In reflecting on the springs of human conflict Mearsheimer concedes that the terms of pure existential security conflict can be transformed by contentions over the good and the just, but he also tends to minimize the significance of this dimension of the struggle as its eruption would undermine the black box abstraction of realism. Offensive realism tells us, however, that it is unwise to rule out such seemingly unlikely events as they can unexpectedly recur. We must always be prepared for the extreme. A fully blown offensive realism might then open up a conception of the political that would conjoin the struggle for power between states to the one within them. Admittedly, the world implied by this dialectical development of offensive realism does not currently exist but it is a possible world and one that speaks to the vital human need for ends and conflicts over ends that liberal hegemony has long suppressed. The prolongation of this hegemony now threatens to cut off the possibility that some people, somewhere might construct new forms of collective existence. Here we must reconsider the role of the subjective, the thymotic drive and the ideas that might inspire it. If today’s so-called great power states can no longer rely upon the mobilizing power of nationalism to neutralize deepening social divides, what passions might the latter inspire, and how will they shape wars of the twenty-first century?
The Great and the Good
Ray Lester Fitzsimmons
These last writings on Wagner make clear the force of his break from his earlier ambition to consider the political from a purely aesthetic perspective. This romantic aestheticization of the political had taken the form of portraying Germany as a new Greece in keeping with the defining tenet of German philhellenism. From the late eighteenth century, and with renewed intensity from the 1790s in the response to the course of the French Revolution, Germans of the idealist era came to think of Greek tragedy as the highest form of art, conveying an experience of the terror of destiny amidst now broken dreams of restoring ancient civic virtue. This was a new experience of a caesura of ancient and modern, and at the same of an epochal nexus upon which a new, modern tragic consciousness became possible. Unsurprisingly, Nietzsche had a scant, tendentious understanding of this French Revolutionary context in which a rebirth of tragedy in Germany became conceivable, though it was Hölderlin, his childhood hero, who had announced this dark rose dawn. Like many readers of Nietzsche, Badiou does not take into consideration this preceding German discourse on ancient and modern tragedy but with less justification as it directly pertains to his conception of the mimetic-antagonistic relation of Nietzsche’s act of epochal division to the Revolution.
Little Infinities
Ray Lester Fitzsimmons