Evola is a good example of something I've started to call "torsion". Wherever you think you recognise a certain pattern or ideology, there's something in him that kind of twists against it: so it's like fascism but with the qualifier that "race" is some sort of suprapersonal caste-identity, and "nation" is organised around some kind of suprahistorical Idea of the spiritual essence of a people, and everything's caught up in a double motion between ascendant-towards-Tradition and decadent-towards-modernity elements.
Nick Land's the same: what looks from one point of view like devious slippery deniability, from another looks like a kind of skein of subversion running through the whole thing. I think that accounts for a lot of the fascination people have with them: they provide "insight porn", a constant stream of slight glitches and surprises, things not working out quite exactly as you would expect, so that when someone then comes along and says "Evola's a fascist" or "Land's a fascist" you think "well that's not quite right, there are all these ways in which it doesn't work as that label would predict, there's something else going on here that you haven't understood", and of course because you have understood it, or at least noticed it, you feel a kind of attachment to that understanding, a desire to defend it.
As far as Land's concerned, there's a line of just straight-up "Europe is committing cultural suicide by letting all these Muslim North African immigrants in" xenophobia (ironically enough) which he espouses without much nuance or distance, and which places him very straightforwardly on the same "side" as the European racist right - there's that and all the "race-realist" stuff he can't keep away from - which I think is indefensible, and undermines the whole project. With Evola, there's an all-too-human desire to position himself as spiritual guru to the SS which, again, I don't feel particularly forgiving towards.
Another interesting thing about this "torsion" is that it sort of burrows into the other side as well - like, if you're familiar with Foucault and his notion that the history of ideas and social organisation moves from one "episteme" to another, then the way the Four Ages stuff in Evola is articulated will seem strangely familiar. It's a sort of inverted historical materialism: in different periods, the relationships between classes (castes, in Evola's scheme) shift, and the each class in relation to the others brings its own values and ideological comportment along with it . So a "leftist" used to seeing history in those terms will find that Evola rhymes, peculiarly, with the view of history they already have - it's just that it's all organised by this theme of decadence from pure origins, and places a positive value on all the heroic and chivalric content of previous ages' ideologies. Or the entire theme of Tradition as a universal and invariant set of principles which can be discerned within the concrete history of actual traditions actually accords very naturally with the Platonism of somebody like Badiou, who is similarly disdainful of the whirl of transitory "opinion" and seeks for procedures by which eternal truths can be discerned and established. You can see how someone might flip from essentially the most modern constellation of philosophical positions to a Traditional viewpoint. It's a flick of a switch, almost - reverse the polarity on your historiography, and there you are. And what you get for making the switch is a restoration of all that evacuated mythic and heroic stuff that the modern constellation largely treats as historical dreck - it's very seductive.
What immunises me against a lot of this is the relationship I already have to the mythic, to spiritualised nature and so on, which I get from reading lots of Alan Garner as a kid, growing up listening to the Incredible String Band, maintaining a sort of half-hearted atheist Anglicanism etc - basically I don't feel a huge gaping void around this stuff which only a world-historical theory of spiritual decline can explain and repair. I don't need to imagine myself the sort of person who might have experienced suprapersonal spiritual transcendence riding off to fight in the Crusades to feel some connection to the cosmos.
Nick Land's the same: what looks from one point of view like devious slippery deniability, from another looks like a kind of skein of subversion running through the whole thing. I think that accounts for a lot of the fascination people have with them: they provide "insight porn", a constant stream of slight glitches and surprises, things not working out quite exactly as you would expect, so that when someone then comes along and says "Evola's a fascist" or "Land's a fascist" you think "well that's not quite right, there are all these ways in which it doesn't work as that label would predict, there's something else going on here that you haven't understood", and of course because you have understood it, or at least noticed it, you feel a kind of attachment to that understanding, a desire to defend it.
As far as Land's concerned, there's a line of just straight-up "Europe is committing cultural suicide by letting all these Muslim North African immigrants in" xenophobia (ironically enough) which he espouses without much nuance or distance, and which places him very straightforwardly on the same "side" as the European racist right - there's that and all the "race-realist" stuff he can't keep away from - which I think is indefensible, and undermines the whole project. With Evola, there's an all-too-human desire to position himself as spiritual guru to the SS which, again, I don't feel particularly forgiving towards.
Another interesting thing about this "torsion" is that it sort of burrows into the other side as well - like, if you're familiar with Foucault and his notion that the history of ideas and social organisation moves from one "episteme" to another, then the way the Four Ages stuff in Evola is articulated will seem strangely familiar. It's a sort of inverted historical materialism: in different periods, the relationships between classes (castes, in Evola's scheme) shift, and the each class in relation to the others brings its own values and ideological comportment along with it . So a "leftist" used to seeing history in those terms will find that Evola rhymes, peculiarly, with the view of history they already have - it's just that it's all organised by this theme of decadence from pure origins, and places a positive value on all the heroic and chivalric content of previous ages' ideologies. Or the entire theme of Tradition as a universal and invariant set of principles which can be discerned within the concrete history of actual traditions actually accords very naturally with the Platonism of somebody like Badiou, who is similarly disdainful of the whirl of transitory "opinion" and seeks for procedures by which eternal truths can be discerned and established. You can see how someone might flip from essentially the most modern constellation of philosophical positions to a Traditional viewpoint. It's a flick of a switch, almost - reverse the polarity on your historiography, and there you are. And what you get for making the switch is a restoration of all that evacuated mythic and heroic stuff that the modern constellation largely treats as historical dreck - it's very seductive.
What immunises me against a lot of this is the relationship I already have to the mythic, to spiritualised nature and so on, which I get from reading lots of Alan Garner as a kid, growing up listening to the Incredible String Band, maintaining a sort of half-hearted atheist Anglicanism etc - basically I don't feel a huge gaping void around this stuff which only a world-historical theory of spiritual decline can explain and repair. I don't need to imagine myself the sort of person who might have experienced suprapersonal spiritual transcendence riding off to fight in the Crusades to feel some connection to the cosmos.
