Il Covile (which describes itself as “anti-modern Marxist’) is a tendency toward ‘traditionalism,’ though Camatte might refute this term and describe his own stance as something like ‘an opposition to artificiality.’ One of Camatte’s key texts in this regard is Amour ou combinatoire sexuelle. If one reads this, along with other instances where Camatte writes about ‘artificiality’ and the role of ‘woman’ it becomes clear that one of the reasons a far-right Catholic group would like Camatte is because he is against things like gay marriage since it leads to things like artificial insemination and surrogacy.
Both Camatte and the far-right, then, wish to slow down or reverse certain tendencies within modern society. Camatte’s insistence that we should resist all artificiality and begin to, as it were, ‘find our place in the world’ (or begin to stop “wandering”) folds in perfectly with Heidegger’s vision67 (who was disappointed that the Nazi’s didn’t go far enough) and the traditionalist yearnings of the far-right.
But it is important to remind oneself that the complaint against ‘modernity’ is made by the whole of the Frankfurt school and Michel Foucault, thus feeding into the phenomenon of Continental Philosophy as well as into the tendency of the ‘ultraleft’ that began after WWII with Socialisme ou Barbarie, going to Debord and beyond. As I indicate elsewhere, it is now apparent to me that the complaint against ‘modernity,’ from wherever it emerges, tends to become fodder for ideologues of reaction. Perhaps the contemporary case of Aleksandr Dugin, who has drawn much of his thinking from continental philosophy as well as from Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord, is a case in point. . . *
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