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.
