CONTRA SPENGLER: THE CASTLE AND THE EUROPEAN FAUSTIAN SPIRIT
Spengler’s Faustian spirit puts an illegitimate sell-by date on that spirit, claiming its will-to-infinity will inevitably become will-to-nothingness in time. But in truth the Faustian spirit is not a rocket ship to nothingness, it is not all spire, it is root and spire.
Spengler also illegitimately severs the Faustian spirit from the Greek sunlight, preferring to associate it solely with the dark Germanic forest. This is a misstep, almost as nihilistic as his association of late Faustian spirit with its own destruction, for let us not forget the spring sun leoparding the Teutonic forest floor. The forest is the stormy gloom of the wild hunt, but it is also the fronded shelter of the dark pleasure dome that holds an artificial sun. This explains the Victorian interior, Art Deco: it is a cosy Faustian, the cosy gigantism of high European art (John Singer Sargent’s giant towering oriental vases cold-echoing amongst the children in the warm family home). In the end it’s all about the excess, and the Faustian spirit is forever both power and pleasure, exploration and control of the earth, extreme endeavour and extreme comfort, it is Riefenstahl’s berg and berg hamlet (the heimat): in short it is the castle.
The Faustian spirit is all weapon, but it is also logically that which is won with that weapon (cosy Faustian, the castle, the treasure, the golden hoard). This explains why the Faustian spirit is under attack as lush homeland and not simply as atomising unworldly nuke, or even past colonial conquest.
Of course the new right Spenglerian will not be denied his autodidact scholarship and will cheerfully celebrate Spengler’s gloomy iron-clad pessimism as a kind of free-form iron, an ersatz heroism. Frankly the concept of the cosy Faustian will make him puke in the comfort of his own home. Nevertheless the iron logic of the castle takes no notice of aspiring nude body builders. In any case the concept, cast-iron and absolute though it is, is a dialectic too far for his tiny mind and body, for cosy Faustianism is only cosy for the ones inside (the castle). It is sentimental gangsterism (the castle is a sentimental gangster).
(Taken from THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CASTLE: the Deleuzian Rhizome as Slave Aesthetic)