Abstract EN:

From polemological, historical and strategic definitions of war, as well as from the theories of a just war, an emergent likeness between foreign war and civil war may be noted which shows the permanence of internal split as the major danger for the city. Setting limits to war partly belongs to a plan of action to stave off intolerable wars in wich fellows citizens would otherwise be enemies. The distinction between "polemos" and "stasis" (Heraclitus, Plato, Thucydides) is taken up in the light of Machiavelli's hypothesis, against duel-like war, of a consubstantiality of war with politics. The concept of paradoxical war, altering the relationship between enemies (Carl Schimitt, Cicero and Antony) allows us the bring out an indeterminate state of war, in between legality and illegality (the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the Paris Commune and the Algerian war of liberation). From the theories of the social contract that postulate an hypothetical, anhistorical and infra-political moment- the natural state- which proves bellicose (Hobbes, Spinoza, Cumberland, Pufendorf, Rousseau, Kant) we can infer the extra-legal nature of war. Thus the notion of "stasis" revisited reveals the nature of politics- and its bellicosity in peace and war times- wich can devise artificial separations to protect the identity and power of the city (conjuration and abstract reference to external war). The concept of city-at-war is based on the fallacious reminiscence of an original war and the real recollection of past civil wars. Political relationships, exacerbated in internal wars, weakened in external wars, shows that the essence of war can first be apprehended in a closed political entity and that the identity of the city folds the exterior back onto the interior; frontiers are not only territorial or State boundaries. The city at war is confronted with its own stratagem at the very moment when crisis makes it ineffective.