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Coming Soon: Overcoming the Bourgeois Mind and Body

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Having just submitted part three of my series on vitality to Counter-Currents, I have two minutes in which to reflect upon my achievement. Modern men, after all, have a right to reflect honorifically when doing something of so little value, for we really have no right to think of ourselves in genuinely Homeric terms. Still, self-overcoming is our only path to destroying modernity (we must destroy everything modern in ourselves), even if “self-overcoming” is a generous way of justifying the hell through which I’ve put myself for the past two weeks.

In writing – and trying my hardest to care – about scientific understandings of environmental influences on body chemistry, I certainly overcame my aversion to such knowledge, at least long enough to write the paper. Nietzsche said something about the dangers of comfort for scholars. I can certainly attest to being more comfortable with Homer, the Classical world, Nietzsche, and fascism than with science and its belief in being able to “explain the mysteries of life.” But for two weeks I forced myself to wade into uncharted waters, unsure of myself and insecure in my abilities to make noble use of modernity’s greatest power over mediocre men.

When my time and megalomania are done, let some unborn biographer say that I finished this paper on a 45-degree day with all windows open, inhaling varnish fumes, and listening to most of what Coltrane recorded from 1965 to 1967. Never before had the latter even been tolerable. But in that harsh and uncomfortable environment, it made such perfect sense that I think I’ve figured out what Coltrane was doing. If so, I am the only man to have done so.

In any case, the struggle to write was worth the effort. The paper will be on Counter-Currents next Monday or Tuesday (November 12-13, 2012). It was co-written by Nick Fiorello, a radical personal trainer and New Right thinker in Atlanta. Nick is more dedicated to bodily precision and technique than anyone I’ve ever met. His gift to the New Right is this dedication, which flows from his Sicilian inheritance. He is also an original North American member of ROMVLAE GENTI and a dangerous man.

Now, however, I will see just how harsh and counter-modern I am, as I still have to write the most challenging paper on Nietzsche that I’ve ever attempted. Just the notes for this thing are 5 pages and span the width of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, making it clear that physiology is more than a metaphor for consciousness; it is the basis of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity. Some papers, like the recent one on Lycurgus, suffer from a lack of sources. This one will suffer from gluttony of them. It should be a book.



Coming Soon: Nietzsche, Physiology, and Transvaluation

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Counter-Currents will soon publish the concluding essay to my series with Nick Fiorello on the body and conceptual vitality. The series has been quite positively received, I must say, and was a grueling thrill to research and write. Despite my lead-in to this paper at the end of the last in the series, I left aside much of the interpretive work on pain and harshness in favor of a more academic treatment of Nietzsche’s complex and marvelous thinking on physiology, which combines transvaluation, instincts, and physical harshness and beauty. That being said, its an invigorating read, with a few nice quotes and a lengthy paper trail that incorporates all of my favorite secondary sources on Nietzsche.

 

I’ve gotten some wonderful comments lately and I will have to wait until after Thanksgiving to address them. One is easy – a publication of the 10 Commandments of the Arditi – and another not so much – on my usage of bourgeois. To be super brief, by bourgeois I mean a form of life, or cultural system, not a class. The bourgeois form of life is that creative of economic man, that reduces life to the marketplace.

 

Happy Thanksgiving.


The Ardito’s 10 Commandments

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1. Ardito! Your name means courage, force, and loyalty; your mission is victory at any cost. Be proud to show the whole world that nobody can resist the Italian soldier. Think of the jewels you are defending with your valor: the freedom of your families, the beauty of your country, and the wealth of your nation. This will give you invincible strength.

2. To win, numbers and weapons do not count: above all, discipline and boldness are the sole values. Discipline is the most beautiful and highest moral force; boldness is the cold, firm will to show the enemy your superiority, whenever and wherever.

3. Victory lies beyond the last enemy trench, to the rear; to reach it, use violence and cleverness, and do not care if during the assault some of the enemy remains beyond your reach. If the enemy surrounds you, then surround the enemy.

4. Always try to absorb what is happening on the battlefield, and rush to help comrades in danger. When you feel the situation is perilous, then throw yourself forward, and forward again.

5. When attacking, use your hand grenades and dagger – the true weapons of every Ardito. When defending the terrain you have won, use your rifle and machine gun. Protect your machine guns if you want them to protect you. Cover the sound of the enemy’s charge with that of your machine guns. Then you will see the charge fail and the enemy falling like cut wheat.

6. If you catch the enemy in the rear, throw him into terror and disorder; there, one courageous man is worth a hundred men, an Ardito worth a thousand enemy soldiers.

7. The terror your enemy experiences before you is your best weapon; be sure to further your fame. Be fierce with the standing enemy, be generous with the falling one.

8. If you are wounded or missing, your duty is to give news to your unit and to try to reach your comrades at any cost.

9. Do not aspire to any other prize than the smile of the beautiful Italian women you defend with your courage. They will cover you with flowers and will bestow kisses upon you when you return victorious, proud of your masculinity, oh beloved son of great Italy.

10. Run into battle! You are the best example of the genius of our people! The entire country is watching you during your bold attack.

I was asked to post these after referencing them in “Mussolini’s New Fascist Man.”


A sickness, perhaps

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DSCN9176

A sickness perhaps

 

In the wake of my last paper published by Counter-Currents, a funny thing happened: I needed to get outside, to leave the books and computer, to allow my instincts something beyond toil. I suppose this is only funny in the context of my last paper (“Nietzsche, Physiology, and Transvaluation”), which was an attempt to conclude a series of papers on physiology and conceptual vitality. (I say attempt, because I’m being advised by John Morgan of Arktos and Jack Donovan of Dissonant Hum to write a true conclusion to the series.) I had begun to “waste away” in the extreme effort it took to meet my deadlines. I actually stopped weight training while writing the Nietzsche paper. Deadline met, I left for my family’s Thanksgiving on a Sea Island in Florida. Tummy full, I promptly disappeared into the Great Smoky Mountains with my wife and son, only to re-emerge upon Modernity’s twilight for a visit from Babbo Natale. All of this adds up to about five weeks without physical training. Two weeks in, I was dreaming about doing pull-ups, a sickness perhaps.

 

Morbid of mind

 

Three weeks later, I had not only become sedentary but also morbid of mind. I tried to write, but everything was pedestrian – too connected to the mundane conversations I’d been having. I wrote a letter to the precocious teenager down the street who’d just been accepted to Emory University. It’s unreadable. I’m no good with the uninitiated. This is all that I kept:

 

The other night our neighborhood was so quiet. I assume you were inside watching TV. Outside it was a perfect fall evening. We were in our backyard, again in miniature, sitting in front of a fire. The clear black sky was full of stars and planets, and I taught my son the position of Jupiter and Saturn, as well as some constellations. As I watched the smoke drift into the black sky overhead, listening to our fountain become the melody for the crackling fire, I waxed philosophically about the pathos of distance between my family and everyone else in the neighborhood.

 

Here we were, after all, with the elements and the heavens, with an understanding of, and reverence for, both of them, and you were watching TV. I remember saying how beautiful it was to be doing something so simple that connected us with thousands of years of our ancestors. Really, I said that it connected us to the Greeks. I was thinking but didn’t say, that our simple actions were a transvaluation of the very essence of the bourgeois form of life. For there was nothing about which science, economics, liberal humanism, or Judeo-Christian morality could’ve inform us that evening. My wife gets it already, so it would’ve been redundant. Words are like that sometimes, especially in the face of the primal.

 

I remember that after dinner, my son and I had a sword fight. I was trying to teach him how to defend my attacks, either through sword placement or bodily dexterity, but being so young, he was only interested in his own charges. I’m trying to balance his attacking instincts with the need to close shop and defend. But all of his heroes attack, so what am I to do? I thought the warm fire, and the cold darkness it accentuated, would help teach him about defense by emphasizing the need for balance. But, I hastily ended the lesson when I saw Jupiter above the truncated-by-privacy-fence horizon. It’s hard to teach him to enthusiastically revere something that modernity derides without contextualization, but sometimes words can spoil a perfect sensation. This was about instincts, after all.

 

 

I wanted to write something to my uncle who thinks he’s being radical by embracing the vaguely defined “Native American culture,” but how does one tell an elder – and an otherwise exceptional man – that he’s just fallen into a trap that betrays the very blood in his veins? Nonetheless, my state of mind and body proved the legitimacy of my most recent work, and more importantly, the thought of Nietzsche, Mishima, Lycurgus, and Mussolini.

 

Burn Something

 

Through it all, however, there was one constant, besides my family: a renewed love affair with the music of John Coltrane. It began with the Nietzsche paper. I wanted that paper to reflect a certain physiological – if not cosmic – energy. I’d used extreme metal and then hardcore during the writing of my dissertation. At that time I simply HAD to maintain the energy of life in Fascist Rome. The dissertation’s pace and energy was to reflect its subject matter, and was to shape the reader’s revulsion or enchantment with the Ultras. The Nietzsche paper was the first thing I’ve written since the dissertation that needed such a musical impetus.

 

I’m not sure why, but I played some Coltrane while writing the introduction. It was probably early-60s post-be-bop, but nothing too crazy. Fortune smiled, however, when what I’d chosen bled into something from late-1965, from the point at which Coltrane ceases to make sense to bourgeois man. Saying much of praise about myself, I heard something. “Dusk Dawn.” “Transition.” “Living Space.” “Attaining.” Even “Expression.” It all made sense. For so long, jazz people have blamed Coltrane’s cancer for his latter music’s lack of regard for musicality. But I never understood that. This is the same argument people make about Nietzsche’s late work, that Twilight of the Idols is the mirror’s reflection of a removed mask of sanity. I think the bourgeois nature of the commentators is what is really being reflected here. What I was able to hear matched what I was reading and writing. It was an act of war against modernity. It was the triumph of a will, and the willingness to destroy an entire paradigm – since we are talking music here, something so magical that I will refrain from any attempts to explain either its humanity or divinity, it must have been a will to destroy a very ontology. Bourgeois man has no frame of reference with which to classify Coltrane’s post-A Love Supreme output (to say nothing of Nietzsche). Especially jazz people. What are they to do with 12 minutes of chaotic squawks, polyrhythmic drumming, meandering bass lines, and random piano play? One hears them clapping politely in Seattle. What they should’ve done was burn something.

 

Epitome of the modern (American) West

 

Coltrane was an extraordinary man. He wasn’t a prodigy. But he became a master – the pinnacle of his craft – through hard work. He took it upon himself to master every form of modern jazz. He played ballads, blues, bebop, post-bop, modal, and free. Like other bebop players of his day, he studied the modern classical music of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Bartók. To play modally, he studied the Lydian and Dorian modes that comprised medieval European music, as well as Indian modalism. He practiced until his mouth bled.

 

When asked what kind of music he played, Coltrane explained in his soft-spoken manner that he was a classical musician. He was a Western man playing music unaccompanied by lyrics that was composed by other Western men. This begs the question that many racialists ignore: what is the black man if not the epitome of the modern (American) West?

 

Jazz became the music of Black Nationalism and white bohemia. That alone says much about American aesthetics – and the utterly bourgeois nature of American radicalism. And yet, even these fringe groups cannot hear late-Coltrane. I believe I’ve just explained why. But for us truly radical thinkers, those of us who have cleansed our instincts of the taint of modernity and have begun to see the world through heroic eyes, might Coltrane’s music, and the story of its genealogy, have something of value?

 

This will be my next project. Keep in mind; I dislike aesthetics as a concept. This dislike is what originally made Deleuze and Guattari so appealing. (Put bluntly, people tend to “like” what corporate marketers tell them to like. Taste has never been active in America. At least not in the mob.) I will say much about music and anti-music, and why the post-bourgeois form of life must have a post-bourgeois musical form. And I will use Nietzsche, for he had much to say about bourgeois music.

 

I will make various Coltrane tracks available for download as I begun writing the paper.


Two Hippy Psych-ward Loving Commies

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Nietzsche would have none of it

I regret to inform my devoted popolo that I am temporarily abandoning the proposed paper on Coltrane’s late music and its usefulness for those on the frontlines of the fight against modernity. Although it seems straightforward enough – a quick summation of modern music, its ascending and descending properties, its racial/national characteristics, and its magical ability to keep us “thinking modern” through structures, notes, chords, melodies, and harmonies (a grammar for the instincts!), all with only a superficial knowledge of music theory – the project ran aground when it became apparent that Nietzsche would have none of it.

Some of you chastise my devotion to Nietzsche, and rightfully so (not really). But Nietzsche had to be central to the paper, for how could I write on music and modernity without using his ideas on both? I said before that Nietzsche had much to say about anti-bourgeois music. In fact, he had too much to say! He says music is the playground of the passions, that it shapes the instincts. Sometimes it is metaphysical, but usually it is merely human. Sometimes it reflects modern decadence, but it most certainly can work against it.

Like physiology, music runs through the entirety of Nietzsche’s written work. But unlike physiology, Nietzsche’s ideas about music – and what makes it either indispensible or harmful to transvaluation – changed with each phase of his thought. This had much to do with his break with Wagner, and this is a problem for me, for I know too little of Wagner from any perspective but Nietzsche’s. And, while I trust and adore that perspective completely, it would still be disingenuous to discuss Wagner as if I really know his work.

PVLCHRVM EST PAVCORVM HOMINVM

Speaking anecdotally on Nietzsche, however, it is clear that in whatever terms he critiques and transvalues modernity, he critiques and values its music. Music that is overly sentimental, nationalistic, hysterical, or vulgar meets the same fate as anything else he so describes. Music that is designed for easy consumption by a thankful mob of philistines is of value only to such a mob. This kind of music Nietzsche discusses like modern art in general: as a diversionary salve or intoxicant for the exhausted and empty soul of the modern workhorse. It’s not that Nietzsche doesn’t sympathize with these workhorses, but the beauty to which he aspires remains forever beyond the unworthy grasp of modern men. PVLCHRVM EST PAVCORVM HOMINVM, as he loved to quote from Horace.

Anyone who paid close attention to the characteristics of modern music that I just gleaned from Nietzsche will see a serious incompatibility with Coltrane. The pieces that I love so much seem like trite collections of modern tropes when digested with Nietzschean ears: the hysterical exaltation, the bombast, the glossolalia – it’s the black church! It’s old black women flailing about in cheap polyester suits and ugly hats! And yet, its so elitist, exclusionary, and just plain difficult to hear – and Coltrane was so maddening for communists and nationalists alike – that there must be something there for us, even if Nietzsche seemingly disagrees.

So, I started thinking about how to better make my case that Coltrane is one of us. I came back to Deleuze and Guattari, the French post-structuralist (post-everything, really) philosophers who were my first and only true love in critical theory. Without giving away the punch line, Coltrane works smashingly with their anti-hierarchical thought. Time is dissolved, territory is liberated, and desire is de-capitalized. This gave me a brilliant idea: write a paper on Nietzsche and two of his semi-heretical postmodern disciples with Coltrane as conversation piece. Even saying it now it fills me with warm radiant light – deconstructing the whole damn lot of modern decadence at the expense of two of its most critical and high-minded moralists while Nietzsche nods approvingly like a proud papa.

But . . . there’s just no time right now.

Two hippy psych-ward loving commies

Instead, what I can do is something Greg Johnson put to me last year: write a paper on D&G from a New Right perspective. He and I are both committed to making the North American New Right a counter-academy to the progressive, leftist, egalitarian, anti-racist/sexist/anti-gay citadels of civilizational/cultural exhaustion that we call universities. Taking our cue from Jonathon Bowden, we are committed to creating a space – virtual, for now (not to be overly metaphysical in opposing virtual to an actual space) – from which to challenge bourgeois hegemony.

We must make it possible for men like us to actually think differently; that is, to think beyond the terms, concepts, and grammar given us by bourgeois modernity. While Greg wants us to be able to critique the comings and goings of the contemporary world from a learnedly New Right perspective, I feel we should discriminate (heavily) against the banalities of modern life. And I’m not just talking about its multiculturalism, democratic politics, Zionist wars, hyper-consumption, and turbo-capitalism, but its very conceptual basis – the entire reality that gives form and purpose to our made-pathetic instincts.

And, while I always give credit to men like Homer, Nietzsche, and Otto for showing me how to make my home (and the bodies of me and my family) a derelict space, I must credit Deleuze and Guattari as well. It is, after all, their concept. For they truly understood what it means to be a derelict of modernity – to think completely beyond the truths, moralities, and ethics of global America. Although D&G wanted us to be derelicts of the West (its reason, ideas, ideals, and identities) I propose that we remove ourselves from an obligatory relationship with modernity, instead. In order to make such a proposal, I misread D&G, quite fundamentally, really. But, I’ve got an in – a shared love interest: Nietzsche.

Nietzsche provides the intellectual thrust of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. While it is unfortunate that GD’s politics are less than “great,” there has been no one of the French radical left that so clearly understands what Nietzsche demanded of us – creation! Transvaluation, in the hands of GD, becomes less about a genealogy of oppositions between the Classical world and Judeo-Christian modernity than about re-constituting the very ground of human thought. Nietzsche’s critical aversion to decadence was unknowable without the connection of slave morality to ressentiment, for ressentiment is the driving instinctual force of the slave and his metaphysical worldview/conceptual system. GD begins his philosophy at this moment – at the Genealogy of Morality’s second essay!

At the base of all of GD’s anti-metaphysical thought (perhaps the only true example of post-metaphysics in the Western canon – that’s right GD, I just included you at someone else’s expense!) is a true but radical reading of slave morality. As he says:

The instinct of revenge is the force that constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics, and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our [i.e., modern] thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking. [. . .] We do not really know what a man denuded of ressentiment would be like. A man who would not accuse or depreciate existence – would he still be a man, would he think like a man? Would he not already be something other than man? To have ressentiment or to not have ressentiment – there is no greater difference, beyond psychology, beyond history, beyond metaphysics.[1]

GD, then, demands that we think beyond the terms of the dominant conceptual, intellectual, teleological, theological, and actional systems of modernity. Otherwise we are merely slaves with new clothes. Desire, capitalism, schizophrenia, machines, and de/re-territorialization are the hallmarks of D&G’s thought. Each of them is designed to force us to think beyond ressentiment; beyond, that is, the enslavement of our minds and bodies by the forces that have made us – the 15 or so members of the New Right – the last free men on earth.

My plan is to explain what D&G are trying to do with their maddeningly complex works, to demonstrate how we might benefit from their diagnoses, and to demand a radical revision of what we are fighting to become. I have a burning desire to redeem these two hippy psych-ward loving commies! To do so, I will use their critical methods against the decadence they unfortunately celebrated – a transvaluation of a transvaluation! I will once again stress how crucial it is that we think with new concepts in order to be free from modernity’s grasp. I will show what music, philosophy, and art do to us. I will show that we must create, and not merely represent, our post-modern world – the most glorious of Nietzsche’s propositions for the Übermensch brought to life.


[1] Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) pg. 35.


We are the real subalterns

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Adam Smith’s contribution to the radicalization of the North American New Right cannot go underappreciated. Not only does it accurately present CasaPound for the first time in the English-speaking world, but it does so in a way that makes the weaknesses of the NANR abundantly clear. I’ve written a follow-up piece for tomorrow’s press that also acts as a preface for my upcoming works on Deleuze and Guattari: We are the real subalterns.

“We are the real subalterns,” I was once told by an activist at CasaPound. His words were astonishing, not only because they so presciently invoke the relationship between CasaPound and the neoliberal Italian state, but also because they come from the American academic radical left’s appropriation of Gramsci. I didn’t have a chance to ask him if he’d chosen “subaltern” on my behalf, and frankly it didn’t matter at the time, for by then I was no longer flabbergasted by the political acuity of my hosts on the Roman social right. In any case, he made his meaning clear with a 45-minute conversation on political and cultural sovereignty; anti-globalization; capitalism and the promulgation of vulgarity; and, most importantly, the use all of these forces make of a regime of multicultural morality. It was this regime that I ended up writing on, but I could have chosen any of the others, as each of them was richly and aggressively understood and combatted by the Romans.

<SNIP>

A subaltern is someone who exists outside the normalized representational structures of society. He, she, or it, does not conform to the hegemony of the cultural norms of the state, living outside the universe of the state’s moral obligation. The left has normalized an understanding of the immigrant, racial/sexual minority, or colonial subject as the subaltern, and seeks to give voice to these voiceless souls through a well-developed language of guilt, evil, economic under-development, and outright racism.

CasaPound and other groups in the pantheon of contemporary Roman fascism, however, are using the word and all of its loaded connotations to wake people up to the fact that Italy no longer belongs to Italians. It belongs, instead, to global finance capitalism. It belongs to the fresh immigrants being pumped into the country to work in what is left of Italy’s agricultural, industrial, and cultural production. For many of us on the North American New Right, that would be enough – the story would end here. But in Rome, there is more. There is always more!

<. . .>

Read the rest at Counter-Currents from 7 March 2013.


Setting my house on fire

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“I’ve been thinking about setting my house on fire …”

Counter-Currents published a new paper, “Deleuze, Guattari, and the New Right, Part One.” It is the beginning of what promises to be the most heretical and radical series of papers I have yet published; heretical because it rests on a convergence of the illiberal “postmodern” Left and the New Right, and radical because it demands that the New Right fully embrace a revolutionary opposition to each and every form of bourgeois liberalism.

It must be noted that I am stretching the bounds of decency in regards to the Nouvelle Droite, as Alain de Benoist might have actually fought Félix Guattari in the Rue d’Ulm in 1968. Perhaps the time is right, though, for reconciliation between all forms of Counter-Enlightenment thought so as to more fully engage the struggle against modernity. This is the impetus of my papers – and it seems, of my thought for this year.

As the series progresses, the language must become increasingly technical. For now it is straightforward, with simple explanations of a few concepts. But in order to keep the future papers stylistically viable, I may post vocabulary and definitions here, as well as some listening material. Mille Plateaux, a defunct experimental electronic music label founded on Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial dynamism and well-developed critique of bourgeois art and music, provides the perfect soundtrack by which to grasp these revolutionary thoughts.

It truly helps to have all narratives disrupted, and this is a major point of the series: in order to create something new, we must (temporarily, in some cases) decenter everything we know and think about ourselves. Otherwise we are just angry and critical men who buy rare books. I, for one, cannot abide such a paltry realization of our potential.

 

 

It Begins with Nietzsche

It begins with On the Genealogy of Morality. It accepts the challenge of Nietzsche’s critique of morality, of his presentation of the origins and omnipresence of ressentiment and bad conscience. It explains what we must do to free ourselves from the reign of reactive forces. It is a philosophy of extreme affirmation, one that makes a metaphysics of force and desire. It is a philosophy – perhaps the only post-Nietzschean philosophy – that embraces the implications of his thought without reservation and without fear (which is not the same as without compromise). It is a philosophy that demands only one thing: that we think differently – that is to say, critically. The hard part, though, is in actually doing so. Because not only the content, but also the form, of how we think is given us by the modernity we so despise.

This idea is what makes reading Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari so challenging, because the content of their philosophy is a demonstration of how radical – how nonsensical – thought must be if it is liberated from modernity.

It begins with On the Genealogy of Morality. As with the band of loosely conjoined thinkers that we call the New Right, Deleuze and Guattari base their attack on modernity on Nietzsche’s de-naturalization (and re-naturalization) of morality. However, where the New Right thinkers critique modernity from the standpoint of Nietzsche’s explanation of the Jewish slave revolt in morality (presented in the Genealogy’s First Essay), Deleuze and Guattari use the presentation of ressentiment and bad conscience (in the Genealogy’s Second and Third Essays) as the ground for a revolution in thought. It is hoped that, by incorporating the New Right and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, we might actually complete the mission of the Genealogy and more fully realize Nietzsche’s revolutionary potential – and our own.

The Illiberal Left and the Counter-Enlightenment . . . to read more.


8 Songs for Deleuze

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For those inclined to join me on this journey of bourgeois self-discovery and self-destruction, I’ve posted 8 songs to which I’ve been listening while reading Deleuze and Guattari. They help me to think about things machinically, to think about flow, and to feel engulfed in pure purposeless rhythm. While each of them has its own unique qualities and quantities (values), each one disrupts time flow and releases subjectivity’s hold on our bodily energy.

07 Amulls by Pan-American

05 5 by Pixel

02 Drowning Horses by Antendex

04 Dog Star by Ethernet

04 Auslaufrille II by Pixel

03 Vaccination by Tim Hecker

01 1 by Pixel

07 St. Cloud by Pan-American



Get To Know: Raster-Noton

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My plan to upload the greatest tracks from Mille Plateaux hit a snag when I discovered that wordpress does not support AAC files. I suppose I could re-load a few CD’s as MP3, but for now I’m going to give you what I can. For all practical purposes, Mille Plateaux has been dead since 2004. It was relaunched in 2010 but without Achim Szepanski, its creator and driving force. For fans of the avant-garde, Raster-Noton picked up where Mille Plateaux left off.

Raster-Noton is a Berlin-based electronic label of the highest quality and most radical aesthetic. With Mille Plateaux’s demise, it is the undisputed leader of the industry, setting new standards for complexity, simplicity, beauty, and dissonance with almost every release. Much of the Raster-Noton catalogue is available at emusic and iTunes.

Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto: ionoscan from Summvs, the most recent, if not the most satisfying of the 5 collaborations between the giants of minimalism.

Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto: reverso (see above)

Alva Noto: Haliod Xerrox Copy 1 from Xerrox, Vol.1, which, along with Xerrox, Vol. 2, form the pinnacle of ambient electronic music.

Senking: Unlighted from Pong. Senking always has that growling bass and a more playful danger than other artists of the genre.

Senking: Mist from List. Growling bass texture and live upright bass.

Robert Lippok: Close from Open Close Open, manipulated orchestra, or is it original?

Kangding Ray: automne fold from Automne Fold, another blend of electronic and acoustic sound.

Pixel: 1  this and the next 3 tracks are from Drive – obviously one of my favorite albums (it just became so while re-reading Deleuze and Guattari).

Pixel: 2

Pixel: 3

Pixel: 5

Alva Noto + Opiate: Opto File 1 from Opto Files, the essence of clicks and cuts. If you don’t like this, or the next track Auslaufrille II, then this music will never be for your ears.

Pixel: Auslaufrille II from Display

COH: Euphrates (Part I – Spiritoso, Con Amore) from Strings, a minimalist manipulation of various string instruments.

Byetone capture this (I) along with the next track, from Death of a Typographer.

Byetone: capture this (II)

This list is incomplete because I am unable to upload AAC files. The seminal unrepresented albums on Raster-Noton are:

Alva Noto: Xerrox, Vol. 2

Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto: Insen, Revep, and and Vrioon; each of which feature Sakamoto’s minimal piano manipulated by Noto’s computer. These recordings changed the possibilities of electronic music.

Kangding Ray: Stabil


Slightly Mille Plateaux

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Mille Plateaux became my grad school soundtrack while in NYC. I had previously been into drum and bass, and then the Warp label mates Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. One day I happened into Other Music when SND’s Stdio album was playing. It’s minimal pulses and crystalline beats were the sirens I’d wanted to hear my whole life. From that day on I bought everything the label put out, and was rarely disappointed.

Andreas Tilliander: Untitled Track 2 from Ljud. Propulsive scratchy clicks and cuts.

Alva Noto: Module 7 from Transform. Minimal.

Donnacha Costello: Your New God from Together is the New Alone. Is it melancholy at dusk?

Andreas Tilliander: Untitled Track 10 from Ljud. Snap, clicky, pops!

Donnacha Cotsello: In Spite of Everything from Together is the New Alone. Lonely, longing, clicks.

GAS: Eins from Koenigsforst. Glacial gas.

Shuttle358: I’m Not Afraid from Understanding Wildlife. Simple beauty from one of the masters of the genre.

Donnacha Costello: Lateral Thinking from Growing Up in Public. Almost techno.

GAS: Untitled from Zauberberg. Molton lava as seen from the air.

Whereas my Raster-Noton selection did not suffer terribly from file type restrictions (I input CDs using AAC because Apple offers higher bit rates for AAC than MP3), this list is almost trivial compared to the brilliance I’ve (temporarily at least) been forced to omit. These are four albums that anyone wanting to know Mille Plateaux should have. They are still largely incomparable.

1. SND – stdio: Clicks and Cuts never got any better.

2. Tim Hecker – Radio Amor: found sound from Ecuadorian fishing vessels turned rapturous post-everything opera.

3. Electric Birds – Gradations: the most satisfying release in MP history: clicks, acoustic guitar, and tape hiss turned into musical clicks, acoustic guitar, and tape hiss.

4. Tilman Eirhorn – Task: saxophonist turned clicks-master. Poetic clicks and cuts.


Venetian Snares’“Integraation” and Deleuze’s Time-Image

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I once wrote a paper for a professor whose work on the anthropology of the imagination I found both inspiring but also compromised by its uncritical use of the Cartesian subject. Although I hate having lost every paper I wrote in grad school to hard drive failure and indifference, this one is probably better off forgotten. For I’m sure that my insolent – no one can teach me a thing – attitude shone forth like a beacon of arrogant, post-bourgeois freedom. However, of all the papers I wrote back then, it is the one to which my mind most often returns. This is because it was on Deleuze’s “time-image” as a tool that can move us beyond the structure and functioning of bourgeois aesthetics, as well as the very ground of representational thought.

Time-image can be called a cinematic concept, in that it was developed to explain how thought might become estranged from historical (chronological) time through exposure to non-narratively-based cinematic images and the cuts that link them. Deleuze understood that these images could force a recollection of the normally unthought links between image, sign, and narrative. When combined with both the Deleuzian “subject as constitution of heterogeneous elements/folds/processes of subjectification” and the Deleuzian/Nietzschean insistence upon the value of falsehood as corrective to the affects of truth (stupidity, as Deleuze would say; comfort, as Nietzsche said), the time-image is a good way to begin thinking about how modernity conditions our expectations.

I’m sure my professor loved getting a 20-page paper on a subject and author that had nothing to do with the topic of the seminar he taught and that used a concept created for visual artistic affects seemingly far removed from the literary approach he took to imagination. But here’s the kicker:

I did it all in the context of a paper about one song by Venetian Snares. I was kind, I included the song on a CD, and for that alone he gave me an A (the grad school equivalent to a C+ in undergrad courses). But the paper was indicative of the radical insubordination I always felt towards any attempts to discipline my critiques of modernity.

The song I used to demonstrate time-image was “This Jar is the Baby Man,” which, alas, I cannot upload, but that one may enjoy here. I would have only done so, anyhow, to show how its destruction of time, movement, flow, and expectation of narrative has been surpassed by another Venetian Snares song:

Venetian Snares: Integraation (from My Downfall – Original Soundtrack)

Today I’d probably write about Integraation as it relates to transvaluation and the destructive beauty inherent in the final negation of negation. If you choose to give it a listen, allow yourself to be affected and moved. Only then should you try to think/make sense of the song: pure affect, aggression, violence, destruction, beauty, pathos of distance, texture, variance, disjunction, war machine. If you like what you hear (sweet sweet aesthetics, how lazily even I return to your comforting embrace) do your instincts a favor and get My Downfall, either by supporting a radical artist with cash flow or by validating my appreciation of Venetian Snares by asking for a free download. The latter option will at least be a big F You to capitalism, which cares not for what you buy, as long as you buy.

Because I have no time write further about the song, I have presented it above as a tool that others might use to explain Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari to their curious, oh so curious, friends and family.


Bridges Must be Burned

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Counter-Currents will soon publish the second part of my ongoing examination of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This part is less speculative than the previous, and focuses exclusively on Deleuze’s “reversal of Platonism” and critique of representation and recognition as the bases of thought. Anyone who has been enjoying Collin Cleary’s review essay of Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization will be repulsed by my paper, which gives no one in the post-Socratic West besides Nietzsche any credit for advancing nobility and aristocracy.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle owe us an explanation for turning us into a race of slaves. Sure, as Duchesne and Cleary suggest, the latter two were aristocrats, but that did not stop them from destroying the legitimacy of the warrior elites in the name of rationality. Far from reading this event as a progressive step toward modernity (as Duchesne must), we can just as easily follow Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s accounts, which read something like this: The logocentric Athenian state no longer had any need of warriors, but good democratic citizens whose peaceful rational natures filled the needs of the marketplace. In other words, the state no longer had any need of warriors, so it turned them into merchants. This was not progress for anyone except politicians, usurers, and traders. Nietzsche calls it a slave revolt, reminding us that aristocracy has nothing to do with a class. Deleuze and Guattari call it capture, reminding us to question how things get entangled in the logics of capitalism in the first place.

Any aristocracy we seek to create can only be modeled on the ethics of Nietzsche’s nobles – who were diametrically opposed to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. I only ask my readers to understand that fighting to the very edge of modernity only to look back in awe at the forces that created the modern world is not revolution, but enslavement to modern ideals, values, and moralized truth. If you want a world of logos, white people, and capitalism, there is no need to mortgage your future or bourgeois happiness by joining our fight. Just move to Idaho, where all that you seek already exists. But if you want revolution against modernity, then it is time to become revolutionary. Bridges must be burned.

Contrary to Collin’s celebration of the foundations of modernity simply because they are Western (or White as some might say), I work only to commit these foundations to an ignoble grave. I do not seek to do so on behalf of immigrants and workers, but on behalf of my son, who, although perfectly compliant with the Idea of Western Man, will never be a free man until the modern West is gone.

I cannot celebrate what I work to destroy. Instead I become revolutionary.

“With Platonism, philosophy becomes a police operation.” – Miguel de Beistegui[1]

The Affect of Truth

Part One of this examination of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari from a radical New Right perspective briefly introduced Deleuze and Guattari, placed their thought within an illiberal Leftist variation of the Counter-Enlightenment, and then grounded that thought in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. While it is hoped that Part One’s radical re-evaluation of postmodernism is not lost on the reader, it is more important that we understand the Nietzschean current that courses through Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. This current will be familiar to any of Nietzsche’s closest readers, although it may be put to different uses than we are accustomed to.[2]

To be familiar with these uses can only be a good thing, however. Truth, as Nietzsche says, affects only comfort. That comfort, according to Deleuze, affects uncritical, thoughtless thought. We can afford none of these, but while we often speak against comfort, rarely do we do so regarding our own thought. This is because of the radical project to which we are devoted. But, as radical as it – and we – may be, we are still prone to noncritical acceptance of concepts and forms of thought that keep us connected to bourgeois modernity. Moving beyond those concepts and forms is the basis of what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming-revolutionary.

Before we get to that, however, we must maintain our focus on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, for we have yet to be fully initiated in the transvaluation that makes becoming-revolutionary possible. This, in part, is the transvaluation of logos.

While the next two papers are based on Deleuze and Guattari’s two-part Capitalism and Schizophrenia, this one continues laying a foundation that might aid an understanding of why this philosophy is useful to the New Right. It focuses on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1994) – his primary dissertation toward the doctorate in philosophy – and his “reversal of Platonism.” This means that, while on our way to an attack on the legitimacy of the liberal nation-state, we will make a quick stop to participate in a riot against transcendence and divine judgment.

. . .


[1] Miguel de Beistegui, “The Deleuzian Reversal of Platonism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59.

[2] This paper was reviewed and edited by Adam Smith.


Walls Must Be Felled

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Walls Must Be Felled

Counter-Currents has published part three of my continuing examination of Deleuze and Guattari’s potential to influence what I am now calling the revolutionary Right, including the New Right, Right anarchism, and secessionism. This expansion is due in large part to Deleuze’s impact on my conception of the social and political forms of affirmative revolution against the liberal State. But it is also due to my discovery of Attack the System, which combines the “true Right” of the New Right with anarchism and secessionism.

Ultimately, this is of singular importance for me, as, while reading Deleuze has only strengthened the Nietzschean foundations of my revolt, this revolt cannot be comfortably assimilated to a nationalist or statist strategy or philosophy. That being said, its seems likely that the philosophy that we now call New Right will eventually include Right anarchism, with the revolutionary potential of either only being realized after they combine their energies. Walls must be felled in order to create the revolutionary Right.

This impetus might take the form of something similar to Jack Donovan’s anarcho-fascism or the Nietzschean fascism of my Romulae Genti. In musical terms, it would fuse Rage Against The Machine with SPQR (a fascist Roman hardcore band).

In the meantime, part three of the D&G series was originally to be part of a longer part two. But with Difference and Repetition playing such a huge role in how the series was actually written, part two was divided. Sometimes it is suicidal to begin reading new sources after a paper is already in production. This time was no exception, as I received Difference and Repetition three working days into part two, and it immediately made what I had already written obsolete.

On that note, anyone wanting to introduce the bomb known as Gilles Deleuze to their revolutionary arsenal, I suggest beginning with Nietzsche and Philosophy, then read Difference and Repetition, followed by Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Of course, at the very least one must read On the Genealogy of Morality before anything by Deleuze. Even as I came to write part three without using what I had previously written, some of it is good and might even clarify what Counter-Currents is to publish.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Toward a Simple Explanation

After meeting Félix Guattari, Deleuze immediately shifted his radical philosophical methodology to contemporary politics and, in particular, a sustained critique of capitalism and the new social forms that it promotes. While he never left behind his deeply philosophical sensibilities (unlike Nietzsche, for instance), his gaze shifted from philosophy-itself toward philosophy-in-the-world. Thus, while maintaining his empirical philosophy of man as a series of affects, he began looking more closely at society as a machine that organizes those affects by codifying human desire. This only furthered his disdain for popular culture, seeing it as something odious at best and at worst, an organization of affects designed to homogenize the various particular forms of human life in the terms of humanism, liberalism, and bourgeois desire.

Deleuze’s philosophical elitism is, then, a form of distance between critical and popular thought, just as it is a form of distance between critical men and popular men. Why, Deleuze wondered, is liberalism promoting opinion at the expense of critical thought? Might it have something to do with enslaving man to the image of an egalitarian and universal human? Of course, and thus the need for a new image of thought. But what does that mean? For starters, it means the need to be liberated from the laziness of representational thought. Only then may the creative potential of man be realized. But if society still organizes affects and codifies our desire, then what good does it do? Precisely! After becoming more philosophical – in Deleuzian terms, a monstrous proposition – we must become more revolutionary. We must become diligently aware of how modernity impacts our bodies. And we must devise methods for creating derelict spaces in which to disorganize affects and decode desire.

The world of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a world of desire, machines, micro-politics, flows, nomad thought, and war machines. It is a world created by shooting Nietzsche through Freud and Marx (to use Francis Bacon’s imagery). It is a world that will make no sense until it is lived. Nonetheless, we will do our best to make it, at the very least, an exciting proposition for those on the edges of modernity.

The problem of modernity, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the creation of the bourgeois subject, and in the most simplistic terms, the bourgeois subject is created by entangling human desire in an economic superstructure. In other words, bourgeois man must be made to desire the form of life that ensures first and foremost his usefulness to the economic flow of capital and goods. This process is the basis Anti-Oedipus, whose title refers primarily to the psychical economy of Freud.

However, where Freud based his model of Oedipus, the libidinal production of (economically) useful subordination, on the interactions of the simple bourgeois nuclear family – and thereby canonizing the petty trials and tribulations of modern men as the basis for the human, full stop – Deleuze and Guattari seek not only to expand the purview of sites of Oedipal production to the Church, the school, the factory, and the political party (among others), but to demonstrate both that “the human” implies a viciously reactive homo economicus, and that Freud’s failure to problematize the human points to the utterly bourgeois nature of his thought.[1] They combined this line of inquiry with a similar critique of Marx’s material economy, itself uncritical of modernity’s quest to universalize homo economicus.[2]

Seeing how Freud’s curative methodology was itself corrupted by the very conceptual possibilities of the disease it purportedly sought to cure, Deleuze and Guattari created an entirely new model of the process of creating economic man. This model begins with desire.

Deleuze and Guattari start with a seemingly simple assumption: that desire is both positive and productive. It does not emanate from lack but from the will to connect with other desires. It is akin to puissance (capacity for existence, or pure energy), or Nietzsche’s will to power, in that it is metaphysical (although never defined that way), and is purely creative and expansive – making life itself the negation of negation. But if life and desire are so affirmative, how do we end up with the idea that desire = lack? The answer is psychoanalysis. It was Freud, and later Lacan, who popularized the idea that desire is connected to sexuality and an insatiable impersonal lack.[3]

By making desire productive, Deleuze and Guattari also make it social, and as such, it becomes the basis for an entirely positive notion of society, and begins their critique of Marx. Marx assumed that capitalism’s power over the individual was negative, using force and chicanery to disconnect the worker from his or her true interests. This chicanery he called ideology. Deleuze and Guattari have numerous problems here, from the idea of the normative economic man to the real materiality of the “real world” being distorted (remember the description of difference above, as it is still the operative conception of experience).

For now there are two things to consider: one, social wholes or communities are not formed through repressive power but positive power. These social wholes are congealed through interests that are formed from coded, collected, or organized flows of desire (no longer puissance but pouvior, or a quantifiable institutional relation of force). And two, being composed of flows of desire (among the other elements listed above), individuals’ supposedly personal qualities begin impersonally and politically, with the interests of the individual and the social whole intrinsically aligned. If we were to stop here, we would have a decent understanding of Michel Foucault. But Deleuze cannot abide a life so naturally reactive and negated. Thus, we must continue.

Deleuze and Guattari, desperate to know why there has never been a sustainable revolution against capitalism, no longer seek the answer in institutional macropolitics but in what they call micropolitics.


[1] Anti-Oedipus, 1-4

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 55.

[3] Anyone doubting the power that psychoanalysis holds over modern conceptions of the human needs to read both Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique and Yockey’s Imperium. Both of them grapple with the same assumptions about modernity, psychoanalysis, and Marxism reached by Deleuze and Guattari, albeit from more racialist (MacDonald) and statist (Yockey) positions. Otherwise, just attempt to define sexuality and see where you end up.


What’s the price of heroes?

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Counter-Currents has published the conclusory paper in the series called “Deleuze, Guattari, and the New Right.” The fourth part is quite different from the first three, so if you hated those papers you might want to have a look at this one. Then again, if you tend towards truth, morality, conservatism, nationalism, or other aspects of liberal logos and politics, you’re just as well to avoid this one too. In it, I trade in my fascio-nationalism for a burgeoning version of Jack Donovan’s anarcho-fascism. In laymen’s terms, this means that I allowed Deleuze and Guattari to problematize my faith in Fascism. It also means that I’ve decided to be a better Nietzschean.

Just as liberal/democratic scholars do extreme violence to Nietzsche in order to mold him to their bourgeois needs so to do Fascist and other nationalist scholars. Instead of molding Nietzsche to fit Fascism’s needs, I used him to discern what is counter-modern in Fascism, leaving nationalism and international militarism by the wayside, while focusing instead on the will, instincts, and ethics of Fascist heroism. Of course, my anti-national Fascism was formed in Rome, amongst Fascists that rally around a bi-color flag of red and yellow and understand the liberal Italian State as a colonizing force, so it’s not like I was ever committed to a Statist solution to a Statist problem.

What is new is that I am actually advocating anarchism and any type of micro-rebellions that will shake the foundations of the liberal State. These micro-rebellions are described as ontological events in D&G 4, but one should also see them as epistemological possibilities – as the creation of opportunities to force thought to think, as Deleuze so beautifully explains the derelict space that is Nietzsche’s oeuvre. We need bombs and explosions to damage our most cherished beliefs, in order to make sure that they truly serve our needs and not those of liberalism, the State, capitalism, or the bourgeois Last Man that lurks in each of us. In other words, we need to shake up the New Right just a bit, and force our thought to affirm and create. As Deleuze explains, quoting Nietzsche, “‘It is not guilty pride but the ceaselessly reawaken instinct of the game which calls forth new worlds.’ Not a theodicy but a cosmodicy, not a sum of injustices to be expiated but justice as the law of this world; not hubris but play, innocence.”[1]

This has prompted me to reconceptualize the New Right and its goals in a way that still allows me space to move amongst the white nationalists. Thus, you will notice my use of revolutionary Right instead of New Right. Nota bene that I am using revolution purposefully, as it is a concept that needs to be stripped of its Leftist connotations, even as it is highly modern, as Hakim Bey explains in TAZ. At the end of the day, there is no way to suggest that we are anything but modern men in revolt against modernity, so I am comfortable with the compromise – at least for now, anyway; because now we have a host of other problems to make of ourselves in this world. To create we must affirm, but to affirm we must destroy.

We need to ask ourselves how much of the utopia that we design is motivated by our current comforts – both material/ontological and spiritual/epistemological? How much of those comforts is the work of ressentiment and laziness? How much of what we value owes itself to its timeliness? And as men and women who have embraced an untimely – uncommon, illiberal, violent, aristocratic – form of life, how are we compromised by our willingness to celebrate ideas, concepts, values, moralities, theologies, politics, and just plain assumptions and vulgar opinions that are utterly modern in form and content?

How do we know what we know, at who’s benefit, and at what cost?

What is the price of heroes?


[1] Nietzsche and Philosophy 25.


Live Tonight on Alba Voce

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From 7 to 9 PM EST on Thursday, May 23, I will be the guest and topic of conversation on David Baillie’s “Alba Voce” Internet radio show. It is a live show, so it might be possible for callers to join the discussion. Given that Mr. Baillie is a Christian White Nationalist, I am not entirely sure to what extent my affirmative heresies will be tolerated. I can only promise a serious approach to the problems facing revolutionary men at the Right edges of late-Capitalist modernity.

Expected topics of conversation include:

  • Deleuze and Guattari
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Bruno Latour
  • Alexander Dugin
  • Jack Donovan
  • Physiology, naturalism, and conceptualization
  • Violence and pedagogy
  • The creation of actant-networks
  • The revolutionary potential of White Nationalism
  • The world revolution against globalization
  • Ultras and Fourth Generation Warfare
  • Publishing and a model of revolutionary exposition

Those familiar with my essays know how much room for critique and dereliction these topics contain.

The show can be accessed here.



Santa Cruz Run Interview

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I was interviewed last weekend for the Santa Cruz Run Internet radio show hosted by Vernon Bohr. It is similar to my last interview with David Baillie, which is slightly disappointing. I simply have not sufficiently developed a common language with which to discuss my intellectual endeavors, and this leads to a very rhetorical and fatuous version of Mark Dyal. Nonetheless, the 2-hour interview is available for downloading or streaming.

The latter portion of the interview might be useful in a maddening way: a neocon listener called in to chide me for a number of heresies: running big business from American soil, misrepresenting the purpose of education, and delimiting the importance – both strategic and financial – of American taxpayer funding of Israel.

Even if one is disinclined to listen to the whole interview, the comments of the neocon caller warrant attention. In fact, I am crediting the caller with the quote of a lifetime – the kind of quote that one can only ever hope to hear from the mouth of his enemy. Pause for a moment to remember my pedigree: maximum hostility toward modernity, bourgeois ontology, and the Judeo-Christian truth/moral regime; and full commitment to the creative and revolutionary affirmation of Nietzsche and Deleuze. Sense for a moment the always/already weariness with which I engage in any exchange with neocons (or any other form of liberal). Then listen to my veiled attempt at obsequiousness.

After I sportingly threw the guy a bone by criticizing Israel, he was gracious enough to conclude without malice or irony that, “without multinational corporations the United States would not exist.”

This is as radical a critique of America and its modernity as one will ever find, and yet it was mouthed as a defense of both America and global capitalism. No matter: I am taking it as my own. In some future project – right now slated to be my second book with Arktos – I will explain how the homogenizing forces of American/global capitalism have been almost uncontested in reducing contemporary life to the service of consumption, while creating and animating a set of affects that both formalize utterances (somewhat obviously in the combined energies of morality and truth and even less so in the image of thought utilized by the bourgeois form of life) and machinize relations and bodies (making us unwilling and unable to defend ourselves from the regime at hand).

For now, I am working on my first book for Arktos – a reworking of my academic work on Roman Ultras – as well as a new version of the Homeric Gods review essay for The Initiate. The former will be the basis of a new understanding of political language and behavior, while the latter will combine Homer, Otto, and Nietzsche with a mildly-Spinozan Deleuze.


Flows, Fluxes, Stops, Starts

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Dancing with a Ball and Chain

“All that is important is that each group or individual should construct the plane of immanence on which they lead their life and carry on their business. Without these conditions you obviously do lack something, but you lack precisely the conditions that make a desire possible. Organizations of forms – formations of subjects – incapacitate desire: they subject it to law and introduce lack into it. If you tie someone up and say to him, ‘express yourself, friend,’ the most that he will be able to say is that he doesn’t want to be tied up. The only spontaneity in desire is doubtless of that kind: to not want to be oppressed, exploited, enslaved, or subjugated. But no desire has ever been created with non-wishes.” Dialogues II: 96.

Dialogues II (1977/1987), Deleuze’s philosophical/conversational exchanges with Claire Parnet, assembles a cross section of flows, fluxes, movements, and speeds that mirror those of A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987), which was published three years later. Like topological excavators, Deleuze and Parnet map a terrain of concepts, flows, and fluxes through Deleuzian topics like desire, utterances, and assemblages, while applying them to Anglo-American literature, psychoanalysis, and the State and revolutionaries. The book functions as a how-to manual, clearly showing the possibilities and proper demands contained in Deleuze’s methodology.

It is the book that I’ve been reading exclusively for two months, and I will continue to do so until it is complete. Apart from Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962/1983), it is the most important of Deleuze’s books that I’ve perused. The deep philosophy books are magisterial, but one must adopt ascetic practices to get the most from them. This one, like the Nietzsche book – and Nietzsche’s own books – is closer to a bomb-making guide. “Use this sentence to destroy assumption A, that one to render laughable 1/8th of the bourgeois form of life, etc.” It is becoming my world, allowing me to destroy any lingering unexamined modern assumptions that a few years in the New Right did not uproot.

Silence usually means production, and this period sub silentio is no exception. Aside from the upcoming publications mentioned below, I am working on an essay intended for only the most radical men and women of the revolutionary Right. I will submit it to either Counter-Currents or Attack the System later this month. It is a scathing continuation of my series of papers on Deleuze and Guattari, addressing the necessary distance between revolutionaries, their derelict spaces, and the bourgeois form of life. Part of it might look something like this:

“Of course, anyone who’s read my recent work knows that the North American New Right (NANR) has a revolution problem. While the core of the phenomenon is bourgeois – seeking a nationalist movement-based solution to contemporary America – there is a fringe on its farthest distant edge – an edge that overlooks an icy precipice; accessed only by continual self-overcoming, by thought and action freed of any Logocentric restraints, by the sweaty muscular precision that comes with properly using one’s inheritance – that no one desiring to merely rehabilitate the bourgeois form of life can reach. From that precipice, the utterly bourgeois notions of State, movement, and mass appeal become evidence that bourgeois constitutions are still at work, and give off the hint of a desire to ensure that any movement that is possible amongst the radical Right is squashed.”

The essay will wonder aloud at the implications of a Right that avoids the possible at any cost, choosing instead to laud “the real” and its comforting embrace; asking if bourgeois solutions to modernity are self-crippling for the sake of the enemy still within us – like “dancing with a ball and chain, like a butterfly around a flame,” unable to justify ones existence in any terms but those given us by our captors.

Ultimately, instincts and physiological constitutions provide us with the Right that we deserve.

Multiculturalism and Nietzschean Paganism

I was honored to write the Foreword for Kerry Bolton’s next book Modern Babel: Multiculturalism, Globalization, and the New World Order. My little essay, “The New True Enemy,” is a super-fun read. It’s neither manifesto nor polemic, but instead a simple call to arms – another call to become-revolutionary, or as a Guattari put it, to become homo insurrectus. As a writer, I couldn’t be happier to have my name connected with Dr. Bolton’s book. Even though he posits racial and bio-genetic reasons for resisting global capitalism, he nonetheless provides the revolutionary Right with a rented Ryder truck full of affective energy to be directed against capitalism.

As I was writing that essay, I was also revising my Homeric Gods review essay for publication in the Traditionalist journal The Initiate. I suppose at this point being associated with Traditionalism is no less awkward than being part of the North American New Right, and no less problematic. As the revised essay explains, replacing the One True God with Several True Gods is not paganism, but a mummification of the myriad pre-Christian forms of life and a lowbrow subcultural form of bourgeois comfort seeking. Instead I promote a Nietzschean paganism that is less concerned with Logos than with affect and ethics.

Revolutionary Becoming in the Loveliest of Places – Dust to Dust

Being in the company of one of my raptorous men and his lovely wife always awakens in me a desire to listen to The Civil Wars. That I saw said raptor this week was fortunate, since The Civil Wars released their latest LP on 06 Aug. In deep listening this morning I discovered some lyrics that contain something of the distance that separates me from my contemporaries – those who think that their current physiological and conceptual states are adequate enough to buttress the creation of a new form of life; those who believe that science and State-sponsored thought will free them from liberalism; those who would build walls at this moment, instead of at the conclusion of war.

Let me in the walls

You’ve built around

We can light a match

And burn them down

Let me hold your hand

And dance around

Around the flames

In front of us

“The revolution will [indeed] be a festival.”


The Revolt? No, ma’am. I’m Revolting.

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Drunken Exposition on Imperium Europa

On October 30, 2013 Dana Roccapriore hosted me for an episode of his radio show Imperium Europa. Dana asked some familiar questions about my time in Rome and my essays published at Counter-Currents, but also allowed me space to expound upon my current work and its relation to the revolutionary fringes of the Radical Right. Although the interview – available here – totaled two hours and 40 minutes, he and I are planning a sequel that will address some of the problems created by my work. Among these I am anxious to discuss:

  • The continued epistemological blind spots in North American New Right thought.
    • The nation-state and race as behavior motivating and teleological narratives.
    • The relationship between epistemology and ontology.
      • How what we know reflects who and what we are.
      • Modernity and the dominant paradigms of engaging with and combating the bourgeois form of life.
        • How liberal politics gets smuggled into anti-liberal political radicalism.
        • The modern image of thought and the perpetuation of modernity.
          • From Plato to CNN, it all just “makes sense.”
          • Derelict spaces and war against modernity.
            • Physiology, assemblage, and raptorism.
            • Nietzsche and Deleuze

American Raptor: The Spector Haunting the Last Man

The book for which I am now gathering notes will examine these problems in an ethnographic and philosophical style and tone, although it takes much of its concepts and organization from paleontology. Tentatively titled American Raptor, in honor of the raptor fossils on display at North Georgia’s Tellus Museum, the book will provide valuable examples of transvaluation, dereliction, infiltration, and revolution, while demonstrating the beauty and joy of Nietzschean nobility – those qualities and values that so enchanted Gilles Deleuze. And because it will engage the most radical thinkers amongst the academic Deleuzians – Brian Massumi, Ian Buchanan, Eugene Holland, and Gregg Lambert – as well as anarchic and nomadic anthropology – James C. Scott and Pierre Clastres – it is the book I would’ve written even if I were an Associate Professor.

But that I write it for men and women whose lives sparkle with the possibilities of a post-bourgeois form of life and not for a group of institutionally educated and justified slaves of mediocrity is a rare and delicious dessert.

American Raptor takes the Nietzschean/Deleuzian diagnostic “we each get the _____ that we deserve,” at face-value, examining in precise terms the gulf between men and women content to be in a herd and those who readily and willfully leave the herd – those who complain incessantly and preach about mass movements and natural hierarchies simultaneously; those who demand a meaningful God or a Master to make life tolerable; or those whose instincts do not promote slavish devotion to bourgeois and reactionary concepts and ideas. These latter I have begun to call raptors, because they live in small packs and feed upon the slothful and contented automatons of the bourgeois herd. They engage a form of life that pushes beyond every bourgeois notion of identity, political action, philosophy, hierarchy, or community that is commonly regurgitated by thinkers on either the Left or the Right. These small pockets of men and women in Appalachia and the southeastern swamps have created veritable derelict spaces of their lives. And for these people, none of the bourgeois narratives being offered – none of the abstract biological, anthropological, or historical mystifications of life – promise anything but the continued homogenization of their particularity and mobifcation of their potentiality.

American Raptor asks these few – very few – raptors to continually overcome what they’ve been asked to slavishly understand from State-sponsored political, scientific, and religious thought. It asks them to understand how their politics is being compromised by liberal bourgeois slave-based politics and concepts that seek above all to maintain their association with action in liberal bourgeois terms – to put The Revolt above revolting, to put the interests of The Mob or The Race or The Nation above their own instinctual and willing forces, and to seek their own justification from the herd via a dialectical rationalism that views and analyses exclusively from the slave perspective – and to limit their own becoming beyond bourgeois.

It asks of and speaks exclusively to the raptors – only to those who have transvalued their own weakness – and leaves modernity and its vulgar ressentiment to those who cannot live without it. But before American Raptor can do so, it must take its cues from the very men and women it seeks to reach. Modernity estranges us from ourselves by actively promoting – breeding! – the triumph of reactive, slavish instincts. That triumph can be examined most clearly in the two most thoroughly modern herd-promoting concepts: race and nation. What do they do: particularize and ennoble or homogenize and weaken?

To whom do they ring true: the noble, courageous, confident, and strong, or the degenerating, impoverished, slavish wildebeest who cannot survive without the comfort and safety of its herd? They and other concepts with similar genealogical properties are examined epistemologically but also ontologically, given that the structures of knowledge and being share a common root. And with that we return to the dictum, “we each get the (movement, philosophy, philosopher, qualities, quantities, forces, desires) that we deserve.” Some use Nietzsche’s name in order to justify their slavish and ressentiment filled instincts; some talk rapturously about organic bases of community without the slightest inkling of either concepts’ genealogy; while others self-proclaim themselves radicals as they lament the dismantling of traditional (conservative) American values.

But still others, those becoming-raptors who have left behind the sense making apparatuses, instinctual reaction, and ontological reterritorializations of modernity – those who have left behind the tools that effectuated the slave revolt and regime under which we currently live; those who know that merely moving to the extreme edges of a herd still leaves one a member of a herd, and that, in order to revolt, the herd must be left behind and systematically devoured – inherit only that which enhances their beauty and power. It is these men and women who have shown me what revolution looks like. Some of them have read my work; some have even read Deleuze and Nietzsche; and some have no need of books in order to know what their instincts have already taught them. Beauty is indeed for the few.

The New True Enemy

In the meantime, Black House Publishing has published Kerry Bolton’s Babel, Inc. My preface to Babel, Inc., which I call “The New True Enemy,” aligns Bolton’s book and his energies with a more general revolutionary potential than just the disgruntled-conservatism that pervades much of New Right thought. As I say,

For while it has long been common to read Rightist ruminations on race, immigration, and even ethnological characteristics, only recently has the Right devoted much critical thought to capitalism and the liberal State. Bolton, in his characteristically energetic style, not only makes it possible to know how the United States and its neoliberal allies are combining multinational corporate Money Power with the contemporary moral and truth regime known as multiculturalism to create a new type of human creature, but he also succeeds in making this arrangement the primary target of Rightist agitation and revolt.

 

For unlike the Left, which is utterly complicit in the very State-sponsored liberalism that it purports to oppose, the Right’s anti-liberalism and transvaluational tendencies have allowed it to remain free of the sense-and-capital making apparatuses of the liberal State. Despite this freedom, though, the Right has said very little about the State or capitalism. Perhaps this is because both are darlings of Marxist ideologues, or because the Right has always been fond of nationalism and Statism and weary of homo economicus. In any case, Bolton has ensured that the State and its capitalist “culture of death” will no longer be ignored.

In other words, if the Right is content to attack its “racial enemies” like immigration and multiculturalism, and sing tropish and stale hysterical songs about degeneration and community, while ignoring the two most powerful agents of modern bourgeois power – the State and capitalism – then it has very little to offer those who are truly committed to overcoming the Last Man.


Make an Assemblage!

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A few weeks ago, Achim Szepanski, the legendary founder of the Force, Inc. family of record labels – including Mille Plateaux – noted on his Facebook page that Gilles Deleuze was particularly fond of “Textuell,” a track from Oval’s Systemisch album (MP CD 9, 1994). This immediately set me in motion toward my vast collection of Mille Plateaux albums so as to discover the song again. Much to my chagrin I discovered instead that Systemisch was missing from my collection – not because I unwisely loaned it out but because I never had it to begin with. So, in an extraordinary demonstration of varying timescales and the capitalist power of absolute deterritorialization, I ended up discovering just today an album that, 20 years ago, laid the foundation for much of the music of my adulthood.

In order to facilitate the most radical of assemblages with an upcoming paper on music and revolt, please download Systemisch on me. If Oval, Mille Plateaux, or Thrill Jockey seek restitution, I ask them to address me directly – as I will gladly pay for the downloads that take place – and leave the State and its capitalist overseers out of it.

Keep in mind that I am also offering these tracks here because some of my readers live beyond the world market and do not have access to legal music downloading.

Download: systemisch_oval_01_textuell.mp3

Textuell

Download: systemisch_oval_02_aero-deck.mp3

Aero Deck

Download: systemisch_oval_03_the-politics-of-digital-audio.mp3

The Politics of Digital Audio

Download: systemisch_oval_04_schoner-wissen.mp3

Schoner Wissen

Download: systemisch_oval_05_catchy-daad.mp3

Catchy DAAD

Download: systemisch_oval_06_mediation.mp3

Mediation

Download: systemisch_oval_07_tonregie.mp3

Tonregie

Download: systemisch_oval_08_oval-office.mp3

Oval Office

Download: systemisch_oval_09_compact-disc.mp3

Compact Disc

Download: systemisch_oval_10_post-post.mp3

Post-Post

Download: systemisch_oval_11_gabba-nation.mp3

Gabba Nation

 

UGH – Give me a few minutes to figure out why the tracks are Adobe-based and not straight downloads.


Dancing with Athena

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