Imminent War
“In war people act as if they have to avenge the deaths of all of their ancestors...”
Elias Canetti, The Book Against Death
War proliferates sleep. It keeps us asleep, supporting blind fraternity in arms that turns away from the metaphor of woman’s body. War rages against life, against women, even if they blend in the military ranks on a par with men. None go to war out of love. Killing men, killing women, and now also children and whole families, forms a strange brotherhood against the existence of the other where aggressivity that sustains the imminence of war becomes the stage without spectators. The sleep which the combatants walk into, moderates the imminence into not yet. The external threat lives and comes in effect from within.
At the end of the war only the subject survives. It is only after the war that the subject as a moment of the innocent subject comes to life. It is the subject supposed, as Lacan said, by a body of fragmentary memories, homages, debris of deaths and loss, and of mourning. In this sense, the subject of war is akin to the subject of the unconscious. It exists as a void wrapped up in the signifiers that bear the unbearable and make no sense. As soon as they are coupled with the knowledge of history and of military conflicts, the ideological narrative that interweaves races, nations, their claims and rights take on a meaning. Only now will hatred, revenge, and finally guilt be nourished. This loop has in its centre the imminence of war that accompanies the desire to sleep and to die every step of the way.
It is curious how a subject in analysis recalls being encouraged as a child to watch scenes of napalm bombs dropped on Vietnam, lighting up like fireworks, or how he is given collections of lead soldiers he organises into armies facing each other, with an odd Zorro hiding behind the stage, or how his father took him to the cinema to watch “300 Spartans” whose bravery and heroism were second to none. This did not spare them from dying all for one and one for all, and from being each struck by a deadly arrow that in the hands of Eros aims to awaken to love. And yet when this young subject sees a kissing couple on the Tv screen, he is told not to look. War and love find a common friend who incarnates a victim and a spectator. In each one can be found what Simone Weil called, based on her reading of the Trojan war, a “force”. It is what “does not kill just yet” as “it turns a man into a stone”1.
Only the subject, made of the indelible traces of annihilation, remains. The idea of peace is formed on the basis of a discontinuity, a couple kissing as a disruption of belligerence. Any variant, an omission, or a slowing down promises peace while bombs continue to fall. This moment of naivety, which is the moment of the subject, brings our attention back to war.
We would do well in the discussion of the logic of war to extract and discard a whole gamut of national, racial, geo-social components that colour and inhabit war histories. Out go the Nazis, the Romans, the Normans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Mongols, the Chinese, the Israelis. The list is very long. What would remain at the end, apart from the innocent subject, is some One of war outside sense, the One Lacan detached from the imaginary identification of the Einziger Zug Freud was the first to isolate. The One of the signifier embedded in the real is what Lacan constructed after Freud. Would this remainder, beyond history, nation, and race form a pure basis for consideration of war? This little delusion, not alien to transcendentalists, is not without merits. The logic of war requires we strip the feathers, the garments, the military metaphors of wars to stick to the One that passes from one war event to the next. This infinitesimal ingredient can be found in the imminence of war, in the “not just yet”, prior to all military act possible and specific to “the obscure kakon to which the paranoiac attributes the discordance with all living things”2, as Lacan tried to capture the kernel of aggressivity. Whether it is a tinge of fury, a jouissance to conquer, to erase, to obliterate, to subdue, to enslave, or just to kill, it comes down to a killing – you. It is always you I have to kill. Apparently, there is no room for both.
We tend to think of wars as battlefields on which a fight between two armies takes place, followed by bloodbath, the field covered with dead bodies, collected and buried. Then we learn of new configurations, e.g. war as invasion, conducted in accordance with international treaties, with POWs treated accordingly, prisoners exchanged, ceasefires allowing access of food and medical aid. These two models dominate the entire history. Today the real of war is no longer moderated by symbolic laws and pacts that would restrain both sides to a limit as guarded by international agencies. Today there is no war that obeys these symbolic terms. Instead, a war is waged against the other on terms that are entirely specific to the needs and force the government members are guided by and by agencies of invaders without any connection to international agreements still trusted by Freud. The battlefields and the law-bound conflicts have now been replaced by mad, criminal, immoral leaders who engage without limits in systematic decivilisation of an entire people while the local and international communities remain dumbfounded. War has in effect become a one-sided annihilation of the neighbour without an enemy on the other side. The enemy remains hidden behind the civilian crowd and in the underground of a hospital building. The only connection to the neighbour is in the roots of language recognisable by the subtlest of differences between the neighbours: Shalom, Salem. And since all reporting and transmission from the scenes of war ceased as a result of prohibition, denial has replaced the dialectic of truth and lie. We could say this war is against language itself, against the symbolic dimension that no longer includes the international community of observers, however divisive these might be. With the prohibition of speech on the ground, without truths and lies that speech produces, and with the media steeped in condemnation and accusations from a distance, we are walking into sleep of the real that has taken on a form of oblivion of the Other. This type of war focuses on and exploits the one-sidedness that has led to starvation and deprivation of whole families and to infanticide. The child is a future enemy. It is war because blood flows but whose blood, is it? Any other war today, where blood is not shed, belongs to the realm of a conflict, trade, financial, cyber, etc. That the latter ones take over remains a wish.
We might look at Freud who proposed a diversion from violence by shifting the agent of war from an individual to a community. He predicates this “transition from violence to this new right or justice” by way of establishing a community that “must be maintained permanently, must be organised, draw up regulations to anticipate the risk of rebellion and institute authorities […] to execute the legal acts of violence”3. Freud’s belief in the universal father makes him in effect a father of what over a decade later emerges from the League of Nations, namely the United Nations. Freud believed it was possible to have a “community of interests” where emotional ties would flourish and bond its members. Let’s say Freud testifies to a modality of love that can sublimate hell into if not harmony, then permanent discontents in the hands of a community tied by a common interest.
Lacan linked the violent acts to paranoia and delusion: “The correlation appears even more profound when the aggressive act dissolves the delusional construction”4. In this dissolution in the paranoiac subject, the specular imaginary and the real are tied up closely. War unleashes the real, and therefore this knotting, in me and in you. The “force” that Weil locates in both the invader and the invaded, is the term akin to Lacan’s aggressivity in so far it characterises the subject in its relationship with the ego. Once unleashed, the terms of stopping the lawless impact, felt again in recent years in all media but also in every medium that involves the specular image of me, vary from one war event to the next. If, conversely, I restrain the real in me I also restrain it in you. This corelation is strange. It points to the trigger of the pair of me and you, friend and foe, being located externally, as the third. The corelation involves the other as foreign and familiar, dependent on me and supporting my dependence on him. This stranger, referred to by Freud as Nebenmensch, my most innermost fellowman, both most distant and most intimate, allowed Lacan to compress it into a new paradoxical figure: extimate. What separates us and conjoins us, what distinguishes the distance from proximity is the relationship with death.
The desire for death sustains the desire to sleep. Why do we want the other to be dead? It is not because the other is my neighbour – killing him would mortify me. It is the moment when the other looks from the mirror back at me that I kill him as other only to carry the effects of this mortification in me. It is what glimpses through the mirror, while being located beyond it, that points to the place of the real that does not change. It is what Lacan calls the “fundamental evil”. If it lies in my neighbour, it also “dwells within me. And what is more of a neighbour to me than this heart within which is that of my jouissance and which I don’t dare go near”5. The incomprehensibility of my own death sustains the wish of the death of the other. Maurice Blanchot imagined having one leg in the grave and one in life. This deadly acrobatics was already known to Tantalus, evoked by Lacan, whose allegiance to the immortals and to the mortals alike made Lacan unfurl it for us as paradigmatic of the obsessional. His body indeed remains caught up in the balancing act of his, and therefore the Other’s, desire, in whose mortification, and therefore in a homage to death to come, he relishes with only that which survives this battle remaining in the hands of life. It is here that what Guy Briole refers to as “homosexual fraternity”6, is revealed as fraternity of obsessionals in search for death. Here, the drive to kill the specular image and the proliferation of sleep, interweave. Could 300 psychoanalysts stop the war? Psychoanalytic differential diagnosis doubtless humanises the death drive and the push to kill the other with it.
War becomes a means to dehumanise the human, including the deprivation of the death rites, which is the approach taken by Briole. Today, this forms a part of systematic decivilisation of a people. We will not find any traces of dehumanisation of death among the Greeks who sought in polemos a move towards justice, safeguarded by Dike, in so far as there was a limit. Nor will we find such a dehumanisation in ancient authors like Sun Tzu whose Art of War examines modalities and uses of aggression for the purpose of conquering the enemy in the name of universal karma. Tzu’s detailed discussion of techniques and strategies of starting, conducting and finishing a war, indeed humanises the beast by moulding war into a practice of “the Tao of command, and management of logistics”. The ritualistic repetition, to be found in Lacan’s master discourse, thus endeavours to raise prowess and pride in what is essentially “the greatest affair of the State”7.
In its act and logic war pushes and accelerates towards death of the other and therefore of me. It invades and assaults the very alterity of the Other, the heteros we link with the feminine Other. Does war aim to kill the woman as Other in this way despite women engaging in this practice too? Aristophanes raised this question when he wrote Lysistrata. Together with other women, she goes on strike which is what according to Lacan should be expected from the hysteric. This abstention from sexual activities doesn’t affect men who refuse to be tied to home and to matters of courtship and love. Women do not realise that men’s bellicose attitude is not linked to avoidance or denial of love but that it is war they love above all else. Men prefer to serve the death drive only to settle an account of revenge or to maintain fraternity or both, than to cherish life as women do. With the elegy to death to which war today testifies, the force of hatred looms over the living. The triumph of the phallic jouissance eclipses the feminine as a love of life. Anyone who goes to war has already given in to death. The subject that returns from the war, is marked by the metaphorical debris of the dead fragments, remains. Before the war and after it the desire to die remains incandescent in the body that is always part-asleep.
1 Weil, S., “The Iliad and the Poem of Force”, S. Weil & R. Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, trans. M. McCarthy, New York Review Books, New York, 2005, pp. 1-37.
2 Lacan, J., “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis”, Ecrits, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, Norton & Co., New York, 2006, p. 90.
3 Freud, S., “Why War?”, 1933, trans. J. Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1964, SE, Vol 22, p. 205.
4 Lacan, J., ibid.
5 Lacan, J., The Seminar, book VII, the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 186.
6 Briole, G., “The Inexorable Logic of War”, trans. S. Seth, The Lacanian Review Nr 15, winter 2024, p. 87.
7 Tsu, S., Art of War, trans. R. D. Sawyer, Westview Press, Inc., Boulder, Colorado, 1994, p. 167.