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Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer's concept of “pure war” refers to the potential of a culture to destroy itself completely (12).2 We as psychoanalysts can—and increasingly must—explore the impact of this concept on our practice, and on the growing number of patients who live with the inability to repress or dissociate their experience and awareness of the pure war condition. The realization of a patient's worst fears in actual catastrophic events has always been a profound enough psychotherapeutic challenge. These days, however, catastrophic events not only threaten friends, family, and neighbors; they also become the stuff of endless repetitions and dramatizations on radio, television, and Internet.3 Such continual reminders of death and destruction affect us all. What is the role of the analyst treating patients who live with an ever-threatening sense of the pure war lying just below the surface of our cultural veneer?
At the end of the First World War, the first “total war,” Walter Benjamin observed that “nothing [after the war] remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body”(84). Julia Kristeva makes a similar note about our contemporary situation, “The recourse to atomic weapons seems to prove that horror…can rage absolutely” (232). And, as if he too were acknowledging this same fragility and uncontainability, the French politician Georges Clemenceau commented in the context of World War I that “war is too serious to be confined to the military” (qtd. in Virilio and Lotringer 15).
Virilio and Lotringer gave the name “pure war” to the psychological condition that results when people know that they live in a world where the possibility for absolute destruction (e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As Virilio and Lotringer see it, it is not the technological capacity for destruction (that is, for example, the existence of nuclear armaments) that imposes the dread