On Violence: Paradoxes and Antinomies || Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de...

Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de BenoistAuthor(s): THOMAS SHEEHANSource: Social Research, Vol. 48, No. 1, On Violence: Paradoxes and Antinomies (SPRING 1981),pp. 45-73Published by: The New SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970798 .

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Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and / Alain de Benoist / BY THOMAS

SHEEHAN

XVeflecting on the French situation in 1912, Georges Sorel, the evangelist of what Professor Roth dubs "the cult of violence," wrote that "ardent young men are turning toward what Republicans call reaction, because only there do they perceive some signs of vitality."1 Today in Europe, a dozen years from the uprisings of 1968, after half a decade of left-wing terrorism in Germany and Italy, and in what seems to be the twilight of hopes for some form of Eurocommunism, Sorel's words ring true again. Among the youth of Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium - not to mention Spain - the last five years have seen the quiet but steady growth of what analysts have named Eurofascism, a perhaps small but well-financed and internationally coordinated network of extreme right- wing groups, ideologically grounded in the philosophies of men like Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist and, in their more extreme forms, dedicated to violence and terrorism in the name of saving Europe from both capitalism and Marxism.2

Europe woke up to the new ideology of Eurofascism in the spring of 1978 when, in a series of articles entitled "Une

1 Jack J. Roth, The Cult of Violence: Sorel and the Sorelians (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), p. 107.

2 A very rough list includes: in France, the Fédération d'action nationale européenne (now called Faisceaux nationales européennes) and Mouvement nationaliste révo- lutionnaire; in Italy, Terza Posizione and the terrorist group Nuclei armati rivoluzio- na ri; in Belgium, the Vlaamse Militanten Orde. In Germany there are 69 extreme- right groups, of which 23 are known to be armed.



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nouvelle droite?," Le Monde discussed the works of neofascist philosopher Alain de Benoist and probed into his study group called GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civili- sation européenne). The world woke up to the terrorist potential of the new fascism with the bloody massacres perpetrated in the summer and fall of 1980: the bomb explosions at the Bologna railway station in August (85 dead), at the Munich Oktoberfest in September (13 dead), and at a Paris synagogue in October (4 dead).

Fascist ideology, fascist terrorism - the question of their possible connection presses to the fore. To be sure, no one would want to lay responsibility for the deaths in rue Copernic directly at the doorstep of Alain de Benoist, any more than one would want to blame the massacre in Bologna on the Italian parliamentarian and neofascist ideologue Pino Rauti. Both men, in fact, have severely condemned those terrorist acts in their respective countries. Nonetheless, one is left with the question of what form of ideology could possibly underlie those dreadful acts, inspiring and, in the eyes of their perpe- trators, justifying them. And, short of terrorism, what is the ideology of the new fascist? Why are "ardent young men" turning again, in whatever numbers, toward reaction?

There is no lack of studies on terrorism from political and sociological points of view, although, given the course of events in the past decade, most of the analysis has focused on leftist terrorism. Professor Ferrarotti's penetrating investiga- tions into the social roots and what he calls the "hypnosis" of violence have a broader perspective and have taken long steps toward an understanding both of the causes of violence and of its ambiguous fascination for certain intellectuals.3 I find his suggestive discussion of violence as an "interruption of discourse" to be a fruitful starting point for some reflections on what I shall call the "mythology of violence" within the mythic-metaphysical framework of the extreme right, par-

3 Franco Ferrarotti, Alie radiei della violenza (Milan: Rizzoli, 1979) and L'ipnosi della violenza (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980). On "the interruption of discourse," see pp. 9 and 94.



EVOLA AND DE BENOIST 47

ticularly in Italy and more generally in Europe. I shall concentrate on the work of the late Julius Evola, both because his philosophy of fascism continues to exert great influence in Italy (neofascist political leader Giorgio Almirante has called him "our Marcuse, only better"4) and because the differences between his thought and that of Alain de Benoist allow us to see what might be "new" about the New Right.

Within the limitations imposed by the form of an essay, these reflections can be little more than a sketch of some themes that belong to a longer and more wide-ranging study of the political philosophy of totalitarianism. In the present essay I wish to suggest that, whereas social, political, and psychological analyses of terrorism do contribute greatly to our understanding of the phenomenon, they also leave un- touched an essential aspect of it: its mythic appeal to the terrorist and, in his eyes, its quasi-metaphysical justification. To adapt Hegel's phrase: in order to understand terrorism in its depth we must try to comprehend die verkehrte Welt, the upside-down world, of the terrorist's metaphysics of reality and history. While this metaphysics, this vision of what is essential and what ought to be, is inscribed in the terrorist's politics and incarnated in his actions, it is not adequately explained by analyses of his strategy and tactics. The almost religious appeal of a life of clandestinity, with its rituals of the underground and its messianic challenge to risk one's life for a cause, calls for an analysis not just of the psyche of the terrorist but, even deeper, of the myth or metaphysics to which he responds.

A brief reflection on the meaning of violence and terrorism may bear out this point. (For now I take terrorism not as qualitatively different from violence but rather as an extreme form of it.) In Greek philosophy and especially in Aristotle, violence (bia) was any force exerted against the essential na-

4 Cited in Giorgi Galli, La crisi italiana e la Destra internazionale ( Milan : Mondadori, 1974), p. 20. Rauti calls Evola "the greatest traditionalist thinker in our days in the entire West" (Le idee che mossero il mondo [Rome: Edizione Europa, 1976], p. 65).



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ture of things (para physin). Aristotle saw everything as pos- sessed of an intrinsic nature or finality (telos), and all movement or becoming that tended toward the fulfillment of that finality was "telological" or in accord with the thing's essential nature (kata physin). In this straightforward view of reality, true development is movement toward the essential (genesis heneka ousias), and violence is movement against the essential. And for today's terrorist it is the same - except that he dis- agrees with society about what is politically natural and essential (physis, ousia) and hence about what constitutes violence. In his inverted world, which he sees from the viewpoint of what Ricoeur has entitled "the hermeneutics of suspicion," society as it stands is "unnatural" and therefore violent; and what society calls violence is for him either self-defence (resistance against the unnatural) or therapeutic (restoration of the essential) or maieutic (helping give birth to the natural and essential).5

What society calls terrorism is, for the terrorist, an urge for the essential, for what ought to be. It is fundamentally a "metaphysical" act. Disagreements about whose violence is really violence are, for the terrorist (but also for the society he attacks), disagreements about the essence of the political order and ultimately about the essence of history and reality. To be sure, policemen cannot discuss metaphysics when trying to disarm a terrorist. But at the level of reflection on the causes of and motives behind terrorism, and especially fascist terrorism, not much light is shed by easy appeals to "ir-

5 Compare the words of Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, leader of the failed coup against the Italian government a decade ago: "[Evola] is not afraid to be considered a reactionary, i.e., a man of the Right, when he warns that revolution makes sense only when it is a reconstruction, that is, a violent removal of an unjust state of affairs or disturbance in the civil and political order . . ." (from his introduction to Julius Evola, Gli uomini e le rovine [Rome: Ascia, 1953]; reprinted in Omaggio a Julius Evola, ed. Gianfranco de Turris [Rome: Volpe, 1973], p. 93). Sorel's concept of violence is more complex. While he does see it as a normal manifestation of the social order, he nonetheless believed it maintained the "scission" between the proletariat and the corrupt world about it and that it had the function of midwife to progress. See Roth, The Cult of Violence, pp. Ill, 163, 265.




rationalism" and "nihilism." If anything, fascist terrorists are very rational and extremely positive about their metaphysical beliefs. And the challenge is to understand those beliefs, not because comprendre tout c'est pardonner tout, but because jail sentences have never been an effective way to abolish philosophical convictions.

An analysis of the mythics and metaphysics that may ultimately underlie acts of violence and terrorism could be carried out with regard to the extreme left as well as the extreme right. Toni Negri, the Italian theoretician of a radical neo- Marxism, speaks in almost religious and Manichaean tones of a revolutionary "logic of collective separateness," of the con- viction that true Marxists are "another race," born of a "virgin mother" and dedicated to "the battle between the true and the false," led by the Party which is compared to a "combatant religious order."6 Indeed, I maintain that both the radical left and the radical right represent, at the level of their mythics and metaphysics, different but ultimately homologous reactions against what Mircea Eliade has called "the terror of history" - even if Marxism pretends to be the science of history. Although I cannot argue it here, I hold that Negri's neo-Marxism is as much a metahistorics in a teleologkal (specifically an inverted eschatological) modality as Julius Evola's fas- cistic philosophy is a metahistorics in an archeological (and specifically cyclical) modality.7

In what follows I do not intend to suggest that the mythics or metaphysics of the radical right necessarily demands and intrinsically justifies terrorism, any more than I would hold anything like that for radical Marxist philosophy. But there is

6 Antonio Negri, // dominio e il sabataggio: Sul metodo marxista della trasformazione sociale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), pp. 57, 47, 18, and 36 respectively. Rauti seems to hold similar notions of the (Fascist) Party as modeled on the religious fighting orders of the Middle Ages: Le idee, p. 339.

7 Cf. Negri, // dominio, p. 72: "Our sabotage organizes the proletarian assault on heaven so that finally that damned heaven may be no more!" On Negri's neo- Marxism, see Thomas Sheehan, "Italy: Behind the Ski Mask," The New York Review of Books 26 (Aug. 16, 1979): 20-26.



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an essential element in both Evola's and de Benoist's visions of reality that not only interrupts discourse, as Ferrarotti puts it, but also denies its validity from the outset and thus does radical violence to the nature of man himself. Whether and to what degree this violence at the level of theory finds its way into practice and is used as a justification for terrorism is another, although not unrelated, question.

Evola's "Traditionalism"

Julius Evola (1898-1974) was perhaps the most original and creative - and, intellectually, the most nonconformist - of the Italian Fascist philosophers. His most important works on idealist philosophy, spiritualism, orientalism, and racism were written between 1925 and 1943 (a major book on The Metaphysics of Sex appeared in 1958), but his deep and continuing impact on the ideology of the extreme right is evi- denced by the energetic republication of his works in recent years.8 (Whatever "philosophy" undergirds the writings of Italian neofascist ideologue Pino Rauti is made up of rehashes and outright plagiarisms of Evola's work.9) Although he never joined the Fascist Party, he was an ardent supporter of Musso- lini and enjoyed the dubious privilege of having // Duce en- dorse his book, Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race (1941), as the official statement of Fascism's "spiritualist" racism as against Nazism's merely biological racism. When Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, Evola and other Fascist in-

8 For a bibliography of Evola's work and secondary literature, see Omaggio a Julius Evota, pp. 117-205. In what follows I concentrate on Evola's Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, 5th ed. (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1976). I abbreviate the work asÄMAi.

9 Although Rauti plagiarizes blatantly, he also does so badly, miscopying footnotes, misspelling words, etc. Compare his Le idee che mossero il mondo (-IMM) and Evola's Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (=RMM) on the following pages: IMM 40 = RMM 322; 41 = 322f (but compare the footnotes); 66 n. 3 = 342 n. 2; 173 = 363 and 365 (but compare footnotes 13 and 18 respectively); 211 n. 2 = 38 n. 16; 212f = 139f (but Rauti miscopies "Vollgenossen"); 219 n. 8 - 375 n. 8; 220f = 378 (but compare the footnotes); and most blatantly of ali, IMM 387-389 = RMM 419-421.




tellectuals visited Hitler to discuss the formation of the Fascist Republic of Salò. After narrowly escaping arrest by the Americans in June 1944, Evola fled Rome for Vienna, where he was crippled during a bombardment. In 1951 he was jailed in Italy for six months on charges of "reconstituting Fascism" but was acquitted. He spent his last years continuing to write while overseeing the Julius Evola Foundation in Rome.

Evola's philosophy, which he entitled Traditionalism, is a curious but finally coherent synthesis of metaphysical idealism, primitive mythologies, and what he called a "metaphysics of history." In fact, however, his metaphysics of history is a long diatribe against history in the name of the ultimate primacy of the eternal, stable, suprahistorical realm of the spiritual and ontological, "the Being of origins."10 This unmitigated affirmation of the spiritual, which in very different ways was char- acteristic of reactionary intellectuals between the wars,11 forms the foundation of Evola's philosophical fascism and the basis of his repudiation of nihilism, bourgeois materialism (especially in its American form), and, of course, Marxism. In his eyes it marked the critical difference between the Olympic, Apollonian nature of Italian Fascism and the pagan, romantic-telluric Dionysianism of German National Socialism. In the young Italian neofascist of today, I believe, Evola's distinction has disappeared, and one finds instead a confused mythology that combines the uranic (e.g., summer-solstice fes- tivals) with the chthonic (in Italy J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy is generally identified with the youth culture of the right wing, where it enjoys enormous popularity). In any case, one does well to remember that charges of "irrationality," "nihilism," and "romanticism" entirely miss the core of Evola's thought. If anything, his philosophy is one of the suprarational rather

l0RMM, p. 229 (l'essere delle origini). 11 Compare, e.g., Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Ralph Man- heim (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 45-50. See also Alastair Hamilton, The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism, 1919-1945 (New York: Avon, 1971).



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than the irrational, of Being rather than nihilism, of Olympic classicism rather than romanticism. For him, history, evolution, and the world of becoming are the realm of irrationalism and nihilism.

Of course, the invocation of spirituality was a common- place of Italian Fascism. Even Mussolini was given to protrep- tics in which he called upon the Italian citizen to "achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists," and in describing Fascism in 1930 he said: "This political process is flanked by a philosophical process; if it be true that matter was on the altars for one century, today it is the spirit which takes its place. ... By saying that God is returning, we mean that spiritual values are returning."12 At the risk of stating the obvious, I believe that the urge for the "spiritual," however poorly defined, is still what ultimately moves the neofascist militant and terrorist in Italy today. The point now is to see how the primacy of the spiritual in Evola's thought constitutes as well the destruction of the world of discourse, of logos y and ultimately of history.

Evola's earliest philosophical works from the 'twenties were dedicated to reshaping neo-Idealism from a philosophy of Absolute Spirit and mind into a philosophy of the "absolute individual" and action.13 At first Evola seemed to follow Gen- tile's anti-intellectualist turn toward action and becoming (verum et fieri convertuntur , Gentile wrote),14 and he sought to reread Hegel's speculative dialectics of necessity in terms of a voluntaristic dialectics of freedom ruled by the maxim tu devi diventare Dio, "You must become God." In his 1925 Essays on Magical Idealism Evola wrote, "God does not exist. The Ego

12 Benito Mussolini, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), pp. 8 and 35.

13 Especially Saggi suW Idealismo Magico (Todi and Rome: Atanor, 1925); Teoria dell'Individuo assoluto (Turin: Bocca, 1927); and Fenomenologia dell'Individuo assoluto

(Turin: Bocca, 1930). See also the reviews in Omaggio a Julius Evola, pp. 24-54, upon which I draw.

14 See Giovanni Gentile, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, tr. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 269, 271, and 15 respectively, cited in Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), pp. 404 and 408.




must create him by making itself divine."15 But it was in

working out the idea of the individual who elevates himself to the level of absolute self-determination in the world of action that Evola discovered the existential power of primitive mythology and made the decisive turn from neo-Idealism to what I call his "metaphysical mythics," the vision that structures his best-known and most influential work, Revolt Against the Modern World.

It is in Evola's approach to his metaphysical mythics - his method in the broad sense - that we find the interruption, and indeed the invalidation, of discourse of which Ferrarotti speaks. "I have always fought against words," Pirandello wrote in 1925 when subscribing to a manifesto of Fascist intellectuals,16 and this phrase could well stand as a motto for Evola's repudiation of discursive argumentation in the name of a spiritual intuition as the proper method in philosophy. The suprarational "intellectual intuition" that he proposes is in fact a kind of Platonic anamnesis (a riconescere o ricordare) of the eternal, nonhuman realm of the spirit. In the introduction to Revolt Against the Modern World Evola writes:

The truths that allow us to understand the world of Tradition are not those that can be "learned" or "discussed." They either are or are not. We can only remember them, and that happens when we are freed from the obstacles represented by various human constructions (chief among these the results and methods of authorized "researchers") and have awakened the capacity to see from the nonhuman viewpoint, which is the same as the Traditional viewpoint. . . . Traditional truths have always been held to be essentially non-human}1

For Evola, discursive thought "decentralizes" man by detach- ing him from the realm of Being. Indeed, the Vete noire of Western philosophy is Socrates, who introduced "the most fatal deviation," that of "substituting discursive thought for

15 In Omaggio, p. 26. 18 See The Appeal of Fascism, p. 84. 17 RM M , pp. 12f; for "riconoscere o ricordare," p. 124.



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the spirit." The result has been "the emancipation of the individual as 'thinker' from the Tradition, and the affirmation of reason as the instrument of free criticism and profane knowledge."18

What we find in Evola is no advocacy of the irrational but, quite the contrary, the reassertion of a perennial theme in Western philosophy: the primacy of nous over episteme, of intellectus over ratio, of Vernunft over Verstand, of intellectual intuition over discursive knowledge. And to the degree that these two poles are dichotomized and bereft of any mediating connection - as they emphatically are in Evola and as they potentially are in certain interpretations of, for example, Thomas Aquinas and Heidegger - we may say that the charge of a fascism of the spirit can be laid at more doors than just Evola's.19 What Evola has done is to actualize and exaggerate a tendency that is implicit in all Western philosophies based on the primacy - indeed, the possibility - of an intellectual intuition. He repudiates dialogistic, discursive reasoning (logos, ratio) not because he favors a descent to the irrational but because he affirms, along with Aristotle, the superiority of the suprarational ("Since man is - more than anything else - nous, life in accord with nous is also for him the happiest" [Nie. Ethics, K, 7, 1178 a 8]). In asserting the primacy of this "nonhuman element of man," Evola calls his philosophy "anti- humanistic" in the sense of something "more-than-human." Spiritual intuition is the means whereby "empirical existence comes to be really transformed and resolved in divinity."20

Evola's method of intuitionism grows out of the content of his philosophy. As we turn to an explicit consideration of that content, we find his thought articulated into: (1) a metaphysics

18/?AÍM, pp. 319 and 320. 19 Regarding Aquinas, see Pierre Rousselot, L'Intellectualisme de saint Thomas, 2nd ed.

(Paris: Beauschesne, 1924), p. 228f: "Christian life seems to have developed in St. Thomas an enthusiasm for intelligence, along with a correlative disdain for discursive human reasoning." Also pp. 25f on Aquinas's opposition to "the idolatry of the enunciable."

20 Evola, Saggi suit Idealismo Magico, p. lö. tor the nonnuman element ot man, RMM, p. 125.




of dualism and hierarchy that comports a philosophical anthropology of "spiritual virility"; (2) a political philosophy of empire and a social philosophy of castes; and (3) a "metaphysics of history" based on an antihistorical, cyclical theory of time.

Metaphysics and Anthropology. At the basis of Evola's Traditionalist thought lies "the doctrine of the two natures" a dualism of the supernatural and the natural, where the supernatural is emphatically not to be read in Judeo-Christian terms (which are founded on the "Semitic spirit"), that is, as an hypostasized and separate realm, but rather in ontological terms.21 For Evola, the higher realm is the (ill-defined) power of the a priori and the normative, the "world of 'Being,' which alone can provide stability," an underivable and unconditional principle or "occult force which, when present, living and active . . ., reacts on the world of quantity by impressing upon it a form and quality."22 Evola's "supernatural" is the dimension of what I call the "archeological," that is, of the ontological arche which is the origin and ordering principle of everything else, to which it is compared as form to matter. This arche is the power of the Law, "that primordial legislation which orders things hierarchically" by giving things their relative ontological status. This suprahuman themis is reflected in but not derived from human nomos: "Every law, if it is to have objective validity as such, must have a 'divine' character. But when this character is recognized and when, therefore, its origin is connected back to a nonhuman tradition, its authority [is] absolute, the law has validity as something infallible, in- flexible, and immutable, something which does not admit of discussion. . . ,"23

In mythic terms, this metaphysical realm of Being is described in terms of the divine, not as a personal God but as

21 RM M , pp. 19 and 345. 22 RM M , pp. 82 and 211. 23 RMM, pp. 38 (primordial legislation) and 40 (every law).



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numen y an immutable "naked force," an "essence free of passion and change, one which creates distance with regard to everything which is merely human," a solar realm of Olympic peace and light, of divine "regality."24 In Evola's mythic "metaphysics of history," this dimension corresponds to the Golden Age of Hesiod and the Satya (or Krta) Yuga of Hindu mythology (sat = being; satya = truth), "the age of Being and thus also of truth in the transcendent sense."25 In mythology's "sacred geography," this dimension is described as the polar realm, the center of the earth, the axis mundi. If we seek the origins of some of the arcane symbols and rituals of young Italian neofascists, it is to such pages as these in Evola that we must turn.

Correlative to the principle of spiritual dualism in Evola's metaphysics is the principle of hierarchy. By virtue of its archeological nature, the realm of the spiritual has a cosmological function: it imposes form and quality on lower matter (principle of matter and form) and thus creates a hierarchy or "great chain of Being" in which things are "analogous . . . homologous forms of the appearance of a central, unitary significance" (principle of correspondence), and in which "every reality [is] a symbol and every action a rite" (principle of symbolism).26 The world, in this perspective, is "a stable and animated or- ganism, constantly oriented toward the supernatural, sanctified in potential and in act according to its hierarchical gradations in all domains of thought, feeling, action, and struggle."27 It is precisely this neat and tidy pre-Copernican world that Evola's social and political philosophy seeks to re- store: an antihistorical cosmos of levels of Being ordered according to form and matter. It is the basis of his theory of corporativism in economics, of the aristocratic caste system in

24 RMM, pp. 65 (naked force), 343 (free of change), and 23 (regality). Also RMM, p. 344, "purely Olympic divinities, free of passion."

25 RMM, p. 229. 26 RMM, pp. 14 (analogous), 151 (symbol, rite). On "the great chain of Being," cf.

RMM, p. 134, "una luce che si irradiava. . . ." 27 RMM, p. 79.




social relations, of the man-woman relation in sexuality, and of "spiritual racism" in ethnology. Running through all these areas is the principle that the "daimonic" element of matter receives its liberation and elevation by the imposition of the qualitative element of form. For example, woman, who represents the daimonic material element, can "enter the sacral hierarchical order only mediately, by her relation to another, to man," who represents the formal, qualitative element.28

Corresponding to Evola's metaphysics of dualism and hierarchy is his philosophical anthropology of "spiritual virility." This virility is not (or not only) a matter of biology and sexuality, but above all of ontology, of that "sense of Being" which characterizes all elites.29 Spiritual virility is "transcendent virility," the condition of always being turned toward the archeological-hierarchical principle that orders reality, not in a relation of personal devotion or belief as in Judaism and Christianity (for the "divine" is an impassive numen) but rather in "simple relations of technique." In the ethical realm these relations translate into what Evola calls "fidelity," a loyalty to the archeological-hierarchical power of the spiritual realm, a "magnetism" toward the "center."30

Such fidelity, which is best manifested in the priest-king of ancient cultures, the heroic warrior of later cultures, and the knight of medieval chivalry, has "a supernatural sanction and a religious value" because of "the traditionalist conception of hierarchy, according to which all power comes from above."31 The anthropology of spiritual virility and the ethics of fidelity find expression in the man of action (the warrior) and the man of contemplation (the ascetic). The former, in fighting a sacred war (for all actions are symbolic rituals), and the latter,

28 RMM, p. 203. Evola treats the man-woman relation in RMM, pp. 200-215 and in Metafisica del sesso, 2nd ed. (Rome: Atanor, 1969).

29 Cf. RMM, pp. 227f. This sense of Being and the sacred is the basis of the aristocrat's sacred right to property: see RMM, pp. 194-199.

30 RMM, pp. 65 (spiritual virility), 69 (transcendent virility, relations of technique), 49 (fidelity), and 132f (magnetism, center).

31 RMM, p. 347.



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in turning "toward the principle from which every 'form' procedes," provide the types of Evola's suprahuman anti- humanism and the role models for young neofascists today.32

Social and Political Philosophy. Evola's theories of the State, of a social caste system, and of racism follow directly from his mythics of dualism and hierarchy and from his anthropology of virility and fidelity. Here I shall only sketch some major lines of these theories.

For Evola, the State has a transcendent meaning and finality: it is "an apparition of the 'world above' " and, in its proper form, which is that of Empire, it is an essentially sacral institu- tion whose organicity reflects the hierarchical ordering function of the ontological arche. "If an Empire is not a sacred Empire," he writes, "it is no Empire at all."33 Because of its intrinsic sacral origin, the State-Empire does not get its legiti- macy from the people - this "is an ideological perversion typi- cal of the modern world" - but rather from the realm of the spiritual, for again the principle of matter and form applies: "At bottom the substance of the demos is always daimonic (in the ancient, not the Christian-moral sense of the term) and always needs a catharsis, a liberation, before it can have validity as the force and material (dynamis) of a Traditional political system. . . ,"34 For Evola, the best incarnations of organic ideal of the State in the last two millennia have been the Roman Empire and, in second place, the medieval Holy Roman Empire, but for all his admiration of these models, he did not believe that they could be reproduced today. Rather - in 1972 - he opined: "Within the limitations of an epoch like our modern one [if we seek a monarchical model of contemporary governance], we could refer to an 'authoritarian

32 RMM, pp. 145 (toward the principles) and 145-165 (ascetic, warrior). 33 RMM, pp. 42 (apparition), 139 (organicity) and 105 (sacred Empire). See also

Julius Evola, Lo stato (Rome: Fondazione Julius Evola). 34 RMM, pp. 43 (ideological perversion) and 44 (demos, daimonic).




constitutional monarchy' like that which existed in Germany at the time of Bismarck."35

Evola's social doctrine of an aristocratic caste system, modeled ultimately on the Hindu caste system and on its relative reproductions in Roman and medieval Europe, is the most concrete application of his principle of hierarchy. It is also the basis of his argument against the doctrine of egalitarianism with its "leveling down to equal rights and duties, to an equal social morality which tries to impose itself on all persons in the same measure and to be valid for all. . . ."36 This is nothing other than the modern sacrilege of "superseding one's caste," that is, one's "proper organic preformation" which is registered in one's birth and which "gathers, preserves and refines one's talents and qualifications for determinate functions."37 Although Evola probably did not really hope for a restoration of the four castes in their traditional form (priest-ruler; aristocratic warrior; merchant; worker - cf. the Hindu Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya, and Sudra), there is no question that he fa- vored a closed and stable organic society where "everyone [keeps] his function in the entire order" and where, mythically speaking, "God assigns each one his proper status."38 The modern alternative is "a civilization that no longer knows anything about the salutary and creative limits constituted by the castes and the traditions of blood," a chaotic world where "men may go wherever they want according to the destiny which their actions create for them and which superior forces can no longer modify."39 The so-called modern "free" man is, for Evola "the casteless, the slave emancipated, the pariah glorified."40

35 In Omaggio, p. 163. 36/?AÍAÍ, p. 125; for the doctrine of castes, pp. 120-133. 37RMM, p. 126. 3*RMM, pp. 127 (everyone . . . function) and 130 (God assigns). 39 RM M , pp. 213 and 133 respectively. 40RMM, p. 389; at p. 143 n. 20 Evola writes: "The true misery of the Blacks in

America began when they were freed and put in the condition of a rootless proletariat



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The ethical correlative of Evola's theory of castes is, again, fidelity, but in this case not so much a loyalty to the archeological nature of the spiritual as to its hierarchical function of placing one in his proper state. The maxims that govern fidelity to one's caste are gnothi seauton (know thyself), meden agan (nothing in excess), and Pindar's genoi hoios esse mathon (become, through understanding, what you already essentially are). We see here again how a type of Platonic anamnesis functions in such a world where all meaning is archeologically determined: one does not create one's destiny but recollects it, reconnects with it in its a priori determination in the eternal realm of the spiritual. "The individual did not 'receive' his proper nature from the caste system; rather, the system gave him the way to recognize or 'recollect' his proper nature. . . ." Such recollection comports three moments: "to discover what is 'dominant' in oneself by the traces registered in one's proper form and proper caste; then to will it, to transform it into an ethical imperative; and further, to actualize it 'ritually' in fidelity. . . ."41

A third element of Evola's social and political philosophy -

his doctrine of "spiritual" racism - might equally be treated under the heading of his philosophical anthropology; in any case, I will make only passing reference to it here.42 For whatever it is worth, Evola prided himself on developing a

theory of races that went beyond the merely biological (a racism of blood à la Nazism) to the spiritual. What constitutes a

superior race for Evola is the spiritual orientation of a given stock, the subsumption of the requisite biological material (and that did mean Aryan races) under a qualitatively elevating form, namely, reference to the realm of the spirit. But in fact

in an industrialized society. As 'slaves' in a paternalistic regime, they generally enjoyed a much better economic security and protection."

4lRMM, pp. 124 (individual did not "receive") and 126 (to discover). 42 See Julius Evola, // mito del sangue: Genesi del razzismo (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1937);

Sintesi di dottrina della razza (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1941); and Indirizzi per una educazione razziale (Naples: Conte, 1941).




all that Evola's theory does is to promote biological-ethnic racism a step higher. There are enough references in his works to the "inferior, non-European races," to the "power of inferior strata and races," to disgusting "Negro syncopations" in jazz, to "Jewish psychoanalysis" - and enough adulation of the Aryans - for us to divine that Evola's "spiritual" racism may have had something other than disinterested Apollonian origins.43

The Metaphysics of History. Evola's theory of history is, as I have mentioned above, an argument against history, against at- tributing reality or value to any form of movement that dis- tances man from the archeological ordering principle of the world. Inspiring all of his work is a powerful nostalgia for the archaic in both a temporal and an ontological sense, and a corresponding repudiation of any manifestations of progress or development. For Evola, evolution is devolution and in fact "nothing other than the profession of faith of the parvenu."44 In no other contemporary European thinker that I know of is the rejection of history - and, a fortiori, of the modern world - so absolute and so violent. An index of the regressive nature of his ontological archeology and his theory of history can perhaps be found in his repeated assertion that the real decline of the West began somewhere between the eighth and sixth centuries b.c.45

In general terms Evola's theory of history is cyclical, and in its specific form it is modeled after the myth of the Four Ages, whether they be described in terms of Hesiod (gold, silver, bronze, iron) or of Hinduism's yuga (Satya or Krta, Treta, Dvap- ara, Kali). Without going into Evola's mythical typification of civilizations according to the four yuga, I wish to emphasize his

43 See Indirizzi, p. 36 (inferior, non-European), p. 42 (Jewish psychoanalysis) and pp. 49f (the Aryan body). RMM, pp. 216 (inferior strata and races), 43 (Negro syncopations) and also 297: "the inferior castes ... of the races of the South." Mussolini's praise of Evola's race doctrine is reprinted in Omaggio, p. 76.

44 RMM, p. 404, italicized in the original. 45 RMM, pp. 8 and 318.



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constant point: that the modern age finds itself in the Kali Yuga, the final "age of obscurity" that precedes the cataclysmic Pralaya or dissolution that in turn leads back to the Golden Age of the Satya or Krta Yuga. Corresponding to the four moments in this cyclical vision of history are the four levels of the caste system. Seen synchronically, if we may use that word, the cyclical theory of history parallels the law of the "regression of the castes," so that the modern age or Kali Yuga is characterized by the dissolution of the first three castes into the fourth caste of mass man, democracy, and "the spirit of the herd." This most decadent of ages, characterized by the "flight of the gods" and "deprived of the dimension of tran- scendence," is at one and the same time the darkest age of nihilism and the prelude to a catastrophe that will issue in a new Golden Age.46

De Benoist's Existentialism

Even from such a brief sketch, the reader may be able to see the coherent structure - if not the credibility - of Julius Evola's metaphysical mythics. But Evola is identified in Europe with the "Old Right," even if his influence in Italy and elsewhere remains strong. We may now ask how his philosophy of fascism differs from that of Alain de Benoist and the so-called "New Right."

Alain de Benoist throws down the gauntlet: "The Old Right is dead and well deserves to be."47 He roundly criticizes its myopia, its father complex (God, king, Führer), its individualism, its reactionary and Manichaean character, its ignorance. All that old nonsense about work-family-fatherland is nothing

4«RMM, pp. 397 (regression), 131 (spirit of the herd), 389 (deprived). On the "flight of the gods" (a phrase from Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 45), compare RMM, p. 133: "l'immediato ritirarsi delle forze dall'alto."

47 Alain de Benoist, Les idées à l'endroit (Paris: Hallier, 1979), p. 57. On de Benoist and the New Right, see Thomas Sheehan, "Paris: Moses and Polytheism" in Sociobiol- ogy Examined, ed. Ashley Montague (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 342-355.




other than "Pétain in the land of the Soviets."48 In its place he seeks to construct la Nouvelle Droite. What is the new ideology - and what is its potential for violence?

What is new about de Benoist's theories can be found primarily in the realm of metaphysical or ontological principles and not in the lack of them. Whereas Evola, adapting the tradition of neo-Idealism, saw the world as grounded in an archeological spirit that gives form, meaning, and hierarchy to everything, de Benoist, who prefers Nietzsche and Heidegger to the Hegelians and who declares himself a nominalist and an existentialist, sees the world as fundamentally chaotic and void of meaning (". . . we find no 'sense' in the organization and configuration of the world. We refuse all determinism, be it 'spatial' or 'temporal' "49). Correspondingly, whereas Evola's ontological archeology comported a "transcendent virility" shaped by the primacy of spiritual intuition and called to the fidelity of anamnesis, de Benoist's ontology of chaos comports an anthropology based on the primacy of the will - a voluntarism or "heroic subjectivism." If God is dead, he says, there are in fact no norms, and a fortiori no hierarchy, except those which man creates for himself by the force of his own will. "The world is a chaos - but we can give it a form. What we do has no other meaning than the one we give it." "The 'order' that we establish around us is, in effect, nothing other than what we put there." The chasm between Evola and de Benoist is definitive: "Either there is an order in the universe, and man's task is to conform to it (and thus the restoration of public order is the same as reseeking the truth . . .) or the universe is a chaos, and the task that man can undertake is to give it a form." And it is clear where de Benoist stands: "Order is created, not received."50

48 Les idees, p. 113. 49 Les idees, p. 38. 50 Les idées, pp. 51 (chaos), 39 ("order"), 101 (either, or), 108 (created, not received).

Cf. pp. 40 and 66 (man, the animal who gives meaning), and p. 105 (why law is

perceived as "sacred").



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De Benoist's existentialism, we should note, is not an abdication of ontology or metaphysics but a recasting of it in terms of voluntarism. In place of Evola's "Being of origins," de Benoist posits man as will-to-power - and this is a decision about the essence of reality (ousia). He affirms that "man is the quintessence of everything" and that his "aspiration to order [that is, his will] is an essence."51 The idea of will-to-power is still an ontology ("In the beginning was action," he writes), and from that voluntaristic metaphysics there follow his ethical imperatives: man must become the "cause and creator of himself," he must "become what he can be" and "construct hero- ically."52 Thus fidelity is no longer, as it was for Evola, a commitment to the archeological nature and cosmological function of an a priori spiritual realm which determines everything. Rather, fidelity is simply fidelity to - oneself. "Fix your own norm - and stick to it."53 There is no justification for any act, other than one's choice of it.

What then of Evola's other metaphysical principle, that of hierarchy? It too is not preordained but to be constructed, in effect by a kind of Platonic "noble lie." "If norms are con- ventions, and if no society can do without norms, then in fact the only possible avenue is to assume and institute a certain collective subjectivity with enough power that it may be perceived in turn as a 'natural* norm that functions as an 'absolute9 in the social structured

For all these major differences, there is still a fundamental continuity between the Old Right of Evola and the New Right of de Benoist, and the connecting link lies in de Benoist's theory of time. Evola's ontology of the arche comports a cyclical theory of time (the periodic return to the arche), whereas de Benoist's ontology of chaos and will comports a spherical

51 Les idées, pp. 72 and 105. 52 Les idées, pp. 51 (action), 44 (cause, creator), 50 (become), and 71 (construct). Cf.

p. 68 (only a project can give meaning to life). 53 Les idées, p. 50. See p. 51, n. 10: "Honor means never to fail the norms you set

yourself." 54 Les idées, pp. 43f.




concept of time (everything is in the instant). History for de Benoist, as for Evola, has no sense, but not because all meaning lies in the archeological origins. Rather, "the past and future constitute dimensions that are present in every actual moment" Nor is this a teleological view of history. "The present, actualizes all past moments and potentializes all future ones. To accept the present by joyously assuming the instant is to be able to enjoy all instants at the same time. The past, present, and future are three perspectives, equally actual now, that are given to every moment of historical becoming."55 But if this instantaneous view of time and history allows de Benoist to break with both linear and cyclical notions of time, it also delivers to him the possibility of connecting with tradition, indeed in a cultural and ethnic sense. Tradition is not the past but is "beyond time"; it is "permanent" and "within us," and it be- comes our tradition by being reactualized.56 But when we probe deeper into this would-be Heideggerian notion, we find that what de Benoist means by "tradition" is one's own temporal and cultural heritage, in fact, one's family and race. "The only true piety [cf. fidelity] is filial piety, extended to include one's ancestors, one's offspring, and one's people. When Jesus affirmed that Joseph was not his true father - that he was the son of the one God and the brother of all men - he started the process of disavowing paternity. The ancestors who preceded us are neither spiritually dead nor gone to another world. They are at our side like an invisible and whispering crowd."57 This noble sentiment takes on a different color, however, when de Benoist begins to speak of the racial heritage of cultures. While he does affirm that "all men of quality are brothers, regardless of race, nation or time," his sense of quality is, like Evola's, aristocratic, and he judges the "masses" as lacking in "form" and "meaning." He praises the Celts over Mediterranean peoples and judges the ancient Romans to be

55 Les idees, pp. 97 (past and future) and 53 (the present actualizes). ™Les idées, pp. 118f. 57 Les idées, p. 54; cf. p. 41.



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superior to the Carthaginians because they were continental European warriors rather than maritime African merchants. Perhaps the Aryan Zoroaster had it right, he suggests, when he forbade interracial marriages.58

The New Right looks more and more like the Old Right when we go on to compare de Benoist's theories of the State with Evola's. The State should be organic and hierarchical, organized around the principle of sovereignty, not divided into parties and factions but modeled after the tripartite European caste system (de Benoist fuses the two bottom castes into one).59 He condemns the "mass democracies" because they homogenize everyone and are indifferent to cultural heritage and national patrimony (they even sell national art treasures to foreigners). He also is clear about foreign policy: "I am the citizen of a country and the heir of a determined culture. I don't make politics an affair of disincarnated morality but one of relations of force. Faced with individual events I ask: what is our interest as Frenchmen and Euro- peans?" Which means that, as a good Frenchman, he will never forgive America for its "offensive against the Con- corde."60

To summarize: De Benoist's fascism is at odds with Evola's metaphysics but agrees with his social and political philosophy. In metaphysics he takes decisive distance from Evola's archeology - his dualism, determinism, and spiritual intuitionism - not so as to substitute for that a teleology or a theory of progress but rather in order to affirm the existential absurdity of reality and the corresponding primacy of the will- to-power. For de Benoist the verticalism and determinism of Evola's mythics verges too closely on a totalitarian univer- salism; and only a nominalistic voluntarism can guarantee and

58 Les idées, pp. 54 (all men of quality: my italics), 99 (masses); Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite (Paris: Copernic, 1977), pp. 56 and 58 (Celts), 53 (Rome), and 50 (Zoroaster).

59 See Les idées, pp. 88, 110 (esp. on "national popular community"), etc. 60 Les idées, pp. 88 (art treasures), 265 (citizen of a country), and 267 (Concorde).




preserve the right to difference and equality within an organic and hierarchical society created by man's own forces.61 Evola's philosophy is an archeological metaphysics that tends to swal- low up action in anamnesis; de Benoist's philosophy is an existential nominalism that abandons the recollective intellect so as to free the will for creative self-assertion. For Evola, the organic State is prescribed by the nature of reality itself and must be reconstituted; for de Benoist, the organic State is an ideal that men can set for themselves and perhaps, with force, establish. Evola offers the assurance of what is a priori determined; de Benoist offers the challenge of what is yet to be achieved. The metaphysics and the approach are different. The goal, it seems, remains the same.

In de Benoist's voluntarism there is as much an "interruption of discourse" as in Evola's spiritualism - with perhaps even a greater invitation to violence in the practical order. "Great and strong things have no raison d'etre " he writes. "That is why they must be done. . . . The action is the most important, not the one who undertakes it; so too the mission, not the one who carries it out. Against individualism - for an active impersonalism. What must be done is not explained in terms of motives. Nobility keeps silent. ... Do not seek to convince; seek to awaken."62

And he is adamant about the unnaturalness of liberal democracy; it is, he suggests, totalitarian and "therefore, by defi- nition, inhuman" It seems that if it is inhuman, it must be violently undone, with an active impersonalism and a noble silence. De Benoist's protreptic is frightening: "The 'positive nihilism' of Nietzsche has no other sense than this: one can build only where the ground has been razed. ... If we want to give birth to a New Right, everything remains yet to be done.

61 De Benoist's insistence on the right to difference is the basis of his preference for a mythological polytheism over Evola's mythic metaphysics of a unified and determin-

ing arche. 62 Les idées, pp. 51 and 53.



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And given the delay to be made up, we have about a century in which to succeed. Which means there isn't a minute to lose."63

Social Myths in Evola and de Benoist

It was Georges Sorel who most clearly posed the need for social myths to move the masses to revolutionary fervor and violence in the name of an absolute and irrevocable transformation of the political and social order. For him, mere theories were the products of bourgeois minds, and because they were geared to describing and explaining facts, they were impotent to move to action. A social myth, on the other hand, was essentially an expression of the will to emancipation, not a description of facts, and only myths embodied the historical forces than in the past had created such revolutionary move- ments as primitive Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, and the French Revolution and that in the present inspired the Marxist proletariat.64

In the work of Evola and de Benoist we have seen the function of such social myths. While in Evola the mythic quality of his metaphysics is more pronounced, in de Benoist too, although perhaps less explicitly, myth is a moving force (see his invocation of polytheism and his assertion that the new doctrine of inequality is still in the mythic state). We have also seen the element of "theoretical violence" embodied in the thought of these two men, especially under the rubric of "the interruption of discourse," whether in the form of Evola's intuitionism or de Benoist's voluntarism. I now propose first to sketch out how the very structure of myth in general, and its relation to time and history in particular, comport a necessary element of violence, and then I will indicate that at the theoretical level a necessary response to such mythics is a

63 Les idées, pp. 109 (inhuman) and 76 (positive nihilism). 64 See Roth, The Cult of Violence, pp. 18, 33, 39, 46, 78-79, 159, 25y, 2b5-Zbb.




radical demythologizing that preserves the ineluctability of discourse, mediation, and history. These suggestions, as I mentioned at the beginning, are only programmatic sketches and formal analyses, and they have many intended limitations. I restrict my remarks primarily to the formal structure of Evola's mythics because it presents a paradigmatic case. The instance of de Benoist's thought is more complex insofar as it represents an inversion of metaphysics, but one that remains a metaphysics nonetheless; thus a structural analysis of its mythic quality and the approach to a demythologizing of it would require another essay focused particularly on his concept of time and history.

The Structure of Myth. Modern ethnological and philosophical studies of myth have generally overcome the naïve view, trace- able to the Enlightenment and reinforced by Positivism, that myths are valueless and unreal products of simplistic, primitive minds. We now see their ontological and creative function in founding societies and cultures, and, in fact, their continuation in modern cultures, not just in the oneiric but also in the social realm.65 Myths are not legends or fanciful stories but, seen structurally, accounts of the only and absolutely true nature of reality; they are the "true stories about time," the "only valid revelation of reality," precisely because they narrate sacred history, that ontologically determinative period or world where the nature of things is established. To narrate a myth (mython tina diegeisthai - cf. Plato's Sophist, 242c) is, for the man of archaic cultures, to reveal the essence of the world by tracing things and events back to their ground in the arche.

There are three structural moments to the mythical narrative: (a) Insofar as it recounts paradisal beginnings (sacred time), it is a theology of divine origins, (b) Insofar as it narrates the alienated in-between (sinful time), it is a hamartiology or doctrine of the sinful fall from those origins, (c) Insofar as it

85 See Mircea Eliade, "The Myths of the Modern World," in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1971), pp. 23ff.



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prophesies the apocalyptic end (redeemed time), it is a soteriology of return to the sacred origins. If we formalize these three moments in quasi-philosophical categories, we may say that mythical narrative represents: (a) an ontology of essential Being; (b) a phenomenology of the loss of Being (the terror of history); and (c) an eschatology of the reconstitution of essential Being. Whether these three moments be scored on cyclical, linear, or "instantaneous" visions of time, and whether they be archeological, teleological, or "existential" in their orientation, they share in common an "ousiological" point of view: they see reality and history from the standpoint of essence (ousia).

The three moments interpenetrate and demand each other; they can be distinguished but not separated. As theology, a myth recounts the essential and calls for faith. Objectively, it tells what is really the case and what is already operative (cf. Aristotle's to ti en einai); but subjectively, because it is only a telling of the story and because it demands faith (both of which indicate man's distance from the sacred origins), the myth as theology awakens a sense of sin or alienation and therefore implies a hamartiology. As hamartiology, the myth narrates the fall from the essential into time and history, which are the jailers of the essential; but insofar as it allows one to recognize sin as sin, the myth is already incipiently beyond sin. Objectively, the myth reveals man's location in a dynamics of fall from the sacred but also, potentially, of movement toward redemption (in the cyclical concept, man is currently in the Kali Yuga). Thus, subjectively, the myth awakens hope, either in the form of nostalgia for the arche or in the form of courage to achieve the telos. The myth as hamartiology awakens an impatience for deliverance and inspires action, and therefore implies a soteriology. As soteriology, the myth prom- ises a radical transformation of history - perhaps, but not necessarily, an irrevocable one - and thus invites to ritual enact- ment (or reenactment) of the sacred and essential in the name of a utopia of love, justice, or transcendent union.

In brief, the myth in its three moments demands faith,




enkindles hope, and inspires to action in the name of "charity" or union. And it is in the third moment above all that we can see its potential for "apocalyptic violence." As a revelation (apo-kalyptein: to reveal) of what history and the world are really about, the myth requires "violence" in order to overcome the perversion of the essential, whether that be a violence from the gods or from man. As the promise of an ultimate reinstatement of the essential (eschaton: ultimate), it is in fact a prophecy of the necessity of the overturning of sinful reality. The apocalyptic-eschatological violence that is intrinsic to myth is grounded in the nature of mythics as an ousiology: a vision of essence, a repudiation of nonessence, and an urge to reinstate the essence - even if the "violence" be as mild as Plato's periagoge, the "turning around" of the soul for the sake of seeing the Forms (Republic, 518 c and d). In the thought of Julius Evola, the metaphysics of the "Being of origins," the condemnation of the decadence (and unnaturalness) of the modern world, and the call to a revolutionary "fidelity" in the form of the ascetic and the warrior, are homologous to the three structural moments we have seen. In de Benoist it is the will and one's tradition that are ousia. Tradition offers the timeless dimension of the essential, and the will to reactualize tradition in the world of chaos incarnates that eternal element. And it is the imperative of willed effectiveness that comports the necessity of "razing" the inhuman and building the human. The therapeutic-soteriological-eschatological imperative in myth - its urge for the essential, whether in the form of an Aristotelian "touching" (thigein) of the truth (Metaphysics ix, 10, 1051 b 25) or the Augustinian "touching" (tangere) of God (Confessions, ix, 10) - is also its demand for violence to history and discourse.

Demythologizing Violence. From Socrates onward, the impetus of philosophy has been to explain the real not by telling stories (mython diegeisthai) but by discursively showing its meaning (logon didonai). In general, this "giving of reasons" has been



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understood as a search for the common and ultimate grounds of things, and hence, whether as ontology or natural theology, has been a rational continuation of the trajectory of myth. The need to demythologize myths implies as well the need to demythologize philosophy's ontological-theological quest for the ultimate meaning of the real. I suggest that demythologizing, to be effective and comprehensive, must become the destruction of the search for "absolute truth" both in myth and in

philosophy, and, correlatively, the assertion of man's condemnation to endless mediation and "hermeneutical truth." I take "hermeneutics" as the commitment to asymptotic mediation and discursive knowledge, one which always exceeds the given in the direction of a "more" but never finds this "more" in an absolute and self-identical truth. Hermeneutics as a philosophical position is the commitment to man as ineluctably kinetic, as a movement which may project a unifying horizon of the real but never attains it, in fact, discovers it to be always receding beyond his grasp.

Applied to the threefold structure of myth, a hermeneutical demythologizing would seek to thematize the following posi- tions. As against the theological structure of myth, it would explicate the atheological nature of history and reality: the denial of a graspable arche or telos, the deconstruction of Being so as to reveal the ineluctability of becoming, the abdication of

hopes for a final resolution to history. There are no gods but only man, and man is the mystery of a question to which there is no answer. There are no ends or beginnings, but only we ourselves, who ever remain "In the middle, not only in the middle of the way/But all the way, in a dark wood . . ." (East Coker).

As against the hamartiology of myth, which affirms a penultimate pessimism and an ultimate optimism, a hermeneutical demythologizing reveals ultimate tragedy and penultimate optimism. It does not refuse action in the social and political world; on the contrary it demands it, but with a discursive structure of social mediation that is disabused of the illusion of




ultimate solutions and that has learned to accept the terror of

history. Perhaps we may take as a motto for this sense of ultimate tragedy and penultimate optimism Cicero's Nee mala nostra nee remedia pati possamus: the refusal to accept either evil in the realm of the penultimate (which is, in fact, where we live) or final solutions in the realm of the ultimate (which we cannot grasp).

As against the soteriology of myth, a hermeneutical de- my thologizing reveals the inevitability of temporal and historical mediation. Man may be an intimation of ends and beginnings, but he does not know them. Like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses (ch. 3) he is condemned to "almosting it." Like Hera- clitus (fr. 122) he is ever in a state of agchibasie, "approxima- tion."

This is only a program for a methodology which seeks to affirm man's historicity and discursiveness as over against any metaphysical mythics that requires in theory and implies in

practice the need for violence. There is, of course, a "violence" to this hermeneutics, but it is that of learning to live with the terror of history. It is the "violence" practiced by Socrates - the

pain of the discursive - which in fact, because he dared to question the myth of immediacy and to propose the state of "knowing that one does not know," brought upon him a much greater violence. And as Albert Camus suggested in 1948, the

question today is whether we will allow the sacrifice of Socrates to happen again in our lifetime.



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