by Greg Johnson
But for many decades now the reverse has not occurred. There is no effort to understand whites qua whites. Our history, our lived experience, our opinions and ideologies are presented to us. Indeed, they are presented to us with an unparalleled degree of arrogance. Europeans who ventured to the Orient were there to learn and understand, however clumsily. They were not there to deconstruct and mock the very foundations of their subject matter. The white race, on the other hand, is regularly excoriated in almost every field of endeavor, especially those connected to academia and the media. Just as a resident of a former colony has the right to refute inaccurate characterizations of his people or to fight for cultural sovereignty, so too do white people.
“That you live in a world of others, a world that exists for others?” For whites, living in a world of others is the daily condition. With non-white births and immigration skyrocketing, it is increasingly rare to find homogeneous white public spaces. For the urbanite, it is simply an impossibility. The cities built by whites have become chaotic anthropological exhibits of different races and different cultures. Older whites can no longer travel safely to their birthplaces, and formerly white working-class neighborhoods are virtually uninhabitable due to high crime and urban blight. Even the suburbs, created in large part by whites fleeing increasingly non-white and unsafe urban areas, have been forcibly integrated through economic incentives, the elimination of freedom of association, and a complete disregard for the interests of white populations. When well-meaning but naive whites try to move back into these cities and neighborhoods they find themselves criticized for gentrification, i.e. the reclamation of formerly white areas coupled with the attempted restoration of order and comfort. To the elites, it is not the destroyers who are morally reprehensible but rather those whites who are trying to raise the quality of life in these areas, even for those non-whites who, unbeknownst to them, resent their very existence. As Franz Fanon wrote: “Confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world, [the colonized subject] never knows when he is out of line.”96
Whites are the engines of production. But our output goes towards parasites both above and below. We are a mere natural resource to be exploited in the eyes of the elites and their (sometimes unwitting) non-white foot-soldiers. It is a question that has been asked many times, but if whites are such horrible creatures why do non-whites flock to our countries? The answer is simple: we are forced to exist for others, and others know this. We are marks, easy prey. White nations have become the receptacles for the world’s biological refuse while whites ourselves remain smiling and docile as we are asked to cough up ever more cash and goodwill to make our displacement easier on the invaders. Unique among world populations, whites not only exist in a world of others, existing for others, but are expected to comply unquestioningly with their demographic and cultural marginalization.
In practice, postcolonialism seeks to challenge white hegemony. But what white hegemony? The notion that whites somehow control not only their own collective destiny but also the destinies of the non-white world is pure fantasy. Even in the colonial era this idea was debatable, but in the 21st century such an idea is absolutely ludicrous. Everywhere non-whites are streaming into white countries, altering the cultural texture, dramatically raising crime rates, making urban areas nearly unlivable. Everywhere non-whites are out-breeding whites. Everywhere whiteness is devalued and mocked. Explicit advocacy of white interests ranges from being a social taboo to a criminal offense in white countries. And who is leading the charge? The Jew-dominated international elite who control the purse strings of white governments, who push for ever more immigration, who have legally codified thought crimes and ended freedom of association, who gloat publicly in their media about the displacement of whites, who tar and feather anyone who dares to speak up for white interests.
If this were happening to non-whites, few would not defend their right to protest, to revolt; few would argue that insurrection would not be a moral duty. It is time for whites to care as passionately about the survival of their own people as they do for the survival of rain forests and of endangered animal species, and to feel as much heartbreak over a raped Swede, a beheaded Brit, a bullied white student, or a jobless American blue-collar worker as they do for the dead child of an invader washed up on a beach.
One crucial element of this must be the recognition that we are indeed colonized. And one way of internalizing this truth is to begin to think, speak, and write in the language of insurrection, the language of the subaltern. This is absolutely necessary for whites: we who exist for others, whose “I”s have been universalized, whose mainstream culture did not develop organically from below but is rather dictated from above, whose opinions about their own future are disregarded. We must eradicate complacency from our minds and begin to think and act like the colonial subjects that we are. Let us create the insurgent knowledge, and let us change the terms and values under which we live.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
February 21, 2016
WE ARE THE REAL SUBALTERNS:
DELEUZE, GUATTARI, & THE NEW RIGHT
MARK DYAL
“We are the real subalterns,” I was once told by a militant at CasaPound.97
A subaltern is someone who exists outside the normalized representational structures of society. He, she, or it, does not conform to the hegemony of the cultural norms of the State, living outside the universe of the State’s moral obligation. Subalterity embraces the contemporary reality of the West for critical and proud Westerners like no other concept. More importantly, it makes possible certain realities that are otherwise unrecognizable. Becoming subaltern means giving up the assumption that we are the legitimate heirs of the West. It means the cessation of a utopian return to a past glory. It means a realization that we must create our world with our own ethics, and we must do so at the expense of the contemporary West. It means destroying any sentimentality we may have for our State.
If one exists beyond obligation to the State, beyond its truth, morality, and what Deleuze and Guattari call its subjectification (literally, the creation of subjecthood through a subjectivity informed by academic disciplines, media technologies of control, images of thought, reductive explanation and uncritical utterance [opinion], and the creation of labor surplus value), then one is free from all of these things. One judges, values, evaluates, and becomes (other-than-)human to the beat of a different drummer—to put it lightly. One’s instincts are unburdened of their purpose to the State. One’s enemies come fuller into focus. One’s ability to create liberated “derelict” spaces is enhanced. One experiences quotidian danger and uneasiness at the expense of bourgeois passivity and complacence. One more readily appreciates the value of struggle.
CasaPound and contemporary Roman fascism is at war with modernity. It is at war with every aspect of the modern bourgeois form of life, felt most keenly in the forces imposed upon Rome and Romans by American capitalist multiculturalism. As such, it embraces any common enemies that have fought against said capitalism, openly adopting the strategies of the traditional and radical Italian Left (hence the creation of CasaPound through squatting). And this puts CasaPound in league with those on the radical Left who are fighting the WTO, IMF, EU, USA, and G8—even when those Leftists are self-proclaimed anti-fascists. It also makes CasaPound and the Social Right difficult to fight—they are camouflaged in a sense, striking at the soft underbelly and unpoliced areas of the State. But doing so does not make them traitors, cowards, or slavish communist revolutionaries out to “destroy something they could not help create.” It makes them instead revolutionaries, period. It makes them rebels against the tyranny of multicultural global capitalism. It makes them freedom fighters against the very dear forces that keep us enslaved to routine.
The lessons CasaPound offers the North American New Right are clear: become revolutionary. Become something that cannot be codified by the liberal State. Become something so active, so affirmative, and so different, that liberal sensibility is deter
ritorialized, never to capture our minds and bodies again. Become not only subaltern but also an enemy of the State.
NIETZSCHE & DELEUZE
“A creator is someone who someone who creates his own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities.”
—Gilles Deleuze98
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. 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 to be 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.99 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.
DELEUZE’S IMAGE OF THOUGHT
Coming to maturity in the shadow of phenomenology and the structuralisms of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jacques Lacan, which refused to differentiate between democracy and fascism—seeking instead to “dissolve” the conception of Western man that made both possible—it is no surprise that Deleuze found it natural to critique the foundations of liberal modernity.100 But unlike the subversive Trotskyite Guattari, Deleuze’s politics were, and would always be, subtle and seemingly inconsistent. While Guattari was a literal street fighter, Deleuze was an extremely critical philosopher who used his vitality to do battle with the history of philosophy.
These battles were fought in order to exalt what he saw as a small elite handful of “non-philosophers”—or non-traditional, non-State philosophers—whose thought served no purpose for the liberal State. For Deleuze, traditional philosophy functions on the basis of codes that have effectively turned into a “bureaucracy of the consciousness.”101 The task of his philosophy is to revolutionarily controvert traditional philosophy by creating something that will not allow itself to be codified by the State.
Shifting now to the language he later used with Guattari, these codes become the conceptual foundation of his political philosophy, allowing him to ground desire, active forces, and reactive forces in the bodily, instinctual, and societal strata that give form to human life. The codes of which he speaks function both individually and collectively; ordering life, determining its forms, boundaries, and significance.102
Thus, while all of his Sorbonne classmates were de rigueur Marxists and phenomenologists—practitioners of political and philosophical systems, that is, that fail to problematize the metaphysical belief in a rationally thinking and acting subject whose experiential nature (it just so happens, evidently) is perfectly compatible with the terms and conditions of the modern bourgeois form of life—he was expounding the virtues of thinkers like David Hume, Henri Bergson, and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work demonstrated the fragility of the habitually and uncritically accepted model, or “image,” of thought in the West.
The image of thought is the “image thought gives itself of what it means to think.”103 In philosophical terms, the image of thought is an immanent plane or set of pre-philosophical presuppositions that condition the determination of problems and creation of concepts. In the case of Descartes’ Cogito, the presuppositions that structure thought are identified by Deleuze as the essence of the dogmatic bourgeois image of thought: thought is a natural human capacity; it naturally possesses a good will and an upright nature; it has a natural affinity with truth, so that it is error and unsound thinking must be eradicated. Most importantly, though, thought is based on recognition: good morning; this is a train; I am a man.104
This recognition presupposes the harmonious coordination of each of the human faculties that relate to the different representations of a single object. This further implies an underlying agreement of the faculties themselves: the thinking subject. But this is only the most timid aspect of thought that functions at the most banal level of life. That it has been selected as the model of thought—even functioning as the dominant paradigm of philosophical thought in the modern West—demonstrates why we no longer distinguish between thinking and knowing. In Deleuze’s mind, this image of thought is a “betrayal of what it means to think and of life,” as it sustains a complacent conception of thought that is incapable of critiquing dominant values.105
DELEUZE’S NIETZSCHE
Deleuze found his counter-image of thought in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. Firstly, the rational Cartesian subject was non-existent in Nietzsche’s work, replaced instead by a bodily-inscribed chaos of competing wills, instincts, and forces; making of thought a problem instead of the basis of humanness. Secondly, Nietzsche’s thought was affirmatively critical of dominant bourgeois values. Unlike Kant, who critiqued certain truths, certain beliefs, and certain morals, Nietzsche critiqued truth, faith, and morality.
He made a smooth space of the mountains and molehills modernity had created in its own decadent image. In language closer to Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial dynamism of A Thousand Plateaus, Nietzsche creates thoughts no longer suffering the administrative machinery or moral economy of the State, but that are instead displaced into frontiers and labyrinthine streets where new movements and distributions become possible.106
Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy pushes Nietzsche’s thought to its absolute limit, making it clear that there can be no simple Manichean shift between active noble forces and reactive slave forces in order to transcend what is modern in each of us. In other words, there must be “no simple substitution” of values, but a radical conversion of valuing itself.107 Transvaluation thus becomes less about a genealogy of oppositions between the Classical world and Judeo-Christian modernity than about re-constituting the very ground of human thought.
As mentioned above, where the New Right gravitates toward On the Genealogy of Morality’s First Essay, Deleuze concentrates on its Second Essay. This gives him an advantage in understanding the deepest implications of Nietzsche’s thought: namely, how even those on the most radical edge of modernity are still children of ressentiment as long as they think with bourgeois modernity’s image of thought.
As Deleuze says:
The instinct of revenge is the force that constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics, and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our [i.e., modern] thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking. [. . .] We do not really know what a man denuded of ressentiment would be like. A man who would not accuse or depreciate existence—would he still be a man, would he think like a man? Would he not already be something other than man? To have ressentiment or to not have ressentiment—there is no greater difference, beyond psychology, beyond history, beyond metaphysics.108
Deleuze is clearly talking about the Übermensch, but whereas other
thinkers—perhaps drunk on Nietzsche’s poetic proclamations of his arrival—discount the sacrifices necessary for moving men in his direction, Deleuze is unsparing in connecting ressentiment with the very tools of modern consciousness:
Evaluations, in essence, are not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate, serving as principles for the values on the basis of which they judge. This is why we always have the beliefs, feelings, and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being or our form of life. There are things that can only be said, felt, or conceived, values that can only be adhered to, on condition of “base” evaluation, “base” living, and “base” thinking. This is the crucial point: high and low, noble and base, are not values but represent the differential element from which the value of values themselves derives.109
This is the capstone that maintains the verticality of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. As Gregory Flaxman says, “One must come to terms with Deleuze’s relationship to Nietzsche for any of his work to make sense philosophically.”110
NOMOS & DIFFERENCE
“With Platonism, philosophy becomes a police operation.”
—Miguel de Beistegui111
THE AFFECT OF TRUTH
Truth, as Nietzsche says, affects only comfort. Comfort, according to Deleuze, affects uncritical, thoughtless thought. We can afford none of these, but while we often speak against comfort, rarely do we do so regarding our own thought. This is because of the radical project to which we are devoted. But, as radical as it—and we—may be, we are still prone to noncritical acceptance of concepts and forms of thought that keep us connected to bourgeois modernity. Moving beyond those concepts and forms is the basis of what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming-revolutionary.