“Unlove”

Is there a place for love in souls and bodies, contaminated by the virus of fascism? And how to understand the peculiar libidinal situation or atmosphere, which arises, when this virus disperses? The answer to these questions is provided by the 2017 film Loveless (in Russian original nelyubov’), directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev. Released shortly after Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in Donetsk in 2014, but before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the film tells the story of Zhenya, a beauty salon administrator, and Boris, a sales manager, who are in the process of divorcing.

As story begins, we learn, that both characters are already involved in new relationships: Zhenya is dating a wealthy man, while Boris is expecting a child with another woman. The only thing that seems to stand in the way of their new, supposedly happy lives is the divorce itself and the question of who will take care of their twelve-year-old son, Alyosha. Contrary to the standard narrative in which parents fight over the right to raise their child, neither Zhenya nor Boris wants Alyosha. For both of them, he is a reminder of the past that threatens their plans for a new, happy life.

One day, Alyosha hears a quarrel between his parents and runs away from home. Only two days later do his parents find out that their son is missing: they contact the police, which is, nevertheless, is unable to help. Instead, policemen suggest for Zhenya and Boris to contact a volunteer rescue group. After contacting volunteers, they begin the search of the missing kid, which ends without success.

Two years later, Alyosha is officially listed as missing. Zhenya and Boris live separately and have finally divorced. Now, Boris lives in the apartment of his new wife, together with her mother and a son, neither of whom he really loves. Zhenya lives in luxurious apartments with her new husband, but she is also far away from experiencing love.

Until this moment, the film might be interpreted as a simple story about the private life of a dissolving family (first, the film was planned as a remake of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, for which Zvyagintsev didn’t get the rights at time). But the last scene, which has already become a classic, imbues the film with radical political overtones: it ends with Zhenya running on a treadmill. She wears a sport costume, made specifically as a merch for the 2014 Sochi Olympics. It is colored in white, blue and red – colors of the Russian flag – and the word “RUSSIA” is inscribed in large letters on it. At the same time, news reports play in the background, with Russian propaganda telling the story of the ongoing war in Donetsk.

As the Ukrainian producer of Zvyagintsev’s film, Aleksey Rodnyansky, rightly observes in his commentary on the film – which he calls “the best film about the Putin era” – in his book Unlove. About Putin’s Russia in Nine Films:

“Unlove is not merely a description of the relationship between husband and wife. In the film, no one loves anyone at all. The daughter does not love her mother, the mother hates her daughter, the husband does not love his wife, the wife does not love her husband, and the child turns out to be an obstacle to the personal happiness of both parents. Over the course of the film, one family breaks apart into two new ones, yet these families, too, are filled with the same unlove.”[i]

But what exactly is this “unlove,” so terribly translated into English – as Zvyagintsev himself has admitted in many interviews – as Loveless? To answer this question, it is instructive to turn to Rodnyansky’s definition of the term. As he continues in his book: “The word “unlove” is the antonym of everything we understand by humanism, empathy, compassion, and sympathy. It denotes a spiritual emptiness, an inability to experience feelings that are not directly connected to one’s own comfort and benefit.”[ii]

Rodnyansky rather quickly opposes unlove to love, what appears to be inhuman or anti-human to the humanistic, the absence of feeling to empathy. In other words, Rodnyansky understands unlove as simple lovelessness, as the absence of love. But is such an interpretation right?

In one of his interviews about the film, Andrey Zvyagintsev notes that the notion of unlove designates “a grave spiritual condition, whether of society or of an individual.”[iii] As he goes on to explain, unlove

“Is not simply the absence of love. It is its antithesis. And not the opposite side of the question – not banal hatred or cold indifference – but something more: unlove. And no reservations.”[iv]

It is very telling that Zvyagintsev opposes unlove not only to love but also to “banal hatred” and “cold indifference”, that is, to the concept of “unlove” as it is defined and (mis)understood by Rodnyansky. If unlove is neither “hot” hatred nor “cold” indifference, how, then, should we approach it?

The logic of bourgeois coldness

In order to understand the meaning of unlove, as it is performed in the film and discussed by Zvyagintsev, it would be very helpful to distinguish between two types of negation, as they were developed by Immanuel Kant. In his works, Kant introduced the difference between negative and indefinite judgments, which is explained by Slavoj Žižek with the following example:

“the positive judgment “the soul is mortal” can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is denied to the subject (“the soul is not mortal”), and when a non-predicate is affirmed (“the soul is non-mortal”)-the difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between “he is not dead” and “he is undead:’ The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction: the “undead” is neither alive nor dead, but precisely the monstrous “living dead:’ And the same goes for “inhuman”: “he. is not human” is not the same as “he is inhuman” – “he is not human” means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while “he is inhuman” means something thoroughly different, namely that he is neither human nor not··human, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although negating what we understand as ‘humanity;’ is inherent to being human.”[v]

It is precisely in this sense that we should read the negative prefix “un” in the word “unlove” and distinguish it from “not love” (which would be, according to Zvyagintsev, the simple opposite of love: banal hatred or cold indifference). Just as the undead zombie is neither alive nor dead, unlove is neither “warm” hatred nor “cold” indifference, but may rather be understood as a form of monstrosity beyond these categories, a “terrifying excess”, as Žižek puts it. This excess is precisely “something more” of which Zvyagintsev has talked about in the passage above. Taking all this into account, one can notice, that the logic behind the notion of unlove closely resembles what Theodor W. Adorno describes in Minima Moralia as bürgerliche Kälte (bourgeois coldness)[vi].

Although the notion of bürgerliche Kälte may at first appear identical to cold indifference, it is in fact far more complex. Bourgeois coldness is not simply the absence of warmth, in which the subject is completely reduced to an object through the mechanisms of “mathematization” and “rationalization,” such that its spontaneity is entirely extinguished (as is often suggested in phenomenologically inspired analyses, inspired by Heidegger and Arendt). Rather, it lies beyond warmth and coldness: it is a form of coldness that nevertheless preserves a residue of warmth, which, in extreme situations, may manifest itself. In other words, bourgeois coldness is not apathy in the simple sense of the term (unless we read the negative prefix “a” in “apathy” as discussed above), but, paradoxically, a cold pathos.

This is the reason, why in the fourteenth aphorism of Minima Moralia, titled Le bourgeois revenant, Adorno could say that “the bourgeois live on like spectres threatening doom”[vii]. As the German critical theorist Henrike Kohpeiß explains this striking thesis in her study Bürgerliche Kälte: Affekt und koloniale Subjektivität, which examines the phenomenon of bourgeois coldness as the dominant mode of Western subjectivity conditioned by ongoing colonialism, bourgeois subjects, for Adorno, are “timeless and elusive beings. They are undead presences whose sources of life never run dry – they exist perpetually in an enigmatic manner.”[viii]

In other words, Adorno’s Bürger is reminiscent of the horrors of zombie-like creature, discussed by Žižek. He is, therefore, not a totally reified subject, or, to put it bluntly, a thing or an object. He is at the same time much more and much less than that and, in this regard, embodies the uncanny dialectic of excess and lack. Continuing her analysis, Kohpeiß goes on to define bürgerliche Kälte as follows:

“Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms for preserving the structurally colonial status quo. It creates an affective zone of protection in the world, into which the immediate consequences of many catastrophes do not penetrate. It functions like an air-conditioning system – a complex technology that reliably stabilizes a room’s climate until those inside come to regard it as natural. Bourgeois spaces both institutional and affective – remain cool and comfortable while it is burning outside.”[ix]

It appears that there is a slight tension between Kohpeiß’s understanding of the Bürger as a monstrous “undead” creature and bürgerliche Kälte as simple “coolness” in the face of a world in flames. Understood in this way, how should we then explain the passage from the (neo)liberal subjectivity of the cold bourgeois to the fascist subject? How can we connect the monstrosity of Adorno’s Bürger with his rather pitiable image of him as cool and indifferent? Wouldn’t it be more productive to suggest that the latter is defined not by coolness in the face of world-fire, but by the inner fire, hidden behind the cool face or facade of coolness?

The age of depression

At this point, a little psycho-genealogy might be useful. In her psychological analysis of Russian — and, by proxy, global — society, the philosopher Oxana Timofeeva draws the following psychological genealogy: after the collapse of the USSR, it was common to hide one’s pain and appear “cool.” This “coolness” was followed by the wave of positivity that characterized the early Putin era: yoga, meditation, psychological coaching, and various techniques of self-improvement were practiced in the name of thinking positively. Yet, this double repression — after the fall of USSR and at the beginning of Putin’s presidency — did not eliminate destructive affects and a depressive mood. Writing in 2019 about the psychological condition of Russian society during the 2010s, Timofeeva pointed out: “It’s not that there was no depression during the positivity wave—quite the opposite. Today’s epidemic of depressive disorders speaks to how it was there but in a state of displacement.”[x]

It is significant that, at this point in her analysis, Timofeeva refers to Zvyagintsev’s film. According to her interpretation, the film had already revealed, in 2017, the repressed depressive mood of Russian society, which had become increasingly apparent by 2019. While agreeing with this diagnosis and interpretation, today, almost seven years after Timofeeva’s analysis, one can go a step further and claim that Zvyagintsev’s film not only revealed the depressive mood concealed beneath the positivity of the preceding period, but also allows us to perceive the destructive force concealed within depression itself. In other words, if depression, as Timofeeva argues, was displaced during the age of positivity, then manic and destructive impulses were themselves displaced during the age of depression. Zvyagintsev’s film seems to capture both displacements, though their significance becomes fully legible only retrospectively. It is perhaps precisely in this capacity to reveal something new retrospectively — to disclose forces that become historically intelligible only later — that the film’s universality and untimeliness lie.

Although — as Timofeeva points out — “there is no direct connection between politics and psychic life,” we can nevertheless attempt a diagnosis of society. If, until recently, this diagnosis appeared to be depression, today we can revise and supplement it: what we were witnessing was not simply depression, but rather what used to be called manic-depressive disorder (and is today commonly referred to as bipolar disorder). According to a somewhat outdated terminology, in the manic-depressive disorder the depressive “episodes,” characterized by a lack of interest in the world and a lack of energy to engage with it (coldness), are followed by manic episodes, marked by sudden surges of energy (heat).

Yet, these two “episodes” should not be understood as entirely separate (even if the term “bipolar” might encourage this interpretation). Rather, they imply and contain one another, like episodes of one and the same drama: the manic phase is always already latent within the depressive mood, and vice versa. The sudden shift, or reversal, from one mood into the other can then be precipitated by external factors. In this sense, what appears retrospectively as a radical break may instead be understood as the actualization of a tendency that was already present, if only in a displaced or latent form.

This is how unlove or bourgeois coldness, as so carefully shown in Zvyagintsev’s film, could be understood. It is neither warm hatred (mania) nor cold indifference (depression), but rather a fiery destructive force hidden behind the facade of coolness. And that is why Zvyagintsev’s film could bear the title of the “best film about the Putin’s epoch”, as Rodnyansky has noted. It should not be read in liberal humanistic terms as a simple critique of indifference and cynicism in Russian society, or merely of its coldness, emphasized in the film by situating the entire story within wintery landscapes and gray post-Soviet settings. The film reveals a far more complex constellation, and here lies its value: behind the facade of coldness, indifference, and ordinary cynicism it has captured a deadly exterminating force, the eruption of which we have been watching with horror and despair for the last five years.

Notes:

[i] Alexandr Rodnyansky, Neljubovʹ : o putinskoj Rossii v devjati filʹmach : 9 rota, Obitaemyj ostrov, Elena, Stalingrad, Leviafan, Neljubovʹ, Dylda, Razžimaja kulaki, Mama, ja doma. (Riga: Meduza, 2024), Chapter 6, “Neljubov”. Available online: https://meduza.io/book_landing/2025/05/08/aleksandr-rodnyanskiy

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Anton Dolin, A Free Man Has, Before Our Eyes, Become a Lost Man: Interview with Andrey Zvyagintsev, Cannes Jury Prize Winner. Meduza, 29 May 2017: meduza.io/feature/2017/05/29/chelovek-svobodnyy-na-nashih-glazah-prevratilsya-v-cheloveka-poteryannogo

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Slavoj Žižek. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), p. 166.

[vi] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), p. 74.

[vii] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, p. 34. In original German: “Bürger leben fort wie Unheil drohende Gespenster”.

[viii] Henrike Kohpeiß. Bürgerliche Kälte: Affekt und koloniale Subjektivität (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus Verlag, 2023), p. 10.

[ix] Henrike Kohpeiß. Bürgerliche Kälte, p. 12-13.

[x] Oxana Timofeeva. Depression, or The World of Clinical Triangles. e-flux, September 2026.