The sublime object of militarism

Abstract

Slavoj Žižek's analysis of ideology helps us to see that, far from hosting the end of ideology, the contemporary world is ideologically saturated. Ideology has come into its own via the development of doubling strategies that simultaneously articulate and hide the workings of ideologies. This is not a simple process of socialization or “brainwashing,” but a complex double move that facilitates identification and disidentification at the same time. Contemporary militarism performs the first move by separating regular life from the war, establishing the war to be “over there,” big but distant, not here. It enacts the second move by saturating our daily lives with war-ness, in the form of securitizing practices such as surveillance cameras, wire tapping, electronic locking systems, sign-in sheets, guards with clipboards and often guns; but the terms of the saturation reinforce the prior belief in the separation of the war from our lives. Today's wars carry on alongside “normal” life without seeming to interrupt it, pretending to separate it completely while it in fact saturates our lives. © 2009, Caucus for a New Political Science.