UNPAYWALLED: Renaud Camus part 2
Plus: Make Politics Kinky Again
Last week I unlocked part 1 of this 3-parter on Renaud Camus, “replacism” and post-human ideology, and have enjoyed the thought-provoking discussion this prompted.
This week I’ve unlocked part 2, which deals with “replacism” as an ideology, including material supplied by Camus’ translators from more recent publications than the one discussed in part 1.
Part 3 is here, and will be unlocked for free subscribers next week. Without further ado:
Plus: Make Politics Kinky Again
Some time ago I wrote a short provocation for Asylum on power, politics, and difference, titled MAKE POLITICS KINKY AGAIN. For a number of reasons it’s taken a while for it to be published. But maybe you read?
But if we accept, in principle, that BDSM serves as a safety-valve for the dangerous allure of power asymmetry within the contractual liberal paradigm, it’s plausible that these pre-existing differences of disposition obtain more broadly too. If a preference for domination or submission just is, in a BDSM context, this may also be the case beyond that context. More plainly: it’s possible that even outside the carefully ringfenced zone of heavily pre-negotiated sex LARPing, some individuals may be more naturally disposed than others not to be leaders, but to be led. This is perhaps the most taboo possibility of all: so much so that the founding constitution of the modern world’s only superpower explicitly disavows it. But what if, in fact, all men are not created equal? What if some individuals genuinely prefer, outside as well as inside the BDSM safety-zone, to accept authority rather than to seek it?
Camus x Meat Lego Gnosticism next week, plus a few other updates…meanwhile see you in the chat!
Mary's excellent piece makes me think of the veritable Navy of British kayakers I saw one summer on the Dordogne River, paddling busily past the Chateau de Beynac, a key fortress in the Hundred Years War. Question: were the holiday boaters instrumentalizing the river more or less than Richard the Lionheart and his legions?
It also calls to mind a far more personal experience. Having lived in Asia for a lengthy clip with the benefit of charming of industrious domestic help (read as written), I can say in hindsight that great domestic help was as much a minus as a plus for our family. My wife and I each had chores to do growing up; our kids had no chores. I would sometimes try to find them some, but to no avail. As soon as the helper learned of it, she would do it first thing the next day, even if it meant taking out an already-empty trash bag. All of which is a pleasure over a week or two, but less so over several years.
Chores are the ligaments of a household, which is the inner sanctum of the family. Imagine a cathedral church service in which the janitor swings the incense and lights the candles (no offense, janitors). But you do it because you can, and tell yourself its more efficient, it frees you up to do more important things. And some parents freed themselves up quite a bit more, having drivers drop off and pick up their kids, make the meals, do the shopping, you name it. The pros are it is efficient and everything gets done and you don't have to lift a finger. The cons are that your kids get to be 12 years old and have never teamed up with you to jointly tackle a practical need, nor did they ever tackle one solo for the family. The pro is significant and obvious; the con is huge and oblique.
Perhaps that was the Nomos of the Expat Household, exacerbated by a good amount of Airport Nomos as well. It is a thinning down of life towards an existence of escapist me-time, which is luxurious as a flow and dehumanizing as a stock. Likewise, David Goodheart's Anywhere People vs. Somewhere People are Mary's digital nomads. Her linking them to Camus' replacism is brilliant. Touche.
But did something change a century ago? Is Taylor some rough beast that slouched in to presage War? I don't think so. I agree with Mary that Ellul and Schmitt and Heidegger are right about the instrumentalism of technology, but technology in any form is a force multiplier, not a primary resource or base force. The base force, as it were, is us, with our brains and hearts that act but never change.
Re Camus part 2, I agree with it entirely. I think the reason elite types get so fussed over Camus is that he so precisely calls out the morally empty reality over which they preside. I may say his insights also accord with what I have felt, for some time, to be the core failing of modern Conservatism: that it has very largely dispensed with the cultural outlook, its historic heartland, in favour of the bluntly economic - in a Taylorist or even neo-Darwinism sense. Hence accusations of the Tories being 'the nasty party'. For far too long they have been functionally illiterate when it comes to culture, and now it is coming back to haunt them. Meanwhile, cultural conservative parties are making inroads all across Europe, prompted by the mass immigration that left and right have blithely encouraged for decades. If that doesn't speak to a lingering desire, and need, to preserve our historical cultural identities, I don't know what does.