Project MUSE - How To Do Things With Clausewitz (original) (raw)

The argument of this article is that the modern understanding of warfare is organized by a series of attempts to conceptualize the relationship between language and violence. Examining efforts to rewrite Clausewitz's famous maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means, I consider the difficulties that arise in distinguishing rhetorical from non-rhetorical models of battle. Paradoxically, the impulse to generalize physical combat as a basic paradigm of social experience reveals that military praxis is as much a struggle of words as a clash of swords or an exchange of missiles. Even in Hannah Arendt, who starkly opposes violence and reasoned discourse, the understanding of war rests on a notion of intra-linguistic abuse, the idea that words can injure words. In the final analysis, war is not politics waged otherwise; rather politics depends on an appeal to a verbal militarism that should, politically speaking, be impossible.