People of my generation, born in the late USSR, probably remember that the main political topic discussed with children back then was peace. When I think about it, I recall chalk drawings on the pavement — a yellow sun and a blue sky – making it palpable.

Peace is an abstract concept. Unlike some specific object like a table or a tree, it is not in itself available to our senses. And if peace is understood as the absence of war, then it is also a negative concept. In order to come to it, one must subtract war from reality. That’s why few people take peace seriously: it’s hard to believe in. You need a good capacity for fantasy.

However, the yellow sun and blue sky make peace simple and imaginable. When there is war, the sun disappears, and bombs, shells, and drones fall from the sky. Thanks to the concrete materiality of the bright sun and the clear sky, we understand that peace is a basic condition of life.

Love, like peace, is not available in itself, and it’s hard to believe in it. But living beings are given it directly as an experience. It is not an object, but a condition — you are either in it or not. If not, then everything that concerns love does not concern you. In solitude, you’re left one-on-one with Thanatos.

Love is the intrusion of Eros, which changes everything. Though not an object, it always takes on a concrete form. When I think about love, I picture the one I love. The beloved is my sun and sky — in him, love comes alive and takes on a body.

In its material embodiments, however, love does not cease to be universal. As Plato said, in the appearance of the beloved we are confronted with beauty itself — the eternal idea inscribed in the memory of the soul. Such memory-ideas refer to the infinity of past incarnations — not even ours, but all in general. In the search for beauty itself, desire — or, as Plato calls it, the immortal soul — attaches itself to various mortal bodies.

The more I desire one person, the more I desire many others. This is the dialectic of the individual and the universal. Making love with one, I feel like giving myself to all others who partake in beauty. Each such act of love is potentially an orgy. Each orgy is a commentary on Plato.

Christian universal love also does not exclude the orgy. The church ritual sublimates it beyond recognition, translates it into a transcendent order, but at its base remains desire and the mingling of bodies. God is love — this should be understood literally. God is not a subject who loves and wants reciprocal love, but love itself, coming in a multitude of bodies.

Even in sincere attempts to subject love to the demands of morality and law there is a degree of hypocrisy. Morality grows out of a system of prohibitions and taboos, but love cancels this system. Like revolution, it either goes beyond the law or never enters its bounds at all.

The amorality of love is not always criminal. In its primordial chaos there is also something childlike, innocent. Childish joy and play. In playing, we pretend, switch roles, take on new forms. The game of love creates new worlds, new skies, new suns. This is its metaphysical power. Each lover is a new sun. Each sun is the star of its sky. The sum of stars and skies — planetary systems — makes up the galaxy of the Milky Way. Along the Milky Way, with light steps, walks Eros, the most peaceful of the gods.

Love, like peace, is the opposite of war, for war is a highly organized state form of enmity. If love creates worlds, war destroys them. To destroy our fragile worlds, every war has a sufficient moral foundation. Wars are always waged in the name of some value — in the name of what the attacking side declares to be good, and against what it calls evil.

In today’s one-dimensional system of moral coordinates, one fascist regime fights preemptively against another. Preemptive violence, whose high moral justification is security, follows the logic of a self-fulfilling prophecy: we attack them because otherwise they would have attacked us first — they respond, and now, as if confirming our fears, their drones fly into our homes.

Fascism teaches that one may only love the homeland — not the real one, but the symbolic one — kissing the icons of leaders, pouring blood into the soil. It hates debauchees who change genders like gloves, generals in chiffon skirts who have forgotten what war is, women walking by themselves, artists, poets, and useless, idle immoral elements. Fascism comes under the banner of suffocating normality and common sense to replace the chaos and general madness of life with the order of death.

Fascist regimes feed on fear. Fear of attack, intrusion, touch, penetration, and mixing. Fascism builds walls and reinforces border control, so that the concrete materiality of the other would not enter the abstract body of the state.

The beloved intrudes illegally and immediately mixes with all the elements of my world in such a way that this world can no longer return to its previous condition. The ice has melted, the water has seeped into the ground, love has passed through walls and, with a crowd of illegals, crossed the borders of worlds.