Arktos

I just finished translating Daria Platonova Dugina’s A Theory of Europe. I’ll be sharing some of my favorite passages here over the next week.

For now, only a released impression, or indication: What an astounding work… What a moving array of modes and tones, analyses and prophesies, written and spoken words, lived experiences and enlivening visions — all bestowed by one human being for the sake of awakening others… Only Daria could have given us this book, as an unexpected result of her death, because of her life, and only we — no one else — are capable of receiving it. Right here and now.

Gramsci, Schmitt, Heidegger, de Benoist, Faye, Dugin, and many others — iconic thinkers are seamlessly mobilized into the mosaic of her free-flowing speeches and interviews. May ’68, the collapse of the Soviet Union, wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Mali, elections in France, Germany, and Italy — political events become moments in the advent of her feeling of the pulse of geopolitics. Putin, Macron, Le Pen, Zemmour, Mélenchon, Biden, Trump — all are characters on the stage of civilisational shifts which she sees unfolding around her. “Left” and “Right”, and all the ideologies of Modernity, are loosened and shed in the light of Rome, Europe, Eurasia, and the Continents of the Spirit, in the open-ended dynamics of multipolarity — and then she suddenly takes us back down to dissect concrete media scandals, photographs, and politicians’ posturings. She contemplates the spectacle and shows us when to dance, when to refrain, and when to pull out the dagger of truth. She takes us with her as she recounts her life in France, her activism and scholarship in Russia, and her reporting from the battlefields in Ukraine. When you reach the last page, where she transitions from discussing Chinese politics to comparing different punk and rave genres of music to traditional Slavic clothing, you wonder where you are, where you’ve been, and where to next…

On the pages of this book, we discover the existential dimension of any transient political and intellectual phenomena — in the existential optic of none other than Daria Platonova Dugina, in her piercing wordplay, in her bouts of humour and dead seriousness, in her free-handed conversing as well as in her rigorous writing. Instead of nothing, instead of one or another “news channel,” we are urged to live and breathe what she calls “re-information” and, above all, “transformation.”

Among many other things, we hear her say:

“This is the time of the Great Awakening. I think this is a chance for us to wake up. It seems to me that now all of history or, in the very least, the whole history of my life has been split into ‘before’ and ‘after’ the Special Operation. Simply the world has radically turned and radically changed. All the cards have been re-dealt and, indeed, all the masks have flown off… In fact, it’s very important to pray, to sincerely pray… If we don’t seize this chance, if we don’t wake up from hibernation, from indifference, from idleness, then woe to us, woe to us!”