Russia’s Grassroot Necropolitics

The Case of the National Bolshevik Party (with special reference to Eduard Limonov and Zakhar Prilepin)

Abstract

The notion of death in the artistic, political and military activities of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party (aka Other Russia) is examined from a psychoanalytical and a metaphysical viewpoint represented by Freud, Jung and Spielrein, on the one hand, and Aleksandr Dugin and Limonov himself, on the other. Limonov and Zakhar Prilepin serve as representative case studies against the background of the Balkan, Chechen and Ukrainian wars of the 1990s-2020s. Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics provides the overall theoretical framework for discussion.