Guénon in Russia: The Traditionalism of Alexander Dugin PDF

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Guénon in Russia: The Traditionalism of Alexander Dugin Jafe Arnold1 A laborious introduction Since at least 2014, when the high-profile American political journal Foreign Policy deemed him one of the “leading global thinkers and agitators”2, the Russian philosopher and political figure Alexander Du...

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Guénon in Russia: The Traditionalism of Alexander Dugin Jafe Arnold1

A laborious introduction Since at least 2014, when the high-profile American political journal Foreign Policy deemed him one of the “leading global thinkers and agitators”2, the Russian philosopher and political figure Alexander Dugin (1962-) has figured in the forefront of journalistic and scholarly attention in the West. One of only a handful of Western scholars to have authored on Dugin before this “globalization” has since appraised that Dugin has become “the best-marketed of all Russian ideologists, both in Russia and in the West.”3 Indeed, across a plethora of media, Dugin has been made irrevocably (in)famous with such sensationalistic titles as “the most dangerous philosopher in the world”, “one of the most dangerous human beings on the planet”, “Putin’s Brain”, “Putin’s Rasputin”, “Kremlin Guru”, and other epithets which, regardless of their persuasion or accuracy, are endemic of the increasingly widespread impression that Dugin’s position in 21st century international discourse marks a kind of “touchstone of controversy.” As a token of this prominence and controversy, in September 2019 the Nexus Institute organized a public debate between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Dugin in Amsterdam which was presented as a “recast” of Settembrini and Naphta from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.4 Yet while the overwhelming bulk of attention devoted to Dugin remains strictly political in interest (and most frequently in character), a steadily growing body of literature has endeavored to consider Dugin’s actual intellectual profile and corpus. In particular, light has been shed on Dugin’s affiliation and engagement with the current of Traditionalism, originally expounded by the French intellectual René Guénon (1886-1951) and popularly associated with such a range of authors as Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998), Julius Evola (1898-1974), Hossein Nasr (1933-) as well as, to disputed extents, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) and others. While Dugin has repeatedly, explicitly claimed his identity as a The author expresses sincere gratitude to Prof. Mark Sedgwick and Dr. Michael Millerman for commenting upon this article’s first draft, as well as Tommy Cowan, Michele Olzi, and John Stachelski for their editorial suggestions and encouragement. 1

“A World Disrupted: The Leading Global Thinkers of 2014”, Foreign Policy (2014) [http:// globalthinkers.foreignpolicy.com/#agitators/detail/dugin]. 2

Marlene Laruelle, “Alexander Dugin and Eurasianism”, in Mark Sedgwick (ed.), Key Thinkers of the Radical Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 155. 3

“The Magic Mountain Revisited: Cultivating the Human Spirit in Dispirited Times”, Nexus Instituut [https://nexusinstituut.nl/en/activity/the-magic-mountain-revisited/]. 4

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Traditionalist since the 1980s, the recognition and examination of this affiliation has only come to be addressed in Western scholarly literature within the last two decades. Without a doubt, seminal impulse in this direction can be attributed to Mark Sedgwick’s influential 2004 monograph on Traditionalism, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, whose prologue opened with none other than an account of Sedgwick meeting Dugin in 1999 and which featured an entire chapter devoted to Dugin, therein identified as a “centrally important Traditionalist” who, Sedgwick submits, is “responsible for the last major modification [of Traditionalism] of the twentieth century, equipping Traditionalism for the European East.”5 Sedgwick’s book also presented one of the first historical inquiries into Dugin’s intellectual origins in the Soviet-era underground occultistturned-Traditionalist dissident group known as the “Yuzhinsky circle.”6 In a subsequent study, Sedgwick would deem Dugin “one of Russia’s leading exponents of Traditionalism”, discern that “a form of Traditionalism that is both distinctively Soviet and distinctively Russian…lies at the heart of Dugin’s politics”, and ultimately suggest that “given that the intellectual has remained consistent over the years while the political has changed somewhat and the public has changed even more”, more serious attention should be devoted to Dugin’s actual thought, particularly Dugin’s Traditionalism, rather than his perceived political associations.7 In Sedgwick’s words to the American Academy of Religion: “his [Dugin’s] spiritual practice may be explained in terms of Guénon, and his political activity may be explained in terms of Evola.”8 An appreciation of Traditionalism to Dugin’s thought and activities - although not necessarily of Dugin to Traditionalism - can be found in the early scholarship of the abovequoted Marlène Laruelle. While Laruelle’s work has primarily focused on another current with which Dugin is arguably more visibly associated, namely, Eurasianism9, Laruelle acknowledged in her 2006 article on Dugin: “The influence of Traditionalism on Dugin seems to be fundamental: it constitutes his main intellectual reference point and the basis of his political

Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 221, 268. 5

6

Ibid., p. 221-223.

Mark Sedgwick, “Occult Dissident Culture: The Case of Aleksandr Dugin”, in: Birgit Menzel, Michael Hagemeister, and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (eds.), The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (München/Berlin: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2012), p. 273, 276. 7

Mark Sedgwick, “Alexander Dugin’s Apocalyptic Traditionalism” (American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 19/11/2006), p. 12. 8

On Eurasianism, see: Sergey Glebov, From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s-1930s (DeKalb; Northern Illinois University Press, 2017); Marlène Laruelle, L'idéologie eurasiste russe ou comment penser l’empire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999); Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Washington, D.C./Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/John Hopkins University Press, 2008). 9

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attitudes as well as his Eurasianism.”10 Although Dugin’s intellectual and political projects, which Laruelle deemed Dugin’s “business cards”, have alternated and evolved over the decades, Laruelle emphasized that “he continues even today to disseminate the Traditionalist ideas that have been his mainstay since the beginning, displaying a high degree of doctrinal consistency”, even somewhat empathetically suggesting: “his [Dugin’s] philosophical, religious, and political doctrines are much more complex and deserve careful consideration. The diversity of his work is little known, and his ideas are therefore often characterized in a rash and incomplete way.”11 Subsequently, Laruelle would author a study which, following Sedgwick’s first broaching of the subject, highlighted the centrality of the discovery of Traditionalist thought to the Yuzhinsky circle and Dugin’s early intellectual career.12 Despite these recognitions however, a pivotal nuance of Laruelle’s analysis is her judgement in the spirit of the remark of “business cards” that “Dugin should be read not only as an ideological bricoleur but an intellectual chameleon… motivated, above all, by his unceasing drive to court a new readership, as well as by the need to secure niches in the publishing market.”13 In line with this perception, Traditionalism is seen as merely another selectively advertised “business card” in Dugin’s discourse or, as Laruelle wrote in a condensed entry on Dugin for the recent Oxford handbook Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, as one among multiple “ideological toolkits” which - Laruelle switches over to political criteria - Dugin “has failed to anchor…in Russian public opinion or in the minds of Kremlin decision makers.”14 As suspectedly follows, the latter recent contribution of Laruelle’s pays only cursory, passing mention to Traditionalism as a reservoir of subsidiary “metaphysical arguments” and does not engage in any examination of his actual corpus.15 Any genuine significance of Traditionalism to Dugin and of Dugin to Traditionalism has been adamantly denied by the political scientists Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovtsov. In an influential joint paper, Umland and Shekhovtsov argued: “Dugin’s form of ‘Traditionalism’ - if one chooses to use this term - has little relation to the philosophical school…Perennial Philosophy serves Dugin as an arsenal of unconventional terms and offbeat notions - freely reaggregated in Dugin’s worldview - rather than as an organic precursor or ideational Marlene Laruelle, “Aleksandr Dugin: A Russian Version of the European Radical Right?” (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Kennan Institute Occasional Papers Series #294, 2006), p. 10. 10

11

Laruelle, “Aleksandr Dugin: A Russian Version of the European Radical Right?”, p. 1, 5.

Marlene Laruelle, “The Iuzhinskii Circle: Far-Right Metaphysics in the Soviet Underground and Its Legacy Today”, The Russian Review 74 (2015): p. 563–80. 12

13

Marlene Laruelle, “Alexander Dugin and Eurasianism”, p. 166.

14

Laruelle, “Alexander Dugin and Eurasianism”, p. 167.

15

Ibid., p. 166. 3

foundation.”16 Instead, in Umland and Shekhovtsov’s opinion, Dugin’s “amalgamation of Traditionalist concepts” is based on what they deem “Evolian” and "European New Right” “instrumentalizations of Traditionalism”, which are said to not be “legitimate successors” to “Guénonian Traditionalism” or “are at best skewed interpretations of Integral Traditionalism.”17 Although recognizing that “there is no doubt that Dugin has contributed to the development of Russian Traditionalism”, Umland and Shekhovtsov insist that “he has done so less by thinking or writing than by being an industrious publisher”, and the two even warn that “an authoritative Western classification as a ‘Traditionalist’ could prove useful for him.”18 Studying Dugin as a Traditionalist, Umland and Shekhovtsov argue, is tantamount to “providing Dugin with a pseudo-conservative veil that obscures the revolutionary-ultranationalist - that is, fascist - agenda underlying his publishing activities.”19 The American scholar of esotericism, Arthur Versluis, whose edited volume Esotericism, Religion, and Politics included a re-print of Umland and Shekhovtsov’s article, has subscribed to this line, remarking that Guénon would “not recognize himself at all in Dugin’s violent exhortations.”20 In her most recent text on Dugin, Laruelle has altogether backpedaled to join Umland and Shekhovtsov, asserting that in Dugin's “entrepreneurial” corpus “promoting the Traditionalism of Guénon and religious prose…makes sense only in the context of the metaphysical arguments that justify the choice of fascism…”21 Meanwhile, the Russian scholar of esotericism Pavel Nosachev has highlighted the need for nuance: “In distinguishing contradictions between the views of Evgeny Golovin, Alexander Dugin, René Guénon, and Julius Evola, we are merely pointing out the ambiguity of the very term ‘traditionalism’ and the even greater ambiguity of so-called ‘Russian Traditionalism.’ Perhaps the very term traditionalism is in need of greater clarity…”22 Outside of academic monographs and journals, Dugin’s relation to Traditionalism has also become the subject of dense polemical publications. For instance, the first book-length work Anton Shekhovtsov and Andreas Umland, “Is Aleksandr Dugin a Traditionalist? ‘Neo-Eurasianism’ and Perennial Philosophy”, The Russian Review 68 (2009), p. 676. 16

17

Ibid., p. 672, 665, 666.

18

Ibid., p. 672.

19

Ibid., p. 676.

Arthur Versluis, “Review of Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century”, Esoterica 8 (2006), p. 186; Arthur Versluis, Lee Irwin, Melinda Phillips (eds.), Esotericism Religion, and Politics (Minneapolis: New Cultures Press, 2012). 20

Marlene Laruelle, “A textbook case of doctrinal entrepreneurship: Aleksandr Dugin” in ibidem, Russian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Political Battlefields (London: Routledge, 2019), p. 124. 21

22

Pavel Nosachev, “K voprosu o russkom traditsionalizme”, Tochki 1:1-2/10 (2011), p. 183. 4

to be published on Dugin in English was the “exposé” by the American Evangelical Lutheran bishop James Heiser, subtitled Aleksandr Dugin and the Perils of Immanentized Eschatology, which argued that “to properly understand the worldview of Aleksandr Dugin, it is necessary to understand him in the context of an intellectual movement…which is now known as ‘Traditionalism’” only to identify the latter as the “dangerous fiction” behind “the corpus of Dugin’s demon-haunted prose” which “may no longer be ignored without peril to the West.”23 On the opposite side of reaction, in 2018 Charles Upton published the thick polemical tome Dugin Against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory.24 The latter bombastically advertised by its featured reviewers as an “epic struggle…like Gandalf awakening to the dark side of Sauron”, “like a medieval knight casting a lance at a fire-breathing dragon, the very symbol of Satan” by “the preeminent, living intellectual heir to the great French metaphysician René Guénon”25 - argues that Dugin “inverts” Traditionalism towards “Satanic" and “chaotic” political ends. Most recently of all, we cannot avoid mentioning the book by the American scholar and journalist Benjamin Teitelbaum, War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s FarRight Circle of Global Power Brokers, which identifies Dugin as one of a handful of Traditionalist-inspired political strategists whose role in contemporary (geo-)political processes is pivotal on a global scale, facilitating newfound mainstream interest in Traditionalism in the context of rising 21st century nationalisms and populisms.26 As can be seen from this overview of existing literature and discourse on even such a particular dimension of Dugin’s thought and profile as Traditionalism, much ink has been spilled and many axes have been swung at determining Dugin’s intellectual identity and significance, at times even tempting the impression of an emerging field of “Duginology”, in which no consensus and little constructive cumulation has emerged.27 The subject of “Dugin as a Traditionalist” or “Traditionalism in Dugin’s thought” has been met with sharp divergences, particularly striking among which is the trend not only towards polemicizing and dismissing any serious substance of Dugin’s relationship to Traditionalism - which, besides Dugin’s own explicit James Heiser, The American Empire Should be Destroyed: Aleksandr Dugin and the Perils of Immanentized Eschatology (Texas: Repristination Press, 2014), p. 12, 14, 19-20, 123. 23

Charles Upton, Dugin Against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory (Reviviscimus/ Sophia Perennis, 2018). 24

“Dugin Against Dugin”, Charles Upton (2018) [https://charles-upton.com/works/metaphysics-and-socialcriticism-demonology-eschatology/dugin-against-dugin/]. 25

Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (New York: Dey St./Harper Collins, 2020). 26

See: Luca Siniscalco and Jafe Arnold, “‘The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the World’: Luca Siniscalco interviews Jafe Arnold on the ‘Esoteric’ Alexander Dugin”, La Rosa di Paracelso: Rivista di studi sull'Esoterismo occidentale (forthcoming, 2021). 27

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admissions and discourse, has been conclusively demonstrated by historical research into Dugin’s intellectual origins and trajectory - but also framing any such scholarship on the matter as at best frivolous and at worst politically suspect. This situation might very well be attributed to glaring shortcomings, first and foremost to the absence of any serious, detailed examination and discussion of Dugin’s vast corpus dealing with Traditionalism as such has developed over the past three decades.28 As the Canadian scholar and translator of Dugin, Michael Millerman, has put it, one of the greatest pitfalls of existing academic literature on Dugin is that such “lacks engagement with relevant primary sources.”29 For example, the whole of Umland and Shekhovtsov’s pivotal article delineating Traditionalism from “Duginism” mentions without analysis only two short articles by Dugin on Aleister Crowley from 1996 and 1997 and only one of Dugin’s books, namely, The Philosophy of Traditionalism of 2002 - a rich, obviously relevant work from which merely two truncated quotes are withdrawn out of context as supposed evidence of divergence with Guénon.30 In addition, a more recent academic contribution examining Dugin in the context of “conspiracy theory”31 with minimal reference to Traditionalism ignores one of the many explicit statements of Dugin’s work Conspirology itself, namely, that the perspective on “conspirology” presented therein can be understood “only upon acquaintance with Traditionalism and the works of René Guénon.”32 For scholarship purporting to critically discuss and offer definitive assessments on Traditionalism and Dugin, such essential research foundations remain glaringly lacking. Equally significantly, however, the roots of such divergences over Dugin’s relation to Traditionalism reflect the complexity and nuances of this current itself and its study. It is undisputed that the founding father of such an ideological legacy which has come to be known as “Traditionalism” was René Guénon, whose key concept was the “Primordial Tradition”, who presented his works as elaborative of “traditional metaphysical principles”, whose main organ for exposition and collaboration was the journal Études traditionnelles, and who held the receivers Dugin’s total Russian-language oeuvre currently consists of 70 books, fewer than 10 of which have been translated into any one other language. 28

Michael Millerman, “Alexander Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism and the Eurasian Union Project: A Critique of Recent Scholarship and an Attempt at a New Beginning and Reorientation” (2012) [https://www.academia.edu/9504317/ Alexander_Dugins_NeoEurasianism_and_the_Eurasian_Union_Project_A_Critique_of_Recent_Scholarship_and_an_Attempt_at_a_New_B eginning_and_Reorientation]. 29

30 Aleksandr

Dugin, Filosofiia traditsionalizma (Moscow: Arktogeia, 2002).

Victor Snirelman, “Alexander Dugin: Between Eschatology, Esotericism, and Conspiracy Theory” in Asbjørn Dyrendal, David Robertson, Egil Asprem (eds.), Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2018): p. 443-460. 31

Aleksandr Dugin, Konspirologiia. Nauka o zagovorakh, sekretnych obshchestvakh i tainoi voine (Moscow: Eurasia, [1991/]2005), p. 127-128. 32

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of his thought to be an intellectual and spiritual elite. Guénon himself referred to “traditionalism” or “traditionalists” (such as, but not limited to, the Catholic current) exclusively in a pejorative sense.33 Nor did Guénon’s prominent Italian correspondent, Julius Evola, seem to fully identify with the term until a work published in the last year of his life34, 23 years after the term “traditionalists” first appeared in Études traditionnelles in the 1951 issue in memoriam of the deceased Guénon in the form of the question of whether one could “supposer qu’il soit licite de parler d’un pareil groupe” consisting of Guénon, Evola, and Leopold Ziegler.35 It appears that neither Coomaraswamy, Schuon, nor others associated with the “first wave” of Traditionalism attached such a designation to Guénon or their own works. Although among scholars Traditionalism is generally accepted and regularly employed as referring to a current of ideas centered around the works and correspondences of such authors, just as many and likely more studies ...