/lit/ - Literature

Imagine thinking right-wing = capitalism/conservatism/reaction.


Since time is in fact circular, it is not in the past that the present ought to be measured in order to prepare for the future, it is by the extreme future (the concept of what is ideally to be realized) which is also the origin of the past, which thereby assumes the past only by revising it.
When the present is decaying (and such is the sad condition of our times), it is natural that we tend, in a reactionary fashion, to return to the past, because illness is a corruption of the health it presupposes ; reaction is opposed to progressivism, which dreams of an infinite, linear movement towards a necessary progress (as opposed to the past situation). But the reactionary spirit opposes progressivism only by adopting the same postulate, namely the linear conception of time ("things were better before"), and as such, is the partner-in-crime of progressivism. To return to the past to ward off the catastrophe of a future, potentially contained in a decaying present would re-engage the process of giving birth to this present decadency. The proper method of promoting real progress, then, is not to return to the past as a paradigm - thus to a past that needs to be made present again - but to return to the past in a critical perspective, namely to make present only what was timeless within the past, and to what the past itself was inadequate (if it had been adequate with it, it would never have given birth to a decaying present), in order to promote a future which, far from progressivism, is inscribed in the "telos" of a return to the Origin (the concept of what has to be, first in intention and ultimate in execution), which, far from the reactionary spirit (sacralization of the past as past), is ablative of temporality itself and of the past. It is not because this shifting, collective, historical reality, which is France, has become aware of its vocation only within and through its history, that its past history should be taken as the proper expression of its concept.