[Wesleyan University]
Photograph of the Center for Humanities building

War

Wars bring brutality, death, upheaval, and trauma. Participants and survivors bear witness to the disruptions of war in concrete detail. Nothing is so urgently documented as war, and war-making itself is often organized with reverence and precision. Yet accounts of war struggle with the limits of their narrative grasp. How might we make sense of the very breakdown of meaning and order? Can war be understood, as commonly claimed, to be the continuation of politics by other means or is it more accurate to understand politics as the continuation of war by other means? By virtue of the vivid struggles bound up in our ordinary and literal understanding of combat, war inevitably becomes the ground for metaphorical extensions, and these in turn affect our understanding of war in its most visceral form. The interaction between concrete and symbolic dimensions of war is far from simple.

The Center for the Humanities invites scholars and visitors for 2009-2010 to shed light on the realities and meanings of war, and to explore whether and how these are changing. Is war paradoxically presented as a state of exception, yet one from which there is no exit? Has Kant’s ideal of “perpetual peace” yielded to an ideology and reality of eternal war? What is the impact of bringing war home to civilian life, whether in the marketing of combat games and paraphernalia or in the involuntary re-enactments of post-traumatic stress disorder? How has war become a paradigm for political projects such as “wars” on terror, cancer, drugs, or poverty? How are cultural debates figured as social battles such as the war on the family or gender wars? What new responses to war are emerging in politics, theory, and religious and social movements?

See our Fall Lecture Series