Synopses & Reviews
War After Death: On Violence and Its Limits, examines forms of violence that regularly occur in actual wars but do not often factor into the stories we tell about war. These stories--from Homer and Virgil to Kant, Clausewitz, Goya, Freud, Schmitt, and Derrida--revolve invariably around killing and death. Recent history demonstrates that body counts are more necessary than ever; but the fact remains that war-and-death is only part of the story--an essential but ultimately small part. Beyond killing, there is no war without torture, tape, and attacks upon the built environment, ecosystems, personal property, artworks, archives, and intangible traditions. Such violence is rarely even classified as violence because it does not represent a grave threat to human lives. I argue, however, that the destruction of nonhuman or nonliving things deserves to be called violence; and further that such violence is a constitutive dimension of all violence--including violence against the living.
Violence against the nonliving is not aimless, but its aim does not correspond to its limit. The problem with such violence is precisely that it entails no natural limit. Only laws, conventions, institutions, or singular acts, can hope to hold it in check. The goal of my work is precisely to understand the aim of violence-without-limit and evaluate responses to it. I examine specific moments in the history of war: Goya's etchings of atrocities during the Peninsular War or the international outcry that met the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001. So, too, I analyze how violence against the nonliving emerges as a trope within literature and philosophy: Jean Genet's use of the liberal public sphere to stage himself as an inanimate decoy addressed to a hidden enemy; Samuel Beckett's predication of "the worst" as ongoing violence in Worstward Ho; and the construction of language as war against language itself in Jacques Derrida's writings on translation.
In addition, War After Death offers a rethinking of psychoanalytic approaches to war and the theory of the death drive that underlies them. My approach emphasizes the fact that modern war itself is a civilized achievement--a complex institution governed by a system of idealized conventions or rituals--and that killing is foremost among its rituals. The death drive itself would then be the living being's primary response to an encounter with violence that does not recognize the distinction between life and death.
Review
"Steven Miller's book War After Death is a truly impressive piece of critical writing. Indeed, this book is one of the most intellectually rich, trenchant and engaging works of criticism that I have read over the last decade."-Elissa Marder, Emory University
"In the long tradition and ever growing sea of works that have linked 'language, literature, and war,' this is a strikingly original work that attends to the import of that phrase with exquisite responsibility."-Gil Anidjar, Columbia University
Synopsis
War after Death considers forms of violence that regularly occur in actual wars but do not often factor into the stories we tell about war, which revolve invariably around killing and death.
Recent history demonstrates that body counts are more necessary than ever, but the fact remains that war and death is only part of the story--an essential but ultimately subordinate part. Beyond killing, there is no war without attacks upon the built environment, ecosystems, personal property, artworks, archives, and intangible traditions.
Destructive as it may be, such violence is difficult to classify because it does not pose a grave threat to human lives. Nonetheless, the book argues that destruction of the nonhuman or nonliving is a constitutive dimension of all violence--especially forms of extreme violence against the living such as torture and rape; and it examines how the language and practice of war are transformed when this dimension is taken into account.
Finally, War after Death offers a rethinking of psychoanalytic approaches to war and the theory of the death drive that underlies them.
About the Author
Steven Miller is Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. He is the translator of Catherine Malabou's
The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (Fordham).
Table of Contents
Introduction (i.e., the death drive)
1. Statues Also Die
2. Open Letter to the Enemy: Jean Genet, War, and the Exact Measure of Man
3. Mayhem: Symbolic Violence and the Culture of the Death Drive
4. War, Word, Worst: Reading Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho
5. Translation of a System in Deconstruction: Derrida and the War of Language against Itself
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index