The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

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.

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.

    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.

Dear friends: it is the final part of our geopolitical Serbian School experimental course. That is based on the previous lecture courses that are already made. I presume that you have understood well the previous courses. They are necessary to understand this final metaphysical and philosophical summary of multipolar approach to understand the very essence of modern situation concerning cultures, civilizations, societies, globalizations, and the place of identity in this context. Noology is the new philosophical discipline or approach developed by Romanian and Russian school of thought. There are two branches in noology; one Romanian and one Russian. Romanian is represented by philosopher Lucian Blaga and his kind of continuator, modern Professor Badescu. Russian noology is completely different but having the same sources of inspiration as developed in my person and my friends. I have published already 18 volumes of Noomahia, more or less 800 pages each one. So that is a kind of already made work. It is not finished yet. I’m working on the 20th book now. But it will have 21, maybe 22 volumes in all. So that is the project that is based on the special philosophical, metaphysical approach I try to explain in this course, in the ten lectures. They are very important because they are a kind of summary of everything said and done before. Excuse me for speaking English but the problem is not only that we lack the qualified translator from Russian to Serbian but there are kind of new created terms as well in Russian. For Russian to understand noomahia in Russian is difficult. For Serbia, it’s almost impossible because nobody can make a correct translation. If I would know Serbian well enough, I would prefer to make this lecture in Serbian but I doubt that there is someone besides myself that could make such philosophical translation. So excuse me for English in this course but I could stop or return to the point if you miss something.

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). 

China is recognized to be an independent and unique civilization by virtually everyone, and therefore there is no need to prove this. Rather, we are faced with attempting to reveal the structure of this civilization’s Logos and to determine as much as is possible its geosophical map both within the borders of China and beyond, as well as in its dialogue with neighboring civilizations.

Chinese culture has exercised an enormous and at times decisive influence on neighboring peoples, first and foremost on Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, all of which during certain eras held themselves to be part of Great China – not in the sense of political unity, but as indelible and organic parts of Chinese civilization and the Chinese horizon. This horizon also substantially impacted the peoples of Tibet as well as the nomads of Turan bordering China from the North. Moreover, we can encounter definite influences of the Chinese element among the peoples of Indochina and South-East Asia, such as in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, as well as, although to a lesser extent, Indonesia and the Philippines.

It is clear that the neoliberal elites have concentrated huge wealth and power by surpassing the aspects of body politics that has given birth to a state of anarchy. The neoliberal cult unashamedly claims, “We owe nothing to those whom we promised nothing.” That is besides the reality that they have plundered the wealth of ordinary masses. In this way, the neoliberal elites have affected the liberal ideals, such as liberty, justice and equality, without giving logical justification and propositions for the existing ills.

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.

The New Metaphysics, which describes the ontological situation of extreme despair and the completely God-forsaken world, took shape in my consciousness in the early 1980s under the impression of my grasp of Traditionalist thought (Guénon, Evola, Schuon, etc.) and under the conditions of late Sovietism. Being attracted to the Hermetic tradition, I went to a chemical shop and asked for sulfur, mercury, and salt, to which the clerk replied with scant courtesy that they did not have any of the above, and that everything could only be distributed on approved ration coupons anyway. I didn’t have any coupons, nor any permission. Thus, for the first time, I laid out the approaches to the “New Metaphysics” in an unpublished article written in 1985, Sverkhchelovek (“Übermensch”). The essential point of this article boiled down to reflecting on the Nietzschean definition of the Übermensch, as described in detail by Evola in his Ride the Tiger. “The Victor over God and Nothingness” – I interpreted this formula as the essence of a special metaphysical program. “God is dead,” exclaimed the madman in Nietzsche’s work, “and we have killed him, you and I!” Man defeated God, and God retreated. This is desacralization. The sacred left. What is left? Nothing. After all, the sacred was the essence of everything, the center of being. After the death of God (victory over God), nothingness or “modern nihilism” (Nietzsche) was discovered. 

 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. 

The past is a Foreign country, these are the famous words of V.I Hartley but future is a quest; a quest for destiny, a quest for identity and a quest for order. History has always been ambiguous because facts are hard to establish, and reality is built on prejudices, misconception and ignorance of our perception and knowledge. When we talk about the twentieth century, it ended with the end of ideological conflict and marked the beginning of a new era in which ordinary masses began to define themselves in terms of culture and religion.

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.

The Globalists might appear to be looking for some kind of increased living standards and opportunities for people in a world without borders, new destinies for migrants happily moving without documents to foreign territories, but this story, this narrative of the earlier, rosy Open Society and early liberalism is only for the news. The most foundational, responsible, and realistic thinkers of speculative realism have already arrived at a different agenda. Their commentaries, criteria, terms, and projects are much closer to this active demonic nihilism. Here we can recall Friedrich Georg Junger’s words that where there are no gods, there are titans. There is no void. Where there are no angels, there are beasts. If we close the world egg on the top, we open it from the bottom. If we refuse God, the Devil comes. Man doesn’t come, as man can only stand so much in place without God. It turns out that the one who nudged man to kill God was not man himself, not of his own will, but rather the one standing behind him who, according to skepticism and rationalism, isn’t supposed to exist. The Devil pushed man to assert that there is no God, that there is only the material world, and now he is saying: “Greetings, my dear, you have done what I requested. It is I, I am Reza Negarestani, I am object-oriented ontology, I am progress, I am the 3D printer, now I will print you and your offspring, and everything will be well.” Gradually, humanity will be “packaged” in the supermarket of dark enlightenment.

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.

Why are we talking more about liberalism? Because, unlike the ideological conditions of the twentieth century, today socialism is not particularly influential and, moreover, does not have the ability to totalitarianly dictate its ideological principles. Also, socialists today have almost no influence on the definition of basic legal categories. And if they do, then in the case of China or North Korea, then only on a regional scale and moreover, an adequate assessment of this influence requires a thorough analysis of such legal systems as Chinese or North Korean. And there everything is far from what it seems to an outside observer. But it goes without saying that the ban on ideology should concern not only liberals, but also leftists.

“Huntington could foresee that instead of ideology, modernisation, westernisation, technological assertion, there is some core of self-consciousness or identity that is more stable and stronger. I think he could see that we are coming to this moment, this deep truth of fundamental spiritual identity of civilizations, as they appear on the historical scene after the collapse of liberalism—the last utopic modern political theory.”

“Liberalism is obsolete as Putin has said recently, and instead of it, civilizations reappear, and now the problem is what will be the multipolar order? What are the borders, and that is very important and significant. What are the numbers of civilizations that are ready or not yet? What will be the juridical aspect of civilizational? All that has to be decided now. We live in the moment that nothing is as yet decided, but everything is put under question,” Mr. Dugin observed

Therefore this Mahdi does not become angry except for God's sake, so that his anger does not go beyond (what is required in) upholding God's limits[xlviii] that He has prescribed; this is just the opposite of the (ordinary) person who becomes angry because of his own desires or (something happening) contrary to his own personal aims. And likewise the person who becomes angry (only) for God's sake can only be just and equitable, not tyrannical and unjust. Now a sign of whoever (rightfully) lays claim to this spiritual station is that if he becomes angry for God's sake while acting in judgment and upholding the (divinely prescribed) penalty against the person with whom he is angry, then his anger disappears once he has finished fulfilling (that religious duty)—(to the extent that) sometimes he may even go up to the (condemned) person and embrace him and be friendly with him, saying to him "Praise be to God Who has purified you!" and openly showing his happiness and pleasure with him. And sometimes (the condemned man) also becomes friendly with (his judge) after that, for this (inner fulfillment and realization of the divine commands) is God's Scale (of Justice), and all of (God's) Mercy comes back to that condemned man

Pyotr Volkov: In Central America, the US political domination existed long before it reached South America. The US political and cultural domination of the South America began after 1947 with the demise of the British empire and the start of the Cold War.  Britain’s domination of our economy brought us a lot of technological progress but U.S domination of our economy brought the very opposite. If it wasn’t for the anti-Yankee sentiment, the U.S would had brought our people down to the Middle Ages.

Iurie Roșca: You are writing a lot in your book about Russian Orthodox Faith and about spiritual issues in general. Is it because of your Russian roots or because of your interest in the spiritual decadence of Modernity?  As we all know such decadence grew catastrophic during the current historical period of globalization and the Western ”culture of death”

Pyotr Volkov: I must admit that my preoccupation for the spiritual decadence of Modernity is something painful   that sometimes it keeps me awake at night, it just makes me sick. Despite my distant Russianroots,  I felt like some kind of superior force or reason guided me all along this path. Following this path is the entire reason of my earthly existence, anyone is in need of a true reason to live  or die.

These three paradigms can be provisionally placed along a vertical axis between the “here” (ενταύθα) and the “there” (εκείνα), between Earth and Heaven, between cause and effect, between the yield and the source, and so on. Each Logos builds its own universe and presents itself as the master and “demiurge.” Therefore, from a noological point of view, we are dealing not with one world but three whose paradigms conflict with one another and each encompass an infinite number of cosmic layers, hierarchies, and life cycles. It might be said that the Noomachy unfolds between these three Logoi in their vying for domination, and the reverberations of this primordial struggle are projected within these three noological universes, thus giving rise to internal battles, conflicts, splits, and oppositions. By virtue of implosion, this paradigmatic “three-way war” collapses each of the Logoi, immersing their content, structures, and “populations” into a funnel of fundamental catastrophes. Studying Noomakhia therefore demands a more careful dissection of these three Logoi. Each of them can be presented as a philosophical country, organized in accordance with certain rules with their own extended geography and topology of central and peripheral zones, and with a number of internal levels and both common and local hierarchies. These three noological countries are the country of Apollo, the country of Dionysus, and the country of Cybele (the Great Mother). 

The classic expression of this order was the ancient epoch of Mediterranean societies beginning with the Achaean conquests and Homeric Greece. Such a system was characteristic of Ancient Greece and Rome with the exception of periods of decline distinguished by a strengthening of the political positions of “urban dwellers”, who represented a mixture of higher castes with uprooted peasants that gave birth to a new type of merchant hitherto alien to classical Indo-European societies. This type of merchant could have taken shape through the degradation and materialization of the warrior caste (which Plato describes in his Republic as the phenomenon of timocracy), or from below through a specific deviation from social type on the part of former peasants or urban artisans. It cannot be ruled out that this was the result of influences that were altogether foreign to the Indo-European cultural circle, such as Phoenician or, more broadly, Semitic cultures, for whom trade was a widespread social occupation. In the city-states of Greece, “urban dwellers” and “citizens”, i.e., “townspeople”, formed a specific social milieu in which the three classical functions of Indo-European society found parodical manifestation. In the very least, this is what Aristotle presented in his Politics. The authority of king-priests (the sacred monarchy) transformed into tyranny. The domination of the warrior aristocracy gave way to domination by a financial oligarchy. The organic self-government of ethnically homogeneous and solidary communities (polity) became “democracy”, or the power of the sporadic and disparate crowd unified only by territory of urban residence.