Thinking war?

The time has come. We can no longer pretend we live in peace. Are we already at war? But what does this mean “to be at war”? What is war? Two and a half thousand years ago a presocratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus gave an answer: “War is the father of all and the king of all; some he has marked out to be gods and some to be men, some he has made slaves and some free.” This certainly made sense for Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, but does it still make sense today, when the ongoing wars can easily turn nuclear? How to think of war if we know that the humanity won’t survive it?

The class will engage in close readings of the chosen texts and other readings from a variety of literary, artistic, and historical sources, like, for instance, the anti-war writings of the Viennese cultural critic Karl Krauss. Special focus will be put on the relation between war and politics. We will discuss Machiavelli’s Prince as well as the famous claim of the Prussian general Clausewitz that the war is a continuation of politics with other means. The question of how the contemporary wars relate to the crisis of the global neoliberal capitalism, will not be forgotten either. 

 

Readings:

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Leicester: Allandale, 2000

https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf

Carl von Clausewitz, On War. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1968. J. J. Graham translation, 1908. Anatol Rapoport, editor. Introduction and notes (c) Anatol Rapoport, 1968

https://ebook-mecca.com/online/On%20War%20-%20Carl%20von%20Clausewitz.pdf

John Keegan, The Face of Battle. A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, London: The Bodley Head, 2014

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. p.16-17.

Éric Alliez, Maurizio Lazzarato, Wars and Capital: An Excerpt, South Pasadena: semiootext(e), 2016.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/78/82697/to-our-enemies

Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Neilson, The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World, London, New York: Verso, 2024. Chapter 3. “Regimes of War”

Wolfgang Streeck, „Notes on the political economy of war”, Review of Keynesian Economics, Vol.12 No.3, Autumn 2024, pp. 293-307.

https://wolfgangstreeck.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/streeck_2024.pdf

Consists in the active participation and contribution (discursive, textual and performative).

The module grading is based on the mentioned contribution, active in-class participation and

• - submission of written assignments (word minimum of 500 total)

 “Students from other departments or universities will be given a place on the course subject to room capacities.”