Existential politics

Session 4 “The Great Russian Name Correction”

In the history of 20th century philosophy and political science, everything associated with existentialism is opposed to politics. It is the existentialism of Sartre, Camus, leftist existentialism, which serves as a basis for criticising political structures and political systems, because it is a remote response to Heidegger.

Politics, in this sense, is something alienated. It is once-and-for-all fixed institutions, rituals, norms detached from existential roots that suffocate so-called existentiality: either existentiality or politics. The existentialist critique, whether leftist or liberal, uses this opposition between the existential and the political to build on it a critique of traditional political institutions: the state, the hierarchy.

"You are all states, politicians, you alienate our being". This is pure alienation and on this basis he proposes to reform society. This, by the way, is a common trait of liberals and communists. We reform society to reveal the fullness of existentialism by breaking down political structures. In fact, existentialism is generally oriented against politics and serves liberal and Marxist philosophy to argue the need to dismantle political systems. Liberals tell us that politics is the domain of das Man (if we want to use the Heideggerian term) and, therefore, to free ourselves from das Man, we must free ourselves from politics. This approach of existentialism against politics must be rethought in the context of the fourth political theory. Especially since the fourth political theory, in which a new subject of politics appears, replacing the individual of liberalism, the class of Marxism, the nation or race, or the nation-state of fascism, is precisely labelled Dasein.

In fact, the fourth political theory is existential politics and thus we enter a deliberately paradoxical sphere, because the left and the liberals are together here. They attack the political from the position of conditional existentialism and the Fourth Political Theory builds its political doctrine on Dasein.

When we labelled this seminar with the title 'Existential Politics', we got it right. Who else but the representatives of the Fourth Political Theory should be asked to solve this rather important and interesting problem of the correlation between the existential and the political? We have chosen everything correctly as a topic, we have set it up correctly, and now a final preliminary remark from the introduction. Speaking of existential politics, we must put aside for a while what we might call political Platonism.

The Logos of Apollo will not be of much use to us. In order not to get into this complicated Nietzschean-Heideggerian controversy with Plato, let us set this topic aside and emphasise that we are in the picture when we speak of existentialism, we are in the actuality of Heidegger, in the actuality of the pure problem of the immanent, in the actuality of Brentano, Husserl and in the field of phenomenology, without touching Apollonism.

Let us focus on what we say about Heideggerianism, trying to remove from Heideggerianism explicitly what it implicitly contains. For Heideggerianism implicitly contains political philosophy, whereas explicitly it does not. In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger says that actually the philosophy of politics should not be a separate institution, a separate discipline, because philosophy is the philosophy of politics. And politics is, in a sense, philosophy.

In some comments, scattered separately in different works, he mentions politics indirectly and remotely, somewhere polemising with Schmitt, somewhere leaving his remarks in the margin with Jünger. All this is very interesting, but Heidegger has no explicitly political philosophy. But our task is to derive this philosophy from him. It will, in fact, be existential politics and the philosophical foundation of the fourth political theory.

In order to move in this direction, I propose, for the sake of clarity and illustration, to juxtapose two topologies: ethnosociological topology and the Heideggerian topology, which is also given implicitly, in passing. Ethnosociological topology is well detailed in my textbook "Ethnosociology" and in the courses and seminars we held at the Centre for Conservative Studies at Moscow State University. We dealt with the problems of ethnosociology quite extensively. Let me briefly remind you what we are talking about.

Ethnosociological topology considers the structure of possible political or simply social organisations of society in the following chain.

The ethnos is an ethnic entity in which a person has no individual definition, in which the collective self is the only one: Do Kamo. This is a figure that in some oceanic tribes is difficult to define. It is the I, the we, the you, the chief, the fetish, the ritual: it is all Do Kamo. It is a collective entity, the individual as ethnos. It is an archaic society in which there is no social stratification. Equality, fraternity, unity are its fundamental properties.

It follows the second form, Λάος. It follows logic, not chronology: there is a backward movement in history. Laos is an ethnos that knows no time, no history, no accumulation. Everything exists in the ethnos from the point of view of the potlatch: the complete destruction of any excess product and the creation of the conditions for the impossibility of any accumulation, of any gap, of any linearity, that is, the very assumptions of any linearity, of any verticality are ritually destroyed. If there is a harvest, a lot of produce, then it must be destroyed - these additional products should, for example, be consumed in orgies. It will be nauseating, but you still have to eat and drink everything, because if you leave these products, they will cause some imbalance, problems, catastrophes. So everything has to be as it is now. This is the ethnic balance, the total balance.

The next form is when one ethnos subdues another ethnos: a nation appears, an elite appears, an aristocracy, the masses appear, that is, those who rule and those who are ruled. Two languages usually appear. A nation is made up of two or more ethnic groups. There is no such thing as a nation with only one ethnos, because it is thanks to the appearance of people with a different mentality, often with a different language, and certainly with a different social type, a different way of life, that this ethnos-winner becomes an aristocracy, becomes another people, another ethnos, a dominant ethnos, and the ethnos that has been subjugated, as a rule, is the more peaceful and quieter majority, remains an ethnos already within Laos. There is a complication of structure, social differentiation, castes, stratification, and we can say that a nation or Laos is an ethnos that has entered history. As a rule, a people creates either a state, i.e. politics, the polis proper, or religion, or civilisation, or everything together. The optimal form of expansion, of development of Laos in such a maximally full form of revealing the structure of the people as a complex and layered pattern of the people as Laos is the Empire. It is between the ethnos and the people that one distinguishes between archaic and traditional society. Any form of traditional and archaic society ends up in these two categories with two different conceptions of anthropology, of society. In one case there is complete equality, in the other there is hierarchy. In one case there is a collective self, in the other the collective self of the masses or the grassroots is contrasted with the individualised self of the aristocracy, i.e. a more complex model emerges, at the limit an empire.

There are three other versions. When one goes beyond traditional society, beyond the norm. Because ethnos and Laos are the two basic forms of normal society. Then there is a pathological society, the nation, when the individual identity of the aristocracy, i.e. the dominant ethnos, is projected onto the masses. A nation presupposes an individual identity. The individual identity is a kind of hybrid between aristocrat and peasant, a hybrid between ruler and ruled, it is a hybrid that generates pathology.

A normal, healthy society ends with the empire, with Laos: an ethnos can exist within it, it always exists, sometimes the empire can break into ethnos, and then reassemble itself in Laos. L. Gumilëv studies these processes as ethnogenesis and the nation is the end. When the whole structure begins to fall ill, then it becomes a freak. A nation generates a hybrid, a kind of mongrel: a cowardly warrior, a lazy peasant, a stupid philosopher, i.e. the most pathological things, which in principle are impossible in any society. Either you are a philosopher, or you plough the earth, or you fight, and if you are neither: you are afraid to fight, you are lazy to dig the earth, you are lazy to philosophize, I will only pretend; then this is the bourgeoisie - the third sector, which creates a nation. The nation is a form of disease. It appears in Modernity on the ruins of empire, of social stratification. The nation not only destroys the aristocracy, it destroys the peasantry and the people, it destroys the ethnos; it destroys the diversity of languages, it destroys idioms, that is, a national language that no one speaks or that one part speaks, and is imposed on all. As a French friend of mine says: "I grew up in a village, near Bordeaux, and in our patois we spoke, we did not understand French, that is, in the villages they speak their language; but the French language is a bourgeois phenomenon, in general the national language, the idiom, is a genocide of the diversity of ethnic colloquialisms." All this is subjected to total destruction, no collective identity is preserved, everyone is given a nominal individual identity that undermines the Do Kamo, this community spirit. Everyone is forced to be individualised.

Nationhood is a disease and nationalism is a form of aggressive obsession. To be a nationalist is to be a pig, a convinced pig, a mean, a coward, a fool, and to destroy the empire, to destroy the peasantry, to destroy tradition, to destroy religion along with bourgeois nations, secularisation, mercantile society. Then, the nation prepares for itself a degenerate, a citizen, a creature, a bourgeois bastard without property and qualities, without organic bonds, without healthy identities.

When nations do their duty, individuals say to nations: 'Enough, we will now be a world civil society'. They dissolve and the era of globalism arrives. The nation has created this cretin, the modern man, taken him out of the context of the village, the aristocracy, the church, monasticism, and turned him into an unknown person, and this incomprehensible person, who has survived the era of nation states, simply integrates into global humanity. This is already liberalism, globalism is the next form.

We are talking about a completely artificial construct, modern man, detached from organic models, from ethnos, from Laos. Laos is discredited as a dark Dark Ages, ethnos is discredited as archaic, everyone laughs about it. The peasant life, the peasant rituals, the curled beards at the spirit of the grain after the threshing, after the mowing has passed, after the grains have been harvested. All this is considered a kind of nonsense and he appears a rational and 'reasonable' idiot, an utterly ignorant bearer of the new time.

When he subdues the entire planet, destroys the remnants of traditional society, of archaic society, destroys ethnic groups and nations, a post-society will emerge. Everything human in an individual will be extinguished, and he will think: 'I am no longer a human being: I change my sex, I mate with a toad, I mate with a toad, and I have half a computer, an electronic eye sees further, an electronic leg jumps better, an electronic hand rakes more'. Thus gradually emerges the post-society, the last stage of degeneration, which begins with the nation. The nation is the meanest, dirtiest, most disgusting beginning of the collapse of all traditional notions. This is roughly the organisation of the topology of ethnosociology.

The second topology is the existential topology. I have published an article entitled An Existential Theory of Society, in which I propose to consider the situation, based also largely on Heidegger's Black Notebooks, in the following way. Heidegger says that Dasein, as a main category, is neither individual nor collective and this is very important. Dasein does not belong to everyone.

If we collect all people, we do not obtain Dasein but, at the same time, if we disperse all people and remain alone, we do not abolish it. That is, Dasein is equally inherent in individuals, masses and collectives. One person can be all the Dasein of himself, alone, without all the others, and one can imagine the whole of humanity, which is existentially bad or does not want to exist, and there will be a minimum of Dasein there. In a single being, in some cases, there may be more Dasein than in the whole nation, yet one can never possess Dasein alone: it is not an individual thing at all, it is a being-there.

According to Heidegger, Dasein represents a kind of foundation of human existence. We can relate Dasein, in this Heideggerian sense, to what we have called ethnos in the ethno-sociological actuality, i.e. a certain basic phenomenological structure of consciousness, i.e. an algorithm for structuring the intentional act. This is what Dasein is and ethnos is responsible for it. According to Heidegger, the deepest archaic structures, i.e., ethnos structures, are responsible for the mechanisms of constituting the content of the intentional or existential act; hence language, because language, according to Heidegger, is the existential of Dasein and speech cannot be individual, it is always collective; speech, the ability to speak, to exchange words, to formulate statements and hypotheses, creates a linguistic world in which ethnos exists. Ethnos is language and it is no accident that we Russians call the word language the people. Language is the main thing of ethnos, it is the existential main of Dasein, it is always collective and, of course, no one can invent his own language. It will only be understood by him. Language is a universal ethnos thing and language is the most important existential of Dasein. It is a kind of foundation. Dasein as coinciding with or relating at least to ethnos in people acquires a further dimension.

Heidegger, in the Black Notebooks, speaks of the existence of the Einige (the one, the unique, the Some). The Some, according to Heidegger, represent the philosophical and ontological concentration of Dasein; they are those who think in the people. Because they think in ethnos, they are both ethnos and something other than ethnos.

Heidegger means that the elite or strata, the highest strata, the representatives of the highest castes of the nation represent such an inclination, if I may say, a dimension of Dasein, in which this Dasein begins to unfold the Logos embedded within itself. The aristocracy is solitary, unified, it is no longer collective, it is already personal, it is already individual. These solitary individuals derive the potential content of Dasein in certain formulae.

People also talk, but usually they talk nonsense, meaningful nonsense, very important nonsense. They organise the objects of the world, they name them, they inhabit them. It is a gigantic, fundamental and beautiful work, but fundamentally it is nonsense, and the Einige, some of them, the lonely ones, collect from this sea of almost multidirectional linguistic mass, living magma, and construct poetic works, philosophical theories. The Einige are Heidegger himself, they are Nietzsche, they are Hegel. They are warriors, they are priests, priests of Apollo, priests of Dionysus. They are some chosen few, rare non-farmers who are supposed to incarnate in the Selbst Dasein'a. So, in the end, if we talk about the more complete model of Laos, of the people as ethnos that has entered into history, we see the gestalt of an empire in which the supreme ruler is the Selbst Dasein'a and we arrive at a picture that interestingly coincides with the basic Heideggerian problematisation. Heidegger says: how can we create a fundamental ontology or ontico-ontology? And again: today's Dasein, which we are dealing with in the modern era and in Europe in general, is very poorly connected to its Logos. The Logos, the superstructure, the ontology, the metaphysics that is built on this Dasein, does not take its parameters into account at all, it is hasty, it is alien, chimerical, and that is why this alienated ontology must be subjected to destruction, where Sein und Zeit begins, and build instead a fundamental ontology, that is, to derive the logos from Dasein. And this means that the elite must not be the bearer of a separate external logos, but that the elite must lift itself up, elevate itself precisely from this Dasein in which it finds itself. This is a political task not articulated by Heidegger, but the political task of constructing the existential politics or the fourth political theory is completely homologous in its structure, in its algorithm, to the goal Heidegger set himself, namely the construction of the fundamental ontology.

I have emphasised several times, and will emphasise it again, that fundamental ontology presupposes a destruction, that is, a removal, an elimination of classical ontology and the construction of ontology. Heidegger thought in this way, this ontology in our reconstruction, in our two topologies, is ethnos, which is ancient, it represents consciousness, but it does not represent Logos. It represents the structures of the intentional act. Dasein as such is ancient, but the elites, that is, the representatives of the upper classes, are those who must take on the mission of expressing the Logos of the people they represent. Their ethnic origin does not matter. However, these philosophers or representatives of the upper castes are a little different. They will always be a little different from everyone else. Gumilëv tried to describe them biologically as passionaries: if an ordinary person spends all his strength ploughing a field, a passionary, who takes on this task, ploughs a hundred fields at the same time, and this is very painful, especially for someone who works sincerely but can only plough one. A passionate person does not plough two fields, that is what I liked, not three, he ploughs a hundred; such a passionate person is only destructive, what he does not touch, he leaves smouldering ruins, that is why he goes to the warriors and gives freedom to his bogatyr skills. Only in war is he good, because in peaceful life such a representative is only ugly, useless and frightening. So, in any case, he who expresses the Selbst Dasein'a and comes close to this statement is a certain vertical and here we can speak of the Existential Empire.

The construction of the Existential Empire is the correct solution to the problem of fundamental ontology on the level of the political. If we sum up and remove what we have said about the nation, civil society and post-humanity (so far we have not paid attention), we are left with two categories - ethnos and laos, i.e. archaic society and traditional society. Now let us understand what traditional society is from an existential point of view. The traditional society, the normal society, the living society is one that removes the ontological from the ontic. That is what a sacred empire is. That is why it is not a political organisation. Empire is a philosophical concept, it is sacred by definition, and the emperor is also a sacred figure, he is not a political ruler. Political rulers, on the other hand, are those who move in the direction of the Empire, they can stop at any step, but they move towards the Selbst of Dasein, towards the sacred monarch who is at the centre of things, towards the king of the world, Melchizedek, the King of the Grail, that is, towards the figure who is at the centre of all ontology and ontology is already inseparable, indistinguishable from Dasein.

We are speaking of an existential politics, of existential empire-building in existential empire-building, with a very careful check that in this traditional imperial society the positions of the elite are occupied by those who are truly capable of performing this operation: the uprooting of the vertical Logos from the ontic environment of the Dasein.

If this process of upper caste initiation - and upper castes have always had to undergo initiation - is interrupted, or imitated, or forgotten, or abandoned, then a false ontology occurs, according to Heidegger. There is an alienation of the ruling elite from its people, the ruling elite no longer understands Dasein, it constructs its own detached ontologies, and these ontologies are not true (here one may recall Heidegger's critique of Platonism). I do not now undertake to say to what extent this is justified. But what does Heidegger mean by this critique? That it is an erroneous construction of the first plane of reality, which loses contact with phenomenology.

The third part is the Existential Empire of Dionysus. It is very important to emphasise that it is existential politics that insists that the organisation of society, of Laos into a state, religion or civilisation is not in the full sense of the word transcendental, i.e. Apollonian. What lies at the centre of the Empire is not pure transcendence, but is transcendent immanence or immanent transcendence, it is not a Logos detached from Dasein, but is a Logos that lies at the centre of Dasein. Hence the Selbst of Dasein. Hence the figure of the emperor is not a figure of God, but a figure of the divine person. The Selbst of Dasein is a profoundly immanent thing. It is the most transcendent of the immanent and the most immanent of the transcendent.

When the people as ethnos, as mass, authentically exists, only then is it given a king. The tsar is not only to be served, not only to be begged, to be demanded. The king appears to the people when the people begin to live in the right way. This king must be a philosopher, and who else? When an idiot stands over the people, it is no longer a kingdom, it is no longer an empire. This property and quality of the sovereign must undergo a certain verification, and the verification is the ability to identify fundamental-ontological meanings immanent-transcendent from the structure of the intentional act. This is a kind of philosophical superstructure on the processes of intensionalism, which forms the phenomenological world of ethnos and the elevation to metaphysical generalisations without leaving the zone of the immanent horizon. Therefore, one cannot speak of the Apollonian figure of the king, but precisely of the Dionysian nature of the existential Empire. The emperor in such existential Empire is here, he is not deified, he represents the great man, yes he is Selbst Dasein, yes he is a radical subject, but he is not God. God is there, God is a purely transcendent instance, and the king is not God, but neither is he man. In relation to men he is God, but in relation to God he is man. It is a middle way, and this position speaks precisely of the Dionysian nature of the existential empire.

Attention should be drawn to the enigmatic prophecy of Prometheus in Sophocles. It indirectly announces that Zeus will end and there will be another king and only Prometheus knows which one. We can now recall the details of the story as the Titans tear Dionysus apart. What was Dionysus doing before he fell victim to the Titans? He was playing on the throne with Zeus' thunderbolts. Indeed, in the teachings of the Orphics (and the Greeks knew that Dionysus was the future king) Dionysus is the king of the future age, and the Eleusinian mysteries were largely based on this. So this future king, or king of time and, at the same time, king of eternity, is not Zeus, but the one who will replace the transcendent-apollonian power of Zeus with the immanent-transcendent power of Dionysus. Dionysus, who plays on the throne with the thunderbolt, is the essential figure of Selbst Dasein, who does not detach himself from Dasein, but always remains at its centre. This is the puer ludens.

We can recall Heraclitus' formula: Αιων παις εστι παιζων πεσσευων παιδος η Βασιληιη, that is, this is the child who plays dice, he is absolutely free and there is no need for him. And what is this child that is eternity, the eternal child? To this child belongs the Βασιλεία, that is, the kingdom. It is the real child, the child-king, who is at the centre of things, who symbolises only himself and represents only the figure of the true existential emperor.

The existential empire is the realm of masks, the realm of personalities and identities. This empire is immaterial and therefore the state, if we speak of the existential state, cannot be material; the existential state does not have a single material task, but neither does the state have a single religious task in its pure form. All the tasks that the state resolves, all its functions, all its instances must be a mask that is more important than what it portrays, what it reveals and what it conceals beneath. It is an empire of masks, it is an empire of theatre or a theatrical empire in which everything is on a thin film on the sides of height and depth.

In this sense, the empire poses immaterial, not spiritual problems. All the problems the Empire solves are almost dreamlike, theatrical. Behind every element of being in the Empire lies its secret dimension of inner depth, which is what makes the Empire sacred. Conversely, every sacred meaning immediately acquires some administrative and economic expression. It is an empire that is largely ironic, as ironic as the cults of Dionysus are. Everything overflows here: it is not a world of substances, it is a world of faces, of masks, and everything overlaps.

I would like to draw attention to Ernst Kantorowicz's wonderful book on the second body of the king. I have written extensively about it in my new work Genesis and Empire. The second body of the king also indicates the essence of the Empire. In the Empire there is always a kind of boundary between this and that, between the first body and the second body, it is the gap that Shakespeare basically describes in Richard II about these individuals. 'Who is he, then? - asks Richard II, looking at himself in the mirror. - Who am I?' he tries to understand. - Am I a king? Am I a great power or am I just a pathetic man?" This conversation between King Richard II and the mirror embodies the empire that is included in the mirror. It is an empire of mirrors.

Interestingly, Kantorovich also says that in the Middle Ages, scholasticism discussed not only the king's second body, but also the donkey. There was the theory of the donkey's second body. A donkey, of course, the special donkey on which Christ entered Jerusalem. Some scholastics proposed the following model: Has the donkey returned? The Gospel account emphasises that, after Christ's entry into Jerusalem, the donkey was returned to its owner but, if it carried God himself, it was an unusual donkey, it must have had a second body and the donkey's second body was not returned.

An empire is always composed of two bodies. Everything in existential politics is composed of two parts that flow into each other. empire is never material and it is never spiritual. The Church is spiritual, but the empire is spiritual and material, all together. In an existential empire, in a full-fledged empire, everything must be made up of the two.

I wanted to read the great piece by Hegel with which the Phenomenology of Spirit ends. Notice that it is an absolutely amazing passage in which Hegel talks about the realm of spirits (Geister Reich), which is the existential empire we are talking about. I will only read a fragment of it: 'The goal, the absolute knowledge, or the spirit that knows itself as spirit, must travel the road of remembering the spirits as they exist in themselves and as they perform the organisation of its realm. Their preservation [in memory], when viewed from the side of their free present existence, which appears in the form of chance, is history, while from the side of their organisation, understood in the concept, it is the science of knowledge that appears; both sides together - history understood in the concept - constitute the memory of the absolute spirit and its Golgotha, the reality, truth and authenticity of its throne, without which it would be lifeless and alone." Hegel ends the Phenomenology of Spirit with Schiller's beautiful words: 'from the cup of this spirit realm its infinity bubbles up for him'. Basically Plotinus, who speaks of ἕν.

Let us move on to the fifth part. Now we come, actually, to the nation. We have spoken of the existential empire, that is, the empire that reflects the existential form of the relationship between the masses and the rulers in a fully-fledged existential state. The nation represents the collapse of the very possibility of existential politics. It is either the nation or existential politics. Together with the bourgeois national state of the third power, existential politics ends, because there is an alienation of both identities in this secular society (from the word Laos), both poles cease to exist authentically. People are torn from the land, moved to the cities, deprived of their children, their rituals, their families, their villages, their attitudes towards death. This is very important.

Community death is immortality, because the peasant does not know death, the ancestor lives through him. The centre of the peasant's being is being for marriage, because in marriage the ancestor lives again, and it is he who organises the marriage; he ensures that the new groom and bride give continuity to himself again. In this sense, the covenant between community and ancestor constitutes a special form of ethnos or existential community. The existential community organises in its own way the relationship with death, which in us disappears, because the ritual ends, the great traditional family ends, the whole cycle of life ends, the complete cycle of peasant existentiality, which existed at the level of the archaic stratum of society, in every traditional society of the Middle Ages.

However, there is also an alienation of the heroes, because the individual, the bourgeois is not a heroic individuality that enters into a special relationship with death. If the peasant is immortal, has a relationship with death as with his ancestor, as with himself, with his own inner dimension, the warrior and the priest turn to death in the full sense of the word. They enter into the element of death, they affirm this irreversibility, this asymmetry of death. This is the most difficult path. In fact, they exist authentically, because death for them as such is and is the pure element of negation. That is how they grasp the transcendent dimension, and the bourgeois says: we do not need an ancestor, we do not need transcendence, let us turn our backs on the peasant and the aristocrat and not enter into any relationship with death, let us put cemeteries somewhere out of sight and forget these archaic ideas about the ancestor.

The bourgeoisie and the nation circumcise the immortality of the peasantry and at the same time eliminate direct, heroic contact with the death of the demigod to whom the major tragedies are dedicated. The new epoch thus produces a mutant that eschews the possibility of authentic existentiality. National society, nationhood, nationalism: this is already an anti-existential politics, which deliberately deprives man of the possibility of being man, i.e. of authentic existentialism, and, as a result, we sail together with the nation-state into the realm of Das Man. Everything here is inauthentic. Everything exists and exists absolutely inauthentically and it is absolutely impossible to escape it, wherever one goes. At the top of society there is no one, only bourgeois, merchants, who count money; at the bottom there are the comforters, the scum, the losers who also want to eat better and obtain material things. A person who seeks an existential awakening cannot find a place here, because in this politics, in this organisation of the nation, in this individuality, in this individual identity, there is simply no possibility of authentic existence.

After the nation and nationalism have closed, blocked the possibility of authentic existentialism, the nation itself is overtaken, globalism, human rights, the individual, already taken as pure bearer of Das Man, begins. It takes over the earth, moves briefly over this barrier, because it completely emasculates its content and has to give way to artificial intelligence, chimera, LGBT, feminist - the last product of the fallout of Dasein, which begins with the nation.

From the point of view of existential politics, there is no difference between artificial intelligence, the Singularity and today's postmodernist, transhumanist, transgender, LGBT and bourgeois nations of any 17th century. It is all on this side of the barricades. It is all within the framework of inauthenticity, and inauthenticity only increases with each successive proposal to break free from some political structure. Consequently, artificial intelligence - Das Man - expands its impact and, ultimately, artificial intelligence is the direct consequence of Das Man, because Das Man has always been the element of total alienation, and artificial intelligence simply appropriates it. Artificial intelligence becomes possible when man completely loses contact with his Dasein; if we remove Dasein from the human being, we get artificial intelligence.

Since moderns do not turn to Dasein and are blocked in this direction by the epoch of bourgeois revolutions, only a conservative revolution that destroys all that is modern, all that is Western European, the modernist superimposition of one illusion upon the other, can give a revolutionary explosion of existential politics. Everything else is existentially inauthentic, and this inauthenticity only intensifies and intensifies.

If the king of the existential empire is Selbst Dasein, then artificial intelligence is Selbst das Man. This is the ultimate concentration of inauthenticity, when even Dasein disappears. There is only one difference between man and machine. Can a machine also feel? Is it also a mechanical thing, and love? And think? It cannot exist. A machine is man minus Dasein, and modern man has no Dasein, does not suspect it, has never thought about it, and therefore the transition from modern man to machine, from liberalism and individualism to artificial intelligence and post-humanism will not even be perceived. It is not a matter of technical chipping, of stamping. It will happen metaphysically, so that no one will notice what is being taken away. Take away what? Death. Because the existential - the main existential of Dasein - is the relationship with death. If you take away death, you will say: 'That is everything'. So the bourgeois have hidden the dead somewhere. Once the dead were at the centre: relics stood, there was a procession to the cemetery, people with trumpets, it was beautiful, death was everywhere, so luxurious, so intense. It reminded us, as now in war, of what we are. Then, little by little, the bourgeoisie pushed it away, pushed this death even further away, and the artificial intelligence says: 'That's it, death is over, we can fix it, let's move the hard disk and that's it, you exist on a cloud server'.

What are we getting at with this exposition of existential politics?

Existential politics is deliberately impossible within the framework of Modernity. Neither nationalism, as the most vile and abominable phenomenon, nor liberalism, which is a direct consequence of nationalism, nor post-humanism, which is self-evident, offer any possibility of existential politics, and all their arguments, borrowed indirectly from Heidegger, Sartre and Camus, have the pragmatic aim of destroying the previous institutions that modernity itself created. They need to move from nation-states to a global system, so they criticise nation-states, accusing them of being an instrument of alienation.

It is not, however, the nation-state that is the instrument of alienation. The main instrument of alienation is liberal ideology, which is extremely individualistic. It is even more alienated, even less existential than the nation-state. Interestingly, the totalitarianism of liberalism only increases. The liberalism of 30-40 years ago was not so savagely totalitarian. By and large, everything was controlled, everything was directed, but at least a semblance of possible freedom, of options. 'I want to be left-wing, I want to be right-wing. "No problem. You are marginalised, sure, but be" and today liberalism immediately alienates the left, especially the right.

The real alienation is not nationalism, but this very trend of modernity, which is coming to artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence is the apex. Now Yuval Harari, Schwab's assistant, is the glorifier of the singularity. Fukuyama instructs the SS, the WSU Nazis. Then there is Bernard-Henri Levy. Now this philosophical framing of liberals and post-humanists is on the front line, now they are shooting at us, where Andrei (Korobov-Latyntsev) is, where our friends are, where our hearts are: in Ukraine, of course.

It is not the nation-state of the Russian Federation that has challenged the nation-state of Ukraine and the supporting nation-state of the EU and the US. This is something completely different. We are talking about a fundamental existential revolution. It is about an empire rising from oblivion. Our empire is the empire of the coming king Dionysus, the subject of the secret, dangerous and disturbing prophecy of Prometheus. He is the existential king, the radical subject who is beginning to appear on the horizon. Either he started the SMO, or no one did.

Nobody could have initiated SMO, because it is not logically derived from anything, and within modernity it has no explanation. SMO only has an explanation in terms of existential empire theory. This is a very important conclusion.

Now our goal is clear, the goal of the fourth political theory is clear, the goal of existential politics is clear: it is the elimination of modernity. We must subject modernity to complete deconstruction. Nothing of modernity can exist authentically.

We only need the archaic - well, imperial, traditional - marvellous and the entire construction of the spirit, the realm of spirits that Hegel spoke of, is now at stake. The philosophical war is now strictly with this fundamental existential enemy and, consequently, it is very important - if many people agree with us on liberalism and post-humanism - then the subtlest thing is perhaps to give a fundamental definition of the understanding of the impasse of nationalism.

It is not only Ukrainian nationalism that we are dealing with. Our nationalism belongs to the same category. It is an artificial and inauthentic tool of the modern world, directed against our essence, against our people, against our empire, against our historical rebirth. Therefore, we must be uncompromising in this case.

It is very important that the people of the existential empire, the people of existential politics, the people of the Russian logos realise that we are the people of the empire and traditional society. Any Western modernism, any nationalism (and this is a Western phenomenon), any appeal to bourgeois modernity is a betrayal of our great cause to build and revive the existential empire or the realm of the spirit that Hegel spoke of, the realm of the profound.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini