by Graham Lister

In the Anglophone world, in particular where it has been picked up by cultural studies, the term ‘body’ is a fairly reliable warning of hot air to come: a flashing sign for the sensible and time-poor to stay well away. But there are exceptions. One of which might well be The Coming of the Body by Hervé Juvin, in which premonitions of a new and radical regime of individualism under the aegis of the human body, as life distends and capital mutates to meet it, emerge (somewhat incongruously) from the French insurance industry.

Social agendas in the West are in flux, as new kinds of issues gain salience - pension provision, immigration policies, reproductive rights, marital arrangements. Juvin’s contribution belongs to the genre concerned with such issues; illustrated with an abundance of striking data, and delivered with an intellectual mordancy and crisp literary style that remain, even today, peculiarly French. The author might also be regarded as a very particular and local phenomenon. In the Anglophone world business and culture are typically strangers, yielding at best, earnest middle-brow apologetics at the level of Adair Turner’s “Just Capital”; but in France the intellectual executive is a not unfamiliar or strange figure. Operating within the insurance world, Juvin writes without any overt political attachments.

“The Coming of the Body” announces a time when the human body has started to pre-empt all other measures of value in the West, separating the experience of contemporary generations from that of all predecessors, and the rest of the world. The basis of this sea change lies in the spectacular transformation of life expectancy. When the Revolution broke out in 1789, the average span of life in France was 22. By 1900 it was just under 45. Today, it is 75 for men, and over 83 for women, and continually increasing. Quoting Juvin; “We have every reason to hope that one girl out of two born in France since 2000 will live to be a hundred years old”. This prolongation of life is “the present that a century of blood and iron has left us - the present of a life that has doubled”. It amounts to “the invention of a new body, against need, against suffering and against time; against the world too - the world of nature, which was destiny”. The gift is restricted to the rich. “An entire generation will soon separate Europe from its neighbours to the south, when the median age of its population passes 50 (towards 2050), while that of the Maghreb remains under 30”. If we were from the developing world we too would be desperately doing everything within our powers to make it to the West.

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Robert Steuckers circulated me today with his Euro-Synergies URL to a short interview for Alternative Right with Gianluca Iannone of the Italian culturist organisation CasaPound.  The interviewer is the Tokyo-based Colin Liddell.  The two longest and most interesting answers given by Iannone are repeated here.

Founded in 2003, CasaPound is doing successfully what some in British nationalism consider to be essential at this time of nationalist disintegration.  Iannone explains:

CPI works on everything that concerns the life of our nation: from sport to solidarity, culture and of course politics. For sports, we have a soccer teams and academy, we do hockey, rugby, skydiving, boxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, scuba diving, hiking groups, caving, climbing. For solidarity, we have first aid teams, we do fundraising activities for the Karen people, and we provide help to orphans and single-mums. A phone line called “Dillo to CasaPound” (tell it to CasaPound) is active 24/7 to give free advises on legal and tax issues. On the cultural ground, we host authors and organize book presentations; we have an artist club, a theater school, free guitar, bass guitar and drum lessons, we created an artistic trend called Turbodinamismo, we have a publishing company, dozens of bookshops and websites. Politically we propose various laws like the Mutuo sociale (social mortgage), Tempo di essere Madri (Time to be a mother) or against water privatisation and so many more. Speaking about CPI is never easy because all these things are CASAPOUND. All of these represent our challenges and projects for now and the millennium.

Obviously, Casapound Italia is a formula specific to the current evolution of race-loyal, anti-liberal politics in Italy.  It demonstrates, however, that in principle there are viable alternatives to party politics.  For his part, Iannone evidently regards politics as a wrong turn.

The important thing is to generate counter information and to occupy the territory. It is fundamental to create a web of supporters other than focusing on elections. For election, you are in competition with heavily financed groups and with only one or two persons elected, you can’t change anything. Politics for us is a community. It is a challenge, it is an affirmation. For us, politics is to try to be better every day. That is why we say that if we don’t see you, it is because you are not there. That is why we are in the streets, on computers, in bookshops, in schools, in universities, in gymnasium, at the top of mountains or in the newsstands. That is why we are in culture, social work and sport. That is a constant work.

All that said, there is a caveat.  At best, Culturism is utilitarian.  It is not a revolutionary programme but a smoothing of the way for serious anti-liberal, anti-globalist activism.  It necessarily operates within the existing terms of public discourse.  It has no spine of its own.  It has to reach out.  It has to look and sound like its constituency.  Therefore, those who make their contribution through it must guard assiduously against accommodationism and the resultant loss of racial focus.

In a massively propagandised macro-environment like ours, Culturism only makes sense if there is a separate but complementary effort to redefine - and racialise - the terms of debate.  Then it has something to feed off, something to propagandise in return.

I am informed by Drew Fraser that Tom Sunic has interviewed him for VoR.  The link to the first part of the interview is here.  This should be an interesting encounter.  There is some similarity in their backgrounds, but Drew is a much more legalistic and establishmentarian thinker than Tom, and a committed Christian.  He gives a good interview, too.

by Graham Lister

For the philosophical communitarian, the Sartrean cogito, spontaneously reinventing itself ex nihilo, permanently free to choose and revise its definition of the good, is a fiction that pervades all modern liberalism. From Hobbes, Locke and Kant, through to Mill and Rawls, the rootless, solitary and “unencumbered self”, as Michael Sandel describes it, prior to and independent of its ends and rationally deliberating on the value of its voluntary attachments, is adopted as the starting point of social analysis.

This conception of the subject, it is argued, precludes from the start the possibility of genuinely communal forms of association, of “constitutive” communities “bound by moral ties antecedent to choice”. This is why communitarians stress the cultural constitution of the subject, the way the individual forms his or her identity, sense of self, and intuitive system of values by inheriting and passing on an unchosen legacy of collective orientations, shared meanings and standards, networks of kinship and pre-contractual forms of solidarity which are a prerequisite for, rather than the outcome of, the subject’s capacity for moral commitment.

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It’s really one question that hangs over political nationalism, though it has many forms.  How do we make politics amid all this hostility?  How do we get this movement moving?  How do we make our people wake up?  How do we get them to turn away from near concerns and act at last in their own ethnic interest?  Is it better to be accommodationist, civicist, expedient and dishonest?  Or principled?  Isn’t “principle” the problem?

And so forth.

For weeks the BNPIdeas website, which is centred on Andrew Brons, has been filled with inventive ways to ask this question.  Inevitable I suppose, given last October’s failure to launch a new party and the non-appearance of the “parallel party structure” that was promised in its stead.  It is apparent now that action of any profitable kind is beyond the power of nationalism in Britain.  Fear of moving forward, disdain at staying put, the impossibility of going back, spill out all over the page, and over it all hangs the big red sign declaring triumphantly, “You lost!”

Which is all too possible as things stand.  No surprise then, to see yet another agonised article, this time penned by a William Shakespeare (of no evident poetic leaning), deploring the division in nationalist ranks, and proposing “the way forward” thus:

I also appeal TO YOU – YOU who are reading this article – because, like any proposal, it requires a display of support and the posting here of as many messages of general support and agreement as possible.

The plan I put to you is this. In order to advance the prospect of Nationalist Unity, without which nothing on a national political front can ever be accomplished, I propose that a simple petition, or plebiscite to use an old term, of ALL Nationalists and supporters of Nationalism is undertaken.

Every individual would submit their name and some address detail to distinguish them (if not a home address, an email perhaps) and – this is the really important bit – each person would include a brief summary of what THEY consider to be the most vital pieces of policy and constitutional requirements that a single, united, nationwide major Nationalist Party ought to have.

That is the ineluctable product of an absence of leadership and clear principle.  But, then, nationalism in Britain has ever been a cut flower ideologically, and no leader could compensate for that, as I tried to explain in a comment to the bard’s article:

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Earlier today I came across this video at BDF posted by Chuffer, a good, reliable nationalist and ex-BNP member, and a regular participant in the BDF bear-pit.  The theme of injustice and betrayal is not new to us, of course, though it is certainly a pleasure to see it so well structured.  But the street interview section is important, and especially refreshing to see.  There are the authentic voices of the English working-class who have been been subjected to eighteen years of relentless Lawrence propaganda.  And they know it.

Still, one wonders why they exhibit such a resigned attitude, and not more fight.  Then one remembers how deserted these people are.  Not the politicians, not the press, not the Church, not the schools, not the law ... no part of civil society spares them a word of acknowledgement.  It truly is the most complete betrayal imaginable.  And yet, as this video shows, the Lawrence propaganda almost certainly now exercises more influence over the minds of the traitors than it does the betrayed.

Tom Sunic interviews Soren here.  Run-time 35min 28sec.

Tom gets Soren to expand, somewhat, on his adoption of the Gramscian dictum “pessimism of the intellect - optimism of the will”, on religion in our present woes, on the concept of the enemy, and on civilisational collapse.  Probably the best interview Soren has given.  Still some dark areas for me, but much to think about.

Kievsky as guest blogger:

I’ve been waiting for a reason to use this as a blog post title, and this alternet article gave me a priceless quote illustrating exactly this truism.

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