The Split of the Nation

Abstract

The article's main objective is to show that the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine fulfilled a political role it had not anticipated. By relying on the logic of exclusion of enemy, Euromaidans contributed to the political consolidation of the national enemy in its struggle against its own political regime. They helped the formation of both the liberal, protest collective subject in Russia and the Ukrainian liberal, collective subject. Such a strong correspondence, even melding, of the nationalist, political subjectivity of the Ukrainian maidans with Russian, liberal, protest subjectivity indicates a coinciding of two types of nationalism (Ukrainian and Russian), which both equally divide the nation into two subjects: (1) the subject of the Nation, with a capital “N” (educated urban professionals, “the elite of society,” etc.) and (2) the subject of the nation, with a lowercase “n” (“vatniks,” “gopniks,” etc.).*

Keywords::

• radical democracy
• nationalism
• populism
• political subjectivity of Maidan
• political articulation
• nation-state
• national enemy

This article is the republished version of:

The Split of the Nation

Notes

^*Vatnik is derived from the word for cotton (vata), used to stuff cheap jackets worn by the poor (“trailer trash”). Vatnik is a derogatory social slang neologism in Russian and Ukrainian languages. The term is used primarily to refer to individuals who represent the poorest and most dispossessed part of the post-Soviet population who advocate for conservative and anti-liberal political and cultural values. Unlike vatnik, gopnik has a wider social connotation and car refer to aggressive, uneducated, lower-class suburban male dwellers (see British chavs).—Trans.

^* The word maidan (Persian origin) means “public space or public square” in Ukrainian.—Trans.

^1. In the context of this essay, there is an important distinction made between politics and the political as articulated in the theory of discourse-analysis of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.

^2. “… [T]he EU drafted the economic cooperation treaty exclusively around its own interests—Western financial assistance to Kiev has been very limited in the past six months, and the natural gas reversal, designed to be an alternative to Gazprom has yet to be organized.” A. Epstein, “Neumenie zakonchit’ voinu,” Radio Svoboda, August 2, 2014. www.svoboda.org/content/article/25478307.html.

^3. See S. Žižek, “Why Both the Left and Right Have Got It Wrong on Ukraine,” The Guardian, June 10, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/10/ukraine-slavoj-zizek-lenin.

^4. Here, the lowercase “m” in maidan is meant to refer not just to the square in Kiev, but to all the protests as a whole, and the reasons behind the occupation of the public spaces of many Ukrainian cities.

^5. G.C. Spivak and J. Butler, Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (London: Seagull, 2011).

^6. J. Butler, “Violence, Non-Violence: Sartre on Fanon,” Graduate Faculty Philosophical Journal, 2006, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 3–24.

^7. See the definition of the national enemy put forward by Ukraine's most famous writer Oksana Zabuzhko in “Na Maidane prokhodit Shevchenkovskoe veche” [Shevchenko at the Maidan]: “Ukraine is very lucky to have the national classic, Shevchenko, who is not just a good poet, but through his life and work embodied the absolute, organic rejection of evil as it is manifest on Earth, which he first encountered in the evil empire of Russia.” Ukrainian Pravda, March 9, 2014, www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/03/9/7018220/.

^* Who does not hop is a Moscovite.—Ed.

^8. Z. Shcherek in conversation with E. Fanailova, “La Boheme at the Barricades Part 8: The Poles and Ukrainians. Zemovit Shcherek,” Radio Freedom, July 9, 2014. www.svoboda.org/content/article/25448718.html.

^9. Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? p. 87.

^10. Ibid., p. 29.

^11. Ibid., p. 30.

^12. Ibid., p. 31.

^13. Ibid., p. 31.

^14. See B. Brucato. 2011. “The Crisis and The Way Out of It: What We Can Learn from Occupy Wall Street,” October 8, 2011. www.benbrucato.com/?p = 215; “Democracia real YA!” Manifiesto, 2011: www.democraciarealya.es/manifiesto-comun/; D. Graeber, “Occupy's Liberation from Liberalism: The Real Meaning of May Day,” The Guardian, May 7, 2012. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/07/occupy-liberation-from-liberalism.

^15. Ukraine above all!—Trans.

^16. Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? p. 87.

^17. According to Chantal Mouffe, the political is defined as a set of practices and institutions through which order is created, and human coexistence organized. The concept of order in this definition refers to the exclusion of the “affective dimension” from the sphere of politics.

^18. In an interview with Mary Zournazi, Mouffe said, “people are not exclusively motivated by self-interest or rational reasons, but often by what I call passion.” “Hope, Passion and the New World Order,” Mary Zournazi in conversation with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Contretemps, 2001, no. 2, p. 40.

^19. For details concerning “new social movements” outside the logic of such demands see J. Butler, “So, What Are the Demands? And Where Do They Go from Here? (Occupy Wall Street).” http://ru.scribd.com/doc/86333441/Butler-Judith-So-What-Are-the-Demands-Occupy-Wall-Street; S. Žižek, “Occupy First. Demands Come Later, The Guardian (October 26, 2011), http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/occupy-protesters-bill-clinton

^20. C. Mouffe, “Agonistic Public Spaces, Democratic Politics and the Dynamics of Passions,” Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art. ed. J. Backstein, D. Birnbaum, and S.O. Wallenstein (Moscow; Berlin: Interros Publishing Program, Sternberg Press), p. 95.

^21. Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Spivak uses the term “multi-ethnic empires.” p. 74.

^22. Ibid., p. 86.

^23. A. Magun, “Protestnoe dvizhenie 2011–2012 godov v Rossii: Novyi populism srednego klassa,” Stasis, 2014, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 192–226.

^24. Ibid., p. 193.

^25. Ibid., p. 193.

^26. See E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 2001), p. 150.

^27. Ibid., p. 68.

^28. Ibid., p. 177.

^29. Ibid., p. 177.

^30. Ibid., p. 190.

^31. Here the concept of radical chance is also evoked. See “The meaning of the ‘radical’ in ‘radical contingency’ lies in the fact that contingency (in its very play of necessity) can never be completely erased by any objectivity or systematicity and, thus, it is itself necessary.” O. Marchart, “Politics and the Ontological Difference: On the ‘Strictly Philosophical’ in Laclau's Work, Laclau: A Critical Reader, ed. S. Critchley and O. Marchart (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 60.

^32. See A. Norval, Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 47.

^33. A. Magun, Otritsatel'naia revoliutsiia. K dekonstruktsii politicheskogo sub”ekta (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii Universitet, Sankt-Peterburg), p. 34.

^34. Laclau, likewise, subscribes to this view, and strives to understand the subject by using the language of the philosophical tradition as a condition of opposing objectivism in philosophy. See E. Laclau, “Glimpsing the Future,” Laclau: A Critical Reader, p. 324. “The political riches of Laclau's text,” writes L. Zerilli, “arise precisely through its engagement with traditional philosophy and, specifically, its deconstruction of classical universalism.” L. Zerilli, “This Universalism Which Is Not One,” Laclau: A Critical Reader, p. 89.

^35. Norval, Aversive Democracy, p. 90.

^36. Ibid., pp. 105–06.

^37. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 166–80.

^38. J. Glinos,“Radical Democratic Ethos, or, What Is an Authentic Political Act?” Contemporary Political Theory, 2003, vol. 2, p. 196.

^39. E. Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), p. 52.

^40. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 97–98.

^41. E. Laclau, “Glimpsing the Future,” Laclau Reader, p. 324.

^42. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. x.

^* A pejorative epithet of Putin. Punning on Putin, Hublot—his brand of wristwatch. Hublot is homophonic with “khuylo,” a very derogatory Ukrainian word for the penis.—Trans.

^43.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 9G6bMheayBQ.

^44. A citizen of a borough belonging to the middle class, a kind of medieval bourgeoisie.—Trans.

^45. Here Jünger is referring to small-scale bombings in late 1920s Germany for which both the National Socialists and the communists were blamed. Jünger calls the bombings nighttime “fireworks.”

^46. E. Jünger, “Natsionalism i natsionalism,” Natsionalisticheskaia revoliutsia, trans. from the German A.V. Mikhailovsky (Moscow: Skimen, 2008), pp. 169–70.

^47. Ignoring criticisms of parliamentarianism (e.g., Walter Benjamin's) as inherently violent.

^48.Kolorad is a reference to the striped St. George ribbons that Russian patriots wear, which are reminiscent of the strips of the invasive Colorado beetle. It is a pejorative epithet used to refer to Russian patriots.

^49. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998).

^50. J. Butler, Giving Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2006); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009); Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

^51. Butler, Frames of War, p. 4.

^52. J. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (London: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 18.

^53.www.youtube.com/watch?v = v0EsZIUfKJo. Four women attack Putin during an exhibition in Hanover. Yelling the equivalent of “Go to hell!” or “You're a cocksucker.”—Trans.