“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.
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
