In the Crosshairs of the Fourfold: Critical Thoughts on Aleksandr Dugin's Heidegger (original) (raw)

This paper [preprint version, final text in Critical Horizons, 2020] has two central parts. In Part 1, we situate Dugin’s interpretation of Heidegger in relation to the better known, broadly left-liberal approaches to interpreting Heidegger’s thought, stressing Dugin’s unusual focus on the German thinker’s “middle” or Nazi-era texts, and showing how this periodizing optic affects Dugin’s culminating reading of Sein und Zeit and its key axiological notion of authenticity (Part 1). Part 2 examines Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger’s radically pessimistic, trans-epochal critique of Western thought, centering around his striking reading of the esoteric notion of “the fourfold” or das Geviert. In this account, the essence of reality itself, the “crosshairs” of the fourfold, is provocatively depicted by Dugin as war, Polemos, Kampf, or Krieg, following the Heidegger of 1933-36. In a move which echoes Heidegger’s own post-1938 relativizations of all distinctions between Nazism, liberalism and socialism—as well as the Shoah and mechanized agriculture—we examine how the Russian thinker ends by obviating any distinctions between liberal or democratic and totalitarian regimes, war and peace, and genocide and consumerism. The entire Western legacy, from Plato to NATO (sic.), must be overcome in the “another beginning” destined for the new Russia, if it has the ears to hear. The concluding remarks consider the implications of our analysis in terms of the politics of Heidegger reception, on one hand, and Dugin’s reception, on the other. *Critical Horizons, 2020 (in press).