![]() ![]() Yet, the repressed implacably returns, even if (especially if) in its comebacks it sidesteps conscious representation and imprints itself directly onto the flesh, onto sentient and exposed bodies. A repressed trauma of planetary proportions, it took about one generation for the narrative to shift, for tourism and agricultural production to develop there, and a little less than two generations for the exclusion zone to be converted into a military theatre. Such a decision is made by that place itselfįrom all sides, the East as well as the West, the ideological investment in presenting Chernobyl as a nuclear phoenix who comes back to life from the ashes of fallout has been tremendous. We cannot decide on the habitability of a place. ![]() Such a future may be bemoaned or, with a good measure of misanthropy, celebrated: finally, Earth will have been cured of humans, who – cancer-like – eroded its climates and ecosystems. Everything that concerns Chernobyl – the name of the place long since synonymous with the event – is part of a miniature postapocalyptic laboratory for imagining ‘the world without us’, a global future where there is no place for human beings. This surreal set of circumstances is far from idiosyncratic. The retreat of the Russian troops from Chernobyl occurred on the last day of March 2022, just five weeks after the area had been occupied. Having plundered and wreaked havoc in people’s homes, they abandoned their improvised ‘command centre’ and ‘military quarters’, where command and control no longer made sense. Leaving behind a terrible mess, the already-mutilated earth further scarred with the broken lines of trenches, dugouts, fortifications and other military structures that cut into the forest floor, its topsoil and subsoil. They departed in a hurry, suddenly, unannounced. And that site, in its turn, condenses the modes of thinking and acting that continue to steer the world toward global disaster. If we look a little closer, we can espy in it a strange condensation of everything that went wrong, and continues to go wrong, at the site of the nuclear accident. Despite the relatively quick withdrawal of the occupying forces from this place, this story (which is more than a ‘news story’) is far from irrelevant. Still, it is imperative to think through the absurdity, the staying power, and the subterranean connections linking this ostensibly fleeting military disaster to the catastrophe that took place in Chernobyl 36 years prior. ![]() Trenches in Chernobyl may appear as one of those peculiar shards that kaleidoscopically and only momentarily make up the category of ‘current events’. The story I want to save here is that of the trenches dug up by Russian troops in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone, early on in their brutal assault on Ukraine. Plato’s question throughout the Republic was: what could be saved from oblivion? Which tale, conveying crucial ideas such as justice, beauty or the good, would be transmitted further to others and into the future? These questions are ours, too. It is with a view to resisting the bulldozing forces of the global dump that we need patient reflection and careful philosophical analysis, lingering with a singular event, being or image. In my book Dump Philosophy (2020), I treat these phenomena of the Information Age as part of a global ‘dump’, where all qualitative differences are erased and where the nihilistic attitude of generalised indifference rules the day, despite peaks of usually superficial engagement. As a result, vital issues flash by before our eyes, only to be displaced and buried under piles of trifling matters. A massacre and a wardrobe malfunction are put on the same level of intense scrutiny and curiosity, attitudes that just as quickly latch on to another object. The vicissitudes of spotlighting various events are daily, if not hourly: something that was the focus of attention yesterday may be forgotten today. They seem to be entirely contingent, their amplification on the global scale dependent on how many people are paying attention. ![]() Contemporary events appear in ever-shifting configurations. ![]()
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