This is a bold and astonishing book. It pulls together two very different Russian philosophers, the humanist Vladimir Bibikhin and the Putin apologist Alexander Dugin, serious Heideggerians who apply the masters legacy on mortality, politics, and metaphysics to reboot a new Russia. A wake-up call for the Western ear too prone to hear only our own fading triumphalist debates. -- Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emerita of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, USA This book offers a provocative and unsettling meditation on what a new beginning in thought might mean today. Drawing on Heideggers later vision of a thinking released from metaphysical closure, it brings into stark relief two radically different Russian appropriations of that legacy: Vladimir Bibikhins gentle reverence for Being and transformative openness, and Alexander Dugins volatile defense of cultural singularity through what he terms a philosophy of chaos. The dialogueat times implicit, at times confrontationalbetween plenitude and void, nonviolence and aggression, resonates far beyond Russias borders. What emerges is a deeply consequential challenge to the intellectual complacency of the West: that our assumptions about universality, reason, and order may themselves be historical accidents rather than philosophical necessities. One may recoil from Dugins polemics or find solace in Bibikhins calm, but neither can be dismissed. This book forces us to confront a world where thought itself should begin againfrom nothing, or from everything. -- Marina F. Bykova, Professor of Philosophy, North Carolina State University, USA Love and Meng brilliantly take the reader through their original and compelling interpretation of Heideggers revolutionary notion of openness, the violence and criminality against conventional thinking required to attend to it, and the diametrically opposed directions that two Russian thinkers take Heideggers destruction of metaphysics on behalf of the other beginning: the philosophy of chaos of Aleksandr Dugin, Putins philosopher, and Vladimir Bibikhins emancipatory amekhania as joyful exuberance at life. In unfolding the reception of Heidegger by these recent and influential Russian thinkers, the authors place the reader at their crossroads, and ours. -- Henry Pickford, Professor of German Studies, Duke University
