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Hermeneutical and Ethical Reflections on Oleksandr Mykhed’s The Language of War

This essay explores what kind of language we speak when war engulfs us, when we are awakened by chaos and “the noise of Russian helicopters.”[1] Personally, I have never endured such an experience; however, I have spent the past three years listening carefully to Ukrainians who have experienced and presently are experiencing this chaotic nightmare. As a hermeneutical philosopher, I believe that words can and do disclose truth and reality, including the painful, stark realities of war. I also believe that those like Oleksandr Mykhed, who have witnessed the hell of war and have provided a testimony of their experiences, deserve to be heard, and that in opening ourselves to the harsh truths that they voice, we can come to see ourselves in bonds of solidarity with them, both as fellow human beings and as those who share our democratic and humanistic values.

My essay’s principal dialogue partner is Oleksandr Mykhed’s book The Language of War, which offers a poignant, philosophically and ethically rich chronicle of the Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine—or as he puts it, mere “fragments” of a chronicle since “no consciousness could endure all of it.” The “it” in view here includes the chaos and cruelty of Russian violence exploding day after day in the cities, schools, libraries, and civilian homes throughout Ukraine.[2] Lingering with and listening to the language of war that Mykhed’s text offers is not only an intrinsically worthwhile endeavor but is also an ethical act, a recognition of the dignity, value, and respect owed to Ukrainians as fellow human beings and as those who are putting their lives on the line for their families, their country, and for democratic values. Perhaps in listening we will hear and in hearing we will heed the truth-disclosing-words that Mykhed so powerfully delivers, such as the truth that war reveals the “crystal fragility”’ of our taken-for-granted, normal ways of being as well as the fragility and vulnerability of human beings and everything that lives and breathes in this world.[3]

In Mykhed’s first chapter, he recounts what he experienced in the opening days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The word “chaos” permeates this chapter. For example, he speaks of “chaos feeding on chaos,” being awakened by chaos, by war, by the “noise of Russian helicopters.”[4] He describes Russia as a “country that sows chaos” and warns that “everybody should realize: this war concerns everyone. Because chaos can only spread, it knows no limits.”[5] The chaos of war seeks to bring about both destruction and a sense of groundlessness, a sense that there is no safe or solid place on which to stand or to find shelter.

And yet, even in this first chapter where chaos abounds, Mykhed  finds a way in and through language to stand and call Russia to account for its atrocities and misuse of language, and likewise calls us to a proper, truth-telling use of language—one in which language discloses rather than distorts reality, showing us what is true, even when we don’t want to see it. For example, he writes: “Russia forbids their media to call war—a ‘war’ and invasion an ‘invasion’.[6] In contrast, what Ukrainians insist upon and seek to practice amidst the chaos of missiles and the chaos of words is, as Mykhed puts it: “A language in which everything is called by its name. A war is a war, not an operation.”[7] We regain our ground, when we begin to regain the truth of language.

About mid-way into the book, and chronologically about a year into the full-scale invasion, Mykhed recalls a conversation that he had with a friend a few months before the full-scale war began. Mykhed’s friend, Chekh, who was a war veteran, had been asked to write a piece for a British journal reflecting on whether there would be a war in Ukraine and how the country was preparing for war. Mykhed remembers responding to his friend that he couldn’t imagine rockets reigning down on Kyiv. However, that was then and by this time a year had passed, and rockets, missiles, and bombs were falling from the Ukrainian sky daily. Replaying and reflecting on that conversation, he writes: “ . . . I recall that conversation countless times and cannot forget the sticky feeling of helplessness and insecurity, the sensation of the ground slipping away from under my feet. Like when I start imagining something for which there are no words in my vocabulary. And with each new terror, new levels of horror and experiences open up, for which new descriptions and words must be found.”[8] What Mykhed describes in his attempt to find the right words to make his experience intelligible, communicable, and shareable finds resonance with Han-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy and understanding of language. That is, for Gadamer, language is not only world-disclosive and world-shaping, but it also plays an essential role in the ongoing process of self- and world-understanding. Language, for Gadamer, is, we might say, grounding—or as he puts it, “elemental”—but also excessive and always on-the-way (unterwegs). It discloses truth and makes claims upon us, but there is never a final, exhaustive word; nor can language fully capture our experiences—and especially so when it comes to such limit-experiences as war. And yet, words do disclose truths and provide us with greater clarity regarding what is actually the case, even if words do not exhaustively capture those realities. Finding the right words, like seeking clean air and water, is necessary for our well-being. This is the case not only on the individual level but also personally, collectively, and politically, as the right words help us process and share what we (and others) have seen, heard, witnessed, and experienced. Owing to our linguistic and social nature, even when we are at a loss for words or find our words inadequate to present the reality of our experiences, we, nonetheless, seek and struggle to find the the words that will disclose the truth and reality of our experiences. Finding the right words helps us to regain our footing, to stand, and live again individually and collectively. In, so to speak, wording our way back to solid ground, we simultaneously word our way back to others.

On this point, Paul Celan’s reflections from his famous Bremen Address provide helpful insights. In his speech, Celan explains, in part, what he hoped to achieve through writing his poetry: “I tried to write poems in order to speak, orient myself, explore where I was and where it wanted to go with me, in order to project [entwerfen] a reality for myself” (Celan 2000, GW7:186; my translation).[9] For Celan, the conscious choice to write poetry in German—the language of the aggressors—was the path that he felt was necessary to reorient himself vis-à-vis German language, history, and culture and to see, in light of the violence that had been carried out by the Nazis, what place, dwelling, and future might exist for him.[10] (Of course, not everyone will nor should take this path; in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine, many Ukrainians, including scholars, have, and for good reason, foresworn speaking and writing in Russian.) The broader point of interest to me is that for both Celan and Mykhed, the act of writing is a reorienting, grounding, and reconnecting act. It is an ethical act. Writing provides the one who has lived through such violent and disorienting limit-experiences as war, torture, and the like, a way to call out the injustices of the aggressor and to bear witness to the atrocities that have been committed. Writing for both thinkers is not an escape from the harsh realities of the world but rather discloses those harsh realities and place a demand on us to respond to the truths that are revealed. As Carolyn Culbertson remarks, “for Celan, the demand to write issued from a distinctly interpersonal need that linguistic beings possess. This is the need to bear witness to loss, to find an empathetic other that will listen, and as part of this listening, engage in the process of interpretative understanding.”[11] With his decision to reclaim German language, and through it to make all its marks, stains, and abuses present and unforgotten, Celan, as it were, forced German language, culture, and people to see and remember what they (and those acting in their name) had done or failed to do. His poetry testifies to the humanity and individuality of thousands of murdered Jews (including his own parents) and simultaneously exposes both the misuse of language that prepared the way for genocide and the silence that refused to say what needed to be said. Whereas German propaganda’s objective was to de-humanize and turn individuals into an anonymous mass and finally to exterminate them, Celan deploys German to give witness and testimony to each individual breath crystal, each human life lost. His poetry communes with the dead; it calls every You willing to linger, listen, and enter this “landscape of death” to receive this testimony, this witness, this breath of the true poetic word. Here the work of Celan, Gadamer, and Mykhed come together in seeing poetry and what we might call writings birthed from limit-experiences as seeking an other to hear, receive, and respond to its testimony. As Celan poignantly states in his Meridian speech: “The poem is alone. It is alone and underway. . . . The poem wants to reach the Other, it needs this Other, it needs a vis-à-vis. It searches it out and addresses it” (Celan 2005, 181).[12]

Although Mykhed, as we have seen, acknowledges the struggle to find “new descriptions and new words” for “each new [act of] terror,” he, nonetheless, is adamant that these war crimes and atrocities must be put into words so that those who have suffered, died, and given their lives to protect others are not forgotten.[13] As he puts it, “war is a tally of tragedies that cannot be forgotten, […] it is a martyrology of destroyed cities and cultural monuments.”[14] Anyone who has followed this war closely understands what Mykhed has in view—namely, Russia’s targeted attacks on cultural objects such as libraries, theaters, churches, protected cultural sites and the list goes on. In other words, an objective of Russia’s war is to eradicate Ukrainian culture and identity. With this point in mind, Mykhed writes: “Publishing warehouses are being destroyed. Libraries are in flames. Russians are burning Ukrainian books and ‘purging’ libraries of ‘enemy’ literature. Sales are plunging. Bookshops are only just reopening now. Prices for paper and printing materials are on the rise. Hundreds of books ready to go into print this year will not see the light of day. A generation of authors will not make their mark in the world of literature.”[15]

Another thread that runs through the chapter is his discussion of the different ways in which the language of war manifests on both the Ukrainian and the Russian side. For example, he begins with reflections from the Ukrainian side and states that the language of war is condensed, non-ornate, to the point, and that concision is borne from necessity. Time, space, electricity, food, water, and other needed resources are scarce. One hour you have electricity, the next you don’t; today your flat exists, tomorrow it doesn’t. Thus, in day-to-day exchanges, one’s language must be curt and clear. Your life and the lives of others may depend upon getting a message across as clearly and quickly as possible. As he explains, “the language of war is direct, like an order that cannot have a double interpretation and needs no clarification. We speak more clearly, more simply, in chopped phrases, saving each other’s time. […] no rhetorical questions.”[16] His examples of how and why language must be simplified are chilling.

Parents write with marker pens on the backs of small children—names, addresses, phone numbers. In case they get lost. Parents or children. In case they get killed. Parents or children. This war is about homemade grave crosses and attempts to record at least some details. Like a handwritten letter from Mariupol seen on the news: “Please, tell him: Dima, mother died on 9 March 2022. She died quickly. Then the house burned down. Dima, I’m sorry I couldn’t save her. I buried mother near the kindergarten.” Next is a plan with directions to the grave. And below: “I love you.”[17]

Terse and to the point, but even here, the language of war compressed by necessity reaches out to another, seeks to comfort, wants to make sure that the dead are honored and not forgotten.

Mykhed also highlights how the language of the military has impacted civilian social discourse. For example, the word “plus,” which is equivalent to the English “roger that” and connotes a confirmation of sorts is frequently heard in civilian conversations and texting—in the latter, one need only type one symbol, the plus symbol (+) to communicate to a loved one that you are still alive. However, this one symbol in all its simplicity brings with it a constellation of poignant associations and fields of meaning; it confirms that the one you love is still breathing, still fighting, still resisting, still alive, and thus there’s a chance that you will see them again. The plus symbol, in the language of war, is a sign of life, hope, return, future possibilities apart from war—one character, one symbol yet abounding with an excess of meaning.

From the Russian side, the language of war manifests and is employed quite differently. Here we see a calculated abuse of language, language deployed for the purpose of destroying, deceiving, and dehumanizing Ukrainians—in short, here the language of war is inherently violent, and the objective is to distort reality rather than disclose truth. To illustrate, Mykhed writes:

Orwell’s ‘war is peace’ becomes a reality in Russian propaganda. In a new spiral of history, Russians call the occupation, with their decimated cities and towns, ‘liberated strikes’ and ‘missiles of goodwill.’ Russians use language as a camouflage net, which they are pulling over their crimes, trying to hide the atrocities under the neutral definition of a ‘special military operation’. And, of course, the abbreviation ‘SMO’ (Special Military Operation) makes it even easier for their populace to swallow.

The most important thing, though, is that Russians name ‘denazification’ as the strategic goal of their invasion, which should evoke associations with the consequences of Nazism in the older Soviet generation. But this is an old trick of Russian propaganda, which never wastes a chance to stigmatize anyone, declaring that one of the post-Soviet countries is imbued with the ideas of fascism.[18]

Here language is cynical—the goal is to confuse and sow doubt and skepticism as to whether the reality of a situation can ever be disclosed. The meanings of words are intentionally turned into their opposites—war is peace, occupation is liberation—and terms like “special military operation” instead of invasion and war are employed in order to hide the crimes and injustices carried out by the Russian Federation and its combatants. The use of the terms “denazification” and “Nazis” is particularly cynical, as it simultaneously attempts to erase and empty the historical meanings and references associated with these terms vis-à-vis Nazi Germany and to infuse (and con-fuse) them with false meanings and references—i.e., Ukrainians are the new “Nazis” that must undergo denazification, which, in truth, means de-ukrainification. But as Mykhed highlights, this is a move that Russian propaganda has been making for some time and is part of their mirroring approach. That is, the present Russian Federation, whose regime, actions toward and narratives about Ukraine and Ukrainians are themselves more accurately characterized as fascist, project these names and attributes onto Ukraine’s leaders, land, and people in order to justify their invasion and associate it in the minds of the Russian populace with the victory against Nazism in the so-called “Great Patriotic War.” However much Russia’s disinformation and abuse of language seem to be effecting a new reality based in falsehoods, the truth and reality of Russia’s heinous actions have a way of piercing through their propaganda narratives. As Mykhed observes, “the boundaries of historical eras are getting thinner and start cracking when, on the twenty-third day of the invasion, ninety-six-year-old Borys Romanchenko died in Kharkiv during Russian shelling. He had survived the Nazi death camps of Buchenwald, Dora, and Bergen Belsen. But he died from Russian ‘denazification’, which has only one goal: to kill us for being Ukrainians.”[19]

In contrast with Russia’s abuse of language to serve its imperial war aims, Ukrainians place a premium on frankness and have an astute understanding the ethical and political dimensions of language. Toward the end of the chapter, Mykhed describes this dimension of the language of war in a way reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s notion of parrhesia. For example, Mykhed explicitly describes the language of war as one of “exact definitions and conscious responsibility for every word spoken.”[20] This notion of being responsible for our words resonates with Foucault’s understanding of parrhesia as truth-telling.

In Foucault’s later works, particularly in his lectures at the Collège de France (1982–1984), he offers illuminating reflections on the Greek term parrhesia and examines how truth-telling operates in a wide-range of historical, social, and political contexts, from ancient Greek philosophy to modern political discourse. As Foucault explains, parrhesia is more than frankness or free speech, as the term is often translated in English. The one who practices parrhesia speaks openly and truthfully without embellishment, deception, or rhetorical manipulation. Importantly, there is an ethical duty to speak the truth, even when it is uncomfortable and may involve significant negative consequences to one’s reputation, career, and well-being. In fact, as Foucault points out, in the case of Socrates, truth-telling cost him his life, and one could point to numerous examples in the present war in which those willing to speak the truth about Russia’s war have been imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. The truth-teller is thus understood as an ethical subject who exhibits courage and integrity, and, as both Foucault and Mykhed emphasize—the truth-teller takes responsibility for her words. In addition to cultivating virtue, self-understanding, and self-transformation, parrhesia is often a political act that speaks truth to power with the aim of unmasking the violence, lies, and distortions of political propaganda. Hence, the practice of parrhesia by citizens is essential for a healthy democracy and is likewise a powerful weapon needed to expose and dismantle corrupt, authoritarian, and totalitarian regimes. Because of their long history of fighting against Russian imperialism and aggression, Ukrainians understand this better than most in the West; in light of our current political situation in the US under the Trump regime, we would do well to learn from their insights, courage, and actions.

Bibliography

Celan, Paul. “Appendix: The Meridian.” Translated by Jerry Glenn. In Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen, 173–185. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

Culbertson, Carolyn. Words Underway. Continental Philosophy of Language. New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019.

Mykhed, Oleksandr. The Language of War. Dublin: Penguin/Random House, UK, 2024.

Notes

[1] Oleksandr Mykhed, The Language of War, 1.

[2] Mykhed, Language of War, Preface, xi.

[3] Mykhed, Language of War, 276.

[4] Mykhed, Language of War, 1.

[5] Mykhed, Language of War, 5

[6] Mykhed, Language of War, 4.

[7] Mykhed, Language of War, 6.

[8] Mykhed, Language of War, 154.

[9] The (full) German text reads “In dieser Sprache habe ich, in jenen Jahren und in den Jahren nachher, Gedichte zu schreiben versucht: um zu sprechen, um mich zu orientieren, um zu erkunden, wo ich mich befand und wohin es mit mir wollte, um mir Wirklichkeit zu entwerfen” (Bremen Address, GW7:186). That Celan uses dieser [“this”] to modify Sprache [“language”] suggests that he had a particular language in mind—namely, German.

[10] See also Bruns’ comments on how Celan, in contrast with a Heideggerian idea of language overtaking us, might think of language itself undergoing an event. As Bruns explains, “language for Celan is something that can undergo an experience with history and be overwhelmed and transformed just in the sense that it can never go back to the way it was; it is always marked by the events it lives through. Celan helps to show the marks, and perhaps that is what poets are for in a destitute time” (Bruns 1997, “An Introduction to Gadamer’s Poetics,” 43).

[11] Culbertson, Words Underway, 55.

[12] See also, Remington’s discussion of the “relation between the merely memorial and the ethically immemorial”—the latter in the Levinasian sense. Celan’s poetry, Remington goes on to say, preserves the “excess of the Shoah” as “that which cannot be narrated, nor remembered,” and hence cannot be reduced to the merely memorial. “If we read Celan’s poetry as a gesture of commemoration of the dead, we must also acknowledge that Celan gives no relief to his readers. As Celan says, the poem ‘searches’ for and ‘addresses’ its Other in the hopes of an encounter. Such an encounter, as a shattering of the self, should offer no succor” (“Dialogical Memory,” 15).

[13] Mykhed, Language of War, 154.

[14] Mykhed, Language of War, 154.

[15] Mykhed, Language of War, 155.

[16] Mykhed, Language of War, 156.

[17] Mykhed, Language of War, 156–157.

[18] Mykhed, Language of War, 160.

[19] Mykhed, Language of War, 160–161.

[20] Mykhed, Language of War, 162.

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Book Plug Spotlight:

David Utlser’s book, Paul Ricoeur and Environmental Philosophy (Lexington Books) , is now available for pre-order, and will be, I’m sure, of interest to our readers. Here’s what Brian Gregor (California State University) has to say about Utsler’s book:

“This book is an excellent introductory treatment of the relevance of Paul Ricoeur to environmental philosophy. It succeeds as an introduction to environmental philosophy for Ricoeur scholars as well as an introduction to Ricoeur for environmental philosophers. There are several books and essay collections on the hermeneutical approach to environmental philosophy, so this makes a valuable contribution to that field by focusing specifically on Ricoeur.”

 

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Coming Soon: Gadamer on Art and Aesthetic Experience: Rethinking Hermeneutical Aesthetics Today (SUNY Press)

It was a pleasure to be part of this book project, Gadamer on Art and Aesthetic Experience: Rethinking Hermeneutical Aesthetics Today (forthcoming, 2024, SUNY Academic Press), edited by Stefano Marino and Elena Romagnoli, who were absolute;y delightful to work with.

The book is currently in the copyediting stage, so keep your eyes out for it to appear in the near future. Scholars  interested in reviewing the book can contact me via cnielsen@udallas.edu, and I will forward your information to the editors. 

Here’s the list of contributors: John Arthos, Alessandro Bertinetto, Georg W. Bertram, Mariannina Failla, Jean Grondin, Stefano Marino, Cynthia R. Nielsen, James Risser, Elena Romagnoli, and Gert-Jan van der Heiden.

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Paperback Version of Gadamer’s Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary

The paperback version of Gadamer’s Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary, edited by Cynthia R. Nielsen and Greg Lynch is now available in paperback version, which means it is much more affordable. Below is a  brief description of the book and the table of contents.

If you are a scholar interested in reviewing the book and have a journal editor interested in publishing your review, please send me an email (cnielsen@udallas.edu), and I can put you in touch with our publisher for a review copy.

Book Description

Gadamer’s Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary offers a fresh look at Gadamer’s magnum opus, Truth and Method, which was first published in German in 1960, translated into English in 1975, and is widely recognized as a ground-breaking text of philosophical hermeneutics. The volume features essays from fourteen scholars-both established and rising stars-each of which cover a portion of Truth and Method following the order of the text itself. The result is a robust, historically and thematically rich polyphonic reading of the text as a whole, valuable both for scholarship and teaching.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Basic Structure and Argument of Truth and Method, Jean Grondin

Chapter 1:  Gadamer on the Significance of the Humanist Tradition for the Human Sciences, or: Truth and Edification, Theodore George

Chapter 2:  Gadamer’s Astonishing Question: Engaging with Gadamer’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics, Nicholas Davey

Chapter 3:  Re-claiming Art’s Claim to Truth, Daniel L. Tate

Chapter 4:  Gadamer on Play as Ontological Explanation, Jessica Frazier

Chapter 5:  Gadamer and the Plastic Arts, Cynthia R. Nielsen

Chapter 6:  Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and Historical Meaning, Kevin M. Vander Schel

Chapter 7:  Phenomenology’s Essential Role in the Hermeneutic Tradition, David Vessey

Chapter 8: The Historical Situation of Thought as a Hermeneutic Principle, Carolyn Culbertson

Chapter 9: The Recovery of the Fundamental Hermeneutic Problem, Application and Normativity, David Liakos

Chapter 10:  The Finitude of Reflection, Greg Lynch

Chapter 11:  Language as Medium of Hermeneutic Experience, Carlo DaVia

Chapter 12:  Gadamer and the Concept of Language, Gert-Jan van der Heiden

Chapter 13:  On Language and the Universality of Hermeneutics, James Risser

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SEP Entry for Gadamer’s Aesthetics Updated and Expanded

For those interested, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for “Gadamer’s Aesthetics” to which I have been added as a co-author has been updated, expanded, and is now live and archived (i.e., the downloadable PDF now has the current, updated version). Several, more recently published secondary sources have been added, and I have expanded a section on Kant’s influence on Gadamer. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer-aesthetics/.

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Zhadan on War-Time, Language, Memory, and Poetry After Bucha (Part 3)

This is the third and final part of my essays reflecting on Serhiy Zhadan’s acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels). Part 1 focused on the existential and phenomenological experience of “war-time.” Part 2 turned to Zhadan’s reflections on how war impacts one’s ability to breathe and the many ways that war disrupts, challenges, and reconfigures language. In Part 3, we discuss Zhadan’s insights regarding memory in a time of war; memory will bring us back to language, phenomenological reflections on time, and the possibility of poetry after Bucha.

As one living in the midst of a live war, Zhadan wants us to understand that this is not simply a “different experience.” Rather, living in war-time leaves its indelible mark deep in your innermost being, in your memory. What you live and suffer through in war alters “memory and fills it with excessively painful images, excessively deep traumas, and excessively bitter conversations. You can’t rid yourself of these memories; you aren’t able to fix the past. It will always be a part of you. Hardly your best part.” What you have seen—tortured, maimed, dead civilians, soldiers, dogs, cats, birds; what you have heard—parents crying in anguish over murdered sons and daughters; what you have smelled—scorched earth, homes and hospitals ablaze, human flesh decomposing; what you have tasted—snow mixed with toxins from shelling; and what you have felt—your inability to breathe, the tension that runs through your body at the sound of sirens and other loud noises, a feeling of what goes beyond feeling or pervasive numbness—these experiences are seared into your memory and require you to seek out a new language. That is, you need a new language not only to express, but to learn how to live with these searing memories. The silence, the loss of words, that overtakes you in a time of war, is, however, doesn’t have the final say. Here Zhadan sounds a sorrowful yet hopeful note: “Poetry after Bucha and Izium is still undoubtedly possible. Moreover, it’s necessary; however, the specter of Bucha and Izium, their presence, will weigh too heavily in this post-war poetry, which, to a great extent, will determine its content and tonality. This painful, yet necessary realization that mass graves and bombed neighborhoods will provide context for the poems written in your country—does not fill you with optimism, of course, yet it makes you understand that language requires our daily labor, our constant involvement, our engagement. After all, what do we have in order to make our point, to express ourselves? Our language and our memory.”

Russian missile attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine December 31, 2022. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko

This hopeful note about language resonates with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s view of language and likewise brings to mind some of Paul Celan’s reflections about the possibility of poetry after catastrophe. For Gadamer, as linguistic and interpreting beings, we are always striving to find the right words to better understand and communicate events, experiences, and matters of concern. Even when an event or experience leaves us speechless, we are, as it were, in conversation with ourselves as we try to understand what has occurred, what it means, and what it means vis-à-vis our own self- and world-understanding. Gadamer holds that, on the one hand, thinking and language are intimately connected, and on the other, that language, understood more broadly as linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit) is not limited to its verbal expressions. Yet our ability to communicate verbally and share our experiences with others is an essential feature of what it is to be an interpreting being—to live hermeneutically. Rather than placing the logic of the statement (Aussage) at the center of his philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer emphasizes the interplay of question and answer, which is at the heart of all genuine conversation, even “internal” conversation. In his 1985 essay, “Boundaries of Language,” Gadamer writes: “language is not fulfilled in statements but as conversation [Die Sprache vollzieht sich also nicht in Aussagen, sondern als Gespräch], as the unity of a meaning that develops out of the word and answer. Language attains its completeness [Rundheit; lit. “roundness”; fullness; comprehensiveness] therein. That is especially true for the language of words. But it is surely also the case for the language of gestures, or morals, and of forms of expression from different and foreign life-worlds” (16).

In other words, it is in the ongoing, back-and-forth of conversation—with another or oneself—that we engage in the difficult work of finding the right words, the words that, insofar as they can articulate the reality and truth of an event or experience, enable us to gain a better understanding of the matter at hand and ourselves. Even when you arrive at the answer that an event—such as a traumatic event—can never be made completely or exhaustively intelligible nor rationally justified, achieving these realizations in words is to say something meaningful and true about the event. This lack of complete intelligibility, however, in no way means that injustices cannot be prosecuted. Rather, it means that what can be understood about the event—for example, that war crimes and atrocities were committed—must be documented with the utmost care, so that the testimonies of survivors, eye-witnesses, forensic and other specialists can be presented in the clearest and most comprehensive and coherent way possible. Such work is incredibly difficult, perhaps the most difficult kind of conversation because you have to enter into the darkest aspects of humanity; you have to find ways to talk about the most cruel and inhumane actions. Although the trauma caused by war-time is an extreme event, nonetheless, it involves the kind of labor-intensive, engaged searching for the right words of which both Gadamer and Zhadan speak.

Zhadan illustrates the difficulty and the hope of language through a brief account of one of his friends from Kharkiv who had been injured in the war and had to be temporarily hospitalized. Zhadan’s friend told him that his injury was the result of a phosphorus bomb that the Russians had used and that despite this, his friend—now a soldier in a live war with combat experience and into whose eyes “you could glimpse two months of hell”—was eager to return to the frontline. His friend’s account of what happened to him and especially his desire to return to the frontline to continue fighting for Ukraine’s liberation left Zhadan speechless. As he explains, “This is one of those cases when you simply don’t know how to respond. Language betrays you, you lack language, and you are left merely searching for the right words. They are sure to turn up, though, eventually.”

At this point Zhadan offers another existential and phenomenology description of how time is experienced during a time of war. Here he speaks of time as frozen, no longer flowing, and creating a sense of “cold timelessness.”  This frozen time not only halts the normal movement of time, but it also freezes speech—that is, the here and now of the present is so oversaturated that it seems pointless to talk about the future; frozen time creates a numbness to the future and cuts you off from the past. Listen to Zhadan’s poignant characterization:

“War time truly is a time with a disjointed panorama, disrupted communication between the past and the future, a time when you feel the here and now with maximum acuteness and bitterness, when you immerse yourself in the space that surrounds you and focus on the moment that overwhelms you. There are certain elements of fatalism to this—when you stop making plans and thinking about the future, as you try, first and foremost, to root yourself in the here and now, under the skies that unfurl above you, and the only thing that reminds you that time is passing is the fact that days turn to nights, summer follows spring without fail, and despite the frozen nature of your feelings, despite the stupor, life goes on; it doesn’t stop for an instant.”

Instead of sensing your agency, your connection to history, and your creative aspirations for the future, it is as if you are fixed in the single timeless space of this here and this now abstracted from the normal cadence of time. When you do get a glimpse of some semblance of time’s movement, it is the cyclical, non-individualized, unremitting movement of daytime to nighttime, summer to spring. It’s as if time becomes one of those amusement park rides in which you are strapped in and then the outside wall spins insanely fast while the floor drops out beneath you. All you can do is close your eyes so that you don’t get sick and hope that the ride is over soon. Not only has the world become more dizzying and without a solid ground, but your perception of what it is—the harsh realities shape its contours—is forever changed.  As Zhadan observes, the experience of war-time shifts “the distance between you and reality […] Reality is now closer. Reality has become more dreadful. And now you have to live with this.”

Zhadan does not romanticize war-time; he existentially understands the trauma of war, and yet, he voices, from within the pain, hope—hope in language, in memory, and in a renewed sense of time.

In the last section of his speech, he emphasizes our language and the collective, shared activities that will be required to bring past, present, and future back into fruitful harmony. Here he starts with a series of questions:

“What will our language be like after the war? What will we have to explain to each other? First and foremost, we will have to say the names of the dead aloud. They must be named. Otherwise, there will be a major fragmentation of language, a void between voices, and a fracture in our memories. We will need tremendous strength and faith to speak about the dead, as their names will shape our vocabularies. Yet we will need just as much strength, confidence, and love to speak about our future, to articulate, vocalize, and outline it.”

Zhadan sketches what a post-war communal linguistic, remembering should involve. The names of the dead must be spoken aloud by a community, by a “we.” Past lives stolen from us must be collectively re-membered through present shared linguistic activities—that is, linguistic activities carried out by a community that in some meaningful way allows for an ongoing remembrance of all whose lives were taken. These collective activities contribute to a reorientation of past, present, and future; a restoration of fractured memories; and they give voice, dignity, and honor to the dead. One can imagine the creation of new monuments with the names of soldiers who courageously gave their lives for Ukraine’s freedom and independence, or perhaps an annual reading aloud in religious ceremonies of the names of local citizens whose lives were extinguished during the war. Whatever form it takes, this shared linguistic activity of re-membering is required for the present healing of individuals and the community of the future.

Regarding Ukraine’s future, Zhadan draws attention to Ukrainian agency, responsibility, and solidarity. Ukraine’s future, he says “is shaped by our visions, our convictions, our willingness to take responsibility. We will work at returning our sense of the future, since there’s just so much in our memories that demands our involvement tomorrow. We are all linked by that current that carries us, that won’t let us go, that unites us. We are all linked by our language.”

Zhadan is perhaps also, with his stress on our language, evoking a double-meaning—that is, the our might refer not only to the collective and creative work of poetry, ritual re-membering, and bearing witness, but perhaps also to the willful embrace by Ukrainians from all walks of life of the Ukrainian language, a language forged in a time of war. (Consider, e.g., President Zelensky’s switch to Ukrainian during the present phase of this war and the worldwide interest in learning Ukrainian to show solidarity with Ukraine.)

Zhadan ends with sober words about language in (and after) war-time and, significantly, he connects language and truth. “As long as we have our language, we have, at the very least, the vague chance to articulate ourselves, speak the truth, and tidy up our memories. So we speak and we go on speaking. Even when words hurt our throats. Even when they make us feel lost and empty. The possibility of truth is behind our voices.”

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Zhadan on War-Time, Language, Memory, and Poetry After Bucha (Part 2)

This is the second part of a multi-part series reflecting on Serhiy Zhadan’s acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels). Part 1 focused on the existential and phenomenological experience of “war-time.” In Part 2, we turn to how war impacts the most fundamental embodied experience—breathing—and how war changes language, shifting its “coordinates of meaning” and disclosing the insufficiency of our previous vocabulary.

Not only is war-time experienced as time-out-of-joint but the very act of breathing is transformed. As Zhadan puts it, from the very first day and every day it continues, war is experienced as a “temporal fracture, the absence of continuity, the feeling of air being compressed.” Here in this “zone edging toward death,” to simply breathe becomes laborious because “reality is exerting pressure on you, trying to squeeze you out to the other side of life”—that is, to death. What differentiates the “reality of war” from the “reality of peace” is precisely this sense that events, emotions, and sensations are compressed and your day-to-day, moment-by-moment being and acting in the world is constantly under pressure. There is an “inability to breathe freely and just speak.” To speak the wrong word at the wrong time and with the wrong inflection might result in a beating or losing the opportunity to get food or water for your family; it might even mean your death, depending on the mood of the occupiers. Zhadan is not advocating for silence; prudence is, of course a necessary virtue for war-time; you learn how and when to speak depending upon the situation at hand. Even so, within this compressed, pressurized war-world everyone must at some point speak. “You have to speak. Even during times of war. Especially during times of war.”

Language is, of course, dynamic, living, and constantly shaped by new social realities and events that compel us to rethink our former ways of expressing or describing our world, ourselves, and others. War, Zhadan states, “unequivocally changes language.” Words, phrases, and how we speak is disrupted, challenged, questioned, re-thought, and revised. The horrific, inhumane, experiences of war require a new vocabulary, as former names and ways of talking about events, actions, and political ideologies no longer suffice. Yale historian Timothy Snyder analyzes this phenomenon in his essay, “The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word,” which explains the etymology, history, and significance of the new word, “Рашизм.” The neologism, “Рашизм,” variously translated into English as “ruscism,” “russism,” and “raschism” was coined to describe the complex of Russian ideology (with particular attention to Putin’s regime) and extreme violence at play in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Рашизм is a term of severe condemnation, which means, roughly, “Russian fascism.” Variants of the word can be traced back to 1995 in descriptions of Russian military aggression in Chechnya (see Wikipedia, “Rashism.”). The terms “Рашизм” (“raschism”/ “ruscism”) and “рашисти”—i.e., “raschists” or “ruscists,” which refer to those who support and promulgate Rashcist ideology and implement its violence—became more widespread in Ukrainian media in 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine and subsequently illegally annexed Crimea. (It is important to remember that the Russo-Ukrainian war began in 2014 and had already been underway for 8 years when the Russian Federation launched its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.) However, as Synder notes, the term started resurfacing with the revelations of mass graves and atrocities in Bucha and the areas surrounding Kyiv. Likewise, council members of Mariupol used the term to describe the war crimes committed against the residents of Mariupol. In light of the realities on the ground—the hundreds of bodies lying dead in the streets, the mass graves full of tortured bodies, corpses with their hands tied behind their backs and gunshot wounds in the head—Ukrainians had to search for the right word to describe the extreme violence against humans, non-human animals, and the natural world. Raschism (“Рашизм”) is that right word, the word that creatively puts fascism and Russia into play, enabling the complex history, ideological underpinnings, and brutal reality of this war to more sharply come into focus. Not only does the Ukrainian deployment of the term more aptly disclose the realities of the war, but it is also a way to resist and subvert raschist narratives and attempts to erase and rewrite Ukrainian identity. As Snyder observes “Russian myths of empire cannot contain the imagination of the Ukrainian victims of a new war. National identity is about living people, and the values and the futures they imagine and choose. A nation exists insofar as it makes new things, and a national language lives by making new words.”

In fact, which language we decide to speak can connote ethical and political significance. One can, as Ukrainian writer  did, intentionally choose to forego Russian and to write only in Ukrainian. In “Writing off Russia,” an insightful interview with Refayenko conducted by Yale historian Marci Shore, Refayenko explains why he made this choice.

“At the beginning of the century, I positioned myself as a Ukrainian writer who also functions in the Russian cultural-linguistic sphere. It never entered my mind to write in Ukrainian. After 2014, I learned Ukrainian and wrote a novel in Ukrainian, to show Russians and anyone else that even for a Russophone Ukrainian, learning Ukrainian is not a problem–and not only learning it well enough to speak it, but also learning it well enough to write literary texts.”

At that point in his life, Refayenko, wrote in both Russian and Ukrainian.  He wanted, as he put it, “to be clear to everyone that the problem of defending the

Russian-speaking population in Ukraine has never existed—nor does it now, though it was precisely with this slogan that Russian combatants ‘liberated’ me and my family from our own country. We were forced to leave for Kyiv. But we knew of course that the Russians would not stop there. And so it happened. After February 24, I made a firm decision never again to publish a single text in Russian. […] A language has not been invented in which it is possible to talk with someone who has come to your house to murder you, to murder your wife and your child, to destroy your home and scorch your land. And I have no desire to contribute any longer, even if indirectly, to Ukrainian literature in the Russian language. If it does continue, then let it continue without my participation.” Refayenko’s decision is completely understandable in light of the trauma he has undergone and witnessed.

Transfer of civilians from Irpin to Kyiv due to Russian attacks.jpg
By Mvs.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115915000; Wikipedia “Irpin refugee column shelling

This difficult relationship with language is a perfect segue back to Zhadan’s reflections.  Zhadan discusses the difficulties and frustrations that he and other Ukrainians experience in their attempts to convey to European intellectuals and politicians (and the same applies, in my view, to certain American intellectuals and politicians) what life is like in war. The very architecture of language, says Zhadan, has been altered. The linguistic constructions that seemed smooth and unproblematic in pre-war days no longer suffice. War-time creates new linguistic challenges, in which words like “peace” suddenly become stumbling blocks in the pursuit of common understanding, and this inability to be understood is exceedingly painful for Ukrainians, who are already experiencing day after day, month after month the trauma of war. In what follows, Zhadan describes the frustration and pain that Ukrainian intellectuals, activists, politicians, and engaged citizens experience in this war-time linguistic landscape of fractured discourses.

“Since the onset of war, we have all been trying to regain this disrupted ability, the ability to express ourselves so we’re understood. We are all attempting to articulate ourselves, the truth, the outer bounds of our turmoil and trauma. […] How can one talk about war? How can one manage all the desperation, fury, and rancor in one’s tone, as well as all the energy and eagerness to stick by your fellows, not to retreat. I think we aren’t the only ones struggling to convey what matters most. The world listening to us isn’t capable of understanding one simple thing—when we speak, the degrees differ too drastically. Ukrainians shouldn’t have to justify their emotions, but unpacking these emotions is worthwhile.”

While Zhadan justifiably voices frustration with the lack of understanding of well-intended Western dialogue partners due to the vast differences in experience between them and Ukrainians living in and through war-time, he, nonetheless, does not give up on the possibility of meaningful conversations. However, he is aware that such conversations will be difficult. “We can articulate it; we can vocalize everything that has and will happen to us. We simply have to be ready for the fact that this won’t be an easy conversation. Nevertheless, we have to begin it today.”

The differing perspectives and “fields of vision” among the groups of dialogue partners and even the “varying weight and color” of the words and definitions employed create hindrances to what is most needed—namely, an accurate and true understanding of the present phase of the war and how we arrived at the point. As Zhadan observes, “Sometimes it seems like, as the world watches what has been transpiring in Eastern Europe for the past six months [written in Oct. 2022] it has been using vocabulary and definitions that haven’t been able to explain what’s going on for a long time.” He then focuses specifically on the word, “peace,” and asks what his Western dialogue partners who keep calling for peace—peace now and peace at all costs—mean by the term. The Ukrainians—those actually living through the hell of war—want this war to end more than anyone; but they want it to truly end so that real peace, not a mere temporary absence of artillery strikes, can be restored in Ukraine. It is precisely with their differing uses and understandings of peace that Eastern and Western European dialogue partners are struggling to find common ground.

Here Gadamer’s hermeneutical insights have much to offer Western European and American intellectuals and politicians who want to engage Ukrainians in a genuine dialogue. Ukrainians have demonstrated their integrity and their willingness to die for our shared democratic values. They have shown that, unlike Putin, they are reliable, trustworthy dialogue partners. Ukrainians have existential experience as well as deep historical and cultural knowledge of Russia, its military, and its political strategies and maneuverings. Western partners need to approach Ukrainians with a willingness to listen, learn, and to allow their own present understandings to be challenged and revised. That is, our comportment should be what Gadamer calls hermeneutical openness. We listen to the other, open to the possibility that we have misunderstood and consequently need to amend our former understanding of the situation or question at hand. Although in the passage below, Gadamer speaks of interpreting a text—which for him is a kind of dialogue partner—his insights can readily be applied to the cultural and political dialogue that we have been discussing.

“A person trying to understand a text [Ukrainian culture, history, politics vis-à-vis Russia] is prepared for it to tell him something. That is why a hermeneutically trained consciousness must be, from the start, sensitive to the text’s alterity. But this kind of sensitivity involves neither ‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self, but the foregrounding and appropriation of one’s own fore-meanings and prejudices [pre-judgements; Lat. pre-judicare]. The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text [Ukrainian culture, history, politics vis-à-vis Russia] can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings” (Truth and Method, 282).

To demonstrate hermeneutical openness in a dialogue does not mean that you have no say and the other is always right; nor does it mean that you leave your values and cultural and historical horizons behind. Quite the opposite, one’s values, pre-judgments, and present historically shaped understandings that constitute one’s hermeneutical horizons are foregrounded. (Some of our pre-judgments are problematic, harmful and need to be changed; others disclose themselves as true when put to the test.) Our pre-judgments and biases function as conditions for the possibility of genuine understanding to take place; it is through making our views and the assumptions that enable them explicit in conversation with others that such views can, in fact, be tested. If, for example, our present understanding of what real peace means vis-à-vis Ukraine and Russia is misguided or shown to be false through our dialogue, then we have the opportunity to amend those views and to expand and enrich our horizons.

With this openness in mind, let’s listen to what Zhadan has to say about what true peace means for Ukrainians and to his criticism of Western Europeans (and again, I add, certain Americans) who are calling for peace now and at all costs. As Zhadan explains, what Ukrainians find so disturbing about these types of calls for peace is “the fact that we understand that peace won’t come merely because the victim of aggression has laid down their arms.” Zhadan reminds us that the civilians in Bucha, Hostomel, Irpin, and Kharkiv were, in fact, unarmed, and yet they were shot, tortured, shelled, and ruthlessly murdered and raped. The very fact that these injustices and atrocities have occurred cannot be pushed to side in present calls for peace. And here Zhadan highlights a crucial difference in the respective views of peace. For Ukrainians living in war-time, peace cannot be separated from justice; the two are intimately connected. As Zhadan puts it, “when speaking about peace in the context of this bloody, dramatic war instigated by Russia, some people don’t want to acknowledge a simple fact—there’s no such thing as peace without justice.”

He continues with a litany of what has passed for peace and for what some—those who call for peace now and at all costs—continue to advocate. “There are various forms of frozen conflict, there are temporarily occupied territories, there are time-bombs camouflaged as political compromises, but unfortunately, there won’t be any peace, real peace that provides a sense of security and prospects for the future. And by castigating Ukrainians for being unwilling to surrender and perceiving that as an element of militarism and radicalism, some Europeans […] are doing a bizarre thing; by trying to stay in their comfort zone, they venture beyond the bounds of ethics. And this is no longer a question for Ukrainians—this is a question for the world, for its willingness (or unwillingness) to swallow yet another manifestation of utter uncontrollable evil in favor of dubious financial gain and disingenuous pacificism.” Ukrainians fighting to save their lives and the lives of their loved ones in the midst of bombardments and atrocities are not radicals for supporting their military. Nor are they radical nationalists for rejoicing when their occupied cities are liberated, and the Ukrainian flag is once again flown over a city administration building. Anyone who has been even slightly attentive to the war crimes uncovered in Bucha, Irpin, Kharkiv, Kherson, and the list goes on would, it would seem, grasp the relief, joy, and ability to breathe again that liberated Ukrainians experience when their armed forces return and expel the brutal aggressors.  Zhadan’s statements about certain Western voices staying in their “comfort zone”—in their utterly detached, disembodied comfort zones of thought—and thus going “beyond the bounds of ethics” is worth dwelling with. It is as if certain intellectuals enter into an academic game, which requires them to leave their ability to think and feel with those who suffer, finding it more comfortable to engage in academic word games. For example, instead of listening to Ukrainian survivors of rape and torture and publicly condemning such actions, they focus their intellectual energy on explaining their aversion to Ukrainians’ or journalists’ or other academics’ use of the word “evil” to describe Russian atrocities because the term “evil” has theological connotations and is therefore meaningless. (Or they stress that we must speak of evil actions rather than evil as a reified entity, etc., etc.) Even if one agrees with aspects of their arguments, hyper-focusing on these nuances instead of the horrific violence being carried out in Ukraine illustrates intellectualism gone astray, detached, disembodied, in-humane. We need a re-attunement or re-focusing on the ethical dimensions of our being-with-one-another in this world, the existential here and now that needs protecting so that there can be a future.

Continuing his thoughts about ethics, politics, and language, Zhadan writes:

“It turns out that these days a lot of things, phenomena, and concepts need to be explained, or at the very least, they need a fresh reminder, they need to be re-articulated and embraced again. Typically, war shows what people have been trying not to notice for a long while; war is a time of uncomfortable questions and tough answers. This war launched by the Russian army has suddenly put forth a slew of questions that reach well beyond the context of Russo-Ukrainian relations. Like it or not, in the upcoming years, we will have to talk about things that make us uncomfortable: populism and double standards, a lack of responsibility and political conformism, ethics, which, as it turns out, have hopelessly disappeared from the vocabulary of those who make crucial decisions in the modern world.”

Responding to a possible retort that the issues he brings to our attention deal with the realm of politics—as if politics and ethics have no significant overlap—Zhadan, says, in an Aristotelian spirit, then let’s turn to politics and show how the two are intertwined: as the individual and the community are intertwined, shaping and being shaped by one another, so too with ethics and politics. He starts with a critical tone—namely, that what passes as politics today is quite often a “screen, a chance to avoid bumping into sharp edges” rather than speaking the truth frankly, plainly—calling deceit, deceit, war crimes, war crimes, and genocide, genocide. We even shy away from using the word freedom and need to be reminded as to what freedom is—not the mere lack of constraint, but freedom in the positive sense—namely, the freedom to flourish as an individual-in-community-with-others, and importantly, not just human others but natural and earth others, whose flourishing rather than mere survival is intimately tied to our well-being. Freedom, peace, crimes against humanity, genocide, reparations, occupiers, collaborators, filtration camps, are, in times of war, “lexical units” that “sound particularly sharp and expressive. Avoiding them without getting cut is very hard. They shouldn’t be avoided.”  Let’s not avoid them but face them, inspired by the spirit of courage that Ukrainians are showing day after day living in the midst of sub-freezing temperatures, lack of electricity, and constant artillery, missile, and drone strikes on their critical infrastructure, museums, schools, hospitals, and homes—all of which are attempts to destroy their right to exist as Ukrainians. Let’s call war crimes, war crimes, genocide, genocide.

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Zhadan on War-Time, Language, Memory, and Poetry After Bucha (Part 1)

“There is no peace without justice.” Serhiy Zhadan

On October 23, 2022, Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels). This prestigious award has been given since 1950 to individuals who have made significant contributions to peace and to those who have fostered understanding among different people groups. What follows are my reflections on Zhadan’s acceptance speech, which is resonant with philosophical, poetic, ethical, and political themes well worth lingering with—and especially so in this dark time of war.

Bucha after the battle (2022)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bucha 

After sharing a grim story about a how volunteer in Kharkiv had to obtain a refrigerator truck to collect human bodies that had been lying on the ground for over a month, Zhadan asks a profoundly philosophical question and then responds with an equally profound—not to mention existentially and phenomenologically rich—answer. “What does war change first? One’s sense of time, one’s sense of space. The outline of one’s perspective, the outline of temporal progression changes very quickly.” When you live in a time of active war, your present-time and present-space is so overwhelming present, that the future is occluded. The closest one gets to the future is perhaps tomorrow. As Zhadan explains, “What’s happening to you here and now is all that matters, just the people and things that will be with you tomorrow morning—tops.” However, that presumes that your flat, or wherever you happen to be sleeping that night, isn’t bombed. Surviving, “staying alive and pushing forward another twelve hours or so is the most important task at hand.” Hegel’s “here and now,” which is so quickly subsumed in this dialectic, knows nothing of the existential experience of time and space in a time of war, where “here and now” means I am alive for another hour or another five minutes, and this place, this space, this concrete wall is literally a shield protecting me from exploding missiles and razor-sharp shrapnel shards that will either kill me or rip through my body as easily as a knife cuts through butter—but the this “here” in view is my body and perhaps my blood.

If you survive the night, you awaken with a sense of what is most urgent. That is, in a time of war, you don’t waste time; rather, you welcome time as a gift—whether you are given one more day, morning, or hour, you grasp with everything that you are that whatever time you have must be lived well. Zhadan discloses an experience of time that doesn’t quite fit into phenomenological descriptions of time that one finds in the hermeneutical tradition—namely, “empty” and “fulfilled” time. Instead, war-time seems to involve elements of both but in an intensified, oversaturated way.

Let me explain. In his reflections on our experience of an artwork Hans-Georg Gadamer describes what he calls “empty time” and “fulfilled” or “autonomous time.” (cf. “The Relevance of the Beautiful”; hereafter, RB). Empty time is measurable; it’s the time we experience in our everyday life when, for instance, we are frenzied and can’t seem to find enough time. Here time is experienced as scarce; we create our hour-by-hour daily schedule, but time always shows up as deficient, lacking, never enough. Yet, we also experience time as empty when we are bored and have a surfeit of time. In both cases, time is perceived as something to be filled, calculated, used, or spent. In contrast, Gadamer describes fulfilled or autonomous time as an entirely different experience of time that is “profoundly related to the kind of time characteristic of both the festival and the work of art” (RB, 42). Fulfilled or autonomous time arrives at the proper time, drawing us into its rhythm. Anyone who has genuinely participated in a religious festival or communal musical celebration understands this transformation of empty time into festival time. There is a certain rhythm to a festival, which often unfolds through specific shared rituals, customs, and activities. As we participate in the festival activities, we become so engrossed that it is as if time stood still or took flight. Such festival celebrations are experienced as integral wholes; there is a clear beginning, middle, and end, and all of the parts are organically related and comprise a whole. To illustrate these aspects of “autonomous” time having its own time, Gadamer highlights the stages of human life. For example, he writes: “childhood, youth, maturity, old age, and death are all basic forms of such autonomous time. We do not calculate here, nor do we simply add up a gradual sequence of empty moments to arrive at a totality of time. The continuity of the uniform temporal flow that we can observe and measure by the clock tells us nothing about youth or age” (RB, 42). In contrast with the predictable, monotonous ticking away of clock time, our experience of the arrival of the various stages of human life comes upon us and often rather unexpectedly. “Suddenly we become aware that someone has aged or that someone is ‘no longer a child.’ Here we recognize that everyone has his own time, his autonomous temporality” (RB, 42).

Just as life has its own rhythm, so too with the work of art. Gadamer observes the “close proximity” of life and art in that both display an internal unity or structure. In other words, like the organic unity of a living being, the elements composing a work of art are intimately and internally related; they form an integral whole in which each part has its proper place, and the composition as a whole has its own appropriate rhythm or unfolding. Both the living organism and the artwork are characterized by an “internally structured unity” and both display “autonomous temporality” [Eigenzeit] (RB, 43). Of course, a musical composition offers a clear example of the artwork’s autonomous time. Composers often include tempo markers on their scores, instructing the performer to play certain sections rapidly, adagio, or legato. However, these markings are not simply the decision of the composer; rather, the composer has tarried with the piece and has attuned herself to the proper unfolding of the piece. Both performers of the pieces and engaged listeners, must also “find the right time as it is demanded by the work. . . . The correct tempo can never really be quantified or calculated” (RB, 43).

In sum, tarrying [verweilen] speaks of the engaged participant’s temporal comportment with an artwork. Such a comportment requires an active attunement to the artwork in which one is ec-statically present—that is, “fully there” with the other—anticipating the artwork’s “coming forth.” [By “ec-static,” I have in mind the hermeneutical understanding of the term which originates from the Greek, ek-stasis, which means literally, “to stand out.” In this context, it means a kind of self-forgetting owing to one’s attunement to the other; a displacement or being beyond oneself.] The artwork’s coming forth happens when it “comes to stand” and “the while” [die Weile] opens, suspending our ordinary experience of time such that it is existentially and phenomenologically experienced as a timelessness-within-time and thus as fulfilled time. Here it is as if time stands still.

Returning to Zhadan’s reflections on war-time, I highlight certain differences between it and Gadamer’s notions of empty and fulfilled time. In the experience of war-time, you are also “fully there” and engrossed in your present activities. However, when drones strike and one’s home is shelled, being attuned to and fully there with what is unfolding around you is at the same time to have a heightened awareness of yourself as an embodied self, a flesh-and-blood human being, who is fragile, vulnerable, and mortal. In other words, you are both fully there and fully cognizant of the fact that what might happen next can annihilate you—that is, kill you, violently steal your life in an instant—an Augenblick in a double-sense: a moment of vision in which you are acutely aware that the next moment could be the last. The Augenblick of insight and death.

In war-time, time is so out of joint that empty time and fulfilled time are conflated and both are intensified, oversaturated. For example, a civilian in a war zone counts seconds between the sound of explosions in order to determine what kind of weapon was being used—e.g., a mortar or a howitzer—and thus how to respond. This is in fact what civilians in Eastern Ukraine have been instructed to do—it’s one of many survival tips. Along similar lines, a first responder counts the seconds after an initial explosion and tries to gauge how many minutes remain before the second strike occurs. (This is a brutal and criminal tactic called a “double-tap” strike that the Russian forces used in Syria and currently deploys in Ukraine.) In such cases, time is experienced as both measurable and oversaturated—the very next second could be the last; time is felt at the same time as disorientingly fast and as if “time-less.”

Like autonomous or fulfilled time, war-time has its own time, but it has no “proper time.” War-time is time-out-of-joint in the most extreme sense; what occurs in war-time should never be experienced by any living being—human or otherwise. What unfolds within war-time has its own time but to call it “proper,” “appropriate,” “fitting” does violence to the very fabric of our existence; war-time strangles the excess of life, inhibits the free back-and-forth movement of creative play that characterizes human and non-human animal life. When you live in war-time, its reality is always there; you have moments when you can repress it; but it is always there, always present, even when the bombs are temporarily absent. If you want to survive, a certain degree of being “fully there” is necessary—that is,  attunement in a time of war is a matter of survival. Even when you are fully there and attuned to the movements, activities, and erratic pulse of war, its “parts” are not experienced as an integral or meaningful whole. Instead, its “parts”—the random shelling, shooting, and murder of civilians and targeting of non-military objects such as people’s homes, hospitals, schools, children’s playgrounds, queues of people waiting for bread, using rape as a “military strategy”—all of these crimes and atrocities are unintelligible; they are sense-less; they are “parts” that utterly lack integrity; they will never form a meaningful whole and yet they must be prosecuted; justice must be served. The whole, if we can call it that, appears as fragmented, but what has been experienced, what survivors bear witness to—these parts, that make up this fragmented, disjointed “whole”—must be spoken about; this speech, this witness, this testimony of what has happened in war-time plays a vital role in justice being served and genuine peace returning to Ukraine.

“There is no peace without justice.” Serhiy Zhadan

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