Kant’s statue in Kaliningrad, vandalised by Russian hooligans in 2018
“No You Kan’t!” – The Telling Provocation of a Russian Vice-Admiral
In September 2020 we illustrated an entry titled “What Is Philosophy?” with a picture of Kant’s statue in present-day Kaliningrad (former Königsberg) splashed with pink paint by Russian hooligans as a mean to protest against the nomination of the philosopher’s name for relabelling the city’s airport. The episode took place in 2018. As the BBC then informed (in an article titled “No you Kant: Russians reject German thinker’s name for airport”) Russian Vice-Admiral Igor Mukhametshin (who in 2019 was appointed deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy for armaments) had formerly (in a speech delivered to soldiers from the Russian navy in Kaliningrad) “denounced” Kant as a “traitor” (because of being German!), “calling for him to be rejected in a vote to rename Russia’s Kaliningrad airport”. Additionally – as we echoed ourselves in our 2020 entry – he “accused [Kant] of having written ‘incomprehensible books that no one reads.’”
(The link to the video of the Vice-Admiral’s original speech supplied in the BBC article is a dead link, as the corresponding youtube account has been suppressed, but the video can still be found here in Russian with no English subtitles.)
While in 2020 we found the Vice-Admiral’s words – in particular those referring to Kant’s “incomprehensible books that no one reads” – eloquent as regards the uneasiness that philosophy provokes among those who, as Deleuze says, fight for the enslavement of others as if it were their freedom” (e.g. the tyrant and the priest)(*), today we deem the Vice-Admiral’s words tragic instead. And we should like to briefly explore here the extent to which the vandalisation of Kant’s statue incited by the words of a current Russian Vice-Admiral provides an important symbolic key to the barbarian Russian invasion of Ukraine we are witnessing these days, as well as, more generally, to the menace that Russian Christian Neo-Fascism (of which Ivan Ilyin must be seen as the intelectual forebear, United Russia as the political branch, and Vladimir Putin as the leader)(⧓) represents for Europe.
On Civil Society, Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine, and the Russian Christian Neo-Fascist Ghost
Allow us to begin with the definition of the term “civil society,” which vertebrates modern Europe.
As the contemporary Spanish philosopher Felipe Martínez Marzoa suggests, civil society is a (social) system based on the reciprocal dependency of a number of particulars (or individuals) who are, in principle, independent from one another, but that need to count on one another, nonetheless, to satisfy their needs.(#) It can therefore be argued, first, that the type of reciprocity at stake in civil society is a “mutualist” (to use Proudhon’s term) or confederal one; and, secondly, that a principle of (individual) freedom is co-substantial to it.
Needless to say, this is a concept of civil society which belongs, as a concept, in the sphere of the thinkable, and, more exactly, in that of practical reason, or reason applied to the living together of free particulars and thereby to the actions conducive to make such free living-together possible. As per this concept, in consequence, “civil society” must be seen, first and foremost, as a theoretical model and, thereby, as a regulative reference or norm – as an ideal, if you wish. For reality always proves far-more complex and, often too, far-more messy; thus the principle of freedom which is constitutive of civil society is damaged, and eventually dissolved, when vertical subordination substitutes for reciprocity.(∞)
Nevertheless from the ancient-Greek polis onwards partial instantiations of such model are not uncommon in Western history.(⊗) Moreover, as contemporary ethnography shows (we are thinking here of Lévi-Strauss’s notion of inter-clan dynamic disequilibrium and of Roy Wagner’s notion of reciprocity of perspectives applied to the configuration of the socius, most extramodern groups function in a similar manner, only that in their case the logic of confederation applies not so much to particulars as to families, clans, and tribes.(¥)
On the other hand, it is not simply a question of an ideal and its never-fulfilled realisations. Human history is driven by various kinds of forces, and exploitation and violence are two of its constants. The ideal of civil society – or any other akin ideal based on the principle of free social reciprocity – serves to introduce some degree of rationality and cooperation where cooperation and rationality are seldom the rule; and in this sense it can be affirmed that civil society is, by definition and compared to all others (including the many forms Asiatic despotism may take, of which Russian Christian Neo-Fascism is but one), the less-evil model of human conviviality.
Like any type of Fascism, Russian Christian Neo-Fascism represents a serious menace to it. Its notion of a “Sacred Motherland” or “Fatherland” (Отечество) traversing the ages like a ghost(⋈) – a ghost raised to the dubious position of “spiritual reservoir” of human salvation, which requires the sacrifice of all particulars that live under it as well as that of their immediate neighbours, and that is perceived as being illegitimately attacked and compromised by anything different from it – is best described as a spectral, sadistic, and paranoid figure of the imagination rather than a theoretical model of what we have previously called practical reason.
If Europe, then, is to blame for anything vis-à-vis Russia over the past three decades is for having underestimated (out of naivety or perhaps out of greed?) the risk of welcoming the creators of such a ghost (to whose preoccupying growth Christian Orthodox fundamentalism and Stalinist nostalgia have contributed their own grains of sand)(◘) into its commercial and financial galaxy. For while all other European countries that had belonged in the Soviet Union have assumed, in various ways and with different results, the path of civil society, which has allowed them to enter the EU, Russia (ruled by an ex-KGB officer) has shown no intent whatsoever thereof. The issue, in other words, is not the NATO’s alleged advance in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Russian’s supposed humiliation due to it,(⊜) but something else, namely, Russia’s Neo-Fascist delusion.
For a delusion it is – one (albeit the most dangerous!) out the many delusions that, as the contemporary Russian poet Maria Stepanova lucidly puts it,(⦹) populate the Russian imaginary, of which Cosmism and New Age spiritualisms of all sorts are part and parcel, as well. If one bears in mind, though, that, at the same time, Russia has an incredibly well-educated and valuable intellectual urban class, and especially an artistic youth often living in miserable conditions(Δ) but willing to do new things with a dedication and a creativity rarely matched elsewhere, the diagnosis, sadly, can only be that Russian society suffers from neurosis and cultural “schizophrenia” (to paraphrase Stepanova again)(⧮) alike.
Excursus: We are writing this back in Europe from St. Petersburg (Russia), where we have lived for four months (from mid-October 2021 to late-February 2022) and from where we left only a few days after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, leaving behind many good friends and projects (and a beautiful cat we hope to recover soon), but also the feeling of having lived in an impressively authoritarian country where almost everything, from booking a hotel room to asking for an administrative paper to crossing the border is done at the price of permanent tension.
Back now to the concept of civil society: when the State (which can be either a repressive instrument for the reproduction of an uneven concentration of power, as Clastres discussed in Society Against the State, or else a warrant for reciprocity to flow evenly, as in the social-democrat model)(∅) is turned into a despotic machineat the service of a delusion like the aforementioned one, then civil society is prevented from taking shape – the State, that is, becomes the tangible body of a ghost.
So why is the body of the ghost brutally devastating Ukraine? Because after the collapse of the Soviet Union Ukraine – whose unity is neither ethnic nor linguistic (i.e. is not national in the usual sense of the term) but civilian, and whose complex history is one of recurrent occupation (by Habsburgs, Russians, and Tartars) and resistance to it – aimed precisely at becoming a civil society. It is that aim, above any thing else, that Putin wants to abort (with a military invasion) and to punish (by the cruelty of the latter), inasmuch as the possibility that a civil society exists in a territory identified by him and his fellow ghost’s-supporters with the mythical land out of which the ghost itself once emerged defies the radiancy of the ghost and could weaken its uncontested power in the long run. And once more: that which is not the ghost is an ontological degeneration au sense fort. Hence Putin’s infamous description of the Ukrainian government as “a band of drug addicts.”
That politics and spectrology intersect in contemporary Russia is evinced, on the other hand, by the fact that a mummy (Lenin’s) lies at the core of the Kremlin (for the Soviet nostalgics to pay its respects to it) and that the Kremlin’s walls have been covered by Putin with numerous portraits of another (this time imperial) ghost: Peter the Great’s, whom, as the Russian historian and Putin’s supporter Roj Medvedev puts it, Putin himself wants to emulate as regards the recovery of the geographical boundaries of Russia. – Finland and the Baltic republics should take heed.
Compare this twice-delirious ghostly centre of today’s Russian politics with the empty, unbounded space at the centre of any Greek polis, which was (is) a symbol that the common cannot be appropriated by any particular, regardless of the megalomaniac nature of that particular’s dream (or nightmare). That empty space is still found at the heart of Europe’s parliamentary democracies, whose parliaments are periodically dissolved in the time of elections, out of which not only a new executive power but also a new legislative power results. A despot’s tendency (including Putin’s) to perpetuate his tenure is the antithesis of rhythmic democratic emptiness, which ought to be seen in turn as a temporal translation of the spatial Greek model.
On the Commercial Sanctions against Russia and Their Theoretical Dimension
Civil society, we have said, is a system based on the reciprocal dependency of a number of particulars who are in principle independent from one another but who need to count on one another to satisfy their needs. In turn, a system based on such reciprocal dependency requires – as Martínez Marzoa stresses too – that goods (i.e. all things capable of satisfying such needs) be defined as things susceptible of being exchanged.(⊙) It can therefore be argued that a principle of exchange (and of free exchange for that matter, given the inherently horizontal nature of confederal reciprocity) completes the idea of civil society.
Yet if all things are susceptible of being exchanged this means two things. First, that a plane of equivalence must be established for them to be exchanged. Second, that a common value must be assigned to them. “Free market” is a possible name for that plane of equivalence. As for the common value, two options are possible, roughly speaking: one is to identify it with the “utility” of things (which is, needless to say, qualitatively different), another one is to identify it with the “work” (which can be measured and thus quantified) invested in making them. If one were to interpret this distinction in Aristotelian terms it would be possible to affirm that first option privileges teleology over efficiency, and that, conversely, the second option privileges efficiency over teleology. In a way, distinguishing between form (or idea) and matter applies here as well.
Of these options, the former is that of classical economic theory, whereas the latter is the one endorsed by Marxism. In our view, the former one is preferable from a theoretical standpoint: if, say, I am hired to teach in a university, it is, above all, the utility of my teaching that the university should pay me for, as the potential utility of my teaching is also the reason it has to hire me in the first place, independently from the fact that my salary may, and should perhaps, include, in some proportion, a payment for the work I invest (i.e. for the effort I put) in preparing my classes.
So in addition to punishing its economy – which, most importantly, may bring about, sooner or later, inner protests that could precipitate Putin’s fall and thereby encourage a change of regime – the sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine display theoretical overtones: if civil society and some kind of free market co-imply each other, the decision of certain firms and governments of blocking their commercial relations with Russia can be seen as a most-coherent response to an attack to civil society, i.e. as a coin flipping or figure-ground reversal of the theoretical problem caused by such attack.
Russian propaganda pretends that these sanctions are illegitimate – one wonders on behalf of what principle! Tellingly enough, however, this claim is but another proof of the Kremlin’s difficulty not only to accept, but to understand, the notion of a free association of particulars.
Excursus: Over the past few days Russian propaganda also claims that, when the US invaded Iraq, nobody in the West protested, and that the fact that everyone does now that Russia has invaded Ukraine shows how extended hatred to Russia is in the West. This claim entirely overlooks the numberless demonstrations, debates, publications, and even diplomatic tensions (e.g. between France and the US) that the invasion of Iraq provoked in the Western World. But it is normal, as Russian propaganda is merely that – Russian propaganda, which has a long and fascinating history (actually it would be possible to define the Soviet State as a “propaganda State,” as Peter Kenez did in 1985.(⦿) Let’s, furthermore, recall here Hannah Arendt: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”(⧂)
From Kant’s Philosophical Sketch of a Perpetual Peace in Europe to the Twilight of Practical Reason
To end with, let’s return to Kant. In his 1795 Philosophical Sketch on Perpetual Peace (in Europe), whose overall idea can be viewed (nonetheless) as the forerunner of the modern notion of international law – the very one Putin’s invasion of Ukraine flagrantly violates – Kant states(❊) that “No State shall by force interfere with the constitution or government of another State,” and that “No state shall [either], during war, permit such acts of hostility which would make mutual confidence in the subsequent peace impossible.” These are nos. 5 and 6 of its “Preliminary Articles.” Two additional articles read as follows: “The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states,” and “The rights of men, as citizens of the world, shall be limited to the conditions of universal hospitality.”
There is little mystery, then, in Vice-Admiral Igor Mukhametshin’s words that Kant’s books (and, one may infer, Kant’s thought) are (is) “incomprehensible”. It certainly must be so for a Russian Christian Neo- Fascist мужик (muzhik, “male”) leading what, regretfully, seems like a “holy war” to part of the Russian population.(†) In contrast, standing with Ukraine against the invasor Russian army of which Igor Mukhametshin is a Vice-Admiral, means supporting civil society against a new form of Fascist tyranny and, thereby too, supporting practical reason against totalitarianism.
The shadow of the Christian cross is casted down by the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill I, on the face of Vladimir Putin as the latter attends an Orthodox Easter service in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral of Moscow in 2015. Kirill I justified Putin’s invasion of Ukraine four days ago because it has been launched, in his own words, “against those who support the gays,” who are, he and Putin claim, a product (like feminism, multiculturalism, etc.) of the anti-Russian West. See further James Kirchik’s 2014 article on Putin’s anti-gay crusade. Not only has Kirill I supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but blessed it, as The Times informs, with the offering to the National Guard of Russia of an icon depicting the appearance of the Virgin Mary to Russian soldiers during the First World War which, in the words of Putin’s security chief, Viktor Zolotov, “will accelerate our victory.” (Photo: Reuters/Ivan Sekretarev/Pool.)
A further illustration of Putin’s anti-Kantianism, and of his particularly worrying depreciation of practical reason – and of its twilight in the years to come should Russia (and China)(ß) win the upper hand in this – is provided by his recent nuclear threat against the West, which, significantly, contrasts with the care the NATO members are taking to prevent an escalation of the conflict while helping Ukraine in the militar. For whereas the NATO members fear an escalation that would be fatal for everyone (themselves included), and thus base their choice not to provoke such escalation on something that resembles the keystone of Kant’s formal ethics, i.e. Kant’s categorical imperative (choose that which, if it were chosen by everyone else, would damage nobody, and avoid, instead, that which would), Putin, conversely, opts to materially coerce the West, thus echoing in his discourse the coercive ethics of Christianity: “if you intervene, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history,” i.e. if you challenge me, you shall be punished.
We all know (in the West) that practical reason, in fact reason tout court, cannot be established upon such premise. But for a despot, and for those who support him (in and outside the West), this matters little. Anyone can become the target of his wrath: you are either with him (unconditionally)(∫) or against him. As Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova says Putin is seemingly ready to “open fire on his own people.” Hence those Russians, especially young Russians, who are protesting today in the streets of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other locations of the Russian Federation against the Kremlin’s irrationality, have been severely warned by their government: if you stand against us, you, too, will face the consequences; and thousands of them have been arrested. But this is just normal a country in which, as Amnesty International reported in 2020, “freedom of peaceful assembly is constrained, freedom of speech restricted, dissent repressed, and harassment, prosecution, and physical attacks against human rights defenders remain commonplace”; and where, as a colleague at the European University at St. Petersburg confessed to me in December 2021, people know that anything, absolutely anything (one’s physical disappearance included) may happen. But as Russia’s Orthodox Patriarch Kirill I likes to say – and Putin possibly likes to think – “some human rights are heresy.”
(*) Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (trans. Robert Hurley; San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988), p. 13.
(⧓) See further Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn, “Putin’s Philosopher: Ivan Ilyin and the Ideology of Moscow’s Rule” (Foreign Affairs, September 20, 2015). Aleksandr Dugin supplies in turn the geopolitics; see Ed Simon, “The Would-Be Czar’s Dark Prophet” (History News Network, March 3, 2022). On Putin himself, see Jason Stanley, “The antisemitism animating Putin’s claim to ‘denazify’ Ukraine” (The Guardian, February 26, 2022). For an overview, see Michel Eltchaninoff, “Ideologues and Cassandras: The Thinkers behind Putinism” (Books & Ideas, November 2, 2015), as well as Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).
(#) Felipe Martínez Marzoa, El concepto de lo civil (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones/Metales Pesados, 2008), p. 12.
(∞) Which, however, need not be the rule. The problem with Marxism is, in this respect, its both negative essentialism (deviations are the truth of what can no longer be deemed reciprocity) and its logic of conflict (abuse fosters subversion and revenge, hence a new, if reversed, type of subordination from which miraculously things will improve one day).
(⊗) The extent to which Western Christianity, with its increasing emphasis on individual consciousness and autonomy, has, despite its many inherent problems (egoism, sinfulness, etc.), contributed to the extension of such ideal in Europe, is worth examining.
(¥) Notice Lévi-Strauss’s reference to Proudhon in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (ed. Rodney Needham, trans. James Herle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 490.
(⋈) Cf. already Cyrus Hamlin’s 1886 article, “The Dream of Russia.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1886/12/the-dream-of-russia/522855/
(◘) See Galia Ackerman, Le Régiment Immortel. La Guerre sacrée de Poutine (Paris: Premier Parallèle, 2019), as well as Clémentine Fauconnier’s review of it (“The Militarisation of Russian Society”) in Books & Ideas (November 25, 2019).
(⊜) On which see Anne Applebaum, “The Myth of Russian Humiliation” (The Washington Post, October 17, 2014). The argument that the eastward expansion of NATO is chiefly responsible for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – which one reads here and there these days and Hilan Bensusan underpinned in a letter he wrote to me in response to a previous version of this essay (Bensusan, private communication of March 11, 2022) is flawed on several accounts: first, because it portrays geopolitics as a chess game played by two unchanging, essentialist opponents (those of the Cold War, with their respective areas of influence over which they would exert their paternalistic tutelage) and thus fails to consider why most of the ex-Soviet European republics themselves have freely applied to join NATO; secondly, because it obliterates how NATO functions and overlooks, therefore, why some candidatures (like Poland’s) were initially rejected due to the fact that their armies lacked civil control (as it is still the case of Russia, whose aspiration to join NATO was dismissed for the very same reason) and why others, in turn, have been repeatedly avoided until Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 to counter the democratisation of Ukraine, which compromised the NATO-Russia cooperation agreements of 2002; thirdly, because it likewise ignores Putin’s willingness to impose in Russia and beyond a model of authoritarian rule and State capitalism (not very different from China’s, on which see Sophie Lepault and Romain Franklin’s excellent ARTE documentary Le monde de Xi Jinping) that clashes with the social-political and economic values (human rights, democracy, free market, etc.) of the countries members of NATO, values whose defence is NATO’s ultimate raison d’être; and, lastly, because it ultimately accuses Ukraine of wearing too short a skirt and, thereby, of provoking its own “rape” (in Putin’s own terms, on which see Slavoj Žižek, “Was Russia’s ‘rape’ of Ukraine inevitable?” [Theory Reader, February 25, 2022]). Aside: It is also fundamentally wrong to view Russia’s and China’s models, as their own propaganda claims they are (on which see Thomas Meaney, “Putin Wants a Clash of Civilizations. Is ‘The West’ Falling for It?” [The New York Times, March 11, 2022]), as exponents of other and perhaps better-forms of civilisation in comparison to the West, for they merely represent the admixture of Asiatic despotism and Western totalitarianism (be it Fascist, Communist, or both) and Western hybris (as evinced inter alia by their commitment to increase their stock of nuclear weapons and their unwillingness to meet international ecological requirements). Similarly, Russia’s and China’s apparently friendly attitude towards decolonial movements in Africa and America (on which see, as regards Russia, Bruce Mutsvairo, Mirjam de Bruijn, and Kristin Skare Orgeret’s February-2022 report in The Guardian) only betrays their attempt to spread their influence across the world (see Paul Stronski, “Late to the Party: Russia’s Return to Africa” [Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 16, 2019]); a world that, as a result, may become less unipolar, but that will likely suffer from just another and not-less preoccupying, if new, form of colonialism.
(⦹) In a 2016 interview with Robert Harrison available here. See also, in Russian, this other interview of hers.
(Δ) E.g. in shared shabby flats whose ramshackle facilities date from the 1940s, as I myself have witnessed.
(⧮) A schizophrenia which is oftentimes institutionally promoted, e.g. by the Kremlin’s pretension that its invasion of Ukrainian responds to its will of fighting Ukrainian Neo-Nazism (which is more active today than, say, German Neo-Nazism as a consequence of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, and whose roots are to be sought in the Ukrainian reaction during World War II to the Stalin’s planned famine of the Ukrainian people which caused six million deaths) when it is actually the Kremlin, rather than the Ukrainian government (whose current president is a Jew!), which supports Neo-Fascism.
(∅) The two models can, of course, concur, e.g. when a State protective of civil society at home promotes inequality abroad, as in the final stages of Western colonialism. It would be easy to deduce from this and other Western aberrations (and there are obviously many) that “the liberal West uses its tradition of criticism and tolerance for its own benefit” (Bensusan, private communication of March 11, 2022). The liberal West, however, is not an acting Subject. Criticism and tolerance are part of it, i.e. they are two of the many intertwined threads of its messy tapestry, which is as messy as any other social, political, and cultural tapestry. Yet it is those two threads, that work inside the West against its own violence, that other tapestries, e.g. those of Russia and China, lack despite their share in the same violence that the West spreads, which thus shields them (unlike the West) against any criticism and tolerance. Now, while criticism and tolerance are two distinctive problematic markers of the West, they are philosophy’s own characteristic markers. “Here,” writes Deleuze, “the full meaning of [a] philosopher’s solitude becomes apparent. For he cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any of them. [Yet] [d]oubtless it is in democratic and liberal milieus that he finds the best living conditions, or rather the best conditions for survival” (Spinoza, pp. 3–4).
(◘) Martínez Marzoa, El concepto de lo civil, p. 12.
(⦿) See Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On Soviet foreign propaganda, see in turn Frederick C. Barghoorn, Soviet Foreign Propaganda (with annotations by Robert J. Alexander and George F. Kennan; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), which was reissued in 2015.
(⧂) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1994), p. 474.
(❊) In, henceforth, Mary Campbell Smith’s translation (Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay [London and New York: Macmillan, 1903], pp. 112, 114, 128, 137).
(†) See the testimonies gathered in Tim Whewell’s 2014 article in the BBC, “The Russians fighting a ‘holy war’ in Ukraine.” See also Giles Fraser’s analysis of Putin’s spiritual self-portrayal in UnHerd and Lena Surzhko Harned’s article in The Conversation on the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, which was built between 2014 and 2020 on the outskirts of Moscow and officially dedicated in June of 2020.
(ß) See the information on The Guardian on the March-15, 2022, US-China meeting in Rome.
(∫) As Putin reminded a few days ago to the Director of Russia’s Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin.