p.
2 Part three shows how apparently unphilosophical political concepts from his
political theory, like “people” and “the West,” possess a philosophical and
Heideggerian meaning for Dugin. (is this a joke?)
p.10 Dugin has taken the standard of the ideal agent from his own experience as the
first Russian thinker to penetrate to the depths of what it is to be Russian, a feat he
accomplished by way of Heidegger through the problematic of archeomodernity. It
might be unusual to speak of a profound experience of one’s identity, but for Dugin
as for Heidegger, Dasein is truly something to be existentially experienced and
withstood, and not merely conceptually understood. Russian Dasein is a “secret fire.”
p.8 In short, Dugin argues that there is not one general Dasein differing
“existentielly,” or merely superficially, from one cultural expression to another, but
rather a plurality of Daseins that differ “existentially,” in their fundamental relation to
being.
[…]
The discovery of the Russian Dasein reveals that the Russian logos is constituted
differently than the Western (German, Greek) one. The Western logos distinguishes
abruptly between this and the other, and the Western sense of being is likewise
always sharply distinguished from non-being, even if being and non-being stand in
a dialectical relationship. In the Russian case being is constitutionally almost
indistinguishable from its matrix, from non-being, and the same is true of logos. This
more than anything explains for Dugin why philosophy arose in the West but not in
Russia: the Russian logos never became distinctly enough demarcated in the
Russian Dasein for that. Dugin’s (2018b) strange statement that the modernization
of Russia consists in the task of understanding Heraclitus perhaps acquires its
meaning from the fact that on Heideggerian grounds, Russian modernity can only
mean the birth of logos out of the chaos of Russian Dasein. It is worth noticing that
Dugin advanced that strange thesis at a conference called “Against The Postmodern
World,” for that shows how intertwined for him are philosophical and political
positions. The homology between philosophy and the political in his thought implies
that even abstruse philosophical concepts have their political counterparts. At any
rate, to repeat, the radical birth of the logos has not yet occurred in Russia, according
to Dugin. What is dominant in Russian Dasein is not logos but chaos, understood as
the pre-logical matrix that contains and exceeds logos, not as the postlogical
“confusion” of disorder (Dugin, 2018b).
p.10 In the preceding sections it was my intention to briefly explain the fourth political
theory’s deep rootedness in Heideggerian philosophy. I showed that its place in
Dugin’s theory amounts to more than mere influence, constituting instead a rather
sophisticated and ingenious operation meant to unearth the possibility of a Russian
Dasein starting from the recognition of archeomodernity. Dugin sometimes calls the
fourth political theory “Eurasianism” when he applies it to Russia. One cannot
discuss the fourth political theory, or Eurasianism, without philosophy, for
“Eurasianism is, first and foremost, a philosophy,” and “without philosophy,
Eurasianism is incomplete, even impossible” (Dugin, 2017: 113).
p. 14 There is a key word in Heidegger, Ereignis. In simplified terms, Ereignis is the
transformative event when “beyng” and Dasein come into authentic correspondence.
Since Dasein for Dugin is Dasein als Volk, and since there is not only one general
or generic Dasein, but a plurality of Daseins, accordingly each Volk has its own
Ereignis, which it is its task to prepare and undergo. Dugin (2011c) suggests that
proper understanding of the Russian political project (and project, or Entwurf, is
another key Heideggerian term) therefore requires to be interpreted as a Russian
Ereignis (120). The entire apparatus of political Eurasianism, including its
ideological, geopolitical, and philosophical resources, is, according to the logic of
Dugin’s argument, employed to bring such a transformation event about. Other
political projects not rooted in Heidegger are inauthentic simulacra, which may or
may not be put into the service of the goal. The Heideggerian interpretation of the
narod comprises what Dugin calls a “metaphysics of populism,” providing the
inchoate longings of anti-liberals with “strategy, consciousness, thought, a system,
and a plan of struggle” (Dugin, 2018c).
p. 13 The emphasis on the narod is not only non-liberal: it is anti-liberal. The concept
of the narod appears “in opposition to liberalism” (Dugin, 2017c). The fourth political
theory raises red cards to those who speak of the people in another sense, as the
civic (1st political theory) or even racial (3rd political theory) “nation.” The existential
notion of peoplehood is directly opposed to all such nationalisms, which are modern
phenomenon. Modernity “is absolutely wrong,” and the fourth political theory is thus
not only antiliberal, but also anti-nationalist (and anti-communist) (Dugin, “Traps and
Dead Ends,” n.d.). It “is a theory of global, absolute, and radical Revolution aimed
not only against the domination of the West in particular, against the current state of
European civilization, the hegemony of the United States of America, or liberalism,
but against modernity itself”
p.16 Any adequate consideration of Dugin’s political theory must be based on the
dual recognition that his thought is deeply indebted to Heidegger’s philosophy, on
one hand, and, on the other, that it extends it and elaborates it in a more explicit
political direction than Heidegger ever did, regarding its political aspects as
homologous to its philosophical ones. One cannot interpret Eurasianism as merely
geopolitical when it is “in the first place a spiritual doctrine”; neither can one interpret
it merely as a spiritual exercise due to its insistence on the implicit political dimension
of philosophical spirituality. “Russia,” Dugin has said, “needs to be allowed the
possibility of formulating its own logos.” The imposition of foreign models of
understanding politics and everything connected with it, however, has deprived
Russians of that right, and “that is the source, the drama of my personal struggle”
(2017b). The construction of Eurasianism and the fourth political theory, whose
“deepest foundation” is Heidegger, is constituted by the aim of freeing up the
Russian logos, and other civilizational logoi more broadly, from the hegemonic,
ideational constraints of the modern liberal West. Due to the political/philosophical
homology, a revolutionary political anti-modernism corresponds to this aim.
Heidegger stands at the center of Dugin’s revolutionary political philosophy.
