Volodymyr Yermolenko, ukrainian philosopher, journalist editor in chief of UkraineWorld.org, published Ukraine in Histories and Stories, from Holodomor to Maidan and Russian aggression to diversity in 2022 and together with his wife, Tetyana Ogarkova, Life on the Edge (La Vie à la lisière), éditions Gallimard, in 2026.

You redefine the “lisière” as a center rather than a margin. How does this overturn our usual political and metaphysical categories?

VY: Well, our argument is that usually we are in this opposition between the centre and the margins.

And you can say that, for example, the classical metaphysics has this difference and then the post-modern or post-structural philosophy tries to say that we would rather go to the margins against the centre. We would rather focus on what escapes the domination of the centre. And this will be the kind of a topos of our thinking.

And I think this is what French philosophers of the 1960s and 70s were trying to do and Derrida and Foucault and Deleuze. Well, we are arguing that the margin is the centre. So it’s not opposed to the centre.

Its logic is not like something going away from the centre, something trying to avoid identity, for example. It’s not that. It’s rather that it’s much more vitalistic.

It’s much more related to the question of life, to the philosophy of life, is like a skin with which we feel something, some pleasure or some pain initially. And the fact that we have this sensor is actually redefining ourselves and redefining our centre. So we are saying that Ukraine is a la lisiere, but it doesn’t mean that we are the frontier or we are at the margins or we are at the periphery.

We argue that what is happening at the lisiere, what is happening at the edge is actually something that defines the whole body, the future of Europe, for example, or the future of our values. So in a way, it’s both non-metaphysical, but also against this post-structuralist opposition between the centre and the margin.

You write that war both reduces and sharpens reality. Does violence reveal something essential about being, or does it distort it?

VY: Well, I think, of course, violence distorts being, but at the same time, it reveals something essential, but not violence itself, but mortality. And I think that people tend to forget about mortality in the peaceful time. And of course, on the one hand, it’s good because it’s more humane that people are much less focussing on the brutal death or brutal end or unexpected end.

People have much more possibility to live their life fully. And this is one of the key to happiness, as we remember since the Greeks. But the problem of this approach is that sometimes you forget that life is so fragile, that life itself is fragile, not only the life when it loses energy.

So that life itself is fragile. And it’s not that you leave your life and then at the end, you kind of start being old and being decomposed and you kind of accept it. But even life during its peak is in itself fragile.

And when we understand that it is always on the edge of being and it very easily can be turned into a non-being, when we understand it, I think we tend to value being in life more. And I think this is what Shakespeare meant by this to be or not to be question, because in the peaceful time, it turns into a kind of a rhetorical exercise. But I think it’s the most basic and the most important question of humans, to be or not to be, this always the struggle between the two, but always understanding that we are living in between, that our life is about how we bring being from non-being and this is called birth, and how we are kind of turned from being into non-being and this is called death.

And this is the most important, tragic thing which is going on, not even being or non-being in themselves, but this lisiere, one can say, or this transition from one into another. The eternal struggle between birth and death, right? And in this sense, I am also very sceptical about some of the great philosophies of the 20th century, who tried to combine non-being and nothingness and death into being, saying that, well, look, you know, it’s kind of, we cannot think about freedom without nothingness, as Sartre would be saying, or we cannot think Zein without thought, as Heidegger was saying. Well, in a sense, indeed, they’re right, but not in the sense that you integrate nothingness into being to better understand being, but rather I would see it as the major opponents.

It’s the tension between them, the eternal tension between them that is really important. And I think the war just brings it back. War brings it to the forefront.

The war tells you that death is not the accomplishment of your life. Death is always the big injustice. It’s always a big tragedy.

It’s always incapacity of being to fulfil itself. The war makes you to rethink death, not as fulfilment, but as eternal lack of fulfilment. And I think the death of children and death of young people is especially important in this sense.

Not important, but especially kind of, especially eloquent in this sense.

You describe Russia’s aggression as a “war against reality.” What does it mean, philosophically, to attack reality itself?

VY: Well, I think that, again, in the 20th century, the concept of reality was too much disenchanted on the one hand, but on the other hand, discredited. I think the major outcome of the 20th century philosophy is that we don’t have access to fresh reality.

We don’t have access to raw reality. Reality is always, comes through mediation of signs, of texts, of social constructions, and all the rest of history. And this is true, of course, but what we did, we threw the baby with the water, while people said, in a very good way, that reality is never present as it is, as some raw thing, which is not mediated.

But the next step was that there is no reality itself. We cannot access reality. We lost any access to reality, and therefore everything goes, in a way.

Everything is a simulacrum. And I think this was a very dangerous step, which authoritarians now are using. So it’s important to say that authoritarianisms, totalitarianisms, are always based upon fantasy.

And their strength, and they always try to verify their strength, is not to be adequate to reality, but to defeat reality. So tyrants are strong when they are able to defeat reality, not only to defeat the enemy, but to defeat reality. And of course, the first step is to say that reality doesn’t exist, and reality is what I’m telling you.

This is the first step of tyrants to defeat us all. They first say that their fantasy about the reality is the reality itself. Of course, we all have fantasies about the reality, but the task of a society is to check our fantasies against the reality, and trying to approach our fantasies to the reality.

Or have fantasies that can transform reality in a way that would not bring a lot of death and suffering. Evolutionary transformation of reality is what technology is, what society is, what culture is, whatever. But I think tyrants want to say a different thing.

They want to say that they will build a fantasy that will be stronger than reality itself. And I think this is what Trumpism is about, and I think this is what Putinism is about. And both of them actually have deep roots into the surrealist politics, or what I call surreal politics of the past in both America and Russia.

And of course, we can also say about other societies as well. And taking the Russian example, the Russian totalitarianisms were always based, or the Russian tyrannies were always based on a certain fantasy, and on a certain statement that our fantasy is such strong that it will defeat reality. So now you have this fantasy that Russia is the major opponent of the Western world, that it is threatened with the Western world, that Ukraine doesn’t exist, and et cetera.

And of course, they know that Ukraine exists, but they want to prove to everybody that their fantasy is right, is correct. In the 20th century, they had a big fantasy of proletariat revolution in Russia, in a situation when even the concept of proletariat was a fantasy, when there was no such thing as big proletariat in Russia. In the 19th century, they had, for example, Slavophilic idea, the idea of Slavic empire, in a situation when basically they didn’t care about Slavs, other Slavs.

They only cared about Russians, and they were identifying Russians with other Slavs. In the 18th century, they had a fantasy about enlightened monarchy, while both Peter I, Peter I and Catherine II, although they were taking idea from Europe, they had nothing, they were building something that had nothing to do with enlightened monarchy, et cetera, et cetera. So I do think that tyrants use fantasy to defeat reality.

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