[lit-ideas] Re: Sacrifice
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 01:39:37 -0500
Robert wrote: Those who die 'for their country' are individuals and
their acts, even if done with choreographed precision, are the acts of
individual persons; the _state_ acts only in the way that other
abstractions do, that is to say through those persons who are its
supposed subjects or agents. There were no agents on the battlefields of
WW I except individual soldiers.
____
It's precisely this parsing that I am questioning. That's why I asked
"How much of the world are individuals? How much of the world are groups
[nations]?"
Nations [Sparta, Athens, e.g.] make war but individuals [hoplites,
generals, sailors, etc.] fight it.
But wait!
Maybe it's that individuals [Napoleon, e.g.] make war, but nations
[France, Prussia, England, Russia, etc.] fight it.
What I'm trying to underscore here is that the abstraction of nation
does not stand in sharp relief to the individual agents of war, but both
interpenetrate the other. And yet the thesis of war as psychopathology
operates from a distance that looks at the fallen individuals and mourns
their madness.
But this distance (to analyze and mourn the madness) presumes only
individual agents subject to great unconscious fantasies, when a more
complex interaction is involved here, competing levels of rationality if
you will.
I appreciate Robert Paul's attempt to help me straighten out my own
thinking. There's something incommensurate in mourning individuals
subject to collective madness as though these fallen dead were only
individuals and not individuals-citizens. My moon is setting here in the
east but I hope to take that thread out of the labyrinth nevertheless.
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