7 research outputs found

    Pharmacotic Wargames:Military Play as Ritual Sacrifice

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    This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military’s use of games to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life. The article makes this case by tracing the roots of Kenneth MacLeish’s ‘churn of mobilization and demobilization’ beyond the military’s instrumental calculations of institutional self-perpetuation, showing that this churn functions according to a logic of pharmacotic sacrifice that is not incidental to, but rather built into, their routine operation. It argues that (ex-)war-fighters function as a contemporary equivalent of the ancient pharmakoi, scapegoated and sacrificed figures into whom a polis poured its guilt and dysfunction in an act of ritual purification. Though rejecting any linear genealogy or transhistorical Western way of war, it identifies powerful resonances between the ancient pharmakoi and (ex-)war-fighters today. Drawing on extensive interviews with US military gamers and veterans, the article sheds light on the growing influence of games on the attraction, production, and recycling of (ex-)war-fighters in the 21st century. At the same time, by tracing the purificatory expulsion of war-fighters, it contributes a novel theorization of the pharmacotic logic of the US military’s war-making apparatus

    Anachronism of hope: the ‘to-come’ in post-horizonal times. In: Hirst, A., Houseman, T., Duque-Estrada, P.C., Edkins, J., and Mendes, C., Disobeying Marx, Disobeying Derrida—Hopes & Risks: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part II

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    Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this group of contributions, Aggie Hirst and Tom Houseman, Paulo Cesar Duque-Estrada, Jenny Edkins and Cristiano Mendes reflect on the legacies of Marx and Derrida: on whether Derrida emphasized the wrong Marxian heritage, on the promise and risks of hauntology, on the ghostly potential for justice amidst devastation, and on the paradox of deconstruction’s legacy itself

    States of Play:Evaluating the Renaissance in US Military Wargaming

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    The pathological politics of COVID-19

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