The warlike desires of modernity

After a presentation of the book, Déborah V. Brosteaux will be interviewed by Thibault De Meyer and Vivien Giet.

Free admission. Everyone is welcome.

Book presentation

Faced with the wars in which European countries are involved, we constantly oscillate between numbness and frenzy. Some war situations give rise to emotional heatedness, a "renewed" psychic and social energy, while others are barely mentioned, relegated to the background. This philosophical investigation delves into the ambivalence of our relationship to war, which is at the heart of the sensitive history of modernity.
Inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, and Klaus Theweleit, the book explores these warlike emotions throughout the 20th century and questions their legacy: the coldness of distancing, the denial of the ruins after 1945, the desire to intensify the experience of self, which mobilized the imagination in 1914-1918 and was swallowed up in the trenches... even mutating into fascist passions that actively fed on the devastation.

Déborah V. Brosteaux takes these desires seriously, including their appeal. And she asks: what emotional transformations can be activated to resist the mobilization of war?