The beginning of Summer 2024 has turned out to be a turning point. One of the single most significant events of the 21st century, long in the making but never necessarily expected to happen, has taken place.

Tucker Carlson, who in a short span of time has arguably become the foremost representative of American dissidence and dissonance, introduced Prof. Alexander Dugin to millions of viewers, on the new alternative version of “prime time TV,” and he also paid respect to Daria. Dugin is now, to use American terms, the world’s most “aired”, “famous” and hence “viewed” philosopher — and the invocation of Daria is no less prominent.

There are many “philosophers” in the stale, academic, simulacral misuse of the term, but Dugin is the only Great Philosopher today in the primordial, spiritual sense. In fact, those few in the West who, like me, grew up with and live by Dugin’s thinking, know that Dugin is the only one in the 21st century who has restored the term, notion, and undertaking of “philosophy” to its original meaning, richness, role, fate, and horizons. In our days, it is only because of and thanks to Dugin that Philosophy has become a positive word again, a hopeful casting out into the horizon, a seeking worth seeking, a wisdom whose undertaking is wise, appropriate, and needed. Because and only because Dugin has re-transformed philosophy into the cosmic and spiritual horizons to which it was originally meant to aspire in ecstasy as well as sobriety. Dugin has reminded and originally shown us what it means to think the essence of reality and the essence of our “reality,” and therefore his thought has no interlocutors in this pseudo-philosophical wasteland. At most, accordingly, his thought has been caricatured by Western journalists and “criticized” by wanna-be dissidents whose pseudo-thinking has never risen above the memes and feed-data that served as their “being pilled.” In the meanwhile, the powers-that-be have resorted to trying to kill him. Can you even fathom the meaning of this beyond “democratic,” “human rights” clichés?

This ominous event cannot be underestimated. If the proper words, terminologies, and approaches to explaining its significance seem to be wanting, then this is only because we are dealing with a gargantuan, profound, incalculable shift which no one has been able to anticipate, much less keep up with. Dugin’s unassailable thinking has been externally battered in ways which no others know: Dugin has been sanctioned, his books banned, his daughter was killed, his collaborators have been persecuted, and, as I can attest on my own behalf as well as others who are understandably more cautious, those seeking to translate his thought have found themselves in the crosshairs of the powers-that-be. Do you even know what it means to be sanctioned, or to have to leave a country, or to be “de-platformed” (what a newspeak term!) because of thinking and translating? I will never forget when I discovered Dugin’s writings for the first time, nor will I ever forget when certain agents, who have never opened a book in their lives, were dispatched to enforce intimidation and threaten prosecution over the very prospect of translating and publishing books. Surely, there is nothing left.

Now we will soon be dealing with two contingent reactions: on the one hand, many profiles representing individuals and groups who don’t think and who shouldn’t even be breathing will spam their quoted comments about Dugin and demand wrath; on the other hand, many well-intending people who have read the little that is available of Dugin in English will now seek to go on the offensive without realizing that they have not even become acquainted with 10% of Dugin’s oeuvre, thinking, legacy, and existentiality, all of which are still in the making. The point is not about reading the other 90% (even though, of course, such would be healthily transformative as is so desperately needed) but about learning to think with Dugin. From one angle, learning to think with Dugin means no less than mastering hundreds, even thousands of tomes, and dozens, even a hundred languages, and millennia, even hundreds of millennia of history, and above all eternity — only so as to find oneself in the same situation in which Dugin was born as a thinker, in the darkest depths of a world in which you have nothing to grab onto besides the sheer, impossible, “post-sacral” will to become a Radical Self, to generate dozens of volumes of Noomakhia, to manifest the vision and vibration of geopolitics, and to theorize the extreme limits of all theories and prepare the ground for an “other beginning” which has no guaranteed continuers. Dugin is the name of the boundary of thinking, the first and final station of a journey which none of us can name…

With the rays emitted by the interview, something has happened that cannot be contained in any of the hitherto frameworks, and it is therefore the interpretations of this event that will establish the frameworks of the future. We find ourselves suspended in a world-historic transition, a metaphysical passage, an “interregnum” becoming a time of decision. Dugin is now poised to suddenly, unexpectedly become a virtual “household” name, his few published works in English will soon become liable clichés parodied and capitalized upon by lesser beings, and maybe even an academic field of “Duginology” will finally emerge… and none of them will grasp the point. “Duginism” is a despicably poor, quasi-journalistic trope whose pathetic originators are well known and now parasitically live off the scraps of doomed regimes’ grants, and “Duginology” might become a surrogate activity against thinking, a castrated historiography instead of and against the historic emerging and calling of the era that falls before its thoughtful momentum.

To be clear, we should welcome hundreds and thousands of articles and essays on Dugin’s thought. Let seeds be thrown and sown. And — should the few of us be brave enough and in a position to rise to the occasion — it is long since due that Dugin’s works be translated and published by those competent and attuned to the words and world at stake. The reason for the posing of a dilemma now is the dialectic of question and answer: Will Dugin become a headline and hashtag, or will Dugin rightfully be the name of the author who has been thinking the most and whose wake is ever waiting for thinkers in the last moment? None of this depends on Dugin, who has been thinking, writing, doing, and teaching for more than 40 years; it depends on you, on us.

Given that, as far as I can attest here, certain authorities are ready to prosecute for translating and publishing Dugin (and will do much beforehand anyway), and given that, as far as I’ve experienced along with others, writing about Dugin will get you censored and expelled from institutions, it is perhaps the greatest challenge and blessing that the real task now is learning and thinking with Dugin. I know two generations of Russians who know this even without the censorship, and I know two generations of Westerners who are learning this, however problematically, belatedly, shyly, and deprived of prospects, never rising up to compensate for what has been lost and granted but always aspiring to find a way to meaningfully think and live no matter what.

Now, as Dugin becomes widely known, all the work that we have failed to or simply couldn’t do, all the thoughts that have remained unsaid, all the vistas that remained unvisited, all the resonances that have fallen silent, and all the falsifications that have gone unexposed — now the time is dawning to see everything through. There is no method, only truth, only revealing. There is no expected reward, only the trials and tribulations of the soul hearkening into the gap. There is no solution, only resolutions (being resolute) to interpret, to bear forth, to behold what is staring back at us in ourselves through Dugin, through his Russia, through philosophizing with a hammer while in meditation and combat at the same koan-time, and in the “ahead” to which we might yet turn our minds in spite of all the talking heads. Dugin has given us everything that a teacher can, and we have everything to learn, assimilate, and follow through.

There is, moreover, far beyond the horizons of the seemingly immediate moment, a particularly acute question which deserves to be treated in many ways. It has in some ways been beckoned and yet remained unsaid in Dugin’s thought, and has been broached by some others who have learned from his thinking, but it is generally forgotten or never even realized among enthusiasts. It concerns the same fact rediscovered by Dugin’s teachers and which Dugin has rediscovered in particularly manifold ways for us. We are in the Kali-Yuga, the End Times. Things will not get better, only worse. The onset of multipolarity, the return of Eurasia, the “popularization” of Dugin, the dissemination of the Traditionalists and Heidegger, etc., are a possibility, an opportunity, that is preordained, favorable, but not necessarily “successful” — in the sense of “accomplished” as well as “fully succeed-able” or “fully expecting successors.” What does it mean — as Dugin once pondered upon his own incarnation in the Soviet underground — that Dugin’s thought shall burst into the open in impossible midsts? What does it mean, if the few of us were to take the offensive and risk much to translate and publish a few dozen more of his books, that Dugin could be more “readable” or “aired”? What did it mean, for instance, for Tantrik works to be translated into the European languages and appear in the West in the depths of modernity? And what does it mean that a great philosopher, great because he has both pondered and critically reflected on such phenomena, might finally “appear” and be “translated” in the lands of dying, persecution, and degeneration? Is a “new beginning” upon us, or is it the end that is ahead, whereupon this is our last breath that, although it can never be full, might yet still be drawn?

It is possible that Daria re-presented to us an essential dimension of Dugin’s legacy: it is eschatological optimism that remains first and foremost and ultimately.

It is possible that the fact of the most widely-viewed American journalist-turned-dissident interviewing Dugin is a momentous sign, an omen of proportions that can hardly be surmised.. but one for which Dugin has dared and given so much to show us the way to take all of this as our own stake, our own challenge, our own, as he called it, rupture of “eschatological gnosis” or “meta-metaphysics.” Dugin is still waiting for interlocutors all the while as we seem to be waiting for "Dugins"...

If a “new beginning” is upon us, then we need new beginners, “beginners anew.” If it is the end that we’ll live to foresee, then we need proper “enders,” truly conclusive discerners whose fingers point to what is behind the moon. For the past few decades, only Dugin has been thinking and forging the end and the beginning… alone, on a tragic, dramatic, beautiful, hard-earned, powerful, promising path. No one, save for a tiny few, has really followed this path, much less learned, internalized, or re-thought its imperatives, meaning, and consequences.

Dear Professor Dugin, esteemed Alexander Gelyevich, please forgive those of us who will not live up to what you have bequeathed, please know that we know that what you have done goes far beyond more than a few lifetimes of dedication, and please know that, when Tucker Carlson said that you were “aired,” many of us few in fact reflected and were dwelling upon the ether, where what is supposed to become “real” first hovers and calls for decisive thinking, speaking, and living. "The eternal not yet..."

Continental Consciousness