If language is the house of being, what does it mean to be homeless in one’s mother tongue?

Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, several prominent Ukrainian writers who wrote in Russian and have received literary prizes from Russia decided to switch entirely to Ukrainian. Some of them declared that they will never again write in Russian.

Most Ukrainians are fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian, but the overwhelming majority speak one language better than the other. One of the two languages is their mother tongue, even if they grew up speaking both. It is not impossible, but also not insignificant, for them to switch entirely to Ukrainian. The switch is even more significant for a writer whose identity and professional life are intimately linked to language. It is painful to think of contemporary Ukrainian writers—Anastasia Afanasieva, Maik Yohansen, Olena Stiazhkina, or Volodymyr Rafeenko—who have decided to cut off their mother tongue. As someone who grew up speaking Ukrainian and Russian, and then slowly and painfully grew several more tongues, while fighting to retain the first two, I was shocked to read in a poem by Afanasieva from 9 April 2022 (a month into Russia’s full-scale invasion): “I am glad to forget forever that language/In which all my poems were written” (2022). Afanasieva’s poem describes and enacts a movement: away from daily bombardments, from home, and from the Russian language. The poem begins in Russian, but toward the end switches to Ukrainian. Rafeenko stated in an interview, “[t]he Russian language in its entirety has become obscene” (2022).

The decision to “forget” Russian is completely understandable because Ukrainians have been living in trauma for the past two years—but also since the initial invasion in 2014, and since the 17th century—a trauma brought on by Russia, Soviet Russia, and the Russian Empire. Their decision is easy to understand, but also dangerous: it might entail literary (if not literal) suicide. After fleeing his home city of Donetsk due to the Russian invasion in 2014, bilingual Rafeenko decided to study Ukrainian in order to continue writing novels. He admits, “[i]t took me a while to master the Ukrainian language at a level sufficient for writing” (Rafeenko 2022).1 The second, Ukrainian, part of Afanasieva’s poem is of inferior artistic quality—most likely by design. She does not seem to have written any poems since then.

The situation of a writer forced to flee their mother tongue in order to survive, who risks forever remaining homeless, suggests a violence that is inflicted not just on a particular language but, more fundamentally, upon logos and being. This violence, of an altogether different level, destroys not only particular human beings but the very possibility of becoming human. My argument here relies on a distinction that appears in four philosophical frameworks: Heraclitus, Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, and Marcel Proust.2 All these thinkers acknowledge the difference between natural languages and logos, or the structures that house being and enable human beings to become human. Working with this distinction, I argue that Russia must be held accountable not only for the war crimes it commits around the world—including Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine—but also for acts of terror against us all: the crimes against logos and being. These are crimes of ontological terrorism.3 Aimed against logos and being, acts of terror destroy the possibility of becoming human. I use such a forceful term because of the scale of the unprecedented violence we are witnessing: on the one hand, the destruction of the structures that support thinking and becoming human is systematic and state-financed, and, on the other hand, social media and now also artificial intelligence accelerates and amplifies the damage.

Theoretical Framework

Martin Heidegger famously claims that language is the house of being (1993, 217). By “language” he means something different, yet not distinct, from a particular language. It is something that all of the natural languages share. It is also something that we, as human beings, share with each other when we make the effort to speak or think. Heidegger’s claim and the image on which it relies—that of a house—is especially meaningful, but it could also be explained through several other concepts and images discussed by Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Proust. I propose a constellation or a layering of concepts to convey my argument, rather than an in-depth analysis of Heidegger’s theoretical system.

Heraclitus’ notion of logos illuminates and expands Heidegger’s notion of “language” as something that is neither distinct from nor reducible to natural languages. Heraclitus’s texts, rarely longer than a sentence, are carefully crafted to be both semantically and syntactically ambiguous. Through this ambiguity, Heraclitus seduces the reader into the processof thinking. A reader must work to decipher his text’s meaning. In his longest extant aphorism, Heraclitus points out that one is able to speak well, that is, according to being, but most of the time we are not attentive or alert enough, and do not hear what is actually being said:

Although this logos holds always humans prove unable to understand it both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For although all things come to be in accordance with this logos, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each thing in accordance with its nature and saying how it is. The other humans let slip away what they do while awake just as what they do asleep escapes them. (DK1)4

I leave the Greek word logos untranslated to invite thinking beyond the English translation of “word” or “reason.” It also evokes resonances with the English word “logic,” while still distinguishing the two. In Heraclitus’s time, logos and mythos, although not synonymous, overlapped and enhanced each other, so logos is not what we ordinarily mean by rationality or logic.5 Logos is not reducible to reason, but it is logical. Logos is structure, which is why the image of a house is so appropriate. This order or structure “houses being,” but it also supports becoming: “all things come to be in accordance with this logos.” Logos reveals difference because it helps distinguish “each thing in accordance with its nature.” Heraclitus’s saying throws the distance between logos and human beings into relief—humans are “inexperienced” even while experiencing, they are “unable to understand” even when they hear, they “let slip away” what they are actually doing.

Yet, this aphorism also reveals a connection between human beings and logos—it has to do with the “always,” namely, with time and eternity. The first sentence of the saying is an example of syntactic ambiguity: the word “always” might be referring to logos (logos always holds), or to the fact that humans are not able to understand it (they are always unable to understand). The ambiguity exposes the link between humans and logos—the two are implicated when it comes to time and eternity.6

Heraclitus also writes: “Although the logos is shared, most live as though thinking were a private possession” (DK 2). Logos is not subjective, nor is it separated from human beings and their particular circumstances or experiences. This is why logos cannot be possessed or controlled in the way a natural language is controlled in authoritarian states, as exemplified in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Logos is always more than any set of linguistic and cultural constructs, so it can never be mastered or weaponized by human beings. Yet there is not only a history of treating natural languages as weapons, but we currently face a large-scale systematic attempt to compromise our relationship with logos and each other. The Russian state has launched a state-sponsored campaign to discredit logos, and is dedicating considerable financial resources to promote the false and illogical idea that thinking is private or subjective. This is much more dangerous than forcing a poet to flee their mother tongue.

In another aphorism, Heraclitus writes: “Not from me, but from the logos hearing, it is wise to say-the-same-as-logos (homologein) that all is one” (DK 50). Occasionally, if I make an effort to hear logos, what I say will coincide with it. I can understand and express something that goes beyond my limited “I”—something that is shared with other human beings and also corresponds to the structures that support or “house” being. In other words, if I make an effort to hear logos, I might say something that does not reproduce my personal or cultural limitations. Whenever I speak, I use a natural language, and frequently this language is tainted with violence. Yet, even in a colonizer’s language, I can say something that does not reproduce or reinforce this violence.

Logos is also a key element of Aristotle’s conceptual framework. Logos indicates or clarifies what is just (dikaios) and unjust (adikos). Human beings can distinguish between the two. (Contra Aristotle, I propose to extend the notion of the human being to include other beings, such as elephants or whales.) The words translated into English as “just” and “unjust” are equivalent to the Ukrainian (and Russian) pravda and nepravda, which can be translated in English as “truth” and “lie.”7 In other words, there is a connection between justice and truth that is less discernible in English, but easier to track in Greek and Ukrainian. So, if we give Aristotle the benefit of doubt, we get the following: a human being is a being who senses or perceives (aesthēsis) the difference between true and false. Logos enables me to perceive truth (Aristotle 1932, 1252b30-1253a3). The emphasis is on aesthēsis, as opposed to intellect. Developing one’s sensibility, educating one’s feelings, and developing aesthetic sensitivity enables one to better distinguish between truth and falsehood.8

Aristotle points to a key structure of logos—the principle of non-contradiction: “It is impossible for the same thing at the same time to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same respect” (1960, 1006a1). I cannot assert both A and not A at the same time and in the same way. If I refuse this principle, I refuse language—I have to remain silent because any utterance presupposes this minimum of logical consistency. This silence is different from the silence a poet faces when fleeing their mother tongue. There is no refuge from the second kind of silence. The principle of non-contradiction might be the best, most fundamental example of the structures that support thinking and being human.

Proust’s term for logos is “the language of an unknown homeland.” In the fifth book of Proust’s novel, La Prisonnière, the narrator points out that “[e]ach artist thus seems like the citizen of an unknown homeland, which has been forgotten, different from that from which will come, setting sail for the earth, another great artist” (Proust 1954, 257). Consider this with another of Proust’s ideas—“[b]eautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language”—to better understand how logos is different from a natural language without being separate from it (1971, 305). The language of Proust’s novel is and is not French. A human being who makes an effort to hear logos—an artist in Proust’s formulation—remembers or re-collects themself and the “homeland” or the “house” they came from. The unknown homeland is the house of being, and each artist will recollect a different part of it. They will express a different region of being, yet it is one and the same being that will be recollected, and the recollection will be supported by the structures of logos that are shared with all human beings who decide to undertake the effort of thinking (Deleuze 2000, 42ff.).

Language and Logos, Applied to a War

Saying-the-same-as-logos, or distinguishing between the true and the false, always happens in a natural language. Some natural languages have colonial histories, and some not only have such a history, but are languages in which and for the sake of which a genocidal war is currently being fought. Orders to bombard civilians are given and obeyed in Russian, as are the orders to rewrite history, burn books, abduct children, and force them to forget their mother tongue. Russia attempts to justify this war by claiming that it is trying to “protect” the speakers of the Russian language, while killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

Every natural language, including Russian, is more than a tool to be manipulated and abused by individuals, or even, as is the case with Russia, by the majority of the population who thoughtlessly repeat, and therefore give life to slogans and propaganda, or remain silent and indifferent. A language is always more than a weapon, if only because one can say-the-same-as-logos in it. No language is inherently obscene, no matter how many obscene crimes are committed in that language. Even so, idiomatic, grammatical, and syntactic structures of natural languages set directions in which one thinks; they help open or close different ways of being in the world.

Ukrainian and Russian languages distinguish between animate and inanimate objects differently than in English. All nouns in Ukrainian and Russian have a grammatical gender: an owl, for example, is not an “it,” but a “she,” and so is the earth or soil. The wind or a stone is a “he.” This grammatical feature does not prevent a person from inflicting violence on the animals or a river, just like a speaker of English is not prevented by the grammatical structures of language from killing a human being. Still, these structures make it easier or more difficult to anthropomorphize a river or extend the notion of the human being to include other beings.

Here is an example from Ostap Slyvynsky’s The Dictionary of War (2023), which compiles the stories of Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s violence. One of these is “Earth,” told by Galyna Dmytrivna from the town of Bilopillya in Eastern Ukraine:

Of course, I planted seeds, what else could I do? I dug and planted here. The house is about gone, but you have to sow. The soil has already suffered enough. At first she was covered with missiles, then the sappers came and said: “Go, lady, wait at your son’s, we will cure your land.” That’s how they said it. They are local, they know and understand everything. And now it’s time to plant. Because digging and sowing the soil is like stroking and scratching a person. I think to myself: “It’s good that the biggest shelling was here in March while she was still sleeping.” (Slyvynsky 2023, 69, my emphasis)

 

It is natural in Ukrainian and Russian to refer to the earth or soil (zemlia) with the feminine pronoun.

If certain features of a natural language might bring us closer to logos, some others, often seemingly innocuous or inconspicuous, reinforce violence or make it more likely. A natural language may be used in subtle ways—invisible for most native speakers—to achieve ideological supremacy, as argued by Lee McIntyre (2018). For instance, to indicate location, English uses the preposition “in,” but Russian and Ukrainian must choose between two prepositions: “v” and “na.” The preposition “v” is used with independent states: “v Ger-manii” (in Germany) or “v Polshe” (in Poland). The preposition “na” is used with dependent and unclearly delimited territories. See Olesia Kompaniiets (2017, 23) summarizing Ivan Ohiyenko’s essay:

when talking about the defined, clearly outlined territory as a whole entity, or an independent state, the usage of preposition ‘v’ (‘in’) is required: ‘v Frantsii’ (‘in France’), ‘v Rosiyi’ (‘in Russia’), ‘v Rumunii’ (‘in Romania’), etc. As for the preposition ‘na’ (‘on’), it is used with geographical names in response to the question ‘where?’ only when the territory is not clearly delineated or is not an independent entity, rather a constitutive unit of the state: ‘na Volyni’ (‘in Volyn’—correct translation, but following the analogy above—‘on Volyn’), ‘na Bukovyni’ (‘in Bukovyna’ or rather ‘on Bukovyna’).9

Historically, both prepositions have been used with “Ukraine.” The preposition “na” carries with it distinct or intentional colonial implications. This difference between “v” and “na” is equivalent to saying in English “in Germany,” or “in Poland,” and “in the Ukraine.” As Heiko Motschenbacher (2020, 3) explains:

With those country names that show variation, the unmarked variant is usually considered preferable, as it is normally free of undesirable associations that the article-marked version may possess. Using a country name with a definite article is often perceived to point back to times before the respective geographical entity became an independent nation and may therefore possess a colonial or outdated flavor (e.g. the Congo, the Ukraine).10

 

The preposition “na” or, in English, the definite article suggests that Ukraine, unlike Bulgaria or Romania, is not a real country, but a dependent territory. The idea is often not explicit—I don’t think it, yet it shapes my worldview. Lydia Starodubtseva (2017), a professor at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, points out that since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, “the choice of the preposition cannot be ethically neutral.” It can no longer be explained by or reduced to following a habit formed in one’s childhood. If a native speaker of Russian does not know the difference between “v” and “na” Ukraine, then this indicates their imperial privilege.11

Russian language textbooks sometimes place an asterisk beside “Ukraine”: in France, in Russia, in Guatemala, but in the Ukraine, but do not explain this exception or acknowledge Russia’s 300-year colonial history.12 Every time a speaker of Russian says “na” Ukraine, they are breathing life into a construction through which one ethnic group asserts supremacy over others. This way of speaking—still dominant in the Russian media—does not accord with logos: it does not distinguish according to nature, obscuring the difference between the just and the unjust.

Words, phrases, and metaphors can be turned into glyby—massive clods or lumps, to use Merab Mamardashvili’s term—that desensitize us and distort or compromise our ability to homologize (2019, 232). The Lingua Tertii Imperii (Language of the Third Reich) discussed by Victor Klemperer (2021) and the language of Soviet propaganda described by Mamardashvili consist of:

otherworldly immobile blocks resembling cancerous growths. How can we think with phrases such as “the vegetable conveyor of the country?” Monstrous muscular model workers out of a propaganda poster emerge from behind this language, but to see or to think about what happens to the vegetables at that moment is decisively impossible. It is as though you immediately fall into a magnetic field and cannot escape its force. (2020, 171)

It is impossible to think when surrounded by lumps of dead language. They clutter and numb one’s mind, and make public thinking impossible. The Lingua Tertii Imperii is destitute, Klemperer argues (2021, 19). It makes things immediately “understandable,” and so discourages us from making the effort of thinking. There is no need to exert yourself, and even if you wanted to, it is not possible to think with these clumsy clods.13

These methods of asserting “ideological supremacy” are not new, but they were perfected by the Soviet and Nazi regimes, and have recently taken a “post-modern” turn. Today’s strain of propaganda appropriates many of the conceptual tools and practices developed in the 20th century to liberate people from oppressive intellectual and political regimes. This is an appalling example of authoritarian regimes misusing the notion of a heterogeneous, complex identity. Gloria Anzaldúa (1999; 2000; 2002; 2009; 2015) and several Latina philosophers, including María Lugones (1987; 2006) and Mariana Ortega (2016), theorize a multiplicitous self that must juggle contradictions. I have argued that these contradictions are seeming, not actual, and that the act of holding them together is a creative one (Sushytska 2019). Still, this balancing act is risky and dangerous: I might not be able to sustain the differently-directed tensions threatening to tear me apart, and I need the support of various structures—familial, professional, and civil-democratic, such as the rule of law—to perform the necessary work to create my self out of this heterogeneous material. So-called “postmodern” propaganda aims to destroy a self by overwhelming it with both seeming and actual contradictions, and also by destroying the structures that support thinking. Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev wrote about the concentration camp in occupied Donetsk, where he was held prisoner from 2015 to 2017, pointing out that the goal of extreme physical and psychological torture inflicted on him and other political prisoners by the guards was to break the self by depriving it of the ability to make sense of what is happening—by making violence absurd and suffering meaningless (2023). The goal of contemporary propaganda is the same: to break people by making it difficult or impossible to understand what is happening to and around them.  

“Postmodern” propaganda’s most terrifying strategy is the direct attack on logos. It targets Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, while relying on it in order to speak. It claims that A is not A at the same time and in the same respect. For instance, Russian state-controlled media disseminated multiple mutually incompatible and often absurd accounts of who and what shot down the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 Boeing-777. Some sources claimed that the plane was shot down by an Ukrainian missile aimed at Russia’s president’s plane; others maintained that the airplane was packed with dead bodies before it was shot down, so this was an operation set up to discredit Russia; and yet another source declared that aliens took down the plane.14 There is now clear evidence that Russia is responsible for shooting down MH17.15“Postmodern” propaganda does not aim to construct an internally coherent narrative, but revels in contradictions and logical fallacies.16 As Klemperer (2021) claims, propaganda is derelict; today it is also particularly brazen. The multiplicity of fantastical and incompatible explanations clutters thinking, distracts from other urgent issues, and, most problematically, it leaves people feeling disheartened and nihilistic. They may renounce the effort of listening to logos and trying to perceive truth. When my sensibility is numbed by a barrage of logically inconsistent information, it becomes even more difficult to distinguish between the true and the false, the just and the unjust.

Post-truth ideology destroys the house of being with several truth claims: “everyone is for sale,” “might makes right,” and “each has their own truth.” Notice that the last claim is logically incompatible with the first two. It is also the one that most directly attacks logos and instigates indifference and nihilism. Behind these truth claims stand centuries of tsardom and serfdom propagated by the Russian Empire. They matured in the criminal worlds of Soviet prisons and gulags, and came into big money after the fall of the Soviet Union. So-called “postmodern” propaganda has a narrative, but it is incomplete and incoherent because its goal is not to convince or even deceive, but to demonstrate authority—to rule.17 The current strain of propaganda aims to remake the world by asserting its authority over truth and being. Russia forces the hypocrisy of Western Europe and the US into existence,18 it empties out the “never again” of the “free world,” and convinces democratic societies that they are morally bankrupt, their highest priority is economic well-being, and their political elites are thoroughly corrupt.

A striking example of “postmodern” propaganda is Russia’s use of the term “denazification” to name the crimes that it has been committing in Ukraine since 2014, but especially since the full-scale invasion in 2022. According to Denys Azarov (et al. 2023, 245), “immediately after the full-scale aggression against Ukraine had begun, Putin declared that ‘denazification and demilitarization’ of Ukraine was the goal of the so-called ‘special military operation,’ ” that is, the war.19 Timothy Snyder, a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, emphasizes that the term “denazification” has a very specific meaning: it refers to the attempts to remove Nazi officials from public life in the immediate aftermath of WWII in East Germany (ctd. in Waxman 2022). Russia’s misapplication of this term is meant to confuse the discourse surrounding its war and obscure the understanding of the war’s colonial character.

More importantly, Russia’s use of this term is an act of terror. In 1946 Klemperer writes: “Germany was almost destroyed by Nazism; the task of curing it of this fatal disease is today termed denazification [Entnazifizierung]. I hope, and indeed believe, that this dreadful word will only have a short life; it will fade away and lead no more than a historical existence as soon as it has performed its current duty” (1). Klemperer further notes: “If a piece of cutlery belonging to orthodox Jews has become ritually unclean, they purify it by burying it in the earth. Many words in common usage during the Nazi period should be committed to a mass grave for a very long time, some forever” (16). Only 70 years later Russia exhumed this “dreadful” word to name its genocidal practices. It is using “denazification” to grossly misname the crimes it has been committing in Ukraine. This is an obscene act: not merely a crime, but an act of terror that compromises our ability to distinguish the just from the unjust, and strips us of our humanity. Where will we bury “denazification” once Russia is defeated? And what might happen to a human being’s relationship with being if it is not defeated?

It is unsettling enough to have poets become refugees from their mother tongue. It is much more dangerous to abandon the house of being to criminals. In his “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger claims that “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (1993, 217). Human beings, oblivious of being, have made themselves homeless: “homelessness,” for Heidegger, “consists in the abandonment of Being by beings. Homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of Being” (242).20 Oblivion of being is bad enough, but today we are threatened by a new kind of homelessness that can result from the systematic attack on logos. Human beings are becoming homeless not because of a forgetting that carries with it the possibility of recollection, but because of the crimes committed against logos. This is true ontological terrorism.