War is a verb consists of a series of articles on war. Articles that are war writing and reading. So writing is also reading those authors who try to give a name to the devastating effect of conflagrations: insensitivity, anesthesia, the brutalization of life for the survivors.
Since the books on combat are addressed to those who can somehow get out of its deadly clutches. Since in war there are the dead, and the half dead. Those who remain in a survival ride over their biography, half identifying with it. In the beginning it was life, Courbet would paint at the origin of his world. However, to that work he responds The origin of the war of Orlan. The nakedness of a faceless man, the nakedness in his stillness. The erection of a body without appropriation. Making war, looting every last vital sign is the principle as an action. Not a substantive word but an act that is carried out as the thanatic map is located within the very interior of the social machine. An act of time. So writing about war could offer an epitaph as an end, as a beginning.
From the mythological cosmology and the tragic poem, from the biblical fratricide, identity is attached to violence. The political scheme of language, national constitutions and the staging of Justice are no strangers to violent tearing. The evil of not being able of the colonial lineages to claim for a deed as a public force. Warned of the social function of the damned, of the surplus, of spending. If art does not assume that margin of catastrophe as a social desire. If we let the catastrophe float alone like a bone without a veil, without an incarnation, we come across the war scandal of a society subsumed to a belligerence as a vital mode, or rather, as a decrease in its vital heartbeat.
Everything is after a genocide, so that writing this after requires not a textual strategy that settles in some reason of State or in the patriotic ways of a national language; but in a geopolitics of sensibility. Not a lost language, not a language of paradise whose hand tends to an aesthetic prophylaxis. To plot a thought of the archipelago that explodes the legitimization of a border, threading the artifices of the imagination where the community can take shape to live and love.
“War is a verb” has the artillery of the word of authors who have been participants in wars. Such as the Armenians Levón Khechoyan and Hovhannés Yeranyan, or neighbors in the conflicts such as Mariné Petrossian. Or that they are relatives of those persecuted by the European wars, such as the case of the Argentine authors Sandro Barrella or Perla Sneh; or harassed by genocide, the political scientist and expert in armed conflicts, the French Gérard Chaliand. The verbal modes indicating the speaker’s position, that grammatical category, that accident consent to go through a range of possibilities until finding a possible tenderness for a war that is named in the past tense, thus accompanies the text of the writing of the book by the Argentine philosopher Diego Tatian .
Our time will be known by the letter, by a perception that accounts for the layers of fiction that are attached to each of our subjectivities. A look that acquired the thickness of a magnifying glass stopped on each intimate loss, on that vulnerable point of each vitality just at risk of being broken. Reading about the books about wars is accompanied by the author’s own South American perspective on the confrontations in Armenia or on the global sanitary measures pronounced from a warlike language.
Contemporary cartography, these time coordinates marked by the immobility of the victim, by policies that explode in the affections of people isolating them, has counters that unravel the skeins of cruelty that sustain the social fabric. Because violence can also be an element that builds ties. Those relationships woven from the perversion of cruelty not only disarm a framework, but also create another. Take the floor, show the wound in order to be able to conceive of a life together. War is a verb because it tries to penetrate the way in which violence is actualized, in the double sense in which the fight occurs, but also in the time and space where it is consumed.
*Author of War is a verb, La Zebra Ediciones. (Fragment).
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