Freud's Why War? Revisited

ABSTRACT

Alternating a return to Freud’s propositions in the well-known paper “Why War?” revisited with her own hypothesis of a feminine-maternal matricial third sitting at the origin of ethics conceived as responsibility towards the other, the author refers to Levinas’s reflections on the phenomenon of war. She relates in particular to his introduction of Totality and Infinity, to passages from Difficult Freedom, as well as to one of his later works, which, in an interesting resonance with contemporary violence, is called: From the Sacred to the Holy. While contributing clinical illustrations or elements connected with the Israeli socio-political context in which she practices, the author focuses on the tension between the reality of wars and the aspiration for peace which she sees as related to a nostalgia to intimacy, that is to the feminine-maternal residing in every human.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• war
• death
• peace
• responsibility
• sacred
• third
• life

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Correction

Notes

3 See Hanoch Ben-Pazi, "Messianism's Contribution to Political Philosophy: Peace and War in Levinas's Totality and Infinity," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (2016).

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2021.1928367)

4 I drew inspiration for the term “matricial space” (espace matriciel) (and derived there from the term matrice, matricial position, transference of matricial space, matricial third) a long time ago from Bracha Ettinger(1997) who, in the wake of Levinas, had suggested the term “matrixial space” (espace matrixiel) in a slightly different context.In Hebrew the matrix that is : the uterus, is called rehem while rehem is found in the word rahamim, which means compassion.

5 I see formlessness, the intimate, and the psychical zone of infinity interwoven with one another and I will come back to this point in the discussion.

6 Palestinian National Liberation Movement.

7 I am using Jean Laplanche’s terminology while agreeing with this thinker that as analysts, we have to speak of sexual death drives and sexual life drives -to be differentiated from biological instincts- I will elaborate upon this point during our discussion.

8 Translator’s note: In French, “se maintenir et main-tenir en un maintenant”. Maintenir lends itself to word play, as main = hand and tenir = hold, keep.

9 Translator’s note: responsabilité affectée, here the word affectée plays on two meanings: responsibility that is invested with affect because one is emotionally affected by the other.

10 Lebanese Shiite political movement with an armed faction that is categorically opposed to recognising the legitimacy of Israel.

11 As Laplanche sees it, the infantile sexuality, the sexuality Freud describes in the Three essays on sexuality, is polymorphous -and in ‘good enough health’ stays for its most part, unconscious in the adults.

12 The externalization of the intrapsychic could account for social and political issues and I think that the political and social could impinge/affect the intrapsychic.

13 A pleasure correlated with excitation.

14 Laplanche (1999) has defined sublimation as the result of the transformation of the sexual death drives into the sexual life drives.

15 Intervention by Dominique Bourdin during the workshop on “L’actuel de l’éthique en psychanalyse”, CPLF, 2014.

16 Rules distinguishing right from wrong as it shows up in an ethical code