• DOI:10.1632/pmla.2009.124.5.1505
• Corpus ID: 154411632

Introduction: Perpetual War

@article{Aravamudan2009IntroductionPW,
  title={Introduction: Perpetual War},
  author={Srinivas Aravamudan},
  journal={PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America},
  year={2009},
  volume={124},
  pages={1505 - 1514}
}

• S. Aravamudan
• Published 1 October 2009
• Political Science
• PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

HEracLiTuS’S FragmEnT 53 dEScriBES war aS an originaL and universal human condition: war generates hierarchy, status, and masculinity.1 Is the ubiquity of war across societies a shared structure of feeling? If so, a comprehensive approach to the perpetuity of war would nonetheless need to engage with warrelated evidence from multiple histories and avoid hasty generalization: from the corroboration of organized violence to the strategic intentions behind it, from the development of new weaponry to the destruction such innovations wreak, from the leadup to war through political rhetoric to the performance of war on and off the battlefield, and from depictions of chivalric glory after a war is over to the gory truths that such stories inevitably suppress. As agonistic sociopolitical endeavors with concrete life spans, historical wars produce meanings different from the myth of generalized chaos, described by the early modern political philosopher Thomas Hobbes as a “state of meer Nature” or “continuall feare, and danger of violent death” (140, 89). War as an abstraction does not make sense without the layered histories of the lives—and deaths—of individuals and collectivities, states and sovereignties. 1 2 4 . 5 ]