Nation and Community in Relation to War: A Philosophical Investigation into the Frontier
Abstract
The language of war, especially the legal one, is state-centric. However, there are possible analytical approaches that could center around other actors and aspects of war that are otherwise overlooked and disregarded. In this article, I analyze two of such approaches: collectivity and territory. Combining these two languages of war can present a more holistic view that creates a unified front against the state-centric method of studying and understanding war. The article starts by explaining territory and its discontents, arriving at the idea of how a frontier interconnects different non-state phenomena in the most explicit way. Then, I analyze collectivity in several forms: nation, community, and no/us, a term introduced by Frédéric Neyrat based on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy. These forms are ordered in their scale of representation of different subjects and non-subjects, and are based on the paradoxes at the heart of ideas, which result in the inability to include the multiplicity. I conclude with an example of no/us being used to make the language of territories and the language of collectivity cohabitate.
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