On War Strategy

Speaking of military cynicism, Sloterdijk said that war, just like Mephistopheles, is a "fluorescent being which lives entirely in its transformations... Metamorphoses from dog to monster, from monster to travelling scholastic are only the beginning of a long series of transformations; Mephistopheles is the master of masks, comparable to tricksters and spies, because the condition of evil in the post-Christian era is its dressing up in the current fashionable and socially acceptable harmless masks"¹. When the theological figures of evil were abandoned, Sloterdijk says, taking the position of a modern thinker, all that was left were science and theories of development (evolution) which, according to him, are "the last logicization of the negative; the death of others appears as the logical and ontological premise for the success of 'one's own undertaking'". But even for Sloterdijk, Mephisto has the profile of a Cynic educator whose discourse takes experience into account, and draws a sharp distinction between the greyness of theory and the greenness of life. Goethe's Mephisto is no longer the Christian devil, but a "post-Christian figure with pre-Christian characteristics", that is, a very special postmodern devil.

We live in a world without theories, the final genealogies of evil have become transparent. What is left is theoretical debris and shards with which we try to impose logic (magic) on the new war disorder. When Konrad says that "only what is anticipated exists", and that "where there is killing, thinkers have not done their work well", he is speaking as if Hegel were still alive. The "merry science" of war is no science at all, and even less is it an invitation to feigned merriment. The motto of Nietzsche's postmodern cynicism is quite simple: "it is dangerous to live". War has become transparent and that is why cynicism is its only strategy. The armies of postmodern cynics know this perfectly well, and they need no preaching about what war is.

On Discourses of War

When the "object" appears, so does the "subject". Thus does the metaphysical discourse of all our "objects" come into being, including the one on war. However, deconstruction of this metaphysics of the object (presence, present) has shown that there are no objects in language. That is why this conflict between consciousness and language is at the heart of the conflict between the modern and the postmodern. That is why the purism of reason (mind) without language is an anachronism of metaphysics which, as Welmer says, has forgotten about language. The discourses of war belong to this metaphysics.

On "Just" War

I could go on about this for a long time, but since the Platonist a priori was replaced by the video a priori, my personal a priori, as Nietzsche says, the idea of good has descended from its pedestal, and evil is shining in its vital beauty. The planet has become ascetic (although there have never been more churches), and transcendencies have sunk into the greenery of life. The discourse of "just war" was already deconstructed by Kant, who in the third article of his Entwurf on "eternal peace" -- dealing with the right (of strangers) to hospitality" -- speaks of right instead of good. Criticism of force was substituted by its deconstruction, which in its mystic foundation discovers the discourse of God.

On World Peace

What does our ascetic planet look like today? It is all in flames; hundreds of local wars are smoldering on Earth today, lasting for decades, precisely since the time of "world peace". This has become normal and common. Trade in war is the most important commerce on Earth, and the most tragic consequence of modern colonization. And that is where I see the paradox of the future of "post", because this ascetic planet without churches is sinking into the Middle Ages, into the age of small wars, of peasant wars. It would be interesting to speculate on what would the thinker of the "pathos of distance" say today on seeing his "ascetic planet" lit with these "small torches" in the cynicism of "world peace". "World peace" is the sum of regional wars, their postmodern quotation.

On the "Criteria of Civilized Political Culture"

This is the essence of the argument which the postmodern is having with the modern. It boils down to the question of whether Habermas's reconstruction of modern rationality is still convincing, with its decentred communicative mind replacing the subjectively centred mind. The cynicism lies in the fact that this "Habermas's mind" is no longer a mind! The author² of a recent work maintains that the modern-postmodern conflict is of limited reach, being the product of "specific historical-cultural circumstances within the European world of life", which goes no further than the borders of "the marginal worlds of life". According to Savic, participation in this conflict cannot be prolonged indefinitely. It will be replaced by other problems before it is solved. "In a structural sense, the marginal position has become paradigmatic, so that modern thinking must view this general marginalization in its positive aspect". The modern-postmodern cannot encompass this conflict, according to the author. "In this way it is demonstrated that the question of Western identity includes the problem of its practical reception at the margins". I believe that Saviæ does not leave the modern paradigm, because he believes that margins are something distinct from the West, that they have become, in effect, its "new paradigm". The strategy of global pacification which we are dealing with here is only yet another of the so-called cardinal cynicisms of Western (modern) identity.

On War Madness

You surely remember Jensen's novella on Gradiva, a girl brilliant in bearing and walk, in fact a stone relief which became the obsession of Jensen's hero, the archeologist Norbert Hanold, whose attention the relief grabbed during his visit to one of the large collections of Ancient art in Rome, so that he was "exceedingly happy when, upon returning to Germany, he was able to acquire a good plaster cast of it". "Gradiva", brilliant in walk; this epithet, which the Ancient poets reserved only for Mars Gradivus, the god of war entering into battle, seemed to Norbert Hanold, writes Jensen, "the most adequate to describe the bearing and movements of the young girl. Or, according to the expression of our times, 'young lady', because she surely did not belong to the lower classes, she was the daughter of some respectable man, in any case she was from some honesto loco ortus. Perhaps -- as her bearing inudbitably indicated -- she could be the daughter of a patrician edil who was in the service of the goddess Ceres, and was presently on her way to the goddess's temple on some errand" ³. This average late-nineteenth century Romantic novella attracted Freud's attention as an example of literary transposition of a case of madness. According to Freud, Hanold's dreams demonstrate the mechanism of repression at work, completely obscuring reality, as this is a case of unrealized love energy. But this relationship between literature and psychoanalysis is not what interests me, there is no reason to add yet another essay to all those already published on this subject. What I am interested in is this Mars Gradivus (the god of war entering into battle) and the insane, evidently homosexual projection which Jensen's character links to him. This "bewitching image" is at the bottom of his madness. We need only take a look at the models of war on our streets and at their hysterical worship of clothing "objects" which, directly or indirectly, point to death itself. As well as individuals, some social groups, too, sometimes prefer to live in dreams, homogenized around one insane idea (another case will be discussed later), rather than in reality. "We love death", say the insane models of war; it is a matter of lethal simulation by the impotent.

The cogito has suspended this madness, it is excluded as the "other" of the philosophical language (fashion), so that it has escaped from the cogito into language, which does not know of the "objects" in which the mad warriors are dressed. That is why there has been this remove from the postmodern Gradivus. This is no longer a case of (instinctual) repetition (sublimation of instincts) which requires the discourse of classical psychoanalysis. I think of a being which does not have a realistic attitude towards death or the "I", because it is always "somebody else" who is dying, and the "I" is infinitely replaceable. Instead of repetition, this is a case of semantic iterability, "which precludes the possibility of existence of pure and great founders, initiators, of great poets, great philosophers"⁴. Let us say that these semantic warriors belong with the initiators, such as the classic Mars Gradivus. They belong to this "semantics without a source".

On the Phantasm of "My Country"

Grotesque are the efforts which some of our thinkers, Mihajlo Markovic for example, are investing into finding some meaning for the war being waged in "my country", because they still believe that their role and task is to be the bureaucrats of meaning. Serbs, as well as those "others", Croats and Muslims, are fighting for "their land", their living space in which, Markovic says, they have "lived for centuries". The Croatian General Ivan Tolj believes the same. Thus the general and the philosopher agree that this war has some meaning. Why does this "intellectual effort" provoke nausea? Why does Lyotard's mega-story about the modern ending in Auschwitz seem convincing by comparison? War, like everything else, has been left without metaphysical and epistemological referents. It is, therefore, necessary, as the Good Soldier Shveyk would say, "to take a crap on it all". In a letter from 1914, Kafka wrote: "The war started today, I am going swimming in the afternoon". Who can still believe Mihajlo Markovic, that Marxist Mephisto?

Repetition leads to insanity, iterability leads to difference, even though "in every sign there is some minimal remnant which enables it to function as a sign. The structure of repetition implies both identity and difference at the same time".⁵. This is the real effect of the iterability which finds a way out from this madness. It is the only one testing the possibilities of survival and resisting the final inevitability of disappearance like the "syntax without source" from which Shveyk or Kafka speak. That is why the "critical reconstruction" of the phantasm of "my country" (who is trying to appropriate the ascetic planet?) does not succeed without cynical deformation in overcoming this postmodern "gap" on the "basis" of iterability, on this "minimal remainder", this "limited, minimal idealization". Only that which has no history can be explained according to the postmodern genealogy of evil. The phantasm of "my country" comes from the "object" discourse of Western metaphysics.

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