On December 3, 1913, the premiere of the futuristic opera “Victory over the sun” took place in St. Petersburg. The poet Alexei Kruchenykh wrote the libretto for this opera, the composer Mikhail Matyushin wrote the music, and Kazimir Malevich designed the costumes and scenery. In our opinion, this theatrical became the starting point for K. Malevich's “objectified” philosophy of war, embodied in a certain “text” by means of visual art. The philosophy of war in the form of visualized philosophizing about war is one of the ways, which the art of the Russian avant-garde tries to oppose the generally accepted canon at the beginning of the 20th century. We mean the canon not only in art, but also in understanding the most significant philosophical issues. This paper studies the philosophy of war by K. Malevich using both traditional methods of philosophy and cultural studies, and the method of designation. This method involves extracting semantic content from visualized images and reconstructing this content to the level of conceptualization. A designatum in our understanding is a subjective image of any concept or representation that can be both expressed, “objectified”, by the author in any form accessible to him (in speech, in an artistic imageries, in behavior, etc.), and deciphered and reconstructed by the addressee. The designatum in the problematic of this article is the system of metaphors, artistic imageries, concepts, ideas and terms that make up the content of the concept of “Kazimir Malevich's philosophy of war” for Malevich himself and everyone who is in the same discourse with him. The latter ones also include all subjects who are in the same discourse with Kazimir Malevich both in a synchronous and an asynchronous mode of existence. The designation of the visualized content of the opera “Victory over the sun”, for which sketches of costumes and scenery were created by Malevich, gives the following results. The painter conceptualizes in visual images two types of war – “ultimate” and “total”. The “ultimate” war is waged by pure human force against the forces of nature itself, and, above all, the nature of the “anachronistic” human. This war always begins with a victory (the name of the opera is far from accidental!), otherwise it is not worth starting. Such a war is always waged according to some meta-rules, by analogy with the “newspeak” of the poets V. Khlebnikov and A. Kruchenykh, whose rules deny the rules of the “anachronistic” language or include them as a special case. Any “total” war is waged against mankind and humanity in general, and it is waged in any way possible. A soldier in a “total” war is allowed everything that leads to the defeat of the enemy. This freedom lies in the ability to inflict violence, to commit the “sin of the great slaughter of peoples”, as K. Malevich called the First World War.
Kazimir Malevich; Russian avant-garde; “Victory over the sun”; philosophy of war; designation; “ultimate war”; “total war”.