Ana Teixeira Pinto

Oh Man! Aggrieved Masculinity, Silicon Valley and the new Far-Right

10 June 2025

After the instant success of The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler wrote a short book that ends with his famous eulogy to a calcified roman soldier whose body was frozen in the line of duty. The text does not conjure triumph or glory but a highly gendered image of duty and sacrifice:

“We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of the Vesuvius died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honourable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.”

In 2013 neo-fascist writer Dominique Venner shot himself in front of the main altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, to protest the legalization of same-sex marriage. For Venner, this new conception of marriage, no longer tied to reproductive futurity, signalled a suicidal tendency.  France was welcoming its own extinction, expressing a  refusal to survive, a desire to eliminate itself. Only the traditional family could stand as a bulwark against white genocide. 

Venner gave the notion of honor pride of place in European identity. As a rejection of morals, an “ethics of honor does not distinguish between good and evil, in which transgression results in guilt. It distinguishes between superior and inferior, where defeat results in shame.” 

In a moment when a great many political questions are articulated in the rhetoric of masculinity, the present talk would like to examine the codifications of excess and the codifications of stoicism via which male aggression accrues cultural capital, and by extension, economic value; how does culture map onto the body a gendered vision of control, resistance and redress; and the surge of revolutionary energy without a clear political content, defined solely by the idea that violence gives rise to the sublime.

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is a professor at HBK Braunschweig and a theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute. She is the editor of the book series On the Antipolitical and co-editor of Fascism, Unreason and the Paradox of Modernity, both published by Sternberg Pres.