Guillaume, This Is Really Nothing

Presumably there are people who specialising in studying the philosophy of the European far right, or even the more specific theme of their appropriation of classical antiquity, as Donna Zuckerberg and others are doing in the US. I wonder how they prevent their brains dribbling out of their ears on a regular basis.

This morning I’ve had the dubious pleasure of encountering Guillaume Faye for the first time: a journalist and writer associated with the French New Right and author of various books and collections of articles including Why We Fight: a metapolitical dictionary, which a Twitter account is now laboriously tweeting to a minuscule audience, therefore bringing it to the attention of the ever-vigilant Thucydiocy Bot:

3/ “Since Antiquity, as Aristotle, Thucydides, and Xenophon noted, it’s been known that every nation that takes in large numbers of aliens is destined to perish, for these aliens progressively replace natives, who are culturally and/or physically destroyed by them.” – p 75

— Why We Fight Metapolitical Dictionary (@WhyWeFightMPD14) November 20, 2017

Yes, because of course the expression of xenophobic views and cultural doom narratives by ancient authors is sure evidence of their universal truth, because classical tradition or something. But wait a minute: Thucydides, who expressly notes the contribution made to Athens’ rise to greatness by refugees from political unrest elsewhere, and who has Pericles emphasise its character as a city open to the world in contrast to xenophobic Sparta? Xenophon, who wrote a short treatise on how to attract more migrants to Athens? Aristotle, who was such a migrant..?

Of course Faye has a get-out clause: he means the bad sort of migrants, the ones who aren’t “ethnically European”, who may even be Muslim (his vision of Europe is explicitly Catholic, so I’m not sure where Protestants, Jews and atheists fit in, but it’s clear that Muslims are The Enemy). “A Belgian, Italian, or Russian of European origins residing in France is not an alien.” Thucydides et al are doubtless talking about welcoming fellow Greeks, not Persians or other dark-skinned barbarians. This side-step may also help him pass over the absence of any actual evidence for these claims of Ancient Greek fear of cultural swamping. (And the puzzling question of why he doesn’t cite Plato, who does, iirc, say something vaguely along these lines in the context of locating a city far enough from the sea not to be corrupted by foreign influences).

The tweeting of Faye’s Metapolitical Dictionary is in its very early stages, so the only entry besides ‘Alien’ so far released is ‘Aesthetics’. This is as full of right-wing pseudo-classicising bollocks as you’d expect.

1/ AESTHETICS – According to Greek etymology, ‘that which evokes a strong sensation.’ Aesthetics is linked to notions of beauty, harmony, achievement of form. 2/ “Contemporary egalitarian ideology abhors and implicitly demonizes aesthetics. It associates…the will to power with discipline, which it considers morally unacceptable…This ideology opposes aesthetics to ‘ethics’ and situated itself in ethics’ iconoclastic tradition.” … 5/ “Instead of harmony, the power of forms, the exaltation and elevation of sensation and beauty – notions is abstract ‘conceptual art’ are preferred, which becomes a pretext for degeneracy, willful ugliness, and subsidized incompetence.” … 7/ “Hence, the paradox of a society that strives to be ‘moral’ and humanistic, but ends up privileging barbarism, the inversion of values, and new forms of primitivism.”

Bingo! You are entartete Kunst and I claim my fifty francs!

What should one do with such stuff, besides snigger? What to make of an organisation with which Faye was once associated and which seems still to exist, more or less, the Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenes (yup, love the acronym), with its fondness for Philipp Foltz’ 1852 painting of Pericles delivering the Funeral Oration as an article header? These are the most superficial appropriations of classical images and inherited prestige imaginable – and of course that doesn’t matter in the wider scheme of things, because this isn’t about offering a historical analysis but constructing an image of culturally superior, ethnically homogenous Europe to legitimise hatred of everything Other.

It’s difficult not to feel a little queasy at the ease with which such claims of European exceptionalism can be constructed on the basis of inherited images of the classical – because such claims are not a million miles away from the sorts of claims we classicists sometimes make in promoting our own subject to prospective students, funding bodies and the like. “Come and study Greece and Rome! It’s fascinating and fabulous, and still important today” we cry, rather than “Classical Antiquity is a pervasive force of malevolence; we need to understand it in order to destroy its influence!”