Remembering the Drone Wars: High Technology Warfare and the Trauma Lacuna

This paper explores drones in relation to states' capacity or desire to generate national memories around warfare. How may a society remember a drone war whose rationality is the cultivation of distance? How is sense made of that lacuna between the visibility and invisibility of suffering? Victimhood is understood as an embodied phenomenon, corresponding to a schematic of trauma, specific to the style, or rationality, of violence. Since body-less war transcends physical and political limits of the body, eclipsing traditional commemorations of trauma, we consider the conditions of possibility for a distinctly national remembrance of drone wars.