Strategies of Reactionary Inauthenticity

The main aim of reactionary literature, it is argued, is the reappropriation of reality, thought to be lost due to modern disregard for "greatness," by means of the stimulation of certain emotions. The reactionary thought is therefore, in its essence, turned away from reality and its actual problems and turned to a fictitious staging of its ersatz. However, this refusal of reality can be analyzed more in detail. I propose four strategies of inauthenticity: 1) The "Shaggy": the simultaneous claims "It wasn't me" and "It never happened like that anyway," destined to muddy the waters of the whole question. 2) The "mash-up": the mixing of different and incongruous genres of literature with the aim of disguising the own agenda: The writers make an effort not to say everything they aim at (for various reasons, not the least of which is a justified fear of revealing their own vacuity). 3) The "mini-me": thanks to the "mash-up", the reactionary writers can, once cornered by the consequences of their actions, retreat by breaking up this mixture and claiming an apolitical position (of being "only" a philosopher, artist, writer, jurisprudent). 4) The "blue pill": the text's effort to prove its own truth by its power to elicit certain emotions, namely the feeling of the sublime. In piling up hyperboles and climaxes, the reactionary text tries to force its way from the fiction that it is to the reality that it claims to evoke, effectively blending fiction and reality until the latter has become unrecognizable.