Where is Your Khorovod? Dugin Would Cry: Two Currents of Circular Desire in the Libidinal Economies of Russian Eros and Archaic Collectivity

In the labyrinthine interplay of contemporary erotic economies and archaic cultural archetypes, the notion of the “khorovod” — that ancient Slavic circle dance, emblematic of communal ecstasy and cyclical renewal — emerges as a poignant site of ideological contestation, where the libidinal circuits of neoliberal femininity collide with the eschatological yearnings of Russian Eurasianism. Alexander Dugin, the philosopher of the Fourth Political Theory, envisions the khorovod not merely as folkloric relic but as a soteriological praxis, a sacred rotation that awakens the collective unconscious, eschewing the linear teleology of modernization for the eternal return of the soil-bound Volk (Dugin, 2012). In his transcribed musings, Dugin implores: “Instead of modernization, we must engage in the khorovod, for modernization is the idea of moving somewhere. But we do not yet know where to move, and why move away from ourselves?” This invocation, steeped in Heideggerian Gelassenheit and Orthodox hesychasm, posits the khorovod as an antidote to the atomized subjectivities of late capitalism, a ritual wherein participants, hand in hand, dissolve into the chthonic energies of the Russian land, birthing a “fresh country, alive, filled with the solar energies of our great people” (Dugin, as transcribed in the provided document). Yet, in the digital agora of Instagram reels and monetized desire, this sacred circle is profaned into the “deer khorovod” (olenii khorovod) promulgated by Mariia Mengli (a pseudonym evoking orientalist mystique), a self-styled provocative psychologist and entrepreneur whose methodology repurposes the khorovod as a marketing funnel for commodified romance. Mengli’s “authorial technique,” as she boasts in her reels, transforms the circle into a predatory orbit of suitors — “minimum five admirers” — from which the discerning woman selects not through communal trance but via calculated scarcity, ensuring she chooses “not from deficit, but from abundance of male attention” (Mengli, Instagram reel, 2023). Herein lies the parallax of the real, to borrow from my earlier exploration in The Parallax of the Real: Lacan between Žižek’s Dialectical Materialism and Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory (Panasiuk, 2025a), where the Lacanian Real erupts as the unassimilable kernel between Dugin’s mythic logos and Mengli’s pink-hued simulacrum, a kitsch eroticism that Žižek might diagnose as the obscene underside of ideological enjoyment (Žižek, 1989).