Warfare and Military Affairs in (and out of) the Nation-State
The frontpiece of
The Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes, 1651.
I wish to begin this, which aims towards a particular (critical) imagination of the role (real and imagined) of the military within the politics and spaces of the nation-state, with a sort of disclaimer. I'm throwing this idea out there, not necessarily sure of what it means or convinced of its accuracy. It is crucial to understand that I am not, in describing this, necessarily endorsing or decrying the things that I am talking about, and I am most certainly not advocating some sort of totalitarian imagination of individual and gender roles to universally fit people into a sort of behavioral mold. In short, I'm wingin' it. So feel free to tear into the idea if you see flaws. With that out of the way:
The Leviathan. Nation-state expressed in physical form, the Leviathan is literally a body politic, with component parts that seethe and tangle in a mass of physical strength, locking limbs into one coherent form. The group’s imagination of the possibility of static unity is captured and given form in the cover of his book (above), but this imagination is not all-encompassing.
In reality, there is movement, struggle, disunity — in a word, individuality. And this grating, the tension of an imperfect lock, manifests itself in the highly visible, occasionally illegible, discontents and disparities of the people that make up (and do not make up) the citizen-subjects of the nation-state. The body politic is what sits center in our imaginations of the possibilities of communal cooperation, of national identity and politics; it is the form and expression of our ability to do, together.
