Heidegger and post-colonial fascism

Abstract

Alexander Dugin is considered a fringe figure in contemporary Russia. Yet, his writings exert considerable influence and develop a virulent nationalism that exploits the vocabulary of post-colonial resistance in an unaccustomed way. Dugin should not be ignored, and this article gives a brief account of Dugin’s peculiar brand of post-colonial thinking by reference to its central source: Martin Heidegger. Specifically, the article examines how Dugin adapts the anti-metaphysical thinking of Heidegger’s most radical work of the 1930s – a thinking that seeks to renew Western thought in an other beginning – to the context of modern Russia as it tries to free itself from Western (American) domination. Dugin aims at nothing less than the creation of a new Russian identity and destiny that will not only save Russia but also, in a nod to Heidegger, renew the Western tradition itself from the “outside.” If Dugin’s political project is ambitious, so is his interpretation of Heidegger which attempts to bring out the full radicality of Heidegger’s thinking, both as philosophy and as politics.

Keywords:

• Dugin
• fascism
• Heidegger
• post-colonialism

Notes

1. While Dugin no longer manages his own institute at the University of Moscow, he still has access to considerable resources through Evrasia, an organization that has a sophisticated website which distributes a wealth of information concerning current events from a notably nationalistic perspective. Perhaps no one has done more to raise awareness about Dugin intelligently than Marlene Laruelle. See Laruelle (2012, 107–144).

2. We refer throughout to the “other beginning” (der andere Anfang) following Heidegger’s practice. Dugin himself likely alludes to this other beginning, though the translation as given in the book title (filosofia drugogo nachala) is also possible based on the ambiguity created in Russian by the lack of indefinite and definite articles. We note that the publishing house Dugin's book is operated by a white nationalist, Richard Spencer, who happens to be the translator’s husband.

3. The word fascism is notoriously difficult to define because, unlike Marxism, it lacks a central theorist. We follow Robert Paxton and George Mosse in defining fascism as an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that embraces a violent politics of particularity. At its core, fascism opposes both liberalism and egalitarianism, while expressing a deep disdain for the bourgeois life of comfort and security (see Mosse 2000; Paxton 2005).

4. There seems to be a defense of Platonism as having a distinctively Russian dimension at work here; more crudely put, Dugin may simply not wish to run afoul of the Orthodox Church.

5. And in a far more comprehensive and radical sense than hinted at by Pierre Bourdieu (1991) in his famous study.

6. Dugin seems to follow Heidegger here in seeking a change that is “more than” revolutionary. Heidegger’s attitude to revolution is decidedly equivocal. The Black Notebooks suggest that he sought change so radical that revolution as hitherto understood would be an inadequate term. See Heidegger (2014b, 48, 53).

7. Heidegger himself brings into question the notion of being as “general.” See Heidegger (1994, 53–68).

8. This move is also a highly controversial aspect of Heidegger’s thinking. How might one get beyond the limits set by the contexts of a tradition? Derrida, for one, denies that this move is possible. See Derrida (1989, 31–36).

9. Dugin relies frequently not only on the Contributions to Philosophy but another manuscript unpublished in Heidegger’s lifetime called The History of Beyng (Die Geschichte des Seyns). In that volume, Heidegger puts the matter succinctly by suggesting that the first move in getting beyond metaphysics is to think Being in itself and not through beings. See Heidegger (1998b, 131).

10. While parody is not likely the right term to use in the case of Heidegger, the forgetfulness of being seems quite clearly an acerbic reflection on the notion of salubrious forgetfulness developed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality (1994).

11. Or, perhaps, because of their success insofar as Plato and Aristotle represent both a peak and decline – their efforts moved farther in exploration than their predecessors but also gave answers that turned into doctrines or dogmas that remain with us to this day.

12. As noted, Dugin refers to volume 69 of Heidegger’s Collected Edition (1998b) frequently, and it is in this volume that Heidegger provides a substantial account of the notion of the land of evening or Abendland. In so doing, Dugin alludes to Hegel’s owl of Minerva in a way that tries to pay heed to two masters: Hegel and Heidegger. For if Hegel views the owl of Minerva as denoting an end, Heidegger’s view is oriented just as much to an end as a beginning resulting from that end.

13. Heidegger anticipated that the kairos of revolution may not be right in his “revolutionary” speech, the “Self-Assertion of the German University,” when he noted that it took the Greeks “three centuries just to put the question of what knowledge is upon the right basis and on a secure path.” It may take time indeed to transition beyond entrenched habits of mind to the other beginning.

14. Krell (2015) subscribes to what we may call the “madness theory” that attributes Heidegger’s radicalism of the 1930s to a “tragic collapse” or diminution of philosophical power. We find evidence of neither madness nor collapse (unless the madness at issue is the kind of philosophical madness Plato refers to in the Phaedrus). We wonder to what extent the “madness theory” is exculpatory, allowing one to protect the “good” Heidegger of Being and Time (1962), the great philosopher, from the “reckless adventurer” of the 1930s. For a more sober approach (which ends up, however, as a kind of apologia), see Malpas (2016).

15. Heidegger could not be blunter on this point when he writes: “Nihilism reaches its peak in Americanism” (2014c, 225). Heidegger’s orientation to Russia was not unusual among conservative German intellectuals of the interwar period. The conservative revolutionary, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, considered Russia a nation of the future, a “young people” (along with the United States and Germany), though lamentably Marxist. While Bruck (1923) is perhaps best known for his book, The Third Empire ([1923] 2012), he is important also as the sponsor for the first collected edition of Dostoevsky into German (1906). The Third Empire has recently been translated ([1923] 2012) by Arktos Press which also publishes translations of Dugin and other figures of the European right. One of the remarkable aspects, indeed, of Bruck’s notion of a third empire is its potential derivation from the Russian notion of a third Rome. In either case, a particular nation is bound to save Europe, a claim repeated by Heidegger himself after 1933 in regard to Germany’s destiny.

16. Obviously, Heidegger left behind “lasting” traces. Yet, it is fair to say that he strove to create writings that perplex, challenge, disquiet, and, thus, remain “alive” to engender further acts of creation long after their inception, much like the philosopher he seeks to overcome – Plato (see Phaedrus, 274b–277e).

17. We mean revenge against the passing away of time, revenge against the “it was,” as Nietzsche put it: “This, yes, this alone is revenge itself: the will’s revulsion against time and its ‘It was.’” See Heidegger’s discussion of this sentence from Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Heidegger (2004, 92–97).

18. Schmitt writes: “When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent” (2007, 54).

19. Strauss indeed suggests that Schmitt’s attempt to rescue politics from the liberal democratic consensus, a sort of universalism, is too caught up in that universalism: it frames the attack on universalism by relying on that universalism to grant unquestioned authority to that attack. As Strauss puts it,

If, then, according to Schmitt’s actual opinion, the position of the political can be traced back to the position of the moral, how does that position square with the polemic, which pervades his whole text, against the primacy of morals over the politics? … He remains trapped in the view that he is attacking. (Schmitt 2007, 119)

20. Perhaps Heidegger put it most bluntly in the Black Notebooks: “Science (Wissenschaft) and morals have destroyed thinking” (Heidegger 2015, 234).