Introduction

The papers collected in this issue of Thesis Eleven – which has been compiled in collaboration with the Histories of Violence’s ‘Disposable Life’ project (http://historiesofviolence.com/specialseries/disposable-life/) – are all new and all confront one of the most pressing questions of the day: what do the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki mean for us on the occasions of their 70th anniversary? For all of us contributing to this issue, the question has proven to be more difficult to address than might initially be thought. Despite the scale of the atrocity, the impact of the bombings on social, philosophical and cultural thought has not been what one might think.

Jan Patočka noted how the bombing of Hiroshima – as so often is the way, Nagasaki was not even mentioned – was seen at the time as an event with an inescapable eschatological dimension. It had transformed everything and was assumed to portend, ‘the spectacular intensity of a destructive end of the world’ (Patočka, 1996: 132). Ingmar Bergman a little later dramatized the eschatological sensibility in The Seventh Seal although he replaced the spectacular with mud. Yet Patočka did not merely make an observation about Hiroshima. He asked a question about it. He asked exactly what has been the effect of Hiroshima on the social, cultural and philosophical understandings of history. Patočka’s answer was stark and perhaps only a little overstated: ‘Thus far the visible impact we could attribute to this fundamental transformation and conversion, not comparable with anything else…has been nil’ (Patočka, 1996: 132). Orwell had spotted this ‘nil’ within weeks of the bombings. In October 1945 he rather sardonically noted: ‘Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected’ (Orwell, 2002: 903). Although Orwell’s point was well-made there was of course a practical reason for the lack of discussion: American military censorship.

If some of the leading journals within the discipline are to be taken as a guide, academic sociology provides a glaring example of the lack of discussion, which Orwell noticed so quickly, and it exemplifies Patočka’s ‘nil’. Between 1945 and 1986 the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology and Social Forces, for example, between them published some 6500 papers. Of these fewer than 12 dealt with nuclear issues (Beckman, 1992). Robert C. Kramer and Sam Marullo (1985: 283) give the number as six. This was of course the period when the Cold War was at its warmest, and when nuclear weapons were a recurrent issue of very immediate concern. This effectively ‘nil’ score of sociology cannot be excused on the grounds of a lack of knowledge or information, at least not once official censorship restrictions were lifted. It can be explained only as the expression of either academic-disciplinary boundaries restricting imagination (according to which this is a matter for political science, not sociology), or self-censorship (don’t offend the grant-givers) or, quite simply, indifference. The ‘nil’ of academic sociology points to the relaxed acceptance of an option to think within wholly familiar surroundings. ¹

Two deeper explanations of the ‘nil’ emerge immediately from Patočka’s discussion. First, in the 20th century events have happened too quickly to permit the opening of adequate space in which to define each new thing in its own terms and to identify its unique qualities (Patočka, 1996: 119). For instance, a perfectly valid case can be made for the sui generis status of Hiroshima-Nagasaki. Yet the dominant approaches have tended to identify it as nothing more than a case study of broader and more general processes. It is made familiar. In other words, the unique aspect of Hiroshima-Nagasaki is insufficiently realized. Once again the disciplinary field of academic sociology makes the point rather well. For example, Joas and Knöbl’s War in Social Thought talks about what they call the suppression of war in sociology. They explain: ‘wars are often constitutive of theory construction, as the informative background to ideas, yet they do not appear in theories themselves at all or only to a small extent’ (Joas and Knöbl, 2013: viii). They go on to write a book which does not mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Presumably the nuclear bombings are simply the ‘informative background to ideas’ and are significant for the book only in as much as they might be ‘constitutive of theory construction’. Joas’s own War and Modernity devotes only three of its 220 or so pages of writing to the nuclear, and these are little more than an extended case study of Cold War power politics (Joas, 2003: 135–8).

Second, Hiroshima has had a minimal impact because its meaning is unclear. The atomic bombing was carried out in the – however cynical and mendacious – name of peace. The Cold War was subsequently justified as the military preparation to wage a war to defend peace. But this implied the collapse of any distinction between war and peace and, indeed, raised the problem of the ‘inability to win a war conceived from the point of view of peace’ (Patočka, 1996: 133). This point can be extended a little beyond Patočka’s own argument but in a direction rather implicit within it. Patočka mentions how the prospect of nuclear war is invariably linked to peace. By this line of argument, then, Hiroshima-Nagasaki was quite simply an instrumental action, carried out in order to hasten the end of the Second World War. Atomic and subsequently nuclear weapons immediately became identified as little more than especially useful tools to secure peace in a less costly way than any alternative might involve (where ‘cost’ is defined as loss to the side able to unleash atomic weaponry on others, the ‘cost’ of lives lost by the others is usually regarded by the weapons-users as an exercise in accounting, not moral proportionality). Once again the specificity of Hiroshima-Nagasaki is quite lost, since the atomic weapons become the contingent, and simply more cost-effective, means towards an end supposedly less effectively achievable without them. The bombing becomes instrumentally efficient and, thereby, of no great significance in and of itself. Indeed it even becomes justifiable. Hiroshima-Nagasaki thus becomes a utilitarian moment, the virtue of which is taken to be proven by the absence of any repetition of the active use of atomic or nuclear weapons.

Fortunately writers, film-makers, artists and critical theorists more attuned to the importance of trans-disciplinary engagement have tried to confront the bombings by asking more searching questions regarding the violence and how it forces us to confront more uncomfortable truths about liberal modernity. What did the violence, for instance, reveal about the political moment? Can it simply be explained as a singular event in history? Have the logics that justified the decimation of entire cities been consigned to the pages of history? What is the symbolic value of the horrifying events today? In what ways do the aesthetics of the atrocities continue to shape imaginaries of threat? And to what extent can we still write of the disposability of entire populations as a matter of urgency, necessity or to establish more peaceful relations amongst the world of peoples? Our ambition for putting together this issue was to consciously attempt to do at least a little to confront the void of the ‘nil’. In doing so, we have at least sought to collectively reconsider: What is the meaning of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for us today, and what responsibilities do we have towards the victims?