By Slavoj Žižek
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…. However, Ukraine is not facing this choice but an almost exactly opposite one. If it wants to return to calm daily life it needs to take the risk of pursuing war (military resistance), i.e., of exposing itself to potential death. If it wants to avoid war, it faces with great certainty another form of death (disappearance as a nation under Russian occupation).
One should note here that it is the West which has the choice wrongly attributed to Ukraine: risking a war (by supporting Ukraine) or choosing peaceful life (by suffering a humiliation of betraying its ally). And, as many critical analysts are pointing out, even the Western European choice of peace does not really guarantee a long-term peace because if Russia gets Ukraine, it will in all probability not stop there but pursue its expansion towards the West, so that the European West will later confront the same choice in much tougher conditions. Here, then, the Western peaceniks (from Viktor Orban and other radical Right figures to pseudo-Leftists) simply cheat by attributing the choice which is not even truly their own to Ukraine.
In Lacanian terms, the true choice is not between life and death but between the two deaths: symbolic death (loss of symbolic identity) and actual biological death. Perhaps, this is the best definition of our global predicament today. The lesson is thus that the ongoing conflict between Russia and the West has deep philosophical roots. When Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, recently said that Immanuel Kant, who spent his entire life in the region of Kaliningrad (German Koenigsberg), has a “direct connection” to the war in Ukraine, he was right. According to Alikhanov, it was German philosophy, whose “godlessness and lack of higher values” began with Kant, that created the “sociocultural situation” that led, among other things, to the First World War:
“Today, in 2024, we’re bold enough to assert that not only did the First World War begin with the work of Kant, but so did the current conflict in Ukraine. Here in Kaliningrad, we dare to propose — although we’re actually almost certain of it — that it was precisely in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals […] that the ethical, value-based foundations of the current conflict were established.”[6]
The governor went on to call Kant one of the “spiritual creators of the modern West,” saying that the “Western bloc, which was shaped by the U.S. in its own image,” is an “empire of lies.” Kant, he said, is referred to as the “father of almost everything” in the West, including freedom, the idea of the rule of law, liberalism, rationalism, and “even the idea of the European Union.”[7] And if Ukraine resists Russia on behalf of these Western values, Kant is effectively also responsible for the Ukrainian resistance to Russia. Alikhanov’s “crazy” statements are thus a useful reminder of the high metaphysical stakes of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
Alikhanov is also right in another sense: Kant brutally dispelled the myth of the sacred origins of the rule of law and made it clear that the origin of every legal order is illegal violence—a lesson inacceptable for the Russian spiritualism advocated by Alikhanov. One cannot but quote here a remark misattributed to Otto von Bismarck: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”[8]
Notes:
[1] See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge 2015.
[2] Quoted from Romans 7 NIV – Released From the Law, Bound to Christ – Bible Gateway.
[3] See Russell Sbriglia, “Minus One, or the Mismeasure of Man” (unpublished manuscript).
[4] Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, p. 87. Numbers in parentheses of unattributed quotations refer to the pages of this book.
[5] Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis. From this point, all unattributed quotations refer to the pages of this work.
[6] Governor of Russia’s Kaliningrad says German philosopher Immanuel Kant ‘directly tied’ to war in Ukraine — Meduza.
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