Doug quoted from the Vegetarian Antichrist story from the London Times:
...>Cardinal Biffi was speaking at a conference in Bologna on the work of Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), the Russian philosopher and mystic, whom he praised as a "forgotten prophet" who had "lucidly foreseen" the horrors of the 20th century. In his last writings, the cardinal said, Solovyov had predicted the rise of the Antichrist after a century of bloodshed, wars, revolutions and the >breakdown of the nation state.
Thought that name was familiar from lurking on the Julius Evola list. Evola was an Italian fascist, much studied in the Red-Brown, "Third Positionist" and esoteric, traditionist circles of the New Age. Articles by Thomas Sheehan, in an anthology edited by a Richard Drake on seventies terrorism from Univ. of Indiana Press, if memory serves, and parts of a chapter in the book by Martin Lee, "The Beast Reawakens, " on post WWII neo-fascism, are easily available book sources. (Doing a search using the google search engine on Evola will probably bring up a lot of hits too.) His influence on Western European and Russian National Bolshevik groupings has been substantial, and in the defunct New Age journal, Gnosis, edited by Jay Kinney (the same Jay Kinney who wrote some great pieces for the Whole Earth Catalogs that showed more than a passing acquaintance with left historical sectarian arcana?) he was cited with regularity along with Rene Guenon. I'm been doing, in fits and starts, because of the Right-Wing Influences On The Left list that comrades Doug and Chip and Alain Kessi, who was the list organizer, is on too, along with a bunch of very astute, mainly European politicos from tendencies from the autonomen to communist and left social democratic and what to me looks like "pre-figurative" (in Carl Boggs terminology) counter-cultural types.
An examination also of the work of Walter Laqueur, in his story of the Russian far right, "Black Hundreds, " reading the books and speeches of Zyuganov, the leader of the largest Russian CP, and the writings of Alexander Dugin, in such bizarre metaphysical tracts as , "The Knights Templar Of The Proletariat, " on his website, and the writings of (have to say his novels, beginning with, It's Me, Eddie, " published by Grove Press in the mid-80's, are hilarious and scathing about Soviet and American society) Edward Limonov, the clownish leader of the National Bolshevik Party, are also good sources. A while back on lbo, a post from the eXile, on hanging out with and interviewing, Limonov, was posted. Also, a volume of The Review of Contempory Fiction was devoted to Limonov.
Following some excerpts from a website on Russian Philosophy, from which I learned that Deleuze and Guattari, have some influence in post-structuralist/pomo circles in Russia. (I couldn't understand alot of , "Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia, " which I read, in a study group some yrs. back with some mostly Cal. Berkeley pomo wankers, had alotta fun reading something I could barely understand, Ken tells me Lacan will be like that w/o Freud nearby, if I ever read more than The Mirror Stage paper from th mid-30's Has lbo ever had a go round on Deleuze and Guattari, to match the Judith Butler polemics?)
Michael Pugliese
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContEpst.htm 6. Nationalist ideology, which emerged in the early 1970s and escalated rapidly in post-communist Russia, has produced its own intellectual elite: writers, critics, historians, and scientists who attempt to create a philosophy of national spirit (which is routinely, though not necessarily, linked to rightist views). Its major intellectual predecessors include the Russian Slavophiles of the 19th century and the Eurasianists of the 1920s. 20th-century German, French and Italian sources, such as René Guénon (1886-1951) and Julius Evola (1898-1974), the founders of contemporary traditionalism as a metaphysical system, are also abundantly cited. The influential publicistic writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the historio-ethnographic treatises of Lev Gumilev (1912-90) can be placed in this category insofar as they concern general philosophical issues, such as the relation between culture and nation, collective responsibility and guilt, biological energy and the moral patterns of ethnic groups. For example, Gumilev advances an original theory (which sometimes echoes Oswald Spengler's "morphology of culture") that explains the rise and decline of ethnic formations by biological rather than social factors, namely by disproportionate infusions of cosmic energies into the biological mass of humankind. Gumilev's key concept is "drive," or "passionality," which accumulates in the "heroic personalities" of certain nations and epochs, accounting for their historical accomplishments. Even more extreme representatives of the same conservative nationalism are critic Vadim Kozhinov and mathematician Igor Shafarevich, who have developed a pessimistic view on Russian and Soviet history as permanently threatened and undermined from within by non-Russians, particularly Jews.
Finally, two modifications of nationalism surfaced in the 1980s-90s. One presented by Viktor Aksiuchits is moderate conservatism, claiming the timeless values of Orthodox Christianity as a specifically Russian legacy destined to introduce the spirit of national reconciliation into a society torn apart by militant pluralism and partisanship. The other promoted by Aleksandr Dugin is radical traditionalism, proclaiming the restoration of a paganist, esoteric legacy and the unification of Eurasia into one Empire under Russian guidance with the aim of waging spiritual war on the secularized and materialist West. Unlike other conservatives, with their exclusively Russian or Slavic nationalism, traditionalists attempt to unite the extreme Rightist movements of the entire world, which reveals that they are more indebted to German, French, and Italian fascist or para-fascist ideologists than to the nineteenth-century Russian Slavophiles. Radical traditionalists believe that after the fundamentally leftist and democratic revolutions in France, America and Russia, the world abandoned Tradition and sold its soul to the devil of material prosperity. That is why a new, metaphysical revolution is needed, this time a rightist one, antithetical to the conventional revolutionary formula insofar as it pursues the restoration of the spiritual foundations of the world that were buried by decadent civilization in its pursuit] of "progress."
...The death of one "big" totalitarianism gave birth to a number of smaller ones. Many politicians, of both leftist and rightist orientation, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Aleksandr Rutskoi, and even the new communist leader Gennady Zyuganov more or less consistently wielded metaphysical ideas to justify their ambitions for intellectual leadership.
This overall tendency, characteristic of the Russian mentality in general but aggravated in the early 1990s by increasing political instability, can be called "metaphysical radicalism." Political radicalism flows from the very core of this type of metaphysics, which, following Marxist paradigm, does not limit itself to explaining the world but attempts to change it. At the same time, any politics with pretensions to radically transforming the world cannot limit itself to the social, economic, and legislative dimensions, but must entail metaphysical assumptions. In the contemporary West, politics usually pursues less expansive goals of partially improving existing systems, and therefore, it is divorced from metaphysical considerations, or at least pretends to be. Since Russia's historical dynamics are not evolutionary but disruptive and catastrophic, each break in political continuity necessitates renewed metaphysical speculation and indoctrination designed to justify the entirely new social order. It is the privilege of metaphysics to address the world as a whole, as it is the objective of political radicalism to transform this whole completely. Thus metaphysical and political radicalism are mutually dependent, as the totalitarian experiments of the 20th century have shown: both communist and fascist radicalism advanced strong metaphysical claims. Russian philosophy, which during the 1950s-80s had resisted the stranglehold of Soviet ideocracy, may now be preparing the foundation for a new type of ideocracy, potentially based on the ideas of Cosmism, universal theocracy, radical traditionalism, Eurasianism or eschatological communism. The options are varied.
Metaphysical radicalism is a specific type of philosophical discourse that ignores the Kantian critique of metaphysics and claims to "transcend" the epistemological limits imposed on human cognitive capacities. It relies on 'revealed', 'self-evident' or 'generally accepted' truth or values that are directly accessible for human mind. However, this philosophical mode cannot be identified with the naive metaphysics that Kant criticized; it aspires not to adequate knowledge but to the practical transformation of the world, not to truth but to power. For metaphysical radicalism, epistemological limits remain effective, but irrelevant, since they can be transcended politically, volitionally, as the projection of a different world is implemented by the forces of social, national and technological revolution. This is not a pre-critical, descriptive but a post-critical, prescriptive metaphysics, one that draws on suppressed desires and taps the collective unconscious. Western intellectuals are familiar with this type of fiery speculation through the works of New Left thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, but the principal distinction of the majority of contemporary Russian "New Right" thinkers is their appeal to the absolute past, to the resurrection of ancestors or the restoration of Tradition.
It is known that sentences in the imperative mood cannot be subjected to the criteria of verification. As Roman Jakobson puts it, "The imperative sentences cardinally differ from declarative sentences: the latter are and the former are not liable to a truth test." (6) "Do this!" as distinct from "S/he has done this" or "This is done," cannot be challenged by the question "Is it true or not?" The same may be said of "metaphysics in the imperative mood," which, unlike the "indicative mood" of pre-Kantian metaphysics, evades critical challenges to its truthfulness. Kant's critique of philosophical dogmatism was crucially conclusive in respect to metaphysical "declarations," but to what extent can it help to demystify the metaphysical "imperatives" that began proliferate in the 19th and 20th centuries precisely as a result of Kantian limitations on theoretical reason?
The alliance between metaphysics and politics has benefits for both of them: as practice, it concentrates on one goal, on one direction of change; as philosophy, it posits itself beyond truth and falsehood. A diversity of positions is possible in philosophy only insofar as it interprets the world, but the task of changing the world leaves one position - the one that is sanctioned as correct and mandatory. One of the most famous Karl Marx's statements on the tasks of philosophy is his 11th thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." There is a curious asymmetry in this proposition: the transition from "interpreting" to "changing" is achieved at the price of "variability" which is dropped in the second part of the thesis. It is possible to interpret the world in various ways, but presumably there is only one way or direction of its practical transformation. This is how totalitarian implications are inherent in the very project of the philosophy as the practical/political action.
There are strong tensions, originating from diverse ideological sources, among the representative trends of metaphysical radicalism. For example, radical traditionalists inspired by such extreme rightist thinkers as René Guénon and Julius Evola, condemn Fyodorovian Cosmism as a leftist, technocratic heresy obsessed with the idea of progress and active, self-governed human evolution. Neo-fascist ideologists of Zhirinovsky's camp condemn radical traditionalists for their romantic alienation from the contemporary scene and their obsession with the past. (7) Nonetheless, these antagonisms serve to underscore the substantial unity of metaphysical radicalism, not in the specific contents of the individual projects that fall within its scope, but in the very mode of projective thinking that establishes a set of ideas about what the world should be, while utterly rejecting the world as it is. Fyodorov, the founder of Russian Cosmism, wrote: "...philosophy must become the knowledge not only of what is but of what ought to be, that is, from the passive, speculative explanation of existence it must become an active project of what must be, the project of universal action." (8) Not only Fyodorovians but radical traditionalists and Neomarxist utopians could subscribe to this statement of what philosophy should do in the face of the world problems and what the world should become in the name of philosophical ideas. The formula for the political implications of this metaphysical radicalism can be found in Nietzsche's prophecy: "The time of the struggle for domination of the globe is upon us; it will be undertaken in the name of basic philosophical teachings." (9) Russian metaphysical radicals invoke as model the fate of Nietzsche's own teachings: German recruits going into the trenches of the first World War with volumes of Zarathustra in their rucksacks.
The ideological incompatibility among Marxist, nationalist and religious discourses, which sharply divided them in the late Soviet period, now becomes more and more irrelevant as these positions merge in the overarching type of radical discourse. Consider the words of Sergei Kurginyan, one of the chief ideologist of post-Marxist revival of communism who was the principal political advisor of the conservative, pro-communist forces in the Soviet leadership that organized the failed putsch of August, 1991, and attempted to preserve the Soviet Union as a communist superpower: "We regard communism not only as a theory but as a new metaphysics which leads to the creation of a new, global religious teaching... It contains many fundamental features vitally important for civilization, features of a new world religion with its own saints and martyrs, apostles and creed. ...Among the indisputable predecessors of communism we identify Isaiah and Jesus, Buddha and Lao Tse, Confucius and Socrates... [...] Today there is no alternative to the communist meta-religion..." (10) Further, Kurginyan insists that Russia, since its ancient history "has experienced a need for an idea with global-messianic potential capable of unifying Eurasia. She found this in communism. [...] The red field, Communist eschatology and Communist mysticism existed, exist and will exist in Russia and, most probably, these ideas... will find their place within Eurasian expanses, merging with Orthodox, Sufi, Buddhist, and possibly, Catholic mysticism." (11)
This example of the discourse of "metaphysical radicalism" reduces or even erases any difference among communist, nationalist and religious rhetoric. Another example comes from the head of the renovated Communist party, Gennady Zyuganov, the strongest contender for Russian political and ideological leadership in Russia today: "From the standpoint of ideology and world view, Russia is the keeper of the ancient spiritual tradition: its fundamental values are sobornost' (12) (collectivism), the supreme power of the State [derzhavnost' ], sovereignty [literally: self-sufficiency of statehood], and the goal of implementing the highest 'heavenly' ideals of justice and brotherhood in earthly reality." (13) Within a single sentence, phrases imbued with religious meaning - "spiritual tradition," "sobornost'" and "heavenly ideals," merge together with "derzhavnost'" and "statehood," taken from the vocabulary of nationalists, and with "collectivism" and "brotherhood," the key words of communist jargon.
Thus we can single out metaphysical radicalism as one of the most powerful tendencies in contemporary Russian thought, as a kind of metadiscursive strategy transcending the ideological differences among previously oppositional movements.
For more, read your Dostoevsky, Berdyiev, or this URL http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContEpst.htm