Endnotes

We’re Doomed, Now What?

  1. No doubt this is Nietzsche’s revision of his predecessor Spinoza’s ideal of amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of god (or nature), which for Spinoza took form in the practice of rational inquiry.
  2. According to Climate Central scientists working from NASA and NOAA data, February 2016 was 1.63° Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, and March 2016 was 1.54° Celsius above. See “Earth Flirts with a 1.5-Degree Celsius Global Warming Threshold,” Scientific American, Apr. 20, 2016, www.climatecentral.org/news/world-flirts-with-1.5C-threshold-20260. Tobias Friedrich and others have predicted temperature increases of up to 7.36° Celsius by 2100. See Friedrich, Tobias, et al. “Nonlinear Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications for Future Greenhouse Warming,” Science Advances 2:11, Nov. 9, 2016, http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/11/e1501923.

Arctic Ghosts

  1. Hadn’t found them, that is to say, until recently: the wreck of the Erebus was discovered in 2014, and the wreck of the Terror in 2016.

The Precipice

  1. Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,” New York Times, June 24, 1988, www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html.
  2. Thomas A. Boden, Gregg Marland, and Robert J. Andres, “Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions,” Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, TN, 2017, http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob_2014.html.
  3. Scott Waldman, “Rise in Global Carbon Emissions Slows,” Scientific American, Nov. 14, 2016, www.scientificamerican.com/article/rise-in-global-carbon-emissions-slows.
  4. Hannah Arendt, introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 3–4.
  5. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, 257–58.

Memories of My Green Machine

  1. J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), 21.
  2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 143. For an interesting and provocative exploration of the “biopolitical” question in terms of nuclear war, see Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14:2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer 1984): 20–31.
  3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8.
  4. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 31.
  5. Neil Badmington, “Theorizing Posthumanism,” Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003): 10.
  6. Daniel T. O’Hara, “Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely Critique of the ‘Post/Human’ Imagination,” boundary 2, vol. 30, no. 3 (2003): 121–22.
  7. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), 109. See also Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 17.
  8. Bernd Hüppauf, “Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation,” New German Critique 59 (Spring–Summer 1993): 62.
  9. “Identity, seen as a complex and continuous process of indentifying with or rejecting other individuals, values, social and natural surroundings, was subjected to crisis very soon after soldiers experienced conditions of the front. There was very little to identity with or to relate to. Soldiers felt cut off from real life.” Ibid., 58.
  10. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 12.
  11. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1976), 286, 493ff.
  12. Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 27.
  13. Ernst Jünger, On Pain (New York: Telos Press, 2008), 31–32 (author’s italics).
  14. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150; and Alphonso Lingis, “The Effects of the Pictures,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (2006): 84.
  15. Russell A. Berman, preface to Jünger, On Pain, xxv.
  16. Wolf Kittler, “From Getalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst Jünger,” Cultural Critique 69 (Spring 2008): 84.
  17. Jünger, On Pain, 30.
  18. Paul Richards, “New War: An Ethnographic Approach,” in Paul Richards, ed., No Peace No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 3. See also Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994), 6. Additionally, interesting discussion of some contemporary issues in the anthropology of war can be found in Keith Brown and Catherine Lutz, “Grunt Lit: The Participant-Observers of Empire,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 2 (May 2007): 326–27; Steve Featherstone, “Human Quicksand: For the US Army, a Crash Course in Cultural Studies,” Harper’s, Sept. 2008, pp. 60–68; Danny Hoffmann, “Frontline Anthropology: Research in a Time of War,” Anthropology Today 19, no. 3 (June 2003): 9–12; and David Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 2007.
  19. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 74.
  20. Phillip L. Walker, “A Bioarchaeological Perspective on the History of Violence,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 590.
  21. Ibid., 586.
  22. Allen Feldman, “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic,” Biography 27, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 186.
  23. Yuval Noah Harari, “Martial Illusions: War and Disillusionment in Twentieth-Century and Renaissance Military Memoirs,” Journal of Military History 69 (Jan. 2005): 72.
  24. Gray, Warriors, 116.
  25. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 126.
  26. Ivana Maček, “Sarajevan Soldier Story: Perceptions of War & Morality in Bosnia,” in Richards, ed., No Peace No War, 64.
  27. Ibid., 73.
  28. “In his study of the technological changes in warfare over the course of civilization, for example, William McNeill finds the creation of the modern army in the seventeenth century ‘as remarkable in its way as the birth of science or any other breakthrough of that age,’ and lists as a major effect of drill—the rhythmic movement of marching in step with many men or of firing a gun by following a precise series of forty-two successive acts performed identically by all participants—the disappearance from the soldier’s body of the signs of a particular region or country: ‘the psychic force of drill and new routines was such as to make a recruit’s origins and previous experience largely irrelevant to his behavior as a soldier.’” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford, 1985), 118.
  29. Gray, Warriors, 27.
  30. Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 82–99.
  31. Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (New York: Penguin, 2003), 239.
  32. Simone Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 2001), 26.
  33. Sigmund Freud, “Why War?” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22 (1932–36): New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=SE.022.0195A, p. 204.
  34. Nietzsche’s insistence on the bodily animal being of man is well known, and his influence on Jünger, Heidegger, Derrida, twentieth-century thought, notions of the “end of man,” and even this paper—while they cannot be addressed here—should not be left unnoticed: “But the awakened, the enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body. The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the Despisers of the Body” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 1 (New York: Penguin, 1969).
  35. Richard W. Wrangham, “Evolution of Coalitionary Killing” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 42 (1999): 1–30.
  36. Ibid., 2.
  37. Ibid., 26.
  38. Although there may be problems with his hypothesis and its political implications certainly make it very controversial, it nevertheless remains convincing. For one (rather flat) criticism of Wrangham, see Paul Roscoe, “Intelligence, Coalitional Killing, and the Antecedents of War,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 3 (Sept. 2007), 485–95.
  39. Hüppauf, “Experiences of Modern Warfare,” 60.
  40. Jünger, Storm of Steel, 92.
  41. Jünger, On Pain, 22.
  42. Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 15.
  43. Gray, Warriors, 179.
  44. Ibid., 53.
  45. Ibid., 28–29.
  46. Jünger, On Pain, 1.
  47. Allen Feldman, “Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities,” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003):, 62.
  48. Scarry, Body in Pain, 81.
  49. Jünger, On Pain, 16–17.
  50. Scarry, Body in Pain, 65.
  51. Weil, Iliad, 3.
  52. Hanna Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 46.
  53. “Although in all forms of work the worker mixes himself with and eventually becomes inseparable from the materials of his labor . . . the body in war is, to an extent found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor: he will learn to perceive himself as he will be perceived by others, as indistinguishable from the men of his unit, regiment, division, and above all national group . . . as he is also inextricably bound up with the qualities and conditions—berry laden or snow laden—of the ground over which he walks or runs or crawls and with which he craves and courts identification . . .” Scarry, Body in Pain, 83, cf. 88.
  54. Richards, “New War,” 17.
  55. See, for example, Gray, Warriors, 148–58; Scarry, Body in Pain, 88; Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 103–20; and Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 42–73.
  56. See Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (New York: Anchor, 1998), 137, 188–90; Gray, 142–48; and Jünger, Storm of Steel, 216 for accounts of warriors who face their enemies with respect.
  57. Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 103.
  58. Gray, Warriors, 163.
  59. Ibid., 81.
  60. Michael Taussig asserts that fetishes “come across more like people than things, spiritual entities that are neither, and this is what gives them their strange beauty . . . Unwinding the fetish is not yet given on the horizon of human possibility.” Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xviii. Consider this passage from The Things They Carried: “The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried his good luck pebble. Dave Jensen carried a rabbit’s foot. Norman Bowker, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitchell Sanders. The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed 4 ounces at most. It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen.” Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1990), 13. On the superstitiousness of soldiers and the myth-making elements at work in the combat zone, see particularly Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1975]), especially pp. 114–54; and Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 30–32, 137–48.
  61. “There are . . . three arenas of damage in war, three arenas of alteration: first, embodied persons; second, the material culture or self-extension of persons; third, immaterial culture, aspects of national consciousness, political beliefs, and self-definition.” Scarry, Body in Pain, 114. Discussion of the Heideggerian sense follows.
  62. Martin Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 8, 16–17.
  63. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 97.
  64. Ibid., 101.
  65. Ibid., 104. I would add, as a point of interest, the possibility that aesthetic withdrawal opens another path to the gestalt of Things, an epiphanic meditation that allows the Being of things to disclose itself without the imposition of instrumental utility.
  66. Ibid., 105.
  67. Scarry, Body in Pain, 61–63, on the “civilization-destroying” or “culture-destroying” aspect of injury.
  68. Ibid., 135.
  69. Gray, Warriors, 179.
  70. Jünger, Storm of Steel, 255–56.
  71. Hüppauf, “Experiences of Modern Warfare,” 61. The preceding text reads: “In contrast to [a] ‘humanist’ vision of modern warfare, a vision of the faceless gray warrior emerged. Linked to the disintegration of the bourgeois ego and its meaningful psychological construction was the reconstitution of man as a fighting machine. The hardened man with his steel helmet, emotionless, experienced, with no morality apart from the value of comradeship and no obligation or attachment other than to his immediate group of warriors, fitted the imagery of futurism and soon degenerated into the fascist myth of the new man. However, this ideological straightjacket, with its looming deformation into fascist attitudes and the Nazi killer mentality, was only the most openly menacing but short-lived political materialization of this experience. Jünger’s idea of the Arbeiter, for all its now-dated characteristics, is a typified construction with considerable significance for western man in the second half of this century.”
  72. Kittler, “From Gestalt to Ge-Stell,” 92. For more on the relation between Heidegger and Jünger, see Eduardo Mendieta, “Imperial Geographies and Topographies of Nihilism: Theatres of War and Dead Cities,” City 8, no. 1 (2004): 20; and, of course, Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy (Boston: MIT Press, 1992).
  73. Gray, Warriors, 103.
  74. Weil, Iliad, 22.

The Terror of the New

  1. Translation by Christian Hänggi, “Stockhausen at Ground Zero,” Fillip, Fall 2011, http://fillip.ca/content/stockhausen-at-ground-zero.
  2. Anthony Tommasini, “The Devil Made Him Do It,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/arts/music-the-devil-made-him-do-it.html.
  3. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1970]), 6, 8, 29, ibid., respectively.
  4. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Viking, 1991), 41.

The Idea of Order I Can’t Breathe

  1. It turns out that I was conflating various quotations. One is from The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias where she writes: “Americans . . . are like spaniards, they are abstract and cruel. They are not brutal they are cruel. They have no close contact with the earth such as most europeans have. Their materialism is not the materialism of existence, of possession, it is the materialism of action and abstraction.” In other places Stein compares Spanish and Russians and finds them similarly “oriental” and “callous.” She writes in Everybody’s Autobiography: “And then it came to me it is perfectly simple, the Russian and the Spaniard are oriental, and there is the same mixing. Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar. Scratch a Spaniard and you find a Saracen.”
  2. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 117.
  3. Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman. Notes on Conceptualisms (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), 17.
  4. Place and Fitterman, Notes, 18.
  5. Ibid., 15.
  6. Philip, Zong!, 43.
  7. Evie Shockley, “Is ‘Zong!’ Conceptual Poetry? Yes, It Isn’t,” Jacket 2, Sept. 17, 2013, http://jacket2.org/article/zong-conceptual-poetry-yes-it-isn%E2%80%99t.
  8. M. NourbeSe Philip, “Wor(l)ds Interrupted: The Unhistory of the Kari Basin,” Jacket 2, Sept. 17, 2013, http://jacket2.org/article/worlds-interrupted.
  9. Ned Parker, “Hamas Denounces Killing of Bin Laden,” Los Angeles Times, May 2, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/02/world/la-fgw-bin-laden-hamas-20110501.
  10. Association of Writers and Writing Programs, “Update Regarding the AWP Los Angeles 2016 Subcommittee,” May 18, 2015, www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_news_view/3716/update_regarding_the_awp_los_angeles_2016_subcommittee.
  11. Timothy Volpert, “Remove Vanessa Place from the AWP Los Angeles Conference Committee,” Change.org, May 2015, https://www.change.org/p/association-of-writers-and-writing-conferences-remove-vanessa-place-from-the-awp-los-angeles-conference-committee.
  12. Vanessa Place, “I Is Not a Subject: Part 5 of 5,” Harriet: A Poetry Blog, May 1, 2013, www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/05/i-is-not-a-subject-part-5-of-5.
  13. Vanessa Place, “Artist’s Statement,” Drunken Boat 10 (Summer 2009), www.drunkenboat.com/db10/06fic/place/statement.html.
  14. Keith Gessen, “On PEN and Charlie Hebdo: Why I Signed the Letter Protesting the PEN Annual Gala,” N+1, May 5, 2015, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/on-pen-and-charlie-hebdo.