Enoch Powell’s Meta–Aesthetic

Enoch Powell is arguably the most important public intellectual of the Right in contemporary Britain and his influence is attested by the rise of English nationalism, by the politics of Brexit and by the continuing dominance of neoliberalism. Academic analysis has consistently positioned him as a Burkean and so part of the conservative intellectual tradition—albeit one who is unusually committed to abstract ideas and theoretical consistency.<br/> In my current project on Powell I argue that such a characterization seriously underestimates the radical nature of his thinking and wrongly locates it as a variety of conservatism. My work shows instead that Powell’s outlook is based on a nihilistic aesthetic of the will constructed from an idiosyncratic reading of Arthur Schopenhauer. Rather than sitting within the conservative intellectual tradition, Powell’s aesthetic of the will works instead to draw conservatism into the orbit of the Far Right.<br/> My short paper will briefly set out why Powell’s reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic offers such an appealing source of authority in the context of neoliberalism’s disenchantment of politics. This enables a meta-level discussion of the aesthetic’s role for Far Right politics, exploring how a nihilistic aestheticism at the level of theory allows the abandonment of traditional epistemological, discursive and rational norms, so opening space for varieties of aestheticized political discourse (provocation and ‘shameless normalisation’, fake news, revisionist history, ambiguity and deniability, etc).<br/>