The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

So we consider the modernity not as the fate 'cause we have it now and we will have it tomorrow, and we are obliged to be modern’ and so on. Traditionalists affirm that to be modern is a decision. You can be modern or you can be not modern. And they have created two concepts - the tradition and the modernity. So modernity is not something actual. That is a kind of society or civilization or world vision or picture of the reality. That is one thing. And there is tradition. That is the picture of reality, the civilization, the culture, and the society that is different. And between them, affirmed the traditionalists, there is antagonism. That is very important because that gives us the possibility to study modernity not as something inevitable but as something that is the product of concrete historical development based on concrete sequence of decisions and choices.

I have already mentioned Edmund Husserl and his concept of intentionality. According to Husserl, intentional act is the act directed towards something that exists outside of our mind but that has no quality in it. So any quality that we are dealing with is inside of mind. Husserl calls that noema. The process of intentional act is noesis and noema is something that is thought of. So we are dealing with the qualities of the objects that are inherent to our process of thought and not exterior to it. So that is phenomenology. Heidegger is a continuation to this phenomenological tradition as are many others. But Gilbert Durand proposes a different way to this phenomenological approach and he speaks about the regimes of imagination. That is very important. Gilbert Durand affirms that our imagination works in three regimes. And that is very very close to the concept of three logos. Now we are going to see how. Regime of imagination is a kind of inner state of the structure of human mind that creates different sequences of basic principle images, symbols and structure. According to Gilbert Durand, there are three regimes. First is diurne, which is the regime of day. That is the regime of light that is based on the concept of strict duality. So there are strict and absolute differences. So when we divide and separate (regime of diurne is to separate, not unite, only separate) everything is clear as in the daylight. And this regime as well is a regime of vertical organization of the space. It is linked, according to Durand, with the postural reflexes of the child. When the child begins to stay in vertical position, it is considered by imagination as a flight. He is a kind of arrow that is going to the heaven. That is the flight. 

We are continuing our lectures dedicated to Noology, philosophical discipline about consciousness, human mind, and the thought. Today we have two lectures. The third lecture has the name ‘Logos of Indo-European Civilization.’ So now we are going to apply the methodological principles explained in the previous two lectures to concrete objects and to concrete civilizations. We have spoken about the three Logos theory and the concept of existential horizon and the Historical. So now we are going to apply that to Indo-European culture. First of all when we are speaking about existential space, we can apply this concept to different scales, to small communities, to middle sized communities, or to big communities, for example united by the similar or same linguistic origins. And now we are going to speak about Indo-European existential space. What is Indo-European existential space? It is one of the largest forms of unity. Indo-European existential space coincides with the space where people speaking Indo-European languages live. What are Indo-European languages? That is Roman, Latin, Greek, German, Celt, Slavic, Persian, Indian Sanskrit and the other Prakrit languages, Hittite in Ancient Anatolia, Phrygian, Thracian, Illyrian (the ancestors of Albanians), and Balts more or less. What is interesting is that gypsies as well belong to this linguistic community because the language of the gypsy is also Indo-European. Their origins are uncertain but they speak in Indo-European languages. As well, Yiddish, a Jewish language, (a German language essentially) belongs to the European family. That is more or less the space populated by the people speaking these languages that enter in this Indo-European ecumene, Indo-European existential horizon. That is a huge amount of space, of peoples, of histories, very contradictory and conflictual, but at the same time that covers people speaking Indo-European languages. That is existential space.

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.