"What does it mean, right-wing culture?", an interviewer asked Furio Jesi in 1979. It is "this culture in which the past is a sort of homogenized porridge that can be fashioned in the most convenient way, that maintains the existence of unquestionable values, marked by words in capital letters." Formerly a mythologist of Modernity, Jesi devoted the studies collected here to identify the underlying matrix, the language and the outward forms of the "ideas without words" of nineteenth- and twentieth-century right-wing culture. He sets to the task by unmasking the platitudes, formulas and slogans that point to a mythical core that is unfathomable and unknown, but that also functions as the founding and shaping element referred to by the recurring principles of Tradition, Past, Race, Origin, and the Sacred. That is, a "void" to be filled up with mythological stuff, manipulated by the right-wing political propaganda to legitimate its power and the dominant social order.
"¿Qué quiere decir cultura de derecha?" le preguntó un entrevistador a Furio Jesi en 1979. Es "la cultura dentro de la cual el pasado es una especie de papilla homogeneizada que se puede modelar del modo que sea más útil, en la que se declara que existen valores indiscutibles, escritos con mayúsculas". Originalmente un mitólogo de la modernidad, Jesi dedica los estudios aquí reunidos a individualizar las matrices subterráneas, el lenguaje y las manifestaciones de las "ideas sin palabras" de la cultura de derecha de los siglos XIX y XX; y lo hace desenmascarando los lugares comunes, las fórmulas y las consignas que aluden a un núcleo mítico profundo e inaccesible, pero también fundante y constitutivo, al que remiten los principios recurrentes de Tradición, Pasado, Raza, Origen, Sacro. Un "vacío" a ser llenado con materiales mitológicos, manipulados por la propaganda política de la derecha para legitimar su poder y el orden social dominante.
Well done! It would be compare right-wing culture with left-wing culture.
Also, do you think there is basically just one "right-wing culture" or perhaps many different "right-wing cultures?" (I am not an expert, and can imagine it both ways.)
Hi, Tim! I think left-wing culture usually is pretty much verbose. I mean they have to argue, since their position isn't backed by the silent connivance that upholds things as-they-are (I think this is the deep meaning of the superb expression of Spengler-"ideas without words"-that Jesi evokes here). This need to relying on arguments is a weakness, in a sense. As to the use of imagined history as myth (a mythical History), I think this is the norm-Jesi is analysing right-wing movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, but take Trump's MAGA, not to mention the mainly Central European immigration and the intent of suppression and/or displacement of native inhabitants in the Middle East based on Scriptures written at least two millennia ago
Well, I guess we'll all be sent back to school. Or worse.
Why?
Is there anything worse than going back to school?