BAROQUE THOUGHT AND ITS IMAGERY IN THE UKRAINIAN POLITICAL IMAGINATION: INTELLECTUAL DE(CON)STRUCTION AND RADICAL PHILOSOPHICAL RUPTURE

Abstract

The article carries out a fundamental epistemological reflection on the nature of the national way of thinking – the Ukrainian logos – in the conditions of the current existential war and deep structural transformation of society. The author argues that the study`s relevance is driven by the internal contradiction of the postcolonial situation: an intense desire for integration into the global intellectual space is often accompanied by an uncritical reception of Western theoretical paradigms (specifically, B. Latour's actor-network theory and «spatial turn» concepts) without proper consideration of their historical and institutional foundations.

The central problem addressed is the “defectiveness” of the Ukrainian logos, which is a concept borrowed from I. Lysiak-Rudnytsky, which points to the chronic weakness of the rational-institutional dimension of the Ukrainian political tradition. The author contends that a conceptual inversion occurs in the Ukrainian intellectual space: institutional weakness and theoretical instability are falsely interpreted as signs of an “advanced” network episteme. The work utilizes the methodological optics of exile, viewed as a state of heuristically productive ek-stasis (with simultaneous critical coverage of this Heideggerian concept within the framework of Ukrainian intellectual discourse and current political affairs), allowing for an analytical reduction of the national life-world and distancing from emotional involvement in the search for truth.

The study reconstructs the cultural and historical prerequisites of this problem, rooted in the dominance of the Baroque type of thinking. Unlike Western modernity, which underwent the school of scholastic discipline and the Cartesian rupture, the Ukrainian tradition filled the structural gap between the Middle Ages and modernity with the compensatory form of the Baroque. The Baroque logos is characterized by sensocentrism, symbolism, affectivity, and a penchant for paradoxes, making it productive in art but entirely inadequate for public administration and constitutional law.

In the political dimension, Baroque thinking leads to the perception of reality as theatrum mundi (theater of the world), where the political process is reduced to aesthetics, staging, and symbolic gestures. Using the speech act theory of J. Austin and J. Searle, the author analyzes Ukrainian political rhetoric as a series of “misfire” performatives functioning outside the realm of institutional facts. While it provides a mobilization catharsis during revolutions, it also makes impossible Weberian “routinization of charisma” and the transition to stable procedural forms of rationality.

The article concludes that overcoming the “defectiveness” of the logos requires not a retrospective reproduction of historical forms but the mastery of the discipline of method based on analytical reduction and the construction of institutional knowledge on transparent foundations. The author insists on the necessity of moving from Baroque affectivity to institutionalized rationality as the sole condition for maintaining Ukraine's agency in the face of global challenges.