1. IntroductionIn February 2019, the film Black Panther was awarded three Oscars in Los Angeles. Some reviewers embraced it for its anti-racist message against the resurgence of racism under U.S. president Donald Trump.1 It tells the story of a black hero who tries to steer the development of an ethnically pure, isolationist hereditary monarchy in Africa. The imaginary state of Wakanda, which presents itself to the rest of the world as a third-world country, has highly developed technologies at its disposal–at (...) the same time, one recalls archaic African myths there.2. (shrink)

The paper studies the significance of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of history for two key thinkers of contemporary radical conservatism and the Identitarian movement, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. Heidegger's often-overlooked affinities with the German “conservative revolution” of the Weimar period have in recent years been emphasized by an emerging radical-conservative “right-Heideggerian” orientation. I first discuss the later Heidegger's “being-historical” narrative of the culmination and end of the metaphysical foundations of Western modernity in the contemporary Nietzschean era of nihilism and (...) of an emerging postmodern “other beginning” of Western thinking, focused on historical and cultural relativism and particularism. In Heidegger's work of the 1930s and 1940s, we find attempts to apply this historical narrative to interpreting contemporary geopolitical and ideological phenomena in ways that connect Heidegger to certain central ideas and concerns of the conservative revolutionaries, especially Carl Schmitt's geopolitical particularism. De Benoist, the key name of the French Nouvelle Droite and a founding figure of contemporary Identitarianism, is particularly inspired by Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche as the culmination of the “metaphysics of subjectivity” dominating Western modernity. For de Benoist, this modern metaphysics is the root of the “ideology of the Same” underlying the liberal universalism and individualism that he opposes in the name of a cultural ethnopluralism. De Benoist's Russian disciple Dugin bases the pluralistic geopolitics of his radical-conservative “fourth political theory” on the legacy of the conservative revolution, the key intellectual model of which Dugin discovers in Heidegger's notion of the “other beginning”. (shrink)

Today, the ‘pluriverse’ is considered to be a radical new concept capable of decolonising political thought. However, it is not only decolonial scholarship that has taken up the concept of the pluriverse; far-right intellectuals, too, have been cultivating a decolonial imaginary based on the idea of the pluriverse. This article compares the way the concept of the pluriverse appears in certain strands of Latin American decolonial theory exemplified by Walter Mignolo, on the one hand, and the ethnopluralism of the (...) European New Right represented by Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin, on the other. Despite Mignolo’s pluriverse being an ‘open pluriverse’ of entanglement between peoples, while the European New Right’s is a ‘closed pluriverse’ of ethnic separation, I argue that these uses of the pluriverse are nevertheless underpinned by a shared analytical and normative framework. This framework is defined by a simple refrain: that what oppresses the world is ontological and epistemological sameness, and what will liberate it is ontological and epistemological difference. I argue that this schema, which misapprehends imperialism as a form of epistemic domination geared purely towards homogenisation, rather than as a set of material relationships that also produce (e.g. racial, sexual, and class) difference, does not provide a solid foundation for contesting colonial relations. (shrink)