Three Propositions on the Phenomenology of War

Abstract

Little in social and political life goes untouched by war. From a phenomenological perspective, this raises an array of questions: How does war manifest itself in the life-world, not least in “peace”? How and to what effect is it occluded? Considered as an “intentional object”—one “for me” and “for us”—how might war lay claim? How might it constitute the “I,” the “We,” and the “Other” that provide our everyday sociality? How might phenomenological work on war in both its historical particularity and in general offer new insight? This paper offers three propositions. The first concerns the challenges of theorizing war. The others how war might be thought about as a generative force in ways that avoid the reactionary vitalism or aestheticization that might be associated with such a view. Far from taking war as “the thing itself,” the central traditions in IR tend toward significant undertheorization. It is not unusual to see IR curricula and textbooks tracing the Twenty Years’ Crisis to its conclusion, to then resume with the emergence of the Cold War and UN system in 1945. Implicitly, beyond a general awareness of its result, what went on in between—the modality of this transformation—is not worthy of sustained pedagogic or theoretical attention. The discipline's central traditions meanwhile consistently reduce war to a consequence of supposedly more fundamental processes: political units competing under conditions of anarchy, contradictions of capital, extension of democratic norms and the disordering effects of undemocratic governance. In each, war is written out, appears as secondary or epiphenomenal. Undoubtedly more war-centered, the subfields of strategic and security studies are frequently constrained in their theorization of war through being policy-focused. Less concerned with the thing itself, they tend toward an instrumentalized account of war through which to prevail within or achieve security from it. The reflections of …