Desire

This chapter discusses how the Russian public imagination is overwhelmed by propaganda claiming Ukraine as part of its symbolic territory, while Russia’s desire is currently directed toward Ukraine. At the same time, in Ukraine, while the country is forced into resistance, the cultural and social conditions already point to the existence of a strong, independent culture that resists this colonial situation, marking the final decolonial stage. This chapter discusses Ukraine as Russia’s main subject of desire, drawing on both post-constructivist theories and decolonial thinking. Searching for an imaginary jouissance (Lacan) of reunification, Russia’s neocolonial aspiration transgresses, splits, and eventually destroys the object of longing—which is, nevertheless, a utopian object—and loses its own integrity in chasing this fantasy of the past. The fatal desire creates a new order of things where the object of desire is unattainable—and this impossibility creates a new power hierarchy that disrupts mutuality of exchange. In this chapter, I examine how the concept of ambicoloniality functions under these conditions of rupture. I concurrently explore how the war and its transgression of limits forced a reconsideration of the concept of the borderline. If traditional decolonial theory looks at a border as a possibility for observing and reshaping cultural and social processes of emancipation as if from an exterior perspective, the violence driven by the uncontrollable and irrational desire of Russia to invade Ukraine, in its attempt to dismantle the very notion of border, led to an opposite result: the reinforcement of territorial belonging through active resistance and a shift of attention to the previously marginalized Ukrainian frontier.