The word remains. War Diaries in ruptured time and space

In this chapter, I link excerpts from the Ukrainian war diaries to material-feminist theories of the physical void (Karen Barad) and psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious (Jacques Lacan) to examine what kind of rupture the war in Ukraine as an event in life and thought is. I ask how and in which sites of social and psychic life the war's disrupting force was experienced. I examine which feelings, thoughts and psychosocial matter got exposed by the ruptures it caused, and finally I explore whether and how a diary entry can be seen as an attempt to respond to and resist an event that aims at disrupting and dehumanising structures and life. In times of war, a society, I argue, slips towards the realm of unconscious being, which is a form of non-being that accumulates in the margins of what is consciously acknowledged as liveable and grievable life. The diaries, however, also show that such a rupture in psychosocial subjecthood does not automatically lead to chaos or despair, but rather to alternative arrangements of words and matter, and with this to alternative arrangements of a collective subject. I call these alternative arrangements ‘word remains’ and attribute to them the radical creativity and criticality of feminine subjectivity.