For Ukraine, for their Freedom and Ours ! - CSO

What can a cultural institution such as a university do against war – in wartime or in opposition to war – if not organize a symposium on culture and war? Beyond the effect of recursion, this event can hope to elicit some responses. Not without reservation because the question is burdened with a suspicion. The Nazi camp commander who plays Mozart on the piano in the evening, the image is well known, especially since Walter Benjamin remarked: “There is no document of culture that is not a document of barbarism”. To which Freudianism will reply that culture is the most beautiful human invention against barbarism, whatever the discredit on its effectiveness. The war in Ukraine, in addition to its serious human and political dimensions, came to restate the question of culture on two major points. The aggression against Ukraine, on the one hand, is explicitly displayed as an aggression against its identity, embodied in its language and culture. On the other hand, Ukrainian public opinion has reacted to this aggression by rejecting Russian culture, particularly at the linguistic level and in the artistic field. For those who are not in the field, culture can provide the critical tools conducive to two complementary functions in order to refuse moral stupefaction and political immobility: to think about war and to say war.