Showing posts with label nanna heitmann. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nanna heitmann. Show all posts

1 Mar 2022

War - What is it Good For?

 
Russian tank entering eastern Ukraine (24-02-22)
Photo by Nanna Heitmann / Magnum Photos
 
 
Well, if nothing else it reminds us that violence is one of those things which, as Byung-Chul Han says, never disappears; not even in its negative, fully visible and all too real form, which, as the Ukranians are now discovering, is "explosive, massive, and martial" [1]
 
Those who (naively) believed that the age of military conflict was over have been given a brutal wake up call by Vladimir Putin and the Russian Armed Forces. 
 
The invasion of Ukraine may only prove to be a temporary set back to the process of globalisation and the utopian dream of a world without borders, etc., but, on the other hand, maybe this would be a good time to reconsider violence in all its externalised macrophysical manifestations ...
 
 
Notes 
 
I know that many readers will think of the No. 1 single by Edwin Starr (Motown, 1970) when they read the title of this post, but what they might not know - unless they happened to work at Pendant Publishing back in the mid-1990s - is that this was originally the title of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1869) and it's this little known fact that I was recalling here. 
 
[1] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (The MIT Press, 2018), p. vii.