Guénon goes mainstream?

Peter King, Reader in Social Thought at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, has just published The Antimodern Condition: An Argument Against Progress with Ashgate (£54 or $109 hardback, ISBN 978-1-4724-0906-5). The title deliberately echoes Jean-François Lyotard's Postmodern Condition/La condition postmoderne, the 1979 book that helped launched the word "postmodern." But King maintains that the most comprehensive critiques of modernity are made not by postmodernists but by antimodernists, and that "the most complete challenge to modernity by any thinker before or since" is that of René Guénon.

King's book is "soft Traditionalism"--it draws on Guénon, but also draws on other sources. It starts with De Maistre and the Counter-Enlightenment, then moves on to Guénon, and then the Romanian-French philosopher Emil M. Cioran, especially as interpreted by Susan Sontag (not someone I have previously encountered in any relationship with Traditionalism). King then turns to the pre-revolutionary Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, Epicurus, the University of Chicago's Martha Nussbaum, and five film directors, including Ingmar Bergman and Hiroshi Teshigahara. All these assist King to examine absurdity, anxiety (the modern "lack of acceptance of what we are and how we are"), egoism, complacency (including blandness, reundeerstood as a virtue) and acceptance. Quite eclectic, then, but it works, and in his final chapter King manages to pull all this together into a coherent critique of modernity.

The book is also "soft Traditionalism" because King parts company with the Traditionalists on certain points. He explicitly rejects Guénon's interest in initiation, as well as Evola's emphasis on race, which he sees (like nation) as a modern construct unworthy of the attention of the true antimodernist. King keeps Guénon's views on esoteric spirituality, but makes them incidental to Guénon's critique of modernity--while for Guénon, of course, the critique of modernity was ultimately incidental to esoteric reality.

King's Antimodern Condition may bring Guénon to new audiences. Ashgate is a mainstream (and good) academic publisher, and The Antimodern Condition complies with mainstream academic conventions. King himself is also a mainstream academic, having previously worked mostly on housing policy, both at De Montfort University and as part the Housing and Poverty working group of the Centre for Social Justice, a Conservative Party think tank. With this book, then, Guénon may join some of the mainstream intellectual discussions that he himself was not interested in, but which may one day finally find themselves interested in him.

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.

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.

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.