Alexander Dugin's framework for understanding Russian thought — two irreconcilable foci, three centuries of oscillation, and the question of whether Russian philosophy is possible at all
Start with these three — the extremes and the archeomodern center.
The major schools of Russian thought from the 18th century to the present, each positioned on the A–B axis of the hermeneutic ellipse.
Russian thought has always responded to Western philosophy rather than generating its own. In the 19th century, Hegel and Marx gave Russians a compressed history of all Western philosophy — which is why Marxism dominated Russian thinking for a century. But the Hegelian/Marxist moment is exhausted. What is the new "password" that gives Russians access to the whole of Western philosophy — and from there, to the possibility of their own?
Martin Heidegger. Dugin's hypothesis: Heidegger is the 20th century thinker who, like Hegel in the 19th, contains within his thought a compressed account of the entire history of Western philosophy — and whose critique of modernity, technology, and Western metaphysics provides Russians with the philosophical tools to approach Focus A (the Russian archaic) without falling into archeomodern confusion.
"My hypothesis is that Martin Heidegger, who created a concept adequate to the entire historical and philosophical process of Western culture, is such a thinker. If this hypothesis is confirmed, it is in him that we have to discover and ground the possibility of Russian philosophy, not in a retrospective, but in a perspective horizon."
— Alexander Dugin, Martin Heidegger: The Possibility of Russian Philosophy (translated by Michael Millerman)Heidegger's concept of Gestell (enframing) — the modern technological mode of revealing that turns everything, including human beings, into resources — gives Dugin a diagnosis of Western modernity that explains why Focus B is a dead end. The Russian archaic (Focus A) is not simply "behind" the West on the same developmental track. It is something qualitatively different — and Heidegger's analysis of Gestell is the philosophical instrument that lets you see this without falling into mere nationalism or romantic primitivism.
In Heidegger's late work (Contributions to Philosophy), Western philosophy is described as a "First Beginning" that has now run its course. What is needed is an "Other Beginning" — not a return to the Greeks but a new confrontation with Being itself, from within a different tradition. Dugin reads the Russian archaic focus (Focus A) as a candidate for this Other Beginning: a reservoir of non-Western, non-technological experience that Heidegger's framework alone can articulate philosophically.
Michael Millerman's doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto was on Heidegger — specifically on the question of how to read Heidegger politically. His translation of Dugin (seven books, including this one) is the direct application of this question: what does Heidegger's philosophy mean when read from a non-Western, specifically Russian, perspective? The Millerman Affair — his effective dismissal from academic philosophy for refusing to denounce his translation work — is itself a case study in what Dugin calls archeomodernity: the Western pole (academic liberalism) suppressing the philosophical question before it can be posed.