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Lieven de Cauter
Based on interviews with Beirut intellectuals and architects, this essay endeavours totrace the contours for a phenomenology or anthropology of civil war. Thomas Hobbesserves as a guide, with his idea of civil war representing a relapse into the ‘state ofnature’; as absence of sovereignty resulting in a ‘war of everybody against everybody’.The effects of ever-latent civil war in Beirut are far-reaching: the fragmentation of urbanspace and the disappearance of public space, the loss of memory and the fragmentationof time, even the reification of language. In the collective imagination and in the arts,Beirut appears as a ghost town, a spectral city with a spectral civility. What we discoveris a city, its inhabitants, its social behaviour, but also its art and literature, in the grip ofpost-traumatic stress syndrome. From all this, we take home two things: first, any citycan (at least in principle) relapse into a similar state of nature — Beirut can become aparadigm of latent civil war; and second, the traumatic modernity of Beirut mirrors thetraumatic artistic expressions of modernism — the shock of modernity is also always amodernity of shock.
