by Marianne AMIEL
War and Peace, the title of Leo Tolstoy's novel, (1869) highlights their impossible separation, despite the obvious opposition between the two terms. Indeed, Tolstoy presents us with two scenes: on one side, war and its massacres, and on the other, a society of speaking beings, a society at peace, cultivated, almost ideal, without us knowing exactly how we move from one to the other. These two scenes oppose and almost ignore each other. The book questions the impossibility for either to stop the ongoing process.
Here is an excerpt that perfectly illustrates this interweaving of two states of affairs from which the hero seems to vacillate, only to end up shattering everything.
"Until his last breath, he could never grasp nor gauge the effects of his actions for they were too much in conflict with the notion of good and with human. He could disown his actions although glorified by half the world and that was why he was led to renounce the truth of good and of all that is human. Enough, enough about these regrettable actions, gather your senses and reflect upon what you are committing! Yet, on both sides, each of these exhausted and starved men was starting to question the need to keep exterminating. Kill whoever you want, do whatever you please but I want it no more. Still, a mysterious and unfathomable strength was urging and enticing them to accomplish this grisly scheme. Unintendedly, they would thus keep to this horrendous task which does not hinge upon human will."
War and Peace, in the same way as love and hatred, or even good and evel, are pairs of contradictory words, each of which covers a broad spectrum of meanings, they are substantial, unalterable, conflicting yet indivisible. The problem is that they trap us into a binary logic on the grounds that they are complementary. In short, one presents itself as the answer to the question that the other asks or raises. These pairs of words are like ideal points that would have remained fixed, frozen, petrified on the Imaginary aa’ axis of the language structure. Words of which the Other dimension would have been stripped when every effort is being made for it to abort, when its implementation is relentlessly impeded and stymied in our society. Indeed, our today’s world rejects language and its subleties, it cadaverises it to the benefit of a certain type of jouissance which draws its energy in violently putting to death the meeting with the other. It does not draw its energy in the encounter of the third dimension which implies the Other, that is to say which forces us to face the symbolic loss.
I pondered over the concept of culture that Freud oftentimes uses in his work. In “Why war?” he seeks to confront it rather than bringing it into conflict with pulsion leading to War.
What is Culture? One could easily enlarge upon this question or even produce a fully-fledged dissertation on it for admittedly, in our today’s society full of facts and jouissance, this notion of Culture has difficulty finding its place in the world. It is as if past and future were torn apart, forever divided. A proliferation of external objects puts it far aside so that the bridge, the link between these two pilers of space-time cannot be built. The whole coming out as an amnesia.
In the words of Freud, civilisation or civilising mission would be more appropriate than culture (cf his book “Civilisation and its Discontents”).
In this short text, the symbolic function is evidently given prominence. Culture is depicted as a symbolic mask which in fact lies upon a hole in the knowledge. The latter being the driving force of language. The lack, a signifier that would complete the being’s quest, enables us to articulate and produce a knowledge.
From a different angle of approach, one could say that it is both the mother and the father who civilise their child upon his coming into the world and who save him from a certain distress, Hilflosigkeit, by the sole action of giving him a name, by naming him. The name -the belonging- therefore originally marks the inscription of the child both as speaking being and as solicitator turned towards the other (with a lower case o).
By becoming a speaking being, he will thus meet this hole designated by Jacques Lacan as “the lack of being” which is a constituent of mankind. To put it in other words, the name is somehow the stamp confirming, asserting that the subject has met this lack of being. It extracts the child from a nameless state. From a no man’s land. From a desperation. Consequently, naming is the ultimate civilising act.
“War takes place when words can no longer be spoken” once said to me a very young patient of mine whose parents were relentlessly fighting against one another. He was right, he is right: two countries at war and neither manages to make peace. But the child, who comes to speak to me, remembers the words, the names and the appointment dates. He will little by little become his parents’ go-between, middleman. By simply talking to me, his analyst, he will leave open what keeps being shut and locked between both his parents -to wit, a nameless state.
Another question : during wars, isn’t the name, or more precisely its mark, erased, weeded out? And would that suppression be beneficial to something else? Yet, we know that the original mark cannot be so easily wiped out for the “psychic apparatus” is the unconscious memory. The original mark does not fade away since it is unwritten. It comes back and remains. For instance, totalitarian regimes ambition and aim to fully erase the human trace/mark so as to erect a sign. A totalitarian regime is therefore an empire of sign. Lacan wrote “the sign is what represents something to someone when the trace/mark is sufficient in itself”. In a dictatorship, the name acts as a sign and no longer as a mark/trace. The sign can be fascinating for it makes it very easy to identify with. There is no need and no room for knowledge nor lack. The sign acts as a center, as a whole, and this center has the particularity of being embodied nay personified. Thus, the center not organized by a lack produces a certain silence: is this peace? Is this fear? This moment emptied of signifiers but filled with signs ?
The subject, stripped of his fundamental and constitutive inward division, comes down to a body devoted to an effigy (Mao, Hitler, Lenin and many more). Some remnants of this acting out, of this shift from trace to sign, still remain in these countries once plagued by dictatorship. It only took one sign to sweep everything away, to efface History, to turn it to stone. This is a sheer insanity over against what language enables to do and to become. This is an acting out. This identification incited by the sign is in fact a death drive. “It leads to the worst” Freud wrote. Not only to the subject’s death but also a death industry.
In our modern and contemporary world, are we not constantly appealed to objects that eventually turn out to be just signs. They radically stray us away from love and from transference. Isn’t sign the censor of language?
Doesn’t a civilisation built its unity on acknowledging the decentralisation -in other words the subjective division between the signifier and the signified- inherent to speaking beings? Indeed, the subject somehow or other manages to decentre the Ego thanks to language that divises us subjectively: it decentres as opposed to the sign that concentrates, compresses and centers. Language allows us to take our focus away (“to decentre our attention”) from the Ego.
A civilisation’s center should thus never be filled nor embodied but should always remain empty, holed: this emptiness is termed as “the locus of the
Other” (with an uppercase O). Unity can take place if and only if the impossibility to reach a totality, a wholeness has been acknowledged, attested, and at best, accepted.
Symbols enable us to move from the confrontation to a real void/emptiness to the representation of it that is to say, to the metaphor of the lack. They are akin to thresholds, to elements reminding us of interdiction, of red lines. Crossing red lines means breaking away from the pact involved in language.
By way of illustration, a flag is far weaker an embodiment of a country in its entirety than a national motto, a kind of pact between the country’s state and its citizens, which distinguishes it from the others without secluding it for all that.
War invariably implies a flag. Men agree to scarify their lives to honour their flag so do enemies for they are motivated by the exact same intentions. Enemies are egos fighting against each other. Indeed, by killing one’s enemy, it is mankind who kill themselves ultimately. Isn’t this tipping point -where the narcissistic surge takes over the symbol and morphs it into a sign- the jouissance of death destroying civilisation and societies? That is to say destroying the expression of the divided subject.
In hatred and violence, the other is the perceived as the one who steals what I fundamentally lack whereas in love the other complements my lack of being. “Make love not war” is a universal saying implying that both signifiers are linked: war and transference.
It is the reason why war relentlessly meets the repetition of failure where the denial to know insists on our impossible quest.
Carried away by his passion, Tolstoï’s main character declares “still a mysterious and unfathomable strength was urging and enticing them to accomplish this grisly shame.”
Doesn’t this sentence show the eradication of the civilising dimension of the impossible?
Consequently, one cannot wedge war to save culture nor civilisation for it leads to the exact opposite! Freud, in his question “Why war?”, ponders over the virtues of subjective division which tones down the almighty death drive and from which a transcendency of what blindly alienated men may become possible. But, this transcendency additionally implies a renouncement. Yet, Freud himself never renounced his desire.
This is an important clarification to help understand the complexity of the question : “Why war?”.