The following is a critique of NIMH’s book, Traité Néo-Réactionnaire, by a reader who understood its argument and took it seriously. Though critical, the piece is thoughtful, respectful, and brilliantly argued. It is a long and demanding article that deserves to be read and should prompt a discussion between the authors.
After our many exchanges, always too brief, sometimes heated but mostly cordial, NIMH offered me his book, Traité Néo-Réactionnaire. So that I could sharpen my critique and we could bring our controversy to a more mature level than exchanges of comments on X, he also offered me a platform to lay out, publicly and in one piece, all the objections I have to his doctrine. I thank him, and will try not to disappoint him with this post. He is entitled to expect a corrosive response from me, but above all, I wanted to express myself in a vocabulary and tone that, I hope, convey the friendship I feel for him.
While I have no doubt that NIMH knows his own thought well, readers of this piece are quite likely to know nothing about my opinions or intellectual background. Yet in a debate of ideas, it is necessary to identify the camp to which each opponent belongs. Understanding the person defending a point of view is always necessary if we are to understand the view itself. Indeed, no idea can make sense apart from the subject who holds it.
So, by way of preamble to this response, and before openly beginning hostilities, I will take the time to introduce myself. I am a young Western European man. This detail is neither innocent nor irrelevant. Nor is it incidental: most of the questions raised for me by reading NIMH’s book are directly related to this identity of mine. If I am so keen to specify who I am, it is because I firmly subscribe to what might be called identitarianism.
I am a young Western European man and an identitarian. My critique will therefore not start from axiomatic neutrality, but from the particularities that determine me as a subject. I do not believe that such neutrality can make sense in any way. Every subject is an identized subject¹: that is, a subject whose own categories determine a particular kind of relationship to the world. The subject’s identity is the sum of the determinants² that distinguish them and therefore define them as a subject in their relationship to the world.
It is necessary to establish these few points here, since they will form the basis for all the views that follow. In identitarian doctrine, a subject is a mode of representation. It is a consciousness whose categorical structures shape and define the way it produces a world of its own. Every element of its representation of the world, every signifier it uses, every item it interprets as constitutive of the world depends on its identity. Identity produces them; they derive from it. The first notion that identitarians therefore reject is that of “objective reality”: reality must always be understood as a lived reality, lived by an identized subject. There is no objective reality in itself. All reality is produced by the identized subject, and at its foundation are the categories of identity that allow it to be sketched out and given shape. Thus, the reality of a young Western European man is not the same as the reality of a European boomer, or of an Afghan Muslim woman, and so on.
The very fact that I am now undertaking this exercise in book criticism, agreeing to take part in this kind of intellectual game, and continuing these kinds of exchanges and social interactions obviously depends on my identity as a young Western European man. Had I belonged to another culture, another ethnicity, another continent, or another anthropological and social milieu, I certainly would never have found NIMH’s book in my hands, and so would never have written a critique of it. My interest in political questions and current events, the way I express myself, and the way I use the signifiers with which I construct my forms of communication are all bound up with this identity of mine. What constitutes my present reality is therefore not universal. The social activities I undertake, the interactions I take part in, and the way I produce a specific social product are all consequences of my identity—that is, of the determinants that define me as a political subject.
Identitarianism thus proposes that we conceive of and interpret social phenomena through the play of identities that characterizes the actors involved. For an identitarian, universalism—the revealed universal Truth, valid for every subject at all times and in all places—does not exist. According to the identitarian, every “truth” depends on the subject who represents it. Each subject has a different point of view on the world, or, to be more precise, each subject is a specific point of view. What is true for a subject with one identity will not be true for another subject with a different identity.
This is especially clear in the study of social phenomena. Take, for example, the declining birth rate: a supposedly neutral observer might say that the birth rate appears to be falling in France in the twenty-first century. But that observation makes no sense apart from the subject who produces it. In France, the birth rate among women with immigrant backgrounds is rising. Among native-born women, it is falling. When the supposedly neutral observer presents their “truth” as universal, they assert something that is false in the reality of certain kinds of subjects. If the observer reveals their identity—if they reveal that they are Western European, that they have in this sense internalized particular ways of representing the world, and that they treat as universal categories that are in fact their own and limited—then we can see that their observation was mistaken: it is not the birth rate that is falling, but their birth rate, the one that reflects their categories. Another kind of observer, for example someone who identifies as Muslim in France in 2025, could just as well say: our birth rate is rising. Both would be right at the same time, because they would be talking about two different realities.
When describing social phenomena, taking identity into account is absolutely necessary. Its importance, however, diminishes when describing other kinds of phenomena, such as physical phenomena. The scientific study of nature can produce propositions that appear³ more universal. Physical phenomena apply equally to any subject: the force of gravity on Earth is the same for every subject, whatever their identity. In physics, we can readily set aside identity. We do not need to know someone’s ethnic or religious identity, for example, to know that they are subject to the law of gravity.
Chemistry and biology, by contrast, may require information about the subject: the dosage of a medicine will vary according to a person’s sex, age, and size. But even here, the nature of biological and chemical phenomena, like that of physical phenomena, means that the same laws and principles apply universally. We may need information about the subject in order to prescribe the right dosage, but the chemical principles behind the drug’s development are universal.
In the realm of social phenomena, however, this universality disappears entirely. The reason is simple: society is where individuals express the categorical particularities that separate them from nature’s undifferentiated universal. It is therefore within social relations, not within physics or thermodynamics, that an individual can experience their particularities as a way of life.
When we speak of identity, then, we necessarily speak of an individual situated within social relations. When we say that a subject represents a particular world according to their identity, we are speaking of a subject embedded in the networks of exchange and interaction that human society makes possible. Society is the framework within which the subject lives as an identized subject. What necessarily concerns the identitarian, then, is the understanding of social, cultural, anthropological, and historical phenomena—in short, politics.
Politics is where human beings realize themselves. For an identitarian, “realizing oneself” means bringing about a reality implied by one’s activity as an identized subject. Politics is the space in which human beings bring a world into being. They always bring that world into being from their own categories, the categories of their identity, so that it is always their world, not a universal one. Consequently, when a society changes its identity because its members change, the society changes along with them: its behavioral and moral norms, its laws, and its institutions change as well.
Because identitarianism sees social reality as always produced by an identized subject, it opposes every form of universalism. But its philosophical implications go further. It opposes the universalist approach at the level of how it describes the relationship between subject and world. Identitarianism offers a new account of that relationship: the world is no longer an external, independent object given to the subject, but is instead produced by the subject, who brings it into being through the categories of their subjectivation—in other words, their identity. For this doctrine to be theoretically and practically valid, it therefore requires a particular conceptual framework. It denies that the world is universal and objective, and instead asks how each subject brings forth a world of their own, both materially and mentally, through the categories that structure them as an identized subject.
Metaphysics Against Identity
The theoretical foundation of identitarian doctrine is therefore the rejection of the world as an objective world. Yet the world’s objectivity may seem natural, self-evident. It may even seem the most demonstrable and rational way of conceiving reality: the world is laid out before us, and human beings explore it and experience it. Nevertheless, this approach is not self-evident. It had to establish itself over time through a long campaign of intellectual and moral proselytizing. It is itself a product of history, the outcome of a process that, since Heidegger, has been called Western metaphysics.
Anyone familiar with the history of European philosophy will recognize that the conception of the subject as an identized subject—that is, as a subject whose relevant categories are never universal categories—is a recent one. For most of Western history, philosophy sought to describe the abstract universal rather than the concrete particular. This failure to understand the subject as one whose relation to the world opens onto a specific, singular world stems precisely from the way Western metaphysics constructed the world as an objective world.
Since Plato, and with a trend that accelerated sharply with the Christian metaphysics that followed in his footsteps, Western philosophy has developed a Gestell: a particular framework of conceptual categories and notions through which to think about human beings and their relationship to the world. This framework is metaphysics. By positing the world as an objective reality independent of the subject, metaphysics defines the subject, separated from the world, as a contemplative being who seeks to know and interpret the external objective reality by observing, studying, and contemplating it in order to understand its essence.
“Indeed, that which is capable of receiving the intelligible—that is, substance—is the intellect; and it is in act when it possesses it. Thus the intelligible, rather than the intellect, seems to be what is divine in the intellect, and study is the greatest pleasure and the greatest good.”
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Lambda (1072b), Flammarion, Paris, 2008.
The world described by metaphysics is one in which the subject encounters objects. An object is something “set there”: the Latin prefix ob- means “in front of.” The term ob-ject refers to something thrown or placed in front of the subject. Metaphysics objectifies the world by reducing worldly phenomena to a collection of things placed there, in front of us, which it is our task to interpret and understand through study and contemplation.
The question remains: how can the metaphysical subject, a passive subject contemplating and interpreting the objectified world, attain knowledge—that is, achieve agreement between the subjective world it represents and the objective world? This is the purpose of metaphysics: to think through the conditions that make knowledge of the objective world possible. Its proposed method might be understood as a method of definition: to produce a definition of what is set before us is to grasp it in a way that corresponds to its reality. The subject must therefore make a sustained effort to define the object in a way that corresponds to its objective “being.”⁴
Within the epistemological framework defined by metaphysics, the subject first encounters a problem in its attempt to define the world objectively. When perceived by our senses, the objective world seems subject to tendencies that produce countless variations within it, so that an objective definition of the ob-ject always seems to recede as we pursue it. How can we objectively define the concept of a tree if each tree the subject observes is unique and different from all the others? We cannot say, for example, that trees in general have a certain height, a certain mass, or a certain number of branches, so that these values are identical for all trees and allow us to define them. Every tree that makes up the objective world posited by metaphysics has its own values in each of these respects, distinguishing it from all other trees. No two trees in nature are identical. The identity that would make an objective definition possible, then, never exists in the reality metaphysics proposes.
Placed within metaphysics’ Gestell, the subject experiences a sensible world independent of itself. The things it encounters in this sensible world, the objects set before it, are all different. It is supposed to produce an objective definition of them, since knowledge has been reduced to intellectually grasping objects as they are objectively; yet it cannot identify the criteria that would make such a definition possible. Because identity is always missing, the subject never reaches an objective definition of the ob-ject. Metaphysics seems caught off guard: it has locked itself into a questionable epistemological framework, and cannot diagnose what, in its own axioms, sets the subject on this spiral of forgetting “being,” in which the thing always eludes it when it tries to approach. “I define a tree as a plant with leaves at the ends of its branches”—but have we never seen a leafless tree in winter? “I define a tree as a plant with leaves at the ends of its branches that it loses in winter”—but have we never seen a tree that keeps its leaves all year? We could keep playing this game for a long time and show that, on the basis of the subject’s sensory experience alone, a tree can never have a “definition” in the metaphysical sense. The definition always recedes, until the metaphysician is almost at an impasse: the tree does not exist; the world does not exist, because I cannot define them.
We say “almost” at an impasse because the metaphysician still has one last card to play. Unaware that perseverare diabolicum, they will follow their premises through to the end and accept the most violent consequence of their system: the being of a thing is not to be sought in the sensible world. The Tree does exist, but it is none of the particular trees the subject observes. It is an eidos, a pure abstract idea, which the particular trees we observe merely bring into appearance. The metaphysical world undergoes a radical reversal: Being, and what is true, belong to the pure idea, while particular things are only impoverished reflections of it, which is why they display some variation. Only then does metaphysics’ Gestell become complete: once the world has been affirmed as an objective world, one must distinguish between the world of Ideas and the sensible world. The objective world—and this is the most important point to remember for what follows—is never the sensible world. It is the world of Ideas, since objective definitions of objects can be produced only at the level of pure, ideal abstraction. Each thing therefore has a “being,” but this being escapes the subject’s sensory relation to the world, because the subject lacks the faculties needed to know it through the senses. If the subject wishes to attain knowledge of “being” as metaphysics understands it, it must abandon its sensory faculties and focus instead on faculties with a greater capacity for abstraction: the intellect, Reason.⁵
“So the things that are always the same as themselves and like themselves are more likely to be the uncompounded things? While those that are sometimes one way and sometimes another, and are never the same as themselves, are compounded? […] Now, you can perceive the first kind at once through touch, sight, and all the other senses; but the others, those that remain the same as themselves, can be apprehended in no way other than by the act of reasoning proper to reflection. For realities of this kind are invisible; they do not present themselves to sight.”
Plato, Phaedo, 78c–79a, Flammarion, Paris, 1991.
The metaphysical subject is therefore defined by universal categories: it is a subject of intellection that seeks to abolish its contingent particularities—its identity, its time and place, and all the elements that make it singular—in order to attain the universal eidos. To escape the subjectivity of the sensible world, which does not know metaphysical Being, the subject must leave behind the categories that make its point of view on the world non-universal. The categories that would make its study of the world subjective and non-universal become categories to be fought against. The pursuit of knowledge thus begins with a rejection of one’s personal singularities—and identity is certainly one of them.
The subject produced by metaphysics must therefore work to deny its own singularities. The ideal metaphysician would be a man without a body, without a history, without determination: just a soul contemplating pure ideas. Historically, this metaphysical subject takes the form of the monk-scribe, a being without identity or impulse, who has repressed every determinant that makes him singular, even regulating the length of every strand of hair so that his particular, specified body disappears and allows his soul to express itself in purity. He will spend his life in the world of ideas, reading and copying, studying, abolishing every pleasure and desire, never so much as indulging in an innocent wank. His gaze upon the world would be subject to none of the variations his subjectivity might produce. He would attain objective truth, real truth, by transforming himself into an abstract universal being. For if the world is objective and universal, then the subject must also think of itself and realize itself in its universality: destroying the subjectivity that makes it singular becomes humanity’s task. This understanding of what it means to be human—as the realization of universality through the abolition of subjectivity—is, of course, characteristic of metaphysics, but also the antithesis of identitarianism.
The abstract universal subject produced by metaphysics, and indeed materially produced throughout history, is what identitarianism rebels against. Our doctrine emphasizes the particularities that lead each subject to experience a different world, and insists that the subject be understood through its body, its various determinants, and the realities that shape its subjectivity. The abstract universal subject of metaphysics, Christianity, and Western post-Christianity is the leftist subject: the subject who refuses to acknowledge that its world is not a universal world, but its own—a world that cannot be lived and shared universally because it is produced by a singular identity.
Modernity Against Metaphysics
Philosophically, the identitarian struggle is a struggle against metaphysics. It belongs to the process of breaking with metaphysics that began at least with William of Ockham and has continued to this day. History has given this process a name: Modernity.
From a seismic point of view, Modernity is the greatest upheaval the Western world has experienced since the rupture of Christianity. In that sense, it claims to rival the very thing it seeks to fight—not Christianity itself, which it opposes only indirectly, but metaphysics, which used Christianity as a sounding board to bring Europe under its sway.
Modernity has many meanings. In history, philosophy, art, and architecture, it does not refer to exactly the same period or movement. Historically, Modernity is generally said to end with the French Revolution, which gives way to the contemporary period. The Modern Period, or “Early Modern Times,” would thus run from 1492—the discovery of the Americas, which brings the Middle Ages to a close—to 1792, the proclamation of the First Republic. It would have lasted exactly three centuries, and we would have left it behind long ago.
In philosophy, of course, the term refers to a different system of periodization. Its landmarks are conceptual rather than chronological. Philosophical Modernity was heralded by a series of fractures within the scholastic structure, which eventually collapsed under the weight of contradictions in its metaphysics. Given the limits of this format, we do not have the space we would like to present the reader with the battle between the Ancients and the Moderns that took place within late medieval scholasticism.
It is worth remembering, however, that in the Middle Ages the Schools—that is, the official, religious, dominant university philosophy throughout Western Europe—were divided into two currents. The first, the older current, embraced all the blunders of Platonic-Aristotelian metaphysics and stretched them across almost a thousand years of inflation and absurd conceptual tinkering in an effort to keep this fundamentally flawed edifice standing. It was called the realist current. It is the purest form of Western metaphysics. It was officially supported by the medieval Church, and its representatives were even canonized: Thomas Aquinas, known as Saint Thomas, the founder of “Thomism,” which is in fact a form of scholastic realism. This current put forward the following thesis: the pure Ideas invented by the ancient metaphysical thinkers are real things; they truly exist, and it is they, rather than the particular things that make up the sensible world, that are “beings.” Knowledge must therefore be understood as knowledge of the abstract, general universal, which is said to be reality.
“What all consistent realists must avow and profess is that their primary being is in reality, substantially, the only being, and that the most general categories, genera, species, and individuals are parts of this being—or perhaps even less than that: appearances behind which the truth conceals itself from our imperfect understanding, which posits the One but does not know it.”
Barthélemy Hauréau, De la Philosophie Scolastique, vol. I, Éditions Classics, 2005.
The realist thesis is therefore the purest form of Western metaphysics: only the eide are truly real. This doctrine reigned unchallenged throughout the whole of the wretched Middle Ages. Obsessed with the pursuit of pure knowledge of the “objective world,” of real truth, Western thought had shut itself inside a truly labyrinthine and gloomy system, where every line of thought lost its way, drowning in the first cause, the One, the generated and the ungenerated, being, and all the other abstract concepts inherited from antiquity that compartmentalized and constrained the exercise of human intelligence. Scholasticism was an incredibly cumbersome edifice, and truly deadly in its conservatism. The realist sect, in particular, had strayed so far from any possibility of producing a discourse even remotely useful to human beings that its excessive linguistic technicality served only to conceal the emptiness of its formulas and its approach.
Wouldn’t one think, though, that the leftist—the “postmodernist,” the Foucauldian—uses the same concepts as the identitarian? They do, certainly, but in a critical sense. When the leftist talks about identity, whiteness, gender roles, and so on, it is in order to abolish them. Contemporary leftism absorbs Nietzschean-Heideggerian perspectivism in a purely critical mode, aiming to move beyond perspectives and thus negate identities. It asks the paternalistic structure of the State to recognize that people have different lived experiences and inhabit differently signified worlds—not so that these differences can be affirmed in their irreducibility and protected, but so that this overarching structure can acquire the tools it needs to abolish them within social relations. Leftism does indeed aim to erase identity, but it does so by affirming identity critically. It simply says that identity exists as a phenomenon that produces non-universality, and then seeks to resolve that non-universality by universalistically moving beyond identities.
Leftism does not, for example, say that men and women are different because they have different identities. It says that they are alike, but that identization makes them different and must therefore be abolished. What leftism continues to pursue is the abstract, undifferentiated universal: objectivity. The mistake made by a certain kind of right was to think that perspectivism lay at the heart of this critical framework, when it was only at its periphery and its heart remained, obviously, a metaphysical concern with the universal. This right thought it would be useful to confront the left by disabling its critical modernism through a metaphysical critique of its concepts, rather than disabling its critique of modernity through a critique of its metaphysics.
NIMH to the Metaphysics’ Rescue?
After this long journey through the history of Western philosophy, we hope we have not led our reader too far astray. “But what does this have to do with NIMH?” That question has been nagging at them for several pages now. This detour was necessary. In fact, it was no detour at all: so far, we have simply been explaining why we reject metaphysics. We reject it because this gloomy theoretical construction is what makes it difficult for the Western subject to think of itself through the political singularity of its Western identity. Metaphysics is the moral and mental structure historically responsible for universalism and egalitarianism, which in turn take political form as causes of various phenomena that we, as Western Europeans, experience as violence, impoverishment, brutalization, subjection, and alienation—in short, phenomena that run counter to our most basic political interests.
It also seems that, like us, NIMH is politically opposed to the structures that produce these phenomena, which may harm the Western subject. We are allies, at least in broad terms, and our respective political projects differ relatively little. Yet even if those projects may overlap, our theoretical foundations seem very different and, at the very least, opposed. Traité Néo-Réactionnaire is conceptually rich. It is also more philosophical than political: a book I can recognize as well constructed, in both form and substance. I readily congratulate NIMH for the impressive work he has presented to his readers. The author offers a synthesis of the conceptual framework of the “NRx” movement, with which I was not very familiar.
My intellectual training has always led me to prefer so-called “Continental” philosophy, while Anglo-American approaches remained unfamiliar to me for a long time. I have little interest in libertarianism, and even less in “neo-reaction.” My intellectual path has led me to find theoretical tools in Continental thinkers, in Heidegger, and in the postmodernists that I find, on the whole, more satisfying than the analytical methods that often characterize American or British doctrines. In a sense, my opposition to the book’s arguments could be reduced to that old quarrel between Continental and analytic philosophy. I therefore read it with a kind of exotic curiosity. I found a new theoretical continent, unknown and wild to me, and enjoyed exploring and discovering it. I encountered a strange topography, a geology, a climate, and a conceptual fauna that took me far from home. At first, I was excited by this encounter; soon, though, I began to feel homesick. These startling configurations disoriented me, seeming to violate the conceptual foundations that are my own. I needed to return home quickly. I could not bear another moment of this liquidation of the theoretical foundations that seem to me the strongest pillars on which identitarianism can lean. It is time, then, to begin our journey back and to bring NIMH home with us.
Entropy as a “Grand Narrative”
The NRx system as NIMH presents it is, first and foremost, a narrative system. It is a set of propositions arranged into a discourse whose purpose is to provide a political doctrine with a narrative foundation. Before examining the philosophical categories NIMH deploys in his narrative, we need to question the metanarrative framework on which it rests. A discourse must be studied from at least two angles: first, its performative function, meaning how it acts on its audience to shape a worldview or mobilize action; second, its internal structure, the logical and symbolic organization that gives it coherence. Before questioning the validity of the philosophical propositions in neo-reactionary discourse, then, we must ask how that discourse operates as a discourse.
The author sets out to describe what, since Lyotard, has been called a grand narrative. Grand narratives are ways of narrating the “real”: discourses that, since the de-Christianization of the West, have sought to satisfy the modern Western subject’s need for hope, spirituality, and belief. Examples include the nineteenth-century narrative of Technical Progress, which urgently foretold a wondrous world in which machines would replace humans in every miserable task of life—work, travel, domestic labor, childbirth—and Marxism, which in the twentieth century announced the imminent arrival of an earthly paradise through proletarian revolution and material equality. Grand narratives always rely on a form of historicism: they claim to discern the course of History and announce its imminent conclusion through the magical resolution of all humanity’s ills.
A grand narrative is first of all a tale, a historical—or rather, historicist—fable. It says that History follows a plan, a precise and defined movement that must lead to an end, usually a happy one, though sometimes an unhappy one. It therefore takes the form of a teleology: the movement of history has an ultimate end, and that end is the result of an intentional or intention-laden purpose. History becomes the arena in which forces of a mechanical nature are resolved; these may or may not embody the will of a consciousness that is then divine or something like it. A grand narrative can therefore be defined by several criteria:
- A mechanical law is said to encompass and resolve all worldly phenomena.
- The law is also said to govern social phenomena, so that the development of societies follows and submits to it.
- The law is said to carry moral meaning, allowing those who believe in it to trust that, at the end of society’s evolutionary process, societies will reach some kind of beatific state: equality, material happiness, abundance, order, and so on.
NIMH accepts that physical laws exist—the laws of entropy—and that they appear to apply to all phenomena in the universe. Entropy is described as a measure of disorder in a system. In physics, and more specifically in thermodynamics, it refers to a system’s tendency toward disorder: every thermodynamic system naturally increases its entropy, as concentrated energy dissipates from an ordered state into a disordered one. For a system to maintain a satisfactory degree of order, it must dissipate energy and use it to maintain its extropy, thereby creating entropy around itself.
In the NRx approach, the law of entropy is not confined to its strictly thermodynamic domain. History, too, would be entirely governed by a selection process that reproduces the logic of entropy: the more capable a system is of dissipating energy to maintain its extropy, the more likely it is to dominate other, less capable systems. This applies, for example, to a living biological body: a lioness, dissipating more energy than a gazelle, will manage to catch it and eat it alive. Or, as NIMH puts it:
“If the goal of life is linked to the production of entropy through the dissipation of energy, then evolution will necessarily favor organisms that dissipate energy most efficiently. Genes coding for phenotypic traits that allow energy to be dissipated more effectively will be selected. Genes then serve as a way of storing information about the environment through a trial-and-error process that maximizes energy dissipation. Organisms with the best genes are those with the most accurate information about the environment in which they must dissipate energy. Evolution will select increasingly complex organisms in order to maximize their capacity to store and process information, following principles specific to a cybernetic system.”
Human knowledge, and ultimately the evolution of societies, would follow more or less the same process:
“It is therefore clear that, from a thermodynamic point of view, the process of natural selection, if applied to structures, can ultimately be reduced to the selection of the information they store. In plants and animals, this applies to genes; in human societies, it would also apply to the capacity to store and use information in order to produce free energy that can be converted into mechanical work. The gene is not the most efficient means of storing information. Since the cognitive revolution around 70,000 BCE, the human brain has grown disproportionately large, giving humans superior capacities in this domain. Their cognitive functions have greatly improved, and with them language and communication more broadly. We have moved from the gene to what Dawkins calls the meme. The more information an organism, a species, or a civilization stores, the more energy it dissipates.”
Natural selection, grounded in entropy and the laws of thermodynamics, is thus transferred into the domain of knowledge: relevant knowledge would be knowledge capable of producing a “memetic” structure that brings the group sharing it into closer alignment with the laws of the universe, allowing it to dissipate more energy. The argument thus moves from thermodynamics to biology, then to interactions among living beings, and finally to human social structures and the history of societies. We are faced with a new historicism that seeks to reduce history to a process in which groups are selected according to how closely they conform to the laws of entropy.
To be precise, for NIMH this selection process is not intentional from the human point of view. Humans cannot know in advance which models best conform to the law of entropy, so history proceeds by trial and error: humans try out models, fail, and learn step by step through a selection process analogous to Darwinian selection.
Entropy is said to lie at the foundation of every physical phenomenon and, through a chain of causation or transfer, to carry over into biology, then into the organization of living beings among themselves, and finally into human social organization. Neo-reactionaries thus hold that entropy is a law determining the movement of History: the interplay of order and disorder, and a society’s capacity to dissipate energy, would establish material power relations and even selection mechanisms. The more energy a human system dissipates, the more complexly it can organize itself, and the more capable it becomes of dominating others. History would therefore have a meaning, a direction pointing toward a state of extraordinary complexity in which society becomes a perfectly ordered structure. This terminal state of complexity, this horizon of History, is the “Singularity”: the moment when technology finally overcomes humanity and our structures enter a “posthuman” stage governed by machines or AI, since they are better able than we are to dissipate energy efficiently.
NIMH’s description of the historical process clearly matches the points we outlined: (1) entropy is a law that encompasses and resolves all worldly phenomena; (2) society is subject to this law, and its historical movement is conditioned by it; and (3) the law gives History a direction and allows for a final state of resolution, which neo-reaction presents as the posthuman state. In this sense, entropy can plainly be described as a grand narrative. Its primary function as a discourse is to structure a belief, rather than to describe “reality.” NRx discourse on entropy, as the author presents it, stands out first for its performative dimension, not its descriptive one. It is a network of propositions that should not be taken as an objectively true description of Truth, but as a narrative about History, meaning, and the role of humanity and its societies.
As such, neo-reactionary discourse cannot escape Lyotard’s critique of grand narratives. The removal of metaphysics from contemporary societies has led to a state or attitude Lyotard calls the “postmodern condition”—though we might consider it, in fact, a thoroughly modern condition. This condition of Western humanity is characterized by a renunciation of grand narratives. That renunciation is not up for debate. It is a fact that must be accepted without reservation, or else we risk speaking into the void, never reaching or making ourselves heard by the contemporary subject.
Some people at the margins may want to believe in such a fable, but we must acknowledge that most of our contemporaries will never be receptive to it. This is due to the moral condition into which modern society plunges human beings: it makes them responsible for their own becoming. Modernity has abolished states of tutelage and long ago brought forth a mature type of human being who will not accept that their being is resolved on a more fundamental plane than that of their existence. The modern subject does not deny that their life may be shaped by local determining forces, but rejects the idea that History follows a metanarrative course, a plot or plan of which they are merely a cog. They do not reject it out of sheer pride, or because of the caricature of modernity as self-centered, lost in the hubris and vertigo of the ego. They reject it simply because they know that the “world” is always the horizon of an existing self. The modern subject can always take the critical step back that places the grand narrative where it belongs: in the realm of storytelling, not in the realm of objective, real truth. They can always listen beyond the narrative and perceive the subject who carries it. Unlike the premodern, the modern subject is no longer fooled. They are ontologically incredulous.
This incredulity that defines modern humanity is undoubtedly an obstacle to neo-reactionary discourse becoming a mass political movement. At best, the modern subject will remain skeptical or indifferent toward a discourse that revives speculative belief. More often, they will adopt a critical materialist stance: they will seek to identify, within the material forces that structure the “real,” what leads neo-reactionaries to formulate their discourse, or what leads people to believe it is “true.” This approach is less concerned with refuting the content of the NRx narrative than with “deconstructing” it as a product of the determinants of an existing self. Behind entropy as a universal law or the Singularity as a horizon, it detects the interests, anxieties, and fantasies of actual individuals: subjects seeking a discourse to legitimize their political desires. We accept those desires as eminently legitimate in themselves, whatever discourse is used to narrate them. Rather than submit to the discourse’s proclaimed truth, the modern subject will return it to its condition as a narrative and dissolve it into the flow of interests and local determinants that structure the political reality of the subject who carries it.
As identitarians and moderns, then, we locate the “truth” of neo-reactionary discourse in the political and social forces carried by our identity. It is because the Western European subject is caught up in particular political conflicts—economic decline, international instability, insecurity, demographic decline, symbolic devaluation, and so on—and because their political desires are systematically repressed by a power acting against their interests, that they invent narratives of this kind. The NRx narrative, with its entropy and its Singularity, is not real, objective truth emerging from the pure, objective description of a universal law. It is a narrative construction that chiefly reflects the scale of the Western subject’s crisis. We see in it less the revelation of a “truth” than a pure symptom: a profound crisis of Western being, which neo-reaction refuses to diagnose and instead prefers to conceal beneath a narrative that becomes metaphysical once more, thereby reproducing the very conditions and categories of metaphysics.
The NRx grand narrative conceals something. What it conceals is a subject: an individual who does not want to be unmasked, who does not want to accept who they are. To locate this discourse in the only reality to which it is connected—the reality of the political subject who carries it—we will now reveal the subject who has cowardly disguised himself behind a supposed objectivity. NRx doctrine originated in the ideas of an American blogger named Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin is white, long-haired, bespectacled, a computer programmer and a geek. Also known by the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, he is a somewhat marginal, nerdy “tech bro.” His decidedly heterodox ideas found some resonance in tech circles in Silicon Valley and among billionaires such as Peter Thiel. They also found a sounding board in another thinker from the Anglo-American world, Nick Land. This contemporary philosopher has had a striking intellectual journey: initially something of a Deleuzian who wrote a dissertation on Heidegger, he broke with his early philosophical intuitions and joined the Dark Enlightenment and neo-reaction. The movement is built around several theoretical touchstones, often Anglo-American and little studied in Europe: Thomas Carlyle, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It is marked by a particular “pop” imaginary and universe, somewhere between The Matrix, cyberpunk, and Lovecraftian esotericism.
Neo-reactionaries are people trained in the hard sciences: white Western geeks who think about their surroundings through particular habits of mind. They generally do not come from the social sciences or political science. Nor do they come from the humanities, classical literature, and so on. Their reality is structured by a particular way of signifying the world. “Feedback loop,” “Singularity,” “exponential phenomena,” “implementation,” “information,” “hyperstition,” “patchwork,” “red pill,” “cybernetics”: this is the vocabulary with which they think about the world. If they have built a narrative in which reality derives entirely from physical laws, that is undoubtedly because such vocabulary plays a major structuring role in their own reality. Far from decoding all of objective reality or describing the fundamental laws of the universe, they do precisely the opposite: they reduce all of reality to their own reality. We do not blame them for this, since we maintain that there is no other way to proceed. To them, for example, social structures and systems of production are understood and described in terms of “energy dissipation.” They do not know how to describe them otherwise. They do not see them as social spaces, places of exchange and interaction in which power relations, norms, forms of behavior, moral conventions, and symbolic judgments take shape. Our point is not that a company should be understood as a site of social interaction rather than as a mechanism for dissipating energy, or vice versa. Our point is that the way someone perceives a phenomenon as one thing rather than another tells us more about the person doing the perceiving than about the phenomenon’s hypothetical reality in itself. And, just as importantly, an individual’s identity helps explain how they perceive reality: the NRx grand narrative ultimately applies only to a particular kind of subject, one who can describe their reality only in the vocabulary of a tech bro.
Our modern condition allows us to take neo-reactionary discourse for what it is: a discourse, not an objective description of some transcendental Truth. We quickly sensed that it was concealing something. We identified it as a “grand narrative” in Lyotard’s sense: a metanarrative of the desires and political perspectives of the subject who carries it. What it concealed, then, was a subject: a subject seeking to describe the world it perceives with particular signifiers, an identized subject shaped by determinants that define it within social relations.
NIMH is a Western European man of the twenty-first century. Like every Western European of our time, he faces social and political problems specific to his situation. These problems call for political solutions. Yet in the world he experiences, NIMH, like me, finds no political tools capable of solving them. On the contrary, he faces a system, a power that openly and continuously represses his desires. This power is essentially a system of alienation and repression: Western institutions work largely against the particular interests of Westerners. Western alienation is clearly connected to the moral values carried by metaphysics, as we defined it above: the neutralization of the subject, which prevents it from thinking about its own identity-based particularities; universalism; and egalitarianism, its material counterpart. These phenomena are certainly political, produced by individuals, institutions, and norms, and are not direct decrees issued by metaphysics, Platonism, or scholasticism. Yet they are rooted in how Western man, as the producer of his political world, perceives himself. And at this level it is obvious that the metaphysics that shaped more than a millennium of our civilization still operates, structuring our representations of the world, our values, and our psycho-affective reflexes. The secularization of Christianity—the transfer of religious norms into moral, political, and institutional norms—lies at the heart of power structures in the West.
Intellectually, we oppose this metaphysical substratum, which survives today as a system of alienation in moral norms, institutional structures, and centers of power. No critique of metaphysics in its political and social forms can do without a critique of metaphysics in its philosophical and conceptual forms. The sociopolitical world is traversed by ideas, representations, and imaginaries that philosophy helps to produce. A “deconstruction of Western metaphysics,” as Heidegger wished for, must today include a deconstruction of the political subject as a metaphysical subject: an abstract, universal, legalistic, egalitarian—or equalized—subject that does not exist as the being-in-the-world of the real political subject, who is always an identized subject. Such a deconstruction must involve renouncing grand narratives that place the subject in a metaphysical relationship to reality, rather than asking how the subject produces its world and how it uses discourses connected to its identity to narrate the world it experiences in its own particular way.
For us, then, it is clear that the Western crisis can be resolved not by constructing a new grand narrative that reproduces metaphysical categories, but by recognizing the ontology of the situated subject—in other words, recognizing the identized subject in its relationship to the political world. Any philosophical doctrine that seeks to formulate objective, universal, transcendental truths—neo-Thomism, Objectivism, and so on—ultimately works against identitarianism, and thus against resolving the crisis shaking the West. That crisis did not begin with wokeness or the Maastricht Treaty; it dates back at least to Constantine and the advent of Roman Caesaropapism. It seems to us that neo-reactionary doctrine, in many respects, belongs among these contemporary metaphysical doctrines.
How Is a Metaphysical Physics Possible?
We accuse NIMH of announcing a new metaphysics. Neo-reaction is, above all, neo-metaphysics. In that sense, it is aptly named: “reactionaries” have always taken refuge in metaphysics to disguise their political anxieties and fantasies. So far, this refuge has never helped them win a victory in the modern West. But unlike the old reactionaries—providentialist royalists who pray and patiently wait for the Holy Spirit to restore a king to the French throne—the NRx movement starts from physical considerations, and thus from material ones. How can this discourse be “metaphysical” if it starts from physical, scientific data to formulate its propositions? How, then, is a metaphysical physics possible?
The answer is not complicated. Neo-reaction constructs a metaphysics from the same elements used to construct any other metaphysics: organizing a subject-world duality, declaring worldly phenomena to be objects, and ultimately affirming that objects exist independently of the subject. Once again, a narrow-minded person might think we can stop there without triggering an inflationary spiral in which the value of sensible reality collapses until a world of Ideas, a first cause, an eidetic Being, and so on, emerges. They might say: “Surely I can claim that the world is made up of objects independent of the subject observing them without being pestered about metaphysical ideas!” But anyone who thinks this misses the fundamental mechanism by which every objectification of the sensible world immediately enters the metaphysical process. As we have said, no objective knowledge of an object—true and valid at all times, in all places, and for all subjects—can arise from sensory apprehension of the world. The subject must apprehend the world non-sensuously in order to know the objective Being of the object. It must therefore apprehend it metaphysically. We will now see that NRx discourse is no exception to this iron law.
We must look in NIMH’s book for the premises that show, first, that he conceives of the world as a world of objects independent of the subject. At the beginning of the book, the author writes:
“Reality exists objectively, and we can only attempt to apprehend it through the mediation of our representations, which will be more or less effective, more or less true. Knowledge is subjective, reality is objective, and truth lies at the boundary between our subjectivity and objective reality. Reality exists independently of us, but truth is intimately linked to our epistemological framework.”
He also adds:
“What we call truth is in fact the degree of adequacy of our conceptual framework for apprehending reality.”
What framework is NIMH constructing here? He tells us that reality exists objectively, and, above all, independently of subjects. This reality, as we understand it, is the world as a collection of objects, as it really exists in itself. The question remains whether the subject can access that reality. Unsurprisingly, it cannot—or can do so only partially, never entirely satisfactorily. “Truth” becomes what the subject subjectivizes from the object. Naturally, this “truth” must be assessable, gradable, and rankable; otherwise, relativism might prevail and every subjectivity would count as a “truth” in its own right. For the author, then, “truth” is not merely what the subject subjectively perceives of the object. It is also the subject’s capacity to conform to objecthood in order to construct objective knowledge: the degree to which a subjective proposition corresponds to the objective reality it seeks to describe. The metaphysical framework is quietly taking shape.
NIMH reinstates the subject-world duality, disregarding the modern thinkers’ centuries-long effort to unify that relationship in the unity of being-in-the-world. He is immediately drawn into the metaphysical vortex. The subject’s small “truth,” which never fully corresponds to the objecthood of the world, is perplexing. We can see that he tolerates it to some extent, aware that we cannot simply demand that the subject produce an absolute Truth here and now. But that absolute Truth still haunts the subject’s small, partially adequate “truth.” If a lowercase “truth” is a subjective proposition considered sufficiently aligned with objective reality, we cannot help thinking that, at least in theory, there must be an uppercase “Truth,” corresponding to perfect agreement between the subject’s subjective proposition and the objective reality it targets. The aim, at a minimum, would therefore be to approach this absolute Truth, even if we accept that it is fundamentally inaccessible.
NIMH’s framework recalls Kant’s: on one side, the pure, ideal world—the thing-in-itself, or noumenal world—which is fundamentally inaccessible to us; on the other, the world as known or experienced by the subject, a phenomenal world that appears to it imprecisely or inadequately. But NIMH adds a peculiar kind of Heideggerianism to this Kantianism. As we have seen, a process of selection allows human beings to move toward increasingly precise knowledge of entropy, and thus to reduce uncertainty. A society better able to dissipate energy passes through the selective filter, and its categories consequently become categories that “unveil” a little more of noumenal being, the fundamental law, at each stage of the selection process. Whenever a structure or system prevails through this process, it is because it dissipates more energy, and thus its categories offer lessons that improve our command of and understanding of the universal law. The human role is to try, without any certainty about what must be done to conform to the objective being of the world. To try, and to face the judgment of entropy’s fundamental law. To try, and learn about the world of objects from success and failure. To try, observe what works and what passes through the selection filter, and thereby improve our knowledge of the fundamental law. Human beings and their evolution would thus “unveil” Being, echoing Heideggerian aletheia⁷, and NIMH believes he is working alongside the thinker who set out to deconstruct all metaphysics.
The author presents humanity and its activities as successive stages in the unveiling of fundamental Being. Human beings try, fail, learn, succeed, and try again. Through consciousness, which here acts as a sounding board that allows fundamental Being to reflect on itself, human beings gradually extract information about the law of entropy that governs and defines this fundamental Being. On the evolution of species—and the same applies to the evolution of societies—he writes:
“Imagine it as a series of experiments conducted by nature itself, testing different forms of life to see which succeed best. It is as if nature were a scientist, learning through trial and error in order to create increasingly adapted and efficient forms of life. It tests and selects, explores and exploits.”
We should not reinterpret the author’s words as meaning that humanity creates the universal law as its societies are selected through conflict. Humanity merely “unveils” a total Being that is already there and that would reach its final form once this process of unveiling was hypothetically complete. In that sense, humanity is itself part of this Being, which takes on a mystical quality that somewhat recalls Schopenhauer’s old Eastern holism:
“Far from being a centralized force or a phenomenon exclusive to certain forms of life, intelligence, understood as an increase in extropy, manifests itself through the multitude and diversity of life on Earth. Every organism, from the simplest bacteria to complex human beings, contributes to this process. They act not as isolated agents but as integral parts of a global system, each playing a unique role in increasing order and information in the biosphere.”
Humanity thus participates in a metaphysical whole in the form of a total, fundamental Being that encompasses every entity, every being that makes up the world and the universe. This whole, this fundamental Being, is the Universe understood as a single ontological unit. Humanity is merely one part, one moment, one component of this great cosmic Whole, which it helps to “unveil”:
“The universe could be a whole acquiring information about itself through decentralized fragmentation. These fragmentary entities of the universe would then have a partial point of view on it. They would not have access to the whole of reality, and there would therefore be a difference between their subjective experience of the world and reality. The latter would not reveal itself to us as it is in itself.”
Neo-reactionary metaphysics is paradoxically Kantian in structure, with its noumenon–phenomenon dichotomy, and holistic in character, since every being participates in the great cosmic Whole.⁸ Humanity, situated in a world whose rules do not depend on it, helps unveil those rules as its systems, paradigms, organizations, and structures pass selective tests. These tests constitute the movement of history: war, battles, commercial conflicts, revolutions, and so on. Each historical stage offers an opportunity to “test” a normative framework, which entropy’s law evaluates through its confrontation with another framework.
The Cold War could serve as a textbook example of this process—or, better still, a comparison of the respective development of North and South Korean societies. Capitalism triumphs over communism; therefore, it dissipates energy more effectively; therefore, it corresponds more closely to the law of entropy; it is “truer,” a higher truth than communism. The triumph of capitalism would thus illuminate what the Universe decides in socioeconomic matters: the great cosmic Whole seems to “prefer” capitalism to communism because capitalism conforms better to its fundamental rules. The neo-reactionary is therefore a capitalist. At least, he prefers capitalism to communism, though he does not rule out the possibility that some untested third system might surpass capitalism. Until such a system appears, however, he is a capitalist. Do not imagine that he is a capitalist because of some political interest rooted in his experience of social relations! His capitalism has nothing to do with him, his identity as a Western subject of the twenty-first century, or the position he occupies in social relations. It is simply prescribed to him, as a neutral, abstract subject, by the revealed Truth derived from the fundamental laws of the Universe…
Besides deciding in favor of one socioeconomic system or another, the great cosmic Whole also provides the neo-reactionary with a whole series of social and political principles. In fact, it provides him with laws and an orthopraxy that have descended from the Universe, rather as the Qur’an descended upon Muhammad:
“Carlyle⁹ knows that the universe has its own law. His work could be summed up in these few lines: the universe has a law; whatever we say, our actions cannot escape it, and democratic voting is not only a defective way of discovering it, but cannot enact laws that oppose it either. For him, laws therefore derive from the Law of the universe and from religion. How can we disagree? We have seen that human society is a dissipative structure, and thus a cybernetic system that follows the rules of the universe. Laws are the conditions under which society self-organizes, and there is no reason to think they could escape the laws of the universe. They may be instituted as official laws, or left unwritten as customs derived from morality. Carlyle tells us that we must direct our actions toward the Good, and never in history have we thought that this could be achieved by rejecting truth.”
He goes on to add:
“Starting from the universality of extropy, we can identify what constitutes the Good in absolute terms and return to traditional conceptions of life without turning back.”
We have indeed wandered into the troubled waters of the worst kind of Platonism. Here is the universal Good, here are the universal rules that every human being must follow, because they are truths valid for all. Try to forget yourselves a little, you individuals. Try to step aside, to neutralize and universalize yourselves. Try to subordinate your actions to the Good the neo-reactionary has taken care to define for you, because he is your new pastor.
NIMH cannot be pleased with this presentation. I can hear him already: “No!” he tells me. “Human beings are free to act, because they must test things and open up paths in order to unveil the Truth!” There is, in fact, a genuine philosophical paradox here. In the NRx system, human beings are indeed the ones who try, as we have said. They are precisely the ones who “unveil” the principles governing the universe by trying things out. To confine them to a “revealed truth” that they must follow for eternity seems to contradict their role as testers of truth. At the same time, however, neo-reactionary discourse advances a program, a project. It does not merely seek to give human beings the best conditions in which to experiment and unveil the Truth—that would require nothing more than the absence of structure, allowing radical freedom. It also seeks to give them a course of conduct, norms, principles, and a morality derived from the lessons and truths they have already acquired about the Universe. They must be free to experiment, but not too free:
“A society needs malleability to allow for growth, because excessive order would lead to its necrosis, but too much malleability will necessarily lead to chaos.”
Far from leaving humanity free to experience that chaos, the neo-reactionary intends to limit it by relying on the revealed truths he claims already to possess. In this sense, he proposes a clear political program: abolish democracy, establish sovereign monarchical authority, create a variety of competing small states, defend the free market, and so on. He claims to have derived this entire program from universal revealed truths.
We are faced with a genuine tension, if not a contradiction, in NRx metaphysics. If human beings are truly free to test and experiment, then we must encourage them to remain at a distance from the lessons they acquire. But in that case, the whole metaphysical system becomes a useless aporia: there would be a fundamental law of the universe governing everything, yet human beings would have to remain perfectly indifferent to it, so that their actions were never determined in advance by knowledge of that law. That is obviously not what neo-reactionaries set out to do. NIMH did not write an entire book only to tell us to act as though we had not read it. To some extent, the human role as tester of truth must be limited, even abolished. In the tension between humanity’s role and the revealed truths derived from the laws of nature, the neo-reactionary always favors the latter. He explicitly says that “laws are the conditions under which society self-organizes, and there is no reason to think they could escape the laws of the universe.” Everything suggests, then, that humanity’s creative freedom is only secondary in the neo-reactionary metaphysical framework. Its primary purpose is to condemn attempts to violate the supposed “laws of nature.” And, despite what the doctrine claims, human beings are free to try only things that have already worked. I know NIMH may personally regret this tendency, but his discourse paradoxically produces, against his intentions, an obstinately conservative type of person: someone waiting to receive a ready-made revealed truth, who will always regard anything that has not passed through what they take to be the filter of “selection” as “unnatural.”
This suspension of humanity’s creative freedom runs through NRx discourse as a whole: respect for a morality of the common good, rejection of civil liberties as a source of disorder, the affirmation of a form of traditionalism, and so on. In this sense, neo-reaction is utterly anti-modern, even anti-modernist. Its only “neo” quality is its narrative course, which starts from thermodynamics rather than a puritanical reading of the Gospel—though even that is debatable. If we take this narrative course for what it is, namely metaphysics, the neo-reactionary is just one reactionary among many. What the (neo-)reactionary defends is a world governed by universalist moralism:
“Just as a belief system must not diverge too far from what is true, its moral system cannot depart entirely from what is true in order to define what is good. So what is good? […] What is morally good follows naturally from what is true. This is why it is important to have the best possible interface with the world, since it will affect our memetic belief system and our morality.”
There is a “true,” defined as human beings’ correspondence with the laws of nature. This “true” gives rise to a “good,” which provides the moral standard by which human beings must assess their behavior in accordance with the “true.” That “good,” in turn, gives rise to a “Good”: the social and political order that conforms to it. We already know the harm this kind of discourse has done to the West by asserting a supreme Good as a universal good, instead of promoting local goods that apply to particular types of people according to their particularities. Neo-reaction has taken great pains to say nothing more than Plato already said. We therefore have nothing more to say than what Heidegger already said against metaphysics.
Heidegger Misappropriated
NIMH proposes an ambitious idea—perhaps too ambitious. He claims to reconcile what we have identified here as Metaphysics on one side and Modernity on the other. He seeks to combine a return to metaphysical objecthood and to the notion of Truth as true, objective truth with a kind of modern perspectivism. To do so, he draws on scientific data that seem to point toward universal objective laws, which could allow him to reinterpret the notion of “evaluation” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Power would become an objective determinant that made it possible to evaluate the world objectively as well. NIMH preserves Nietzsche’s idea of human beings as evaluators of the world—they perceive and understand, perhaps even define, order and disorder—but seeks to ground the terms of their evaluation, their power, in objective facts that conform to the categories of physical laws. In this new framework, objective knowledge proceeds through aletheia. Neo-reactionary metaphysics is traversed by a tension between the subject that “unveils” the world and the retroactive determination of phenomena by the universal laws that objectively structure them.
“We will once again attempt to reconcile Athens and Jerusalem, as Thomas Aquinas did in his day—or rather, we will attempt to reconcile Modernity with premodern conceptions of life […] We will demonstrate that it is possible to rehabilitate the categories of final cause, unity, and being, and that being is intimately connected to truth. Once we have affirmed the absolute represented by Being, we can reevaluate the relevance of the concepts of Good and Evil and finally turn once again to the question of God, and ask whether Nietzsche buried him alive. How will we proceed? By offering ourselves a new accelerationist framework.”
NIMH is therefore trying to harmonize or reconcile Heidegger and Nietzsche with a metaphysical narrative structure. He seeks to make their ideas as little corrosive as possible, so that the Dasein can once again become a metaphysical “subject,” falling back into the forgetting of Being but trying to remember it through the unveiling or the lessons it draws from its experiments in the world. The author is aware that one cannot base a politics of difference on universal revealed truths. Still, he tries to combine the two, arguing that, as an observer-participant, humanity does unveil a universal truth, but does so from a perspective that is always particular. Since the Universe is a great cosmic Whole that subdivides itself to acquire information about itself, each local point of view enriches its global understanding of fundamental Being. In this framework, humanity’s task is to extract the “missing information”: the law of entropy. If entropy increases in the universe, this would ultimately be almost a matter of perception: the Universe becomes “subjectively” more aware of its entropy as human subjects unveil it.
“Life might therefore serve a form of informational unity and purpose. If entropy cannot be separated from the observer-participant, and if intelligence allows us to identify missing information more effectively, then the entropy of the universe would increase for the simple reason that the universe generates increasingly intelligent entities, which identify missing information ever more accurately […]. We therefore cannot avoid examining metaphysics, and, in particular, the ontological question of being. Since information is intimately connected to truth, could the universe be unveiling the truth, as Heidegger imagines?”
Here we find ourselves alongside Heidegger, lost among these metaphysical formulas and wondering what he is doing here. NIMH has chosen to use the word “unveiling” to explain the process by which one gains access to objective information. We consider this a serious misappropriation of the term: it does not accurately convey what the word means in Heidegger’s vocabulary.
Heidegger accuses metaphysics of producing a forgetting of Being, sometimes called Seinsvergessenheit in German. This forgetting results from metaphysics asking about beings, about what is set before us, instead of asking what allows those things to appear as such. The forgetting of Being arises from the way metaphysics divides the subject-world relationship, affirming the objecthood of worldly phenomena instead of starting from an existing being and considering its constitution through being-in-the-world. For NIMH, this question is resolved within NRx metaphysics: the subject must “unveil” Being through its existence by acquiring knowledge of the laws that structure beings.
But the author is describing nothing more than a cognitive process. Socrates already had such a process by which metaphysical “Being” is “unveiled” to the subject: maieutics, or “midwifery.” Maieutics has nothing to do with aletheia. The difference between these two “methods” lies precisely in the metaphysics’ separation of the subject from Being, or the ontological distance it places between them. In Heidegger, unveiling is not a cognitive process by which human beings strive to know an objective truth. It is an ontological event characterizing the unity of the world and my being within my being-in-the-world. Unlike maieutics, aletheia does not aim at a quest for knowledge, much less a quest for information with which to uncover truths that are still concealed. On the contrary, it describes the irreducible unconcealment of the world, because Dasein is-in-the-world; Dasein is always already of Being. When Heidegger speaks of unveiling, he does not mean a process that presupposes an original concealment or an ontological distance between the subject and Being. On the contrary, unveiling is Dasein’s ontological mode. The world is always already Being unveiled. Heidegger tells us:
“Dasein, as constituted by disclosedness, is essentially in the truth. Disclosedness is an essential kind of Being of Dasein.”¹⁰
We must therefore distinguish maieutics—the process by which a metaphysical subject gradually increases its understanding of a Being from which it is fundamentally distant—from aletheia, which posits an ontology of unconcealment, exactly the opposite of maieutics. NIMH is really presenting a new kind of maieutics, supplemented by a holistic movement in which “the Universe acquires information about itself.” He is perfectly entitled to call this maieutics “unveiling.” But the term becomes misleading when it is used to bring Dasein back into a metaphysical system.
This confusion in neo-reactionary metaphysical discourse arises from a misunderstanding of Being. Neo-reactionaries understand it in the traditional metaphysical sense, rejecting Heidegger’s Destruktion. Yet, as we have seen, Being in Heidegger is not a “what” but a “how”: the event through which Dasein opens up the world to manifestation. This world is never the objective sum of things set before us; it is a horizon of meaning constituted by Dasein. In Heidegger, there is therefore no fundamental Being that exists in advance, outside Dasein, and awaits the meaning Dasein will give it. Neo-reaction seems to accept that human beings give meaning to such a fundamental Being, but fails to grasp that Heidegger’s very notion of Being as substance disappears.
We can make our point less abstract by considering an everyday object, such as NIMH’s book. For Heidegger, it is a being because I, holding it in my hands, am myself in the process of being-in-the-world. The book is not independent of me, like an object set before me and defined by objective properties—paper, ink, weight. It is a being that acquires significance through the context of my existence: it makes sense as a tool for reading, a source of reflection, or a presence in my familiar surroundings. For Heidegger, the Being of this being does not lie in an abstract essence, in a “what” independent of me, but in the “how” of its emergence within the openness constituted by Dasein, by my being-in-the-world. A metaphysical perspective such as the author’s, by contrast, would see the book as an object subject to pre-existing fundamental laws or coordinates: a fundamental Being that I merely recognize or interpret, without my existence co-constituting it. For NIMH, the book is an object set before me, whose objective categories constitute a reality foreign to me, and I am expected to conform to them. The more I conform to them, the more I “unveil” fundamental Being.
“Being then designates a fundamental, universal, or transcendent reality, in contrast to individual beings, which are the multiple and diverse manifestations of that reality in the sensible world. This distinction reflects an ontological hierarchy between the fundamental and the contingent, the universal and the particular. By connecting this idea to information theory, we arrive at a view of the world in which information is the substance from which phenomenal reality unfolds. The Being of a being then becomes, for us, the informational component associated with a material being.”
Here we reach the point at which Heidegger’s misappropriation becomes a drama with sinister consequences. NIMH says that the Being of a being becomes the informational component associated with a material being. This abruptly obscures the fact that the Being of a being is me. It reduces that Being to fundamental information that I acquire through a cognitive process. It obscures Heidegger’s teaching that a being is not something merely set before us, but exists because I constitute it as meaningful through my being-in-the-world.
NIMH’s metaphysical framework takes the subject’s “point of view” into account, but in a very narrow sense. It is not a network of meanings belonging to a self that gives meaning to its world, but merely the degree to which subjective knowledge corresponds to the object it targets. The “point of view” is no longer a perspective that projects human beings into their world, thereby recognizing that they are what gives a world meaning. It is reduced to the fact that we cannot objectively know the world in itself. In other words, the “point of view” becomes an epistemological limit: what I know about reality, rather than an ontological feature of the reality I signify.
NIMH tells us that the subject is an “observer-participant,” but what does it ultimately participate in? It participates in a universal, cosmic process of midwifery that encompasses it. The subject is not a source of singular meaning through which a local world acquires meaning; it is an abstract observer who gradually “unveils” the fundamental Being that remains inaccessible to it because it is ontologically distant. This Being then presents itself as a universal substance in which all human beings participate. Within this framework, studying how human beings give their world its own meaning becomes pointless: doing so would deny “truth” as objective knowledge of fundamental Being. Knowledge must consequently turn away from the concrete particular—the achievement of the modernist revolution—and toward the abstract universal. This is the sinister consequence of NIMH’s philosophy: it prevents us from asking whether the self always lives in a world of its own. NIMH has liquidated Heidegger. He has also liquidated the possibility of taking an interest in the irreducibility of lived worlds. He has stripped human beings of their role as those who give meaning to a world of their own and made them signifiers of a world independent of them. He has liquidated identity as an ontological mode of differentiated meaning.
The Usurpation of Identitarianism
Our critique has finally been stated. NIMH reconstructs metaphysics in a way that liquidates the theoretical foundations of identitarian doctrine. Let us immediately set aside conciliatory suggestions such as: “Can’t we accept everything NIMH says while retaining a perspectivist approach?” No, we cannot. The author’s doctrine bears witness to this irreconcilable conflict. Did he not specifically try to reconcile Heidegger with metaphysics? And what was the result? A misappropriation of Heideggerian vocabulary in the service of a thoroughly Platonic metaphysics, which cannot possibly work with Heidegger’s understanding of Being.
Here is NIMH’s framework: we are universally determined by natural laws. Those natural laws must be reproduced in the human laws and social organizations we create. We must therefore start from the universal when thinking about our social and political structures, rather than from the differentiated particular and the specific world it projects. The risk is considerable. NIMH has done away with the theoretical radicalism of the ontological perspectivism on which identitarianism is built. If we all live in the same world and are all subject to its universal laws, and if those laws are also political laws, there is no reason not to defend a pan-anthropic universalism.
Yet the author remains fundamentally right-wing. He does not want to accept that the laws apply universally to everyone, despite having supported precisely that proposition himself. In his discourse, he must therefore try to reintroduce the differential divide that would justify Westerners preserving their nations and developing in homogeneous societies. To do so, he tries to derive a form of differentialism from the physical laws on which his universalism is based.
“The corollary of this observation is that the principles common to living things—thermodynamics and evolution—are also the phenomena that generate particular identities. Today we observe human groups commonly known as populations that can readily be distinguished genetically, since they are the product of this selection. Add to this the interweaving of human action and genetics, which mutually reinforce one another, and you get ethnocultural groups with a particular genetics and a particular culture that have co-evolved. In other words, their identity. Thus, while the accelerationist worldview is universalist, it is necessarily identitarian at the same time […]. This universalism is aware of genetic and cultural differences between individuals and groups, since these are themselves consequences of this evolutionary principle and are nothing but speciation in the making.”
There are biogenetic differences between human populations. There are also local cultural variations: customs, traditions, national dishes, traditional clothing, and so on. Together, these elements constitute ethnocultural differences between human groups. Yet within the NRx system, these populations still live in the same world. They see the same things, experience the same reality, are caught up in the same fundamental Being, and are subject to the same universal laws. At the ontological level—which is the only level that really matters—the author denies that anyone lives in a reality different from that of their “neighbor.” He said that reality is objective and independent of the subject, then added that truth is the degree to which a subject corresponds to that objective reality, and finally that this truth dictates universal laws that also govern human laws. The various populations may differ in their ethnocultural characteristics, but they do not differ in their political interests. On the contrary: once every individual’s political interest becomes conformity to universal laws, we all share one and the same interest—to conform to those laws. The Good for a Western European in the twenty-first century would be the same as the Good for a Malagasy or a Russian, and essentially the same as it was for Julius Caesar or Moctezuma II: to strive toward knowledge of fundamental Being.
The neo-reactionary vision is therefore not identitarian. Neo-reactionaries acknowledge that ethnocultural differences exist, but who does not? No one is so “color-blind” as to deny that a sub-Saharan man differs ethnically and culturally from a Thai woman or a Japanese man, and so on. But the neo-reactionary believes that the Good is the same for each of these different subjects, and that they all aspire to the same thing. In reality, there would be no factors determining distinct political interests among the different groups that make up human societies.
At most, the neo-reactionary might argue that the universal laws of nature designate an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society as better, and that we should therefore accept this revealed truth. In that case, we would point out the contradiction involved in abolishing humanity’s role as a tester of possibilities, as we explained earlier. Still, let us pursue the hypothesis: a homogeneous society is necessary because it corresponds more closely to fundamental Being. Why could that society not be entirely of sub-Saharan or East Asian ancestry? Why should Europe be populated by people of specifically European ethnic and cultural origins? The cold machinery of neo-reactionary doctrine, which claims to be neutral and objective, gives us no reason to defend one group’s particular interests over another’s for reasons that are purely relative to the subject who holds them. Besides, we all know the “Holy Map” that presents the average IQ of East Asians as higher than everyone else’s. If the intelligence measured by this statistic really is what should carry humanity toward the supreme Good and knowledge of fundamental Being, should we not wish for a society that is homogeneous—but Chinese or Korean?
Whichever way we look at it, this doctrine cannot provide a basis for any kind of identitarianism. The reason is simple: rather than starting from identity as the experience of a lived sociopolitical world, and then considering how identity gives particular political characteristics and distinctive meanings to the subjects who share it, the doctrine starts from the abstract universal and defines a “Good” to which the political subject must subordinate its singularities. An individual’s political interest is no longer what makes them singular, but what they must conform to. Like any reactionary doctrine, this one disguises the social and political differences that run through society. It denies communal, historical, cultural, normative, and social identities, among others. It displays a characteristic common to all reactionary thought: an anxious denial of sociopolitical conflict. It wants to describe a harmonious world in which cultural, ethnic, social, and economic differences do not fracture the body politic.
Instead of acknowledging the singularity of his perspective in this tense sociopolitical world, instead of taking his place in that tension and defending his particular interest without denying the diversity of other points of view—each of them a source of division—the neo-reactionary prefers to erase those divisions under the veil of a transcendental unity that would cancel all conflict. Under the influence of conservative anxiety and the drive to preserve the status quo, he seeks to deactivate the singular political claims of others, even at the cost of losing the ability to think through his own singular political claims.
This “accelerationism” is ultimately misnamed. It aims much more at freezing society under the transcendental unity of the supreme Good than at setting it in motion through the eruption of contradictions that arise when the particularities of our lived worlds confront one another. Yet accepting that lived worlds are irreducible to one another means recognizing the singularity of the other’s political interests—which remain inaccessible to me—but it is also the only condition that allows me to recognize the singularity of my own political interests. This mutual recognition of identity-based difference is the condition for affirming my singular identity. I must accept that the world I live in and want is valid for me, but not necessarily for someone else. I must accept that what I consider the Good is in fact my good, with nothing universal, objective, or transcendental about it. I must finally accept that my truth is always an odious lie to someone else, and vice versa. Only then can I affirm that I am an identized subject, that I am someone—a concrete, singular being rather than an abstract, general one. Only then can I legitimately say that something is good or bad for me.
The capacity to affirm oneself as a concrete, singular being is precisely what seems to be lacking in the Western subject’s current situation in the world. Trapped in a metaphysics it has never truly escaped, it remains caught in the paradoxical space of self-negation. This gives it the impertinence to speak as though it were speaking for the entire world, and the deadly foolishness to disguise and conceal its singularity, which it always regards as ontologically shameful. We would gain so much by no longer being ashamed of being concrete, real people with an identity, and by speaking in our own names, from our own local and relative truths. Let us stop speaking in the common name of universal Truth. Let us stop pursuing objectivity in ways that erase the singular perspective of our identity. We should bear witness to our singular lived experiences rather than keep disguising them behind the veil of some metaphysical “objectivity.” If Western man wants to save his world, he must ask himself just one question: What does it mean to be me?
Notes
- We use this neologism to express the participle of a verbal function that the verb “to identify” does not describe precisely enough. The latter designates a subject understood through an identity; here, we instead want to express the way a subject becomes a subject with an identity—that is, the way its identity constructs it, the way it is therefore identized.
- These determinants are varied. They have biological, but also ethnic, cultural, anthropological, historical, social, and other sources. In reality, it is difficult to present the full system of determinants shaping an individual, since that system is so complex. What matters is not the individual’s identity in itself, taken abstractly. It is only when the subject is situated within social relations and placed in relation to other subjects that we can define which of its identity-based determinants distinguish it most particularly. Being white in itself, for example, does not mean much. But being white in society—say, in France in 2025—has a specific meaning, because this identity becomes a political category. In France in 2025, whiteness entails particular social experiences and assigns the subject particular political interests that follow from them. Only then does this element of my identity acquire political meaning—in other words, its only true meaning.
The source text has a fragment immediately after this note: “…as a singularity as the subject of a specific identity. This does not at all imply that none of its particularities come from nature or physics, but only that it is within social space that it will be able to…” The sentence is cut off in the supplied text. - We say that these propositions are “apparently” more universal, not that they are more universal in themselves, because the production of knowledge, including scientific research, is ultimately still a social phenomenon that reproduces particular anthropological, social, and cultural frameworks. Absolute universality and neutrality can therefore be difficult to attain, even in the hard sciences. Since Kuhn, we have known the importance of the subject’s paradigm in the formation and development of scientific truths.
- For now, we leave the notion of being in quotation marks. As we will see, metaphysics, through its Gestell, distorts the notion of being, considerably weakening our ability to articulate identity as we defined it above.
- Here, Reason has little to do with modern rationality. It should be understood in the scholastic sense: a faculty that allows human beings to know metaphysical Being through abstract representation.
- All the quotations from NIMH here come from Traité Néo-Réactionnaire. We have chosen not to give page numbers for quotations from the book. This choice is imposed by the circumstances: we are working from an unpublished version, and our pagination does not match that of the edition readers are likely to have from Éditions Hétairie. The page numbers we cite would therefore never correspond to the pages in the published book they have in front of them. To avoid confusion, we have decided not to include page numbers.
- For Heidegger, aletheia means the unconcealment of beings, which occurs in the openness of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. It is not merely a mode of knowing, but the fundamental event through which Being comes to encounter. We will later discuss whether this Heideggerian reference is appropriate to the system the author proposes.
- We do not have space to develop this point here, but it would be interesting to ask how NRx discourse reproduces a form of postlapsarian narrative. The division between the phenomenon–noumenon duality and fundamental holism recalls the story of the Fall from the Garden of Eden: a rupture that prevents humanity from accessing fundamental Being, and a moral trial it must undergo here below, through historical processes, before it can reconnect with it.
- Thomas Carlyle was a nineteenth-century Calvinist and one of the influences on the NRx movement.
- Being and Time, §44. We do not want to burden the reader with a lengthy quotation from this complex passage by Heidegger. Briefly, its point is that unconcealed being is the ontological mode Dasein gives to its world. It is therefore always already in its truth. We invite readers who wish to do so to read all of §44 of Being and Time, preferably in François Vezin’s translation. It is in this paragraph that NIMH’s interpretive error becomes clear; in our view, it is the source of his confusion between maieutics and aletheia.
