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This is why, the pacifists arouse great indignation, because, while they talk about the need for peace, they actually bring everything into a state of total war. Carl Schmitt made an interesting argument about "total war" and "war of forms." "Total war" is a war of all against all, it begins when the state ceases to defend the interests of its own culture. Then madness is born and homo homini lupus est. Then there is a "war of forms", which is when the state begins to define itself, defining the concepts of friend and foe. In this situation, war is conducted according to a clear strategy. The propaganda of pacifism is actually the propaganda of total war.

— Daria Platonova Dugina @dplat

After an inspirited speech by Zarathustra on the exhaustion of man and the need to overcome him, the crowd shouts: “We have heard enough already about the tightrope walker, now let us see him too!”16 Nietzsche then describes the last humans in even more scathing terms: “Then the earth has become small, and on it hops the last human being, who makes everything small. His kind is ineradicable, like the flea beetle; the last human being lives longest. ‘We invented happiness’ – say the last human beings, blinking.” This is the Hegelian Slave once again, the antithesis of the eschatological optimist.

Nietzsche’s Übermensch, on the other hand, becomes such by an act of will which, starting from the shore of illusoriness, directs its volitional gesture, its intention, towards the other shore, a shore of which it knows nothing. In fact, in this volitional decision, in Nietzsche’s singling out of the volitional need to overcome the human, is inlaid in apophatic optimism: wherever this arrow is shot, wherever it flies, wherever it turns, there is no certainty and no guarantees whatsoever. It is a desperate cast, a gesture towards nothingness, aimed thither where there are no poles. One of Evgeny Golovin’s songs begins with the words “Where there are no parallels and no poles…”

Accordingly, eschatological optimism is to be found in Nietzsche’s recognition of the illusory nature of the surrounding world, in his cold ascertainment of the worthlessness of the last man who blinks, and, at the same time, it is to be found in what appears to be the absolutely groundless act of calling for a departing, for casting the arrow to the opposite shore. No one knows what lies on the “shore across,” hence it can only be a free act of will to overcome the finitude of any illusion.

This is Nietzschean apophaticism. The worthless nothingness of nihilism is to be overcome only by will directed toward the primordial One.

Excerpt: from Eschatological Optimism by Daria Platonova Dugina
https://pravpublishing.com/eschatological-optimism/

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, passively waiting for the end, or retiring to the isolated bliss of knowledge of its fate, we resolve to live and struggle within it, to accept it as part of our own life and our own death, to be philosophers, warriors, and human beings in the midst of it. In other words, we are “optimistic” that our existing and acting within this illusory end-world serves a higher purpose and grants our lives (and deaths) a greater meaning. Daria thought that this intuition can be found in a number of thinkers and writers from the ancient world down to our Postmodern times, yet she goes even further to suggest 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 in a time and place with a certain capacity for thinking and doing, is much more of a task, a goal, than it is a given. As soon as we realize that no amount of our own philosophical knowledge or political 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 go 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 in the world even after realizing its illusoriness and 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 yet harmonious human life.

I know that I am fighting against the hegemony of evil for the truth of the eternal Tradition. It is obscured now, but not completely lost. Without it nothing could exist. I think that any gender and age has its forms to access Tradition and its ways to challenge Modernity. My existential practice is to abdicate most values of the globalist youth. I think we need to be different from this thrash. I don’t believe in anything modern. Modernity is always wrong. I consider love to be a form of initiation and spiritual realization. And the family should be the union of spiritually similar persons.

— Daria Dugina

“We Live in the Era of the End”: An Eternally Relevant Interview with Daria Dugina

In January 2013, Open Revolt was very happy to publish the following conversation between the Eurasian Youth Union’s Daria Dugina and our very own James Porrazzo @porrazzo , founder of New Resistance.

« When I, following Evola, pronounce the word “war,” I have in mind a domain of deep metaphysical revelation. We are talking about war against the dark element, war against the Kali-Yuga…

I want to quote Evola once more: “A warrior tradition and a pure military tradition do not have hatred as the basis of war.” This is very important: true martial tradition does not know hatred. Warriors are genuine peacemakers, people who are filled with love above all else…..

If even one of us, including myself and everyone gathered here today, commits to seeking this “forest passage,” to becoming the anarch, or to making the strong-willed decision that we must break with the modern world and cultivate the warrior and hero within ourselves, then it seems to me that the world is already saved. Because even a single person can save all of mankind, as we know. »

— Daria Platonova Dugina, Eschatological Optimism (PRAV Publishing, 2023) [https://pravpublishing.com/eschatological-optimism/]

💫 Apophatic Apologetics

A Review of ESCHATOLOGICAL OPTIMISM by Daria “Platonova” Dugina

There are few things more intellectually agreeable than a well-reasoned treatise that forces one to continually think, that offers both reassurance and challenge. If such a work is both inspiring and captivating, then it becomes an even finer rarity. So it is with today’s subject, a proper exposition of the good, the true, and the beautiful:

Dugina, Daria “Platonova”, Eschatological Optimism. Russian Federation: PRAV Publishing, 2023.

The book is the posthumously collected essays and lectures of the brilliant Daria (also to some, Darya) Dugina, as masterfully edited by John Stachelski and fluidly translated into English by Jafe Arnold. This review and all page citations are based on the Kindle edition; for reference, I use the pagination rather than positioning provided by my Kindle reader. One may and should order a copy either from PRAV or from Amazon.

✍️ Perrin Lovett

Yesterday, a reader asked to meet in person to purchase a copy of Daria Platonova Dugina’s Eschatological Optimism. The exchange turned into more than three hours of conversation that ranged from Plato to Dugin, Heidegger and Aristotle, Eurasianism and anthropology, Traditionalism and Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology, Leibniz’s monadology and Marx’s critique of capitalism, Kant’s third critique and Guénon on mathematics, transgenderism and the notion of society… and, of course, the life and death of Dasha.

If every procurement of Dasha’s Eschatological Optimism inspires such conversations, then we are already winning.