Bill condon’s gods and monsters (1998)

초록

Steffen Hantke Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters (1998) War constitutes such catastrophic breakdown of civilization that it negates civilization. War does not provide an extension of civilization; it is not, as von Clausewitz’s famous dictum would have it, ‘the continuation of diplomacy by other means’. Rather, it is civilization’s Other. Faced with its own negation in the instance of such catastrophic failure, civilization needs either to be silent about war, or to account for it. It needs to explain not only the local occurrence - any specific war at hand - but the universal existence of war. It matters little if this explanation is cast in an apologetic, legitimizing register, or whether it is delivered as an indictment, an accusation, a critique. The discourse of war is civilization’s attempt at recuperating its Other, at re-integrating it into itself so that it can perform useful cultural labour. Within the framework of such a discourse, war could be presented as an expression of humanity’s worst moral impulses, a scenario in which war would be subject to collective and individual moral choice. Or war could be presented as a result of the species’ evolutionary programming, a scenario that dooms humanity to self-destruction due to a tragic flaw in its essential make-up. Variously, war could be an art, a craft, a profession, a business, a tradition. Culturally speaking, war has been subject to rules and regulations: the code of military honour, the ‘rules of engagement’, or the…. © Peter Lang AG 2018.