Wartime: Foucault, Hobbes and the promise of peace

Abstract

This essay interprets Hobbes’s understanding of time and the constitution of sense as “decaying sense,” or imagination, in order to argue that war —the “war of all against all”— is a universal, existential condition of and for life. The essay explores Hobbes’s understanding of language, fear and anticipation to demonstrate the inevitability of war and argues that, for Hobbes, peace is an empirical modification of war. The essay argues, against Foucault, that for Hobbes there is no distinction between war and the “state of war” and, furthermore, that existential “war” ought to be understood as Hobbes’s conception of the “care of the self”, which Foucault claims is “coextensive with life”. The essay challenges Foucault’s interpretation, following Seneca and others, that parrhesia follows from detachment from life, that is, from the practice of living one’s life as if one were already dead.