1. Shane Brighton 101
across spaces of exchange informed and constituted through human experience.
Just as personal and state identities share a spatial character—a structural (episte-
mic ⁄ ontological) scaffolding that binds human beings to the social—these same
‘‘inter-spaces’’ of the ‘‘inter-national’’ can act as bridges that allow individuals
and states to collaborate, build trust, fight, and ultimately change or be changed
(de-familiarized) by inter-national interaction.
A theoretical engagement with the phenomenology of space—as it affects both
individuals and states—thus points to innovative routes in studying the history
and development of IR and our inter-national allegiances. Indeed, such reflexiv-
ity can be read as a challenge to the geopolitical nature of modern knowledge: a
phenomenon conditioned by conceptions of space and their power to determine
and subvert the identity, thoughts, and places that human beings make for them-
selves. We enrich our intellectual ‘‘tool-boxes’’ and experiences of the world
by engaging with this reflexivity, making our understanding of how we know
ourselves (and how we know others and our interaction with them as being-in-
the-world) part of a geo-historical and geo-phenomenological exploration of
our history, present, and future.
References
Dillon, Michael. (1996) Politics of Security. New York: Routledge.
Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. (2008) The Phenomenological Mind. New York: Routledge.
Huysmans, Jef. (2006) The Politics of Insecurity. London: Routledge.
Luoma-aho, Mika. (2002) Body of Europe and Malignant Nationalism. Geopolitics 7 (3): 117–142.
Luoma-aho, Mika. (2009) Political Theology, Anthropomorphism, and Person-hood of the State.
International Political Sociology 3 (3): 293–309.
Massey, Doreen. (2005) For Space. New York: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964) Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
´
O Tuathail, Gearoid. (1996) Critical Geopolitics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
´
Olwig, Kenneth. (2002) Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Sallis, John. (1973) Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press.
Three Propositions on the Phenomenology
of War
Shane Brighton
University of Sussex
Little in social and political life goes untouched by war. From a phenomenologi-
cal perspective, this raises an array of questions: How does war manifest itself in
the life-world, not least in ‘‘peace’’? How and to what effect is it occluded? Con-
sidered as an ‘‘intentional object’’—one ‘‘for me’’ and ‘‘for us’’—how might war
lay claim? How might it constitute the ‘‘I,’’ the ‘‘We,’’ and the ‘‘Other’’ that pro-
vide our everyday sociality? How might phenomenological work on war in both
its historical particularity and in general offer new insight? This paper offers
three propositions. The first concerns the challenges of theorizing war. The

2. 102 Three Propositions on the Phenomenology of War
others how war might be thought about as a generative force in ways that
avoid the reactionary vitalism or aestheticization that might be associated with
such a view.
Far from taking war as ‘‘the thing itself,’’ the central traditions in IR tend
toward significant undertheorization. It is not unusual to see IR curricula and
textbooks tracing the Twenty Years’ Crisis to its conclusion, to then resume with
the emergence of the Cold War and UN system in 1945. Implicitly, beyond a
general awareness of its result, what went on in between—the modality of this
transformation—is not worthy of sustained pedagogic or theoretical attention.
The discipline’s central traditions meanwhile consistently reduce war to a conse-
quence of supposedly more fundamental processes: political units competing
under conditions of anarchy, contradictions of capital, extension of democratic
norms and the disordering effects of undemocratic governance. In each, war is
written out, appears as secondary or epiphenomenal. Undoubtedly more war-
centered, the subfields of strategic and security studies are frequently
constrained in their theorization of war through being policy-focused. Less
concerned with the thing itself, they tend toward an instrumentalized account of
war through which to prevail within or achieve security from it.
The reflections of practitioners on their experiences of war, however, provide
us with ‘‘organic phenomenologists’’ such as Clausewitz. On War considers the
possibility of strategic theory in reference to the limiting factors that emerge
from war as a phenomenon. The limits to any positive theory of war, for
Clausewitz, follow from the experience of fighting. From fighting to the intel-
lectual challenges of generalship, war presents itself, he suggested, as a field of
contingency in which unpredictability and the general absence of certainty
dominate and ‘‘the light of reason is refracted in a manner quite different
from that which is normal in academic speculation’’ (Clausewitz 1976:113).
Outcomes cannot be predicted with certainty, assumptions are violently unmade
and new ones generated. So often the bonfire of certitudes, war disrupts the
claims of foundational thinking. As a process of violent reciprocation, ‘‘Clause-
witzian war’’ is always to some extent beyond conceptual capture, always a field
of uncertainty, always potentially in excess of the attempt to fully command it.
A first proposition on the phenomenology of war is thus that, as an intentional
object, war presents a surfeit of being over knowing. The conjoined promise and
challenge of the phenomenology of war by extension is that of describing a field
of contingent unmaking and remaking in which familiar or taken-for-granted
objects of knowledge and structures of meaning are overwhelmed and trans-
formed.
Among the most important phenomenological work on ethics and politics,
Emmanuel Levinas’s writing was fundamentally informed by experiences of war.
In the opening arguments of Totality and Infinity, he remarked on the centrality
of war to the objective order that philosophy both described and of which it
formed part, observing that the violence of war ‘‘does not consist so much in
injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making
them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves’’ in an ‘‘order
from which no one can keep his distance’’ (Levinas 1969:21). For those subject
to it, war thus takes the form of a ‘‘casting into movement of beings hitherto
anchored in their identity… by an objective order from which there is no
escape’’ (ibid.). Thus, where a phenomenologically oriented reading of Clause-
witz highlights the immediate experience of warfighting as one in which certain-
ties are constantly unmade, in Levinas one gets a sense of the wider
consequences of this: of war as an order of disordering. Because combatants are
not simply bare life units of strategic calculation but also repositories of mean-
ing, the contingent unmaking and remaking of certainties extends beyond the
battlefield to rework social and political relations. Albeit in different ways, societies

3. Shane Brighton 103
and political elites consistently invest armed forces with markers of communal
identity and the logics of civilization: take, for example, any number of
nationalisms, the civilizing mission of the British Empire, the technological supe-
riority of the United State. It is these complexes of identity, public reason, and
political order that are subject to the contingencies of fighting—‘‘cast in
motion’’—in war.
Levinas’s account of the interruption of subjective continuities, the alienation
of persons from the structures of meaning which defined them in peace, thus
provides the basis for a second proposition: that as a field of contingency, war
forces the unmaking and remaking of social and political meaning in ways which
defy prediction. In this regard, the necessity of descriptive, reflective engagement
with experience becomes more evident yet. If one of the necessary questions
raised by war is ‘‘how and where to begin again,’’ then phenomenology, as a
mode of thinking which seeks continually and rigorously to re-found itself in ref-
erence to experience, suggests its worth. Realizing this further requires consider-
ation of the relation between multiple experiences of war and the task of
theorization.
Another writer on war close to the phenomenological tradition was Hannah
Arendt. She also emphasized the contingent outcomes of war and the very lim-
ited degree to which violence, in itself, could be applied to predictable political
effect. In Between Past and Future, she reflected on a formulation offered by
French Resistance fighter and poet Rene Char. Liberation, Char observed,
´
changed war’s meaning for him and his comrades: impending victory trans-
formed their war into an ‘‘inheritance’’ left to them ‘‘without testament.’’ War
had transformed the world around them and given them an experience of
extraordinary everyday political agency, but the subsequent meaning of these
things was undecided, mute: ‘‘without testament.’’ Char himself sought ways to
dislocate himself from his wartime self, ‘‘break with the aroma of these essen-
tial years, silently reject (not repress) my treasure’’ in the expectation of ‘‘a
private life centered about nothing but itself’’ (Arendt 1993:3–5). Arendt, how-
ever, found within it an ‘‘odd in-between time’’ (ibid.) in which the ‘‘treasure’’
Char was now bound to reject was in fact his elevation and that of his com-
rades into ‘‘a public space… where freedom could appear’’ (ibid.). Their heady
sense of agency was not unique, she argued, but something that recurs in ‘‘the
history of revolutions… which politically spells out the innermost history of the
modern age’’ (ibid.).
It might be argued that Arendt proceeds on the basis of an error from this
point, because the categorization of Char’s experience as evidence of the phe-
nomenology of revolution rather than war stands at odds with his melancholic,
decidedly conservative expectations. Considered instead as an aspect of the
phenomenology of war, Arendt’s ‘‘odd in-between time’’ gives us some sense
of its generative power. In its brutal unmaking of social and political meaning,
the casting into motion of subjects, war offers a space of possibility. It is, how-
ever, in varying degrees determinate for that possibility because its outcome is
always to redistribute power, symbolic and material. In postwar France, for
example, the experience of resistance did not immediately fade but became
reinvented as part of the symbolic authority of Gaullism: a public ‘‘treasure,’’
not Char’s private sort. Other forms of wartime experience provided the basis
for new forms of political expression and, with varying success, new social
movements: consider the role of women’s ‘‘war work’’ in contesting prevailing
gender norms and the ‘‘integration’’ of minoritized communities through mili-
tary service. In this regard, the inheritance of war testifies through subjects
laying claim to their experience. There is thus an odd duality to the genera-
tive power of war: on the one hand, it may force radical innovation in
everything from technology to taxation, while on the other, it opens out a

4. 104 Three Propositions on the Phenomenology of War
space of mute possibility and contestation fundamental to the quotidian order-
ing of ‘‘peace.’’
A third proposition on the phenomenology of war then is that war is a genera-
tive force, not least because it confronts those who experience it with the need
to create—and contest—its meaning in ways that do not terminate with cessation
of physical violence. Here, in tracing the traversal of meaning from ‘‘war’’ to
‘‘peace’’ (in a way that problematizes that distinction), phenomenology opens
up the possibility of new lines of critique, of tracing the logics of war within the
structures and continuities of the pacific order.
Levinas’s ‘‘objective order from which there is no escape’’ enters the life-
world with singularly demanding power. Not only soldiers ‘‘march toward the
sound of the guns’’ to meet an uncertain fate but the orders of sociality they
embody. This power is such that, as Etienne Balibar recently argued, the politics
of war almost always closes down any ‘‘neutral position’’ (Balibar 2008:366).
Subject to this immediate demand, we might again recognize the potential of
phenomenological questioning, the methodological epoche intended to suspend
such immediacies and open out the structure of their operation to critique. The
dangers of not doing so are real. Alienated subjects of war are required to make
new acts of self-recognition, to lay creative, constitutive claim to themselves in
reference to their experience. There is—as Char and others testify—a heady
precariousness involved: the simultaneous freedom and terror of life-worlds
interrupted by a system of objectivity at a time when that system is typically
deeply indeterminate and crisis ridden. Such a moment of self-creation invites
aestheticization.
Char’s poem centers upon the rejection of an experience of beautiful, vital
urgency to which only the most sensuous of language can testify. Its power
derives from his enframement of wartime as a seductive but unwelcome memory
now out of place. Others, though, have offered an account of life centered on
the violent immediacy of war in which its precariousness is raised to the status of
a value. The reactionary vitalism of Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel (2004) presents
¨
the uncomfortable paradox of a compelling, unflinching descriptive power, of
young lives simultaneously taking shape and being erased in trench warfare and
the continuity of that account of martial becoming with the ideological catastro-
phe that followed. Elsewhere, we find the macho revolutionism of Sartre’s intro-
duction to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, where that master phenomenologist
presented the violence of native against colonist as the ultimate act of self-
creation: ‘‘The child of violence, at every moment he draws from it his humanity.
We were men at his expense, he makes himself man at ours: a different man; of
higher quality’’ (Fanon 2001:20).
To assume such positions are necessitated by war is wrong, though they surely
recur. As Char suggests, war itself does not testify: its meaning is to be produced.
But it does necessitate testimony: therein, in part, lays its constitutive power. In
recognizing the generative field forced open by war and the seductions of prox-
imity to death as an organizing principle for political life, phenomenological
questioning provides a valuable juncture for critique. The demand that critical
‘‘bracketing’’ of experience be repeated attunes us to the excess and abstraction
of war: its potential to claim priority, overwhelm, and undo other constitutive
possibilities. Such possibilities do not disappear in war, though they may be bru-
tally compromised. Junger’s and Sartre’s elevation of the generative power of
¨
martial life struggles to a value were, after all, only possible within the context of
extant economies of value. In this wider economy, the injunction to return to a
space of fundamental questioning, to hold to the possibilities of new beginnings,
surely has a place, though beginning again necessarily carries responsibility for
what we start.

5. Shane Brighton 105
References
Arendt, Hannah. (1993) Between Past and Future. London: Penguin.
Balibar, Etienne. (2008) What’s in a War? Ratio Juris 21 (3): 365–386.
Junger, Ernst. (2004) Storm of Steel. London: Penguin.
¨
Levinas, Emmanuel. (1969) Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. (2001) Preface. In The Wretched of the Earth, edited by Frantz Fanon. London:
Penguin.
Von Clausewitz, Carl. (1976) On War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.