This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The Order of War Refberg, Kristoffer Bang Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 25. Sep. 2021 The Order of War Kristoffer Bang Refberg King’s College London PhD Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in War Studies September 2017 London 1 Abstract The present dissertation is an inquiry into how the relationship between war and the subject has been problematised through an ontology of operativity and command. It demonstrates how from the earliest political treatises of the Western tradition, notably in Plato and Aristotle, the notion that war [polemos] must be subjected to ‘steering’ has been present. Once conceived by the Pre- Socratics as inseperable from life [bios], permeating being as well as the cosmos, the dissertation shows how war [polemos] in classical Greece came to be discovered as a relationship of forces that must be mastered by the individual and governed at the level of the polis. The dissertation shows how, in fact, the polis was founded on the idea of steering war as a means of rendering being governable forming the terrain for the entry into life [bios] of the ontology of operativity and command. The dissertation demonstrates how the ontology of operativity and command finds its early expression in the Greek stratia [army] as an articulation of the ruling principle [arkhē] that ties together a tactics of individuating bodies via discipline and a strategy that integrates the tactical individuation of bodies to form an assemblage of forces that can be steered by command. The dissertation shows how, in the stratia, the ruling principle articulated a homological relationship between the government of self and others enabling the army to be shaped from the otherwise disordered multitude. A primordial strategic incitement for rendering being governable, in the army the individual stratiōtēs [a citizen bound to military service], in his government of self, simultaneously came to bind himself to the command of the stratēgos [general]. Tracing an itinerary from archaic Greece to the end of the period of the later Roman Empire, the dissertation analyses the formation of the field of knowledge in which the ontology of operativity and command is displaced from the classical sense of being to be tied to the existence of God. The dissertation explains how this displacement takes place with the translation of the Greek 2 notion of polemos [war] into the Latin bellum, the ruling principle [arkhē] into the word of God [logos], which, ultimately, will be identified with the will (of God). The instrumental logic of polemos inaugurated by the classical Greeks as private war and the will of self (vaguely familiar to the Greeks, but nonetheless present in Aristotle) is then reworked into a theology of war, as the ontology of operativity and command is identified with the will of God. Located within the field of critical analysis, the dissertation draws on, in particular, the work of Michel Foucault. Taking its cue from Foucault’s analysis of war, the military organisation and biopolitics, the dissertation shows how the biopolitical idea of managing life and survival can be traced to the ontology of command and operativity that once found its lowly beginning with the Greek idea of steering war [polemos]. The idea of steering war, the dissertation argues, is a truly fundamental structure of Western politics occupying the threshold on which the relation between the political and man is realised. 3 Contents Introduction 6 Situating the thesis 25 Method 31 § 1 Inverting the Concept of War 1.1 The Circularity (of Steering) War and Biopolitics 58 § 2 Philopolemos – The Friendship of War 2.1 Hērōs 72 2.2 Tragodia 86 § 3 Historia – The Calligraphy of War and Time 3.1 Stratēgos, Stratiōtēs, Stratia 106 3.2 Paideia, Askēsis 117 3.3 Alētheia 123 § 4 Politikon Zōon – Threshold of Classical Politics 4.1 Polemou epithumētēs 128 4.2 Arkhē, Theos, Theōria 143 4.3 Thesis of Biopolitics 168 § 5 Eleutheria – Freedom and the Sheepfold 5.1 To eu zēn 179 5.2 Dikē, Sōphrōn, Sōphrosynē 188 5.3 Technē politikē 209 5.4 Statos 223 4 § 6 Threshold of Modernity – The Logos of Polemos [War] 6.1 The Kinship of War 233 6.2 In Conclusion 236 Bibliography 240 Index of Names 250 5 Introduction One would have a difficult time finding among the Greeks anything resembling the modern notion of ‘war’. Although the word polemos is commonly translated as ‘war’, polemos had a distinctly different meaning far removed from what we today have learned to think of as a certain practice confined to the logical space occupied by the military apparatus or its counterpart, the terrorist organisation. To speak of polemos strictly in terms of the militia [military] or the stratia [army] would have made no sense. Nor would it have been meaningful to the Greeks to speak of polemos simply in terms of the singular activity of delivering the soul of the enemy to the underworld of Hades. The Greeks certainly had a vocabulary available for describing such activities, for example, makhē [combat] or nikaō [conquest], but the category that covered these activities is much more difficult to grasp. Contrary to the modern notion of war, polemos did not function as a category that determined a conceptual boundary enabling the disclosure of the true nature of war or the practices that since came to animate it, gave it presence and allowed it to function in our reality. While Plato, for example, could certainly speak of polemos when describing the practice of combat, he did not specifically have in mind a certain privileged activity bestowed upon the stratia to carry out by the command of the stratēgos [general]. In fact, polemos could not be explained as the effect of a command or a particular will, as we are accustomed to in our thought with the aphorism of war being the continuation of politics by other means. Continuing this line of thought, the idea of a threshold of politics at which point war supposedly ends seems to appear distinctly modern in view of the classical Greek discourse on polemos. Indeed, polemos does not seem to have functioned as a term that demarcated a temporally or spatially delimited state, which could then be excluded from 6 political life [bios politikos] and confined to the outside of the polis. In fact, to think of polemos in terms of an exteriority to the site where man appears as a living being would already be a mistake. On the contrary, polemos is the very site on which man appears. In the early representations of polemos in the oratory tradition of Homer, we find no separation between man and war. In fact, the Homeric vocabulary does not seem to know the idea that war could have an identity different from what simply occurs at the level of being. In Homer, polemos is the very theatre of being and the site at which the hero turns up, half man, half god, to perform his deeds and acts. In just as striking a fashion, when the poet recounts the epic tale of heroes, gods, and mere mortals, we find no real distinction between being and action. In Homer, action is not, as it would become with Aristotle, what occurs as an effect of being having potentiality, which, by the effectuation of a sense of will, would pass over into actuality. The division of being introduced by Aristotle into dynamis [potential] and energeia [act] remains unknown. Accordingly, when the hero performs his deeds and acts, Homer does not invoke the idea of an operativity of being that, as an articulation of will, brings mind [nous, intellect] to bear on the world of things to let potentiality pass over into actuality in what we would call action. On the contrary, when the hero seems to act, it is because Arēs, the terrible war-god, has inspired in his soul the divine exaltation of rage and affect, or because the mighty Sky-god, Zeus, has filled his limbs with the force of that of a wave thrusting against the seashore, and if not then because another and perhaps lesser god or maybe an entire host of gods have intervened in the world of mortals, with their multiple appetites and pleasures and pains, their cunning schemes and innocent deceits, and, in the ceaseless polemology of being, once again set things in motion in the bringing together of opposite forces; the reality known as polemos.