Etienne Balibar: Politics As War, War As Politics

Etienne Balibar is professor in Paris X Nanterre and University of California, Irvine. He

was invited to participate in the first edition of the Dictionary of War but unfortunately
could not make it to Frankfurt. Instead he has sent us as his contribution an essay entitled:
"Politics As War, War As Politics - Post-Clausewitzian Variations". It is the text of a public
lecture he gave at the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern
University, Evanston, on May 8, 2006.

We seem to be really living in a post-clausewitzian era, in a double sense of this expression.

First, there is a lively ongoing debate, which is not restricted to the narrow range of
polemologists, concerning the clausewitzian or non-clausewitzian character of
contemporary wars. This debate started about 25 years ago, when the typical Cold-War era
obsession with mutual destruction of the Great Powers gave place to a keen interest among
military experts and political theorists for low intensity conflicts, mainly located in the
Third World (a category still very much in use after the Second World as such had
collapsed), involving interventions from technologically sophisticated armies from the
North against guerrilla-type adversaries, therefore highly dissymmetrical.
Martin van Creveld from Israel and Samuel Huntington from the US seem to have been
among the first to launch the slogan of non-clausewitzian warfare in a post-clausewitzian
political environment. Then came the ethnic wars in former Yugoslavia and other parts of
the world, which prompted the British peace theorist and politologist Mary Kaldor and
others to launch the idea of New Wars versus Old Wars, involving historical subjects
which are not Nation-States with their regular armies, again suggesting that the explanatory
value of ideas deriving from Clausewitzs celebrated work On War even generalized and
adapted to new circumstances, new strategic interests and new technologies, which had
been a major preoccupation of War theorists for 150 years had reached its limit, and was
henceforth unable to account for the kind of interaction now arising between war and
politics, but also religion, race, economy. Just as, at a certain point, after a glorious career,
Euclidian Geometry had to give way to Non-Euclidian Geometry to describe the real
physical world, Clausewitzian strategy and polemology should give way to a new nonClausewitzian understanding of the historical world, allowing another type of
calculations.

This did not prevent some analysts of contemporary wars to advocate a continuous use of
Clausewitzian schemes and concepts, both analytical and normative, I am particularly
thinking of Alain Joxe in his remarkable LEmpire du Chaos (translated as Empire of
Disorder), who by the same token reinstalled Clausewitz in a series of theorists of War as a
social and political phenomenon, and as the correlate of State sovereignty, which did not
only include Thucydides, Machiavelli and Schmitt, but also Hobbes, Marx and Weber. But
the situation has now changed again, which to a large extent is the result of the launching of
the US War in the Middle East, and the way it has evolved in its first three years.
The rapid succession of a victorious attack and a more and more difficult defensive battle,
haunted by the possibility and perhaps the necessity of retreat, has not only suggested
parallels with the Vietnam War, it has renewed the classical discussion about the return of
the political factors within the military operations, and the famous clausewitzian thesis of
the decreasing efficiency of attacking armies over time, and the superiority of the defensive
strategy over the offensive one in the long run, provided some geographical or
geographical-cultural conditions are given. There is a difficulty here, however, which
everybody has in mind: namely the fact that, in the pure Clausewitzian model, the
subject of the defensive strategy which in the end became victorious, to use a
philosophical category, could be identified with a certain typically modern unity of army,
people and state, either already given, or formed in the war process itself. This was also the
case for the Vietnamese resistance to the American invasion, but remains more than
doubtful and probably inadequate in the case of the war in Iraq, where nobody except some
abstract ideologues of popular resistance or anti-imperialist Jihad could identify the
subject of the anti-US operations in any simple manner, and the very existence of an
Iraqi State and unified people is at stake.
A similar difficulty seems to be affecting the other way of bringing back clausewitzian or
quasi-clausewitzian ideas, or words, into the reading of the current situation, which
concerns the representation of a duel (at world scale) between two adversaries, each of
which seems to be seeking the annihilation of the other, called by the US Administration
the War on Terror. In spite of the blatant dissymmetry of the two enemies, it is tempting
to evoke Clausewitzs idea of the rising to the extremes, which according to him is the
law of the pure war. But again the analogy stumbles on the fact that, in Clausewitzs
model, the mobile of this rising to the extremes of violence is the will of each enemy to
reach a certain vital political goal through the acceptance of a higher risk, which is
presented as a rational wager.

Therefore it also involves a principle of limitation, or self-limitation. War for the sake of
war or at the expense of the destruction of ones power is ruled out from a Clausewitzian
point of view, and so is the idea of a war without limits, either in space or in time, against
an indeterminate enemy identified with evil as such. Perhaps this could be conceived, but
then it should not be called war: another name, less political and more theological or
mythical, should be looked for.
However simplistic and abstract such considerations may sound, they can give us an idea of
the reasons why, today as in previous situations along the 150 years that passed since the
publication of Vom Kriege by Marie von Clausewitz after the manuscript left by her late
husband, the reflection on the intrinsic, perhaps constitutive, relationship between war and
politics remains profoundly post-clausewitzian, but this time in a more critical sense,
notwithstanding the necessity to revisit and possibly reverse, or alter each and every of
Clausewitzs propositions and definitions. If I had time I would try and argue on the model
of what Claude Lefort and Althusser have written on Machiavelli that there is a never
ending labor or perlaboration of Clausewitzs text within contemporary political theory
that goes along with a permanent trouble produced by the reading of Clausewitz on
theorists who, at the same time, do not recognize in him their definition of the political, and
cannot deny that he touches the heart of what makes politics thinkable, albeit not always, or
not entirely rational. But this would pre-empt conclusions deprived of a sufficient textual
basis. Let us therefore return, precisely, to the texts, and examine in a schematic manner
some of their conceptual singularities.
I will divide my presentation in two rather unequal parts, each of which would indeed
deserve a much more developed treatment : the first and longest dealing with some
problems of interpretation, or better said, reconstruction of Clausewitzs theory of the
articulation of war and politics; the second with a derivation from Clausewitz and a
reply to Clausewitz that, in different ways, can be found, either explicitly or implicitly, in
the Marxist tradition, where a class counterpart to the Clausewitzian conception of
national wars can be retrieved. After which, in a conclusion inevitably very brief, I will
return to the issue of the conception of the subject (or the non-subject, or the impossible
subject) which is implied in these ways of articulating War and Politics in an intrinsic unity.

Let us now retrieve some of the problems raised by the reading of Clausewitzs book. To
find an internal consistency, either at the philosophical level or at the pragmatic level, in
what (we should never forget that) remains an unfinished work, whose status has affinities
with the Penses of Pascal or the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, and whose author
has declared himself that he wanted to rewrite it entirely to take into account a crucial
rectification that occurred to him in the middle, is a hard task that has produced hundreds of
commentaries. Not ignoring them, or rather some of them, I will cut through and propose a
procedure of interpretation perhaps incomplete or biased, but I hope not artificial, which
relies on the observation that some of Clausewitzs proposition never ceased to raise
difficulties or call for renewed understanding. Selecting four such propositions, I will try to
assemble them into a kind of system or axiomatics, and I will describe Clausewitzs
theoretical project as a continuous attempt at controlling their excessive consequences,
either taken separately, or reacting one upon the other. And it is the same group of
problematic theses that I will suggest post-clausewitzian thinkers tried to understand in a
different way, or to reformulate, or to dissociate from one another.
Clausewitzs most famous and most frequently discussed propositions (at least today), well
beyond the circle of military experts, are the proposition which defines or characterizes war
as the continuation of politics by other means (sometimes : the mere continuation, the
German term being Fortsetzung), and the proposition which states that defence as a
strategy (what is a strategy? this question is also clearly involved) has an intrinsic
superiority over attack or the offensive, to which I alluded earlier. Let me briefly
comment on each of them, but also suggest that they should be completed by two other
propositions. Only this system or axiomatics of four virtually independent theses, I will
suggest, allows us to understand where the intentions and the difficulties lie.
The continuation thesis is repeated twice, with some significant nuances, in two separate
places, Book I and Book VIII of Vom Kriege, which not only find themselves at the two
opposite ends of the text, but also, according to the authors indications, correspond to
different conceptions of his object.
On the one side, the accent is put on the idea that war is indeed a way to continue to
pursue political goals, to pursue political goals by other means, or through the
introduction of other means, which are the means of actual violence, or even of extreme
violence not only threat or constraint. Implicit here seems to be the idea that the usual or

normal means of politics are non-violent, which in certain circumstances becomes

insufficient, therefore political action would find its absolute limit if it were not for the
possibility of using other means (violent means) beyond the normal ones, thus expanding
the possibilities (and the power) of politics, and achieving its goals, but perhaps at the risk
of an uncontrollable situation, of entering a dangerous field, and a limit domain, where not
only the existence of the political subject is in danger, but the political nature of the action,
or political logic of politics itself, can become subverted. It is in the same context that
Clausewitz would bring in the idea that the use of violent means the means of war, and
the means of these means: the institution of the military, the development of patriotism, etc.
reacts upon politics itself, or modifies politics. Politics cannot make use of the violent
means of war without being transformed itself by the use of these means, and perhaps
radically transformed, denatured. The problem of the articulation of politics and war is
therefore immediately posed in dialectical terms, in terms of a process where the identity of
the initial terms is at stake.
But then, there is a second formulation, in which the accent is put on the idea that war is
nothing else than the continuation of politics by other means, therefore not a trespassing
of the normal limits of the political, but just another possibility within these limits, a
shifting from certain political instruments to others depending on the circumstances, the
forces and the interests at stake (Clausewitz explicitly uses the term instrument) for the
political subject, who in turn becomes precisely characterized by its capacity (which we
may call a sovereign capacity) to use of both kinds of means, violent and non-violent, or
not to limit itself to the use of non-violent means. With such a formulation comes indeed a
certain representation of the rational character of politics, particularly illustrated by the way
in which it makes use of violence to achieve some of its goals or handle some situations,
but again this proves to be a dialectical notion, or to involve a latent tension and a notion of
risk. Since it can be read both ways, or either as a description or as a prescription, either as
an assertion that politics makes use of the violent means of war without changing its nature,
trespassing its limits, or as a warning that the violent means of war remain political means
only if their own consequences and, again, retroactive effects on those who use them, their
own logic do not escape the political rationality or subvert it, i.e. does not become an
independent logic. But in fact would this be an independent logic? What Clausewitz
seems to imply is that you either have an instrumentalization of war by politics, or an
instrumentalization of politics by war, and since the second is impossible or utterly
undesirable, it must be the first, therefore Clausewitz writes that there is a political logic
and only a grammar of war, and the first has a primacy over the second.

Now it seems to me that the difficulty involved here, which is anything but easy to solve
either for us or for Clausewitz himself, and which pushed him alternatively to different
formulations, can be identified through the following considerations. What seems to be the
case is that war, with respect to politics, has to be considered twice, from two different
angles. It is not the whole of politics (since politics has other procedures than war, equally
necessary), but it concerns and affects the essence of politics, which is revealed and,
practically, determined by the ways in which it recurs to war, and the consequences on
politics itself of the political use of the violent means of war. Certainly what Clausewitz
wants to avoid (and we will see that it is not without difficulties, and that the question keeps
haunting his successors) is to assert that recurring to war is the essence of politics, that the
use of the violent means of war, with its logical and existential implications (such as the
necessity to designate one or several enemies), defines the concept of the political, which
in turn can lead to the reversal of the initial statement (namely that politics is the
continuation, or the consequence of war). But Clausewitz wants (or needs) to be able to
make the question of the use of war as an instrument, and the question of the converse
effects of this use upon politics itself its crucial characteristic.
It would be tempting to see Clausewitzs formula as a modern reformulation of the old
Roman juridical and political principle : cedant arma togae, the armed activities of war and
the military institution shall obey the primacy of the civil magistrate, but this formula
which has a normative value, does not account for the problem that obsesses Clausewitz,
namely the fact that war used as a political means reacts upon politics and transforms it, not
into something else but into something new, a new political form where it meets with its
most profound and difficult problems, and where its very possibility is at stake, and at risk.
On the other hand, to permanently subject war to the primacy of the political is to assert
that war is (and can remain) rational, this rationality being essentially expressed in a
practical relationship between means and ends, which form a chain, therefore being a
teleological rationality which comes from the political itself, which sets a measure for the
rationality of war. This is all the more remarkable because Clausewitz is insistent on the
fact that war reaches the extremes of violence.
But to reach the extremes of violence, where actual destruction is at stake, is not to exist in
the form of pure violence. It is at the level of what Clausewitz call tactics, which he
identifies with the management of combat (Gefecht), that the extremes of violence are

reached: this is where men kill and die, individually and in masses. But tactics and the
combat are not ends in themselves, as parts of the war they have to be subjected to
strategic objectives, which themselves serve political goals. We can already understand
here why the question of strategy (its definition, its function) is the most important one in
Clausewitz, and perhaps also the most difficult, which in the end seems to escape. Strategy
articulates within the analysis of war (both historical and conceptual) the level of extreme
violence (the absolute means, so to speak), and the level of political rationality (the absolute
ends). Bringing in an anthropological terminology, we might also say that the violence
that Clausewitz associates with politics under the name war is not unqualified violence
(the formula does not say that violence is the continuation of politics), it is institutional
violence, which has to remain such. Therefore Clausewitzs problem is: how is it possible
for violence to reach the extreme and to remain institutional, within the limits of an
institution? What happens or would happen if this unity of opposites proved unsustainable?
We may perhaps already understand here how and why post-clausewitzian variations are
generated, each time indeed for practical reason and in a given historical circumstance :
formally they will maintain the principle war is a continuation of politics by other means,
the means of extreme violence, using violence as an instrument hypothetically subjected to
the political rationality, or teleology, but they will give completely new contents, either to
the notion of the political, or to the definition of what is a war, or to both, and conversely,
it is only through this new interpretation of the terms politics, war, violence, that they will
be able either to maintain or to question the idea of the continuation. By doing this, they
will exhibit the circularity of the Clausewitzian idea, and also its productivity far beyond
the initial conditions. But I would argue that this becomes possible only if we take into
account the other proposition which, already in Clausewitz, is associated with the general
principle in a more specific set of axioms.
The second proposition to be found in Vom Kriege that is probably most well known
concerns the strategic superiority of the defence over the attack. Again it is not located
in a single place and has several reformulations, but the main developments are in Book VI
and VII which concern defence and attack and contain reciprocal discussions on this point.

Clausewitz is eager to make clear that the idea of the superiority of the defensive concerns
neither the tactical level nor the political as such, therefore it is typical for the relatively
autonomous level of strategy and it can be said that the whole object of a theory of strategy
aims at establishing this thesis and qualifying it according to its many conditions and
circumstances. We find here again a typical circle. There is no question of asserting a
tactical superiority of the defensive in general, much the contrary, the idea is that tactical
attacks are an essential part of every defensive strategy since they exploit momentary and
local imbalances in the relationship of forces in order to harm the enemy and progressively
destroy its capacity to wage the war, that is to move and decide, which was maximum in the
moment of the initial attack. Among the later followers of Clausewitz, Mao Zedong in his
theorization of guerrilla warfare will consistently develop this complementarity, but it is
already clearly there in Clausewitz. There is also no question of asserting a superiority of a
defensive politics or a politics of defence (for instance, national defence, or defence of
the national territory, or independence) as intrinsically superior, and this is probably the
most difficult point. Such a thesis would amount, it seems to me, to a realistic version of
the just war theory, or one aspect of it, the ius ad bellum, whose modern version is precisely
that only defensive wars, waged by nations to react to an exterior aggression, are legitimate.
In this case they would be not only legitimate, but victorious, at least in the long run, and
all things considered, which means with possibly many exceptions. But this cannot be
Clausewitzs conception: Clausewitz has no moral or theological conception of war; he is a
typical advocate of what Carl Schmitt later will systematize as the ius publicum
Europaeum, the idea that nation-states have an intrinsic right to recur to war to achieve their
political goals or pursue their interests, or what they view as their interests. The idea of the
superiority of defence does not concern the political goals (in German Zwecke), it concerns
only, so to speak, the military objectives (in German Ziele) through which these political
goals can be achieved, and it does indeed impose an intrinsic limitation should we say a
material or materialistic? upon the formal rationality of the articulation of politics
and war. This articulation is rational, or displays a rational structure which makes it
available for theory, inasmuch as politics imposes the ultimate goals of war (we might also
say: the ultimate goals of any war are always political, whether consciously or not, whether
the actors are conscious or not of the determinations of their politics), but also inasmuch as
it is the feasibility of the military objectives that decide whether a politics was rational or
not, most of the time in retrospect, and this will be indeed settled in the form of actual
combat. Now we find ourselves again in a strange situation: there is no doubt that

strategy is the main object of Clausewitzs reflection, to which he devotes most of his
analyses, comparing historical situations, discussing the examples of military genius which
are examples of strategic genius, isolating a specific grammatical concept which is the
concept of war plan or strategic coherence, trying to indicate the geographic and
temporal limits within which such a plan can be devised and testes (the campaign, the
theatre of war, etc.). However these efforts are paradoxical: the more they become
precise and substantial, the more the autonomy of their object seems to escape or become
problematic, or rather involved in a logical paradox, as if the main objective of strategic
thinking and planning were precisely to demonstrate on the field, that is, the battlefield, that
there actually can exist, in the long run, something like an autonomy of strategy. Strategy
concentrates the inner tensions and perhaps the aporia of the concept of war. It seems to me
that three additional considerations can illuminate this point.
First, this is where theory and history meet in a problematic unity. Clausewitz is
insistent on the fact that wars are always singular processes, and there can be nothing such
as a deductive science of war. But there can be a reflection on the regularities and the
tendencies of the war-politics articulation, in the Kantian sense of the Critique of judgment,
which remains hypothetical. We might say that the concept of the autonomy of strategy,
which is entirely concerned with its own conditions and limitations, and their variations in
history, is a regulative concept, or a category of judgment in that sense, it is permanently
testing its own validity. We may also suspect that Clausewitz has an interest, both rational
and subjective, in this reflection, which is to decide, in a given historical conjuncture,
whether the lesson to be drawn from history, and more precisely from the history he has
been taking part in, namely the history of the revolutionary and imperial wars between
France and the rest of Europe, showing that with time a defensive strategy is bound to win,
whether this lesson, I repeat, can be extended to the future. And whether this means that
wars will remain an instrument of politics, or in some sense, might become (or already have
become) impossible qua continuations of politics, or only at the risk of annihilating their
logical function. It is striking to see that this question haunting Clausewitz, which is
involved in his own argument concerning the superiority of the defensive strategy, in the
reasons he gives for this superiority, as a tendencial result of history, will be permanently

haunting the post-clausewitzian reflections on war today more than ever. Clausewitz
presents his thesis as a paradox (how come that the strategy which only has a negative
result, defence, can be proved superior to the strategy which has a positive result, attack or
conquest?), and he wonders if this paradox signals a latent impossibility that would become
manifest when the means of war are pushed to the extreme.
Second, we should probably transform Clausewitzs formulations in order to overcome the
apparent scheme of a comparison between the respective qualities of two different
strategies, one of which would be the offensive and the other the defensive, as if they
existed separately, into a more profound question of the transformation, therefore the
reversal of the defensive into offensive, or the quest of the point of inflection where the
defence transforms into attack. This is a question of the space and time of the war, therefore
of its history, and a question of its actors, therefore again of its history in a substantial
sense. War, writes Clausewitz, is a complex form of the duel, which develops over time,
i.e. progressively transforms the relationship of forces between its own actors, who
themselves can be complex actors, since they involve governments and peoples,
institutional and human forces which merge in the typical form of the army (armies are
the general form in which historical actors present themselves in the domain of war),
alliances and changes in the alliances, etc. And the time of war is an oriented time, which
leads from attack to defence and from defence to attack; not a pure logical time, with a
preestablished cycle, but a historical time which is dominated by the tendencial superiority
of all the factors which in the long run reinforce one of the strategic posture. The general
notion used by Clausewitz to summarize these temporal effects is friction. Contrary to what
the connotations of the term might suggest, it is not a mechanical notion, but a historical
one, which integrates moral and technical, psychological and sociological factors. Thus
Clausewitzs problem, the very object of a reflective strategy, becomes the possibility to
understand why an attack that is not immediately successful (or completely successful) is
bound to progressively yield to its defensive adversary, which means should be used to
postpone this inevitable result, and above all to understand how a defensive strategy is a
preparation for a victorious counter-offensive, which means that the counter-offensive is
prepared from within the defensive itself and the defensive in a sense is continued,
prolonged (fortgesetzt) in the phase of offensive, in an immanent manner. There must be an

ideal point of inflection, and the whole question is whether this point can be identified, and
with what kind of event it should be identified. This question was not Clausewitzs absolute
invention, but he gave it a theoretical formulation. It was staged on a grand scale by the
confrontation between the offensive strategy of Napoleon and the defensive strategy of
Kutuzov during the Campaign of Russia in 1812, in which Clausewitz himself took part,
having decided after the defeat of Prussia and its more or less voluntary incorporation into
the coalition led by the victor, to move to the other camp and enrol in the Russian army as a
staff officer. The dramatic moment, to be commented again and again by war theorists in
the 19th century and beyond, including Friedrich Engels and Leo Tolstoy who both relied
on the account of the campaign written by Clausewitz before he embarked in the writing of
Vom Kriege (and published later by Clausewitzs sister), was the battle of Borodino, with
its heavy death toll on the two great armies of nearly equal size and strength, which
appeared as a tactical victory but proved a strategic defeat for Napoleon, and although it
immediately lead to the conquest of the Russian capital, in fact prepared his final defeat.
But this confrontation also displayed some of the typical conditions under which the
inflection takes place : not only the duration of the campaign, the immensity of the
geographic environment, the counter-productive effects of the conquest itself in terms of
raising the hostility of the population, etc., but the combination of regular warfare and
guerrilla warfare (a new notion, if not reality, imported from Spain), and the incorporation
of the people in arms as the main actor of the war on both sides.
Which leads us to a third remark, where the dialectical intrication of the three levels, called
politics, strategy, and tactics, becomes even more apparent. This is perhaps
Clausewitzs most profound dilemma. It concerns the relationship between what he would
himself describe as two logical opposite terms or extremes in the understanding of the
war: on the one side, the fact that where there is war there is a possibility of annihilation
which is sought and has to be faced, and the fact that the proper political capacity within
war itself is the capacity to decide whether a war that has been started should be continued
or not, given the risks that it involves and the effects it produces at the political level, or
should be interrupted: when to finish a war, and at what price, in short. As for
annihilation, Clausewitz clearly believes that there is a limit to it, which should be
approached but not crossed. He considers what he calls absolute war, where the duel rises

to the extreme, involving all the forces of the state or the nation, but not what has been
called later total war, where the civilians are targeted as well as the armed forces. The
annihilation that is at stake in a war that continues politics is the physical annihilation of the
armies, or their reduction to impotency, their disbanding, etc., which makes it impossible
for one adversary to resist the imposition of the others will, or goals. Which conversely
poses the problem of the capacity to halt a war. The reason why Clausewitz is so admirative
of Frederick II, king of Prussia, called the great Frederick, is that he proved able to control
his own victories and make peace at a favourable moment to retain some of his conquests,
and the reason why Napoleons genius was bound to fail and end miserably, pulling his
country with him into defeat, was that he found himself in a logic of conquest where the
political goals could be achieved only at the cost of extending the scale of war beyond any
preestablished limit, where the defensive should prevail and prepare a devastating counteroffensive, re-establishing the status quo ante. But there is a strong tension between these
two extremes, since the capacity to stop the war (again a negative strategic notion, given
primacy by Clausewitz in a paradoxical manner) is the greatest when the war only includes
partial forces and resources, i.e. remains far away from the prospect of annihilation for one
or both of the adversaries, whereas the strategic goal of annihilation materially involves the
engagement of forces and resources, above all human forces, which cannot be withdrawn at
will from the battlefield, or only at the risk of backfiring on the existence of the state. Again
what is at stake here is a point of equilibrium which perhaps does not exist, or is an
impossible point, a point of impossibility for what it makes possible, the articulation of
politics and war, i.e. which raises the spectre of the impossibility of war, while making it
intelligible. Which leads me to some final remarks.
I said in the beginning that we could arrange Clausewitzs major propositions in the form of
an axiomatics, whose status itself is hypothetic and problematic rather than apodictic. Since
now I have only evoked two of the propositions forming this axiomatics, each of which
poses hard problems. I will have to be very quick on the remaining two, but I cannot spare
them because the idea that I want to defend is that Clausewitzs discourse makes sense only
as a combination of them all, that his ultimate question, which is a question about the
subject of war (or the political subject of war, therefore the political subject as such,
as revealed in war), is a question that circulates perhaps endlessly, in an aporetic manner
between these four propositions. And this is also where post-clausewitzian discourses
encroach and found their site within his own discourse.

The third proposition concerns the distinction between absolute war and limited war.
This is precisely the point on which Clausewitz claimed that he had changed his mind while
writing his book (which I remind you remained unfinished) and reached a new position
after which the whole theory should become recast. But this is far from clear, and in fact
calls for a symptomatic reading, after interpreters have tried to solve the riddle in all
possible directions; by projecting on Clausewitz various epistemological schemes
(dialectical, ideal-typical, etc.). First, Clausewitz hesitates between two terminologies to
designate what is not the absolute war: he speaks of limited war and of real war, but
to jump from there to the idea that real war, which actually take place, are always limited,
while absolute wars are only a virtual model, after which we can interpret empirical cases,
but which are not to be observed in practice, is much too simple and in fact contradicts the
text. Very quickly said, I side her with Emmanuel Terray against Raymond Aron, and I
believe that Clausewitzs theory does not reduce the notion of absolute war to a virtual
case or an ideal type, but concerns historical realities, a change of nature of the war which
has been observed in history, and confronts us with a dramatic dilemma. To be sure,
absolute war just as limited war represent antagonistic poles; they represent extremes
in the logical sense between which real wars must shift and display various degrees and
combinations. But reality has approached each of them in almost pure fashion in at least
two circumstances for which I believe that we could find equivalents in a more recent
period : the Kabinettskriege or governmental wars of the absolute monarchies in the 18th
century, waged by armies of mercenaries or professional soldiers or recruiting by coercion
under the command of a military caste, which aimed at shifting the balance of forces and
realizing antagonistic interests within the so-called European equilibrium, were limited
wars by definition; even when they involved bloody battles. But the new wars starting
with the French revolution, the Volkskriege that involved a nation in arms first arising out
of a popular insurrection, then transformed by Napoleon into an imperialist instrument of
continental hegemony, then in turn matched and fought against by other nations in arms,
with each side developing a nationalist mystique, and fighting for what they believed was
their very existence, were absolute wars, involving a rise to the extremes in terms of
magnitude and violence. This evolution is sketched in Clausewitzs extraordinary account
of the world history of warfare in Book VIII, a model for many subsequent attempts
(including Engels in his articles of the New American Cyclopaedia written and published

in the 1860s). And Clausewitzs question clearly is: which reasons do we have to believe
that this evolution is irreversible, that history is evolving into the direction of the
absolutization of war, so to speak, and which possibilities do we have to resist this
tendency, which at the same time makes war the most serious of all political matters,
where the very existence of nations and states is at stake, and in the end could reverse the
primacy of the political over its own instrument? It is useful to remember here who
Clausewitz personally was: a Prussian officer coming from a family of dubious nobility,
with a philosophical education (mainly Kantian), who had taken the risk of leaving his
country to continue to fight the arch-enemy, privileging the patriotic interest over the
immediate diplomatic arrangements. He would play a decisive role in the transformation of
the Prussian army itself into a national army, in the invention of what would become the
huge armies of the 19th and the 20th century based on popular drafting, but he would
certainly not see without anxiety the possibility that this evolution deprive the military caste
and the state bureaucracy of their unmitigated monopoly of the political decision not to
mention the social risks involved in the use of partisan or guerrilla warfare, which in
extreme situations is the ultimate weapon. Which brings us to the fourth and last
proposition.
The fourth proposition is also one of the most disputed ones: it states the primacy of moral
factors, again in the last instance i.e. all things considered, over other strategic factors in
the history of wars. When we start looking at the complex series of elements that are listed
by Clausewitz under the notion of moral factors and what they imply in philosophical
terms, we find a very complex system of forces. Moral indeed refers to considerations of
morality, but they are inseparable from a broader problematic of the passions, individual
and collective, which animate subjects in history. And they refer to the individual as well as
the collective. So you have to take into account both the courage of the soldiers, which
allows an army to confront the risk of violent death, and the genius of the commander in
chief, which makes it possible to replace the infinite complexity of a situation on the theatre
of war by a single intuition, and decide how to move. But you also have to take into
account what Clausewitz calls the intelligence of the State, or its political rationality
embodied in some individuals capacity to commensurate means and ends, and the peoples
patriotism, which forms the background for the soldiers capacity to fight and the nations
ability to sustain sacrifices of resources and lives, and which is also political in the new,

modern, sense. Upon reflection, it appears that all these moral factors are dimensions or
instantiations of what might be called collective historical agency, or institutional agency,
which is why Clausewitz most of the time discusses them in relation with the problem
which, as I said, mirrors the possibility of isolating a strategic relatively autonomous
level, namely as contributing to the consistency of the army, its resistance to dissolution and
its capacity to overwhelm the violence of the enemy. And, conversely, the importance laid
on the moral factor, if it is not a way to ignore other factors (for instance economic and
technical), is indeed a way to subject their own efficacy to the deeper moral instance (as in
the case of the capacity of a nation to mobilize its economic resources for war by raising
taxes, etc.). it is on this point that later theorists, who deemed themselves more materialistic
or more realistic, criticized Clausewitz sharply, for instance pointing at his relative lack of
interest for the development of military technologies and in its influence on the historical
transformation of strategies and the outcome of wars. But even Marxists like Engels, who
devoted a long study (the article Army of the New American Cyclopaedia) to rewriting
the history of warfare from the point of view of the impact of technological changes
associated with successive modes of production, had to look for an equivalent of what he
called the moral factors, which they found for example in class consciousness and more
generally the influence of social ideologies on the possibility and the development of wars.
When you look at the relationship between Clausewitzs four propositions, you realize that
each of them is at the same time supporting and qualifying, or limiting the consequences of
the others, which is why you have to turn in a logical circle indefinitely. So, for example,
the modern transformation of limited state wars into absolute popular wars gives all its
decisive role to certain moral factors, which in turn prove vital elements of the defensive
strategy and its conversion into counter-offensive, in a sense politicizing the war, but also
producing an ambivalence that threatens political rationality, because patriotism is a
popular passion that the state needs to steer but never masters: patriotism in war becomes
hate of the enemy Feindschaft which includes and overcomes fear, and which is neither
identical with loyalty towards the rulers (it can even turn against them) nor subjectively
controlled by the consideration of interests. It is the realization of politics that can destroy
it. It seems to me that we have here the very secret of Clausewitzs relentless interrogation
about the subject of war. The immediate subject is the army, but the army is not and can
never be an autonomous being, at least in modern times: it is continuously produced and

reproduced, and the circumstances of war, as well as their cumulated effects over time,
modify this reproduction. But the army is a monster; it is the combination and the meeting
point of the state and the people, the two instances into which the idea of the nation splits
again. This was Clausewitzs dilemma: draw all the consequences from the fact that wars
were now possible only in the form of national, therefore nationalistic wars, but control the
new popular power that emerged as such on the historical scene, which might seem to
involve that the state itself permanently run ahead of its peoples passions. This was the
military or strategic equivalent of the political problem faced by national states in general:
how to institutionalize the insurrection, or harness the multitude. What is amazing is the
extent to which this problem remained on the agenda beyond the circumstances in which it
had merged as a key to the understanding of the political, namely the aftermath of the
revolutionary and imperial wars of the early 19th century.
But not without complications, and this is where, in a final part that I realize will have now
to be very brief, I would like to bring in some post-clausewitzian discourses; limiting
myself for today to the Marxists (if Marx himself is a Marxist). The difference here
comes from the fact that Marx had not read Clausewitz, or at least not initially: it is Engels
nicknamed General Engels after his brilliant retreat with a detachment of
revolutionaries facing the Prussian army in 1849, and for his permanent interest for military
matters who read Clausewitz with admiration and advised Marx of his importance.
Nevertheless, the comparison has to start with a new reading of the Communist Manifesto,
and more specifically the phrases in its first chapter which explain that the class struggles
whose successive forms constitute the guiding thread for an understanding of historical
transformations; and particularly different forms of the state and different institutions of the
political, should be identified with a continuous civil war (the expression is at the end of
chapter I, isolated but conspicuous), whose actors (or parties) are so to speak generated in
the process of the war itself, which is now invisible now visible as such, and which can
result, says Marx in an amazing formulation at the beginning of Chapter One, either in the
victory of one of the contending classes, or in their mutual destruction.
Indeed we read these phrases after Foucaults commentary which establishes the link with
Clausewitz 1) by suggesting that Clausewitz has in fact inverted a previous scheme of
interpretation of politics as war, more precisely race war, which was dominating

European historiography before the French Revolution and survived it; 2) that the Marxian
notion of the class struggle should be understood as a degenerate form of the race war
(where classes are understood as the continuation of races within Ancien Rgime societies),
just as its antagonistic notion in the 19th century, the notion of the race struggle. To
return to the initial idea of the race war, beyond Clausewitz and beyond Marx, would be,
accordingly, to retrieve a certain purity, or authenticity of the political, identified with
conflict as such, or agonism. From this I will only keep the idea that there is a historical and
logical chasse crois of the notions of war and politics around the emergence of a new
intelligibility of history in terms of class struggles, but I will focus, even very briefly,
around what for Foucault is deprived of any interest, namely the precise confrontation
between Clausewitzs and Marxs concepts of this articulation.
What is striking first is indeed the fact that, by interpreting class struggles as civil wars,
with their phases of dispersion and concentration, latency and manifestation (i.e.,
revolutions, in the general sense), Marx is indeed calling a war exactly what Clausewitz
wanted to exclude from the comprehension of the category war. No more than the
external wars, the national wars, civil wars are forms of pure, indiscriminate violence,
they are also forms of institutional violence, from an anthropological point of view, even if
they can reach degrees of cruelty that seem (or seemed, before certain contemporary wars)
to bypass the limits of civilization. But civil wars appear (and have appeared, since the
Greeks), as the destruction of the typically political institution, the city or the state, and
for this reason in Clausewitzian terms, which clearly anticipate the definition of the State as
monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, which could also become phrased as
monopoly of the political use of violence, a civil war is not a political instrument, it is an
anti-political instrument. It is not before Schmitt that anti-political instruments, including
civil wars, are incorporated in the concept of the political in an antinomic manner; but I
leave this aside for the moment. In fact Marx seems to be torn between two concepts of the
political (and we know when are familiar with his work, and the problems it poses, that this
dilemma was never resolved, and never ceased to weigh upon the development of a
Marxian or Marxist political theory): if the political means the political state, the
emergence of a separate sphere of the political around the state as public agency, acting in
the interest of the ruling class but seemingly, or juridically above class interests as such,
then the class struggle is not political, it is what exceeds the political and, in the end, will
suppress it as a separate sphere (what Marx calls the end of the political state); but if the
political means the conflict itself, its increasing polarization, its becoming conscious and
organized, its role in the production of historical changes, then it becomes defined
precisely in terms of this permanent, trans-historical civil war, which has never exactly

the same form, but never ceases to exist (until the end, that is the final confrontation
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat).
Is this a metaphoric use of the term war? I dont think so, and the comparison with
Clausewitz helps understanding why, but it certainly is a reflective use of the concept,
involving its questioning and transformation, not a simple application of a given concept of
war. What we may read in these passages are the following theses, or hypotheses: 1) only
the social war, as a civil war, becomes absolute, or radically antagonistic, reaching the
extremes, where the risk of annihilation is run, therefore it is the proper war; 2) such a
war is constitutive of politics, it reverses the clausewitzian formula, but also it pushes to
its logical conclusion what remained only a tendency (and, as we have seen, a fear) in
Clausewitz, namely the idea that violence as a means of politics reacts upon the political
and make it a continuation of the war that was its instrument. Indeed this is inseparable
from a total change in the representation of the subject of war: no longer an institutional
and in fact a juridical subject, namely the state, but an immanent social subject, which is
not really to be distinguished from the very process of its historical formation and its
progressive autonomization. Nevertheless, this allows Marx (or would allow a
Clausewitzian reader of Marx we will see that there were quite a few) to retrieve
clausewitzian propositions, or rather clausewitzian problems, with due displacement or
translation in the code of the class struggle.
One of them concerns the possible representation of the classes as armies: this seems to
be the inevitable consequence of a representation of the class struggle in terms of a
confrontation between two antagonistic forces which become increasingly unified and
polarized. In Marxs presentation, this is subjected to qualification: it should be the result of
the class struggle itself, which in this sense does really create or produce its own actors, and
it is a tendency which finds its final realization only in the last stage or figure of the
transhistorical confrontation between exploited and exploiting classes, the capitalist society.
Only in that society does the state directly function as an organizer of the class struggle on
behalf of the ruling class. But what about its adversary? You might think that from the point
of view of the proletariat, the organizing force is the International Association, or the
party. But this is precisely where Marx hesitated to push to concept to its last
consequences, and returned to a more metaphoric use. We know that the representation of
the revolution as a class war was very powerful for one century at least in the Communist
tradition, but in Marx we find only the possibility of the conception of the revolutionary
Party on the army type, a class party or an party of the whole class as it were, and I will
say why in a minute. But before that I have to insist on a second post-clausewitzian or

quasi-clausewitzian derivation, which concerns the question of the defensive. Here we

witness in the Communist Manifesto an amazing reversal which prepares for the return
of an impolitical element: Marx does present the struggle of the proletariat, even when it
is preparing the Revolution and the overthrowing of the capitalist class, as a defensive
struggle, but this defensive character becomes meta-political, and in fact apocalyptic: it is
associated with the idea that the capitalist mode of production while reducing the workers
to absolute poverty and unemployment does threaten their very life, and in this sense the
reproduction and survival of society (since the workers, more generally the labourers, are
those who feed and sustain society as a whole). There is a nihilistic element in Capitalism
as portrayed here by Marx, which allows it to identify the assault against it as a defence of
society against its internal enemy. But then comes also a more strategic or quasi-strategic
consideration, which resides in the idea that the proletarian class struggle derives its own
strength, consciousness, and organization, from the organization of the bourgeoisie against
which it is pitted. Initially at least, Marx would not so much imagine the proletarian class
party as an anti-state, he would rather see it as a negative of the State, therefore a negation
of the negation, if the State is what suppresses society for the sake of the exploiting social
order. All this derives from the fact that, contrary to external war situations, the adversaries
in a social war conceived as civil war are not really external, separated from one
another. They are and remain modalities of evolution of the same social subject in the form
of a division.
Finally the consequence for the understanding of the articulation of war and politics is both
crucial and ambiguous: it is by actualizing the unconciliable character of the antagonism
that the model of the civil war reveals the essence of the political in class societies, and
especially in capitalism; but at the same time it registers this manifestation in the figure of
transition, the vanishing mediator which prepares for the end of the political as such, we
might say its self-annihilation.
What prompted Marx to abandon or neglect this representation in his subsequent works?
They would lead him to looking for other models of the development of the class struggle,
but also to retreating in some sense from the acute picture of the political as anti-political
that he had exposed in the Communist Manifesto: why? In my opinion a series of positive
factors, including the increasing importance granted to the economic cycles of

accumulation in the development of capitalism at the expense of the apocalyptic linear

vision of the increasing polarization of poverty and wealth, played a role, but also
negatively a greater experience of the phenomena of wars and civil wars, which made it
difficult or impossible to endorse the analogy of class struggle as such with civil war, and,
conversely, displayed all the negative sides of the model of revolution as civil war pushed
to the extreme absolute civil war if you like (a lesson hotly debated in the Marxist
tradition subsequently, among reformists and revolutionary). The idea of a limited
civil war, or a civil war refrained, seemed a contradiction in terms. Actual civil wars, in
1848 or in 1872 (the Paris Commune) were tragic experiences of bloodbaths in which the
bourgeois State easily implemented the military apparatus formed in external wars
(including colonial wars) to crush the proletariat, which itself was anything but an army
(not even a guerrilla army). And beside that the 19th century (not to speak of the 20th)
provided overwhelming evidence of the fact that national wars were not giving way to the
class struggle, and remained the proper site of the articulation of politics and war, therefore
strategic thinking. In spite of attempts, never completely convincing, to picture national
wars as mere appearances, or simulacra, masking the real and really political process,
which should be the combined effort of the ruling classes of different countries to
exterminate their own workers by throwing them against one another and cheating them
with nationalist discourses, this hard reality of the national wars had to be taken into
account, and it called for a return to the direct understanding of Clausewitz and his
problems.
This was prepared by Engels, who simultaneously criticized Clausewitzs allegedly
idealistic emphasis on moral factors, and sought a materialist equivalent, which would
prove compatible with an insistence on the technological, economic and social factors of
the wars. This equivalent was found in the idea that peoples armies, or mass conscription,
would potentially introduce the class struggle within the army itself (at least in democratic
republics), thus reversing Clausewitzs fear of the masses in military matters into a
prophecy of their emerging as new strategic actors at the expense of the State and its
military machine. But it was only with Lenin and Mao Zedong that this dialectical principle
would lead to a new articulation of war and politics, displacing the idea of the strategic
combination from the state-army-people unity to a new unity of class, people, and
revolutionary party. Lenin, as we know, intensively read Clausewitz, taking notes and

writing marginal commentaries on his On War at the beginning of WW I, after the collapse
of the Second International and its anti-war agenda. He drafted and successfully tried to
implement (at least in his own country) the motto of the transformation of the imperialist
war into a revolutionary civil war, which describes the moral factor (the internationalist
class consciousness) as the political result over time of the horrors of a popular war (i.e.
waged by mass national armies). It gives a completely original interpretation of the idea of
an offensive prepared from within the defensive; and derives its necessity from the fact
that absolute warfare is, in a certain sense, or rather becomes untenable. It must therefore
destroy the State itself, better said it must recreate the conditions of politics at the expense
of the State, who in a sense could incarnate politics only as long as it also retained the
capacity to arm the people and control its use of the arms it receives, but would become a
political phantom as soon as it would be deprived of it. Or, if you wish, as one would pass
from the State monopoly of legitimate violence to the Class monopoly of historically
decisive violence. It is this displacement of Clausewitz, let us note in passing, that forms
the starting point of Carl Schmitts impolitical concept of the political where
sovereignty is identified with the capacity to install a state of exception in the core of the
State, in order to repress the class struggle in a preventive manner, so that the definition of
the internal enemy, the enemy of the class civil war, is used to recreate the monopoly
of the state and its capacity to wage external wars.
But it is only in Mao Zedongs theory of the protracted war of partisans that we find what
can be considered at the same time a Marxist rescuing of Clausewitzs concept of the War
as the continuation of politics by other means and an alternative to Clausewitzs idea of
the political, which tries to solve the aporia on which, as we have seen, Clausewitz was
permanently hitting his head. In fact I tend to believe, not only that Mao Zedong, as several
commentators have acknowledged, was the most consistent Clausewitzian in the Marxist
tradition, but that he was perhaps the most consistent Clausewitzian after Clausewitz,
because he re-interpreted all his axioms, and not only one or two of them. It is hard to know
if he actually had read Clausewitz in the text, or in some adaptation (I should have to check
whether Clausewitz was translated into Chinese, the only language read by Mao): the
references he gives in his various brochures and articles written in the late 30s and 40s
during the Anti-Japanese War (after the end of the Long March properly speaking), only

quote from Lenins own references to Clausewitz in his essays on imperialism. Which
seems to indicate that, from these fragments, Mao actually reconstructed the problematic.
His key idea is that the defensive strategy which is imposed by the fact that, initially, the
imperialist adversary and the ruling bourgeoisie have armies whereas the proletariat and the
peasants have none will become reversed into its opposite in the end, and lead to the actual
annihilation of the strongest. So the length of the war, the dialectical equivalent of the
friction now called protracted war (or the long March of the war) is the time needed for
the tiny nucleus of revolutionary workers and intellectuals who have sought refuge within
the masses of the peasantry (who find themselves within the people like fishes swimming
in water) to achieve simultaneously a triple result: 1) to arm themselves at the expense of
the adverse forces by performing local guerrilla attacks against isolated detachments of the
invading army; 2) to learn the art of strategy by expanding the theatre of war to the
national level (which in the case of China is semi-continental); 3) finally to solve the
contradiction in the people and separate the people from its enemies (or the partys
enemy), by transferring the hegemony from an external power (either a colonial
conqueror or a national caste) to an immanent power, representing the common interest of
all national dominated classes. The communist party is supposed to be (and to remain over
a long period) precisely that immanent power.
The blind spot of this analysis seems today rather clear (and it was not without
consequences on the subsequent developments): namely the fact that the international
global context of WW II is practically ignored, as if only the national forces would count
strategically in the anti-imperialist struggle. Self-reliance, the great Maoist motto, has a
latent nationalist dimension itself. But the result remains impressive in terms of a new
historical interpretation of the idea of a rationality of war which is political therefore
implies a political subject. So, in a sense, we have come full circle, and it is not by chance,
probably, that the closure of this circle particularly consists in the reversal of the hierarchic
relationship established between institutional warfare waged by the state and popular
guerrilla warfare. But it is not the case, in my opinion, that this reversal completely resolves
the aporia that we found in Clausewitz. It rather displaces it. Clausewitzs difficulty came
from the fact that the State could not be said a priori to have become the absolute master of
the instrument it had to build and use in the course of the transformation of wars into
absolute wars, i.e. wars waged by the people in arms. Maos difficulty, or the difficulty

we read in Mao with hindsight, drawing some lessons from the history of the Chinese
revolution itself, comes from the fact that the immanent power of the organization which,
from the inside, transforms a people into an army, or a popular army with a class
ideology, in given historical circumstances; namely the revolutionary party, can completely
perform the strategic reversal and remain a political agency only at the condition of
becoming a state itself (even if a State periodically destructed and reconstructed by
revolutionary episodes, in the Maoist vision which led to, or was taught, during the
Cultural revolution). The only thinkable alternative very unlikely in the circumstances
of war of national liberation would be that it refrained from taking power, or carrying
on the revolutionary war until the final goal (Zweck); which is the complete destruction
of the enemy thus somehow scaling down the war from absolute to limited.
So the subject of the strategic process (or the subject determined from within the strategic
process) remains in every case a split subject, or a subject oscillating between sovereignty
and insurrection. Some modern theoreticians and commentators of molecular wars
(Enzensberger) solve the aporia by simply eliminating the category of the subject, or
reducing it to negative or defective figures. But in this case it remains to be explained how
the category of war itself can be maintained.
Public Lecture, Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University,
Evanston, May 8, 2006