An exhibition about the war. White walls, perfect lighting, free wine. People with expressions of deep concern look at photographs of torn bodies – and somewhere behind their backs, glasses clink softly. This sound is appropriate. There is no cruelty in it, only the aestheticization of death as cultural consumption. Tragedy becomes content, pain becomes an exhibit.
This is the mirror of the “last men.” Death for them is an abstraction, properly lit and safely distant. It is not death itself that causes fear, but living intensity at the moment of its approach.
The civilization of the end of history is built around the absence of peaks. Its ideal is life as a horizontal line: flat, predictable, devoid of an obscene will to meaning. When chaos bursts into this sterile space, when irony emerges amidst ruins or the ability to write poems while fields are burning, panic ensues. This is a violation of the rules of the game. This intensity is more frightening than any death.
To tame this chaos, the language of care has been invented. Trauma, resilience, assistance, recovery. These words do not describe an experience – they domesticate it, translating it from the language of the subject into the language of the object. As long as someone is a “victim,” they do not need to be recognized as an equal. As long as the category of trauma is preserved, the human remains an exhibit, not a mirror.
But Ukraine is that mirror. It is a ghost of spring, when meanings were worth dying for. The civilization of comfort sees in this mirror what it was before it chose the safety of the horizontal line. Irritation is a reaction to light that is too bright. This civilization wants to sleep, and the excess of our life prevents them from finishing their dream about the end of history.
Of course, not everyone speaks this language. Beside the last men stand those who bring generators, who write about us in their own words, who stake their own names on the line. They are not in that ideology – they are in the same frame. This text is about the others – about those who chose the position of an observer on the other side of the glass.
They are tired. Behind them lie centuries of catastrophes, after which a truce with history itself gradually arrived. The fatigue is understandable. But an exhaustion that has forgotten itself becomes not peace, but numbness. An anesthetized organism does not distinguish warmth from a burn: it simply registers a stimulus and withdraws its hand.
Here lies the abyss. The confidence in one’s own presence: a glass of wine at a vernissage or a signature on a petition is perceived as participation, and a worried facial expression as solidarity. Instead, in response to a scream, they send a brochure on the rules of safe screaming. Sterility versus chaos. Room temperature versus heat. It is a physically unpleasant contact: touching a living thing that has long since learned to imitate the temperature of the environment.
This is not a verdict. It is a diagnosis.
Kant has become a magnet, Beethoven – background music in an elevator. The living has been turned into interior design: convenient, calibrated, safe.
While this culture is preserving – we are giving birth. While it is museumifying – we are living. While it looks at our photos from the distance of white walls – we are standing inside the frame.
And we refuse to step out.