9-11: Pharmacotic War

Modern wars are pharmacotic. They permit governments to draw on the singular capacity of sacralized bloodshed to unify political communities and generate fungible political power, by orchestrating symbolically charged military operations against demonized foreign enemies, while scapegoating constructed domestic threats to internal security. Such practices recall the ritual of the pharmakos, in which ancient Greek communities ritually sacrificed specially designated human victims in order to restore the unity of the polity. Along with other instances of politically manipulated popular scapegoating practices — hate crimes, AM radio talk show discourse, and popular support for the death penalty, for example — the pharmacotic nature of contemporary warfare reminds us that the United States, along with other Western polities, is politically descended, however distantly, from communities that practiced sacrificial pharmacotic rituals, and suggests the extent to which we remain haunted[1] by the originary structuring effects of those practices. Pharmacotic war continues to draw political power from that aspect of the Western collective unconscious that is structured not, as Lacan would have it, like a language, but rather, in the words of Phillipe Sollers,[2] like a lynching.

The collective cathartic effect of such wars has long been widely recognized.[3] Conservative political thinkers have frequently lauded the salutary effects of pharmacotic wars on the body politic. Political leaders can exploit the temporary patriotic unity generated by war to strengthen support for incumbents, pass otherwise controversial laws and programs, silence opponents and dissenters, reward favored constituencies, and accomplish other partisan or parochial goals. Although prolonged pharmacotic wars can aggravate a country’s internal political problems, in the short term they can provide unparalleled advantages and opportunities for the party or coalition in office, and particularly for the president and other executive officials. But wars, especially protracted wars, can also be extremely dangerous for an incumbent government, and for the polity as well. They waste lives and treasure, and while a nation may for a time be willing to expend these in pursuit of victory over a hated foe, unless that enemy continues to pose a clear and present threat to the nation’s people or interests, popular support for incurring those costs will tend to weaken over time. As it does, unless victory is assured or a satisfactory end to the conflict is negotiated, the lives and resources already consumed in the war will increasingly be counted against the government. The patriotic fervor generated by the war, fleeting in the best of times, will begin to dissolve, and if the war becomes sufficiently unpopular the government and its actions may even become stigmatized in the minds of large segments of the population. Some of the policies or programs implemented during the war may become tainted by association with it. In some cases, opposition to a war may become intense enough that a leader, a party, a government, or an entire political system may fall.

War, then, is pharmacotic in a second sense. Like the Greek pharmakon (a term which meant both remedy, medicine, addiction, and poison),[4] war can have simultaneously opposite and contradictory effects on a government or state. War disseminates — it gives rise to unforeseen new situations, creates new dangers and opportunities, and forces new political meanings to be constructed out of these. Pharmacotic wars are thus both beneficial and harmful: like the pharmakon, they are at the same time remedy and poison, temporarily salutary, but over the long term dangerously addictive, and ultimately destructive to the state.

In pharmacotic wars, “symbolic” factors such as heroic victories and defeats, ritualized ideological struggles, politicized religious conflicts, and other contests involving the affective identities, psychological dispositions, and symbolic allegiances — the “hearts and minds” — of allies and adversaries, take precedence over geostrategic, economic, or other material “interests” as stakes of the war.

The events of September 11 have triggered an international conflict that threatens to evolve, in both the United States and in the Islamic world, into just such a pharmacotic war. The September 11 theo-terrorist attack, the retributive violence directed against US Muslims and Arab-Americans, and the liberation of the missionaries/ “Christian aid workers” (the “e/scapegoat” which is an essential part of the Levitican...