Displaced Battlefields: Sigmund Freud and the Reading of War Zones

My dissertation, "Displaced Battlefields: Sigmund Freud and the Reading of War Zones," interprets Freud's thinking on war as philosophically inflected and implicated; further, it argues that, in attempting to map war's metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical occupations, Freud's thinking on war becomes a thinking at war---a thinking that grapples with the limits of thinking as such. By tracing Freud's questioning of war's philosophical reverberations---What is war and where does it take place? Where does it hit us? Where does it hurt? Wherefore warfare? Why war?---I seek to show that as Freud was conducting his readings of war he was simultaneously developing and refining a theory of human subjectivity as one determined by contradiction, conflict, and strife. Indeed, by following Freud's examination of war's disparate terrains, territories, trenches, and theaters, I suggest that Freud affirms the presence of such warfare in our lives and, in particular, in the task of thinking.;I begin by exploring the way in which Freud's early wartime writing and, in particular, his essay, "Zeitgemasses uber Krieg und Tod" (1915), structured his understanding of the psyche as in a perpetual state of 'being-at-war.' I suggest that Freud comes to this conclusion only after first attempting to demarcate and explore a space apart from war---the space of the home front. Then I explore the way in which Freud's later wartime writing and, in particular, his correspondence with Albert Einstein, known by the title "Warum Krieg?" (1932), presents a revised theory as to the nature of psychic conflict---one refined and complicated by the concepts of repetition, the drives, and the structural re-mapping of the psyche---and yet nonetheless presents a radical hope for and affirmation of a time without war. Through these readings, I seek to show that the attempt to think through---to map, trace, and break through---the zones of war that structure and inform our lives remains a most pressing thought for our times.