Crisis of Presence in Times of Civil War

Mirna Abiad-Boyadjian
Globalization, as a process that structures and standardizes the world, has liberated not only capital from government control but also war from being a form of state intervention, to the point where it is difficult to identify the battlegrounds. As Maurizio Lazzarato and Éric Alliez argue in the counter-history of capitalism Wars and Capital, “Deterritorialized war is no longer inter-State war at all, but an uninterrupted succession of multiple wars against populations.”1 1 - Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, trans. Ames Hodges (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext[e] / Foreign Agents, 2016), 26. In their view, the “global civil war” advanced by Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt in the 1960s is transformed through contemporary financialization—and the debt economy—into a multiplicity of civil wars (wars of class, race, and sex, among others) whose matrix is colonial war,2 2 - Ibid., 16. This perspective underlies the correspondence that the authors establish between the colonial undertakings of 1492 and Year One of Capital. or a war amongst and against the population.

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