Content area
In Theory and Use: Post-Napoleonic Waves of War Metaphor charts two genealogies of war that emerge in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and travel across the 19th and into the 20th century. The first is a wave of war metaphor operating at the level of critical theory, a wave that begins in 1832, with Carl von Clausewitz’s postulation of war as a form of writing having a logic “not peculiar” to itself. I argue that this original but not unique logic common to both war and politics is the logic of metaphor, taken in the original Greek sense of meta phorein, meaning “to carry over” or “to transfer.” I trace this conceptual function through Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Elaine Scarry. Whether war rewrites the reality-construct of the State or whether State reality-constructs write war into its subjects, war is a violent carrying over of the order of a symbolic text: war is a meta-phor.
The second genealogy is the wave of war metaphor usage shared by some prominent pairs of 19 th - and 20th -century German philosophers and British novelists, whom I pair for comparative purposes. As Mary Favret and others have pointed out, in the wake of the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, war metaphors become a lingua franca across Europe, a sort of code signaling the shared experience, both real and imagined, of past wars and those seemingly inevitable on the horizon. This common language links German writers who directly experienced war to British writers of roughly the same historical moments, novelists who felt the impact of war indirectly, and who used their imaginations to understand that impact. In the German context, it is philosophy that most explicitly uses war as a metaphor, while in Britain, this usage occurs most dramatically in the novel. To explore the war metaphor itself and the work that it does in German philosophy and British fiction, I pair Friedrich Schiller with Walter Scott, G. W. F. Hegel with Charlotte Brontë, Friedrich Nietzsche with William Makepeace Thackeray, and Ludwig Wittgenstein with Virginia Woolf.
In In Theory and Use, I develop ways to make sense of the abundance of war metaphors dispersed throughout 19th - and 20th - century philosophy and literature. At the same time, and through my philosophical and literary investigations, I try to make sense of my own military experience. The governing question I put to my study texts is, What does “war” do for these writers that another word cannot, and are its diverse ways of signifying within different metaphor contexts unified at a deeper level? In other words, What is war’s symbolic function?
The question I put to myself is this: How are civilians un-made and then re-made into combatants? How is a subject psychologically and morally trained to kill. What did the Marine Corps do to me? In light of my research and personal experiences, I conclude that rather than view war as recourse to brute violence following the failure of rational discourse, we see war as structurally and symbolically homologous to and inseparable from the language use that we call metaphor. Violence is a necessary component of war, though it occurs, of course, in many other contexts as well. The work of this dissertation is to show that metaphor is no less necessary to the conduct of war than violence.