Shekhovtsov vs. Dugin: an academic raid

Even the mind of a brilliant scientist can be subject to strange aberrations. However, because “also”, it is possible for scientists in the first place to risk getting bogged down in all kinds of academic pseudoscientific conventions that can make even good material seem far-fetched, bizarre and simply propagandistic by the standards of their colleagues. For example, we know that Aleksandr Dugin has many critics, and that's fine: criticism is a pretty sacred thing, but Dugin has even more followers, and the saddest thing is to find them in that very conventional “academic” environment. Okay, fine, when the label of “fascism” itself is tempted to be tacked on to Dugin by the untalented and uneducated Andrew “Herald of the Storm” Rudoy, who recently released an hour-long video on the subject without a single substantive argument or thesis; but when something even remotely similar happens in the scholarly world, it already deserves some critical interest.

Ukrainian, or rather European, or even Euro-Atlantic, political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov wrote an article in 2009 titled “The Palingenetic Project of Neo-Eurasianism: Ideas of Rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin's Worldview”. Shekhovtsov's human background does not inspire much confidence: former neo-eurasianist and then harsh critic of neo-eurasianism and Dugin in particular; fond of affixing the label “ultra-right” in his own texts and as part of broad European “anti-fascist” projects such as “Studies on the Ultra-Right”. However, it is worth admitting that despite all this, Shekhovtsov has written the most “academic” of all texts with such messages. His academicism is such that the text contains as many as 78 footnotes and is not labeled at the title level.

However, analysis of a “scholarly” text such as this one, we are not afraid of the word, can expose with renewed force the weaknesses of all such criticism. And fundamental weaknesses in the use of the terms “fascism” and “far right”, even in literature that refers to advanced concepts of Western humanitarian thought and tries as hard as possible to sound “scholarly”.

Let us start, perhaps, with the concept that was placed in the title of the article. What is “palingenesis”? It is the work of British researcher Roger Griffin, who has suggested-ironically-perhaps the best analytical framework, by Western standards, for trying to determine what, in the scientific sphere, we should properly consider “fascism”. After all, it is understandable that neither the Marxist nor the liberal approach stands up to much criticism, whether it be attempts to define fascism in the vein of Georgi Dimitrov or the strange approaches of Umberto Eco.

Roger Griffin is interesting if only because he has repeatedly tried to go beyond the absurd attempts to call the regimes of Italy, Romania, Spain, Germany and other countries “fascism” because of the allegedly proven “open terrorist dictatorship” of the supposedly all-powerful “finance capital”, which presumably cast some extraordinary “imperialism” by those standards and even more presumably objectively was something “reactionary”, and... We would not even like to comment on the evaluative feature of “chauvinist” included in Dimitrov's “scientific” definition. No less important (and even revolutionary by the standards of the West) are Griffin's attempts to break out of the confines of the collective Umberto Eco, for whom “fascism” means “anti-modernism”, “cult of tradition”, “militarism”, total “elitism” without the slightest “egalitarianism”, and other unsupported falsehoods of Western historiography.

What does Griffin offer instead as a definition of some of the most objective and fundamental cores of any “fascist” ideology? To quote Shekhovtsov's reconstruction of Griffin: “He defines fascism itself as 'a type of political ideology, the mythical core of which - in various modifications - is a palingenetic form of ultranationalism. “Palingenism” itself is the myth of resurrection, the new birth of a “nation (race or other real or imaginary community)”, during which this community should “undergo a radical transformation, to become a new people”. That is, to simplify: “fascism” is the fusion of radical nationalism (along some lines) and this myth of rebirth and social renewal.

To be fair, some problems already arise here because, depending on how one understands the expression “radical nationalism”, especially in Griffin's interpretation, within its definition even many socialist regimes can be called “fascist” (at least, in some periods of their existence) and some states of the past, especially in the Renaissance (inspired by the political elements of which, among other things, the “fascists” in the broad sense built their palingenetic myth), can be considered through such a perspective, if it is not further specified.

However, it is clear that compared to Marxist and liberal approaches, this approach is at least partly consistent and verifiable. Moreover, another key aspect of Griffin's “fascism” is the recognition that it was at bottom a kind of political modernism. This is to the credit of the author, who does not try to dismiss all the costs of progress by simply calling them false progress, “reaction”, or “anti-modernism” in the name of the religion of progressivism.

However, the problems with this approach even in relation to the deeper past (and beyond) show that it clearly should not be extrapolated, for example, to modernity. Shekhovtsov attempts to use this approach to build a bridge to postmodernist modernity, where horses and men are mixed together, and to present the fleeting similarities found as fascism. Example: Shekhovtsov manages to find a few quotes in the entire book “The Foundations of Geopolitics” that seem to fit into this view and immediately passes them off as the “basis” of Dugin's political ideology: “The idea of the “geopolitical revolution” (or palingenesis), which should help the Russian people out of the “most serious situation in the ethnic, biological and spiritual sense” is definitely a new concept in geopolitical theory”. Not only does the very reduction of the idea of a “Geopolitical Revolution” to palingenesis reek of a stretch to the level of an attempt to find fascism somewhere in ancient Greece, but the author seriously argues-and without the slightest attempt to prove his point-that this is something “basic” in Dugin's ideology. Even for 2009, this idea is pathologically strange.

However, Shekhovtsov's article has a far more serious sin. And no, I am not talking about the attempt to link the already described methodology with the approaches of Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner and Morse Bloch, although this is, in its own way, an attractive leitmotif of his work. What is truly frightening is another.

There is a rhetorical device common in today's public sphere: calling someone's views “schizophrenically incompatible”. You might say: you have a kind of “confusion in your head”, you don't understand that the ideas you profess objectively do not reconcile (... and, as a rule, there is no argument for this judgment...) - but my views are very compatible, holistic, everything in my views is good.

This technique is incredibly popular. But meanwhile, it is often entirely rhetorical and, as a rule, lacks the logic and rationality that those who use it claim to have. Why? If only because any verifiable comparative context is lost. It is not very clear: in this case, how can we prove that all the intellectuals of the past, on whom we have been oriented all our lives, did not and do not profess any “incompatible” ideology? Especially considering the simple fact that in their time who criticized the representatives of any modernist ideology precisely for “incompatibility”? With what ideal of “whole”, “consistent”, and fully “compatible” ideology do we compare what seems incompatible to us? And is there not some bias in our belief in the “compatibility” of the idealized image of the other ideology? What, ultimately, are the criteria of compatibility and incompatibility?

All these questions are not answered by those who like to talk about objective incompatibility in principle, as a rule, but neither do the questions themselves: it all boils down to rhetorical shouting: “My ideology is whole, but yours is not!”. By and large, this rhetoric is the starting point of most of these conversations. And it often comes from the mouths of people who profess rather monosyllabic ideas or who have carefully disguised their own ideological eclecticism by talking about the eclecticism of others.

Interestingly, Shekhovtsov cleverly attempts to begin with a supposed critique of such approaches to Dugin in contemporary historiography and the public sphere. (Yes: unfortunately, even in the community of “scholars” one can find such views.) “...In our article we start from the opposite assumption that Dugin's social and political doctrine is coherent and consistent in its own way..”. The problem is that he attempts to resolve the apparent contradictions of Dugin's critics and researchers with the idea that all of Dugin's work is consistent-but not because their claims are absurd, but rather because all of Dugin's allegedly contradictory ideas simply, broadly speaking, converge into the core of his “fascist” ideology. “Fascist”, according to Griffin. And why “fascist?” And because it contains the very palingenetic myth, on which presumably everything in Alexander Gelfin's life depends and is rejected.

It turns out that Shekhovtsov is not trying to criticize the very core of Dugin's criticism-he is, in fact, very much in agreement with the fact that there are supposedly some objective contradictions in his ideology. Because of this, it turns out that, using a seemingly established methodology, Shekhovtsov, in declaring that he does not agree with the leading motif of Dugin's historiography - in general he supports it - merely simplifies it further, reducing everything with a convenient scheme to the proverbial “fascism”.

Again, the more random the quotes are, the more ridiculous the tract is; for example, in a lecture by Dugin in 1997, he manages to focus exclusively on this idea, which he expresses in passing: “...one should create a new type of person, that is, a 'philosophical Russian,' by meticulously perfecting it. In general, such research is very easy to do: one pulls out a number of completely random quotes, as long as they fit the concept, and pastes them underneath it, so that everything sounds somehow convincing. And everything seems to be done for the sake of convincing, hardly out of genuine academic interest. A righteous scholar would have written in another, more honest and modest way, “Well, we have such-and-such a framework, such-and-such a methodology, now we will see if such-and-such fits into it..”, but instead we see once again a fanatical claim about the objective discovery of sacred truth. Which seems even stranger, given all the author's stretching.

The strain, by the way, is even more contradictory than it seems. For example, in his search for the confluence of “palingenesis” and “radical nationalism” in Dugin's books, Shekhovtsov finds the most objectively contradictory quote to be found in his book, such as this one: “Progress for true revolutionary socialism consists in the leap, in the traumatic rupture of the homogeneous course of social history. The society (Gesellschaft), the “old world”, the “world of violence”, is subject, according to true socialist doctrine, not to “improvement” but to “abolition”, to “destruction”. It must be replaced by a “new world”, “our world”, “the world of the Community (Gemeinschaft)”, but not that Community (Gemeinschaft) that has been destroyed by capitalist society (Gesellschaft) ... but the New Community, the Community of Absolute Paradise, where the elements of ontological and social entropy will have no access.

The author summarizes this quotation as follows: he says it is embedded in “a confused concept” of Eurasian centrism, where - quite unexpectedly! - “social justice and social economy” are confused with the “conservatism of values and cultural traditionalism” of the “conservative revolution”. (Indeed, where and when have we seen such a thing?). Shekhovtsov, trivializing the reader's attention to another alleged incompatibility of the principles of “left-wing economics and right-wing politics” within the framework of the doctrine he analyzes, notes (!) that “socialism” in this context acquires the characteristics of Third Way ideology. (There is at least one question: why then speak of any cardinal “contradictions” in Dugin, if the concept he expresses is, in fact, already found repeatedly in Third Way ideologies)? Then Shekhovtsov finds “palindenic” features in this approach to socialism (again, recall our question to the methodology: what prevents us from looking for such features in other completely non-national socialisms, especially in those times when something very “national” was glimpsed in them?

However, apart from the giant problems indicated in the parentheses, there is a small problem. I do not wish to insult Aleksandr Gel'evič's quotation in this way, especially since, placed in a broader context of his ideology of that period, it acquires slightly different nuances - but - if we approach it exactly as Shekhovtsov leads us, and observe only the context he provides, and also reject any bias... Suddenly it will appear that the quotation quoted is very “Marxist”.

In fact, to understand it, it is enough to get a few sentences out and replace a word or two. And in the dry residue we will have the familiar logic: so, once there was primitive communism, and the idea of socialism is to -- having survived, curbed, refracted capitalism -- create a new communitarian society, similar to that then, but on a fundamentally different historical turn. This, they say, is human progress.

This is literally one of the basic Marxist assumptions. Slightly, perhaps, modified. Less modified, however, than the “socialism in one country” that has been quietly accepted by the left, since there is not much of “one country” in this quote from Dugin. That is, if Dugin somehow broke the orthodox Marxist covenant, it was only by changing the words-and, apparently, he broke his preferred Marxist message even less than Comrade Stalin did in his time.

Some, of course, may say that Marxists are not for the destruction of modern society, but for consecutive progress with the absorption of the best from every previous historical formation, but if one remembers the correspondence of Marx and Vera Zasulich, it will be clear that Marx and his followers did not have everything logical and unequivocal on this point. And the most consecutive Marxists, as we recall, suddenly decided in October 1917 that in half a year the agricultural country (!) had become “bourgeois” enough to carry out the socialist revolution there. Even if we were to use this logic to criticize the “Marxist” Dugin for his revisionism, the rest of the terminology he uses from other ideological discourses certainly does not contradict the basic semantic content of this quote, but only enriches the overall Marxist message. And it makes absolutely no sense to claim that this quotation expresses something cardinally contradictory to all high ideologies.

By the example of this quote alone - as opposed to elementary attempts to analyze it soberly, presented as if it confirmed Shekhovtsov's message - much of his text makes no sense, and completely so.

But that is not all. Shekhovtsov then criticizes Dugin's “fascination” with “neo-Luddites” such as the American anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan and notes the “obvious antagonism and natural conflict between radical left anarchism and fascism”. The author does not even want to explain to the reader what this conflict is, but to think about it himself-perhaps the reason for the “incompatibility” he sees in the fact that he himself originally called the man “fascist” (at that time, he also called him very distorted) and now speaks of an incomprehensible but “natural” conflict and antagonism between his idea of the man and his separate interest?

This thesis is even more absurd because Shekhovtsov betrayed a total lack of familiarity with the same “revolutionary-conservative” and traditionalist thought. In fact, some authors who all considered themselves to belong to the former strongly criticized (though each in his own way) Technik, and on the whole can be considered “techno-pessimists” (in some contexts even Ernst Jünger, to quote his brother Friedrich Georg!), which brings their ideologisms closer to certain messages and leitmotifs of anarcho-primitivism in revolt against technology. Again, the same trivial philosophical contrasts between “left” and “right” that the Third Way advocates themselves have tried to resolve, but presented in such a way that only Dugin has resorted to such political motivations, and only in the 21st century. Finally, some authors who call themselves traditionalist thinkers were obviously close conceptually to Zerzan's ideas about “restoring the 'golden age' of natural harmony and the simple way of life through the 'dismantling' of technologized modernity and the 'abolition of civilization' as such”-if only for this idea of the “golden age”, but also for a number of other reasons. Again, this demonstrates the stupidity of contrasting “left” and “right” in this context, and the author's ignorance of elementary things.

Things that the author pretends to know. And, perhaps, yes - the saddest thing about this text is that such ignorance is passed off as knowledge, and it is this assertion that matches that rhetoric, which we have already described, of being able to trace the “objective incompatibility” of certain ideological components in the object of research.

After all, let's go crazy for a second and assume that Shehovtsov was right about something and that he actually found at least some verifiable “incompatibilities” in Dugin - and ... so what? Even then, we would be dealing with nothing but a pernicious academic idealism, in which people claiming to be scientists live with literally “the end of history” in their heads: with the strange feeling that all ideologies - and their developments - are over, that everything is frozen in timeless ice, that everything most compatible and coherent has already been combined and brought to a common ideological denominator, and that any attempt to renew, revise, combine anything in the future is somehow consciously “contradictory”. But a simple thought experiment can defeat this kind of worldview: imagine living, dear scholar, at any time in another century against the backdrop of intellectuals like Hegel, Gentile, politicians like Stalin, Churchill and Mussolini, against the backdrop of all their ideological and theoretical maneuvers and - think: if you originally, like today, wanted to look for terrible contradictions in their thoughts and programs - would you find them?

Of course it is. After all, here we are talking about the initial premises, the images the author has already thought up around the characters and ideas he is describing, and the initial intention to describe someone or something as something incoherent. There is no objectivity: just thoughtless nonsense in response to a politically motivated craving.

This popular rhetorical device of contemporary criticism against anyone is of elementary stupidity (and Dugin falls under this barrage most of the time only because he fundamentally says more, more complex and with more references, for which he is somehow dubbed “player” and “postmodernist”); This argument is pretentious, thoughtless, and philosophically illiterate, if only because those who employ this critical model are pathologically reluctant to reflect on the supposed “wholeness” of their own opinions to the extent that they criticize the lack of those of others, and to make any even remotely correct comparisons. If he carefully examined his own opinions and intellectual references with the same criteria with which he tries to criticize others, he would find a thousand contradictions and recoil in horror.

But when you have a log in your eye, the only thing you can do is look for a speck in someone else's eye. Not even when you are a scientist, especially when you are a scientist. Why then should we be surprised by the antics of a certain Andrey Rudog, who, unlike Shekhovtsov, is not stuck in a linguistic trap of more or less modern and at least interesting methodology, but in the fetid agitations of a century or even two centuries ago. Incidentally, I think that if you have to look for the dreaded reactionary fascism for some reason, it is somewhere in the realm of thought that makes people think that way. But that is another story.

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo