Abstract
When Carl von Clausewitz’s statement that “war is a mere continuation of policy by other means” was inverted by Michel Foucault into “power is war, the continuation of war by other means” during his course entitled Il faut défendre la société,the already-growing interest in von Clausewitz skyrocketed. However, the enormous interest in this particular dictum overshadowed many of the even more intriguing observations discovered and diagnoses made by the Prussian general. The present text aims to investigate one of the less-famous pronouncements made in von Clausewitz’s On War. This pronouncement regards the ‘law’ of the ‘escalation to extremes’ that is inherent to every war (a war becomes the war, becomes all or total war). This ‘law’ has received little interest, although it can be considered much more worrisome than von Clausewitz’s more famous dictum. However, it has been recently rediscovered and discussed by the late French philosopher René Girard, and, as will be argued in this text, can be considered as the spectral heritage of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. Although Agamben seldomly mentions the Prussian general (his main influences, Debord, Arendt, and Schmitt, however, often do), the discovery of the spectral kinship between Agamben and von Clausewitz allows us to consider Agamben’s philosophy of the state of exception and total/global civil war from a new and more provocative angle.
Highlights
In what has been considered by some as an almost-infamous paragraph of the Philosophy of Right (§ 324), Hegel writes that “war should not to be regarded as an absolute evil and as a purely external contingency whose cause is itself contingent, whether this cause lies in the passions of rulers or nations, in injustices etc., or in anything else which is not as it should be” (Hegel, 1991: 361)
Leaving aside the paternity of the war-politics relationship which can be regarded as being only of secondary importance, it is with von Clausewitz that we find the connection between politics and war in what has become the traditional way of phrasing the expression
Being heraldic or even prophetic, the step to use another word to describe the paradigm that has already been used is very small, that word being “menace.” what is at stake in the paradigm for Agamben using the language of Aron is that the paradigm is not a model, but a menace. We started this text with a short reflection on the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz’s famous formula “war is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means” (Clausewitz, 2007: 7)
Summary
In what has been considered by some as an almost-infamous paragraph of the Philosophy of Right (§ 324), Hegel writes that “war should not to be regarded as an absolute evil and as a purely external contingency whose cause is itself contingent, whether this cause lies in the passions of rulers or nations, in injustices etc., or in anything else which is not as it should be” (Hegel, 1991: 361). Our focus on von Clausewitz’s work will begin with “his” expression that war is nothing more, nor less, than the continuation of politics by other means (Clausewitz, 2007: 7, 28, etc.). 20 The law of the escalation to extremes (which ends in total war) of the Prussian general and the statement that “faced with the unstoppable progression” of global civil war which makes of the state of exception the increasingly dominant paradigm of contemporary politics (Agamben, 2005: 2) of the Italian philosopher attempt to render explicit the same thing. For as much as Agamben’s political theory could be saying the same thing as von Clausewitz’s war theory, he most certainly is not saying it in the same way if the concept that is at stake is “paradigm,” the interlocutor would finish This imaginary reader would have demonstrated a basic linguistic and even etymologic understanding of the concept at hand, (s)he would have demonstrated a lack in understanding of Agamben’s peculiar usage of the paradigm. Being heraldic or even prophetic, the step to use another word to describe the paradigm that has already been used is very small, that word being “menace.” what is at stake in the paradigm for Agamben using the language of Aron is that the paradigm is not a model, but a menace
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