The Auron MacIntyre Show - Fourth Political Theory： Part Four ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 5⧸11⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:39.280 Thanks for joining me.

00:00:41.180 We're going to be continuing our series on Alexander Dugan and his book, The Fourth Political Theory.

00:00:48.060 This is our fourth installment, maybe our penultimate installment here as we will hopefully be able to wrap this up next episode.

00:00:56.940 But with me, as always, for this series is Michael Millerman.

00:01:00.900 He's a political and philosophical scholar, and he's the guy who helped to translate this book for Alexander Dugan.

00:01:10.140 And so, an excellent person to talk to, as always, on this subject.

00:01:14.000 Michael, thanks for joining me.

00:01:15.580 Good to be with you.

00:01:17.280 Absolutely.

00:01:17.820 So, we're going to be picking up where we left off.

00:01:19.800 We're looking at chapters 10, 11, and 12 today.

00:01:23.860 And these are some very interesting chapters.

00:01:25.960 I know you told me that these are some of your favorite chapters, and I can definitely understand why they go in some very interesting directions and look at some fascinating topics.

00:01:35.460 So, let's go ahead and start with chapter 10, which is the ontology of the future.

00:01:41.640 So, Dugan is going to talk a lot about time in this chapter.

00:01:45.960 He's going to tell us a lot about our perceptions of time, how they can be altered, how we need to kind of change the way that we see time.

00:01:53.980 And the first thing he does is challenge kind of the assertion that the present is what we know best.

00:02:00.380 It's kind of the thing closest to hand in the way with which we can kind of understand all other time.

00:02:05.820 Can you talk a little bit about his understanding of the present and its connection to other periods of time?

00:02:13.700 Sure.

00:02:13.940 So, the initial view is that the present is what's most real or what we know most and best, that the past is next degree of reality, so to speak, because you assume that's where actual events happened, real things happened.

00:02:28.460 The past was the past, and the question is, can we really know it the way that it was?

00:02:33.840 But we don't typically doubt that things happened and there could be a correct account of what happened, and that the future is the least well-known because it's the most indeterminate.

00:02:42.720 It's that which hasn't come to pass yet or that which hasn't been yet.

00:02:47.400 So, that's a kind of ordinary, common-sense, defensible view of the rank between present, past, and future.

00:02:55.280 And Dugan's task gradually is to cast some doubt over all of that because the present, now here he goes into some philosophers like Kant and he'll discuss Husserl in a minute, but the gist of it is that we have much less access to or understanding of what's going on automatically than we think we have.

00:03:15.920 In fact, we're always, time is always exposed to interpretation of what's going on, to the significance of what's going on, to the coherence of what's going on.

00:03:24.800 And it's this theme of meaning, coherence, and significance that he tries to bring to the forefront in order to be able to connect the theme of time with his more general theme of politics and of multipolarity.

00:03:39.060 Because, after all, it's not a book just about time.

00:03:41.720 It's a book about the way the dispute over the meaning of time has an effect on how we think about alternatives to modern political ideologies.

00:03:50.380 Yeah, and I think most people would probably be a little surprised to find that to be a focus in a book about political theory.

00:03:57.000 But I do like the way he kind of explains why this is integral, why you need to understand this if you want to look for new political theories, new avenues and understandings of politics.

00:04:08.560 So, like you said, he reaches for some different illustrations.

00:04:13.860 I think the most striking one is probably Husserl, who I have not read, I'm not read in.

00:04:17.880 But he uses the kind of the analogy of time as music and musical notes to kind of explain the relationship between time and how maybe the present is far more connected and in dialogue with these moments of time than we understand it.

00:04:35.520 Yeah, that's right.

00:04:37.520 So, Husserl has a book called Phenomenology of Time and Consciousness, where he examines what it's like when we perceive a melody, for example.

00:04:46.560 So, if somebody were to think about their favorite song or lyric or opening riff or something like that, you have the anticipation of expectation of that first note.

00:04:58.720 You already hear it even before it's played, if you're remembering it.

00:05:02.020 And then, you know, go a little bit into the phrase, into the musical phrase, and whatever specific note happens to be playing, there's also the presence of the past notes there together with it.

00:05:13.660 So, it's like, where do you draw the line?

00:05:15.700 Where do the beginning and end of the present start?

00:05:19.720 When you're listening to a piece of music, it's the whole thing together.

00:05:23.420 You know, you have the anticipation of the coming notes, the memory of the notes that were played, and never just the one that's ringing out at the moment all by itself.

00:05:30.180 So, this allows us to think about political history, sociological history, about our traditions, about our customs, about the meaning of both our ancestors on one hand and our future generations on the other.

00:05:43.460 So, if there's an attitude towards the coming notes, let's say, that they're completely unrelated to the past ones, well, that's a kind of absolute chaos, you know.

00:05:52.860 Even in the controlled chaos of some kind of experimental jazz or other forms of music, there's still a meaningful connection.

00:06:00.880 So, Dugan wants to take that experience that Hustle described when he looked at our perception of time and the continuities of past, present, and future,

00:06:08.900 and use it to help us to think about, as I say, social, political, and cultural history.

00:06:14.500 And it is, I think, an evocative and helpful way to do that.

00:06:18.540 So, even little observations, he makes that resonate more than it seems at first.

00:06:24.360 When he says, for example, that the past is present in the present, the present becomes continuous and includes the past as a vanishing presence.

00:06:33.720 It's like the note that rings out.

00:06:35.560 So, if we go to our ordinary political opinions and categories and concepts and all of that, there's a kind of progressivism that tries to break with the past.

00:06:45.820 It doesn't hear the resonance of the ancestral or the traditional in the present, or it tries to turn away from it completely.

00:06:54.000 And that music analogy helps us with genres, with styles, maybe even with remixes, with all kinds of different creative interpretations to think about that continuity in new ways.

00:07:04.720 Yeah, and I really like the way that he phrased kind of the future as the death of the present, where you're always kind of just living on the edge of that experience.

00:07:13.060 And fully understanding your present is also understanding that kind of the present is dying as it goes along into the future.

00:07:20.760 But another thing that I think he takes from Husserl, although I'm not exactly sure, so maybe you can clarify that, but he talks about kind of the short circuit of consciousness and how time is necessary to the consciousness kind of avoid observing itself.

00:07:36.360 That if it was to kind of truly do that, it would kind of put itself into a shocking state.

00:07:41.640 And so, in many ways, time is necessary as a way to escape this experience, to keep the consciousness from going through this.

00:07:47.940 Yeah, so here, I don't know how much liberty he's taking with the interpretation of Husserl here.

00:07:53.960 I can't remember Husserl formulating it in quite that way.

00:07:56.480 But the insight is, for Dugan, a very important one, the way that he develops it.

00:08:01.440 So, as you said, the idea is that we escape into time.

00:08:07.160 Time is a release valve.

00:08:10.080 And if we don't have temporality or time to escape into, we're stuck with this strange moment of consciousness, the self-referential short circuit of consciousness, which creates all kinds of dualities and difficulties and obstacles.

00:08:25.540 It's kind of like, I was going to say something about the movie Memento, but I don't want to do any spoiler alerts.

00:08:30.620 No, you're fine. I love that movie. Go ahead and make your connection.

00:08:34.200 Okay, so the idea that we have to create an illusion for ourself that gives us a purpose to go on or that gives us a world to live into.

00:08:43.540 Because once you've perceived the nature of self-consciousness, self-referentiality, the game is over in a way.

00:08:50.560 So, you have to reconstitute a new temporality to keep yourself engaged and involved.

00:08:56.580 So, hopefully, people who haven't seen the movie see it.

00:08:59.020 But that's a side point.

00:09:00.860 So, the crucial thing is this.

00:09:02.560 Why does Dugan care, in some sense, fundamentally about these questions?

00:09:07.000 Because you had in the 90s, and still, to a certain extent, the whole theme of the end of history.

00:09:11.700 The end of history means that time has come to an end.

00:09:14.600 So, you have all kinds of issues here.

00:09:16.580 What was time that it could, in principle, come to an end?

00:09:20.020 What does it mean for the human being who is in time and who's fundamentally temporal and historical and musical in this analogy?

00:09:26.060 What does it mean for the music to have stopped?

00:09:28.840 And, as he says later in this chapter, not to run too far ahead, but how is it possible for the human being to commit chronocide to end time, to put a stop to the very dimension in which we live and move and have our being?

00:09:44.020 So, the idea that we flee some basic dimension, deep, dark, and fundamental dimension of ourselves, we flee it out into temporality.

00:09:58.300 Dugan is very interested in reconstructing both our fleeing, also what we flee into, but also this idea of a radical subject.

00:10:07.780 What is that part of ourselves that is outside of time?

00:10:11.540 And that is where he goes way beyond Husserl, because Husserl didn't go there.

00:10:17.020 And Dugan goes into a set of other authors and other reflections, and he develops this theme of the radical subject in other books and lectures, here only alluding to it.

00:10:24.980 But, yeah, it's a very beautiful and strange coalescence of two seemingly totally distinct domains of inquiry.

00:10:33.500 Consciousness and time on one hand, politics and history on the other, and yet they're so tightly interlinked here.

00:10:39.520 That's why I love this chapter.

00:10:42.060 So, he then kind of goes into some different organizations of time.

00:10:46.500 He talks about different understandings, you know, circular time, regressive time, the different perpetual states, material time.

00:10:56.120 Could you lay out a little bit, I mean, obviously there's a lot there, but kind of a little bit of those different understandings of time?

00:11:04.060 Sure.

00:11:04.760 So, he says, for example, about circular time, that the power of the trauma of self-consciousness banishes that trauma to the periphery where it becomes circular time.

00:11:16.560 So, you have the eternal return of the same.

00:11:18.700 You have the idea of a rise, of a fall, of a decay, of a rebirth, a renaissance, all of those kinds of things.

00:11:23.720 That's one way of keeping the cycle going, keeping a cycle going, but without any fundamental changes.

00:11:31.320 So, there are people, I'm sure, who listen to you, who listen to me, who read Dugan, or who are interested in traditionalism and all of that, for whom cycles, the circularity of time is probably the key reference point.

00:11:43.300 But another one is that the time is regress.

00:11:48.640 And as he puts it here, the experience of the short circuit is placed in the past.

00:11:52.360 In other words, the temporal Big Bang is in the past.

00:11:54.540 And we're always trying to recapture that moment, but we're further and further away from it.

00:11:59.360 The music is decaying, fading.

00:12:00.980 We forget it.

00:12:01.680 You know, we're left with just very poor reception of it.

00:12:05.000 So, messianic time puts the Big Bang, as it were, in the future.

00:12:10.600 The abolition of time, the fulfillment of history.

00:12:13.980 So, these are all different models about whether we are primarily looking to replay the whole thing, eternal recurrence of the same, whether we're looking to recapture it by going back.

00:12:27.480 That's the kind of traditional time, time as fall, so that the goal there is return.

00:12:32.420 Or whether we have a messianism.

00:12:35.800 And the messianism can be constituted in different ways as well, depending on what you see as the key criterion for the fulfillment of the meaning of history.

00:12:44.640 But what all of these structures, what he does in identifying these structures of time, including material time, where, as he puts it here, time is introduced into the substance of the physical world.

00:12:56.240 So, you no longer see either time as far in the past or time as in the future or time as cyclical.

00:13:00.480 But time is sort of like the, it's built into the objectivity of the world around you in its own way.

00:13:07.240 The reason he can do this catalog is because we, therefore, no longer just take for granted our everyday notion of time.

00:13:15.400 Everybody has something like an everyday notion of time that it's flowing and we're in that flow, more or less.

00:13:22.500 Everybody knows that somehow it depends on our perception because it can seem to pass quickly or it can seem to pass slowly.

00:13:28.540 But still, once we begin to delineate different constructions of time, then you have something you can analyze philosophically and phenomenologically.

00:13:39.460 So, that plurality of times is very important for him.

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00:16:17.020 Yeah, and this is what then kind of where he starts connecting it to kind of the political project, right?

00:16:23.540 He once again enters kind of the theme of multipolarity and avoiding kind of a general imperialism.

00:16:31.600 When it comes to time, he talks about how there is no shared history of humanity.

00:16:37.000 There can only be histories of individual civilizations or individual groups.

00:16:43.800 You can't have one overarching understanding of that.

00:16:46.640 And to try to kind of force everyone into the same story, into the same shared history, into the same shared understanding of time is, again, something he uses, Western racism, which I'm not a fan of his expansion of that term.

00:17:03.080 But we understand what he means by this, the general understanding that everyone needs to conform.

00:17:07.760 Everyone only fits in this Western understanding of history.

00:17:10.580 Everyone only understands time in this one way.

00:17:13.000 And it has to be universalized across the entire globe, across all civilizations and peoples.

00:17:19.220 He says that this is kind of a destruction, a form of bigotry, a form of imperialism that kind of keeps the different civilizations from experiencing reality the way that they kind of need to.

00:17:33.080 Yeah, and the musical analogy fits in a way, and he does mention it, because the music analogy would be that global, you know, monoculture or a single history for humanity would mean that everybody's playing the same song or that everything can be subsumed under the same genre.

00:17:50.180 And that's not true in music.

00:17:53.760 In music, you have obviously many instruments, genres, tempos, and so on.

00:17:58.060 And the idea here is that that's true as well of people's histories, civilizations' histories and states' histories.

00:18:04.220 And so we'd have to think about that, because implied in the view of globalism, it is true that there is a single, let's say, unit, humanity, and that it can march to a single tune, as it were.

00:18:16.880 And depending on whether you think that history comes to an end or not, that, you know, there's a crescendo and then the music stops.

00:18:24.200 And it's not obvious why we should think that, either on the basis of the study of consciousness or on the basis of the phenomenology of time or on some other more narrowly political or social basis.

00:18:35.840 Obviously, if you think that the standard of judgment is the three and a half minute pop song or the, you know, four minute super repetitive hip hop song, or if you think that it's a piece of classical music or something like that, but he says you have to get the richness.

00:18:51.560 The field of music, like the field of politics, is much richer than can be encapsulated by a single dominant paradigm.

00:18:59.000 And so here also he says something which I thought was very interesting, that these different concepts of time, these different histories are so deep that they kind of protect each society from globalization in a way.

00:19:15.240 No civilization can truly understand another civilization's time and history in the same way, and that these things are so deeply ingrained that even when they seem like they've been eradicated by imperialism or globalism, they're still there kind of deeply seated in kind of the metaphysical understanding of the subconscious or whatever you want to call it of kind of the peoples.

00:19:40.140 And so that kind of protects their identity from being completely subsumed by this kind of globalizing force.

00:19:48.480 Yeah, it is a key point for Dugan that there's always something preserved, even if it's suppressed, and even if it's hidden, there's always something unique about the peoples or the civilizations that is preserved up until the irreversible destruction of human essence or human consciousness.

00:20:07.740 And then you have post-society, post-humanity, and you have a completely different picture.

00:20:12.360 That's where he doesn't want to go.

00:20:13.660 That's like the worst possible scenario and the worst alternative, although he does think about it too.

00:20:18.740 So it's not just like, let's say every society, I'll give you an example.

00:20:22.780 When he discusses communism in Russia, he says that even though it was a modern European ideology,

00:20:30.420 it acquired the characteristics of Russian messianism, of Russian archaism, of Russian mythology,

00:20:37.080 it became a very mythologized expression of what was a Western scientific, political scientific construct.

00:20:44.980 And that's because it overlapped with the deep roots of the Russian soul, so to speak.

00:20:50.060 And so here too, you can try to take Western pop song or something like that, put it in some other context,

00:20:55.940 but it's going to get reinterpreted according to the taste and according to the ear and according to the mode and style of that people,

00:21:03.840 even if its identity has otherwise been eradicated, up until that final remnant itself is destroyed.

00:21:10.200 That's what's at stake for him in all of this, whether the final remnant is preserved or destroyed.

00:21:15.580 Yeah, and this again echoes someone who I'm more familiar with, which is Spangler.

00:21:20.240 And Spangler kind of talks about how Christianity has its origins in kind of the Middle East and the Magian soul, the Magian man.

00:21:28.500 But then when it moves to the Faustian man, it's the same religion in theory, but in practice, it takes on a Faustian character.

00:21:36.500 It fundamentally transforms once it's experienced by different people, even though it's thought of as the same religion.

00:21:44.280 So this is, again, something that I think is reflected in multiple other thinkers and is something that many have kind of observed across kind of different domains.

00:21:54.260 But the next interesting thing that I think he talks about is kind of how the end of history is the end of the future.

00:22:03.420 And if we have the end of the future, then there's no place for the consciousness to kind of escape to, to avoid that self-referential moment.

00:22:12.080 And so instead, we start seeing the creation of new escapes, things like virtuality, you know, the virtual world and other things that allow the postmodern world allows the consciousness to escape in places that are no longer time because time, the future is no longer there because history has ended.

00:22:31.360 And so that's very interesting because I think it then leads us to, again, observations that are present in things like neo-reaction and accelerationism, where a lot of many of these things have been moved into different realms, different fundamental needs and human experiences go into something that is kind of no longer human in a way to kind of recreate things that have ended due to this end of history process.

00:22:58.140 Mm-hmm. Yeah. So maybe the neo-reactionaries, I don't know as well as you do discuss it, but for sure, there are examples like Schmidt, Kojev, Strauss, and the authors that I know a little bit better on my end.

00:23:11.140 So, for example, Schmidt, when he talks about the end of the political, so the end of the friend, enemy distinction, the idea that we're going to overcome opposition, overcome war, neutralization, depoliticization, and so on.

00:23:22.420 He says that there you can imagine if man no longer has anything to live or to die for, any serious existential commitment, then life will go on, but it will be a life of his derisive term is entertainment.

00:23:35.600 So it'll be action deprived of real significance. It's another way of putting virtuality, action deprived of real significance.

00:23:43.760 And Kojev also had to discuss on the basis of Hegel what happens when man, who is a fighting and working being, no longer has to fight or work because we've reached the stage of universal recognition, universal mutual recognition.

00:23:55.160 And there, too, there was the idea that it's not like our activity stops, but our activity stops being properly human.

00:24:02.860 It starts being something else. Or as Dugan puts it, I think, earlier in the fourth political theory, there are still markets, you know, there's still TV shows, there's still stuff happening, but it all has the flicker of light with the lack of meaning or significance.

00:24:16.300 So there's a real concern that if it's, you know, if man is fundamentally historical, temporal or musical, what happens to man when the music stops?

00:24:28.100 This virtual escape is one option, and it's probably one that I think we can see if we look around and it looks like people are creating for themselves, you know, second, third, fourth removed from reality domains in which to play and spin their wheels and continue the appearance of a meaningful human life.

00:24:46.300 Which seems to be deprived of all real substance. But the more significant question that Dugan asks in this context, as you saw, right towards the end of the chapter is,

00:24:57.900 how is it, what does it tell us about ourselves that there can be an eradication of time? Because this is very important. He says, nobody can eradicate time for us.

00:25:07.420 Somehow, every human existence ultimately makes the choice for itself at the end, whether it is to abolish time and institute virtuality or abolish both time and virtuality.

00:25:18.680 And that for him, he says very little about it in this chapter, but he indicates it as a theme.

00:25:24.960 You know, he indicates it as a theme. So if we said, fine, time is no longer the sandbox that we're playing in, we've moved into virtuality.

00:25:34.520 And then at some point, you know, to invoke an earlier phrase from the book, the gloomy end of the show of virtuality also comes and people are sick of the fake double, doubled life.

00:25:45.240 Then what are you left with? When you're deprived both of the escape valve and of the pseudo escape valve, then you're sort of left with this.

00:25:53.480 Maybe people have this experience who go to like a sensory deprivation tank or go find themselves in the mountains somewhere.

00:25:59.860 Once their thoughts stop, they encounter the brutal, bare presence of their naked conscious selves, you know.

00:26:08.940 And then what? There's a kind of horror, a kind of terror, but also a kind of new realm that's disclosed.

00:26:15.080 And for Dugan, we have to consider not only the possibility that history continues, not only the possibility that virtuality continues,

00:26:22.520 but also this realm where you're faced with that brutal, bare self-encounter.

00:26:29.500 And I guess that kind of wraps up the radical subject. Is there any more you wanted to say on that idea?

00:26:36.060 I know you said that there's a whole other book or exploration of this in other books, but is there anything else on that?

00:26:41.760 It is a crucial theme for him because he'll mention it again in a subsequent chapter of this book.

00:26:49.940 So you can see that it's on his mind besides the fact, as I said, that he has other books on it and so on.

00:26:54.160 But I think that when the people like me and you who are trying to understand, you know, public intellectuals, cultural commentators,

00:27:04.080 that whole realm, right? People who are reading serious books and looking at politics and trying to understand it.

00:27:08.600 There's always, you know, the sense we have some figures to work with, like Nietzsche's last man.

00:27:14.140 Everybody has some sense of Nietzsche's last man. Nietzsche's Ubermensch or Superman as a kind of, you know, right-wing anti-liberal figure.

00:27:20.580 Or other kind of reference points, you know, where you can see, aha, here's the will to power coming through,

00:27:27.500 or here's something much more degraded coming through.

00:27:30.500 It would be worth, at some point, gradually, it's not going to happen immediately, but gradually getting a sense of this alternative,

00:27:38.840 the radical subject, as one of the figures that can help us to understand the future, our political future, our political present, our political past.

00:27:49.360 Just like Heidegger, just like Dugan has introduced Heidegger into the equation in a big way,

00:27:54.040 probably more so than anybody else has done, at least in the right-wing circles.

00:27:57.520 So we're going to have to think it together with the radical subject, but that's a project for not today and not tomorrow,

00:28:03.460 but people should be aware that it's on the horizon.

00:28:06.380 Gotcha.

00:28:07.060 All right, so our next chapter here is the new political anthropology.

00:28:11.940 And he kind of starts this off by making a statement that would shock some people.

00:28:18.480 I think we will probably be a little more familiar with this idea,

00:28:21.640 but the idea that political systems are what shapes men's identity.

00:28:27.520 What creates identity.

00:28:29.520 The kind of system you're born into kind of defines your understanding and relationship with the state,

00:28:35.180 with violence, with the way that your community negotiates problems,

00:28:40.340 your duties and responsibilities in all of these things.

00:28:42.920 And he kind of talks about the importance of understanding that the kind of the shift in political mode

00:28:49.860 between maybe traditional, modern, and post-modern times kind of fundamentally changes

00:28:56.740 the way that human beings understand identity and the way they see themselves in the world.

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00:29:32.260 Yeah, so the first idea of the political concept of man, it's an old idea, restated here,

00:29:39.120 an Aristotelian idea to a certain extent, or even Plato's from the Republic,

00:29:43.220 that how we conceive of man is relative to the regime type, for example.

00:29:48.960 So I have friends and family who grew up in the Soviet Union,

00:29:52.080 and the Soviet man was a different type of man than the Western man, let's say.

00:29:59.140 Canadian man and American man, also not necessarily the same.

00:30:02.020 You know, European man and so on.

00:30:03.220 So somehow when you grow up under a specific kind of regime,

00:30:06.960 you imbue a lot of the characteristics of that regime,

00:30:09.940 and that become defining characteristics of the kind of human that you are.

00:30:15.280 Now, even Rousseau says, okay, fine.

00:30:17.940 In some sense, we're all human beings.

00:30:20.180 But really, for all intents and purposes, you're a human being molded, shaped, and stamped

00:30:25.740 by your political community.

00:30:27.280 So that's the first notion, the political concept of man.

00:30:30.560 But then he also says there's the concept of the political man, which is this.

00:30:35.140 So the regime leaves its mark on the kind of man you are.

00:30:38.700 But then within that, there are also some people who see themselves as political,

00:30:44.260 as active, as engaged, you know, as expressing the specific civic virtues

00:30:48.820 of the man who's been configured by that regime type.

00:30:52.800 So Dugan is introducing all of this and saying that, yeah, in pre-modernity and in modernity,

00:30:58.140 man has been stamped by his regime type.

00:31:01.800 The problem, though, if you remember the introduction to Fourth Political Theory,

00:31:05.040 the victory of liberalism meant somehow the end of the field of the political.

00:31:09.920 So what happens to political anthropology when the field of the political has apparently collapsed?

00:31:15.680 Yeah, and that's what I was going to get to next year.

00:31:17.700 He then kind of goes into what Schmidt talks about when it comes to liberalism.

00:31:23.420 And once we try to avoid the political, we try to dismiss the political with liberalism.

00:31:28.560 And so if there is no, you know, if there is a, if your entire political framework

00:31:35.300 is the denial of politics itself, then you end up in a very weird situation

00:31:40.380 as you're trying to grasp that identity and understanding.

00:31:43.280 He talks a lot about kind of how the subject and the authority kind of become equal.

00:31:50.500 There's no longer a distinction between those things.

00:31:53.580 I've heard other people call this the politics of the swarm, which I think is kind of a helpful

00:31:58.060 way to understand this, where there is no more hierarchy.

00:32:02.660 There is no more understanding of where power comes from, where your position sits inside

00:32:08.700 society, how to understand yourself in relation to these different hierarchical structures.

00:32:14.600 Everything, power is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

00:32:17.980 It's always located both inside and outside.

00:32:20.980 And so it makes it very difficult for people to then kind of grasp where they sit and understand

00:32:27.740 themselves in context.

00:32:30.680 Yes.

00:32:31.360 So that's a totally different situation than has been the situation before.

00:32:36.180 Dugan tries to understand what could it possibly mean for political anthropology?

00:32:39.520 Because there seems like it doesn't leave you with a clear cut notion of what the man is

00:32:46.620 under some particular regime or of what even political activity looks like.

00:32:51.340 This swarm figure, the micro-politicized trans, sub-individual and trans-individual, the chaotic 0.99

00:32:58.520 self and all of that.

00:33:00.120 So yeah, he gives a description or account of it and tries to say that it has complicated

00:33:03.900 the situation for sure, has made the scene much more chaotic.

00:33:07.680 But he says this is important for him.

00:33:10.340 He says, even though it seems like it's involved in the abolition of the political, of the field

00:33:15.240 of the political or something like that, in fact, it's clearly a political project.

00:33:19.920 It clearly can be analyzed in that way.

00:33:22.620 Just like for Schmitt, you know, when liberals invoke humanity, it doesn't mean they're

00:33:25.860 humanitarian.

00:33:26.640 It just means they're being very crafty and no less political than their enemies in doing

00:33:30.680 so.

00:33:31.440 So what Dugan can therefore do is he can say, let's enrich the scope of the political.

00:33:37.820 We had the pre-modern and modern alternatives with their notion of political anthropology.

00:33:42.340 Then we have the apparently non-political swarm of post-modernity.

00:33:46.800 But once we see that it's also political, we combine it with the pre-modern and modern.

00:33:51.020 And now we have the notion of the absolute political.

00:33:54.560 And the key, if I can just take a step ahead here, the key question for him, I also think,

00:33:59.540 by the way, this is still highly relevant in debates about the right way to respond to

00:34:05.120 wokeism and what the alternative would look like and so on.

00:34:07.320 So the kind of situation is this, in order to deal with the swarm type political anthropology

00:34:17.140 of post-modernity, is it enough to just reassert and reaffirm a modern political anthropology?

00:34:25.200 So in the face of the kind of post-human or even anti-human or trans-human post-modern

00:34:31.880 alternative, we're going to reassert some figure from political modernity.

00:34:36.780 As I think should be clear by now, Dugan is not content in any way to return to political

00:34:43.700 modernity.

00:34:44.500 And that means even to return to the figures of its political anthropology.

00:34:48.960 No going back, only somehow going forward.

00:34:52.300 So the post-modern swarm-like weird chaotic circus clown figure, it is opposed by, he says,

00:35:03.240 the response to the post-human is not going to be the human, because to respond to the

00:35:08.660 post-human with the human is to go back to political modernity.

00:35:11.100 We need some other alternative.

00:35:12.680 These are the parts of Dugan that I think are probably the weirdest for ordinary Anglo-conservatives,

00:35:18.220 right?

00:35:18.400 It's like, what could that possibly mean?

00:35:20.960 What are you talking about?

00:35:21.720 And this is where Dugan also shows himself as most post-modern, you know?

00:35:25.720 And therefore, anybody who has an antipathy to post-modernity as such is going to have

00:35:28.880 some difficulty with these notions.

00:35:31.480 But yeah, no going back to the modern alternatives.

00:35:35.560 That means, what are we left with?

00:35:37.480 And here, by the way, I said at the end of the last chapter that radical subject is important

00:35:43.120 for him.

00:35:43.660 Radical subject is not the same as a character from political modernity, because we're dealing

00:35:48.360 with the root origin of consciousness is, you know, fleeing itself, so to speak.

00:35:54.760 So radical subject is like one of the places Dugan would look for an alternative to the post-modern

00:36:01.560 circus show.

00:36:02.740 But it's clearly not the same as just going back to good old-fashioned 1990s neoconservatism

00:36:09.520 or whatever some people are trying to resurrect.

00:36:13.260 Yeah, I mean, he even says that there's no real adherence to the modern place.

00:36:18.360 In post-modernity, all of that is kind of itself an echo or a clown show that no one's

00:36:23.680 really, like you said, there's no going back to that.

00:36:27.100 There's no connection to that.

00:36:28.200 There's no bridge back to kind of where you were.

00:36:31.500 Yeah, that's an important point, because I and other people sometimes, you know, mock

00:36:36.200 or analyze the woke side of the equation as where the circus is happening.

00:36:40.600 But it's very much the case for him that the neocommunism, neofascism, neoliberalism, they're

00:36:45.520 all one clown show because the political modernity is over.

00:36:48.360 And so everything that we see that reflects political modernity today is simulacrum and

00:36:55.320 not serious.

00:36:57.320 So interestingly, and I kind of found this interesting because I, along with Schmidt, I

00:37:02.400 really like Joseph de Maestra, who I think was a is a big kind of I think a lot of ways

00:37:07.340 Schmidt is kind of a secularization of Joseph de Maestra.

00:37:09.840 And so he kind of talks about the crossing the boundary of Schmidt's political theology

00:37:15.420 and that we're kind of in a we're in a new place.

00:37:19.860 I guess this is because and we'll get into this in more detail in a moment.

00:37:23.140 But I guess this is because we're introducing perhaps non-human entities into or post-human

00:37:31.680 entities kind of into politics.

00:37:33.360 And this is where we're at.

00:37:35.100 What do you think he's kind of talking about here when he talks about kind of crossing the

00:37:40.360 boundary of Schmidt's political theology?

00:37:43.820 OK, so first of all, he doesn't elaborate at great length.

00:37:47.100 So some of this is speculative.

00:37:48.540 I will say some connections that may be helpful.

00:37:50.780 But he says that we cannot speak about political theology because somehow the field of theology

00:37:58.940 and the field of the political are both in this new state.

00:38:02.700 You know, political theology is not as postmodern as we are.

00:38:07.540 It's more like a modern construction to a certain extent for Dugan.

00:38:10.980 So the as he puts it, you can't have an appeal to a telos in quite the same way under the new

00:38:16.940 circumstances, as you could have under the earlier circumstances before there was a crisis of

00:38:22.060 direction, a crisis of legitimacy, a crisis of rationality, and so on.

00:38:25.280 So he suggests this angel politics, political angelology.

00:38:31.960 I want to just say a couple of things about it quickly.

00:38:34.000 So the first one is that it might seem like a very, a phrase that I like, mystical political

00:38:39.980 theology.

00:38:40.660 So you might think political angelology is a kind of mystical political theology, putting

00:38:44.860 mysticism back on the table.

00:38:45.920 But what Dugan says is that it is not mystical.

00:38:50.400 He says it must be considered as a metaphor, which is both scientific and rational.

00:38:55.420 He says that it's not meant to be, it's quote, devoid of mysticism and esotericism.

00:39:00.800 So in other words, he does mean it in a way that is conceptually rigorous and not just completely

00:39:06.940 indeterminate.

00:39:07.780 So that forces upon us the challenge of understanding conceptually.

00:39:11.040 I'll say here's one helpful connection, especially for people who are like pursuing some of the

00:39:15.440 threads.

00:39:17.000 Dugan has at times suggested that you can use the language of the angel, like the figure

00:39:23.120 of the angel and the tools of angelology as a way to interpret Dasein.

00:39:30.060 So it's like a translation.

00:39:32.380 Dasein equals angel.

00:39:33.620 And therefore, angelology is similar to, just expressed in a different language, what it

00:39:39.580 would mean to think in terms of Heideggerian categories or concepts or Heidegger's existential

00:39:44.580 analysis.

00:39:45.320 Because for Heidegger also, people who get into him and who learn to read him, they see

00:39:50.280 what Heidegger talks about when he talks about the human being.

00:39:52.820 It's not what we usually take ourselves to be, because we usually take ourselves to be

00:39:57.500 like our bodily selves or our material selves or psychological selves or something.

00:40:02.280 But Heidegger gives a totally different kind of interpretation.

00:40:05.600 So Dugan at times uses this translation that Dasein is like talking about our angel or ourselves

00:40:13.480 as angel, you know, or the angel of our authentic existence or even the angel of peoples.

00:40:18.180 So that's one sort of link between Heidegger and the figure of the angel.

00:40:22.320 Another, and this gets beneath the one that I just mentioned, there is a scholar who was

00:40:28.160 the first person to translate fragments of Heidegger into French.

00:40:32.780 His name is Henri Corbin, C-O-R-B-I-N.

00:40:36.180 He was also a scholar of Islamic mysticism.

00:40:38.860 So he wrote about the figure of the angel.

00:40:42.480 So he's a French Heideggerian who wrote about angelology and the figure of the angel, the

00:40:46.960 battle for our angel.

00:40:48.120 And he's very important for Dugan because he also shows us how you can take the language

00:40:53.220 of Heidegger and use it to do multipolar political philosophy.

00:40:59.540 See, through Heidegger, you can suddenly start talking about Iranian mysticism.

00:41:03.700 Through Heidegger, you can suddenly start talking about some other kind of religious

00:41:07.300 eschatological viewpoint and so on.

00:41:08.960 So this whole field of angelopolis or angelic political angelology, I would say it's like

00:41:15.720 a poetic or mythical expression of what he means by Heideggerian political philosophy.

00:41:21.700 That would be my thesis.

00:41:23.360 Interesting.

00:41:24.100 Okay.

00:41:24.620 Yeah, I was trying to grasp that because he kind of mentions other actors as well, non-human

00:41:29.600 actors.

00:41:30.120 But he, for instance, gives the example of a text message sending the man.

00:41:34.220 So the man doesn't send the text message, the text message animates the actions of the

00:41:39.340 man.

00:41:40.380 And at some point, I took that to mean you could have technology or forces we don't understand

00:41:48.900 in technology driving political action in a non-human way.

00:41:55.140 So I think, yeah, that's in play as well.

00:41:57.720 Because the whole analysis of technology as destiny, technology as fate, technological

00:42:02.660 interpretation of the world, technological capture of the human essence, that's all fair

00:42:07.260 game under the theme of Heideggerian political philosophy.

00:42:09.920 Because Heidegger writes about technology, its significance for human existence and human

00:42:13.240 history.

00:42:14.240 So you could have, as I say, it's a rich, one of the things Dugan likes to do is sort of

00:42:19.220 sketch out a rich, possible semantic field and then leave it for further exploration.

00:42:25.780 So this would be something he does here.

00:42:27.240 I'll make one extra connection again, just for those who want to know the sources, because

00:42:32.420 they're not so easy to track down without a quick word of guidance.

00:42:36.000 So there's a book in English called Heidegger in Russia and Eastern Europe.

00:42:40.340 And there's a chapter in that book by Dugan that I translated.

00:42:44.420 And it also does some analysis of the figure of the angel in relationship to Heidegger.

00:42:49.000 So that's like another English source.

00:42:50.840 But yeah, all of these processes, the whole realm of destiny, fate, of man's being captured

00:42:56.080 by something other than man.

00:42:57.860 And angelology implies also demonology and implies also the whole celestial hierarchy.

00:43:02.900 And you're in the realm there of exciting, strange, but useful analysis of a kind of poetic

00:43:13.000 type.

00:43:14.140 Yeah, yeah.

00:43:14.520 No, that's definitely where you're at.

00:43:16.040 All right.

00:43:16.980 So our next chapter, the final one we're going to focus on today is kind of the fourth political

00:43:23.600 theory in practice.

00:43:25.900 So he goes into a good bit of detail here.

00:43:30.740 And I'll kind of let you lead this discussion as how much you think, because there's a lot

00:43:33.960 of Heidegger and Dasein and everything in here.

00:43:37.280 So you'll know better kind of where to go with some of this.

00:43:40.140 But he talks about how the fourth political theory has to be one of action, has to be

00:43:45.820 embodied in the doing.

00:43:48.740 And so in order to do that, he kind of brings in Heidegger, his understanding of Dasein and

00:43:55.140 talks about the need for kind of the subject and object duality to kind of be collapsed,

00:44:00.100 that we need to kind of go to a time before theory and practice were separated and understand,

00:44:07.140 you know, this kind of political theory as your action and your your action and your

00:44:13.260 theory are not completely separate things.

00:44:14.880 You don't formulate the theory and completely separate from the action and then follow it

00:44:19.100 step by step or something like that, that these things are more closely intertwined and

00:44:22.920 informing each other.

00:44:25.340 Yeah, that's right.

00:44:26.340 So first, he sets it out that, you know, you have a book called The Fourth Political Theory,

00:44:30.340 you have an idea called The Fourth Political Theory.

00:44:32.040 It does raise the question, how is this theory to be implemented?

00:44:35.000 And that kind of question suggests this division between theory, practice, or as he also puts

00:44:41.460 it in that table, principle, manifestation, mentality, activity, idea, realization, thinking,

00:44:48.220 action.

00:44:48.700 So the sort of like purely conceptual and then the active version of it.

00:44:55.500 But he says, OK, that's a fair question.

00:44:57.720 What would fourth political practice look like?

00:44:59.760 And we can sort of play around with it in those terms, in terms of a radical division

00:45:04.800 between theory and practice.

00:45:06.220 But he says, because he follows Heidegger, that's not the way that he wants to do it,

00:45:10.440 since Heidegger is interested in the root, as it were, that precedes the split or division

00:45:15.300 between these two columns.

00:45:16.520 Now, here is where I think it's a very helpful observation he makes.

00:45:19.860 We, even without any Heidegger and even without any Dugan, have some familiarity with the idea

00:45:27.340 of a blurring between the distinction, a blurring of the distinction between theory and practice

00:45:32.960 or between, you know, the idea and the object or whatever.

00:45:37.800 And our exposure to it is through the postmodern blurring of categories.

00:45:42.220 The postmodern blurring of categories, which seeks to, as it were, deconstruct or transcend

00:45:48.760 or break through the small box and show that everything is intertwined and interconnected

00:45:54.500 in these more complicated ways.

00:45:57.060 And Dugan actually thinks that that is a step in the right direction.

00:46:00.600 So if a rigid distinction between theory and practice is a relic of the old history of philosophy

00:46:06.840 and going to the root, let's say, is a reflection of the new history of philosophy that he's

00:46:13.720 trying to inaugurate and that his fourth political theory is a part of.

00:46:16.600 So postmodernism is closer to that.

00:46:19.340 But it's very helpful in my view.

00:46:21.400 And I think we can see it even with things like transgenderism.

00:46:24.820 The idea is that the postmodern leftist approach to blurring these boundaries is horizontal.

00:46:31.300 It blurs them on the horizontal surface.

00:46:34.620 The colors run together.

00:46:36.900 And in this sense, you preserve the fact that the human transcends, for example, his or her

00:46:42.320 gender.

00:46:43.060 But how is that reflected in the left postmodernism?

00:46:45.780 By a sort of transgenderism. 0.65

00:46:47.980 You know, you move from this one to that one or you play with your gender in this fluid

00:46:51.120 type of way.

00:46:52.360 Whereas for Dugan, that constitutes a parody of man's true, deep, vertical self-transcendence.

00:47:00.080 So I think you could say postmodernism, wokeism, and so on, is a kind of horizontal transcendence.

00:47:06.660 You're jumping out of one set of categories, blurring them, but never moving up or down.

00:47:13.120 Just changing where you fell horizontally.

00:47:16.580 And the crucial breakthrough in the shift to Heidegger, the crucial breakthrough in the

00:47:21.840 shift to Dasein, and for Dugan, the whole alternative represented by the fourth political

00:47:26.820 theory as a kind of right-wing postmodernism, is that it keeps the transcendent gesture.

00:47:33.180 It overcomes the categories of modernity.

00:47:35.220 But it does so not in a flattening, horizontal, chaotic, left way, but in one that really preserves

00:47:43.100 vertical dimension.

00:47:45.200 And then another interesting point, I mean, for people who like this kind of thing, once

00:47:49.860 you've introduced a vertical dimension, you have a question.

00:47:52.720 Fine, you're getting outside of theory and practice horizontally.

00:47:55.960 You're going to go on the vertical axis.

00:47:58.080 But why do you go to the roots?

00:48:00.580 Why don't you go to the top?

00:48:02.340 Why do you go down?

00:48:03.300 Why is it about hitting the ground or getting to the foundations?

00:48:06.280 Why is the whole topography about going below?

00:48:09.400 Why don't you go up into the suprasensible, into the realm of divinity and so on?

00:48:14.620 Which, incidentally, the talk of angelology might have made us expect.

00:48:19.340 So here he says, we have to get to the roots because the branches or the heights are constructed

00:48:25.820 on the basis of the roots.

00:48:27.440 So this is also a very Heideggerian theme.

00:48:29.260 Heidegger said, unless we raise the question, what do we mean by being, which for him is

00:48:34.240 the foundational question, any other self-interpretation is going to be distorted.

00:48:38.920 It's going to be free-floating.

00:48:40.360 It is going to be a big gap.

00:48:41.580 So if you say, oh, these postmodern leftists, they think that we're all about race, gender,

00:48:45.740 but I think that we're about soul and spirit.

00:48:48.740 So Heidegger would come back and say, yeah, but you've left soul and spirit as unclarified

00:48:53.300 as they leave race and gender.

00:48:54.760 You've just invoked a new set of notions, but without any understanding of their ontological

00:48:59.860 provenance or justification.

00:49:03.320 So before we have, whether it's a divine construct or whether it's some other kind of construct,

00:49:10.780 both Heidegger and Dugan say, we need to understand the foundations.

00:49:14.740 The foundations are always going to be deeper than the divisions, and they're always going

00:49:18.280 to be existential.

00:49:21.040 So the existential answer to the question of a fourth political practice is that to think,

00:49:28.540 to speak, to question, to engage, to search, to write is already intermingling, total intermeshing

00:49:36.680 of a magical thinking, a practical intelligence.

00:49:43.560 The world hasn't been split yet into just merely thinking and merely doing.

00:49:48.780 It's a theurgy, as he suggests.

00:49:51.820 And again, I think a lot of ordinary conservative types would find this to be sort of like

00:49:56.740 too postmodern or something.

00:50:00.500 But, you know, how far can we go with Paul, Ryan, Bill, Crystal, 1990s conservatism, or isn't

00:50:09.500 it time to take a step into other possible ways of thinking these questions through?

00:50:14.600 So that would be Dugan's model here.

00:50:16.900 Yeah, I thought it was very interesting.

00:50:18.540 You know, he, like you said, he takes a step towards the postmodern, but he is definitely

00:50:23.000 attacking leftist postmodernism here.

00:50:26.400 He directly attacks Deleuze multiple times saying, you know, the body without organs,

00:50:31.180 the rhizome, these are not useful.

00:50:34.100 They don't work because they don't allow for the vertical, like you said.

00:50:38.500 They don't allow to this, you know, connection.

00:50:41.360 And that kind of makes them dangerous.

00:50:44.800 In many ways, as we've kind of talked about, he kind of mentioned previously in other chapters,

00:50:49.000 this is postmodernism is for him a way, a opportunity to re-enchant the world and to

00:50:55.460 kind of connect, like you said, the roots to the, to these higher concepts once again.

00:51:01.860 Yeah.

00:51:02.360 So he says about Deleuze, by the way, he does always say nice things as well about Deleuze.

00:51:07.040 He refers to his fold in his book, but here he says, we can say Deleuze's rhizome is a

00:51:10.960 postmodern and poststructural mockery of Heidegger's Dasein.

00:51:15.000 They're alike and they're described often in the same terms, but they solve the problem

00:51:19.240 differently, horizontal versus vertical.

00:51:21.260 Or as he also puts it, we can use the thesis that homo integros, meaning the complete

00:51:25.100 integral man consists of homo sapiens, wise man and homo demens, demented or crazy man.

00:51:31.460 And that Deleuze says free homo demens, you know, you, you solve, you have to liberate 1.00

00:51:36.740 our insanity, liberate our craziness, liberate our schizophrenia, our chaotic side and so on.

00:51:43.600 And that the alternative to that is the integrated man.

00:51:47.900 So we're not just trying to liberate the schizophrenic or crazy side of our nature.

00:51:52.760 That's sort of the left postmodern project.

00:51:56.120 Dugan's project is integral man.

00:51:58.840 And maybe in some sense, political angelology or the figure of the angel is another way of

00:52:03.320 stating the integral man.

00:52:05.640 Because integral man is man who's exposed, obviously, as well to the realm of the divine

00:52:09.300 and the holy.

00:52:10.240 And therefore, to talk about angels would be appropriate.

00:52:13.120 So yeah, it's definitely strange.

00:52:16.600 But just to reiterate the point, the main problem, as he puts it, of postmodernity is its

00:52:20.460 elimination of any vertical orientation in terms of both height and depth.

00:52:24.960 Although he, at one point, he has a nice model.

00:52:27.100 I like it anyways, where he does say postmodern has some vertical.

00:52:31.760 Here's how he puts it.

00:52:32.640 He said the premodern world was like the world egg.

00:52:36.760 Okay.

00:52:36.980 The premodern world was open at the top to the energies of the divine and the holy.

00:52:41.700 Then the modern world was closed at the top and at the bottom.

00:52:44.760 So it shut off the holy energies, it shut off the infernal energies, and it tried to

00:52:48.820 become like an isolated world of human construction.

00:52:52.200 And postmodernity is closed at the top.

00:52:54.760 It's closed to God, but it's open at the bottom.

00:52:56.760 It's open to Satan and his minions, but it's closed to God and his host of angels.

00:53:01.020 So there is something demonic and infernal about postmodernity.

00:53:04.340 And that's sort of the liberation of the demented self, which, as you can see, it's just not the

00:53:10.220 game that he wants to play, but it does contain a truth in it, a truth that modernity itself

00:53:15.000 is not enough.

00:53:16.340 Right.

00:53:17.060 And the last paragraph in this chapter is particularly interesting and probably will sound some alarm

00:53:24.900 bells for those who are skeptical of Dugan.

00:53:28.100 But he talks about kind of the fourth political theory is eschatology here.

00:53:33.120 And he kind of talks about how, you know, Judgment Day won't bring itself and we have to bring

00:53:41.680 it, you know, it's a very interesting thing to kind of put at the end of this chapter about

00:53:49.100 the fourth political theory in practice.

00:53:51.680 I understand some of this might not be clear or might be left to interpretation, but what

00:53:57.120 do you think he's doing here connecting the fourth political theory to basically the end

00:54:01.860 of days?

00:54:03.680 Well, yeah, you could say the fourth political practice is to end the world.

00:54:10.240 Okay.

00:54:10.700 But what does the end of the world mean?

00:54:12.880 What does the end of days mean?

00:54:13.800 We've just had a section on the ontology of the future.

00:54:16.320 We've just had a thing on the phenomenology of time.

00:54:18.680 We've had all of these invocations of Heidegger.

00:54:21.100 So in my view, it's impossible to interpret this in any way as meaning or implying the physical

00:54:27.100 annihilation of the objective world.

00:54:30.580 You know, he's not saying fourth political practice means let's take a bunch of nuclear

00:54:34.240 bombs and blow up planet Earth so that human life can no longer live here.

00:54:39.980 World is a technical term in Heidegger's philosophy.

00:54:43.520 It's a term that refers to the way, as it were, we interpret what we encounter, the meaning

00:54:49.560 that things have for us.

00:54:50.860 It's not about physical annihilation.

00:54:52.980 It is, though, about the annihilation of the categories of interpretation, of the concepts

00:54:59.420 that are shaping our reality.

00:55:00.580 And you see, the whole book so far, if Dugan's main aim was physical destruction and annihilation,

00:55:07.040 this would be a manual on, like, how to make a bomb and how to go blow up a building or

00:55:10.300 something like that.

00:55:11.080 It wouldn't be a book about Deleuze and Heidegger and Husserl and so on.

00:55:15.080 There would be no need for all of that.

00:55:17.060 But the fact that he's dealing with that tells you what he's concerned with is the world of

00:55:21.460 our, the world of meaning and significance for us.

00:55:25.080 The world that we make sense of.

00:55:26.480 So the modern world means the world configured by the philosophies of modernity.

00:55:32.300 And when we say the pre-modern world is different from the modern world, we mean it's different

00:55:36.080 in the way that it interprets man, God, and so on.

00:55:39.420 And the difference of interpretation results in a completely differently lived life.

00:55:45.420 That's true.

00:55:46.280 So he wants to put an end, fourth political theory wants to put an end to the world of

00:55:51.900 liberalism, of post-liberalism, of wokeism, of globalism, not, in my opinion, directly

00:55:58.100 through physical annihilation, but rather through this philosophical sense.

00:56:01.780 Although, to be totally transparent and frank, it's equally clear for Dugan that in order

00:56:08.660 to oppose the interpretations and the semantics and all of that, you clearly do have a political

00:56:13.740 corollary to that.

00:56:15.180 So it might mean, like, let's say the war, Russia's war in Ukraine is for him in part

00:56:19.940 a war over the meaning of the world order.

00:56:22.880 So it's not like it's a purely intellectual endeavor because we just saw fourth political

00:56:29.100 theory and fourth political practice, they don't separate fully what it means to be purely

00:56:34.660 theoretical.

00:56:35.320 So in other words, there is a military dimension, there's a political dimension, but to say that

00:56:40.120 he's interested in the end of days or the end of the world clearly does not mean

00:56:43.440 total global nuclear annihilation.

00:56:47.480 In fact, we've seen throughout the book that his whole point is there must continue to be

00:56:51.800 as much as possible a political history, a social history, a cultural history.

00:56:56.300 Time must continue.

00:56:57.460 The music must go on.

00:56:58.640 So that would be impossible to combine with the view that he wants the whole thing to come

00:57:03.020 to a screeching halt.

00:57:04.980 Yeah, I just thought it was important to go ahead and clarify that because I think taking

00:57:08.080 out of that context, which is, to be fair, a pretty complicated context, that paragraph

00:57:13.020 can be pretty alarming.

00:57:14.720 So I think I thought it was worth taking the time to clarify that.

00:57:17.760 Yeah, the risk here would be neither to blow the alarm out of proportion nor to go and diffuse

00:57:23.640 the bomb completely because it is very important for Dugan that the philosophical and the political

00:57:28.540 are, they coalesce.

00:57:30.780 So the war of ideas also may mean a war of armies, but it just doesn't mean global nuclear

00:57:36.100 holocaust. 0.61

00:57:37.420 Right.

00:57:37.960 All right.

00:57:38.560 Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap it up here.

00:57:40.900 Where can everyone find all of your great work?

00:57:44.200 So I have a few different places online.

00:57:46.160 If you go to, for example, michaelmillerman.com or duganbook.com, you'll see some books that

00:57:51.580 I've written, including one on Dugan.

00:57:53.260 I have an online school, millermanschool.com, where I teach Dugan, Strauss, Heidegger, and

00:57:58.020 other figures that we've discussed and that I think people will really enjoy learning about.

00:58:01.880 And you can always just search me up on YouTube where I have a channel and I've done many

00:58:05.420 interviews on Dugan, Heidegger, and these figures.

00:58:07.660 So a lot of different materials, some free, some paid, some books, articles, essays, interviews,

00:58:12.380 and I hope people find it useful.

00:58:14.220 My main social media is Twitter, M underscore Millerman.

00:58:17.980 Follow me and let me know what you think about all of this.

00:58:22.040 Excellent.

00:58:22.580 All right, guys.

00:58:23.260 So make sure that you're checking out all of Michael Millerman's work.

00:58:26.780 And of course, if this is your first time here, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe

00:58:30.560 to the channel.

00:58:31.780 And if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you can, of course, go ahead and

00:58:36.160 check out The Oren McIntyre Show on all your favorite podcast platforms.

00:58:40.980 If you do, make sure you go ahead and leave that rating or review.

00:58:44.380 Thanks for watching, guys.

00:58:45.260 And always, we'll talk to you next time.

00:58:47.380 The Oren McIntyre Show.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - May 11, 2023

Fourth Political Theory： Part Four ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 5⧸11⧸23

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