Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Heraclitus, in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, ed. and tr. Charles H. Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 66–67. 2. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn: Dummler, 1973), 199. 3. See René Girard, “Literature and Christianity: A Personal View,” Philosophy and Literature 23.1 (1999), 32–43; Girard, La conversion de l’art (Paris: Carnets nord, 2008), esp. “La conversion romanesque: du héros à l’écrivain,” 187–200. 4. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos,” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, tr. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press, 1994), 483. CHAPTER 1. THE ESCALATION TO EXTREMES 1. Girard finds a covert tension in Clausewitz between (1) a notion of war’s escalation slowed or reversed by “frictions” or by a reciprocal climbdown between antagonists, and (2) a near-apocalyptic recognition that modern war is becoming endless and uncontrollable. Naville and Howard/Paret follow Clausewitz’s muted terminology of “Tendenz” (Vom Kriege, 8) and “das Streben nach dem Äussersten” (Vom Kriege, 199) by using “tendance” (Naville), “trend” or “tendency towards extremes” (Howard and Paret). Achever Clausewitz consistently uses “montée aux extrêmes” to emphasize the breakaway irreversibility of the reciprocal process towards extremes. We will follow Howard and Paret when quoting Clausewitz directly, but when the issue is this process as Girard understands it, we will translate Girard and Chantre’s “montée aux extrêmes” as “escalation towards extremes.” 2. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and tr. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1.1.2, 75. 219 220 Notes 3. La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1972); Violence and the Sacred, tr. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 4. Carl von Clausewitz, De la guerre, tr. Denise Naville (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1955). 5. Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, tr. Christine Booker and Norman Stone (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985). [RG/ BC] 6. The translators have followed Naville (p. 51) as well as Howard and Paret (p. 75) who both translate “Zweikampf” (Clausewitz, p. 191) as “duel.” Yet Bergson, in Two Sources of Morality and Religion (275–276) argues the obsolescence of duel for modern warfare and more recently Michael Waltzer in Just and Unjust War argues cogently against accepting the connotations of conflict governed by rule suggested by “duel” (New York: Basic Book, 2006), 22–25. Clausewitz’s homely image of two wrestlers (“zwei Ringende,” 191) in this passage suggests we should understand something like “hand-to-hand combat” for “Zweikampf” throughout. Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that “duel” derives from Latin “duellum,” an ancient form of “bellum” (The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971], 705). 7. Clausewitz, 1.1.2, 75. [RG/BC] 8. Clausewitz, 1.1.3, 75. [RG/BC] 9. Clausewitz, 1.1.3, 75–76. [RG/BC] 10. Our emphasis. 11. Clausewitz, 1.1.3, 76–77. “... so gibt jeder dem anderen das Gesetz, es entsteht eine Wechselwirkung, die dem Begriff nach zum äussersten führen muss. Dies ist die erste Wechselwirkung und das erste Äusserste, worauf wir stossen” (Vom Kriege, 194). [RG/BC] German text footnoted in Achever Clausewitz; the phrase in the last sentence is emphasized by Clausewitz. 12. Clausewitz, 1.1.11, 81. [RG/BC] 13. Clausewitz, 1.1.8, 79. [RG/BC] 14. Clausewitz, 1.1.6, 78. [RG/BC] 15. Clausewitz, 1.1.7, 78. [RG/BC] 16. Clausewitz, 1.1.8, 79. [RG/BC] 17. Clausewitz, 1.1.8, 80. [RG/BC] 18. Clausewitz, 1.1.8, 80. [RG/BC] 19. Clausewitz, 1.1.10, 80. [RG/BC] 20. “Undifferentiation” is the term used in Violence and the Sacred to describe the state of a social group threatened by a “mimetic crisis”: violence is so widespread in the group that all differences (social, family, individual) have disappeared. [RG/BC] 21. Clausewitz, 1.1.11, 80–81 [emphases in original]. [RG/BC] 22. Clausewitz, 1.1.11, 81. [RG/BC] 23. Clausewitz, 1.1.3, 76. [RG/BC] Notes 221 24. Clausewitz, 1.1.11, 81 [emphasis in original]. [RG/BC] 25. Clausewitz, 1.1.11, 81. [RG/BC] 26. Here and elsewhere the translators will sometimes translate literally Naville’s “action reciproque” (Naville, 57) for Clausewitz’s “Wechselwirkung” rather than follow Howard and Paret’s “interaction.” 27. See The Critique of Pure Reason, III, §11 passim. 28. Clausewitz, 1.1.12, 82. [RG/BC] 29...