5.
Certainly against the passive, slavish, and moral Last Man, Mussolini proposed a new form of productive and warring nobility; but he also knew that the content of such noble humanity was exceedingly rare, and that the expression that gave rise to its form – namely trincerocrazia (trenchocracy) – was only an answer to democrazia for the men who actually created it in the trenches. The trincerocrazia was created through a collective becoming manifested in fighting, daring, and thriving in Dolomite trenches. It was a transformation – ethical and bodily – of the nature of being human.
It was a becoming-incompatible with the bourgeois form of life. It did not trade one set of universal principles and (e)valuative methodologies for another. Instead it made the fighting man and his experience as such the basis of a new technology of living – one that honored speed, bravery, daringness, precision, violence, and will. It traded a discursive allegiance to universalized abstractions that were couched in natural terms like God, people, nation, and State for a trench-bound allegiance to men who had been created anew – the fabulation of a new man, a new people! – in an arena incompatible with the static belonging available for sale to men in armchairs and smoking salons.
Submission was not an option for these men, and they fought the bourgeois State to the death – at least they did so until Mussolini purged them in order to control their violent refusal to re-enter into the necessary apprenticeship to being-bourgeois that each of us accepts everyday. Submission to the rule of profiteers, priests, and revenuers? The nobility of the trincerocrati was not for sale, nor was their allegiance. Both were only earned – in becoming, not being; their transformation left them incompatible with being bourgeois.
markdyal 