War, trauma and the militarized body

Abstract

This article investigates how the contemporary war dispositif in cinematic representations captures and integrates bodies, gestures, space and desire. It focuses on two analytic aspects of this process, suture and interpassivity, and shows how soldiers, in cinematic space, confront trauma that results from an incompatibility between the accelerated speed of military dispositif and the slower rhythms of everyday life. It analyzes the clash between life speeds through three cinematic texts – The Hurt Locker, American Sniper and Good Kill – and clarifies how such disruptions motivate attempts to manage and renegotiate realities fractured by traumatic war experiences. More generally, it analyzes the ways in which war disfigures the phenomenology of bodies and the life world.