I

One day we shall all be little soldiers of the Great Reich.
Adolf Hitler

I felt so symbolic yesterday
Adam Duritz

Yesterday, everything was so symbolic. Somebody spoke and wrote about life and death, war and peace, reason and reality, struggle and reconciliation, mind and body, subject and object... But what did all this mean? What does it mean to say, to speak, to write, anyway? Who speaks and writes? What about?

Let's say that someone is writing about war. Who is that? It is always some i. Who am i? What do i write about? What is war? Is it at all necessary to speak and write about oneself and war? How is it possible not to write about oneself and war? What do i have to do with war? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. If there exists a connection, then it seems to be a necessary and manifold relationship, which establishes and determines all of us together - both me, my speech and writing, and war. i feel as if i am somehow thrown into this relationship and left at the mercy of its "structures". It seems that i could never be able to speak and write without war. My speech and writing are necessarily some kind of conflict, or an expression of some conflict. Whenever i speak, and especially when i "discuss", i fight a war. Discussion, discourse, discursiveness in general, are seminal forms of war, and vice versa: war is the paradigm and the model of every discussion, every discours.

War, which i enter the moment i speak up, essentially determines my "being". It makes me what i am, it makes me a subject in the strong, totally modern sense of a fluid and chimerical dialectical-metaphysical form. It makes me a universal equivalent, it makes me be I. It seems that i am alive, reasonable, spiritual... that i am I - the true, the only real I - only when I speak-write-fight. To enter the language is to enter the generality and necessity of my subjectivity. My subjectivity is necessarily symbolical. Symbolicalness is always polemical. Language is always logos polemikos. To enter the language is to enter the war.

The only problem is that I do/does not exist! I does not want to exist! In order to be what I am, I cannot, I must not exist!

That I does not exist also means that i cannot and must not exist if i want I to exist, that is, if I want to exist. This is clearly visible in language and in war. There is a double bind at work here: I am always some warrior being, which annihilates itself through war, but this only because I (by myself, from myself and in myself) establish war as my original medium.

When I want to exist, when i want to be I, I cannot do that, because I have to fight, to wage war; because I cannot be peaceful nor left in peace. When i don't want to be I, when i want to destroy and annihilate it/myself, to erase even the traces of my existence (and, of course, the traces of some other I's existence), when I finally want to destroy the whole universe - for, it is always my universe, a universe of some I (it is I and i am It) - I cannot do that, because such destruction is nothing but a new production of me as Me, as an I. I do not exist, but that is precisely the only way for me to exist and be I. The move from i to I is an irreversible transformation into fiction. This is how it really happens:

The Story About Little Soldier or the Story About Me and War
(The dullest Story on Earth)

"I do not exist" means, first of all, that I don't exist as i, as a person, as a living individual more or less conscious of itself and its existence, as an individual with thoughts, body, ideas, desires, emotions, sensations. That means that I am not different from others, that I have no particular personal habits, distinctions, preferences, no value nor dignity. I also don't exist in some fundamental ontological sense, not as an entity. I am just a focal point - or a series of such points - in space and time. All the rays and lines sent from outer space, from "objectivity", are gathered, reflected, crossed and confronted in me. It seems that what I call my personality, my subjectivity, my Ego, is nothing but an energy field, a constellation of forces, radiations and elements of objects and things. I am, therefore, very "objective". What's more, I am totally and exclusively objective. I am everything but the subject. I am just an energy knot, a result of crossings, cuts, intersections, clashes, a resultant of various vectors, directions, lines, things, energies. It turns out that I fall out. I do not become, I do not create myself nor am created, I literally fall out (from something out to something else - I don't exist, that much spoken and dreamt of One doesn't exist, there's always only somebody else, only others, the first one is never there), I fall off somebody or something else, I am a fallout of the other, a refuse of things. And if I am just a point of intersection and a reflection of different lines and radiations, then I particularly don't exist in that strong sense, I don't exist as an identity. I am fictitious (imaginary and irreal) however and wherever I look upon myself. Already as a spatio-temporal coordinate, I am fictitious and imaginary. (Of course, only thus am I reason and mind.) I am neither "here" nor "now", neither "there" nor "then", I am nowhere and never. I cannot be reduced to those qualities. I am just a fiction produced by their mutual connection and permeation. In fact, I am a twofold, imaginary-irreal, product. In the first place, I owe my fictitiousness to their imaginary character (for every time is an imaginary time, every space is an imaginary space). Secondly, I am fictitious because I am other and different from them (all of them, each of them), because I am irreal. My self-determination is as fictitious as that which determines me. It is imaginary insofar as these others (these qualities, forms, entities, things, objects...) are the only reality I can ever imagine or have, they are my only reality. It is irreal insofar as I have to think myself as different from them. I am fictitious when I'm different, as well as when I'm the same as they are. For space and time are fictions. Every spatio-temporal coordinate is a point with no dimensions, whose place and duration are undetermined, it is an immeasurable unit, which however establishes and determines every possible dimensionality and measurability. It is all one and the same paradox of something being simultaneously spatio-temporal and spaceless-atemporal. Namely, I am, exactly as a spatio-temporal place (field, series), irreducible to the element of space and time. I am spatio-temporally inexpressible. I cannot deduce myself from all that, I cannot follow from space and time, nor can I take myself out of them. I exist in space and time, but I am neither in nor equal to them. (I am not space and time!) I am the same, but I'm different. I deduce myself from nothing, I take myself out of nothing - all by myself - and I enter into them. This dragging from nothing is my falling out into the world, my birth, my becoming. I grow out of nothing and I always lean towards and above it. Indeed, the only way for me to become and exist is to deduce, to drag myself out, to fall out from nothing and endure in space and time, that is, in the symbolic reality. My biological birth equals the symbolic one. In fact, I can be born only symbolically. My body exists only symbolically. (Physically, however, I am unborn. My body is physically eternal, it is uncreated.) I am only symbolically real, and that only to the extent of my ability to survive in space and time. Every possible reality is "mediated" by space and time, especially the imaginary one, so that for me there is no reality which is not symbolic. But, also, there is no symbolic reality which wouldn't have the mark of nothing - of the non-symbolic - on itself. I get this mark of nothing at birth, it imprints death on my existence. My end is inscribed in my beginning. Symbolic reality has to return to the non-symbolic one. Non-symbolic reality, however, is not simply unreal (in that case it would be imaginary fictive, and thus again symbolical), it is completely irreal. As non-spatial and atemporal, non-symbolic reality is unthinkable. It is pure nothing. /That's what the council of elders told me long ago. According to them, every possible representation contains the element of space and time in itself. It is impossible to imagine and represent without the spatio-temporal element. But, again, by that same logic, nothing can really be put in front of oneself. Every presentation is some representation, everything present is always something represented, imagined. Everything is a representation, because everything is in space and time. I only see what I imagine, never that which really stands here, in front of me. Spatiality and temporality, space and time: those are imaginary categories, qualities, entities. They are real fictions, imaginary realities. That's why each real point, each real place or field in them, is something a priori imaginary. (The fact that only I enable and establish space and time, that I determine that which forms and preserves my very self as such, is only a logical consequence of their imaginary character and fictitiousness. For it's only fair that they are being established by someone same as them, someone who himself is nothing but an imaginary point, and whose being cannot be determined, confirmed or proved, someone whose being is fictitious, whereas his reality is imaginary.) Anyway, reality itself is just a representation. Presence is re-presentation. Absence of representation is absence of reality./ As simultaneously imaginary and irreal, and thus twice non-existent, I keep on going in circles of my own non-existence. I make myself out of spatio-temporal points, I produce myself from space and time because I think that only they can provide me with reality, that only they can make me exist (really "be" me, "be" I), and then immediately realize how imaginary they really are. I realize that I made them and that I am the principal, in fact, the only player, that I exist only in this circling from myself to myself, that I am the power of imagination and destruction. I realize I am self-produced and absolutely alone. I am my only God and, even if I wanted to, I couldn't have other gods than myself. I cannot touch, I cannot know, I cannot see, I cannot have anything but myself and this movement, circling in myself, around myself, on myself... I cannot do anything and am nothing real. For, in order to really exist (in order to be "alive"), I would have to separate from myself. And how am I going to do that? "How'm I gonna keep myself away from me?" (Duritz). How, if I'm nothing but one fictitious, imaginary and irreal topos? I don't stand and I don't exist nowhere and never. I am not predicted or founded by anything. I am unplaced, non-deducible and irreducible. I am self-purposeful because I cannot have any purpose. I am atopos and utopos. I am Dada! I come from nowhere, I stand nowhere, I don't belong anywhere and lead to nothing (except, of course, to myself). I am inexplicable, because I am clear only to myself, only through and over myself. I am pure being, but a pure non-being as well. In fact, I am only if and when I don't exist. Wherever I turn (myself), I am both imaginary and irreal - I do not exist. /The circle constantly closes over itself: I don't exist because I exist in space and time, and because I am thereby some non-spatial and atemporal point, field, spot, a stain in fact (stain? - yes, an ink stain!), which only fakes existence, which floats on the penetrating currents that flow in and through it like radiation, like poisonous gases, like bullets and bombs, like missiles. I am an imaginary focus of imaginary events, representations and thoughts. I am destruction because I am imagination, and vice versa. My circle constantly closes above me. It is always already closed./ There is, actually, nothing in my I that wouldn't be fictitious, there is no fixed and stable spot in me. I am construed out of forces, objects, events, movements, currents, directions, signs, rays, energies. Everything is mine and in me exactly because everything is external. The only problem is that there isn't anything external, nothing is really external. My complete emptiness and my total fulfillment fall together. I am "overbooked" with objects and their models. I am fulfilled and exhausted in my own model: I am my own model, nothing more and nothing less. My space is completely full, but totally empty as well. It is emptied by that total, dense explosive filling that I am. I fill up, explode and empty over and again. I am (emotionally, intellectually, physically, erotically) "fulfilled" only when I explode and empty myself. I am the place of explosion. I am an explosion which leaves nothing behind it, not even its place. I remain as a double "empty place", as a trace of a place, which can neither receive anything in itself, nor occupy some space. I remain as a displaced place. Nothing real can stand on such a trace of a place, so it remains just a blind spot - like that invisible spot in the eye, from which nothing can be seen, but which (precisely because of that) contains the secret of all seeing. I am this dark, blind spot, an ink-stain that remains untouched, unaffected, unreal. Only the seeing remains in me and of me. I am just a gaze, therefore, something fictitious, imaginary and irreal. I am something ghostly. I am a phantom. In fact, I am just nothing whose proper name (Nothing) and place (utopos, atopos) are found. I am the symbol of no-thing. Since endless repetition and boredom are proper to my I, I'll repeat that once again: either I am neither autonomous nor self-sufficient, not in-and-for-myself, but just a byproduct, a derivation and a resultant of things, forces, energies and their movement, crossing and collision - a thing among things; or I am something different (and, to that extent, autonomous) than things and exteriority, and am therefore some interior that places them in the exterior and establishes them as external. Either there are only objects, things, or there is only I. We cannot exist together. (Coexistence is impossible. We cannot live together.) But, if we don't coexist, then none of us exists. Taken separately, each one of us is nothing (that is, is not). I am independent from others only as that empty place, as a place that exists as little as anything can be put in/on it, that is, only as an utopos/atopos, as nothing. Things, for their part, are nothing without me, without my representation and imagination (transcendental or empirical, what's the difference?). The reality machine can survive only if we are both in it, and that must never happen. I am alone, but alone I am nothing. However I turn, I don't exist. I don't exist autonomously, because there is not a single piece of me left that isn't already reified. If there were any such piece, I would still be nothing, because that piece could only be a place with nothing in/on it (nothing fulfilled, nothing real, really no-thing). That could only be a trace of a place, which is necessarily an emptiness and the irreal. And since, therefore, I don't exist, all those otherwise important things - such as dignity (mine or somebody else's), honesty, integrity, morality, strength of character, etc. - lose any meaning whatsoever. In other words, what does it mean for me to be or not to be in the machine? What machine? Production machine? War machine? National machine? Logical machine? Informational machine? Reality machine? How can I be in any machine when I'm nothing? I am at best objective, reified. And yet, what if I - the reified, impersonal, "objective" and completely thing-like I - what if I were the machine of all machines? What if I were the matrix, the motor and the crankshaft of all possible machines? What if I were some abstract (which is to say: impersonal and undetermined, absolutely adjustable and totally efficient) machine? Then, I guess, I would be the machine-making machine, which produces mechanics and machines in general. I guess I would then be the power of mechanization as the power of abstraction from the specificity of certain materials and products. I would, in fact, be a factory for everything, a reality factory. I would then be able to change my production lines and use all kinds of raw materials without any difficulty. I would simultaneously produce both cans and grenades, both food and poisonous gasses, sun-glasses and optical targeting devices, motorcars and tanks, missiles and airplanes. I could then be both a worker and a farmer and an intellectual and a warrior, all at the same time; because, in all that, I am always primarily a warrior. And I cannot do without combat. As a matter of fact, one could do without real combat, but not without combativeness and boasting. As a machine, I am ruthless and brutal and strong in everything I do. I am always and everywhere a little Soldier, Warrior and Hero. And, precisely because I am so little, so small, I always write myself down with large, capital letters. Because I am never big and powerful enough, I often make weapons in my universal factory, and use them even more often on the battleground of universality. For only by making and using weapons do I exist as what I really am, as no-thing and no-body, as the existence of destruction, as a "being-for-death" which doesn't even know that it has never really been born. I need death (destruction, war) in order to confirm myself and prove I am alive, that is, that I have lived. My life is affirmed by death and by death only. Death is its only proof. And, because it is the only proof of my life, I think and say that death is the only proof of every possible life. As an abstract machine I am the death machine, which identifies and levels all the differences, disagreements and withdrawals. For, only in and for death there is no withdrawal. In and for death, we are all the same. Only the death machine can be the machine of all machines. But, if I am that abstract matrix and the power of abstraction, then I cannot and must not be in any kind of machine. In fact, I must not be anything mechanical. As an abstract war machine, I must be both machine and anti-machine. I can resolve this impossible situation only by being some movement inside-outside, in and out of the machine. "I belong anywhere ... in between" (Duritz). At first sight, it is an impossible, paradoxical task. Whatever I choose, I lose everything, even that which I've chosen. I have to choose between loss and loss - and that's not much of a choice: I lose anyway. But, that's not the worst. The absence of choice is even worse than the impossible choice. There is a difference between the impossible (paradoxical) choice and no choice at all. The former is the choice between two losses, the latter is the loss of choice itself. This latter is my choice, it belongs to me and I choose it every time I have to choose. More precisely, I always choose the annihilation of choice as such. I don't want to have a choice, I don't want to choose. I just want to straighten, equalize, identify, empty, exclude, annihilate and eradicate everything alive. Even myself. Thus, my impossible choice is also annihilated. It is eradicated in that inside-outside movement. This in-out thing makes me what I am. It makes me refuse choice, it makes me negate its reality, as well as the reality of my existence and being. It makes me abstract and (abstractly) destructive. Thanks to this movement I am both a warrior and a coward, in a word: warmonger. For I indeed want war as myself, but I also abhor it. Therefore, I am "cunning": I wage war from an Academy office, protected by the membrane of absolute knowledge. I ceaselessly think and rethink possible and real wars, knowing that thus I think my own Self, and that only thus I render myself reasonable, noteworthy and existing. Of course, I can do all that only if I think/rethink war. War is my sense, and I have to produce it at any cost. I have to, because nobody else will and cannot do that for me. I have to, because I don't want anybody else to be a warlord instead of me. I want to make war without warring, I want to be constantly inside-outside of war, to be and not to be the war machine, to be simultaneously a warrior and a victim. I can do that only if I master the war, that is, if I represent my submission as my own desire and necessity, and turn and distort my passivity into power by means of Knowledge. Speculation enables the fulfillment of my desire, it turns me into a warlord. That's why it is of no importance whether I am "inside the machine" or not. Those are just neutralized and overlapping extremes. I can't and I don't want to choose. It doesn't matter if I agree to play some game or not. It will enclose me and draw me into itself anyway, just as it is all the same whether I win or lose. The important thing is to continue the game endlessly. The machine must work ceaselessly. Because it (this game, this machine) constitutes, constructs and produces me, and that is the only result, the only product and the only profit from all that. But what do I get when I get myself? I again get that total loss of choice, and with it I immediately lose my-Self. Nothing changes. Everything remains the same. More precisely, there remains only the infinite and monotonous return of the same. Everything is so perfect. When you are the non-existing I, nobody can harm you. For You never do anything real, nothing really happens for You. You are, in fact, always bored. Playing war games is boring, but it is even more boring not to play and not to "do" anything. You play the war game because it is the only boring thing that breaks the monotony and which is (unlike sex, for example) perfectly safe. War games are safe because they are your games, because You can never get hurt in them. There's no danger of physical injury or brain damage. But, in this case, brain damage is out of the question simply because You have a factory, a machinery and a weapon instead of a brain. Your space and time are also untouchable. The toughness and strength of your abstraction are unbreakable in their fluidness, thinness and porosity. Nobody can do anything to You, because there's nobody else but You. Even You are not there. That's why, once again, I doesn't exist. That's why I am nothing. And, if I am Nothing, I am destructive. My being is annihilation, since nothing exists only as annihilation. I am nothing, I destroy, I am destruction - first of myself, and then of everything else. I am thus the most powerful, absolute and indisputable ruler. I rule through destruction, and destruction rules through me. I am the exterminator. I am the warrior, the epitome of war. I am the war! In fact, I am the fiction of war. I am the fiction of nothing which destroys itself as a fiction.

Militarism and Pacifism of Language
(Peace as Truce)

Language is the paradigm of a fiction which destroys itself as a fiction. Language is the crossing of fiction and reality. In it, they simultaneously overlap and differ. In it, everything real is fictitious and everything fictitious is real. Language is at once the origin, the medium and the goal of war. War becomes, lasts and ends in it. Language is militaristic and militant. War is the natural environment of language. Language and war "mediate" each other. Therefore, only language makes possible war as such, as both real and fictitious, as war and peace at once.

War becomes real through language. But, in this realization, it also becomes pacified. In and through language, war becomes both the normal, original, real state of affairs, and the mode, the means for preventing or ending wars. Language is the place and the way of turning war into something usual, it is the means for getting used to war as an axiom or a constant of life. Language mitigates and removes the effects of war and at the same time preserves its foundations and causes. It conserves the raison d'être of war. Like paper, language should be able to absorb, accept, express and bear everything - especially war. Only language can do what war can do: it can absorb its own destruction. Besides war, only language can express destruction. It can announce and establish itself as destruction, and still survive. Language, like war, has the unlimited power of resorbtion, because it can think and represent nothing as something positive. Language turns war into peace.

Language also turns war into work. Peace is never peaceful, because the other, the conquered, starts arming himself right away for the next war. It's just that no one puts it that way, people rather say they are "working on something". This "something" is always a project of a new weapon - cold, firearm, nuclear, intellectual, argumentative, discursive... - whereas "work" is nothing but mobilization, state of alert or state of war. To work means to engage in a war, or to train and arm oneself. The production of weapons happens as the war itself. Work is a state of war. "Work" is a totally militaristic category, just like "economy". Every economy (political, libidinal, material or any other) is a war economy.

The phrase that one should "turn", "dedicate" himself or "go back to" work actually means that one should forget the defeat, that is, learn its moral (learn where we "went wrong") and concentrate on the preparations for the next attack. Work has a double cathartic function. On the one hand, it provides oblivion of the defeat, distills its bad effects and turns it into a moral, into a useful lesson. On the other hand, work thus preserves the state of war and promises victory in the future. It nourishes the hope of redemption and of reimbursement through victory (that is, through the victorious plundering). Work gives absolution, hope, redemption and compensation. It might not free, but it surely saves. What is even more important, it obstructs any thought of ending the war. Work rejuvenates and prolongs war by giving it a peaceful form, it adjusts war to peace, so that peace appears as nothing but a tense pause between two battles, or just a dozing phase of war, an interplay during which one doesn't really (physically) fight, but surely plays out the tactical and strategic combinations. Peace is a preparation, a training for war. Peace is truce.

Recycling the War

Besides, peace is a good chance to consolidate, renew and regroup the combat formations, to fortify and strengthen the positions gained. It prevents extermination by war and thereby provides new material and energy for it. To that extent, peace is the recycling of war, a means of its self-preservation and perpetuation. Peace is a pause for regenerating and developing the bio-technological potentials of a warring party. Peace, just like language, does not eliminate conflicts, and certainly not their causes. On the contrary, it only deepens and magnifies them. Peace is like a veil drawn over the battlefield. Conflicts grow and feed on peace. It is a fertile ground for all kinds of hatred and clashes, a period of work on new means of destruction, a period of discovering and perfecting new weapons and war techniques. Peace and work are the same, because peace and war are the same. Production is never productive. It is always destructive. One produces only for destruction, and only destruction itself.

Recycling is, therefore, not opposed to such production. On the contrary. Together with ecology, it is its most cynical and most sublime form. Ecology and recycling are pacified and thereby quite extreme and often very cruel forms of war. They fight against the not yet cleansed regions and people, they fight against the remnants of destruction, against the victims of war. As wars against refuse, against the leftovers of war, recycling and ecology are total, clean wars - wars against war - which purge the very condition of war and cleanse all its traces. Together they are one huge hygienic war, war for cleanliness, which is at the same time the most economic of all wars. As such, it is comparable only to language and writing.

Recycling is, therefore, only the most accurate, the cleanest expression of the working logic and machinery, a linguistic expression "in and for itself", the most proper "notion" of war. Recycling confirms that the only real work is the work of language.

The work of language is a recycling process. It recycles the totality of war and thus universalizes it. (Which is not so hard after all, since every thought is militaristic, and vice versa: militarism is always total and totalitarian, it is a total thought.)

Of course, militarism here means any kind of combativeness and warfare, not just the military one. Still, already militarism in this narrow sense points out the domestication of war in our world. Namely, it is characteristic that today nothing of the usual military procedure (bombing, shooting, terrain cleaning, which is always the cleaning of people and from the people) is neither frightening nor unacceptable. The military profession has always been highly appreciated and considered to be "honorable". Stories about "officers and gentlemen" are being told all the time. Everything that belongs to the usual military procedure (and that is, let us not forget, always and completely the procedure of destruction and conquering) and is regulated by war conventions, is allowed because it is "civilized". Civilized war has to be waged according to certain rules, it has to be formalized and institutionalized in order to be acknowledged and evaluated as such.

Therefore, war first formalizes and institutionalizes itself (that is, the need and exigency that follow from its very "notion"), in order to prove at all worthy of existence. Since only the regularity is acknowledged, rules are the condition of its complete realization. Only that which proceeds according to some rules can be recognized as real, and the rules are congealed in institutions. The form of regularity in general is institutionalization, and war is its original power. To that extent, war is the fundamental, pure form of the struggle for recognition. One recognizes and is being recognized only through war. Since recognition is the condition of survival, war is in fact the essential form and mode of survival.

The necessity of formalization follows from the linguistic nature of war and remains just the flip side of the process of its pacification and normalization, which is promulgated in language. The coercion of institutionalization, which is imposed by war, is characteristic of a warlike, militaristic language and thought in their pacified, civilized phase.

Pacifist Militarism or Know thy own Body!

Once language is understood and accepted as a peacemaking medium, as a pacifist weapon, peace becomes an extension of war, and language becomes its proper scene. War is constantly made, prepared or encouraged, in all the languages of the world. Linguistic warfare shows that war is never over. The recommended listening to logos tells us it's wise to admit that everything is one (battlefield, one war). Of course, it is wise because this much spoken wisdom is the wisdom of the conquest, a warlike wisdom. Wisdom is nothing but strategy and tactic of the struggle to life and death, a war strategy. The wisdom of a "position", more precisely perspective, is proved by its power to become a generally accepted attitude and the final solution. Wars are waged in order to see whose perspective will be accepted. War is made to convince and force the other to see things the way I see them. War is the struggle for recognition and hegemony. The true thought, as wisdom should be, wins by disarming and interning the other thought, the other wisdom, the wisdom of the other. As any war, the thought struggle ends with the disarmament of the beaten. The stronger is wiser. Only the conqueror is wise.

"War is the father... and the king."., thus goes, for thousands of years, the irrefutable law of existence. Also, for thousands of years, civilization cannot imagine itself without institutions. What's more, civilization is institutionalization. Thus, again, civilization is also a polemization. Only civilization knows of war. There is no war in nature (there is struggle for existence, but no war) because there are no institutions. There is no war in nature because there are no techniques, technologies, strategies and tactics of fighting, which all emerge with the institutionalization. In other words, there is no war if there is no rationality. Only rationality establishes war as such. War is rational by definition.

War is, in fact, the basic form of relationship of rationality with that which is different from it. For, that relationship is always polemical, it is a struggle for elimination and recognition of priority. Wisdom is militant (militaristic) rationality, which craves to eliminate its opposite by presupposing "the real" as completely "rational". In other words, it annuls the real as such, that is, as different from itself. It tends to turn everything instinctive, intuitive, organic, everything corporeal, into something mechanical, to turn it into a rational machine or at least entangle it in that machine. Rationality's relationship with the other and different is always some war for domination. And, in order to be at war, it has to procure an endless conflict, which is to say, to perpetuate the other. Rationality does that by constantly posing the other as its own other. The other is always just another I, an alter ego, and thus not other at all. (There's no other, only I exist.) Both of them - I and the other, rationality and reality, machinery and nature, militarism and pacifism - become the same: militant and militaristic.

It is not just a question of having to have the (suitable) other as soon as we have one. It is rather that there is no rational and civilized alternative to war and militarism. Not as long as i am I, not as long as my world is ruled by the language of power, its work and hierarchy; not as long as i am in some Here and Now and have the body placed in that Here and Now.

For language and body belong to the same hierarchy. They perform complementary works on the construction of the militaristic universe and perfectly correspond in it. In that universe, my body is irreparably grasped by language. It does its work on it/me, recycles it and turns it into a war machine, a "perfect weapon", into a means and a goal of destruction. My body is the place of that militant and militarized work of language, and I cannot get away from it. I cannot avoid the contamination of my body with the linguistic "structure" and its hierarchy any more.

That's why it is highly problematic whether anything could be accomplished with silence. Silence, as an interruption of talk (discourse), i.e. as an interruption of/in language, as a reference to the physical, is thought to represent an alternative because it is irrational and uncivilized. As an invasion of the non-linguistic, silence could be a negation of war, or at least its opposite. But, one in fact gains very little with that, just as nothing is gained with a physical gesture. From the perspective of acquired civilization, every movement of the body, every gesture, is in advance posed as a semantic unit, and thus (again) as a part of some language/speech (for example, of the "body language"). Just as the anti-discursive elements of language - those which, like swearwords, linguistically interrupt talks - just as pure silence, bodily actions, i.e. physical violence, do not cancel language. Linguistic violence, affirmed by war and as war, resorbs the non-linguistic and the pre-linguistic violence from which it had, by its own self-understanding, emerged. Therefore, if violence and war are not the same, they are still very close. For language, for its rationality, silent violence is war in statu nascendi, the beginning of its becoming. Language retroactively turns every violence into war. Entering language, civilization and war, might not have been easy nor simple; but it is even harder to exit them. Maybe even impossible.

My body is caught up in the trap of work/war. Any thought of return to its alleged origins, to its original sense and status, is of no help here, because the origin is retroactively grasped and expunged in the work of language. It also cannot be saved by becoming bodiless, fluid, or manifold, because there (especially there) that same work again awaits. The work of language is, like any other, always a forced labor. I have to work/war in order to survive. My survival is always the same. Its sameness is stipulated by that work/war. Everything is always the same, and everything returns. Wherever I turn I see war. Everything is so boring!¹. Yes, after the experience of war, absolutely everything is stultifyingly boring...

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