Citation:
Date Published:
7 January 2022Abstract:
In the 1970s Michel Foucault sought to develop a military model to understand the workings of society. His war schema, based on an inversion of Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means, did not have sufficient analytical power, however, and he abandoned it. Much earlier, Honoré de Balzac’s fictional character Colonel Chabert, the protagonist of Le Colonel Chabert, had reached a similar impasse in his attempt to comprehend legal institutions and social relations through the prism of war. Charting the curiously analogous intellectual failures of Chabert and Foucault, this essay examines both the reach and the limits of war as a schema or grid of intelligibility for the nature and operations of civil society.
October 2021: Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the PhD program in Literature, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. Among other publications, he is the author of Empire of Chance. The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (HUP, 2015), the editor of Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genres (MIT Press, 2017) and of The Humanities in the World (U Press 2020), and he serves the general editor of the book series “Prisms: Humanities and War” with MIT Press.