Injuring and Mourning

Not only does war produce countless deaths, it is also, according to Sara Ruddick, the product of an obsession with death in Western thought. In Maternal Thinking, Ruddick argues that one of the chief contributing factors to the persistence of war is the philosophical privileging of death over life, something that has been clearly illustrated in the preceding three chapters. For Ruddick, Western philosophy has consistently relegated life to a supporting role in relation to death, which is the true motor or goal of human existence. Although such an interpretation of the Western tradition must bracket out vitalist, or life philosophies, it is difficult to play down the significance of death within the Western, predominantly male, canon.¹ Curiously, however, when it comes to warfare and the official rhetoric of a military campaign, death largely disappears. Victories are not noted or recorded by body counts. We tend not to report or show the mounting dead preferring to perform the disappearance of injured and mutilated bodies in the name of ‘decency’. When death is recorded, however, it is invariably a key moment in the sublimation of violence as heroic sacrifice. Central to Ruddick’s argument, then, is that a reconsideration of life, or more specifically, a celebration of birth and birthing labour would be a valuable contribution to anti-militarism: ‘women tend to know’, she comments, ‘in a way and to a degree that men do not, both the history and the cost of human flesh’ (1989: 186). In the light of this, Ruddick’s philosophical revaluation will be used to open a consideration of the function of both injuring and mourning in war and how a reconception of the place of mourning and the role of the mourner might help us question militarism.