Limonov's Rebel's Handbook and Europe Electing Misses by a Jury of Blind People

Limonov's Rebel's Handbook and Europe Electing Misses by a Jury of Blind People

Great Western Hospice is the Russian writer's latest book published by Bietti in Italy: a catalogue of timeless insights that invite us to break away

Source: https://www.barbadillo.it/110296-il-manuale-del-ribelle-di-limonov-e-leuropa-che-fa-eleggere-le-miss-a-una-giuria-di-ciechi/

"Shaken, not stirred".

What does Sean Connery's historic James Bond quip have to do with Eduard Limonov's 'The Great Western Hospice', published by Bietti in Italy a few weeks ago? More than it may seem, because if, on the one hand, in this unpublished Limonov as a sociologist (who considers himself more prickly even than Guy Debord) the figure of the hero tries to regain its centrality in the sluggish European mythopoiesis, on the other hand, the "Agitated" constitute one of the three classes of a tripartition reminiscent of Dumézil, but projected into postmodernity. 

In the Great Western Hospice, in fact, the division is between Administrators, Model Sicknesses and the Agitated, with a guest-star: the Victims - some of whom, we will discover in the course of the reading, are 'more victims than others', Orwellianly.

The People, or rather, 'that monster called the People', is obviously composed of 99% Model Sick, in a condition of perpetual adolescence (anaesthetised, however, by the aggressive and explosive virility of true adolescence), and therefore the object of the author's stratagems, who calls for insurrection against the dictatorship of the people, considered 'as noble an act as it was two hundred years ago to rise up against Absolutism', and judges universal suffrage 'amoral'.

Already from these first lines, one should understand what Limonov's main talent is in this forum that is unusual for him: the ability to devise immediate, disruptive, emphatic formulas that break through the reader's imagination. The talent of a storyteller, in short. Orwell is then 'a curious centaur with the legs of a policeman, the rump of an anarchist and a former Eton student's tie', Nazism is 'the legitimate child of Madam Europe and not a bastard born of Hitler's dalliances with a certain Germany', Bowie a 'nightclub bisexual' - when even Limonov's former friend Dugin, apparently much more serious, had recognised in his 'The Templars of the Proletariat' (AGA Editions, September 2021, euro 32) the strong esoteric imprints of albums such as 'Absolute Beginners' - , Hell is 'always at other people's houses' and 'Literature would gain if television would leave it alone! ".

As for the theoretical framework and literary imagery, there is a bit of the evergreen Schmittian dialectic of friend-enemy, a bit of the revival of the sacredness of borders à la Regis Débray, a bit of the anti-statistic and vitalistic Drieu of 'Mesure de la France', a bit of the macho virility of a Jack Donovan, a bit of Toynbee on the suicide of great civilisations, a bit of Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse No. 5'.

Despite some conceptual garble or misunderstandings, perhaps at least partly due to the language (first and foremost the one on the relationship between the individual and the community, where Limonov at times almost seems to argue that the problem of the West is the over-centrality of the latter that marginalises the former, while the discourse is evidently more complex and, probably, reversed), Limonov has some brilliant insights into modern Europe, which in his eyes resembles, not surprisingly, a more subtle - but no less 'violent' - sociological transposition of his novel 'The Executioner': a soft regime of "statomasochism" in which "the atrophy of free will is not provoked by abominable torture, but slowly, by devious grafts" and in which working and productive capacity, as opposed to the blissful anarchic arrogance of the lazy man of popular folklore, is the only yardstick for evaluating modern man, and the look is "the miserable revenge of contemporary man on history".

Not to mention that, despite the fact that the book was written in the early 1990s, it retains a remarkable relevance on some central issues of today's public debate: freedom of the press as an 'empty' right in the absence of minimum economic and media conditions to exercise it, the role of 'neo-language' in progressive ideology, 'tele-statism', more dangerous than any of Goebbels' employees, as well as the evolution of blind and spontaneous violence into soft violence for 'not humanitarian but pragmatic' reasons, and the 'moral' stigma in the head of the adversary, which has now replaced victories in battle on the international chessboard.

In short, averting the risk of sounding, in the last years of her life, like a housewife from Vogh... from Djerzhinsk who opposes pop, hair and football matches, Limonov plunges the knife into the beating heart of the European democratic contradiction, which consists, in nuce, in entrusting 'the election of Miss World to a jury of blind people'. And no, not in the sense of Czechoslovaks.

*Grande ospizio occidentale, edited by Andrea Lombardi, with an introduction by Alain de Benoist