René Girard
Achever Clausewitz: entretiens avec Benoît Chantre.
Paris: Flammarion, 2011. Champs essais. Revised and enlarged edition. 9782081226395 411 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 4.5" x 7.25", is like new.
"René Girard discusses here the work of Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), a Prussian strategist and author of "Vom Kriege" ("On War"). This unfinished treatise has been studied by many military, politicians and philosophers. An essential axiom has been retained: "War is the continuation of politics by other means." Clausewitz would have thought that governments could silence the guns. But the success of this formula shows a refusal to see the novelty of the treatise. An observer of the Napoleonic campaigns, Clausewitz understood the nature of modern warfare: the terms "duel", "reciprocal action" or "rise to extremes" designate an implacable mechanism, which has since established itself as the only law of history. Far from containing violence, politics is running behind war: the means of war have become ends. René Girard makes Clausewitz the fascinated witness of an acceleration of history. Haunted by the Franco-German conflict, this strategist illuminates, better than any other, the movement that will destroy Europe. To "finish Clausewitz" is to lift a taboo: the one that prevented us from seeing that the apocalypse has begun. Because human violence, out of control, now threatens the entire planet."