Filling out the ballot to declare his candidacy for the 2004 presidential election—as the then-prime minister and future chief of state—Viktor Yanukovych did not shy away from displaying the politically enticing achievements of his past: Doctor of Sciences in Economics, member of the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Chairman of the National Olympic Committee, awarded the Order of Merit, to name a few. Within this flurry of accolades, however, an emblematic pattern precipitated. One word after the next, the public official seemed incapable of spelling not only details from his own resume but also his wife’s patronymic. Importing letters from Russian absent in the Ukrainian language, failing to decline the name of his place of origin, and most notoriously endowing the word prof (f)essor with a spare letter «f», he could do it all. The politician had accomplished an unprecedented feat, making twelve errors in the span of ninety words.
Ukrainians have long been witness to the stupidity of our leaders. For decades we have reveled in the catalogue of idiocy with which our collective memory is laden to this day, no matter how starkly the conditions of the present war may repress it—"Операція Проффесор" («Operation Professor») satirizing Yanukovych for his lack of qualifications and criminal history being one of the inaugurating manifestations of this phenomenon. The requirement of the Ukrainian language for public communication by officials conjoined with the general incapacity of politicians to do so properly were often the source of these occurrences. Yanukovych’s prime minister Mykola Azarov, for example, by means of his conduct inaugurated the term «Azirivka» into public parlance. With an ardent tendency toward hypercorrection, the head of the Ukrainian government replaced vowels o, e, y, with «i,» most prominently demonstrated in his 2010 denunciation not of «bloodsuckers» (кровососи) but «blood-breasts» (кровосісі). During the Maidan, the communicative inability of these political leaders—or bloodsuckers—became a popular play of language: «words like бійкіт biikit ‘boycott’ and бімба bimba ‘bomb’ (бойкот boikot and бомба bomba in standard Ukrainian)» came into use.
Stupidity, however, was not confined to the domain of the sitting government during the Maidan Revolution. Most notoriously, on the night that the first deaths became known among the protestors, future Ukrainian prime minister and at that time one of the self-proclaimed leaders of the opposition movement, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, declared on stage: «Якщо куля в лоб, то куля в лоб, але чесно, справедливо і з повагою. Але я скажу одне: я з цього шляху не зійду ні на один міліметр, і ми з України не відступимо.» (If it’s a bullet to the forehead, then it’s a bullet to the forehead, but with honesty, justice, and with respect. But I say one thing: I will not step off this path even by a single millimeter, and we will not retreat from Ukraine.) Laden with pseudo-revolutionary fervor yet quite evidently out of place coming from a figure widely perceived as a mild-mannered technocrat—not to mention the already existing associations of Yatsenyuk’s physiognomy with that of a rabbit beginning in the late 2000s and the overly theatrical nature of his declaration—the pronouncement went on to become an easily accessible staple of Ukrainian political satire. Even after the full-scale invasion, Yatsenyuk is still being asked about the notoriety his declaration has garnered over the years.
While reminiscence on these instances of stupidity brings about involuntary memories of a Ukraine seemingly past—before the watershed intrusion of war rearticulated what was, is, and can be—as a result of its cultural prominence, the politician-idiot became a national archetype of our collective imagination. The question has never been whether our statesman is a fool, but how the fool became our statesman.
Volodymyr Zelensky built his career by exploiting this archetype, amplifying it in skits with his comedy group Квартал 95 (Kvartal 95). It is in these skits—along with animated shows like «Сказочная Русь» (Fairytale Rus) watched by not only adults but kids like myself growing up—that the predominance of the archetype was consolidated. On a Friday or Saturday night one could tune into 1+1, one of the most prominent channels in the country, to watch the politician-idiot play out his stupidity, be that a recreation of Yanukovych’s hat-stealing past or a satirization of Member of Parliament Oleh Liashko (whose hypothesized homosexuality was a recurring implicit comedic subject). In his TV show Servant of the People, Zelensky, playing a commonplace good-willing history teacher, was meanwhile able to curate and present an aura of implicit simplicity as a foil to the kaleidoscope of self-serving idiots. It is the prominence of the politician-idiot—a role for the current President to inhabit and transcend—that catalyzed his eventual rise to power.
Following the outset of the full-scale invasion, the pattern has persisted. While these manifestations may lack the cultural richness of their historical antecedents, it is evident that the war has not been able to completely eliminate the politician-idiot archetype. A few more brief examples here should suffice. One is the bravado of former presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych, who over the course of a few months went from being one of the most trusted people in the wartime media ecosystem to a laughingstock as a result of his persistent predictions during the first year of the war that all would come to an end within two or three weeks. Another is current member of the Ukrainian parliament, Mykola Tyshchenko. Formerly a member of Zelensky’s party in parliament, Tyshchenko was expelled as a result of a scandal that crystallized around an unauthorized trip to Thailand. While the MP declared that he had «carried out titanic work,» public outcry caused by a video posted by Tyshchenko—in which he can be seen swimming joyfully in the tropical azure waters while his constituents reckoned with a bone-chilling winter back in Ukraine—led to his dismissal. Conditions may have changed, but a tendency nonetheless persists: the wheel turns, stumbling in place.
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We have, however, also learned that stupidity is far from a solely local phenomenon. Since the annexation of Crimea, all interaction with the international community has required Ukrainians to operate with a methodology of duplicity: a rhetoric of profound gratitude and reverence paired with an internal conviction of the West’s naïveté. Western authority is sanctified at the level of means, as a consequence of the country’s material reliance on outside support. Concurrently, it is placed into doubt at the level of ends, as the geopolitical methodology of perpetual deterrence—”peace for all!”—entrenches an incommensurability between rhetoric and the reality that it purports to govern. The current U.S. administration has only laid bare what had for years been a latent structural dissonance of a foreign policy driven by a fracturing duplicity, today verging on full-fledged schizophrenia. Russia’s full-scale invasion has brought forth an always already present stupidity far more insidious than that of the politician-idiot.
To understand the role of stupidity in this war, however, we must look more closely at the term itself. In his 2014 essay on Western attitudes toward Russia, Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko wrote of a similar dual-headed structure performed by Moscow: «Throughout its modern history Russia continuously tried to play a double game: to look ‘civilized’ to please the West, but also look ‘sufficiently barbaric’ to scare it.» Today we find this same formulation inverted. Russia must look uncivilized enough to please the West by allowing it to inhabit the position of what Hegel called «the beautiful soul»: existing in the frozen immediacy between moral purity and the impure realm of action, the West is permitted by the perceived possibility of Russia’s unilateral lack of civility to take the stance of moral superiority.
At the same time, it must remain insufficiently barbaric so that the structure itself can persist—so long as the military aspect of the Ukrainian question remains contained within the country’s own limits, the hypocritical double bind of the beautiful soul need not be forsaken. For while the prediction of Kyiv’s 72-hour collapse is often mentioned as a demonstration of Western incompetence, it can alternatively be read as an articulation of its desire to render the historical-political event of the war—a catastrophe for the collective imaginary of a pacifist pan-European unity enshrined after WW2—a mere incident. Hegel notes that over time «‘the beautiful soul,’ being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is unhinged, disordered, and runs to madness, wastes itself in yearning, and pines away in consumption.» The longer the war persists, the greater the likelihood that the beautiful soul will have to give up one of the two poles that constitute it, either giving up the stance of moral superiority (as already seen in part in the U.S. today) or giving up military inaction (far more relevant in the case of countries like Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia).
What does any of this have to do with stupidity? At face value, the politician-idiot is the direct contrary of Hegel’s beautiful soul. The clumsy Ukrainian public official claims no moral superiority but actively seeks to demonstrate their own authenticity in relation to the public, conveying a certain capacity to meet the requirements of the masses in a given situation, be that on a beach in Thailand or a revolutionary stage. Rather than espousing any distinctiveness, the archetypical politician-idiot rises to the precise level of the environment they find themselves in. They self-determine their performance as self-evidently adequate with no reliance on an external moral standard, only to be forced to search for justification in retrospect. Simultaneously, unlike the «beautiful soul,» the public official finds themselves in a position where inaction is structurally unacceptable. There is no outside that permits shelter for the purpose of a liminal stasis. As a result, the politician-idiot finds themselves perpetually in a state of action that chases after the minimum moral standard of conduct: sincere inability in contrast to hypocritical distance. What unites the politician-idiot and the abstract unity of disparate institutions, divergent interests, and discordant multitudes brought together through symbols that is «the West»? It is an unabashed servitude to an unconscious, structural stupidity.
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The stupidity of this war takes the shape of a kaleidoscope: countless dualities—Ukraine’s duplicity, Russia’s barbarity, the West’s morality—refracted in a flurry of death. Why does the war persist? And what role does stupidity play in this perseverance? Often, stupidity is understood as a failure of comprehension, a shortcoming of reason. Fundamentally, it is conceived as a problem of error. Granted solace by the promise of eventual correction, we await better solutions. Yet, they never arrive quite in time. Espousing cynicism, however, is also no answer. Instead, it is necessary to adjust our understanding of the very term.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in his work Difference and Repetition, proposed a structural definition of stupidity, not as an error but as a structure of thought. Stupidity is the flow of convention—the circulation of clichéd frameworks and ready-made solutions that prevent genuine thought from ever taking place. Deleuze writes, «a tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.» Is this not the very fate of the politician-idiot archetype? The origin of Yatsenyuk’s pseudo-revolutionary declaration on the Maidan or the war-time confidence of Arestovych’s two-to-three-weeks until war’s end is found not so much in their conscious contemplation of the political situation they find themselves in but in a regurgitation of certain clichés in the name of public recognition; a caricature of militant fervor for the former, of paternalistic appeasement for the latter.
It can, of course, be said that Arestovych himself was aware of the falsity in his rhetoric, knowingly transmitting a «sedative» to the worried masses whom he explicitly sought to pacify. Yet this very institution of stupidity is at once the cause of the tyrant’s eventual downfall: entrapped in service of his own system, the tyrant can only sustain his rule so long as in the crack between reality and appearance the light does not shine too brightly. The same reproduction of pre-given formulae that the politician-idiot unconsciously regurgitates in their speeches and proclamations eventually becomes the structural genesis of their incapacity to govern the masses. Arestovych was eventually forced into resignation as a result of public outrage after he made an unverified and later proven false public announcement that a Russian missile that killed dozens of people was shot down by Ukraine.
The failure of the politician-idiot is a product of the inability of common sense to reckon with the unrecognizable complexity of an encounter with the real. Consider Yanukovych in 2014 as the paradigmatic example of Deleuzian stupidity and its collapse. After having his victory in the fraudulent 2004 election annulled by the Orange Revolution, Yanukovych was elected president in 2010. In late 2013, he ordered a sweep of protestors on Kyiv’s central plaza, largely young students, later to be justified by the need for the yearly Christmas tree to be erected. Reproducing a pre-conceived notion that pronounced and swift violence would quell the instability, the president would soon come to be the victim of the very stupidity he himself institutionalized, as thousands flooded the streets mere days later. Yanukovych’s forced flight into exile was the culmination of the politician-idiot’s servitude to his own stupidity, as the political rupture of the Maidan exceeded the repertoire of the archetype, rendering him incapable of coherent action. The president’s twelve errors were not a failure of the mind but merely another step in the cadence of stupidity that presupposed its own collapse.
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If the clichéd maxims of the politician-idiot demonstrate how the logic of stupidity’s surface operates, badly posed questions or distorted problems are the means by which this transcendental structure is erected in the first place. Deleuze writes, «stupidity … is evidence of an inability to constitute, comprehend, or determine a problem as such”—a failure to ask questions. Diplomatic negotiations demonstrate the operative structure of Deleuze’s concept clearly. Consider the Minsk agreements, for example. Initiated to find a way for a political resolution in the Donbas region and a halting of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, the diplomatic processes at Minsk and their eventual failure have become a central pillar structuring the problematic of the current diplomatic impasse. Possessing a recollection of what prior negotiations have looked like, Ukraine and Russia have developed a certain horizon of what interaction with the other side might look like: for Ukraine—a disbelief in Russian commitments to any ceasefire; for Russia—an understanding that any and all conditions can be and are malleable with little detrimental implications from outside the conflict itself. As a result, the memory of Minsk presents an active dual-enforcement mechanism preventing peace from being a materially believable outcome, as the failed solutions from twelve years ago continue to determine how we ask questions today.
The post-2014 negotiations themselves, however, were a product of stupidity. As Chatham House noted, for example: «Minsk-2 contains contradictory provisions and sets out a convoluted sequence of actions.» At the crux of these contradictions we find a question that remains pertinent today: «is Ukraine sovereign, as Ukrainians insist, or should its sovereignty be limited, as Russia’s leaders demand?» It is this problematic that fundamentally determined the approach to the negotiations from all three sides involved: Ukraine, Russia, and the West. In the determination of this problem, we can see an exemplification of how the «beautiful soul» approaches the world.
Discussing Hegel’s concept within his own conceptual framework, Deleuze writes: «The beautiful soul behaves like a justice of the peace thrown on to a field of battle, one who sees in the inexpiable struggles only simple ‘differends’ or perhaps misunderstandings.» Central to Deleuze’s indictment is the inability of the beautiful soul to perceive difference as anything more than a reconcilable feature of two entities. Between the two sides of the question, however, persists a pernicious chasm fertile for stupidity to sprout. Ukraine’s claim to sovereignty over Ukrainian territory and Russia’s claim to sovereignty over Ukrainian territory are one and the same, rendered by the beautiful soul a mere task of dialogical resolution where all differences are harmoniously arranged and adjudicated. Notably, the word sovereignty itself did not appear in Minsk-2, nor was Russia mentioned. The beautiful soul’s rhetoric of difference, in this context, is not far removed from Putin, notoriously assimilating any differences between Ukrainians and Russians as variations of a single political and historical unity: «the beautiful soul says”—in unity with the tyrant, it should be added—”we are different, but not opposed…»
When the beautiful soul is faced with the need to do something, yet committed to an identity constituted by moral superiority distinct from the impurity of action, stupidity becomes the transcendental governor of the state of affairs, both de facto and de jure. For the beautiful soul, it is the valiant search for solutions that determines how the problem faced is to be understood, and as a result the questions that are asked. While it is the form and outcome of Minsk-2 that remains noteworthy today rather than the actual content of the agreements, the document nonetheless highlights the primacy of applying solutions over understanding the problem in-itself that remains central to this day.
Article 9 of Minsk-2, for example, states that the «free and fair elections» would be held in the Donbas territories before «the process of returning the border to Ukraine’s control begins.» The keystone problem of the sequencing within this formulation is the question of how it is possible for free and fair elections to be held under conditions of occupation. Yet, the problem itself here is not important: the master signifier of democracy overcodes all contradictions to bring all the factions, with their little differences, into a unified, beautiful synthesis. Reluctant to act, the beautiful soul itself ceaselessly poses questions—”how do we solve this democratic conundrum?”—instituting stupidity that fails to understand the actual structure of the problematic (how can Ukraine overcome a confrontation with a nuclear power while ensuring that its people do not perish?). Although there persists a tendency to represent the failure of Minsk-2 as mere error, caused by a lackluster execution of certain provisions rather than the provisions themselves, history is bound to repeat itself lest we stop yearning for solutions detached from the problems we encounter in the world and begin posing questions freed from the dogma of what seems possible.
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The beautiful soul means no harm. After all, it is beautiful. The West—composed, of course, of various heterogeneous elements, each with their own interests and desires—may act with no malice aforethought and do what it deems itself most capable of doing in relation to aiding Ukraine’s survival. Nonetheless, embedded within the universal flow of thought that is infatuated with solutions, conjoined with the valorization of a fictive return to normalcy, this abstract unity in its action is incapable of engendering a thinking that attests to the reality of the problem. Stupidity precedes the agent who is submerged into the flow of clichés and preordained solutions. Returning to Ukraine, briefly, may grant some insight here.
Servant of the People, a TV show that not only catapulted the political career of President Zelensky in 2015 but also became the namesake for his political party in 2019, may be considered an implicit response to Deleuze’s verdict that a tyrant is the first servant to the stupidity they institutionalize. Zelensky’s character Vasyl Holoborodko—a benevolent yet self-righteous political amateur, a history teacher who does not seek power but finds it thrust upon him by a combination of internet virality and the pressure of his young students—enters the political field by the grace of serendipity, seeking change. In concept, Holoborodko neither institutes the system of stupidity nor intends to serve it. He is the servant of the people. Nonetheless, even within this fictional phantasmagoria little change is accomplished early on in the show beyond cosmetic alterations.
In the final episode of the first season, at last, a radical break arrives. As the central characters gather at a nationally televised public debate on the anniversary of the country’s independence, flashbacks unfurl a series of events through which Holoborodko and his youthful team instigate a carefully planned investigation to arrest the chief facilitator of the stupidity around which Ukrainian governance at the time was said to be organized—state-wide corruption. The figure of the institutionalizing tyrant turns out to be Prime Minister Yuriy Chuiko, who has been in power for the last twenty years. Far from embodying the role of a politician-idiot, Chuiko is a wise master of the structure, whose dishonesty and deceit hold the system of governance together while keeping the country itself in a perpetual stasis of debt, inefficiency, and inequality. He is the conductor of the idiots that surround him, floating heads that stereotype the archetype with precision.
The rupture does not last very long. Despite his commitment to serve the people rather than the stupidity of the system, in pursuit of convincing the parliament to pass a required package of reforms to unlock conditional funds from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the honest history teacher has no choice but to seek out help from the very man he had arrested. The faithful outsider initiates himself into the logic of an unwinnable game. A whole separate movie is made to depict the arduous journey of the president and former minister to achieve the right ends when only the wrong means to do so are available. At the end of their endeavor, however, Holoborodko is forced to resign after unceremoniously rejecting the extractive terms of the IMF’s deal.
Two things here are worth noting. First, there is an evident inability of the servant to serve the people. The only way that the writers of the show are capable of conceiving change is by forcing their protagonist to reinforce the same processes he seeks to dismantle. Second is the total political collapse that follows Holoborodko’s expletive rejection of the IMF. Knowing the facts of the situation, one cannot say that the act itself was unreasonable. In fact, perhaps today we would find ourselves in a better place if economically extractive, environmentally damaging, and financially dubious proposals by certain organizations and nations were explicitly and publicly decried. However, the reason the presidential outburst was incomprehensible is that the structure of thought of the society within the TV show apparition had pre-determined the correct solutions: take foreign money whenever you can, don’t ask too many questions, look the other way at the unfavourable details, and most importantly of all—do not disturb the well-meaning, giving hand of transnational capital. Reaching the right answer is only a matter of achievement; the result is assumed in advance. Even in the fictional worlds relayed to us by means of the media that we consumed en masse, an exit from the stupidity of clichés was deemed impossible, whether that be as a rejection of how we ought to act in relation to the West or a self-contained capacity to find new means to achieve better ends.
Yet, it would likewise be wrong to exonerate the fictional president from the part he plays in this overarching terrain of stupidity. Holoborodko’s ascent towards presidential stardom takes as its point of departure the enactment of the fanciful myth of a regular decent person who sanctifies the tarnished corridors of power by simply being themselves, wagering that the self can enter the world without the world entering the self. Within this portrayal, we reencounter Zelensky’s character as the beautiful soul, this time under a slightly different illumination. Pondering the Hegelian concept within the domain of psychoanalytic theory, Jacques Lacan wrote of the modern man as having «taken on its form in the dialectical impasse of the beautiful soul who does not recognize his very reason for being in the disorder he denounces in the world.» For Lacan, the beautiful soul is a figure constituted by the disorder of the world—in this case the corruption, violence, and injustice of the Ukrainian political system—yet acts as if it is external to it.
No doubt, the beautiful soul is a victim of suffering. In the show, the people of Ukraine, whom Holoborodko is meant to stand for, are in fact exploited by its government. Yet at the same time the beautiful soul draws an unconscious enjoyment from this suffering: the history teacher is sustained by the structural satisfaction of occupying the position of the one who suffers innocently and accuses justly. His entire identity is dependent on an opposition to the disorder of violence, corruption, and governmental chaos. Even more explicitly, his entire political being is structurally constituted by this disorder. Holoborodko does not choose to run for president, but is coerced by his own students to do so after a video goes viral of him leveling an admonishment against practically everyone around, from society broadly to the school administration and voting booths. Rather than deciding to oppose corruption and to change the system as a result of extensive contemplation and fearless conviction, the history teacher finds power lying in his lap, thrust upon him by the conditions of evil he then condemns.
Holoborodko’s outburst with the International Monetary Fund and the recruitment of the corrupt prime minister, in the Lacanian sense, can be understood as the culminating demonstration of the beautiful soul’s inability to operate outside the disorder it denounces. Unable to pursue action that communicates the extractive nature of the proposal, instead denouncing the IMF with vulgarity in the name of self-purity, Zelensky’s character finds a perverse self-satisfaction in fabricating even more chaos to which «he is only too well adapted.» As a result, we are left with everyone enjoying their own stupidity—both those denouncing the action of the public official and the agent of action himself are left encircled in their own cheap maxims as the country wobbles in place. Most importantly, however, the outburst with the IMF is not an error but the logical outcome of Holoborodko’s initial thrust into power. He was chosen by the electorate, motivated by his students, to be the one who will not compromise, no matter the cost.
Can we speak of the West in this war as occupying this interpretation of the beautiful soul, the Lacanian ego that fails to recognize its own role within the disorder that it denounces? A veritable enjoyment is definitely present in occupying the position of the morally righteous giver, a participant in the schema of war with no involvement in this impure world other than an effort to bring peace for all. At the same time, as we’ve seen with Minsk-2—and can ascertain more assuredly from a broader historical horizon that includes the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which required Ukraine to surrender its nuclear arsenal, or the lackluster response of the Obama administration to the annexation of Crimea in 2014—the implicated nature of this heterogeneous third party in the constitution of the disorder that is this war is also evident. These indictments of the West themselves, however, have become clichés, accusations of little influence even at the level of discourse. There is no outside position of the one in the know, for stupidity is reproduced not at the level of conscious intent. The failure of Minsk-2, the continuation of the war today, the disorder we are all witness to, is not an error of policy but a product of its success: a means of ensuring the position of the morally righteous giver indefinitely.
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For the early Lacan, the task of the analyst is to show the beautiful soul that they are all too well adapted to the position that they occupy. The answer to the problem of the dialectical impasse is fundamentally one of making the patient recognize their position in the symbolic order, hoping that something productive may come for them from that recognition. In the pursuit of recognition, however, we risk finding ourselves once more entrapped in stupidity by granting primacy to the search for solutions without having understood the problem, without having begun to ask the right questions. Rather than searching for the right answer, then, we might start first by mapping out the different forms in which stupidity as a transcendental structure of thought manifests in this war.
Russia has instituted a war that it is financially incapable of finishing. While the country’s economy may not collapse from the sanctions imposed on it by the West—disregarding the incessant refrain expressed by political experts over the course of the last four years—its economic reproduction is ever-more reliant on the military-industrial complex. Concurrently, the economy is operating at near capacity, meaning that less and less profit can be gained from freely allocating more resources towards war-oriented production. However, the notion that «the Kremlin will soon face a fundamental choice over whether to radically escalate its demands on Russia’s economy and society or to scale back its war aims» follows the faulty logic of a patient capable of changing their ways after recognizing the fraught symbolic position they find themselves in. There is no choice. Having determined the full-scale invasion to be the solution to his geopolitical problems, Putin is a slave to war as a structure of thought. He is entrapped as the first servant of his own system. Russia’s stupidity is one of commitment.
Ukraine, meanwhile, finds itself in a position where peace has become fundamentally incoherent. Looking towards the past, any agreement-to-come is far too late—the structure of stupidity has already killed hundreds of thousands. Moreover, as Minsk-2 and its historical antecedents demonstrate, any agreement can be placed into question without repercussions. Nonetheless, in the present it is clear that a resolution is demanded. The problem is that, looking towards the future, any agreement-to-come is nothing but a deferral, a delay between this war and another. Negotiations merely reproduce the same problem that has rendered the victim’s condition possible. If Russia’s stupidity is a terror-laden commitment to war, producing maxims determined to structure the solution in advance, then Ukraine’s stupidity is a tragic necessity for the nation and its people to survive, meaning that the scope of imagination for understanding the problem at hand is necessarily limited. Ukraine must act in a certain manner because it strives to persist, to continue existing in time. At the same time, with each repetition a new challenge to this persistence emerges: repetition becomes both a condition for survival and a mere deferral in the face of death. Ukraine’s stupidity is one of recurrence.
Turning to the mediators themselves, it is tempting to disentangle the recently emergent figure of Donald Trump from the broader schema of the relationship between the West and Ukraine. In spite of that temptation, we can understand the approach of Biden and Trump to Ukraine as two manifestations of one and the same policy: the West’s stupidity is one of deterrence. A solution of freezing the conflict has been determined in advance. The difference is only of means, seeking the same end. For the Biden administration, this meant giving Ukraine just enough aid to persist, delimiting any escalatory dynamism through aid. For the Trump administration, it means placing both sides in negotiation ad infinitum, the repetition of which prevents any decisive outcomes, and benefits only one party.
If during Minsk-2 the master signifier around which futile negotiations were structured was free and fair elections, the objective this time around is far less ambitious: ceasefire as compromise. Yet, we should keep in mind a point made by philosopher Erich Unger in 1921, who wrote the following in the aftermath of WWI:
Compromise is always and must always be a mere postponement of rape: it is a temporary agreement among enemies as long as neither one of them can muster the strength to defeat the other. Every compromise is a product situated within the mentality of violence, no matter how much it may disdain all open violence, because the effort toward compromise is motivated not internally but from outside, indeed by the opposing effort, for no compromise, however freely accepted, is conceivable without a compulsory character.
A ceasefire under coercion enforces the promise of a beautiful soul that all differences, even in the context of a war in which hundreds of thousands have died, are merely reconciled disparities, papered over by the search for the right answer. In both the case of Biden and that of Trump, a politics of deterrence is interlinked with the rhetoric of finality—indeterminacy and decisiveness made one and the same.
What can be said of Europe here? The distinction between the Hegelian and Lacanian beautiful souls here is perhaps most fruitful. Due to its geographical distance from the war, the United States is capable of keeping the impurity of the world’s disorder distinct from its everyday existence. The self-identity of American subjectivity in relation to the war in Ukraine persists through a misrecognition of the country’s very own reason for being in the external chaos it denounces. Trump’s proclamations a few months prior to his reelection serve as the most poignant demonstration of this misrecognition: «Why is it that the United States is over $ 100 Billion … into the Ukraine War more than Europe, and we have an Ocean between us as separation!» Yet, one could likewise assert that the perennial vacillation since then between affirming support for Ukraine and reinforcing pro-Russian propaganda is a product of this structural misrecognition. Europe, on the other hand, does not possess the luxury of misrecognition, as proximity forces the war into active contemplation. As a result, the dual polarity of the beautiful soul threatens to tear the subject apart. Aware of the contradiction it instantiates yet unable to do anything about it, the beautiful soul, as Hegel notes, «wastes itself in yearning, and pines away in consumption. Thereby it gives up, as a fact, its stubborn insistence on its own isolated self-existence, but only to bring forth the soulless, spiritless unity of abstract being.» Europe is caught in knowing that it must act and in simultaneously being aware of its inability to do so in any unified, decisive way. The culmination of this movement is a wasting away in procedural sameness amid the loss of any originary spirit.
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In the final season of Servant of the People, Ukraine finds itself entirely fragmented. After Holoborodko is ousted from power, each new leader promises change, failing inevitably. Deleuzian stupidity is satirized as the country falls into a state of perpetual revolution. Suddenly, however, as the crisis reaches an intolerable threshold, Zelensky’s character is vindicated and recognized to be the bygone Messiah whose return reunites the country. Out of the ashes, a nation is reborn. Throughout all of its ridiculing of the politician-idiot, and its truly consistent dramatization of promised solutions, the show predictably provides no way out but a return to the cliché of the leader-savior. In the process, the underlying collapse of Ukraine as a country is abstracted and quickly forgotten.
The intended message is that after all the turmoil at last we learn to see correctly, we learn to recognize. As the country crystallizes around Holoborodko, we finally understand that he was the right leader all along, without whom the entire system could never come together. Here, however, we encounter an impasse: the character is at once the emblematic common man representing us all, and at the same time the unparalleled and unique outsider who is the only one capable of bringing us together. What we are left with is a system that promises to transcend itself while merely ensuring self-renewal. The beautiful soul constituted by the disorder that it denounces without understanding its reason for being within that disorder can do no more than dismiss all problems as the consequence of error—we simply have the wrong people; we just have not found the right speaker of parliament, minister, or president—while leaving the system of stupidity itself entirely intact.
Success is presented as the consequence of recognition, the ability of all actors to finally recognize what is good for them and how it is to be achieved. At the table of negotiations we find similar aspirations. Yet, we can only recognize things that we already know: ready-made solutions, pre-determined formulas—the stupidity of answers all articulated within a framework of what is socially deemed as an intelligible possibility. Today, recognition is mounting an unprecedented tour de force in the political sphere under the designation of common sense, a presentation of the already-known as self-evidently correct. Stupidity cannot be eluded through convenient catechisms and overcome by calculated mediation. Thought requires us to pass through it.
While Deleuze notes stupidity to be thought’s «greatest weakness,» he likewise asserts that stupidity is «the source of its highest power in that which forces it to think.» We do not have an innate capacity for thought. In fact, the very opposite is the case: thought does not think itself lest it be forced to do so by a power that it encounters from the outside. For Deleuze, thought comes about by means of a certain violence unleashed upon it by means of external signs that we come face to face with in the world, a fuse that sets off a chain of uncontrollable reactions that exceed recognition. An encounter from the outside that elicits thinking in thought is necessary, an ascent out of the universal flow of stupidity.
In 2014, an encounter with the brutality of the politician-idiot forced us to redetermine how we pose the question of governance and progress. In 2022, an encounter with the proliferation of clichés, soaring in from the outside—the «denazification» through a «special military operation» for the purpose of a «historical unity”—forced us to, briefly, reformulate the idea of what a society can be. We are nevertheless quickly compelled to return into the soothing river that is the universal flow of thought—a stream of maxims and pre-determined answers. As Volodymyr Ischenko notes, «despite strong popular mobilization, anti-oligarchic rhetoric and a widespread distrust of the established opposition parties, there was no serious challenge to the top-down process of power reallocation after Yanukovych’s flight.»
Stupidity is not the absence of encounter but its ceaseless conversion into common sense. Its rule is contestable not only in moments of exception, for it is a manifestation of a will to ignorance that subsists and insists as the determinative social process of geopolitics: a mechanism by which what forces itself upon us as excess is immediately returned as insufficiency. If we find ourselves in the universal flow of stupidity that encumbers our everyday conception of the world, we are likewise at all times enveloped by encounters that threaten to shatter the «cowardice, cruelty, baseness» for which stupidity is the transcendental overseer. Political ruptures merely make undeniably evident the stupidity that is always already present, the transcendental structure of the way we apprehend the world.
We can claim the failure of Minsk-2 to be caused by a lackluster execution by the parties involved. Yet, the more one jumps on brittle ice, dismissing the cracks propagating across the surface, the fewer excuses one has for being swept away by the icy current beneath once the ice gives way at last. An apprenticeship of the encounter in this sense would be learning not to recognize signs that might evoke thought—for recognition per Deleuze is the nullity of thought—but to establish conditions in which what comes at us is not subordinated to pre-determination, while also ensuring that when it does come we remain worthy of its arrival: worthy of December 2013, February 2022.
The beautiful soul valorizes its own stupidity, reveling in it as a means for self-elevation that simultaneously exorcizes it of the possibility for truly entering the impure world of action. Yet one can only elude the imminent coming of that which cannot be appropriated through the mediation of the recognizable for so long. Burying the problem of stupidity in an apparatus of diplomatic circumlocutions and the rhetoric of deterrence, the beautiful soul together with the politician-idiot basks in the self-celebratory glory of received ideas and solutions assigned in advance. The dead of this war are no error. They are the direct result of stupidity’s constitutive hegemony.