Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou PDF
Preview Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou
Theorizing War Also by Nick Mansfield MASOCHISM: The Art of Power CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE NEW HUMANITIES (with Patrick Fuery) SUBJECTIVITY: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway CULTURAL STUDIES AND CRITICAL THEORY (with Patrick Fuery) Theorizing War From Hobbes to Badiou Nick Mansfield © Nick Mansfield 2008. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008978-0-230-53732-3 All rights reserved. No reproduction. copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced. copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988. or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Saffron House. 6-10 Kirby Street. London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited. registered in England. company number 785998. of Houndmills. Basingstoke. Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC. 175 Fifth Avenue. New York. NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States. the United Kingdom. Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-35907-3 ISBN 978-0-230-23494-9 (eBook) DOI10.1057/9780230234949 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging. pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mansfield. Nick. Theorizing war:from Hobbes to Badiou/Nick Mansfield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 978-1-349-35907-3 1. War (Philosophy) I. Title. B105. W3M37 2008 355.0201-dc22 2008021217 10 9 8 7654321 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Transferred to Digital Printing 2012 To my brothers, Martin and Paul Contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction: War and Its Other 1 Part I Posing the Problem 9 Hobbes: War redeemed by sovereignty 9 Kant: Peace through war 19 Clausewitz: War as the activation of the social 28 Part II The War/Other Complex 39 Freud: War and ambivalence 40 Bataille: War, consumption and religion 63 Deleuze and Guattari: Owning the war-machine 82 Under the black light: Derrida, Levinas, Schmitt and the aporia of war 98 Part III The Problem of Difference 119 The collapse of difference: Insisting on Clausewitz 119 Global war 141 Recovering difference 150 Conclusion: War and Human Rights 162 Bibliography 169 Index 172 vii Acknowledgments Parts of this book were originally published as "Under the Black Light: Derrida, War and Human Rights" in Mosaic, 40 (2), 2007, 151-64, and as "War and Its Other: Between Bataille and Derrida" in Theory and Event, 9/4,2006. Thanks to everyone who has put up with me going on about war in recent years, and above all, thanks to the usual suspects: Bonny, Oskar and Tilde, without whom nothing would be much good. viii Introduction: War and Its Other In Philosophy in a Time of Terror, in a discussion of the opposition between "war" and "terrorism," Jacques Derrida tells Giovanna Borradori that the terms themselves are unstable and have a political history that must be rigorously examined: Semantic instability, irreducible trouble spots on the borders between concepts, indecision in the very concept of the border: all this must not only be analysed as a speculative disorder, a conceptual chaos or zone of passing turbulence in public or political language. We must also recognise here strategies and relations of force. The dominant power is the one that manages to impose and, thus, to legitimate, indeed to legalise (for it is always a question of law) on a national or world stage, the terminology and thus the interpretation that best suits it in a given situation. (Borradori, 2003, p. lOS) He cites two examples of how the terms "war" and "terrorism" have been manipulated in historical circumstances in order to fulfil certain political goals. One is the retrospective definition by the French parliament in the 1990s of the Algerian War as an international war, and not a domestic conflict, so veterans would have access to certain classes of military entitlements (p. 104); the other, the insistence of the US government that any resistance to the established governments of South America be denoted as terrorism (p. lOS). We all think we know what war is, but the term "war" has a history and cannot simply be taken for granted. Certain legal thresholds have to be crossed for collective violence to be officially recognised as war. Since the Treaty of Westphalia, the most common way of understanding this is that war is the prerogative of states, or at least of political organisations 1 2 Theorizing War that aspire to be states. Yet, Derrida's comments remind us that, even allowing for these legal constraints, war itself is not a simple thing to identify, and is not always identified. The term may pre- or post-date certain events that may, at the time, be experienced and represented completely differently. War's meaning is unstable and problematic, and the use of the term is more than just a simple act of description. Indeed, the term "war" can only be applied once certain other conditions are in place. Not least of these conditions is that war must always emerge in relation to other ideas, terms and concepts, and is always in relation to them, even if these are not always explicitly articulated. The aim of this book is to show that the deployment of the term "war" is inevitably a deployment of something else as well, the "other" of war, something called variously peace, or civil SOciety, or sovereign authority, or love or friendship. Yet, this other is not a simple opposite to war, something that we aim to protect from war or retrieve from it somehow. The deployment of the term "war" is made possible only by the deployment of this other term. It is indeed, often, perhaps usually, the deployment of this other to war that licenses war and makes it possible. The term "war" is not then a simple descriptor of an unambiguous fact or a naturally occurring phenomenon. Governments sometimes hesitate to apply the term to their own aggressive military activity. Since the Second World War, the declaration of war has declined in importance. This may be because governments may want to allow certain impressions about their activities to endure: that they are merely supporting-even just "advising"-an ally, or targeting a rogue organisation with no real political standing, in a brief police action. Military activity, here, is seen as almost medicinal, a short sharp cure, a course of therapy for low functioning nation states, or the quarantining of an unpredictable political contagion. These activities do not quite cross the threshold to become real "war," and so the term itself is not activated officially, and emerges only as the shorthand excitement or incitement-of journalists. On the other hand, as has been widely observed, governments can all too quickly denote as war things traditionally seen as the domain of social policy. Social problems as mundane as substance abuse, crime and poverty are now dealt with by wars. The declaration of war has become a regular and random re-announcement that deviant social practices, and inevitably deviant social groups, are present within the social field, and must be annihilated. Governments do not declare war on one another anymore, even as they send their children out to fight, but societies do declare undefined and potentially interminable wars on fractions of themselves. Of course, the
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