ABSTRACT
If a guiding motif of the long nineteenth century was that war is the continuation of politics by other means, politics today seems to have become the continuation of war by other means. Power has certainly not disappeared, nor even diminished, but it has often become more subtle: hegemony has become hegemonic. This cloaking and transformation of violence in symbolic forms, however, has increased the possibility for challenges that do not depend entirely on traditional material resources. “The struggle of man against power,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera put it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Victors and victims are now entwined in ongoing struggles of claim and counter-claim, memory and counter-memory: contemporary politics continues past wars as discursive battles over their legacies. The question is whether these discursive struggles tend towards a resolution or generate new cycles of hatred and atrocity.
