I’m preparing a review essay of Pierre Krebs’ Fighting for the Essence (Arktos 2012). I received it Friday and, upon a cursory perusal, it earned an immediate reading (no small feat considering the titanic pile of books in my stack). Despite suffering from a tendency among GRECE thinkers to subscribe to a form of pluralism that relativizes even the European cultures they are, ostensibly, fighting to pull back from the multicultural abyss, Krebs has synthesized three of my favorite thinkers (Nietzsche, Evola, and Walter Otto) into a stirring call for a renaissance of pre/anti-Christian intellectual (warrior) elites. For all of its faults, the book convinced me of my own European credentials (see my repeated critiques of the North American New Right) as its unapologetic academic style (and partisan passion) read like a nursery rhyme to my ears.
My European credentials were also confirmed by Gianni Vattimo’s essay on “The ‘Italian’ Nietzsche,” found in his Dialogue with Nietzsche essay collection (Columbia University 2006). Although the essay is too brief and limited in scope to fully explain the Nietzsche that is peculiar to Italian radical thinkers (could there be any other kind devoted to Nietzsche), it did explain well enough that ‘the Italian Nietzsche’ is one that is connected to politics and to understanding the possibilities of post-representational thought. While I long ago gave up the hope of moving beyond the metaphysics of Being, instead coming full circle and embracing being at any cost, and despite being completely unmoved by the Nietzsche presented me by Vincent Crapanzano – the French Nietzsche that (supposedly) problematized all truth and all morality as it was, it was in Roma that I finally and exhilaratingly read Nietzsche from beginning to end. And, like other Italians, I found him to be clearly and critically political; the foremost destroyer of the truths and foreign intellectual systems that have created the decadent modernity from which we now suffer so terribly.
markdyal 