Fascist Genealogies and the "Beyond" of Reason

This paper analyzes two of Mircea Eliade's interwar Romanian political writings in light of Eliade's later theories of religion as put forward in Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958) and Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God (1972). In question are two articles that Eliade wrote in early 1937 for the Bucharest newspaper Vremea about the deaths of Legionary volunteers Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin in the Spanish Civil War and the Moţa-Marin oath that resulted from their deaths. These articles see Eliade praising Moţa and Marin's sacrifices as exemplary instances of "Christian heroism" while valorizing the role of death and sacrifice in the Legionary mystico-fascist framework through this new "Moţa-Marin" oath. By looking at these articles through the lens of Eliade's Patterns and Zalmoxis, particularly his theories of myth, ritual, the sacred, and sacrifice, this paper looks to contribute to the conversation around the relationship between Eliade's Romanian past and his mature scholarship. 

The phrase "the dark enlightenment" occupies a highly contested and volatile space in our contemporary political moment. On the one hand, it is linked to the writing of neoreactionary thinkers Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land who use it to signal their rejection of democracy and racial equality as a viable path toward freedom. On the very opposite end of the political spectrum, feminist, queer, and decolonial scholars have turned towards a different version of the dark enlightenment or endarkenment as a liberatory framework with the unique capacity facilitate communitarian ethics, care, and resistance. Because esotericism acts as a ballast between these vastly different political positions, this paper examines the writings of medieval theosophist and mystic Jacob Böhme to understand how his cosmology and apocalypticism shaped contemporary debates about race, technology, and the end of time.

Conservative claims to sacrality ground a social/political order by appealing to external sources (e.g., Carl Schmitt’s exceptional sovereign and Mircea Eliade’s axis mundi). Progressive claims to sacrality, meanwhile, often treat the sacred as an externality that cannot be subsumed within the existing order and thus offer a resource by which to challenge it (e.g., more recent work by Barbara Sostaita and An Yountae). Despite their differences, both of these discourses suppress the Christian genealogy of the sacred that shapes its use in the academy. The result of this obfuscation is to reinstate the sacred/profane binary rather than challenge it, thus also rescripting its binaries and the modes of domination they secure. This presentation returns to the sacred/profane binary as constructed by Rudolf Otto to address the limits of the turn to the sacred and to suggest that new vocabularies are needed in the postsecular turn.

Walter Benjamin once wrote that the best tool in the struggle against fascism would be a concept of history that is not surprised by fascism. In this paper I argue that such a conception must attend to the repressed forces that continue to shape history in politically ambiguous ways. I first revisit the appeals to religious and mythical authority by fascist intellectuals in Germany and Italy, before considering the irony that recent leftist critical theories appeal to the non-rational in ways similar to the fascistic work it contests. I conclude by returning to the interwar period to consider three efforts—by Freud, Rosenzweig, and Heidegger—that articulate an “unconscious of history” in response to totalizing violence. This genealogy asks whether contemporary critique unwittingly repurposes fascist hermeneutics or whether mobilizing the “beyond” of reason by both the right and the left demands more careful consideration.