By N. Curtis
The patience of warfare as a characteristic of contemporary lifestyles is tested via problems with identification and distinction, that's, the development of 'self' and 'other' as person or group. Key texts touching on in particular to id and battle are addressed, together with these via Nietzsche, Heiddeger, Marcuse, Freud, Lacan, Honneth, Bataille, Simmel, Elshtain, Ruddick, Schmitt, Delanda, Hardt and Negri, Baudrillard, Virilio, Beck and Joas. Its theoretical method units this learn except the normal political technology and IR techniques to the topic and makes an important contribution inside this quarter of social concept, cultural experiences and verbal exchange experiences.
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Extra resources for War and Social Theory: World, Value and Identity
Sample text
This ideal community would consist of those ‘who had subordinated their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason’ (359). 4 Because of Freud’s belief in the persistence of the earliest stage of phylogenetic development, each time he accounted for the increase and expansion of culture, this primitive and ever-forceful desire was able to find expression; between individuals, tribes, nations and civilizations the satisfaction of instinctual impulse remains the prime mover. Who, in the face of experience and history, he writes, will have the courage to dispute the assertion: ‘Homo homini lupus [‘Man is a wolf to man’]’?
Through proving true to a test, a being in one way or another first becomes in each case what it is and how it is’ (in Fried, 2000: 30). However, as Fried notes, rather than simply plotting a future and holding oneself to a final decision, which could still be little more than a glorified flight from oneself, being resolute means ‘constantly holding open the meaning of the future and its possibilities on the basis of an ongoing interpretive reflection on what has been given in the past’ (98).
This rationality is the fixation of all things within an operational system, and yet this ‘presupposes a “supra-technical” language community from which it draws its force and appeal’ (149). This total ordering of the German mentality represents a ‘ruthless utilization of all available means for getting a bigger share in the distribution of power’ (158), and a situation in which all aggression is directed outwards against the weak, the alien and the intellectual, whose ideas might hamper the efficient use of those means by and for the German people.
