Sections offered FALL 2023:
#31777 |
EDGAR ILLAS |
TuTh 9:45 AM–11:00 AM |
HU 217 |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credi
This course explores one of globalization’s darker but also more visible sides. A perpetual state of war involving neocolonial invasions, terrorism, corporate warfare, state violence, lawfare and media battles has become the most unfortunate feature of the global integration of the planet. This course will study the historical specificity of this stage of global war vis-à-vis previous types of wars. Our analyses will focus on a variety of global and local, or “glocal,” cases, including the expansionist wars of Russia, the war on terror, the corporate mafia, the Israeli/Palestinian architectures of destruction, the African “necropolitics” of death, and the drug wars.
Two lines of inquiry will guide our approach to global war. The first part of the course will consist in an examination of war as a political and philosophical concept. Drawing from a variety of texts that go from the pre-Socratics to Carl Schmitt and Pierre Clastres, we will differentiate between primitive, classic, modern, and global war. We will pay particular attention to Italian theorist Carlo Galli, who is arguably the most important thinker of global war. The second part of the course will be devoted to the study of aesthetic, architectural and journalistic materials related to six conflicts located in Ukraine, the Middle East, Italy/Europe, Israel/Palestine, Africa, and Mexico/the US. Through the analysis of these works we will reflect on the discontinuities between war as political event and war as individual experience.
The course will not examine specific military or legal issues but will rather undertake a humanist and theoretical analysis of the elusive phenomenon of global war. This approach may be more attuned to the diversity of forms that constitutes global violence beyond the ordinary depictions of the media. The underlying hope is that the recognition of this diversity will enable us at the end of the course to catch a glimpse of a potential future of global peace.