In one of his signature reversals of accepted wisdom, Michel Foucault modulated Carl von Clausewitz's well-known aphorism on war and politics to read, “Politics is the continuation of war by other means” (48). That is to say, even in peace, the law is enacted by force. In conditions of state-determined necessity, that force appears as a direct actor in legitimizing what Giorgio Agamben calls “the state of exception.” In English law the term would be “martial law” (Agamben 7). By extension, if globalization has again become the “global civil war” (Arendt, qtd. in Agamben 1) that was the cold war or has created a new state of “permanent war” (Retort 78), then war is global politics. So what kind of war is the war in Iraq (Reid)? It is now being waged by the United States as a global counterinsurgency. In the field manual Counterinsurgency issued by the United States Army in December 2006 at the instigation of General David Petraeus (Bacevich), counterinsurgency is explicitly a cultural war, to be fought in the United States as much as it is in Iraq. Cultural war, with visuality playing a central role, takes “culture” to be the means, location, and object of warfare. In his classic novel 1984, George Orwell coined the slogan “war is peace” (199), anticipating the peacekeeping missions, surgical strikes, defense walls, and “coalitions of the willing” that demarcated much of the twentieth century. In the era of United States global policing, war is counterinsurgency, and the means of counterinsurgency are cultural. War is culture. Globalized capital uses war as its means of acculturating citizens to its regime, requiring both acquiescence to the excesses of power and a willingness to ignore what is palpably obvious. Counterinsurgency has become a digitally mediated version of imperialist techniques to produce legitimacy. Its success in the United States is unquestioned: who in public life is against counterinsurgency, even if they oppose the war in Iraq or invasions elsewhere? War is culture.

In October 1912 the first issue of Harriet Monroe's new journal, Poetry: A magazine of verse, appeared. The last has yet to come. In an era when little magazines came and went like mayflies, Poetry came and has refused to go. The journal had it all—in its early years it was at the forefront of debates about imagism, vers libre, and other issues concerning the “proper” form and content for poetry. Monroe, its editor, is still insufficiently appreciated as a major figure in literary modernism. We hope to change that. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Modernist Journals Project (MJP) has completed a digital edition of the first eleven years of this distinguished journal, using original copies provided by the University of Chicago Library, supplemented in some instances by copies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library. Those of us working on this edition have discovered many interesting things, including the first publication of Joyce Kilmer's “Trees,” which Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren later used as the primary example of bad poetry in their New Critical textbook, Understanding Poetry (274–78).

As part of poetry magazine's annual poetry day, wealthy patrons of the arts gathered in chicago on 19 november 1960 for a private auction of books and manuscripts that benefited the Modern Poetry Association. Among the items available for bidding were handwritten fair copies of W. H. Auden's “The Shield of Achilles,” “Musée des Beaux Arts,” and “The Unknown Citizen,” all on 8½-by-11-inch sheets of unlined white typing paper, the poet's signature conspicuously appended to the bottom right corner of each page. Having been recognized earlier in the day as Poetry's “Poet of Honor,” Auden had written the copies for the charity event. Hyman J. Sobiloff, a successful industrialist and published poet, purchased the collection for one thousand dollars. In January 1961, he donated the pieces to the Library of Congress, where they remain to this day. At the time, the collection proved somewhat newsworthy: Poetry, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post and Times-Herald, and the Library of Congress Information Bulletin all ran brief articles on the auction and donation. Since then, however, the documents have been essentially lost to history. Few, if any, other written records of them remain, Auden's biographers have ignored the manuscripts, and no critical analysis of their content has yet been published.

Hanover, New Hampshire. Another frigid winter day. I am walking to lunch. The dartmouth college green is covered in snow, and temperatures are dropping. It is January 1991, the day after Operation Desert Storm was launched in the Persian Gulf. “stop the war!!” A few people carrying large and small signs stand on the corner closest to Main Street; you can see their breath as they chant. “US out of Kuwait!” The war is so new that no lectures or teach-ins have been scheduled on campus yet, and I see that the protesters are neither students nor faculty members: they are people, many of them older, from surrounding New Hampshire and Vermont towns. Ahead of the academics, once again, I'm thinking. As on other such occasions, Grace Paley is here, wearing her blue parka, purple wool hat, snow boots, and mittens, holding her sign. The protests will continue every Friday at noon, in snow and ice, until the United States starts moving troops out of the Gulf in early March; I join when I can, but I often have conflicts on campus. Paley drives in from her home in nearby Thetford, Vermont, every time, without fail.

My Title, a variation on Susan Sontag's regarding the pain of others, is meant as an homage to sontag and as an extension of her searing critique of war photography and its reflexive objectification of suffering, its conversion of victims into objets d'art. But why, in particular, the pain of women Holocaust victims here? Because we have finally begun to amass a large and profound critical literature on gender and the Holocaust, which, alongside Sontag's work on photography, might help us look at how and why the public gaze of photographers, curators, historians, and museumgoers continues to turn women into objects of memory, idealized casts of perfect suffering and victimization, and even emblems of larger Jewish suffering during the Holocaust.

Western Literature's most magnificent object stages an intimacy between struggle and tranquillity. A gift to no soldier, but to his mother, requiting her ancient kindness, the shield of Achilles proffers a drama of war and of peace. The city of peace vibrates with the sound of flute and lyre, a wedding celebration, deliberations at assembly; the city of war quivers with well-armored soldiers, women and children perched atop the walls, beyond the walls an ambush laid along the river just where flocks of cattle come to drink (Il. 18.478–608). Homer teaches this truth about the object world: in the moment of their manufacture, weapons already manifest both prosperity and pain, technology and ceremony. Sweating, and longing, and grieving; springing, and whirling, and tumbling. The worlds inscribed on the shield figure those worlds out of which weaponry as such is forged. Could some new ekphrastic pedagogy disclose such worlds in the Hummer, the Abrams tank, the M-16, the B-52—revealing the quotidian histories they both congeal and obscure? If not, must we settle for Auden's lament, the mother pained now by what, for modernity, the god has wrought: “there on the shining shield / His hands had set no dancing-floor / But a weed-choked field” (294 [“The Shield of Achilles”]). Is the modern artifact so bereft of people?

Today the argentine judiciary dispenses ritual punishment as it condemns the oppressors of the last military dictatorship (1976–83) in the name of historical truth. Human rights organizations and movements have contributed immeasurably to this end. More than two decades have passed since the historic military-juntas trial (1985), and over the years successive state policies have proved that traumatic memory is a contested site, subject in this postdictatorial democracy to both debate and governmental intervention.

Violence as a public and private practice is a constant. Furthermore, it belongs in the political axis since political institutions measure, plan, and distribute it, inscribing and administering it according to their productive and programmatic interests.

Violence is adaptable and acquires different forms and formats, which range from the most concrete corporeal reality to the infliction of punishment on the symbolic and emotional registers of the subject. It is mobile but enduring, adjusting to the emergence of new social subjects. The enduring struggle against violence resituates and changes it, bringing about the penalization of practices considered abusive, such as long workdays, certain school regulations, or the beating of women.

Critical art ensemble staged the theory of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) as a gamble against a form of the all-too-present future of “dead capital,” otherwise known as late capital. In our 1994 book The Electronic Disturbance, Critical Art Ensemble argued that dead capital was being constituted as an electronic commodity form in constant flow (11). Capital had been, was, and would continue to be reensembling itself, as the contemporary elite moved from centralized urban areas to decentralized and deterritorialized cyberspace (13). For Critical Art Ensemble, it was clear that cyberspace, as it was called then, was the next stage of struggle. The activist reply to this change was to teleport the system of trespass and blockage that was historically anchored to civil disobedience to this new phase of economic flows in the age of networks: “As in civil disobedience, primary tactics in electronic civil disobedience are trespass and blockage. Exits, entrances, conduits, and other key spaces must be occupied by the contestational force in order to bring pressure on legitimized institutions engaged in unethical or criminal actions” (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience 18). As we imagined it in the early 1990s, electronic disturbance was the core gesture that could initiate a new “performative matrix” (Electronic Disturbance 57).

In October 1992, the united nations security council requested the secretary-general to appoint an impartial commission to examine and record the atrocities committed in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Two years later, this commission produced its final report. Some of the goriest pages in this catalogue of infamy are dedicated to the explosion on the Markale open-air market in central Sarajevo that took place around noon on Saturday, 5 February 1994. The report describes it as “the worst attack on civilians during the siege” of Sarajevo, citing that it killed at least 66 persons and wounded 197 (781). This explosion can be said to represent the turning point in the Bosnian war, which by that point had lasted some twenty-two months without any reasonable resolution in sight. David Binder, a New York Times reporter and the author of the most detailed account of this atrocity to date, writes that it

Stockhausen aside, how can anyone call the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers a work of art? Of what value is such a designation? What does calling the destruction of the Twin Towers a work of art assert about (performance) art, the authenticity of “what really happened,” and social morality during and after the first decade of the twenty-first century? To even begin to address these questions, I need to refer to the history of the avant-garde—because it has been avant-garde artists who for more than a century have called for the violent destruction of existing aesthetic, social, and political systems.

The Mahabharata, composed in sanskrit, is generally described as an epic. Other sanskrit texts refer to it occasionally as a kavya, or poem, and more often as an itihasa, which literally means “thus indeed it was,” suggesting an element of history. As with many early epics, it carries a consciousness of history but does not claim historicity. It evokes a past society of clans and narrates the events that bound them together or tore them asunder, focusing on the actions of those regarded as heroes.

Why do people go to war? Readers of herodotus who seek to uncover the cause of the Greco-Persian wars often find themselves baffled or confused, since he refuses to ascribe responsibility to any one factor or privilege one explanation over another. In this respect, he continues a tradition famously inaugurated by Homer, who takes an oblique stance on the cause of the Trojan War by commencing his Iliad in the tenth year of the conflict with the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon. Writing after Herodotus, Thucydides also makes a particular war his subject but refrains from offering simple or uniform reasons; admittedly, he says that the power of Athens and the fear that it inspired in Sparta are responsible for the Peloponnesian War, but he arrives at this inference by way of an extraordinary introduction that encompasses factors as diverse as migration, piracy, and geology. For his part, Herodotus ostensibly singles out Croesus, the king of Lydia, as the first to undertake “criminal acts of aggression against the Greeks” (5; bk. 1, ch. 5), but the implication of the Histories and its many details is that no one person or thing can be held responsible for war and no one cause leads to it. If the origins of conflict cannot be reduced to a single person or thing or cause, that may be why so many individuals in Herodotus are unable to justify the need for war or account for its regularity.

My recent book the war complex required rethinking the legacy of World War II. Called “the good war” in common parlance, World War II remains a potent and emotion-laden memory. But when it was over, fifty to eighty million people (estimates vary widely) had died—soldiers but also, and in greater numbers, civilians. Hitler's forces had murdered many innocents, and Japan had unleashed slaughter in China and Southeast Asia and bombed Pearl Harbor. But the Allies, the good guys in the tale, had killed roughly 600,000 German civilians and 400,000 Japanese (Sebald 3). So if World War II was necessary and justified, it was nonetheless terrible and even rotten.

A la guerra me lleva
mi necesidad;
si tuviera dineros
no fuera en verdad.
My poverty takes me off to war;
if I had money, believe me, I wouldn�t go.

War is everywhere and nowhere in don quijote. It consumes don quijote's thoughts but seldom appears in the guise he expects. War animates the protagonist's most elaborate, potent fantasy of self-aggrandizement and social climbing, in which he lends his strong arm to a king to help him fight his wars and is rewarded with the king's daughter (Cervantes, Don Quijote 211–15). Yet as Don Quijote sets about trying to make his name through daring feats, actual war seems both elusive and overwhelming. Instead, Cervantes gives us a series of fantasies that ironize the conventional representation of heroism in a romance key, registering the anachronism of the single knight in a world marked by the collective allegiances of epic. At the same time, through a series of burlesque battles, the text reflects on the incommensurability of humanist pieties about war and its actual experience. Finally, in its engagement with problems of religious and ethnic difference, Don Quijote registers the contrast between war as it might be and the conflicts Spain actually experienced both within and beyond its borders.

Although the european eighteenth century was long called the “age of Voltaire” (at least in textbooks), it was also an age of war. Courts and cities were undergoing a progressive pacification, as Norbert Elias has argued, but elsewhere the “civilizing process” was more bellicose. To finance the expansionist wars of Louis XIV, whose reign ended in 1715, and those of Louis XV, including the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the Seven Years' War (1756–63), the French state expended two-thirds of its revenues on war (Meyer 57). Despite the Anglomania that marked progressive intellectual and literary circles in France around mid-century, between 1689 and 1815 France and England were officially at war for sixty-two years, not including minor conflicts. Against this backdrop, the image of Voltaire is that of an unflagging pacifist. Standing for all wars, the fictional war between the Abares and the Bulgares in which the naive hero of Voltaire's Candide finds himself caught up is described by the text's narrator, in a bitingly ironic oxymoron, as “a heroic slaughter” (114). War for Voltaire represented yet another instance of infamous unreason, odious intolerance, and despicable evil. It was the collective, generalized form of the l'infâme (“the despicable”), against which he publicly and tirelessly railed. The phrase écrasez l'infâme (“crush the despicable”), appended to his letters beginning in the early 1760s, signified the Enlightenment project of rooting out error, superstition, and intolerance by means of reasoned argument, common sense, and often a healthy dose of sharp irony. Quickly becoming a battle cry, penned in condensed, symbolic form as “ÉCRLINF,” the phrase had preserved all its caustic energy when, a century later, Friedrich Nietzsche inserted it throughout his Ecco Homo. Voltaire's attempts to stamp out this evil took local forms, such as the highly public letter-writing campaigns he mounted to spark indignation and obtain justice for the victims of intolerance, as in the causes célèbres involving the protestant Calas and Sirven families, the young chevalier de La Barre, and Lally-Tollendal.

Though few today, even in academic circles, can say with certainty when, where, or over what issues the seven years' war was fought, this mid-eighteenth-century conflict can fairly be characterized as the first global war. It was fought on three continents—Europe, North America, and Asia—and there were significant encounters in West Africa and the Caribbean. It engaged all the European powers, and it is estimated to have cost over a million lives. The historian Linda Colley has characterized the Seven Years' War as “[t]he most dramatically successful war the British ever fought” (101). From the standpoint of empire, this assessment is accurate. The war established the contours of the vast British Empire and brought the rival French presence in North America and India to a sudden end. It also had transformative outcomes for the populations caught in the crossfire. Terms such as global, diaspora, refugee, and cultural minority are more widely applied in discussions of contemporary transnational warfare, but they helpfully illuminate the upheavals associated with this eighteenth-century conflict. The global warfare of the 1750s–60s relegated the indigenous population of North America to the status of an embattled cultural minority, and it turned thousands of francophone Canadians into refugees. Yet despite its scale and the social and political fallout it occasioned, the Seven Years' War has never occupied a central place in the national narratives of its major contestants or in the historiography of the Enlightenment. The main reason for this low profile, I think, is that the war was a many-sided conflict, fought on both metropolitan and colonial fronts. Because of this multilateralism, the war has had a fragmented historical reception, a fracture reflected in the various names by which it has come to be known. The label Seven Years' War is generally used to refer to the fighting that took place in Europe. The war in North America, on the other hand, goes under the name French and Indian War, though in Quebec it is remembered more acrimoniously as the War of Conquest. Histories of India often inventory the warfare of the 1750s–60s under the academic-sounding title Third Carnatic War; a more meaningful characterization would be that it marked the starting point of British rule in India.

“War always interested me,” wrote the twenty-three-year-old Leo Tolstoy in “the raid” (1853), an early story inspired by his personal experience of a brutal border skirmish in the Caucasus. “Not war in the sense of maneuvers devised by great generals … but the reality of war, the actual killing” (1). The focus of Tolstoy's interest here remained absolute throughout his long and brilliantly inconsistent life. As a second lieutenant during the Crimean War in 1854–55, he wrote three “Sevastopol Stories” about that city under siege, which were so cannily constructed and voiced that the new tsar, Alexander II, deeply touched, decreed that they be translated into French so that Russian courage would reach a European audience—whereas other readers took these tales as critical of the imperial war effort, even as subversive. Tolstoy revealed his own chauvinist side in the mid-1860s while writing the final books of War and Peace. Napoléon was a caricature from the start, of course, but, in a rising arc of patriotic disdain, Tolstoy proceeded to ridicule almost every alien nation's soldiers, generals, and tacticians; only simple Russian peasants, partisans, Field Marshal Kutuzov, and the occasional clear-seeing field commander were exempt from the author's scorn. By the end of his life, Tolstoy professed radical Christian anarchism and pacifism, preaching nonviolent resistance to evil and urging young men to oppose the military draft. But he never lost his fascination with close-up “actual killing.” The greatest literary achievement of Tolstoy's final decade, the Caucasus novel Hadji Murad, ends with such graphic slaughter, so many grotesque hackings and mutilations, and even the beheading of the hero described at such epic leisure that it is difficult to believe Tolstoy ever doubted the veracity of languages of violence.

In the modern english lexicon, the curious word thug is usually traced to Hindi. In the early days of the antithug military campaign in India, William Henry Sleeman, the British architect of the campaign, brought out a thug lexicon entitled Ramaseeana; or, A Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugs in 1836. This lexicon represents the first systematic attempt to identify who the thugs are and how they communicate with one another in secret society. It appears to provide hard linguistic evidence for a newly discovered threat to the British presence in India, cobbling together a large collection of predominantly Hindi words and phrases and building them into a coherent image of the thug that attests to the authenticity of Hindu thuggism. The graphic details of thugs' cold-blooded strangling of innocent travelers are as numerous as the amount of verbs and nouns that have found their way into the book and into subsequent embellishments by popular media. That the word thug is of Hindi origin (thag, theg, or thak) seems sufficient to prove that thugs exist and pose a threat. (Echoes of this argument can be found in the justifications for the United States–led war against the terrorist network al-Qaeda.) But as Martine Van Woerkens and other scholars have shown, thuggism was actually invented by the British who tried to seize criminal jurisdiction in areas that had been in the hands of the Mogul rulers. In the course of extending their control over a mobile population, the British used the construction of thug monstrosity to lay the foundation of “a ritual of conjuration” in the play of mirrors between them and the colonized (Van Woerkens 292).

At the outset of his public career, when he was aligned with William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass followed Garrison's lead in preaching the efficacy of moral suasion in the fight against slavery. Douglass elaborated his Garrisonian position in “My Opposition to War,” an address delivered to the London Peace Society in May 1846, one year after Garrison published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. A self-proclaimed “advocate of peace,” Douglass declares unequivocally that “such is my deep, firm, conviction that nothing can be attained for liberty universally by war, that were I to be asked the question as to whether I would have my emancipation by the shedding of one single drop of blood, my answer would be in the negative” (Frederick Douglass Papers [FDP] 1: 262). Offering an example of what he terms “the demoniacal spirit of war,” Douglass reports on how a New York iron worker and several women and children were killed by a bomb recently discovered from the British bombardment during the Revolutionary War. Then and now, he says, the loss of innocent life was a daily occurrence of “the demon, war” (263).