This text was originally delivered as a lecture at the New College of Sociology in London.

If the title of this lecture clearly echoes Georges Bataille’s essay from 1933, the reversal of object evidently advances a claim about a shift in polarity. By now, many will have encountered antifa, the crassest example of contemporary antifascism, acting-out on college campuses, policing social media, or rioting on city streets; all who have will know about the malice they promote, and the support which they enjoy from corporations, mainstream politicians, and their allies in the media.

It’s worth reiterating that the New College of Sociology exists to face, as challenges to thought, the political and social problems which present themselves to thought, on the basis of the principle that philosophy and its adherents must defend at any cost. Against demands for silence in the mask of violence and intimidation, philosophy upholds the right and duty to question and to doubt. As Kolakowski observed: “There is one man with whom all European philosophers identify themselves, even if they dismiss his ideas altogether. This is Socrates—a philosopher who is unable to identify himself with this archetypal figure does not belong to this civilization.”

Hence we are compelled to admit we aren’t certain what fascism, precisely, means today apart from escalating mediatic sophistry and propaganda, but are drawn instead to listen to the stories of the people who we know, the climate we experience, and the scenes before our eyes. Antifascism, not fascism. In short, if Adorno, Wilhelm Reich and others in the 1930s perceived in fascism an anomaly which demanded their reflective attention, and denegation, from the side of their commitments, whether on the Marxist line of political manipulation by the bourgeoisie, or the Reichian diagnosis of the sexual repression of the masses, today it is antifascism, in its connection to manipulation and repression, and the accelerating deployment of the sign, or the specter, of fascism, which incites reflection.

What explains the extension of this concept, and its contemporary ubiquity; what is its relationship to political reality, and the structure which gives rise to its elaboration, and dissemination; what is the cause of its increasingly incessant invocation, in strident, vehement, staccato mantras? First, it’s worthwhile to restate the obvious: antifa are not fascists, but communists. A reactivation of the paramilitary goons of the interwar German Communist Party, whose attacks on their competitor National Socialist Party’s meetings in the 1920s, memorably described by Wyndham Lewis, led to the formation of the Brownshirts, they participate both in the thanatropic project of Communism to, as Gustave Le Bon puts it, “utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization” and the centralizing project of the Party to “stand guard over an empire of rats” as the apparatchiks of the wasteland.

Antifascism began its political existence as a Party front, and its connection to the Party which, like the Devil, travels under many name, remains in force. This same point applies, redundantly, to every Party front (all ideologies are ultimately Party fronts) including socialism, feminism, and anti-racism, and everything which follows about antifascism also applies to them; fundamentally because they are fronts, and therefore vectors of the dissonance which forms the atom of this power.

But the proposition of this lecture is that antifascism defines the deepest layer, the germ of the contemporary state, its claim on power, and last ditch legitimation. Antifa, their apologists insist, are extremists; that is, zealots of a mode of thought that also functions in a moderate form, less spectacularly, yet more destructively. “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too,” observed Heinrich Heine. In truth, these two moments make one. Nothing separates a violent attitude towards thought from bodies, as thoughts are also bodies, as Régis Debray observes: “A process of thought possesses the objective materiality of an organizational process. The Protestant heresy did not first take place in the minds of the faithful, only subsequently in a second phase to engender pastors, temples, synods. Geneva, and burnings at the stake. It was right away besieged by and within collective practices of organization.” An ideology confers a formal structure, through which material is shaped, narratives are organized, data is interpreted, or excluded or foreclosed, a mass is regimented, and a Weltanschauung is reinforced.

Antifascist ideology constitutes, first of all, an antifascism of thought, and the problem, from our side, of what antifascism does to thought. Instead of confronting this question immediately (and risk becoming mixed-up with its object) it’s worth recalling the essay to which this lecture owes its title: Georges Bataille’s “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” published originally in Boris Souvarine’s Trotskyite journal La Critique Sociale in 1933. One can begin by connecting the repugnance which the name of Bataille elicits from some of our friends on the Right with the disgust their own dissidence provokes on the contemporary Left; just as the rumor of a swastika in a contemporary art gallery today is more outrageous to mainstream sensibility than two hundred gallons of transsexual urine. This persistence of repulsion, but at the same time, its mutation, brings us to the essence of the matter. “Everything leads us to believe,” Bataille suggests, “that early human beings were brought together by disgust and by common terror.”

Bataille’s text goes far beyond the abjection with which he is associated, as well as the political remit of its title, to draw a general schema of society split between a “homogeneous” or everyday world defined by “consciousness of the possible identity of delineable persons and situations” and a heterogeneous sphere crowded with “elements that it is impossible to assimilate” and therefore is kept separate from by the force of taboo, from the Polynesian participles “ta” and “bu” meaning “to mark” an “intensity.” This division plausibly animates every system of knowledge and myth. While the homogeneous is anchored in money as a common denominator, and medium of general equivalence, and governed by a science devoted to “establishing the homogeneity of phenomena” the essence of “heterogeneous reality is that of a force of a shock” knowledge of which “is to be found in the mystical thinking of primitives and in dreams.” Science “cannot know heterogeneous elements as such,” since they are “assumed to be charged with an unknown and dangerous force” about which nothing can be said for certain.

The general frame is captured by Giorgio Agamben: “In our culture, knowledge (according to an antinomy that Aby Warburg diagnosed as the “schizophrenia” of Western culture) is divided between inspired-ecstatic and rational-conscious poles, neither ever succeeding in wholly reducing the other.” Rationality governs instrumentality and homogeneous quantification; the heterogeneous embraces the unconscious, and the kingdom of the sacred, which Bataille designates “as a restricted form of the heterogeneous.” The qualification is cardinal. Restriction distinguishes heterogeneity which is acknowledged as sacred, and therefore controlled, from unrestricted heterogeneity equating to sinister forces unbound.

The homogeneous functions on the basis of a constitutive exclusion: the heterogeneous cannot become an object of instrumental calculation, or rational quantification, but must be attended to in sacred terms. Via an attitude of reverence, or יִרְאָה, fear/awe, a practice of silence and stillness, and determined rites, which canalize the sacred into restricted forms, the heterogeneous world, which is the world of the spirits, is kept under control, just as authority avoids the tragedy of the commons, which is better termed the tragedy of the deracinated mass.

The loss of the sacred is a loss of consciousness, enacting an effective disappearance, and not an absolute elimination. The heterogeneous is not abolished; what is abolished is connection and control. The same pattern repeats itself eternally: the destruction of the regal sacred, at the hands of insurrectionary reason, provokes a pandaemonium and general slaughter, which ceases only with the the reappearance of a remnant of the royal sacred, in Bonapartism, and again in fascism. “Heterogeneous fascist action,” Bataille writes, “belongs to the entire set of higher forms. It makes an appeal to sentiments traditionally defined as exalted and noble and tends to constitute authority as an unconditional principle, situated above any utilitarian judgement.”

In contrast to the “flattening” principle of democratic equality, which in collapsing into dissonance the distinction between the ruler and the ruled, alienates itself from any stable principle of legitimation, “the fascist leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence. Opposed to democratic politicians, who represent in different countries the platitudes inherent to homogeneous society, Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other.”

Insofar as today’s new wave of politicians, Trump, Bolsonaro and Orban among them, seem to match Bataille’s description, one is entitled to inquire: are these men therefore fascists? The question is deceptively complex. If, from a logical perspective, this conclusion seems to constitute an illicit minor fallacy (fascist leaders are heterogeneous, but the heterogeneous is not thereby fascist, just as all men are not Socrates) its superficial plausibility (Socrates is fascist!?) whispers an essential truth. Fascism, or something labelled fascism, today defines the line of demarcation of the homogeneous discursive spectrum of our time, and thereby designates an intuition of the heterogeneous regal sacred. Hence the countersign of the times: to locate someone interesting (heterogeneous), find out who’s been called as a fascist, and know a fool from their support of antifascism.

A MUTILATED SACRED

Left and Right polarities originate within a sacred context, as opposed to a political determination, which is a secondary derivation, and a profanation. Language, too, originally is sacred, but in the crab bucket of language, which constitutes its mundane form, the power of a symbol confers the limits of a world divided between wardens and those attempting to escape. For the former, nothing can be done; for the latter, few in number, the object of philosophy, and praxis, consists in the possibility of restoring a political compass which points north; what Confucius called the Rectification of Names.

Towards this end, the recent reappearance of the recognition of the leftism of fascism, provoked by antifa, though insufficient insofar as it contents itself with rebarbative stigmatization of the rival faction of the Party (the issue is not limited to assessing the evil of political mafias on the basis of their proximal “contamination” by fascism) represents a sign of mental health after eight decades of derangement. The relation between fascism and what was traditionally known as the right before the Second World War is ambivalent; this much is clear from the case of Ernst Jünger in Germany, whose adherents ultimately attempted to assassinate Hitler, as well as the activity of Julius Evola in Italy, which consistently attempted to separate the populist (leftist) aspect of fascism from the hierarchal (rightist) dimension which he sought to promote.

For these men, as well as others, in a moving situation, fascism appeared to promise possibilities of purging politics of its destructive leftist elements, in order to restore the regal sacred whose shadow it contained. If, already, by 1938, it was clear to all concerned that they had failed, in fact, disastrously failed (fascism being, as Bataille put it, “simultaneously too immediately interested and too cowardly…it is incapable of regeneration through the criminal creation of sacred forces,”) the ghost of their ambition today defines the remit of the contemporary non-fascist project: to locate from within what today is labelled fascist or far-right the possibility of the renewal of the political integrity that enabled Charles I, for example, to maintain on the scaffold that he was “the Martyr of the People” given that the liberty of the people “consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their goods may be most their own… not for having share in government.”

PULVERIZED SOVEREIGNTY

From the Left, a pulverized sovereignty, fragmented into contradictory, competing interests, ripples across the subtle body of a nation, or a psyche, from the macro to the micro, creating discord and suspicion. From the Right, within a ritual circuit polarized between impurity (a cadaver, or adept) and purity (a relic, or an initiate), a ruler is divested of his impure ‘human’ nature to become the avatar of supra-human force.

Just as a mind need to be cleared and thoughts stripped of sentimentalism to truly think, sovereignty, like trust, is absolute, or non-existent. The issue is not only political, but existential, not only social, but individual and psychological. “Why should the Emperor be a human being?” Mishima asked an interviewer in 1966. “Why mustn’t he be a God at least for us Japanese? If I explain this matter, it all boils down to a question of ‘love’ in the end… Feudalism collapses, the nation industrializes and then cannot but become a modern welfare state - the most desperate of conditions. In the meantime, the more a nation modernizes, the less meaningful, the cooler, become personal relationships. For people who live in such a modern society love is impossible. For example, if A believe that he loves B, there is no means for him to be sure of it, and vice versa. Therefore love cannot exist in a modern society - if it is merely a mutual relationship. If there is no image of a third man whom the two lovers have in common - the apex of the triangle - love ends with eternal skepticism…”

In the confusion regnant as a de facto prohibition that sees in fascism, incontestably a mutant construct, a sight of purity, sovereignty itself becomes taboo. “It is forbidden to forbid,” ran a slogan scrawled on the walls of the Latin Quarter in May 1968, as Kenneth Clarke was filming his crepuscular Civilization across the Seine. Nonetheless, although the sacred can be dissipated, it cannot be destroyed; instead, with the restriction of legitimate restriction, it degenerates, into an illegitimate self-mutilating shadow. Now foreclosed, but still energized by a double logic of attraction/repulsion, which draws certain elements towards it, while repulsing others, its shrunken head migrates into the camp of its enemies, as a limit condition and identity. Hence the rattled conviction of the sacred or “heterogeneous” aspect of fascism that goes beyond fascism, but has become embedded in it, like the שכינה fallen into the shells of the קליפות, among antifa militants, construed psychologically as a object of hatred, which simultaneously forms their being.

SUPERNATURAL TOXICITY

Antifascism is the mutilated remnant of the sacred, trapping a degenerate sovereign power which could, in principle, be magnetized another way. The unrestricted heterogeneous, everywhere visible but nowhere localizable, comes to serve both as the force which antifascism combats, and the source of their license for violence, against opponents, called fascists, who become fascists through being attacked, even if (perhaps especially if) no evidence exists which supports this designation. Due to the supernatural toxicity of fascism (“nothing is more contagious then supernatural defilement,” (Caillois)) anyone in contact with the “fascist” either by knowing them, reading them, or even being read by them, turn into fascists too, in a ritual which destricts the heterogeneous further, and feeds the cycle.

No idea, in other words, is falser than the thought that antifascism opposes fascism, as if the triumph of the former would result in the eradication of the latter; there is instead a thirst for fascism, like an vampire for blood. Hence the term is fixed to all and every heterogeneous thought and feeling or phenomenon that threatens the homogeneous consensus as an independent source of power; whether right-wing populism, or Islamic fundamentalism, healthy sexuality or physicality, or biological reality; anything and everything containing aspects of the regal sacred.

Paraphrasing Sartre, “The antifascist makes the fascist.” Operating a kind of social machinery devoted to the production of fascism, the sacred enemy, or what Genet called l’ennemi déclaré, antifascism invokes fascism theurgically to constitute an antifascist unit, its mirror image, tribally. The operation is productively repressive, just the (restricted) regal sacred is repressively productive. In the meantime, the historical imagination of the world is rendered subject to a de facto censorship precisely in order to make resolution impossible: one cannot thoughtfully engage with “fascism” in any way; one cannot understand it, one must thoughtlessly attack it. One must attack thought. Because understanding, too, demands a kind of prohibition, for example, of the validity of fantasies or the formless value of emotions, it is forbidden to understand. Thus the symptom never stops to write itself, as rituals, and dogma, films, and books, and clickbait, open letters and masked protests, but above all, as fascists, in the present day, the past, and no doubt also in the future.

Through a double-movement, the central trauma, the antifascist sacred nucleus, engorges, and an anxious dreamworld is preserved, to be attacked, despite the problems (if not because of them) now accumulating at the edges of the Empire, and in the center. Insofar as antifascism continues to be fed (appeased) by sacrifices, and devotions, ablutions and concessions, fascism augments in lockstep, at first symbolically (until the entire word is fascist) but ultimately cataclysmically, as the generation of a “real” “fascist” resistance movement mobilized against antifascist aggression, or else in collective liquidation.

HOMOGENEOUS RELIGION

It is helpful to stress the disjunction between Bataille’s vision of fascism, as it appeared to him in the ’30s, and the second-hand aura which it acquired as the heart of a “homogeneous” political religion through the Second World War, and the augmentation in the power of the global, which is a synonym for the homogeneous, which that war delivered.

In the 1930s, Bataille and his colleagues at the original College of Sociology were confronted with a popular political movement, called fascism, which mixed political Left and Right doctrine, but drew power from channeling the remnants of the regal Right sacred. “Like Bonapartism,” Bataille wrote, “fascism (which etymologically signifies uniting, concentration) is no more than an acute reactivation of the latent sovereign agency.” Today, by contrast, one confronts, not fascism, or anything which identifies itself as such, but the sign of fascism, assigned by antifascism, as a reanimated latent principle called to unite a homogeneous field, and determine its exception.

“Since all these things (fascism, the camps, the extermination) have been, and remain, historically unresolvable for us,” writes Jean Baudrillard, “we should be obliged to repeat them forever like a primal scene.” This obligation, which cannot be refused, translates into a psychological structure testifying both to the continued presence of the supernatural sacred force, and the collapse in ritual and dogmatic complexity governing our general relation to it. Reality transforms into a guilty history of fascism. Like in a dream, where manifest and latent content swap positions, this new counter-heterogeneous fascism, equivalent to a transfiguration into the decoy of a sacred force, need not obey any technical definitions, and it does not. What’s decisive is not the homogeneous argument, but the heterogeneous “force of a shock” which is also why rational arguments are not only useless, but foreclosed as obscene, if not evidence of secret fascist sympathies on the part of anybody making them.

Like a travesty of Roman Christianity, or an ironic repetition, on the back of an historical event of overwhelming sacred (sacrificial) power, an imperialist administration calcifies into a strategy of semiotic domination. Bataille describes a fundamentally sadistic structure. “For what admissible reasons would a man want to be noble,” he asks, “and absolutely not ignoble?” If initially the formulation seems to lay the groundwork for the antifascist drive to flatten all distinctions (“the use of the words higher, noble, exalted,” Bataille insists, “does not imply endorsement”) in fact the central issue is identity. “If the heterogeneous nature of the slave is akin to that of the filth in which his situation condemns him to live,” writes Bataille, “that of the master is formed by an act of excluding all filth: an act pure in direction but sadistic in form.” It is the “fascist” who, today, in all their transitivity, and intuitive resemblances, embodies the “impure” low sacred, and the antifascist who incarnates the “pure” heterogeneous; thus the “purifying” quality of antifascist violence, whereby the antifa only need attack something for it to become fascist retroactively. It suffices to point out that toxic, on the back of its incessant antifascist invocation, was the 2018 Oxford Dictionary word of the year.

ANTIFASCIST NUCLEUS

“As a rule,” Bataille writes, “homogeneous society excludes every heterogeneous element whether filthy or noble.” But it excludes them asymmetrically. Where the low sacred is explicitly excluded, killed, or silenced, the violence of the high sacred is overlooked. The question is ultimately who can be killed with impunity; but in the meantime, what faces are punchable, and what voices repressible, according to the rubric of the sacred system. Hence “fascists” are no-platformed by masked groups of Antifa, whose aggression is recoded as community self-defense, against targets with no rights to have rights, just as enemy nations marked by the Pentagon as “fascist regimes” are subjected to surgical strikes without war taking place, or a media lynch mob is organized against children for smiling. “No those aren’t humans, but cattle,” cry even the fathers of the incinerated children in Carthage,” reports Michel Serres. “No,” we say “it wasn’t on purpose, it wasn’t a sacrifice, but an accident.”

Antifascism is incapable of violence, just as the Coalition of the Willing is incapable of war crimes, as it wrecks nation after nation in the cause of human rights on the basis of an antifascist creed which enfolds all parties into a Global Church of Antifascism, vast, guilty and obscure. Organized according to a sacred structure, and everything that forms around it, as a discursive network of taboos, and priests and Bishops, grand inquisitors, and spies who work collectively to separate, across the line of the sayable and the visible the fascist heterogeneous from the propositions, gestures and identities”believed by every good-thinking (“homogeneous”) person born after 1989.”

Antifascism begins in thought, as an attack on thought, and extends outwards as a network of persuasion, directed not at individuals, but types of individual, which, in the context of an individual functions to suppress everything individual about them. In a grotesque parody of the religious suspension of the ethical; the antifa demand to punch a Nazi rehearses a more elemental reflex: the gesture of attaching the term “fascist” and equivalent social markers of toxicity (racist, sexist ad infinitum) to certain thinkers, authors, topics, words, or thoughts, designating certain bodies as (unprotected) legitimate targets. This line runs down the middle of society and the middle of every individual, and incessantly reiterates itself, in conversations, seminar rooms, statements of concern, and questionable propositions one is expected to unquestionably assent to, according to the subtle structuring of propositions channeled through the shattered mirror of the antifascist mind.

“They are pledged to the decoy of war as the others are to the decoy of power,” remarks Baudrillard. The vector of initiation is the Antifascist University. Organized around promoting antifascism as a category of thought, or anti-thought, directed towards the exploitation and manipulation of a tortured student body, the labyrinthine architecture is intricate with traps designed to ensnare weak individuals, lacking a coherent sense of self, into a semantic vortex which supplies them with a cover story in exchange for their commitment. Attended by a priesthood, granted power over minds and bodies to libidinally reorganize them in specific ways, the institution operates through a movement of delegitimization in which Horkheimer’s slogan “If you don’t want to talk about capitalism, don’t say anything about fascism,” functions in reverse, in which the desire to not think about capitalism is paradoxically installed by talking about it constantly, to not talk about the truth: that the possibility of freedom depends on more than a denial, and enslavement nothing else.

The product of the Antifascist University is the Antifascist Personality. A checklist of typical dispensations would be easy to supply. Invariably trained in the victim studies departments of gender and race studies in activist epistemologies, these fields are better seen from the perspective of their subjects than their topics. Libidinally parasitic on their objects, they constitute a form of education committed to creating victims, not merely studying them. They are studying them to become them. Through a form of a mind control which engineers specific individuals into becoming Antifascists by destroying their self-confidence, and in the end, their lives, by flooding the channel with noise, and making conversation impossible, while it sends in the clowns.

“All our struggles are about words,” wrote Wyndham Lewis, “for no-one would fight for reality, since without a name they would not be able to recognize it.” The mismatch is itself a form of power. Through the installation of a status hungry Antifascist Stockholm syndrome, channeled into acting-out, the student bodies it receives are broken by it to continue feeding the machine. Discipline is severed from authority, and coupled to a dissonant syncretic discourse designed to make reality unrecognizable. The Antifascist University not only prevents the resolution of the problem, but even its identification. By incentivizing certain symbols, specific actions and self-destructive patterns of behavior, while proscribing others, the Antifascist University systematically blocks all exits.

ANTIPOWER

The defining incapacity of the Antifascist Personality to notice through the prism of their personal weakness that Antifascism, far from representing an attack on contemporary repressive power, constitutes the purest form of it, comes down to the fact that antifascist power is, precisely, weakness. The overlap with transgenderism, a key component of the antifa, is self-evident.

For the sake of the collective, the individual must be kept dependent, anxious, insecure, confused. The stronger the collective, the weaker every individual element must be. Therefore, the encouragement in antifascist circles of drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, guilt, and self-abnegation in the service of the cause, and the stigmatization of self-improvement as, precisely, fascist. It’s no accident that the antifascist conception of contemporary fascism, in the figures of low-status autists and incels being radicalized through a kind of brainwashing, presents a mirror of their own reality.

“The monks formed,” Hegel writes, “as it were, the standing army of the pope.” Antifascism forms the militia of a decentralized antipope, diffused across a million separate bodies. Behind the mask are Silicon Valley corporations and New York media networks, State-funded fronts and profiteers, Ivy League Universities, energetic corporate propagandists, and political entrepreneurs like the SPLC. Unlike the true believer militant, the sociopathic status maximizers in the Antifascist Curia understand that one is not supposed to believe, and it makes no difference if one does. One must only recognize the power of the language, to profit from the fact that others do.

The discourse is not designed to convince, but to derange, just as contemporary antipower is designed not to organize, but to make true organization impossible. The transformation of the Black Bloc which appeared at the Seattle riots in 1999, wrecking Starbucks, and other symbols of the nascent global order, into the freelance thugs of open borders corporatism is less paradoxical then at first appears. The smoke and mirrors of Occupy Wall Street, which sealed the alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic Party and the surveillance apparatus, diagrams the formal model as a conspiracy of irresponsibility. Using the antifa as attack dogs, the Party insinuates itself as a mediator between the commanding heights of the economy, and an informal threat of violence, while at the same time weaponizing against political enemies on the other wing of the Party.

Flexibly parasitic on both labor and capital, first through the promotion of an ideology of virtue-signaling pornography to scramble intuitions, and then through third worldism to sanction open borders and augment wage suppression, micropolitically antifascism supplies a button one can push in order to increase one’s status, like a dopamine receptor in the brain, because macroeconomically it enables capital flows out of nations into transnational bodies. But the future of this system must be bleak.

Since the Second World War, a holy war and an exercise in power in Bataille’s sense as “an institutional merging of the sacred force and military strength” antifascism has constituted a simulacrum of taboo, marking an intensity dividing the sacred and the profane, and a political determination, dividing friends from enemies; in fact all that it divides is enemies from each other. Anchored in the dissonance between the empirical reality of fascist corporatism in the United States and Europe, and the mythological reality of fascism as the cornerstone of the sacred system (“There are no cannibals here, we ate the last one yesterday,”) this arrangement has a definite expiration date. “As power finds its source in bringing sacred things into play,” writes Bataille, “it is a weakened as a direct result of its tendency to empty sacred things of their criminal content.” The identification of a target, conceived as an incentive structure, like the invention of an office, simultaneously creates a tendency towards the expansion of its remit, towards a point of total purity whose sigil is anesthetized extermination. First, one designates the whole field of fascism as taboo; second, it suffices that something seems proximate to fascism, or proposes to discuss it in a neutral form, finally even discussing the discussion becomes illegal. With the entrenchment of that system, the necessity for sacrifices to maintain the closure grows: as it weakens, and “the gloves” come off, and it intensifies to conceal, and simultaneously to implement increasingly naked violence trending towards the general devastation of the revolution as an orgy of destruction.

Antifascism is the imperialism of nihilism, ultimately opposing all intentionality, and everyone compelled to its exercise. We agree with Evola, “We are not fascists or anti-fascists. Antifascism means nothing.” Our cause is older and more classical: the subordination of our impulsive, unruly reactions to the necessity for discipline, calculation, and patience, and the lucidity that distinguishes itself by an intransigence: to defend the exercise of thought, to make sacred once again certain parts of life, and to most utterly oppose a society that has profaned itself to an extreme degree.