THE MELODRAMATIC SATANISM OF ALEXANDER DUGIN

This passage is an excerpt from Branko Malic's essay "Against the Gnostics," which can be found at his website Kali Tribune.    

Alexander Dugin

                                               by Branko Malic

Much like Heidegger, Alexander Dugin impresses the gullible with his rants “against the modern world” but is in fact embracing the modern world all too eagerly. The purpose of the "Fourth political theory" is not to reject but rather to appropriate the Transition.

In this respect it is astonishing how Dugin at one time can use Rene Guenon’s insights to prove the destructiveness of Western political metaphysics, while just few pages later he’ll embrace the gender theory and its “insights” about the “Death of phallocentric Logos” in order to prove equality of civilisation matrixes ranging from Greek polis to cannibal village, to be incorporated into “multipolar world”. To think in this way is possible precisely because to him the foundation of thought is a pure nothingness, building a virtual image of Tradition while utterly rejecting it by its very nature. Thence politicizing the metaphysics, bringing down angels to play geopolitical games, all peppered with peculiar Orthodox nationalist mysticism, something this author to his misfortune recognizes all too well from bitter experience denied to his more fortunate Western readers.

Good friends we have and good friends we lost … along the way: Dugin’s former friend Edička Limonov and his nowadays friend Radovan Karadžić talking all things philosophical while contemplating besieged Sarajevo. Finally, Limonov takes a few potshots with heavy machine gun at the city. Fingers crossed he didn’t disembowel anyone. 

But, at the same time, Aleksander Dugin is important, even as a un-thinker. If for nothing else, then to point out how melodramatic "either-or" choices are not a luxury we can safely enjoy these days. The Fourth political theory is precisely such choice, but with somewhat exotic, Gnostic spin which renders it attractive but infinitely elusive, like a mirage in the desert.

Strategy of Chaos

As Dugin’s approach implies that there are no eternal truths in metaphysical or religious sense, we are permitted to invoke another kind of truths, not simply inventions of natural and social sciences, but something that lies not above reason but beneath it. In his own words:

“(…) we should postpone such notions as the dimension of spirit and the divine, and move towards chaos and other vertical and depth-oriented concepts.”(Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory, ch. 12. Fourth political practice)

One could argue that to "postpone" doesn’t mean to outright deny, but let’s be careful here. Dasein is essentially being of noch nichts or not yet. This means that it is essentially being of postponing, only projecting its reality but always condemned to the modality of possibility. While, for instance, Plotinus talks of the reversal of Soul into itself, facing its temporality to reach its eternal root in Spirit or Mind (Nous) – in fact making itself real by dissolving its accidental form – Dasein is always only reversing into its own nothingness because the only form it has is the accident. While the Christian interiorises the Logos by turning to what Augustine calls interior man, Dasein means digging ever deeper into the abyss of its own insubstantiality, escaping the light towards darkness.

The gullible reader, unfamiliar with traditional metaphysics and theology, can very easily fall into trap of confusing what he feels to be his or hers true self with what Heidegger and Dugin put forward as invitation to possibility of unknown something. And that invitation leads straight down into the great Precipice, into original Chaos. The name Ancient Greeks gave to the unknown and forever unknowable Nothing.

In Appendix II to The Fourth Political Theory, named “Metaphysics of Chaos,” Dugin explicitly invites his reader to do just that. His argument is that there are in fact two kinds of Chaos. The first, most obvious for us, postmodern men, is a postmodern Chaos. It is a condition where time – above all, the past – is dissolved and history is rendered into virtuality, the insubstantial simulacrum of real world, where all one can do is contemplate infinite possibilities forever to remain unactualized. This is necessary consequence of dissolution of modernity because its subject – the "Individuum" – demands it. The absolute negative freedom is the freedom from the world itself, i.e. the world itself must be rendered unreal as well as it’s essential elements: human body, ancestry, sex and other potentially substantial limits of Individuum.

In this sense, for instance, posthumanist Ray Kurzweill insists that tattooing is a form of externalizing one’s own body preparing humans to merge with machines. The merging itself is a virtualization because it ditches reality for free project of oneself, admittedly cast in chrome and plastic, but still forever elusive and unreal simply because it is coming about merely to affirm the otherness from oneself. It is, simply put, a contradictory absolute act of revoking contingency by making oneself absolutely contingent, an ultimate metaphysical escape from oneself.

Now, if this posthumanist approach doesn’t sound Gnostic enough to you, let us hear what Dugin proposes.

There is, namely, another, more original, form of Chaos. It is, in Dugin’s opinion, the ancient, primordial and ever present Origin of all – both Gods and Men – "Mother Night" banished from history by the light of Logos; the primordial waters as they were before Fiat Lux of arrogant Demiurgos, the absolute freedom encompassing all, including the errant Logos itself, to which we can return at every given moment by deliberate (entschlosen) embrace of its eternal possibility. This is the Existential Empire of Dasein, a condition where all semblances of rationality are ditched for the sake of absolute freedom towards death, the complete negation of actual for the sake of possible.

In this sense, Dugin observes Chaos as a sort of Platonic dynamis panton, an all-possible, eternal root of everything that is. However, he really inverts the order of principles of traditional metaphysics, as exposed both in Platonism and traditional Christian theology and puts in the forefront that which is in fact the last and least of all. While the Platonist’s name for dynamis panton is the One, ineffable, immaterial and, in most eminent sense, supernatural Origin of all, which is so all encompassing and at the same time ever present as to contain both ultimate possibility and ultimate actuality, Dugin takes for his principle it’s absolute Other – the Matter.

'The Left Hand Path Is Truth'

This, in Platonic tradition proper, is a principle only insofar as it is a boundary of finite Beings, but is, taken in itself, a pure sub-mundane Nothing, Mother Night negating all light, reason and reality, that which is absolutely ‘bellow’. It is the cosmic underworld, the metaphysical catacombs for the Gnostic to hide, not from the persecution of man, but from the world and their own conscience. In this sense, Dugin’s Fourth political theory is a typical form of “left hand” Gnosticism, more or less identical with what we in the West call Satanism. Here’s how he himself describes it in one of his early essays:

“Mankind has always had two types of spirituality, two paths — “Right Hand Path” and “Left Hand Path”. The first one is characterized by the positive attitude to the surrounding world; the world is seen as harmony, equilibrium, good, peace. All evil is viewed as a particular case, a deviation from the norm, something inessential, transient, without deep transcendental reasons. The Right Hand Path is also called “The Way of Milk”. It doesn’t hurt a person, it preserves him from radical experience, withdraws from immersion into suffering, from the nightmare of life. This is a false path. It leads into a dream. The one going by it will reach nowhere…

The second path, the “Left Hand Path”, sees all in an inverted perspective. Not dairy tranquility, but black suffering; not silent calm, but torturous, fiery drama of split life. This is “The Path of Wine”. It is destructive, and terrible; anger and violence reigns there. For the one who is going by this path all reality is perceived as hell, as the ontological exile, as torture, as immersion into the heart of some inconceivable catastrophe originating from the heights of space. If in the first path everything seems as good, in the second — as evil. This path is monstrously difficult, but only this path is true. It is easy to stumble on it, and it is even easier to parish. It guarantees nothing. It tempts nobody. But only this path is the true one. Who follows it — will find glory and immortality. Who will withstand — will conquer, will receive the award, which is higher than life.“

Well, if there is something more appalling than melodramatic philosophy, it is  melodramatic Satanism. For all the refinement of his later writings, this spirit of the occultist “left hand” is demonstrably ever present throughout everything Alexander Dugin says or does. What he preaches is admittedly not posthumanism. On the contrary, it is no less ambitious subhumanism. It is an invitation to shed all semblance of humanity on the way down to regression into the waters of original Chaos, dissolving body, soul and mind into an animal, sub-animal, vegetable, sub-vegetable, mineral and finally non-mineral world of absolute deprivation.

This is, give or take, is what for discerning observer Hell itself should look like. Darkness in which only possible thought is a mirage while its only possible utterance is onomatopoeia, a cacophony of shrieks ever being reduced into sounds of muddy waters boiling into silence. And this, dear reader, is the Existential Empire of Dugin’s dreams. You are invited to it – after all, he knows how eager the Westerners are to escape the aberrations of their broken empires. But to escape fire by jumping into the drained cesspool of original precipice – albeit decorated with images of dead Byzantine tranquillity and endowed with a Laibach soundtrack to make descend more cool – is a rather flimsy move, don’t you think? Is posthuman vs. subhuman really either-or choice? Is it really so melodramatic?

I think not.

It is no choice at all. Dasein has no choice. Individuum has no choice. Only the discerning human being can have a choice. And it is, as it indeed was from the dawn of Divine Logos, the ancient gesture Christians took from the oath giving ritual of Roman soldiers; the gesture of waving ‘no’ to the Darkness.

At the same time it is the ultimate “no thanks” to all those strange men offering strange candy to spiritual children of non-spiritual age.

An universal antidote against the Gnostics.

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