The Person in a War Situation: Approach to the Revelatory Potential of the Passive Subject

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

The article is devoted to the designing of the passive subject’s potential in the long term of overcoming war, in particular, the war in Ukraine. Relying on R. Girard’s idea of understanding of war as a self-discrediting cyclic violence, and also on E. Levinas’ ontology of constituting the passive subject by means of a discretion of the other, the author allocates three types (registers) of subjectivity in a war situation: two registers of an active subject (‘hero’ and ‘victim’) and the register of a passive subject. These three types of the subject are derived from three types of attitude towards death in E. Levinas’ ontology and illustrated by comparing the main characters of N. Gogol’s novel “Taras Bulba” described in two different editions of the work. According to the author of the article, only the passive subject has the exposing undermining war potential through aspiration to a discretion of the radical other in a phase of kenosis.