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Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni), Flying over the Coliseum in a Spiral (Spiraling) (Sorvolando in spirale il Colosseo [Spiralata]), 1930
Marx, Wagner, Schreber, Weininger, Marsden and Sorel perceived the ‘Jew’ to be emblematic of all that was contra naturam, the dulling hand of the money power that induced infecundity and barrenness, metaphors in their own right for the stifling of creativity and the severing of man’s connection to the divine source of humanness.
The mood was expressed most profoundly by Ezra Pound.
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA NATURAM
The philosophical response was a separation of the subject from the constraints imposed by the object, by freeing the individual from the determinateness of science.
This was a revolt against the rule of the capitalist money power, not only characterised by Marx as Judaic, but also codified by him as a directional telos.
Immanuel Kant led the revolt, ‘discovering’ the subjectivity of knowledge and asserting the power of the human mind over the external world.
New ground rules were attempted by Friedrich Schelling who concluded that there could not be some single philosophy which might reconcile the world in consciousness and the world outside consciousness.
Hegel took up the challenge laid down by Schelling, re-engaging subject and object in a dialectical process that regarded real nature, like real man, as a predicate, a symbol of some latent supernatural reality.
Marx restored the power of the object over the subject by embracing the dialectical process and famously turning Hegel’s idealism on its head. ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence’, wrote Marx, ‘but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ The materialist directional telos was born that to this day provides the mainspring of sociological, historical, economic and political thought in the contemporary academy.
With the directional telos arose a new manifestation of an old struggle. This time the Demiurge confronting the divine mystery of creativity in man would be the determinist and materialist dialectic; the mission of mankind to make his own world and shape the cosmos versus the Weiningerian nightmare of a dehumanised, Judaised, feminised self, the passive, unproductive, unconscious, amoral and illogical product of Usura.
This was the new form of the ages old Zarathustrian struggle, which renders the old alliances strange in retrospect to 21st century eyes, so imbued are we with the false political dichotomy of left and right liberalism that serves to mask the only bifurcation that counts.
Early twentieth century Sorelian amalgams within the Futurist art of anarchists, syndicalists, nationalists, revolutionary socialists and fascists cannot be explained in terms of today’s bogusly constructed oppositional politics, yet they all celebrated the technological triumph of humanity over nature and man’s ability to shape the world. Committed to a universal dynamism, their common cause held a Weiningerian resonance: the ‘fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of materialistic, self-serving cowardice’(Futurist Manifesto).
© John Dunn.
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