Alexander Dugin

Discussion

Slavoj Zizek on Dugin's Spiritual Differentialism

Slavoj Zizek:

"For Dugin, the transcendental-ontological analysis of Dasein that Heidegger deploys in his Being and Time is not universal: every civilization gives birth to its specific form rooted in a specific collective spirituality. There are many figures of Dasein, the Russian one is different from the German one, it is focused on “narod,” the people in the sense of German Volk, not state, not just nation (nationalism), not race (Fascism), not class (Marxism), and especially not liberal individualism. “Narod” is thus an ontological category, it designates a historically-specific form of the disclosure of Being, of how its members perceive what matters in their lives, what gives their lives meaning, what freedom and dignity mean in their spiritual universe. For an authentic Russian, “freedom” is something different from the liberal notion of human rights and freedoms, it is a mode of free immersion into the spiritual substance of one’s people which only provides dignity to him.

For Dugin, philosophy is thus immanently political, inclusive of advocating war: war in Ukraine is a war between Western global modernism and the Eurasian spirituality. There is war because (as Heidegger saw) the West reached its deepest decline in global liberal hegemony, Western modernity is Evil embodied, while Russia did not yet fully articulate its Eurasian spiritual identity – this task still lies ahead, and only Russian philosophy grounded in Heidegger can do it. Here Dugin replaces Germany (as, for Heidegger, the unique spiritual nation) with Russia: a “new beginning” - the awakening expected by Heidegger, a new Ereignis - will take place in Russia, not in Germany, not even in the West. Dugin refers here even to Russian language itself: he notes how the terms that sound artificial in Heidegger’s German (like “in-der-Welt-sein,” being-in-the-world) have much more natural everyday equivalents in Russian.

Dugin is not simply a Rightist against the Left, he notices how at a certain point Bolshevism itself took an Eurasian turn. One should mention here Aleksandr Blok, the great Russian poet who wrote TheTwelve, the great ode to the October revolution: he was quickly disappointed by the Bolshevik Revolution and his last work before his early death in 1921 was a patriotic poem “Scythians” which advocates a kind of “pan-Mongolism,” a clear precursor to today’s Eurasianism - Russia should mediate not only between the East and the West but also politically between the Reds and the Whites to end the self-destructive civil war. This is also why Dugin prefers Stalin to Lenin: in 1921 Lenin conceived the task of Bolsheviks to bring Russia as fast as possible to Western modernity, while this reference to the West disappears with Stalin.

Dugin is not simply opposed to the West: his target is modernity which culminates in liberal individualism. One should note here that a similar reading of Heidegger as a tool to keep at a distance global Western modernization is practiced not only in Russia or some other Slavic countries but also in non-Slavic countries from Romania to Iran. (In my own country, Slovenia, some Heideggerians were interpreting Dostoyevski - whom otherwise Dugin rejects - as a case of overcoming Western nihilism.) Dugin solicits every country, every people, to get rid of the liberal-individualist yoke of global modernity and discover its own specific spirituality. The role of Russia is to defeat the global West and thus to give each country, the Western ones included, the freedom to discover its own spirituality – one may say that Dugin provides a philosophical version of the idea of multipolar world embodied in the political notion of BRICS."

(https://slavoj.substack.com/p/the-failure-that-saves-us)

Michael Millerman on the Dugin Decade

" I owe you a brief word on the substance of the Dugin decade.

While the end of history thesis had argued that the world was tending towards global liberal unipolarity, Dugin was predicting, and calling for, multipolarity. As he wrote in his Theory of a Multipolar World and elsewhere, multipolarity means a world in which there are many civilizational blocs, not just a single model of civilization (indeed, in this respect Dugin’s view is closer to that of the Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila, one of whose aphorisms runs as follows: “Civilizations differ radically among themselves. From civilization to civilization, however, the few civilized men acknowledge each other with a discreet smile."

If this is all we ever learned from Dugin, it would still be valuable. Multipolarity has been one of the keywords of Putin’s reign, as I outlined in this Hillsdale presentation, and you would be better positioned to understand Russia’s actions on the world stage knowing that than you would be by forcing everything into the flattening perspective of global liberalism.

Another important element of Dugin’s thought — of course, he’s not the only person to have suggested this — is that liberalism represents to some extent a war on the human essence, or at least consists of an interpretation of what it is to be human that culminates in the technological overcoming of humanity itself. Dugin thus regularly supported reopening the question that, according to Thiel’s Straussian Moment essay had been closed off at the beginning of modernity and the enlightenment: the question concerning man. In pursuit of this question, Dugin studied, wrote about, and taught a wide range of pre- and post-modern authors, including mystics like Palamas, Eckhart, Suso and Tauler, as well as occultists and esotericists, like Paracelsus and Böhme. He wrote about “the sociology of the imagination” (Durand), and penned several books on Martin Heidegger, existentialism, and phenomenology, to say nothing of his most obscure yet important topic, that of the “Radical Subject.”

Do we find any recent evidence for the enduring relevance of such concerns? Consider the Joe Rogan podcast episode featuring Marc Andreessen as the guest. Andreessen says at one point that the medievals were better equipped to understand our world and its new technologies because the language of angels, demons, spirits and other divinities is conducive to interpreting non-human agents like AI. That is the kind of point Dugin has been making for over a decade.

These two topics — multipolarity and the war over what it is to be human — are linked, for Dugin. Geopolitical multipolarity, he has argued, reflects the multipolarity of nous, intellect itself. He wrote a series of books about that called Noomakhia, Wars of Nous. The model in that book series of three logoi, the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and the Cybelean, has also proven to be a valuable framework through which to view the gendered dimension of global politics. And the broader argument that geopolitical disputes can have something fundamentally metaphysical or philosophical about them has been buttressed by recent history, as the reaction to woke leftism run amok has sometimes taken the form of a traditional defence of human identity and the human soul. End of history theorists believed something similar about the relationship of philosophy and politics — the thesis is after all Hegelian — but for them the convergence of political and philosophical unipolarity was a good thing, though Fukuyama himself doubted that it would survive the vitalistic Nietzschean distaste for the last man, perhaps having learned from his teacher Leo Strauss that nature can be chased out with a pitchfork but nevertheless it returns."

(https://millermanschool.substack.com/p/the-dugin-decade)

More information

Bibliography

"The list of distinct studies on Dugin includes, among others:

D. Shlapentokh, ‘Aleksandr Dugin’s views of Russian history: collapse and revival’, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 25(3) (2017), pp. 331–43;

D. Shlapentokh, ‘The great friendship: geopolitical fantasies about the Russia/Europe alliance in the early Putin era (2000–2008) – the case of Aleksandr Dugin’, Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 22(1) (2014), pp. 49–79;

A. Shekhovtsov and A. Umland, ‘Is Aleksandr Dugin a traditionalist? “neo-Eurasianism” and perennial Philosophy’, The Russian Review, 68(4) (2009), pp. 662–78;

A. Shekhovtsov, ‘The palingenetic thrust of Russian neo‐Eurasianism: ideas of rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin’s Worldview’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9(4) (2008), pp. 491–506;

M. Laruelle, ‘Aleksandr Dugin: a Russian version of the European radical right?’, Kennan Institute Occasional Papers, 294 (2006);

J. Kipp, ‘Aleksandr Dugin and the ideology of national revival: geopolitics, Eurasianism and the conservative revolution’, European Security, 11(3) (2002), pp. 91–125; and

J. Dunlop, ‘Aleksandr Dugin’s “neo-Eurasian” textbook and Dmitrii Trenin’s ambivalent response’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 25(1/2) (2001), pp. 91–127.