Friday, January 04, 2019

Panel on Traditionalism at European Academy of Religion

There will be a panel on "Dynamics of Local and Global Reception of Traditionalism: Reconsidering the Heritage of René Guénon" at the 2019 Conference of the European Academy of Religion, to be held in Bologna, Italy from Monday 4th to Thursday 7th March, 2019.

The panel is on March 7, 16:45-18:45.

Panel abstract:
One of the most influential Philosophers of the 20th century, René Guénon (1886-1951) has left a rich heritage, whose intricate history and ramifications are only beginning to be studied. The aim of this panel is to present some cases of this heritage, insisting on the local factors modeling its reception, as well as on its adaptation to metapolitical and global concerns. Attemptive typologies of the complex reception of Traditionalism will also be proposed and discussed. 
Chair: Ionuţ Daniel Băncilă (University of Erfurt)

Panelists:
  • Marco Giardini (Independent Scholar) - The Journal “L´Ultima” and the Reception of René Guénon in Catholic Italy
    The journal “L'Ultima” occupies a special place in the landscape of Catholic thought between Second World War and the Second Vatican Council, although it has been surprisingly neglected by the majority of scholars of Church History of History of Religions. Marked by a strong eschatological vocation, it gathered several authors who proposed original interpretations of Catholicism inspired by the “traditionalist” current that was taking shape in the mid-twentieth century around the works of René Guénon. In particular, contributors such as Attilio Mordini (1923-1966) and Silvano Panunzio (1918-2010) wrote a considerable amount of articles in which the main aspects of Christian doctrines re-interpreted in line with the metaphysical and cosmological principles that these authors “discovered” in Eastern traditions through the works of Guénon and his first followers. The paper intends precisely to highlight some aspects of Mordini and Panunzio's writings for “L'Ultima” in order to assess the original aspects of what may be called the first organic reception of Guénon's works within Italian Catholic circles, in a way that reveals a very positive stance to the “traditionalist” current in contrast to various forms of criticism leveled to the French metaphysician in previous decades.
  • Ionuţ Daniel Băncilă (University of Erfurt) - A Typology of Romanian Traditionalism
    While the reception of R. Guénon in Romania reached its peak in 30es, not one single profile of the intellectuals involved in this process (M. Avramescu, M. Valsan, V. Lovinescu, A. Dumitriu) was like the other. My paper aims to give these and other actors in this complex reception process their proper historical and cultural contextualization, but also to discuss affinities of other individuals and groups with guénonian thinking. Later reception of Guénon through the reading-group established by V. Lovinescu at the end of the 50es and its reactivation under different auspices after the fall of the Communist regime will also be discussed. The individual intellectual profiles marked by the thinking of Guénon are then to be summed up in a tentative typology of his reception in Romania.
  • Marco Toti (Independent Scholar) - Metapolitics as Esotericism Through Geopolitics. A. Dugin and C. Mutti’s Eurasian Perspective
    This paper aims to focus on the so called “Eurasian perspective”, by way of analyzing some of the most significant topics endorsed by two of its most important spokesmen, the Russian A. Dugin (1962-) and the Italian C. Mutti (1946-): their major sources and essential geopolitical purposes, with special reference to the “heterodoxically metapolitical” rereading of Guénon and Evola, “revised” through a wide spectrum of assorted ideological insertions. In particular, the paper aims to clearly distinguish their perspective from American “apolitical” perennialism (H. Smith, J. Cutsinger). This does not mean that the respective Weltanschauungen could not often converge, although “metapolitical purposes” are irrelevant to the latter. The main point, as we understand it, is the relationship between metapolitics and "pure metaphyscs".

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