Dugin’s (Postmodern) Denial of Reality Conrad Bongard Hamilton

6 March 2024

Below is an excerpt consisting of the final section of Sublation Media’s tenth research pamphlet, Conrad Bongard Hamilton’s The Apostate Fascism of Alexander Dugin. In the earlier part of the pamphlet Hamilton argues that the aporetic “anti-racist” fascism of Dugin’s pre-2009 work must be understood as arising due to the contradiction between the Hitlerism of his youth and a post-Soviet Russian political culture deeply marked by both multiculturalism and Third Worldism. Because of this, when Dugin attempts—amidst the instability of the 1990s—to produce a domesticated fascism, the result is rather strange: an ethically inclusive iteration of it that sees the Nazis as having erred in their embrace of racism and nationalism, and that calls for Russia to join with peripheral and semi-peripheral in order to confront the West. In this part, Hamilton focuses on the Heideggerian impulse found in Dugin’s writings from The Fourth Political Theory onward, making the case it owes less to fascism per se than to the relativistic vertigo of late capitalism.

The pamphlet can be purchased in either digital or physical form here. Sublation’s Patreon subscribers can acquire a digital copy for free.

Dugin’s initial synthesis of “Red” and “Brown,” we argued earlier, occurred within the context of the syncretic approach to Russian state-building characteristic of the 1990s. Putin pursued this from the side of liberalism and nationalism—acquisitive consumerism and a reasonable degree of personal freedom combined with a robust state, which could repel the threats leveled at it by the West. Deeply distrustful of the Yeltsin clique from which Putin emerged, Dugin pursued a different synthesis, blending the unbridled fascism of his youth with the “premodern” elements that he purports to discover within Bolshevism. Yet this still leaves us with a question: how can we understand Dugin’s sudden shift from Mackinder to Heidegger, from Red Brown to Dasein? For those who see Dugin as ‘just’ fascist—not just McManus, but a number of well-known scholars—nothing could be easier to explain. Dugin is a fascist, therefore he does fascistic things, like praise Heidegger and give vocal support to Putin. But again, this doesn’t really tell us much. Worse than that, it actually contributes to obscuring a more meaningful understanding of Dugin’s work—as well as the parallels between it and the prevailing intellectual fashions of the West.

Against the doxa that’s coalesced around Dugin in the West, then, we would like to advance a thesis that may seem counterintuitive: that his embrace of Heidegger, while certainly conditioned by the autarchic if not outright fascistic elements of his thought, is best understood as an acclimatization to the intellectual culture of late capitalism. There is much that supports this on the historical level. It is often remarked that Dugin’s interest in Heidegger developed ‘late’ (though Dugin claims that Heideger was an influence from 1999 onwards, proof if it did not surface in his work until The Fourth Political Theory in 2009). Less dwelled upon, though, is the relationship between the belated reception of Heidegger within Dugin’s work and the belated reception of him within Russia. The first Heideggerian to achieve fame within that country was Vladimir Bibikhin. Elliptical and oracular, Bibikhin’s summaries of Heidegger’s unknown works found a ready audience as bootleg, samizdat literature. He would also go on to author a number of significant texts in his own right—most notably 1998’s The New Renaissance, which is partly an attempt to re-read Heidegger’s Ereignis as a more general theory of social renewal. But the first major vindication Heidegger experienced as a ‘serious’ thinker in Russian was in 1989. That year, an international conference was organized to celebrate his 100th birthday in Moscow. Russian scholars participated, from Bibikhin to Ioulia Podoroga to Nelly Motroshilova. So too did foreign ones, including Richard Rorty and Jean-Luc Nancy.[1] With its star-studded roster, it helped kick off a boom in Heidegger studies that endured throughout the 1990s and 2010s. So much so that Michail Maiatsky has characterized the present-day reception of him in Russia as “differ[ing] little from other Western countries.”[2]

Heidegger, therefore, reached the mainstream in Russia just as capitalism of the neoliberal type was beginning to flourish. Some of the reasons for this are unambiguous—the presence of state censure in the Soviet Union, the transmission of direct scholarly influence from the West, etc. However, it is likely also broadly structural. Postmodernism—as is well known—was characterized by Fredric Jameson as the “cultural logic” of late capitalism. He developed this thesis by extrapolating the ideas of the Trotskyist thinker Ernest Mandel along aesthetic lines. For Mandel, the end of World War II had inaugurated a “third stage” of capitalism—late capitalism—in which production and consumption were globalized, and in which financial capital played a more decisive role than ever. For Jameson, postmodernism—with its depthlessness, and refusal of all fixity—is the aesthetic stage which corresponds to this. Within postmodernism, the distinction between low culture and high culture is cast aside, as commercial ties facilitate the fusion of sacred and profane. Personal agency disappears, as the individual becomes nothing more than a packet of data or object of market research. And there is no ‘outside’—something assured by the extirpation of non-capitalist modes of production.

Postmodernism thus appears within Jameson as the aesthetic expression of a society in which—more than ever before—“all that is solid melts into air.”[3] Except for one constant: the reproduction of capital, which is nevertheless disguised by its diffuse, all-pervasive character. Clearly Derridean “différance,” or Deleuze’s more lexically conventional “difference,” can be seen as exemplars of this (and Jameson indeed makes these connections). But the equivocal role of Heidegger as a forerunner of postmodernism in his analysis has received markedly less attention. In Postmodernism, Jameson compares Van Gogh’s “Peasant Shoes” with Andy Warhol’s “Diamond Shoes” in order to contrast modernism with postmodernism. In examining the former he draws heavily from Heidegger’s seminal “On the Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, Jameson argues, allows—by framing art as a conflict between foreground and background, World and Earth—a larger understanding of the “initial content” or “raw materials” the work of art “confronts and reworks”[4] (in the case of Van Gogh’s painting, the experience of “agricultural misery”[5] implied by a worn out pair of workman’s boots). Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes,” by comparison, is seemingly without any bottom end—it refuses “even a minimal place for the viewer.” We would confront it in a gallery “with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object.” In attempting the explain this shift from depth to depthlessness, Jameson writes that:

Heidegger continues to entertain a phantasmatic relationship with some organic precapitalist peasant landscape and village society, which is the final form of the image of Nature in our own time. Today, however, it may be possible to think all this in a different way, at the moment of a radical eclipse of Nature itself: Heidegger's “field path” is, after all, irredeemably and irrevocably destroyed by late capital, by the green revolution, by neocolonialism and the megalopolis, which runs its superhighways over the older fields and vacant lots and turns Heidegger's “house of being” into condominiums, if not the most miserable unheated, rat-infested tenement buildings. The other of our society is in that sense no longer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist societies, but something else which we must now identify.[6]

For Jameson, Heidegger’s work is an aporetic, “antimodern modernism.”[7] With its valorization of the German woodsman, its opposition to technology, its disdain for the industrialization wrought above all by the Anglo-American world, it represents a protest against the conditions of modern life. This protest is one that is necessarily shaped by modernity. It is what it reacts to—if it were not for the increasingly global spread of capitalism, it would not exist. “Antimodernism,” however, ceases to have a definite vocation in the stage of late capitalism. Heidegger’s rejection of modernity was conditioned by an awareness of what modernity is not. Once the contrast between modern and non-modern is abolished due to the subsumption of the latter of the former—something apparent in, for instance, the industrialization of agriculture and its assimilation by large firms—modernity is no longer something one can ‘react’ against. It is instead experienced as an unbroken continuum, as a frictionless space of flitting images which bear no relation to an ‘exterior’ world.

With this in mind, we can better understand the fate of Heidegger’s work. In the post-World War II era, different aspects of it were eagerly absorbed—the analytic of individual Dasein for the existentialists, the critique of metaphysics for the poststructuralists. If existentialism corresponds with an anguished individualism, with the death throes of the individual as something other than a seamless conduit for consumption, poststructuralism corresponds with the unambiguous triumph of the logic of capital (and thus took root during the heyday of the golden age of capitalism). In this context it is only natural that the positive aspects of Heidegger’s work be jettisoned. Yes, we’re told he was a brilliant critic of the shadowy structures that have long undergirded Western philosophy. The problem is that, in his efforts to get beyond them, he too often took recourse in the “metaphysics of presence”: the assumption of a ‘real’ reality, which can somehow emancipate itself from the shackles of the hermeneutic circle (because, paradoxically, Heidegger’s recognition of the gap between signifier and signified presupposes an ultimate need for referentiality).

Where does Dugin come into this? By his own admission, Dugin is—like Heidegger—an “antimodernist.” On the surface of things, this would make him—since antimodernism is, as Jameson points out, a species of modernism—an anachronism for a postmodern age. One should not assume, however, a complete exhaustion of the critical aspirations of modernism in the post-World War II period. In Postmodernism, Jameson draws attention to a few modernist survivals—among them Hilton Kramer’s attempt to recover a long-lost American literary modernism and Jürgen Habermas’ affirmation of the supreme value of the modern (that is, the political). In both cases these are attributable to premature deaths: in the first, of the subjective American modernism that the 60s put an end to; in the second, of the cutting short of German modernism by the Nazi seizure of power.

Far from being something simply past, modern is then for Jameson immanent to postmodernism.  This includes within the work of putative postmodernists themselves—Jean-Francois’s Lyotard view of postmodernism, for instance, as a propaedeutic to the triumphant reappearance of high modernism. We could elaborate on this by—in a way that doesn’t stray too far from Jameson’s own analyses—touching on the foremost poststructuralist philosophers: Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida. In the latter parts of their careers, all three evinced an increased recognition of the need for some kind of fixed, normative point that could support the fusillade of challenges launched by their own projects. For Deleuze, this took the form of the admission—in A Thousand Plateaus—that one must keep alive “small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality,”[8] eschewing a careless “destratification” that would backfire upon itself. In Foucault, it took the form of a re-evaluation of Kant, so as to present his historical critique—though not transcendental—as consistent with the values of the Enlightenment.[9]And in Derrida, it took the form of the “democracy to come”: the idea that democracy, in so far as it deconstructs itself, is the form of government most germane to the values of deconstruction—even if it requires a hard kernel of sovereignty so as insure that democratic means do not beget undemocratic ends.[10]

The particular motives for these concessions to modernism vary. What seems to unite them, though, is an acknowledgement of the need of some kind of state through which poststructuralism could perpetuate itself. In part, this was just a practical reality. Once the anarchistic hopes of May ’68 were scuttled, and recaptured by a state apparatus that seemed impregnable, the question shifted from how to overcome the state to how to perfect it (something very apparent in Foucault’s remarks on neoliberalism[11], or in his enthusiasm— shared by Dugin—for Iranian “Islamic government”[12] [13]). Though critical as often as not of capitalism, a homology can be drawn on this basis between the role of the state for the poststructuralists and the role of the state within late capitalism. Within late capitalism, the state ceases to be an independent vector, and becomes more and more a transmission device for the ‘deconstructive’ (if you’ll forgive the use of the adjective) processes of the marketplace. Within poststructuralism, the state—articulated as any kind of ‘fixed’ subjectivity—is only given license in so far as it carries forth the process of its own auto-critique.

Dugin was not part of the iconoclastic generation of thinkers associated with May ’68. As a youth in St. Petersburg, he didn’t witness its anti-statist zeal, nor the floundering of its idealistic objectives. His full encounter with postmodernism occurred later—in the Russia of the 90s. Living in a society hobbled by endemic unemployment, high infant mortality, rampant alcoholism, and all the other charmless features of Russia’s capitalist shock therapy, it is perhaps unsurprising that he developed an ambivalent relationship towards the fluidification of reality characteristic of postmodern philosophy. He didn’t dismiss fully its tools—if postmodernity is the logic of late capitalism, how could he? Nevertheless, the direness of Russia’s blind date with the free market drove him—with far greater urgency than that which animated the poststructuralists—to try to theorize a state apparatus capable of containing the chaos it had unleashed. Here we must observe a difference. For the poststructuralists, who had never known anything but capitalism, and had seen it edge towards inexorable triumph, there was no way to turn back the clock on postmodernity. For new, normative structures to have legitimacy they would need to participate in the drive towards a ‘deterritorialized’ future that had replaced modernism as the horizon of possibility (even if this meant attenuating its excesses).  In Russia, the artificial and undemocratic nature of the USSR’s collapse, as well as the scale of the human suffering that succeeded it, caused the past to seem comparatively tangible, if not attractive.

This is why Dugin’s philosophy is so preoccupied with the past tense. Our “nihilistic” present forms a short circuit, uniting us with the “eternal ontological archetypes” embedded within history. The preoccupation of the poststructuralists, by contrast, is with the future tense—with the push towards an Enlightenment beyond Enlightenment, that fully realizes the modern ideal by abrogating it. Given this concern with the past, it is unsurprising that Heidegger eventually became a core thinker for Dugin. Knee-deep in corruption and blindsided by a West that it soon learned had no intention of relinquishing its expansionist aims, Russia did not have the luxury of waiting for postmodern capitalism to fulfill its promise of a destratified world. It had to pivot, erecting a line of defense against both Wild West capitalism as well as the literal West. Because he inspired it, Heidegger shares in common with the poststructuralists a critique of Western metaphysics—and is to this extent thoroughly contemporary. His advantage over them for Dugin’s purposes is that his analytic of Dasein, when understood collectively, can be easily pressed into the service of a national-collectivist agenda.

The official line on this is that the philosophy of the poststructuralists—up to and including its political aspects—is ‘good,’ whereas Dugin’s philosophy is ‘bad.’ Things are likely not so simple. Since he comes the closest to a postmodern rationalization of state sovereignty, Derrida’s work here is probably the best basis for comparison (also since both Derrida and Dugin are deeply influenced by Carl Schmitt). As mentioned before, his political writing is centered on the idea of the “democracy to come”: the promise of a form of politics that exceeds existing democratic norms. Embedded within this concept is a confrontation between the idea and practice of democracy. There can be no democracy without majority rule. At the same time, this very commitment to the majority risks undermining “democratic freedom “. For there is nothing to stop the enemies of democracy from exploiting it from within—from using elections to annul democracy itself, assuming dictatorial power. Democracy is in this sense “autoimmune.” Threatened by the very thing that enables it, it must paradoxically stave off its subversion through the use of sovereign power.

It’s clear enough that Derrida’s work contains within it a commitment to universality. That he sees democracy as irreducible to a formal procedure, as dependent on a higher-order ideal however, raises the question : from where does this ideal arise? Though fully aware that there is no ”proper, stable, and univocal meaning of the democratic” that can be traced back to Ancient Greece, Derrida is nevertheless clear—the privileging of democracy is intimately connected with the West. It derives from “what is called the European tradition (at the same time the Greco-Christian and globalatinizing) that dominates the worldwide concept of the political.”[14] This commitment to the European tradition risks parochiality. But for Derrida it is justified because democracy is “the only name of a regime, or quasi-regime, open to its own historical transformation, to taking up its intrinsic plasticity and its interminable self-criticizability, one might even say its interminable analysis.”[15] How disposed non-Western parts of the world are to this remains to him open to question. Take his equivocal comments on the Islamic political tradition:

I don't know how much weight to give in this whole story to the rather troubling fact that Aristotle's Politics, by a curious exception, was absent in the Islamic importation, reception, translation, and mediation of Greek philosophy, particularly in Ibn Ruchd (Averroës), who incorporated into his Islamic political discourse only the Nicomachean Ethics or, like al-Farabi, only the theme of the philosopher king from Plato's Republic. This latter theme seems to have been, from the point of view of what can be called Islamic “political philosophy,” a locus classicus. From what I have been able to understand, certain historians and interpreters of Islam today regard the absence of Aristotle's Politics in the Arab philosophical corpus as having a symptomatic, if not determining, significance, just like the privilege granted by this Muslim theologico-political philosophy to the Platonic theme of the philosopher king or absolute monarch, a privilege that goes hand in hand with the severe judgment brought against democracy.[16]

Derrida is in no sense a simple proponent of Western chauvinism. But as these remarks suggest, he nevertheless considers himself the defender of a democratic heritage which is, at least historically, uniquely “European.” Since democracy is not just one political system among others, but is the sole one capable of self-deconstructing, this means that the European tradition enjoys a special relation to universality.

Dugin, of course, doesn’t appeal primarily to “democracy” to legitimize his defense of Russian values. Instead he—for the historical reasons we’ve already outlined—looks elsewhere, to a multicultural pluralism which Russia has, in comparison with other nations, upheld. If for Derrida there is a “democracy to come,” one could say that for Dugin there is a “multicul to come.” Liberal “tolerance” is in essence a sham, since its affirmation of multiculturalism is always undermined by its underlying need to impose Western norms. From this standpoint, views such as those of Derrida are—for a better or worse—disqualified as ‘racist’ from the get-go:

Any idea of progress is in itself a veiled or direct racism, asserting that “our” culture, for instance, the “white culture” or American culture is of higher value than “your” culture, than, for instance, the culture of Africans, Muslims, Iraqis, or Afghans. As soon as we say that the American or the Russian culture is better than that of the Chukchi or the inhabitants of the Northern Caucasus, we act like racists. And, this is incompatible with either science or with respect toward different ethnicities.[17]

Postmodern tolerance, for Dugin, only functions along a “horizontal axis”: all cultures are equal, provided they swear fealty to a set of Western values which secretly dictates to them the limit of their authentic expression. What he promises is something more radical—a complete immersion in cultural singularity. In this context, the limitation Derrida ascribes to Islamic culture is generalized. Dugin would agree that the cultures of the “East,” including the Islamic, do not have the same relationship to democracy as the European one. Where he would disagree is in conceptualizing the European tradition as more universal by virtue of this. Okay, it’s steeped in democracy—so what? Democracy is not the eye of a pin one will slide through en route to heaven. It’s just a cultural feature, like any other.

Dugin, therefore, avoids the Eurocentrism of Derrida’s discourse. Does this mean that he’s above chauvinism? Not at all. One conspicuous advantage Derrida has over Dugin is that—as a superior philosopher—he recognizes that, for any ideal to hold weight, it must have an existence over and above the culture from which it derives (even if this separation is ultimately illusory—a founding contradiction, as it were, of the ideal itself[18]). Otherwise it would become self-annulling, empty. Democracy is of the West. Yet it is also independent of it, since it can be wielded to critique the West when it transgresses its spirit. Without this it would turn in upon itself, paradoxically becoming anti-democratic.

Let us compare this with Dugin. For Dugin, it is necessary to make use of phenomenology. Let us, he states, “place all that we know about the historical subject outside the framework of classical ideologies, carry out the Husserlian method of epoché, and try to empirically define that ‘lifeworld’, which will open up before us.”[19] As with Heidegger, though, the phenomenological method for him is not a means of striving for a priori eidetic knowledge. Indeed, as Heidegger states—and it is equally true for Dugin—the “methodological meaning of phenomenological description is interpretation.”[20] Since for Heidegger “ontology is possible only as phenomenology,”[21] this means that—whenever Heidegger or Dugin talk about ontology—they are really talking about nothing other than the cultural backdrop which mediates individual knowledge.[22] This has implications for Dugin's entire discourse of cultural relativism. “Societies can be compared,” he writes, “but we cannot state that one of them is objectively better than the others.” But what meaning can “objectivity” have if—by Dugin’s admission—it has no extra-cultural claim to truth? By proclaiming the irreducible singularity of all cultures, Dugin in effect loses the common genus necessary to relate them to one another. All we’re left to do is plumb the depths of our own cultural archetypes, without regard for universality. His work thus degenerates into an unreconstructed endorsement of cultural subjectivity—and by extension, chauvinism. “Everything that the Eurasian speaks of,” he writes” “is the absolute truth, and this must be accepted without all kinds of critical reflections; accepted and repeated.”[23] Or as he puts in Ethnos and Society:

So the process of ethnosocialization excluded the very possibility of philosophical doubt. Affirming oneself in the ethnos guaranteed the reliability and certainty of endowment with being, no questions about the authenticity of which could arise even theoretically. The question of thing and image (representation) and their correspondence did not and could not arise; both were strictly identical.[24]

Within the ethnos—that is, tribal society—the capacity for doubt does not exist. It emerges later, at the stage of the narod, due to the freeing of the aristocracy—including philosophers—from the responsibility of labor (the narod can be understood as synonymous with “civilizations” such as Ancient Greece or India). Once the nation appears, rationality, the notion of an objective world, ceases to be the province of a small elite. It is imposed on all. But instead of seeing this as an opportunity, as a means for the many to take up the weapons of reason to overthrow the few, Dugin longs for a reversion to a pre-objective state.  Semi-peripheral nations such as Russia, with their residual narodni structures, are globally important—yet at the same time, they are closer to the ethnos than Western ones. They can therefore lead the charge in overthrowing the objectivity that is always a secret cipher for bourgeois rule. In this analysis, the distinction between reason and unreason, truth and falsehood, simply ceases to exist. They are cultural expressions. And culture derives its legitimacy only from phenomenology—from the fact it’s experienced by this or that individual. From this standpoint it’s easy to justify expansionistic actions such as the war in Ukraine. So easy no justification is needed at all. ‘Objective’ reality doesn’t exist. Ergo: to be Russian is to support the defense of the Russian lifeworld.

It is quite understandable that Dugin should not want to author—as Derrida does—a qualified defense of the ‘democratic’ values of the imperial core. Even Derrida acknowledges that these values are often wielded cynically; for Dugin, as a Russian, that cynicism is too much to bear. What’s more troubling—as the above remarks suggest—is the result. Derrida’s late-career turn towards the Enlightenment was motivated by the discreet awareness that—without a normative basis—deconstruction risks regressing into anti-rationalism. Unbothered by this, Dugin backslides into a Heidegger-influenced rejection of all rationality. With no substitute for the European reason that dominates “the worldwide concept of the political,” his work thus inverts into something close to self-parody. The Islamic political tradition, Derrida argues, is prepossessed by the idea of “the Platonic theme of the philosopher king or absolute monarch.” Echoing this characterization, Dugin time and time again advocates an image of the East as little more than an abstract negation of the West. Democracy—though not wholly dismissed—is downplayed for no other reason than because “because the West is for it.”[25] Cultural relativism is advocated so thoroughly it cancels itself out, becoming “ethnocentrism.” And even the philosopher king is subject to rehabilitation, with Dugin acclaiming the “sacral, rational, clear, and ideal”[26] [27] character of power for Plato. What we have here isn’t ‘depth’, but pseudo-depth—the simple inversion of dominant reason, with culture as a magic substitute for causal mechanisms.

One can sense amidst all this a certain loss. Whatever its defects, one thing Marxism provided Russia with—as well as much of the non-Western world—was an alternative conception of modernity. It didn’t do away with representation, with the distinction between subject and object, because it insisted that the world existed. In the era of Lukács and Sartre, this alternative understanding of the world could still be bridged with human experience; by the time of Althusser[28], it seemed as if it would exist as a scholastic rationalism or not at all. So Dugin simply drowns it in Dasein, preserving at most a few of its isolated doctrines. Modes of production, means of production, social formations—none of these terms play a decisive role in his work. Taking an ill-explained “racism” as his animus, his message is this—that we must reject Western liberalism. But if racism is—as he seems to acknowledge—perpetuated primarily by ulterior means, how can opposition to “liberalism” suffice to vanquish it? Western liberalism, as he states himself, is just the humanist and individualist “left-wing” complement to “right-wing”, capitalist economics.[29] To this dominant reality does Dugin offer any solution, other than autarky? Or does he—like the liberals he’s so incensed by—evade the problem? We can judge him by his own words. “I personally like socialism,” he writes in Putin vs. Putin, “but I think that this issue is open to debate and discussion. On the other hand, with respect to the principle of multipolarity, we fully support [Nursultan] Nazarbayev’s idea of multipolar currencies, which states that every region of the world must have its own currency. We oppose dollar imperialism.”[30]

Opposition to “dollar imperialism” is not an ignoble cause. The dominance of the U.S. dollar confers exceptional privileges, including the ability to borrow abroad more easily and to compel other countries to comply with U.S. sanctions (Dugin’s remarks here are prescient, considering the importance of this to the sanctions imposed on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine). And unfashionable though it may be in the West, there is plenty that can be said in favor of autarchy—the remarkable developmental achievements of the USSR and China, the hundreds of millions raised out of poverty, attest to the salutary effects that can result from doing away with foreign exploitation. This is still true today, in a world where at least 40-50% of the manufacturing capital in Africa is controlled by foreigners.[31] To make socialism an ‘optional’ component of this agenda however is to effectively marginalize the question of whether the non-Western working classes will be the beneficiaries of these gains—whether a national project, in other words, will also be a social project.[32] Perhaps Dugin is unperturbed by this. Perhaps he thinks the privilege of partaking in Russia’s “special truth” will suffice to draw support. But it was not—he’d be well-advised to recall—patriotic political ideals that catapulted communism to power in these countries. It was the promise of a new social world. As well as the immediate aid that was provided to the masses, via programs like land reform and literacy-building initiatives.

There is a lesson in all of this for Putin’s Russia. Pragmatic to the core, Putin’s agenda rested on two points—the reining in of the oligarchs, and the repulsions of threats from the West. To bring the capitalist economy under the control of a decisive sovereign, as well as to restore Russia’s preeminence to Eastern Europe—nothing could be more straightforward! By making himself an active critic of US policy, Putin—it is true—helped usher in a multipolar turn that will outlast him. These objectives soon began to chafe against each other, however. Without a drastic shift towards state capitalism, towards socialization of the economy, oil exports became Russia’s major economic lifeline. The increase in global oil prices in the late 2000s helped buoy Russia’s economy, giving rise to lofty hopes—Putin’s claim in 2008, for instance, that within 12 years Russia would rise from being the tenth-largest nation in the world in terms of GDP to the fifth. That didn’t happen: by 2020, it had sunk to eleventh place.[33] Other parts of Eastern Europe took note: Russia was den of iniquity, with no future. And so their drift towards succession continued. Putin tried to make up for this by, like Dugin, diffusing ‘traditionalist’ ideology—reinvigorating the Orthodox Church for instance (whereas he didn’t even know how to hold a candle or cross himself with the right number of fingers prior to this[34]). Eastern Europeans, who’ve long been disabused of serious religious commitments, didn’t care.[35] By the time of the Ukraine War, it was clear: the only thing that could stop the rapid erosion of Russian regional power was violence.

Putin is thus a tragic figure—someone who glimpsed greatness, but couldn’t rise to the task of realizing it. Unable to muster the radicalism to escape the vicinity of meek reform, he became a horrible mediocrity instead of a hero. This same mediocrity pervades Dugin’s work, which retreats into ersatz relativism, into irrationalism, instead of trying to confront the world. “Postmodernity,” he writes “is a permanent simulation of revolution[36] […its] heroes […] are ‘freaks’ and ‘monsters’.”[37]Dugin’s monster is the double-headed serpent of fascism and communism. Pull back the mask, and you’ll find something familiar—postmodern capitalism. If he’s going to make a list of the salesmen of the simulacra, he should add his own name.

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[1] Michail Maiatsky, “Reading Heidegger in Russia before and after the Black Notebooks” in From Heidegger to Dugin and Back. ed. Marlene Laruell (self-pub, 2022),  19, retrieved from https://www.illiberalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/From-Heidegger-to-Dugin-and-Back-Marlene-Laruelle-ed.-2022-1.pdf.

[2] ibid.

[3] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, [1848] 1948), 12.

[4] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 7.

[5] ibid.

[6] ibid., 34-35.

[7] ibid., 304.

[8] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1980] 1987), 160.

[9] Jameson attributes to Foucault of The Order of Things an inversion of the transcendental subject, so that “it is not the unity of the world that demands to be posited on the basis of the unity of the transcendental subject; rather, the unity or incoherence and fragmentation of the subject […] is itself a correlative of the unity or lack of unity of the outside world.” See p. 137 of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

[10] In 1991’s Postmodernism, Jameson lists Derrida amongst those thinkers who—having eschewed content in their thought—must reintroduce it discreetly in the form of “the self,” or a “generally psychoanalytic bottom line,” rather than in relation to “history or the social.” Later, of course, Derrida did turn to politics, albeit via the messianism of “democracy to come” and his ‘spectral’ reading of Marx. Of this shift, Jameson remarks in 2009’s Valences of the Dialectic that—in so far as it treats political transformation as an ideal rather than as an immediate reality—it reflects the climate of the “1980s and 90s, when radical change seems unthinkable.” See pp. 198-99 of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalismand p. 177 of Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009).  

[11] Before neoliberalism acquired its specific ‘right-wing’ association, Foucault deemed it to be a form of governmentality that—by participating in market construction—reduces the pressures of normative-disciplinary control. See p. 260 of The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978—1979.

[12] Michael Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming [Rêvent] About?” in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam, eds. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [1978] 2005), 203.

[13] The link between Dugin and Foucault is all the more instructive because their support for—or at least refusal to dismiss—Iranian Islamic government stems from a shared appreciation of the ‘Shia Heideggerian’ lineage of Ali Shariati. Though there is a difference: Foucault expressed these sympathetic views before Khomeini consolidated authoritarian power, Dugin did so long after.

[14] Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [2003] 2005), 28.

[15] ibid., 25.

[16] ibid., 31.

[17] Dugin, Fourth Political Theory, 60.

[18] It’s probably better not to encumber the reader with the philosophical underpinnings of Derrida’s democratic ideal. Suffice it to say though that whereas a Kantian Idea refers to an object that is beyond space and time, Derrida—in a more Heideggerian vein—sees every ideal as haunted by time. “Democracy” therefore cannot be absolute—it must be open to things which contaminate it, such as the victory of anti-democratic forces in elections. But it also must contain these, leading to a double bind.  

[19] ibid., 33.

[20] Heidegger, Being and Time, 35.

[21] ibid., 33.

[22] The perceptive reader may notice that both of these quotes were cited in the sixth part of Chapter IV of György Lukács’ The Destruction of Reason, “The Ash Wednesday of Parasitical Subjectivism (Heidegger, Jaspers)” (though the phrasing of the quotes here is derived from the Stambaugh translation of Being and Time). The charge of “irrationalism” leveled at Dugin equally reflects a debt to the anti-Heidegger polemic of Destruction.

[23] Alexander Dugin, The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory: The Fourth Political Theory vol. II , trans. Michael Millerman, 154 in PDF (London: Arktos, 2017), downloaded illegally as an e-book.

[24] Alexander Dugin, Ethnos and Society, trans. Michael Milerman , 62 in PDF (London: Arktos, 2018), downloaded illegally as an e-book.

[25] Alexander Dugin, Political Platonism: The Philosophy of Politics, trans and eds. Michael Millerman and Ciarán Ó Conaill (London: Arktos, 2019), 11.

[26] ibid., 25.

[27] One shouldn’t be deceived by the use of the word “rational” here. Dugin is fond of Plato, not leastly because of his critique of democracy, which he repurposes to assail the West. But his justification for his interest in Platonism elsewhere rests on the notion that it is “extremely close” to the thought of ‘traditionalists’ including René Guénon due to the way that both posit an invariable “world of principles” which the material world indexes to. Of course, this comparison omits a major detail: whereas the Platonic forms stem from the search for truth—for a reality which eludes sense-experience, such as the way that the physical world does not instantiate geometric properties—the knowledge the likes of Guénon and Dugin purport to have discovered is essentially cultural and supra-rational. Thus when Dugin advocates Platonic rationalism, he only does so from the standpoint of it being a ‘choice’ made by Dasein (thereby overcoming the Heideggerian objection that Plato represents the enclosure of Chaos by “the majestic edifice of logos”—to use Plato properly, it would seem, one must be a Heideggerian). What this means in less pretentious language is that rationality—whether one selects it or not—does not have any independence from the matrix of culture. See p. 42 and p. 61 of Political Platonism respectively.

[28] We would be inclined to read Althusser’s opposition to phenomenology—or Marxist “humanism”—as a reflection of the defusing of the class struggle in France; its retreat from quotidian life in the context of late capitalism. This made it practical to stress the non-phenomenal character of science—the way one doesn’t acquire the concept of H20 by swimming, for instance—and defend Marxism accordingly. It’s arguably for this reason why Dugin’s use of phenomenology just rehashes postmodernist conclusions: because in an age of epistemological confusion, of conspiracism in lieu of cognitive mapping, appeals to ‘experience’ only affirm the sameness of capitalist reality.

[29] Dugin, Foundations, 560.

[30] Alexander Dugin, Putin vs. Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right, trans. John B. Morgan IV, 383 in PDF (Budapest: Arktos, [2012] 2014), downloaded illegally as an e-book.

[31] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, [2013] 2014), 68-69. Note that this is Piketty’s own estimate based on available data.

[32] It also marginalizes the question of time, since—if Dugin really wants to reinforce and revive originary, non-linear conceptions of time—this would ipso facto require the rejection of the capitalism which is responsible for their repression.

[33] Short, Putin, 508.

[34] ibid., 441.

[35] “Russia’s church authorities did not engage its new parishioners in serious conversation about the modern world. Instead, they talked to them with the same didactic tone as the old ladies, telling them about their formal requirements to light candles before the church icons in a certain way, how to dress, and how to observe all the Orthodox fasts properly […] For the youngest Russians who have gotten used to online communities and virtual communication, the church’s stone buildings offer very little they can relate to.” Alexander Baunov, “Russians Are Getting Sick of Church,” Foreign Policy, June 12th, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/06/12/russians-are-getting-sick-of-church-orthodox-putin.

[36] Dugin, Fourth Political Theory, 199.

[37] ibid., 19.