Life in the End: The Message of Daria Dugina

When Daria Dugina was killed in a car bombing on the night of 20 August 2022, Western media celebrated. The New York Times jumped to report the casualty of “a Russian hawk who railed against the West’s ‘global hegemony’” and “a rising figure in the ultranationalist milieu in Russia.” U.S. state radio called Dugina a “propagandist” and gave the floor to an expert who proclaimed that her death effectively sent the “message” that no one should feel safe from reprisal. In a recently leaked video, Sarah (née Michael) Ashton-Cirillo, a former Las Vegas political operative and transgender activist who became the English-language spokesperson of the Ukrainian armed forces, rejoiced over the elimination of “an evil creature who died a death they deserved” and insisted that the assassination of civilians remains a legitimate and vital strategy on the table. In other words, as the smoke cleared, it was to be “understood” that the “case” of Daria Dugina, the daughter of the premier Russian geopolitician and “the most dangerous philosopher in the world,” Alexander Dugin, was supposed to be a loud and clear, “successful” message.

Very soon, however, the message emitted by Dugina’s death began to turn out to be opposite to the one intended, as the news drew shock and condemnation from diverse quarters. Thousands of people around the world stood up to testify that they had known or worked with Dugina, were inspired by her, and would not stand idly by as she was turned into a “headline” cynically tossed around the media of the powers-that-be. Many more onlookers found themselves perturbed by the thought that the bombing of a 29-year-old journalist was supposed to be something positive. Pictures, memories, quotes, and celebrations of Dugina’s life and work began to flood social media faster than the algorithms and “fact checkers” could flag them as “disinformation.” Then, as if suddenly second-guessing their actions and fearing the aftermath, the Kiev regime denied responsibility, while U.S. officials tried to turn the tables and insert a measure of safe distance and “plausible deniability,” claiming that they had been unaware of the operation and had “reprimanded” the Ukrainian government in private for such “dangerous adventurism.” 

In the days and weeks that followed, Dugina’s fate was lamented by the Pope, she was posthumously awarded by journalists’ associations in multiple countries, and street art, vigils, memorials, and grand initiatives arose in her honor in Russia, the former Ukraine, Serbia, France, Italy, and other countries. Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke out in a letter to Dugina’s parents with solemn tone: “A vile, cruel crime cut short the life of Daria Dugina, a bright, talented person with a true Russian heart: one that’s kind, loving, sympathetic and open. As a journalist, scholar, philosopher, and war correspondent, she honestly served the people, the Fatherland, and proved with her deeds what it means to be a patriot of Russia.” For some people, the latter was enough said (either for praise or for confirming prejudices); for others, however, the question now begged itself in all its intensity: Who was Daria Dugina?

As someone who knew Daria, it remains difficult for me to speak or write of her in the “historical” third person as Dugina (or “Platonova,” her beloved pseudonym, about which more below). Nevertheless, in her life and in her death, Daria was — and is — someone historically significant. The “miscalculation” of the “aftermath” that has troubled high corridors in Washington and Kiev boils down to overlooking the fact that Daria Platonova Dugina was much more than the daughter of Alexander Dugin, a journalist, or a civilian casualty in the context of a massive geopolitical conflict. She was precisely what the powers-that-be do not know and therefore do not understand: Daria Platonova Dugina was a thinker, a spiritual visionary, a philosopher on the rise. As such, her killing made her into a martyr for all those who commit to radical thinking that leads them against the grain of the modern world (dis)order. Only upon getting to know Daria the philosopher can we begin to understand what was at play in Daria’s life, work, and death, what message her killing was supposed to send, and what message it has actually “driven home.”

In order to understand Daria, we should immediately clarify what we mean by “philosopher,” because this term has mixed connotations. For Daria, nothing could be further from philosophy than the cognitive and linguistic puzzles juggled around most university departments and academic offices. Daria studied philosophy at Moscow State University, Bordeaux Montaigne University in France, and her death left her PhD in ancient political philosophy unfinished, yet she piercingly quipped that most people who graduate from faculties of philosophy are “idiots” — in the original ancient Greek sense of the word, meaning someone who never bothers beyond their own nose. Daria was raised on and professed the thought of the Traditionalists, Martin Heidegger, and her father, Alexander Dugin, all of whom teach that much of what passes for “philosophy” is nothing other than the corruption and inversion of the authentic philosophizing and spirituality bequeathed by the ancient thinkers of West and East. For Daria, real philosophy meant committing to thinking the greatest things that can possibly (or even can’t possibly) be thought, and the radical way of life and the spiritual quest that accompany such. In Daria’s philosophizing, you won’t find “thought experiments,” “cognitive science,” or “logic”; rather, you’ll find yourself thrown into metaphysical dimensions, facing the Idea of the Good, Beauty, God, Being, War, Death, the End of the World and even the End of Philosophy. Daria’s radical recourse to the ancient spirit of thinking was enshrined in the pseudonym she chose for most of her work during her lifetime: “Platonova,” after Plato.

It is a serious loss to the world that Daria did not live to write and publish her philosophical magnum opus. Nevertheless, her family, friends, colleagues, and admirers have done a great service by collecting her essays, articles, lectures, talks, and notes into the book Eschatological Optimism, which I had the honor and challenge of a lifetime to translate and publish. The idea named in the title, “Eschatological Optimism,” was one of the main thoughts which Daria was pursuing on the eve of her death, and it not only communicates to us the essentials of Daria’s philosophy that did make it to paper, but also tells us much about Daria herself, how she saw her life and what she would have thought about her death.

The gist of Eschatological Optimism is the following: We live in a world which is an illusion that is bound to end, or perhaps already is the end, but instead of leaving this world, retiring to the isolated bliss of knowledge of its fate, or passively waiting for the end, we resolve to live and struggle within this world, to accept it as part of our own life and our own death, and to strive to be philosophers, warriors, and human beings in the midst of it. In other words, we are “optimistic” that our role of thinking and struggling within this illusory end-world serves a higher purpose and grants our lives (and deaths) a greater meaning — and a greater task. Daria thought that this intuition can be found in a number of thinkers and writers from the ancient world down to our Postmodern times, but she insisted that this idea is not only a concept, but a profound way of life, indeed the primordial and ultimate meaning of philosophical and spiritual activity as such. According to Daria, being a human being, i.e., a finite person born into a time and place with a certain capacity for thinking and doing, is much more of a task, something to live up to, rather than a given. As soon as we realize that no amount of our own knowledge or activism can change the course of the world or bring the illusion to an end, the horizons don’t close — on the contrary, they open up for the first time. To persist against the grain, to fight against all the odds, to think the unthinkable, to transcend the world while remaining within it, to commit to being our greater archetypes in this world (dis)order even while realizing its illusoriness and its (as well as our own) inevitable, impending end — this is the “proactive optimism” that Daria’s philosophically attuned eyes and ears saw and heard at the heart of the reality of an awakened, dissident human life that can find its own higher harmony in the fray. It is not difficult to intuit the mysterious resonance between this key idea, which Daria was seeking to put into words and action, and the symbolic meaningfulness of her death. In fact, there is precedent in the ancient world that was certainly dear to Daria: the teacher of Daria’s “namesake” and the “founding father” of philosophy, Socrates, was executed for his radical questioning, and Hypatia, the most famous female Platonic philosopher, was killed for her political advising.

The opposite of Eschatological Optimism and Daria’s life philosophy is what is on the “agenda” today. For Daria, the Postmodern matrix into which much of the West has been spiralling is the absolute antithesis to authentic human life and the ethos of the philosopher-warrior. The growing technological matrix of Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Transhumanism, and the “Great Reset” threaten to degrade and root out what’s left of humanity on the spiritual and physical levels to an unprecedented, perhaps fatal extent. Daria adamantly believed that the technological and non-human entities, identities, forces, and programs increasingly invading our lives, societies, and elites’ agendas are fundamentally demonic — the latest incarnations of the metaphysical evil which all sacred traditions know. Just as an exorcist and demonologist must know the names and characters of the entities they confront, so did Daria seek to uncover the “hardware” and the “software” by plunging into the murky depths and infernal abysses of Postmodernist thought. Daria saw herself as a soldier in the cosmic War of Minds over envisioning the fate of humanity and the world, and like a reconnaissance scout she sought to map out the enemy territory and explore the no-man’s-land in the darkest shades of contemporary thought. In her lectures and speeches, Daria constantly encouraged young people to take up philosophical arms and break through to the pulse and course of civilization before it irrevocably slides into the cyberpunk-like, QR-coded, data-harvesting dystopias currently being designed in Silicon Valley, at Davos, and elsewhere. It is awful, but significant, to compare this to the way Daria’s life was taken, i.e., by a remotely detonated device: Where is the human being and the warrior in a world in which a human life is a matter of touching screens and pressing buttons?

Nor is it difficult to see the resonance between Daria’s emphasis on the illusoriness of the present world, the danger emanating from the Postmodern West, and the (geo)political context of her death. In an interview from 10 years ago, Daria summarized her worldview and geopolitical vision to her American friends thusly: “for us, truth is the multipolar world, the blossoming variety of different cultures and traditions.” In other words, Daria believed — or rather knew — that the U.S.-dominated world (dis)order that set in after the end of the Cold War, and more broadly the Western-dominated world (dis)order of the past few centuries, was destined to collapse. Moreover, following her father, Daria believed — or rather knew — that her country, Russia, a continental-scale multinational civilization between East and West, had a key role to play in challenging and reshaping this world (dis)order in the 21st century. As a journalist and geopolitical analyst, and as a member of the International Eurasian Movement, Daria sought to trace, understand, interpret, and communicate this tectonic shift to, and in dialogue with, the rest of the world. Our planet has always been home to many different civilizations, cultures, systems, and faiths, and Daria contended that the 21st century could — against or playing with all the odds — see the return of a multipolar world. Of course, this is unacceptable to Washington, so in March 2022, just over a week after Russia sent shockwaves throughout the world by launching its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, the U.S. sanctioned Daria for “disinformation and propaganda targeting Western and other audiences.” Daria was not dismayed; on the contrary, as an eschatological optimist, she was motivated to go even further, so she dropped everything and went to Ukraine as a war correspondent. Daria believed — or rather knew — that the war in Ukraine is not between Russian “irredentism” and a newly reimagined Ukrainian nation, but a pivotal fault line in the collapse of the current illusion, a showdown between Russia and the U.S.-NATO, and by extension and in its depths, a key node in the fight for a multipolar world. Daria chose to head into an historic war zone not as just another journalist, but as an eschatological optimist, and for that reason she was a heroine to many men and women who dare to do much less out of their own knowledge, beliefs, and destinies in a world with whose state they do not agree. Daria’s philosophy and her decisions as to where she put herself in practice in the world were in unison.

Not long after her return, Daria was killed. One night, she never made it home from the Tradition Festival of Literature and Music. According to Russian security services and a recent “exposé” all too conventionally “covered” in The Washington Post, Daria was killed as part of a “shadow war” waged by Kiev assassins trained, armed, and funded by the CIA. Why? Daria was not a politician or official in a position to influence the war, nor was she a primetime newscaster commanding public opinion, nor was she even the internationally recognizable symbol that her assassination precipitated — or revealed — after the fact. According to various U.S. media accounts, the bomb was meant for her father, leaving Daria as a “classic” instance of “collateral damage.” Perhaps I am biased out of passion, but I am among those who think that Daria’s death was not an accident. Her killing was meant to inflict pain, fear, paranoia, and a warning: Your daughters, sisters, friends, and colleagues are not safe if they think and live against the illusion, against its warlords over the border and across the ocean. Instead, a martyr was born, one whose whole life philosophy became a testimony that attained unexpectedly soon fulfilment.

More recently, the same media which sought to cast Daria’s death as a message have complained about a rising “Daria Dugina cult.” Behind this so-called “cult” is a reality that concerns and affects every critically thinking human being, dissident, or even honest and aspiring journalist or analyst, of which there are so few. One world is ending, its death-agony is thrashing and lashing out, yet, nevertheless, some strong-willed men and women decide to live on, to think and show a different way, and to put themselves on the frontlines of thought and life in deed. The significance of Daria Platonova Dugina’s eschatologically-optimistic philosophy, life, and death is her vocation: You can and must live on, wage struggle, and think critically and radically. In the light of her death, the “case” or “message” of Daria Platonova Dugina has emerged to be a barometer, a signpost, a last straw, a beginning rather than an end. Daria’s eschatological message is at once the simplest and the most difficult: A new dawn is on the horizon sooner or later, but it starts with you here and now.

– Jafe Arnold

Originally written for New Dawn

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