Ilia State University
Invited Lecturer
Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy
PhD Candidate
Tbilisi, Georgia
valerilokhishvili03@gmail.com
Abstract
The August War of 2008 represents one of the most significant traumatic events in contemporary Georgian political and cultural experience. This presentation aims to conceptualize the August War not merely as a military-political conflict, but as a traumatic event that profoundly influenced the formation of Georgian national identity, collective memory, and political narratives. The presentation will draw upon psychoanalytic theory, particularly the conceptual frameworks developed by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. According to Lacan, trauma is associated with the intrusion of the “Real” — an experience that cannot be fully integrated into the existing symbolic order and therefore disrupts the subject’s stable identity. From this perspective, the August War may be understood as an event that destabilized the structure of post-Soviet Georgian political self-perception and generated the necessity for the restructuring of national narratives. One of the central arguments of the presentation is that the trauma produced by the August War was never fully registered within the symbolic order as a loss. The traumatic experience remained partially unarticulated and unresolved, continually returning in political, cultural, and media discourses. In Lacanian terms, it is precisely this unregistered loss that creates the conditions for traumatic repetition, whereby society repeatedly returns to an event whose full symbolization remains impossible. At the same time, Žižek’s theoretical approach enables us to analyze the war as an ideological symptom — an event that reveals the internal contradictions of the political and social order. In post-war Georgian public discourse, themes of trauma, loss, insecurity, and national unity acquired particular importance, playing a significant role in the formation of new forms of political and cultural self-identification. Special attention will also be devoted to the institutionalization of trauma through memory politics, media representations, and state narratives. Thus, the memory of the war functions not merely as recollection of the past, but as an active force in the construction of contemporary political and cultural reality. The presentation will examine how the experience of the August War became a central element of contemporary Georgian collective memory and how it has been reflected in media discourse, public narratives, and processes of national identity formation. The aim of the research is to demonstrate that trauma may function not only as a destructive force, but also as a transformative force of identity, although its unresolved character continues to produce persistent symptomatic tensions within the public sphere. Consequently, in Georgia the question of the August War transcends a purely political dimension and emerges as a traumatic and enigmatic core of the restructuring of national identity.
Keywords: August War; trauma; loss; memory; identity; Lacan; Žižek.