‘Russian warship, go fuck yourself’: Humour and the (geo) political limits of vicarious war

Abstract

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, vicarious identification (VI) with the Ukrainian fight swept across the West becoming the de facto and normatively prescribed response and a source of status, self-esteem and jouissance for all those vicariously participating. For their part, and with some success, the Ukrainians encouraged such a response through carefully curated acts of vicarious identity promotion. Mobilising the British context as an example, this article reflects on the temptations and limiting politics of vicarious war, highlighting three points. First, that VI with the Ukrainian fight was tempting, in part because it enabled a nostalgic appropriation that helped flesh out post-Brexit notions of ‘Global Britain’, but that in doing so made this increasingly a war more about ‘us’ than ‘them’. Second, that humour has played a particularly central role in these processes. Third, that VI-derived support is inherently unstable, something evident whenever news from the battlefield has turned grim, threatening to diminish the ontological satisfaction previously derived.