Firemen extinguish a fire inside a residential building that was hit by a missile on February 25, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Photo by Pierre Crom/Getty Images)
Nadine Gordimer once remarked of JM Coetzee that he knows himself better than most people will ever know themselves. I understand this to include his grasp of what motivates his behaviour.
Consider, for example, Coetzee’s observation in his literary essay on the largely forgotten South African novelist Daphne Rooke (1914 to 2009) that the lesson of eugenics driven to extremes by the Hitlerite mob before and during World War II, and memorialised at the Nuremberg trials, was not observed in South Africa. The apartheid laws which materialised from 1948 onwards were a manifestation of this unlearned lesson.
Taking our cue from Coetzee’s astute note, in this contribution I want to focus on another interesting example of “legitimate” governance (namely Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in the Ukraine) by way of reference to the adventure of insight proposed by Jacques Lacan (1901 to 1981). Lacan was deserving of his reputation as a famous French psychiatrist, philosopher and cultural theoretician of international stature.
He was well known for his orthodox re-reading (or reinterpretation) of the Freudian corpus and is remembered for suggesting to his students that even though they might be Lacanians, he regards himself as a Freudian.
Lacan’s prioritising of the signifier over the signified (as in his famous remark that the “unconscious is structured like a language”), precipitates the unfolding of the Lacanian metaphor “the signifying chain”, which is a great heuristic device for explaining its revolutionary impact.
“The signifying chain” refers to the adaptations or evolution(s) an idea might or might not undergo as it negotiates new and unforeseen contexts.
In Lacan’s well-known essay, The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud, and found in his collection of essays Écrits: a selection, he points out that the resonance between the unconscious and behaviour and the ability of language’s use can give us valuable insights into the visceral terrain (or unconscious) of the speaking subject.
Lacan understood the unconscious to be the effect that language has on human behaviour and, by implication, that which “necessarily” disrupts conscious life.
Freud famously said that he did not discover the unconscious but he certainly made it popular. For example, it was Freud’s invention of the talking cure that demonstrated that the silences and other nuances that punctuates the speech pattern are windows into the soul. The analyst is trained to decode these even though they may not, and almost invariably are not, evident to the analysand (the patient).
By the same token, Lacan argues that the unconscious also functions like a language of sorts, giving up the subject’s motives and other desires or fears as a language pattern would. The important issue for our purposes is that the implications of Lacan’s notion are that people often do not know their own motivations for the objectives they declare their behaviour is directed at.
Just as the analysand on Freud’s metaphorical couch is not aware of their language giving away (perhaps not all) the secrets in the psyche, we are rarely aware of our true motives driving a particular course of action.
Putin’s war in Ukraine is a good case in point. As a scholar who has been studying crimes committed by the state for at least a decade, I have been following the full-scale Russian invasion since its inception in February 2022.
Russia appears to have dismissed or ignored several warnings about Ukraine’s pending incursion. This is not the first time Kremlin leaders have ignored warnings of a major incursion on Russian soil. In June 1941, Hitler’s Nazi armies invaded Stalin’s Soviet Union and were only evicted from the Fatherland after the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943, which is still remembered today as the greatest tank battle in the history of human warfare (involving a good 6 000 tanks altogether).
The apparent bulge in the enemy lines was a clever trap prepared by the Soviets for the German armies. After Kursk, the German high command lost its initiative on the Eastern Front and cleared the way for Stalin’s generals’ great offensives in Eastern Europe and, eventually, the capture of Berlin. Like a seasoned chess player, Ukraine’s choice of invading Russia’s Kursk region is likewise itself highly symbolic and significant.
The vast majority of Russians accept the official narrative, and motivations for, the Russian war in Ukraine. Even though the data is distorted (because of the respondents’ fear of giving the “wrong” answer), most Russians (65%) in a Levada poll of June 2024 believe the West is to blame for the outbreak of the war.
Putin, as is well-known, claimed his “special military operation” (or whatever euphemism would suit the cause), which was the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, was or is justified by the Nazi government in Kyiv.
According to Matthew Sussex, a strategic and defence studies fellow at the Australian National University, “Having punched through a thinly defended portion of its border near the Russian city of Kursk — itself famous as a scene of one of the Soviet Union’s greatest victories against Germany in the second world war — Ukraine’s forces reportedly have captured up to 70 settlements.”
Putin’s warnings of dire punishments and consequences to follow is nothing new to those countries — Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia and Syria (not excluding Ukraine) — in Russia’s orbit that have been at the receiving end of his wrath in the past.
Sussex explains that: “But that’s also nothing Ukrainians haven’t seen before — in the slaughter of civilians at Bucha, the flattening of cities like Mariupol, the indiscriminate attacks against civilian hospitals and the veiled Russian threats about ‘accidents’ at the occupied nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia.”
But the unpreparedness of Russia for the Ukrainian incursion in August 2024 is not the only resemblance between the Nazi invasion of Russia in June 1941 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s armies in February 2022. There are many more, as the journalist John Blake points out.
Both Hitler and Putin made use of inflamed nationalistic sentiment to kick-start their respective wars — Hitler with the minority German population in Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Putin with the Russian-speaking populace in the Donbass province of Ukraine. By the same token, neither of these dictators had any sympathy with the suffering of the civilian population in pursuing the objective of territorial conquest.
Add to this litany of war crimes the illegal theft and transfer of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia (a crime against humanity impeccably mirrored by their Nazi predecessors). Additionally, just as Hitler thought Soviet Russia was not a real country because “one need only to kick the door in for the whole edifice to come crumbling down” (as he reputedly claimed), likewise Putin harboured the same illusions of Ukraine.
Both also bargained that the war would be a short conquest, which proved to be a miscalculation. No wonder Russia experts Alexander Baunov and Alex Gabuev, two researchers attached to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argue that after Putin’s convincing victory in the election of 2024, there is an uncanny resemblance between the Russia fashioned after his image and Stalin’s now-defunct Soviet Union. What will the endgame hold?
The Ukrainian incursion into Western Russia, and especially the historically significant Kursk region, has shown up the Russian pretext of de-Nazifying Kyiv as devoid of truth, because Putin’s own behaviour leading up to, and during, the full-scale invasion resonates with the conduct of the Nazis of old.
Make it make sense. Either they don’t fully understand their own motivations or they don’t care (unlike JM Coetzee). Jacques Lacan’s famous adventure of insight shows beautifully the discrepancy between conscious behaviour and the unexamined motivations embedded in the unconscious.
Dr Casper Lötter is a conflict and cyber criminologist affiliated with North-West University’s School of Philosophy.