Crisis of Presence in Times of Civil War

This embodied experience of war leads us to consider war less as a voluntarily waged battle than as a struggle fought at the heart of existence—a life marked by war. It is a war of this kind that Lazzarato and Alliez refer to when they highlight the destruction wreaked by capital accumulation since the colonization of the New World (and, via feedback effect, Europe³ 3 - Ibid. In citing Michel Foucault’s lecture “Society must be defended” (February 4, 1976), the authors remind us of the feedback effects of external colonization on power mechanisms in Europe. ) on “the material conditions of life, but also in terms of existential territories, universes of values, cosmology, and the mythologies at the foundation of the ‘subjective life’ of the colonized people and the poor of the so-called ‘civilized world.’”⁴ 4 - Ibid., 52. Thus, material and immaterial destruction still determines how biopower invests spiritual and biological life in the interest of maintaining the global capitalist machine. It is clear that wars of subjectivity form the matrix of colonial war.