I find Jorjani generally interesting. His conversational partner here, Mr. Davis, though is definitely more up my alley. In fact many of his points here are almost verbatim echoed in my last essay. Jorjani gets a bit too pompous and nationalistic sometimes for sure. But I do see his point, which I think is not about the U.S. as it is currently run by finance capital and the CIA, but by a different spirit and order more closely aligned with what America could be.
This was a really good conversation they were having. The geopolitical stuff in particular is so hard to find these days. I think both of these guys are on the right track in a way very few others are. I don’t think Jorjani is particularly original or deep as a philosopher, but he is sensitive to the problems of our time and is doing his best to bring the threads together as a political thinker in a way that is unique and important at this time. Though I like that Mr. Davis is softening Jorjani’s militant polemics and cultural essentialism with the Bergsonian/Deluzian alternative to the dialectic that I use and that he seems to be in the process of adopting.
I haven’t seen any of Davis’ other videos yet, but a friend told me he was an angry righty. Here he seems to be consciously transforming the common melodramatic framing that the right, especially the more angry far-right tends to adopt. He seems to be reading Stiegler and really into Bergson lately(according to his recent video titles), which might be having a profound effect on him. I know Deleuze and Bergson have had that effect on me. Not that I was ever an angry righty, but deep reading of post-structural thought really gives you an appreciation for difference, and Begson/Deleuze really offer a way of doing critique that is inherently constructive and affirmative.
Jorjani has read some deleuze, but has shown only a superficial understanding of him in the few places he has written about him. And in one of his Mishlove interviews, he claimed to be a philosopher in the deluzian sense because he “creates concepts”, which Jorjani seemed to take to mean someone who creates catch phrases like “the spectral revolution” or “prometheanism”.This branding exercise is definitely not what Deleuze means by a concept, which is better described as a new connection in thought. Jorjani seems more interested in creating a movement that he can have power in than he is in creating new concepts. Hence his earlier attempt to co-opt the alt-right. He would make a good cult or religious leader and his instincts are very much aligned with making a new religion or theocratic political movement. Whereas Davis here seems much more interested in creating a diverse cultural coherence, just as I advocate, to which Jorjani could only answer that he would tolerate such diversity as the Nazis mystics tolerated aligned cultural groups during their reign!
On another note, I think Steiner could illuminate much of what they are talking about here, especially the question that could be framed as whether America has a soul. In Steiner, the U.S. is destined to lead a cultural age in the far future after Russia takes over from the current age within which America is little more than an extension of European civilization, its decadence perhaps (as Spengler would have it), but also its seed potential for the future, if we don’t mess it up by falling into the trap of technocracy(Ahriman) that Steiner worried about in this century. The American soul, like every soul, is not an isolated essence but a development with resonances going back to Atlantis(supposedly), Rome, and other technological and “promethean” cultures, and a potential for being the catalyst for rapid evolution or rapid destruction.
