“The shadow of the object fell upon the ego:” colonial melancholia, reading Freud through Fanon’s sociogeny, and implicit memory

Abstract Russia’s full-scale aggressive war in Ukraine launched in 2022, once again, opened the debates on the inclination of humans towards destructiveness. The paper argues that the predisposition to the war was driven by colonial melancholia. Melancholia, in this case, is characterized by colonial attachments, internalization of “loss of empire,” and destructive and genocidal drives. The analysis of the issue is sought through the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and memory studies, reading both through a decolonial lens. The article draws on the decolonial critique of psychoanalysis, going beyond a Freudian conceptualization of melancholia towards collective sociopsychological dispositions as outlined by Fanon. To decolonize memory would mean embarking on all the aspects of the formation of implicit memory (beyond commemoration) of Russia’s colonial past and present—including the affective legacy of colonialism, namely, the post-colonial melancholia of the colonizer.