as it seems today, Drieu—just like Henry de Montherlant, another exponent of wartime heroism and comradeship—came and went at the Front more or less as it suited him.

The destructive power of the new machinery of war only confirmed in Drieu, as in so many others, the sense that a sick civilization had reached its end. Something new, “a new man,” vital, healthy, strong, heroic, had to be created. The new must necessarily be superior to the old, and certainly it would not be found in outworn liberal parliamentary democracy but in some form of totalitarian regime. For totalitarianism was “the new fact” of the twentieth century, as Drieu was to define it. Even when, under the German Occupation, he finally came to grow disillusioned with Hitler, realizing at last that the Führer had no intention of fostering principles of Fascist “renewal” in France, Drieu’s thoughts would tend to Communism rather than to General de Gaulle.

(…)

Drieu’s response to Hitler’s masterly manipulation of politico-theatrical spectacle was thus rooted not only in the adoration of power and virile health and strength but also in a form of joyous aestheticism. His political commitment to Fascism, to the Parti Populaire Français led by the former Communist working-class demagogue Jacques Doriot (with whom Drieu became disillusioned when he discovered that Doriot was being subsidized by Mussolini), and his later collaboration with the Nazis during the Occupation—these were as much aesthetic as ideological in inspiration. Paul Sérant, in his invaluable study Le Romantisme fasciste, pointed to the aesthetic element in commitment to Fascism. It is an aspect that is often overlooked.

Ever since the serious revival of Drieu’s work and literary reputation in the 1960s, a number of French critics have sought to exonerate him or, at the least, to play down his political “errors.” They have concentrated instead upon his artistic merits and upon his value as an essential witness of his era. A kind of Olympian literary or cultural attitude that only the French seem to be able to carry off with aplomb comes into play here. Besides, the fact that Drieu committed suicide in 1945, after several unsuccessful attempts to do so, has endowed him with the legendary aura of the tragically self-destructive, misunderstood artist, an aura that once fascinated Alfred de Vigny in the young poet Chatterton, and that has continued to exert its spell ever since.

(…)

The sad fact remains that Drieu’s “aesthetic vision” cannot really be separated from his political commitment: the two elements were interconnected and became in- extricably fused. Very loosely, there would appear to be at least two periods in Drieu’s political development, although he was always deeply influenced by thinkers on the Right, by “the anti-Modern, from [Joseph] de Maistre to Péguy,” as he once expressed it, by opponents of capitalism and of liberal parliamentary democracy. One period falls before the notorious right-wing riots of February 6, 1934, which almost overthrew the Third Republic; and the other after that watershed, when he announced that he was a Fascist.

(…)

In the important 1942 preface to his novel Gilles, replying to his critics, Drieu declared: “They did not take the trouble to see the unity of views beneath the diversity of means of expression, chiefly between my novels and my political essays.” He went on: “Some artists think that I have been too concerned with politics in my work and my life. But I have been concerned with everything and with that [politics] also. A great deal of that, because there is a great deal of that in the life of men, at all times, and because all the rest is tied to that.” Despite the clumsily chatty tone, what could be clearer? Professor Reck would have us believe that Drieu cared about art, literature, Paris, and politics “in that order.” He himself contradicts her in the preface to Gilles.

Certainly, there was a time when Drieu put literature first, but it did not endure. If it had, his story might possibly be an entirely different one. As with his politics so with his art, there are very roughly two periods in Drieu’s development. From an aesthetic point of view, the division falls around 1925-29, when he broke with Surrealism, the chief avant-garde literary and artistic movement of the interwar years.

What is his real criticism of the Surrealists in the three open letters addressed to them that he published in 1925, 1927, and 1929? It is that they have become salon revolutionaries who think that dreams and violent words are the same thing as revolutionary action. Worse still, they have deceived him personally by their commitment to Communism. “Surrealism was revelation—not revolution,” he insisted. Wrongly, the Surrealists have abandoned art and artistic independence for politics. How ironic it now seems: at that moment Drieu loudly proclaimed that an intellectual should not join a party. Emmanuel Berl, in his Mort de la Pensée Bourgeoise (1929), favoring the revolutionary stance of Malraux, saw Drieu’s solution then as an endorsement of the theory of art for art’s sake.

(…)

According to Professor Reck, the word “decadence” has fostered a great deal of misguided critical commentary on Drieu’s work. There is, however, no avoiding it, for the idea of decadence is central to both his artistic and his political outlook. He was obsessed by decadence, dreaded it, saw it everywhere, both outside and inside himself. As Frédéric Grover, the distinguished authority on Drieu, once pointed out: Drieu denounced the horror of contemporary civilization, finding decadence in every human activity: religion, art, sex, war, and government. For Drieu, all forms of decadence merge in sexual decadence. This was a theme on which he was an expert, through his two unsuccessful marriages to wealthy young women; his various plans to marry heiresses; his numerous mistresses, including the wife of a United States diplomat; and, throughout his life, his unbroken association with prostitutes.

(…)

What Drieu hated, besides the decadence he acknowledged in himself, was the decadence of others: the supposed materialistic outlook of Americans; the mediocre aspirations of the inferior bourgeoisie; democracy (which favored the mindless herd and, especially, the Jews); the utilitarianism of modern industrial society founded on money instead of on religious faith and on the human relationships that had supposedly prevailed in the agricultural society of the Middle Ages. Drieu was always harping on the virtues of the Middle Ages, boring Victoria Ocampo on this theme, virtues extolled by Carlyle and others. It is curious that admirers of the relations between nobleman and serf always seem to have imagined themselves as aristocrats rather than in the place of those whose existence was nasty, brutish, and short. In fine, Drieu was haunted by decadence as an aesthetic, moral, and political “fact” after the manner of his master, Nietzsche, who confessed to being more concerned with this problem than with any other.

It would be difficult to overstate the theme of decadence in the ethos of writers up to 1945: Drieu was simply an extreme example of its deleterious effects. What nobody seems to have asked—presumably because they were blinded by the metaphor of decadence and by the myth of social health and heroism—was “Who profits from this notion?” Today, it seems only too clear that ideologists of the extreme Left and Right used it and gained immensely from it, by ceaselessly repeating the refrain of the decay of Western civilization and pillorying its values. For Drieu, nothing remained for the individual but to try to create something new “in order not to die.” Having rejected various forms of “renewal” on offer, including the royalism of Charles Maurras and Soviet Communism (because he said he could never be a materialist), he threw himself into Fascism. Why did the solution have to be one of this extreme nature? It was because, in the face of nothingness and decay, totalitarianism appeared to him to be “the new fact” of the twentieth century.

The pressure of left- and right-wing propaganda about bourgeois decadence and the decay of corrupt democratic regimes (hardly contradicted in France by the scandals of the 1930s) impelled Drieu toward political commitment, despite his early advocacy of artistic independence. In his third letter to the Surrealists, he said that he had been accused of “not liking to commit myself.” The more uncertain he was, the more he felt the need for political commitment. Toward the end of his life he said that he settled for an answer in order to stop vacillating. “To live is first of all to commit oneself,” thinks Gilles, who wants to dirty his hands along with the rest of humanity. Drieu even spoke of “the fall into a political destiny” in Socialisme Fasciste. In October 1937, he explained to Victoria Ocampo how “From the moment that I am not a ‘Communist,’ that I am an anti-Communist, I am a Fascist. From the moment I bring grist to the mill of Fascism, I might just as well do it unreservedly.” Not long before he took his own life, he wrote of his regrets: “But I was set on committing myself, more than anything I was afraid of being an intellectual in his ivory tower.” Doubtless, he was far from alone in dreading such a fate. It is not difficult to see how much Sartre learned from Drieu, despite his deep loathing of the man and his actions.

(…)

Drieu wrote out of what was negative in himself. He recognized what he called in Franglais his penchant for “self-dénigrement,” and his masochism. In a remarkable discussion about Drieu with Frédéric Grover in 1959 (published in La Revue des Lettres Modernes in 1972), André Malraux spoke of this tendency in his friend. According to Malraux, Drieu was far from being the negative personage he projected in his writings. On the contrary, claimed Malraux, he dominated any gathering of leading intellectuals by his “astonishing presence” and charisma. It would seem to be essential to any discussion of Drieu’s work and attitudes to try to embrace his psychological make-up and its effect on his precarious balancing act between dreams, art, and action.

(…)

Drieu’s argument in that essay is not peculiar to his concept of pictorial art: it is, in essence, quite familiar from other writings of his about general modern decay, including his articles on circus, music hall, and theater, explored by Professor Reck. Up to 1750, Drieu asserts, man is still a solid being, as depicted by Watteau. Indeed, Drieu even finds assurance in Watteau, one of the most mysterious and enigmatic of eighteenth-century painters. What vigor, health, certainty, equilibrium, are to be found in Watteau’s Gilles! exclaims Drieu, who invites us to compare this figure with the man of 1830, completely ravaged by the rationalism of the Enlightenment and all its attendant ills. The mysticism of the Middle Ages (Drieu’s King Charles’s head or, as the French say, Ingres’s violin) has not entirely departed from Watteau’s Gilles, who still shows signs of a virility that was soon to depart. In short, Drieu’s account of Watteau’s painting cannot be separated from his views on universal modern decadence, views which lie at the core of his political stance also.

(…)

If there is a connection to be made between literary and painterly techniques—and so far I am not convinced that there is—it would have to be examined with the most scrupulous tact, with strict reference to the available evidence (and no straying beyond it), evidence considered in relation to the writer’s imagination and mental outlook as a whole. Drieu stressed the unity of his work, and there is no reason to doubt his own word in this regard. Whatever one may think of him as a human being or as a talent, he is so candid a representative of the negative and nihilistic aspects of his age that he merits no less than critical rigor tempered with justice.”

[catenaaurea]

If I am anti-modern, it is certainly not out of personal inclination, but because the spirit of all modern things that have proceeded from the anti-Christian revolution compels me to be so, because it itself makes opposition to the human inheritance its own distinctive characteristic, because it hates and despises the past and worships itself and because I hate and despise that hatred and contempt and that spiritual impurity; but if it be a question of preserving and assimilating all the riches of being accumulated in modern times and sympathizing with the effort of the seekers after truth and desiring renovations, then there is nothing I desire more than to be ultra-modern. And in truth do not Christians implore the Holy Ghost to renew the face of the earth? Are they not expecting the life of the age to come? There will be novelties then and for everybody. I admire the art of the Cathedrals and Giotto and Angelico. But I loathe neo-Gothic and pre-Raphaelitism. I am well aware that the course of time is irreversible; in spite of the great admiration I feel for the age of St. Louis, I do not therefore want to go back to the Middle Ages, according to the ridiculous desire generously attributed to me by certain penetrating critics; my hope is to see restored in a new world, and informing a new matter, the spiritual principles and eternal laws of which the civilization of the Middle Ages, in its best periods, offers us only a particular historic realization of a superior quality, in spite of its enormous deficiencies, but definitively over and done with.

Jacque Maritain, Antimoderne (1922)

[aurevoirmonty]

"Parmi les autres confessions chrétiennes, l’Eglise orthodoxe est la plus traditionnelle, la plus antimoderne et la plus conservatrice de toutes."

Alexandre Douguine

[ravenkings]

Restated in broad terms, once “religion” and “science” are formulated as opposing discursive terrains, religion-science hybrids become both threatening and appealing. They are threatening because they risk destabilizing the system’s points of closure and because they suggest pre-hybrid and therefore supposedly premodern systems. But also they are appealing because they promise to heal the split between the two notionally opposed terrains. Moreover, the more “magic” becomes marked as antimodern, the more it becomes potentially attractive as a site from which to criticize “modernity.” Finally, for all the polemical attacks against superstition and magic, disenchanting efforts were only sporadically enforced within the disciplines, such that notions of magic and spirits keep resurfacing as redemptive possibilities. 

– Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences

[randomnumbers751650]

Me, clueless: Ah, what a good day to continue reading Compagnon's book on the rise of the antimodernism

Reads him citing Baudelaire's views on the death penalty: What the heck?! What the actual checking heck????!!!?????

[fabiansteinhauer]

Was ist ein Akt?

1.

Henryk Siemiradzki, voller Name eingedeutscht auch so: Heinrich Hippolytowitch Siemiradzki. Man sagt, er sei Pole und Russe gewesen, er wurde in einem kleinen Vorort von Kharkiv geboren. Seine Herkunft wurde aufgeteilt, ohne dass man etwas von der Ukraine sagte. Wo der Ort heute liegt, ist umstritten, es soll unter anderem die Ukraine sein. Sein Vatername bedeutet was, Hippolyt, ein vor allem in Frankreich und Polen gebräuchlicher Name, ist derjenige, der die Pferde los, sie von der Leine lässt.

Let the Hippos go. In Rußland, wo das Wort Gesetz volksetymologisch kein Zaunwort, also nicht wie das griechische Wort nomos, sondern ein Pferde- und Reiterwort ist (zakon assoziiert man wörtlich gesagt mit der Formulierung 'Nach dem Pferd'), kann man schon mit diesem phantastischen Namen Hippolyt große Freiheiten assoziieren. Lass die Zügel los. Reite nicht das Pferd, lass' dich vom Pferd reiten, auch das kann ein Gesetz der Freiheit sein. Weil bis heute auch in Deutschland das Ressentiment kursiert, in der russischen Gesellschaft fehle "jedes Verständis für Freiheit", muss man denen, die so etwas behaupten und insoweit die russische Regierung in ihren Phantasmen und ihrer Propaganda gleich doppelt bestätigen, ihre Augen entzügeln.

2.

Der Vatername bedeutet vielleicht auch dem Heinrich was, war ihm vielleicht Programm. Auf jeden Fall malt er 1886 bis 1889 ein Gemälde, das zu den ersten Gemälden gehört, vielleicht sogar überhaupt das erste Gemälde weltweit war, das bei seiner Premiere (89) ausschließlich mit elektrischem Licht angestrahlt wurde.

Siemiradzki liess die Fenster der Akademie in St. Petersburg an der Newa mit schwerem, schwarzem Stoff verhängen und stellte vier neu erworbene Strahler auf, damit die Farbgebung von keinem natürlichen, launischen und unzureichenden Tageslicht gestört würde. Das Licht sollte aus 'Griechenland', aus dem Süden, importiert werden, das geht im Norden um 1889 endlich, elektrisch. Dieses Bild ist ganz großes Kino, ein Blockbuster vor der Geschichte des Blockbusters. 30.000 Besucher allein bei der ersten Austellung waren elektrisiert, nicht nur die Leuchter und das Bild. Wie eigentlich alle Akademiemalerei aus der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts stürzte die Wertschätzung dieses Bildes eine zeitlang im Westen ab, aber seit einigen Jahren steigt sie auch im Westen wieder an. Das sind Objekte, an denen eine zeitlang das Dogma der großen Trennung vollzogen wurde. Es wurde behauptet, sie seien nicht modern, sondern antimodern, sie seien nicht fortschrittlich, sondern rückschrittlich, sie seien nicht frei, sondern gezwungen, nicht wahr, sondern falsch. Diese Trennung ist geschrumpft, ihre Haut geschrumpelt und in Falten, nicht nur wegen Siemiradzkis avantgaristischem Einsatz künstlichen Lichts.

2.

Das Bild von Phryne in der Hamburger Kunsthalle, die Hamburger Phryne, ist klein und portable. Jean-Léon Gérômes Fassung, der Phryne 1861, also 30 Jahre vorher gemalt hatte, ist 80 cm hoch und 128 cm breit, das ist noch ein kleines, fast niederländisches Format, gut passend in kleine Haushalte, weshalb auf man solchen Formaten häufig keine große Geschichte, sondern kleine, kleinbürgerliche, auch burleske Genreszenen des Alltags findet. Siemiradzkis Petersburger Phryne ist monumental. Das Bild ist 390 cm hoch, fast vier Meter, und 763 cm breit, über acht Meter breit. Allein für die Wand, an der dieses Bild hängen soll, bräuchte man heute in Frankfurt Wohnraum, dessen Mietkosten einen Mindestlohn deutlich überschreiten. Im Russichen Museum, dessen Bau auch wegen dieses Bildes vorangetrieben wurde, steht das Bild an einer Wand.

3.

Siemiradzki hat dieses Bild explizit auch als Antwort auf die Hamburger Phryne entworfen. Фрина на празднике Посейдона в Элевзине: Phryne bei den Festen des Poseidon in Eleusis, das ist der volle Titel, nicht ganz so lang, wie das Bild breit ist. Hier sieht man jenen Akt, der der Hamburger Version nach, also der dargestellten Gerichtsverhandlung nach eine Tathandlung, möglicherweise ein Verbrechen gewesen sein soll, ohne jede strafrechtliche Konnotation und Konsequenz.

Phryne wird in den Texten dazu auch nicht als Hetäre oder Prostituierte beschrieben, sondern als Kurtisane. Das mag dem einen oder anderen zwar erstens zwielichtig und dann zweitens auch anrüchig klingen. Das heißt aber 'nur', dass sie hier wie ein Cortigiano gelesen wird. Die Kurtisane und der Cortigiano sind beide Figuren, die wörtlich am Hof dienen, im weiteren Sinne an öffentlichen Räumen und Architekturen, sie gehören zum Hof und zur Stadt, zum Platz und zum Bürgersteig, zum Hafen und zum Garten und sie bewegen sich dort wie stadtbekannte Hunde und der Fisch im Wasser. Phryne, die als Kurtisane bezeichet wird, ist auch Hoffräulein oder Höfling, sie wird dabei als dienstvoll, auch als verdienstvoll, gelesen. Prominenz und Promiskuität können bei der Kurtisane und dem Cortegiona Hand in Hand gehen, was aber zuerst heißt, dass sie Figuren deutlicher Mischung sind.

Im Rückgriff auf die antike Literatur taucht in den Museumstexten, anders als in Hamburg, deutlich der Hinweis auf, das Phryne ein Vorbild und ein Modell war. Sie kooperierte mit Meistern, nämlich Meistern schlechthin, dem Praxiteles und dem Appeles, denen es nur dank ihrer Hilfe gelang, Figuren der Aphrodite bzw. der Venus anadyomene (der aus dem Wasser steigenden Venus) darzustellen. Meisterhaft und dienstvoll: das ist eine Kooperation, ohne jene Unterschlagung, mit der Dienerschaft abgewertet und Meisterschaft aufgewertet würde. Die Anregung nahm Siemiradziki wörtlich, wenn auch inkonsequent. Technisch, wie er dachte, hat er ein ebenso elektrisch, künstlich beleuchtetes Modell fotografiert, um die Übersetzung vom Raum auf Fläche zu vereinfachen, auch das verheimlicht er nicht, wozu? den Namen des Modells, den hat er nicht bekannt gemacht. Die Nutzung technischer Apparate ist modern, aber damit von der Vormoderne auch nicht derart getrennt, dass diese Trennung nicht auch winzig sein könnte. Auf die Idee war nämlich auch Caravaggio schon gekommen, wenn auch mit anderen Umsetzungsschritten.

Siemiradzki entwarf das Bild als Antwort auf die Hamburger Phryne, weil er dieses frühere Bild für zynisch hielt. Eine dunkle Szene, ein Innenraum? Ist der er Areopag ein dunkle Kammer? Ist das nicht ein heller Felsen unter freiem Himmel? Sieht man in Hamburg nicht eher die viel spätere stoa basileos, die Königshalle/ Agora, und dann auch noch ohne den dorischen Säulengang? Eine auf dem Bild zur Passivität verurteilte, und darum freigesprochene Phryne, ein voyeueristisches, verlogenes, spätrömisch-kleinbürgerliches Stück, ein verschämter Vollzug männlich gewaltigen und gehemmten Blickes: man kann der Hamburger Phryne einiges vorwerfen (muss es aber nicht). Hier, bei Siemiradzki, wird gefeiert und kein Gedanke an Strafe verschwendet. Das ist fin de siecle, wie es von Helge Schneider begriffen wird, der nämlich sagt, das hieße soviel wie jeden Tag besoffen. Gefeiert wird so einiges, Phryne ist ein Teil davon, auch im Zentrum des Bildes, aber da eine Verschaltung, die auch gehen lässt. Das Küstenlicht wird gefeiert, die Architektur wird gefeiert (allein schon der steile Aufstieg zum Tempel des Poseidon!). Die Leute feiern sich und die Anderen. Die vier Meter und die acht Meter kurz zusammengefasst: Hier wird viel, Überfluss und Griechenland, Süden und frühe Zeit (Zeit, in der noch viel Zeit übrig und nicht knapp ist), gefeiert.