The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

We were very close to it in the Dusan the Strong in your history, with the first and the second Bulgarian Kingdoms in the history of Bulgarians, we were close some time in the Polish Kingdom with Lithuanian and Great Moravia as well with some philosophical tendency. But we have never achieved the final version of this Logos in Eastern Europe, as well in Russia. We didn’t achieve the final version of Logos. Our existential horizon is not finished. It hasn’t received the last form. And that maybe is our historical challenge. And Slavophile thinkers saw that we came to the history later than the other when there was already a huge building of German philosophy, German political history, French philosophy, Roman philosophy, Greek philosophy, and as well political history. We Slavs have arrived to this a little later, not in the history, but to the understanding of history, to Logos of history, and to our philosophy. Our philosophy is a little bit childish and infantile. There is great example, great explosion of intellectual richness of precious thinkers such as Petar II Petrović-Njegoš metaphysical as well, Russian Dostoyevsky but all that is a kind of feeling of coming of our Logos and not the Logos itself. We are living in the anticipation of the Slav Logos. And when we study the past, we see many heroic deeds but we could not say that is our Logos. No. That is something like that. There is Saint Sava in Serbia. That’s anticipation of the Serbian mission, of the history. The creation of Nemanja Dynasty, Russian Ivan the Terrible and the other moments in our Slavic history are anticipation of Logos and not the Logos itself. That’s my personal opinion and it’s more difficult to describe our own Logos than to study the Logos of the other because it demands very deep introspection inside in our culture.

n our European civilization, we have two existential horizons and two daseins. One is the Logos of Apollo represented by the official ideology, three functional ideology, and the other is the Logos of Cybele. That is very important in the shadow part, in our subconscious, in the mother tradition. It is a part of the second parallel, hidden, or secret ideology. It is not the void. It is an ideology that is present in our societies but is not obvious, is not explicit. It is an implicit Logos of Cybele but is still alive because we are living in the civilization with the huge part of agriculture system and economy because we continue to produce and to consume the agriculture and food and we are sedentary. This level which we could individuate put the concept of the Logos of Cybele, not to the ancient types, but the Logos of Cybele exists now inside of ourselves, because our society is partly based precisely on this moment of noomahia. But noomahia is a continuing process. We could not once and forever grant the victory of one logos. If the Logos of Apollo weakens, that means that some other pole will become stronger. If the patriarchy dissolves (which is the case now in modernity), the other counter-current begins to appear, becomes more and more explicit, not implicit. That is the most important result of this noological analysis.

    And we could regard this existential horizon as space where the people live, Lebensraum. But at the same time, it could not exist without human being, without people, without language, without tradition. If you put the mixed population in some space you don’t get this existential space. It is not Dasein. And that is very difficult example in our history - Kalingrad people by Russian that was Prussia people by Baltic tribes, invaded by Germans, assimilated, and after that taken by us and we have put the Germans aside. So that is space Russian, not so German, no, Baltic, no. There is the place, the people there living, the culture, and the history but there is no Dasein. So a part of territory of the space is evacuated from existential aspect. It’s very special conditions. I have studied Serbian history and that is kind of this idea of migration of Serbs that created the similar idea where are the borders of Serbia. Where is Serbians, the bearers of Serbia? Or could the Serbs exist without Serbian motherland or not? It is open question. So that is a kind of exilic tradition. So it deals with the problem of existential Dasein. Existential Dasein is not the territory. And that is not only the people. It is the relation, the Sein (being) to the place, existential relations of the being to the place that passes through the people, through the cultures, through the humans, through the thought. It’s very particular concept but it’s very important to geosophy because geosophy studies precisely existential horizons. It is the relations of the being to the space that goes through the culture, through the language, through the tradition, through the identity. So that is very important category of geosophy.

Today the West is imposing not its system, but its systemlessness, not its obviousness, but its doubt, not its assertion, but its deep internal crisis. When we join the global network, we do not receive a new identity and we do not come into contact with a new world. We simply irrevocably surrender to the storage room with a forgotten entry code those remnants of what made us who we were before and that reality in which we lived before. The act of dropping old certitudes and definitions is quite specific: it is a passport to the “new times”, a credit card for complicity in globalism, a mandatory requirement, and all those who reject this “initiation into globalism” automatically end up on blacklists, henceforth deemed agents of the “axis of evil” – after all, they did not catch the “latest news” that the world and the human are dead (following the death of God). 

Over the course of this struggle, the flame of the “resurrection of the spiritual North”, the flame of Hyperborea, will transform geopolitical reality. The new global ideology will be that of Final Restoration, putting a final end to the geopolitical history of civilizations – but this will not be the end which the globalist spokesmen of the End of History have theorized. The materialistic, atheistic, anti-sacred, technocratic, Atlanticist version of the End will give way to a different epilogue – the final Victory of the sacred Avatar, the coming of the Great Judgement, which will grant those who chose voluntary poverty the kingdom of spiritual abundance, while those who preferred wealth founded on the assassination of the Spirit will be condemned to eternal damnation and torment in hell.

 Dugin enters into scene in a modernity which is crumbling but threatens to take to the grave the human essence itself with it. His rebellion is projected revolution over the earthly and the political action, without pretending in any way to transcend Dasein, which is an imperative task for each people. His proposal demands a new historical principle which culminates completely the end of modernity founding a new epochal life over the return of the sacred and eternal archetypes. For Gómez Dávila, this would be the return of the sign of Christ; its historical praxis: the devotion to the miracle. For Dugin, the aegis of his Russian Orthodox Church, which reaffirms however, a plural comprehension of the gods: the logos of each people.

The circle of sacred animals is apportioned according to the logic of the five elements: the Black Turtle or Snake is associated with Water and the Underworld (the land of the Yellow Springs); the Yellow Dragon with Wood, the East, and the Spring Equinox; the Red Phoenix with the South and the Summer Solstice; the White Tiger with Metal, the West, and the Autumnal Equinox; and the Yellow Unicorn (qilin) with Earth and the Center. All of these sacred beings, however, are described as having a whole complex set of properties, such as horns, the tails of snakes or fish, wings, paws, scales, etc. In other words, all of them are pantheria, or “all-beasts” featuring elements of other animals. They are proto-animals, spirits, and sacred symbols containing the powers of the fivefold rhythm of the dispensation of Yin-Yang. In some sense, they might be called “gods” or “onto-logoi” insofar as they exhibit the most general synthetic powers conjugated with each of the elements; but as living and personified beings, they embody these powers in a concentrated form drawn towards a single pole. Appealing to the pantheria is a kind of spell of the elements which, in order for it to be possible to be evoked, must have personal traits. 

Today we assist not only huge geopolitical transformations in the balance of leading world power (the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity), but as well the deep ideological changes. Concretely in the Middle East we see how important is still the role of USA, Israel and European Union on one hand, how Russian and China presence changes the situation in region, and how different Islamic countries and different tendencies in Islam confront or ally with each other. So there is ideological – sometimes theological dimension behind the geopolitics and we cannot any more reduce the problems to simply national States competition or East-West ideological opposition. We need new tools of analysis that would explore the ideological ground and project it on the geopolitical map. We are in need of new kind of mapping the space. And that concerns Middle Eastern space much more than any other. Because it is here where main trends are redefined now.

This is the phenomenological, Heideggerian foundation of object-oriented ontology: the object continues to be a constituted subject. Not the strong, hard subject which wields it - and this is where Deleuze’s proposal comes in - the paranoid subject which reinforces itself and dissects others, but one which begins to dissolve itself and becomes schizophrenic. This “subject”, according to Deleuze and Guattari, dissipates itself into schizo-masses. With this gradual self-denial, self-splitting, this kind of metaphysical suicide, Dasein begins to endow objects with its own decomposition which enlivens these objects. For instance, in David Lynch’s films, such as in the Twin Peaks series, the character speaks with his own leg. When the character gets lost in the woods, he suddenly starts to speak to his own leg, which responds with its own voice. In other words, the leg, a subordinate, mute, obedient thing, a slave to the human brain, suddenly demonstrates the qualities of autonomy, has its own preferences as to where to go, can be angry, and so on. This is, as object-oriented ontologists say, a kind of “parliament organs”, a “parliament of things” or…as Bruno Latour says the new ontologies of the creation of hybrids between subjects and objects. The talking leg is one example of the constitution of independent objects. Thus, the object of object-oriented ontology becomes a reality, the object acquires independence significance from the subject insofar as the subject is abolished. And this object itself will be extinguished.

The subject is not so much “done away with” as it is abandoned. In this case, the subject is understood not as a pre-phenomenological subject, but post-phenomenological, Dasein.

Martin Heidegger’s influence looms large over the field of political theory. Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and others are among Heidegger’s sometimes rebellious, sometimes reverential intellectual offspring. But on the whole they and other political theorists responding to Heidegger tend to depart from his account of philosophy or his ideas about the relationship between philosophy and politics. This paper will argue that the Russian thinker Alexander Dugin, who tracks Heidegger much more closely than other theorists do, should be included in the list of philosophically serious and important political-theoretic Heidegger receptions. Including Dugin among receptions of Heidegger brings to light forgotten or suppressed possibilities of Heideggerian political philosophy not reducible to Nazism. Dugin's use of Dasein in particular provides a fruitful starting point for comparisons with liberal, leftist, and other uses of Dasein among political theorists.