synarchy movement of empire book ii - Pierre Beaudry's Galactic ...

At the age of sixteen, Joseph de Maistre was a member of the {Black
Penitents} of Turin, a flagellant type of religious group called {The
Confraternity of Sympathy and the Holy Cross}, which trained young boys
to keep vigil with condemned criminals awaiting execution. A biographer of
Maistre, Descostes, described the duty of the penitents in this fashion:
"When a criminal had to be hung from the great trees of Verny, it was the
penitents who went to pass next to him the night of the condemned, to assist
him, exhort him, and then to receive, from the hand of the executioner, the
quivering cadaver, which they buried themselves." (Descostes, {Joseph de
Maistre avant la Révolution}, I: 93.) What sort of effect such scenes must
have had on a boy of sixteen is difficult to assess. However, would it be such
incongruous speculation to imagine a Joseph de Maistre becoming totally
insensitive and impervious to the shocking spectacle of executions such as
he described himself, with such brutal details, in the {Soirees de Saint
Petersburg}? Thus, Maistre deemed his conscience to be clear when he
concluded about his embracing of the theory of the {two souls}: "I will
never believe, unless I happen to be warned that I am mistaken by the only
power (the Pope) with a legitimate authority over human belief. " And since
the Pope did not say he was mistaken, Maistre went about his business, and
because no one stopped him from believing he was a pure superior spirit.
4.2 MAISTRE AND BATAILLE: THE POLITICS OF EXTREMES
What do Joseph de Maistre and Georges Bataille have in common?
This is what a former professor of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln,
Owen Bradley, attempted to answer in a book called {A Modern Maistre},
which was published in 1999, with the assistance of a grant from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. At first glance, there seems to be no
possible common ground between the apparently ultra-Catholic Maistre and
the anti-Christian Bataille, except for one thing: they are both Beast-Men
executioners. In his treatment of the question of human sacrifice, especially
the questions of violence and transgression, Bradley showed the connections
between Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, Hegel, Lamennais, Nietzsche,
Emile Durkheim, Georges Bataille, and the deconstructionist-terrorists such
as Althusser, Michel Foucault, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michael Leiris, Rene
Girard, etc. In other words, once the artificial ideological barriers between
left and right were transgressed, the connection to international terrorism
was just one simple step away. Interestingly enough, if one puts in a search
186