Sunday, November 24, 2013

Bertonneau's blog

Thomas F. Bertonneau, whose blog at the conservative Brussels Journal was mentioned in an earlier post, also has a very active stand-alone blog, The Orthosphere, started in 2012. The blog is mostly Christian and political, and advertises the possibility of setting up or joining "local traditionalist groupuscles." The two groupuscles that are linked are both Australian, and paleoconservative more than Traditionalist, though one--in Sydney--does have an interest in Evola. Bertonneau's interest in Guénon is such that his blog own can be called "soft" Traditionalism.

Thanks to N. R. for drawing my attention to The Orthosophere.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

New translations of Dugin, and other reading

Alexander Dugin's Fourth Political Theory has just (2013) been translated into Greek, published by Esoptron (Έσοπτρον), a mainstream Greek publisher. English and German translations have also been published recently (2012) by Arktos, the current incarnation of the publisher previously noted in this blog (post here) under its former name, Integral Tradition Publishing.

All these books are available on Amazon, which makes it possible to see what other authors some of Dugin's readers are buying. Unsurprisingly, one finds Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, and Guillaume Faye. There is also a new addition, Markus Willinger, whose Generation Identity: A Declaration of War against the 68ers is also published by Arktos. Willinger is a young (born 1992) Austrian, a reader of Evola and de Benoist and Faye, whose book contains forty short chapters on topics such as identity, loneliness, religion, ecology, death, sexuality, ethnopluralism, and the Zeitgeist. Chapter 41 is his "declaration of war." Another book that Dugin's Amazon US readers are buying is Jack Donovan's exploration of masculinity, The Way of Men. But then a lot of people are buying Donovan at present.

To avoid Dugin, go to Mars!

An unusual argument was made in yesterday's USA Today: to avoid Alexander Dugin, humanity should go to Mars. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, starts an opinion piece in which he argues for a joint Russian-American Mars exploration program by referring to Edward Snowden, Syria, and Dugin as indices of deteriorating Russian-American relations. Instead of quarrelling, Zubrin argues, Russia and America should combine forces in a "grand project." I wonder how Zubrin became aware of Dugin.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

María Zambrano

I have just stumbled across the work of María Zambrano, the Spanish philosopher and sometime poet who died in 1991.

Zambrano is interesting because she read and was influenced by Guénon in the 1930s and 1940s, during a period when Traditionalism seems otherwise to have had little impact on the Spanish-speaking world, and because she was herself a leftist--the daughter of a member of Socialist Workers Group, the wife of a diplomat of the Spanish Republic that lost the Civil War to Franco, who returned to Spain precisely because the war seemed lost, who left Spain for exile as Barcelona was about to fall to the Nationalists, not to return until 1984. Finally, she is interesting because she was a woman--there have been female Traditionalists, but all the major figures and writers have been male.

Zambrano is in fact so unusual in Traditionalist terms that a careful examination of her relationship with Guénon's work is required. There seems to be general agreement that she was a perennialist and that Guénon was important to her, and that the mystical is central to her work, but she of course had many other sources, from Plotinus to the Spanish tradition, in which some include Ibn Arabi. Zambrano was also involved with the circles around Eranos. Some of these issues are examined by Adele Ricciotti in "Método y simbología en la razón poética de María Zambrano,"Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska 36, 1 (2011), pp. 27-39. But more work is needed.

For those who know Spanish,  a beautiful reading of a beautiful passage from Zambrano's Claros del Bosque (1977) is to be found on YouTube.


Friday, August 30, 2013

Boutchichi rap

One of France's leading rappers, Abd al Malik, is a Boutchichi, a member of the Moroccan-based Sufi order that is currently one of the world's most important, and draws on Traditionalism.

Abd al Malik, a French rapper, seen here on the cover of his best known album, Dante, is also a poet, novelist, and débatteur. He is celebrated by the French establishment (he is a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a sort of literary knighthood) both because of his artistic achievements and because he is that comparatively rare thing, a French Muslim with street credibility who celebrates the Republic rather than criticizes it.

Abd al Malik credits Sufism for his appreciation of pluralism, a position that is certainly found in the Boutchichiyya, and which owes something to Traditionalism. A recent article on Abd al Malik, Jeanatte S. Jouili, "Rapping the Republic: Utopia, Critique and Muslim Role Models in Secular France" (French Politics, Culture and Society 31, no. 2, 2013, pp.58-80), which discusses the Boutchichiyya but not Traditionalism, records Abd al Maliks's youthful interest in philosophy. Deleuze, Camus and Sartre are mentioned, but not Guénon.