Excerpts on Alexandr Dugin
Note: What follows are some extracts from my new book, “Psychoanalytic Sociology: A New Theory of the Social Bond,” which serve as a bit of a response to Alexandr Dugin’s recent “Lacanian” analysis of American politics. You can purchase the book here.
From Margaret Thatcher’s UK to Deng Xiaoping’s China, and from Ronald Reagon’s United States to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, the 1980s were the beginning of a period of intense symbolic disillusionment. Social populations experienced temptations for retreat from the traditional bureaucratic mechanisms of power which were based upon hierarchical offices. The Weberian thesis of the ideal-typical bureaucratic structures of social legitimization in the West, particularly within the United States, was put to the test against the expansion of private markets and the explosion of international trade. New horizonal mechanisms of power were revealed: Islamic markets, Russian markets, Indian markets, and so on. The so-called world system of Immanuel Wallerstein, which was based upon the thesis of stratification within an international or world system, confronted the dark truths of Samuel Huntington and Alexandr Dugin: there are social bonds whose apparent “stubbornness” with respect to the international community is also a mark of their singularity. Across all scales — whether micro-logical, as in the case of primary social interactions among family or peer networks, or macro-logical, as in the case of national, cultural/ideological, or sovereign structures — symbolic power shifted out of its dwelling place and migrated into the real.
Paranoia became a distinct possibility: “China wants to attack us!,” “Russian civilization is a threat to democracy!,” and so on. The melancholic position also showed itself: “As Russians, we have everything we need and do not require bilateral relations, international trade, or solidarity.” The “non-rapport” emerged as a principle of this era of singularities; we no longer imagine a world structured by a single overarching principle of order. This new “multipolar” world meant that we needed to rethink the principle of social cohesion: should the distrust of hierarchical symbolic power lead us to embrace horizontal systems of order based upon resemblances? We also witnessed the movement from modern patriarchy toward a sort of “neo-patriarchy” cross-cutting the entirety of the political field. Whether it is the “MeToo” movement and “cancel culture” or “Men Going Their Own Way” and “Involuntary Celibates,” these are responses to the same underlying problem concerning the displacement of symbolic power and its reconsolidation in the real.
There were efforts across the globe to reestablish the potency of patriarchal power within its symbolic mode. At one extreme, we have seen the rise of so-called neo-fascism, new tyrannical political leaders and popular social movements propped up by narratives that legitimize their position as “victims” and call for rebellions against the establishment. On the other side, we have heard testimonies of violent excesses of power vocalized not only by some of the newest social movements but also by those in positions of power (e.g., Justin Trudeau’s minority government frequently claims that they are up against the threat of fascism and widespread racism). In both cases, whether on the so-called left or “right,” the victim position and the rebellion against the establishment bolster one’s imaginary continuity with the real. I remember, distinctly, the evening when Donald Trump was elected as president of the United States: the tone among voters was precisely that they, like Trump, were tired of establishment candidates such as Hilary Clinton. Then, after his election, Trump continuously cited his victim position: the media treat him unfairly, all politicians treat him unfairly, and so on. Whether through nostalgia, expressed as grief for the loss of common sense and the good old days of politico-economic stability, or through an appeal against the onslaught of powerful forces that threaten us (even, and especially, within our safest spaces): both positions rely upon a lingering suspicion that the world has changed and that we are ill-equipped to accept the new circumstances. In most cases, one attests to their own certainty of victimization, to their non-dupery about the symbolic.
Lacan warned about the effects of the erosion of symbolic efficiency during his seminar of 1971–2. Many years earlier, he proposed that we have never offered ourselves up to the benefits of capitalism. This did not imply that Lacan was championing capitalism, but rather that he discovered, in a way, that we had never truly entered capitalism in the first place and that, perhaps, we remained nonetheless within a stubborn feudalist temptation (Rousselle, 2023). He warned about the benefits offered to the subject by the paternal function, even by capitalism, and the subsequent rise of those who would refuse these offerings and fall into horizontal politics that “segregate” from the world (Lacan, 2023). The movements of comrades, brethren, friends, and peer networks segregate from others, … together. This is how Lacan once put it: “they isolate, together.” This paradoxical social bond is like a delusional family system that (rather than introducing the essential symbolic coordinates that would introduce the subject into the field of language and the Other) operates against the Other. For a while, Lacan believed that the non-du-pere — the “no” of the father — was the symbolic mechanism according to which a resounding “no!” to satisfaction was accepted by the subject as the price paid for admission into the family system (but also, more generally, any social system). Yet, Lacan also discussed, as a prerequisite to any acceptance of the non-du-pere, the “wow of the father.”
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Recently, one of my closest friends introduced a new concept to me: “civilization state.”1 What is a “civilization state?” Some commentators of international political affairs have argued that the ascendant “civilization state” has overcome the Western model of the “nation state.” For a long time, we spoke only about international politics, in the sense of alliances among and across nations, and the United Nations served as a common model. In this conception, the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or the “North Atlantic Alliance,” was to forge some sort of a bilateral relationship (whether militarily or otherwise) with or against foreign threats and innovations. And who were these foreigners within Western international politics? Well, Ronald Reagan, in the mid-1980s, began to discuss the threat of “rogue states.” The word “rogue” is interesting because its earliest usage is from the 1500s, as far as I can tell, and it means: “a large wild beast that lives separately from its herd.” It is supposed to be a part of the common herd, but it is separate from it. It has gone rogue. It is in this sense that the rogue figure demonstrates something of the foreigner that has gone astray into another avenue of strangeness, outside of the group.
For President Reagan, and President Clinton after him, the rogue state was not seen as an innovation but as a threat: the rogue state does not relate to others under the governance of international law. An essay in Foreign Affairs journal, written by Anthony Lake, states that “the [rogue state is] recalcitrant and outlawed [ …, ] [it] chooses to remain outside the family [of democratic nations] but also to assault its basic values” (Lake, 1994). Apparently, it is incumbent upon us to agree or disagree with the definition; to suggest that rogue states are inversely “good” or “bad” to democratic states. As sociologists, we are not interested in condemning or condoning, but, more modestly, simply in understanding. Reagan pointed at Cuba, Iran, and so on: we saw elements of the stranger states emerge also in 1983 when Ronald Reagan used the phrase “evil empire” to describe the Soviet Threat. Precisely, when the American Empire was also involved in an arms race, the threat of another empire emerged.
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“[…] Hence, today, when we witness Russian students and citizens protesting against the horrible events occurring in Ukraine, we should be prepared to ask ourselves the following: how does this oppositional group sustain itself amidst the war? For example, Antonio Gramsci popularly offered the following distinction: a ‘war of position’ and a ‘war of maneuver.’ The former was described by Gramsci as the only possible point of opposition within Western cultures. It consisted of the building of ‘blocs’ that is, cultures of opposition to the overarching hegemony: universities, non-governmental institutions, media, radio programs, and so on. However, are the sanctions against Russia during the war not designed (willingly or unwillingly) precisely to destroy the ‘war of position’ within Russia? That is, the very spaces within which ‘civil wars’ and ‘political uprisings’ were made possible are now being uprooted by removing their funding, their access to vital resources needed to stage their revolt. This is true especially of those institutions whose mere existence was a threat to the ruling orthodoxy, demonstrated most obviously by the fact that they were constantly under surveillance by Russian intelligence agencies. In such cases, civil war is rendered impossible and Western sanctions perhaps ensure a state of perpetual war between the West and Russia (or worse, the West and the East).
The problem with the media is not that it is not free (hence Elon Musk’s solution of ‘free speech absolutism’ misses the point, noble as it may be). There are those who claim that blocking Russian Television (RT) in the West (or, similarly, Russia blocking Western media and social media, in retaliation) is a rejection of one of the pillars of the West, namely, ‘free speech.’ This vision remains tethered too much to an Oedipal (or classical Freudian) worldview: there remains a belief in a ‘shared world’ within which one might be capable of socializing and communicating with one another. It is in this sense — and only in this sense — that Aleksandr Dugin has a point about ‘multipolarity’ (e.g., there is a Russian ‘truth’ and there is an American ‘truth’) but for the wrong reason. Indeed, at first appearance there does seem to be two truths: a Russian truth and a Western truth. However, what is missed, crucially, is that truth, in its psychoanalytic dimension, is only possible within a so-called empire of lies. This is why it is necessary to think of the jouissance of war and the jouissance of the civilization state. We no longer live in a world where the category of truth is at the fore because the dwelling space within which it could have been articulated has collapsed.
The loss of the category of truth does not imply that I am advancing some sort of ‘postmodern relativism,’ ‘post-structuralism,’ or ‘cultural Marxism.’ Rather, this, precisely, is what both Dugin and Zizek seem to be advancing, each, in their own way, since they are both battling, cunningly, for the rights to articulate a universal political position. For Lacan, particularly in his earlier period, truth exists as a concept within the coordinates of a shared symbolic world. For example, it is possible to claim that the category of truth locates revelations of the ‘symbolic unconscious,’ or, in the Marxian language: it locates the space of determinative ‘totality’ obscured by the imaginary relations of capitalist commodities. Or, finally, put in the language of the American sociologist C. Wright Mills: it is the pursuit of a ‘sociological imagination’ which sees political and historical determinations hidden deep inside of the narratives we tell about our personal biographies. But singularities do not exist within that world. They cannot see outside of themselves, even, especially, when they claim otherwise. Thus, I return to my oft-quoted example: when, many months ago, American President Joe Biden looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin and saw a killer, Putin responded that Biden was seeing his own soul reflected back at him. But we should be prepared to add to this the following: when Putin looks into the eyes of his ‘Western partners’ and sees those who continually expand NATO and infiltrate his country, is he not seeing his own imperialist ambitions reflected back at him?
The problem in the era of singularities is not that the war in Ukraine did not take place and that it is too detached from a real which never existed anyway. Rather, what the recent crisis demonstrates is precisely the inverse: it is too real. This is why the theory of simulacra will not get us any further in understanding what is most at stake today. The war is already here, and we are in the midst of it. None of us are untouched by it. The hypocrisy of the West in terms of its handling of Ukrainian refugees neglects to mention a few important points: first, it is largely simulacra, since many Ukrainians have yet to see concrete results from Western governments; second, the current crisis, unlike many other crises around the world today, may actually lead toward the Third World War. This makes the current crisis much more difficult to articulate in terms of Western double standards (e.g., ‘we help white Ukrainians but not … ‘). While this claim is no doubt true, it fails to recognize that if we do not continue to do so then we risk a rapid escalation of the situation.
We are now living in an era that cannot articulate its own insularity. Today we struggle to relate to one another, and civilization seems to no longer exist as a possible space of refuge. For example, my Russian students have frequently explained to me that they are at war with their family members, at risk of being kicked from their homes, precisely over their narrative about what is happening in Ukraine. The fragility of the social bond as such is at stake. This is the problem with the clinical structure that psychoanalysts name psychosis: it is not, as some psychologists maintain, that in psychosis one suffers from delusions ‘detached from reality.’ Rather, the problem with psychosis, obviously, is that there is “too much” reality. We often begin today with an unshakable conviction, a statement of certainty. It is the other who threatens our convictions. But this is not how things used to function in our societies: we used to doubt our intellectual and political positions, and we presumed that there was an Other out there who had the certainties that we lacked. We should not be nostalgic for a lost time, but we should be prepared to admit that a transition has occurred: we have lost the Other, and we have assumed the position of the one who supposes knowledge. When we assume the position of the one who knows, the world itself collapses: the threat is no longer contained within but hits us everywhere from without. This, I maintain, is the source of the great wars that are occurring in all aspects of our lives today.
We should absolutely reject political discourse that insists that to be a good ‘Leftist,’ or to be recognized as a member of a social community known as ‘Left,’ one must adopt a commonsensical point of view by ‘taking sides’ or explicitly declaring allegiances. For example, Slavoj Zizek recently took aim at ‘Leftists’ (though he insisted that he wouldn’t recognize them as such) for ‘blaming the West for the fact that US President Joe Biden was right about Putin’s intentions.’ Is this not precisely what we are up against today, namely, the fact that we are always correct about the other’s intentions (even, and especially, before we have any proof of the fact)? ‘Have no fear,’ they might claim, ‘the proof is coming in the future!’ Perhaps Putin would offer a similar rebuttal: ‘see, I told you that the West has been aligned with Ukraine, transforming it into a de facto NATO state!’ If we are against this war, it seems to me that we must be prepared to examine it as an exemplary case of war in a time of generalized foreclosure.
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Today, the civilization state has emerged as a fundamental concept in geopolitics. A civilization state does not essentially concern itself with relating to other nation states within an overarching governing framework. At best, relating to other nations or social groups is a secondary concern to its own insular agenda of expansion along its perimeter. Put simply, the civilization state is concerned with its own distinctive or singular internal culture and the unique constitution of its own social group. China is a good example of civilization state discourse. There are also debates about whether or not India is a “civilization state,” which has led some to use the concept more cautiously.
Alexander Dugin, a sociologist from Moscow (who some claim has been instrumental in intellectual guidance for the Ukraine-Russia conflict), has claimed that India shares the vision of the civilization state with Russia. One might notice that civilization states are not within the Western world. The point that I would like to make, however, is that the civilization state is not foremost concerned with foreigners; at least, not as we have hitherto defined it. For example, the “foreign agent,” in Russia, does not map into the concept of “foreigner” as we’ve defined it. Rather, civilization states are more interested in what is singular and irreducibly unique to their own civilizational context. In this sense, civilization states are stubborn.
To read more, purchase the book here.
