Some Reflections on the Metapolitical Thought of Guillaume Faye
Robert Steuckers shares his thoughts on his political comrade and friend, Guillaume Faye. Euro-Synergies, October 15th, 2024.
This essay was originally published in French on Robert Steuckers’s website, Euro-Synergies, on October 15, 2024. Robert Steuckers is a Belgian political thinker, a former GRECE member, and founder of the European New Right journals ‘Vouloir’ and ‘Orientations.’ He currently runs the website Euro-Synergies and serves as the Deputy Editor-in-Chief for Arktos Journal. Hyperlinks have been provided where I felt additional background/context was needed.
Translated by Alexander Raynor.
I met Guillaume Faye in Lille during the winter of 1975-1976. In a hall in the metropolis of French Flanders, he gave a lecture on Europe's energy independence. This was a subject he always held dear, tirelessly advocating for energy autarky based primarily on nuclear power, as France had wanted since the 1960s. Energy independence provides power, an essential word in his discourse, which allows escape from submission to the American hegemon. If there is submission and not power, decline, decay, and disappearance follow. Possessing power allows one to manage, administer, and confront reality. Faye always declared himself "realist and accepting."
Later, especially from the fateful year of 1979 (and I will explain here why it was fateful), we had long discussions on geopolitical, geostrategic, and geo-economic subjects. On other themes as well, of course. And on our childhood memories, as students, as readers. It emerges that Faye was a student at a Jesuit college in Angoulême, his hometown. There he acquired a solid Greco-Latin education, from which, without saying so (which is a pity), he deployed his original metapolitics. I'll come back to this.
Guillaume Faye entered the ‘New Right’ movement through the springboards of the Oswald Spengler Circle and the Vilfredo Pareto Circle, where Yvan Blot also worked, with whom, despite their differences and their parallel but not common paths, he shared some key ideas, including Hellenism (rather Aristotelian), interest in a political economy freed from liberal and Marxist slogans, the will not to alienate Russia (from Brezhnev to Putin). These two initial circles of the New Right movement in Île-de-France addressed "realist" themes, truly political ones. Faye always remained faithful to them, abhorring phatic blabber, grandiloquent poses, and inept boasting. Faye, in his hostility to these drifts, often referred to the notion of "ideological nuisance," developed by one of his mentors, Raymond Ruyer.
To this critique of "ideological nuisances" was added, from 1980, the method of "doxanalysis" (analysis of opinions) by Jules Monnerot, also the author of a "Sociology of Revolutions". Monnerot communicated to Faye the idea of heterotely: the result of a policy based on an "ideological nuisance" is never consistent with the initial intentions. Wanting to make the happiness of the administered in the name of ideological tinkering (François Bourricaud, another reference of Faye) generally leads to waste at best, to disasters at worst (and we have been there for a few years!).
When I knew Faye, the Western sphere was gradually sliding towards neoliberalism, that is, towards a domination of politics by economics. To restore the primacy of politics (Carl Schmitt, Julien Freund) and to escape the all-economic, it was necessary to take an interest in non-liberal, heterodox economic thoughts (that is to say, non-Manchesterian, non-Marxist, and non-Keynesian), leaving all their places to the specific history of States or Empires, to specific institutions born from the history of peoples, to ethnological and anthropological data.
The essential idea was to promote again, in theoretical debates, the autarky or semi-autarky of large national states (François Perroux) or large spaces (Friedrich List, Carl Schmitt, André Grjébine), because the economy was then no longer solely at the service of the economy itself or of financialization instances but at the service of populations, in order to perpetuate them over time, to link successive generations in effective survival strategies. The economy cannot therefore be overarching, must be bridled by politics and put at the service of the State or the Empire (of the Great Space according to Carl Schmitt, still little known at the time of our discussions within the "Studies & Research" department of G.R.E.C.E.).
In the first half of the 1980s, Faye was an attentive reader of works showing the anthropological damage caused by the gradual erasure of politics and by the victorious advances of the all-economic. Two concepts, particularly fine, mobilized all his attention: the obesity of the State according to Jean Baudrillard (also author of a work on the damage generated by the consumer society, by consumerism) and the idea that we were entering an "era of emptiness" according to Gilles Lipovetsky's definition.
An obese State, handicapped by excessive welfare, a plethoric tertiary sector, and an over-subsidized cultural sector, cannot return to the essential, to its regalian functions, truly political ones. This suffocation leads notably, via consumerism according to Baudrillard and via the nonsense of television varieties in the American fashion, to a problematic cultural void, preventing the cultural elites of a country (or a continent) from finding in their own culture the resources to clear their societies of the dross brought by obesity.
Hence the metapolitics to be defended to the elites (Platonic) must consist of a work of permanent reminiscence of the Greek heritage (Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides) as the foundation of theoretical and practical thought, which must lead to a realism of Aristotelian type (he will repeat this during his last broadcast on TV Libertés), called to constantly consolidate the power really existing within the polity to which one belongs, or to actualize what is potentially powerful but still fallow (Aristotle, Gentile, Dutch actualists); this metapolitics aims to make the polity slim and flexible, strong and not obese (Baudrillard), while innervating it with a discourse emanating from a "strong thought" that gives substance again to the society which, thus, does not fall into the "void" (Lipovetsky).
However, the existence of "democratic" (or "partitocratic") institutions and practices in Western countries means that ideological nuisances, denounced by Prof. Raymond Ruyer, spread both in the popular classes and in the elites (via deviant teaching since the eruption of impolitical ideologies from the events of May 68).
Any genealogical study of these ideological nuisances obliges us to admit, of course, that the worm was already in the fruit (our Western societies) since the seizure of power in 1789 by the "societies of thought" (Augustin Cochin), even since the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the 17th century (let's reread Bossuet!).
Faye therefore developed, based on the concepts that Giorgio Locchi had instilled in him, a vision of history (of thoughts), which he would explain in a small work, published in very few copies and in an artisanal mode in Embourg near Liège, entitled Europe and Modernity. It is undoubtedly Faye's most difficult text. It was also only a first draft that would have deserved a broader development (we're going to work on it!), accompanied by explanations in a more diluted, more accessible language.
Faye sees, to put it simply, a pagan heritage (that is to say "Greek" according to him), both Apollonian and Dionysian, which is the surest, most solid foundation of our Europe. This heritage, always present but obliterated and repressed in fallow, has been vitiated by Christianization. This Christianization has mutilated the Greek heritage, not the watered-down one, repeated to satiety in educational establishments (Nietzsche) ad usum Delphini but the living one that the Hellenist and mythologist Walter Otto has highlighted. When Faye spoke of Greek heritage or paganism, he spoke as a reader of Walter Otto (which did not prevent him from appreciating libations and goliardic activities).
The trajectory followed by European society will therefore be as follows: it will pursue the Christian or Christianomorphic project (whose form derives from a secularization of the Christian message) while maintaining in its interiority, a tacit resistance of its fundamental Hellenicity (a "Walter Ottonian Hellenicity") or of all other forms of cosmic perception of the living world, forms perceptible outside the Hellenic or Hellenized area, in the face of a growing expansion, within it, of a Christian or Christianomorphic vision, non-cosmic and therefore atheistic, which will rationalize itself from the Reformation and especially from the 17th century to lead to the reasoning spirit of the "societies of thought" (Cochin), to Locke's schematism (the Anglo-Saxon vulgate) and to the ideology of human rights (whose potential drifts will be highlighted by Edmund Burke, in view of the odious slippages of the 1789 revolution).
In this sense, reactions like the German Sturm und Drang and Herder's thought are avatars, partially unconscious, of repressed cosmic Hellenicity. For Locchi, the masterful blow against the advance of the Christianomorphic vision will be given by Wagnerism. To return to the time when this vision of the decline of Christianomorphism and the return of Hellenicity becomes clearer in Faye, that is to say the end of the 1970s, we obtain the vulgate of the "new philosophy" and its main representative, Bernard-Henri Lévy: a hypothetical Yahweh, rethought at the counter of the Twickenham following the ingestion of a few well-chambered whiskies, would have generated over the centuries the republican rationality, purged of any residue of organicity born of the soil, which rationality must imperatively erect itself as an incontrovertible system whose permanent mission is to uproot the culture of the people and of the rooted elites, by violence if necessary. We have here the outline of the repression that is falling today on everything that does not applaud the actions of Macronist and woke neoliberalism. That is "the system to kill peoples", title of Faye's first major work, which has not aged a bit, mutatis mutandis.
The sciences (physical and biological) and technology, which take off in the 19th century, can be put at the service of either the reborn cosmic Hellenicity, truly European, or the atheistic and anti-cosmic Christianomorphic project. In themselves, these sciences and techniques are neutral. For Jürgen Habermas and his mentors of the Frankfurt School, whom Faye read very attentively, technique and sciences are "fascistoid", in the sense that they put themselves at the service of power, whatever it may be (National Socialist, Stalinist, liberal Rooseveltian), more exactly at the service of the leaders in the "era of directors", according to James Burnham (another reference of Faye and Thiriart). However, one cannot do without the "directors", who are the administrators of the "power" that protects the life, economic, social and demographic survival of the people.
Metapolitics, the battle of ideas, must therefore conquer the mental (from the Latin mens) of the "directors", perceived as the "philosophers" of the Platonic tradition, who are therefore not abstruse pitchmen but men of action and prospection. These "directors" must therefore have a Hellenic baggage and not a Christianomorphic, post-Calvinist, post-Presbyterian (Wilson!) or post-Lockean baggage. An Athenian (or Roman) baggage and not a Yahwic baggage, to alleviate the pain and ultra-simplifying boasting of BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy).
Europe therefore has a future only if its "director-philosophers" become "Greek" again (partially Platonic, partially Aristotelian, Apollonian without erasing the Dionysian that lies in the depths of every man, animated by a true cosmic piety). It will perish if its "directors" assimilate ideological nuisances, drifts or avatars of an a-cosmic Christianity, which, in the current context, is equivalent to the woke, genderist and ecologist delusions in the fashion of "Extinction Rebellion".
Note, five years after Faye's death, that the year 1979, as the German historian of our contemporary era Frank Bösch writes in his masterwork Zeitenwende 1979: Als die Welt von heute begann, inaugurated in the Western world all the nuisances that precipitated our societies into decline, into suicidal madness (and which make us hated in emerging and disadvantaged countries).
In 1979, BHL began his career, by castigating anticipatively all the healthy reflexes that could emanate from a people, demanding to be able to survive. In 1979, with Thatcher and then, a little later, with Reagan, neoliberalism took off which will lead to the ruin of the EU. Still in 1979, Islamic fundamentalism appeared on the international scene, bringing back between Morocco and Indonesia, the religious factor that had been repressed by secular Arab states, often carried by the military. This fundamentalism, on analysis, will very often serve as a "proxy" to wage the wars (of low intensity) that the American hegemon cannot wage officially. We have seen it in Afghanistan, Syria, Chechnya.
In 1979, the "Boat People" affair announced the unhealthy craze for population displacements, following wars abandoned by the hegemon, small demographic masses which, used by the hegemon's services, serve to transform all polities into "composite states" and thus to weaken them or make them implode: this practice reached its peak in 2015, with the massive influx of Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees, African refugees following the disappearance of the Libyan “lock”, in Europe in general, in its German geographical heart in particular. The fusion of Christianomorphic miserabilism, which had become more virulent with the "Boat People" affair that had reconciled Sartre and Aron, and radical Islamism within Muslim diasporas in European suburbs, would preoccupy the Faye of the second period, from 1998 to his death. The first period being the one that immediately follows the end of his higher education in 1973 to continue until the end of his metapolitical activism within G.R.E.C.E., end of 1986, beginning of 1987.
In 1979 is also born, in the whole Western sphere, in the Americanosphere or Otanistan, the ecological vogue, particularly in Germany, vogue which will engage on all the deleterious and anti-traditional fashions and, above all, will sabotage any energy autonomy in Europe by rejecting nuclear power: we see today the profit that the hegemon derives from it against the background of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Germany was first defeated by Anglo-American carpet bombing and by the "Soviet spadassin of the thalassocracies" (Ernst von Reventlow). It was then defeated by the ecological virus, as a major ideological nuisance articulated against it, virus inoculated by Young Global Leaders in green suits. This was indeed the purpose of the maneuver! The nuisances injected into the body of Europe in 1979 have caused a "convergence of catastrophes" that Faye anticipated from the start, a convergence he will describe in a book he will publish in 2004, just before the great crisis of neoliberalism in 2008 and before the muscular awakening of Russia (with the affair of Georgia and South Ossetia, in August of the same year).
There would still be much to say about Faye's metapolitics (his friendship with Julien Freund, his years of escapades between 1987 and 1997, the contributions of Locchi, Venner, and Blot, his theses on sexuality, his theses on Euro-Russian and Euro-American relations, etc.). But finally, we can summarize this metapolitics, within the framework of this modest article, as the militant necessity to fight without discontinuity, with the tools he has bequeathed to us, against all the manifestations of these ideological nuisances introduced into our de-Hellenized Western societies in 1979, and against all the ideological roots of these nuisances, in order to bring about a de-Westernized Europe, carried by Greek archaism and by a techno-scientific instrumentarium aiming at power and survival (archeofuturism), constantly reinvigorated by a spirit of adventure (Mabire!) aiming at de-installation, permanent de-encrustation because the enemy is this Occidentalism born of a superficial and mutilating reading of the Bible since the Reformation hostile to the Renaissance, and of a gradual and schematizing rationalization of this hysterical superficiality, seeking the rapid advent of societies and polities droning on for centuries the same worn-out schemas, imposed once and for all and in which all, Bushmen and Lapps, Khmers and Alakaloufs, are asked to settle permanently, once their soul is killed by the system.
Faye, by using the binomials rooting/uprooting, installation/de-installation, has taken up the vocabulary introduced by Bernard Garcet at the school for cadres of "Young Europe" (Jean Thiriart) in Louvain and Brussels in the 1960s: the combative Europe on the march needs rooted and de-installed political and metapolitical militants who will annihilate the incapacitating torpor of a zombie (Venner) or trivial (Thiriart) humanity which is uprooted and installed in the sad and repetitive schemas of an a-cosmic and a-tragic worldview.
This struggle is eternal and planetary. It knows no end. In September 1980, I promised Pierre Vial to defend our worldview, of which Faye was the most pertinent, the most audacious exponent, until my last breath. May others take up the torch when, like Faye, I have passed from life to death.
-Robert Steuckers, October 15th, 2024
Small postscript note [from Robert Steuckers]: I am well aware of the incompleteness of this text. Readers of this bulletin of the friends of Jean Mabire will be able to discover on the internet two other texts published after Guillaume Faye's passing, one written for the website of the German publishers of Faye's brief novel, printed in the first version of his book titled Archeofuturism, where he recounts a day in the life of an imperial inspector of Greater Europe from Dublin to Vladivostok. This interview notably evokes Faye's interest in comic books (Hergé, Jacobs, Franquin). The other, for an Austrian theoretical journal, focused this time on archeofuturism. These texts, originally written in German, have been translated into French:
