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........

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