Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form

The twenty-first century has seen a pervasive militarization of aesthetics, with Western military institutions co-opting the creative worldmaking of art and merging it with the destructive forces of warfare. This book explores the origins of this unlikely merger, showing that today's creative warfare is merely the extension of a historical development that began in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Military thinkers and inventors adopted ideas from aesthetics about the nature, purpose, and force of art and retooled them into innovative military technologies and a new theory that conceptualized war as an aesthetic art form.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 216 pages
Publication date: 03 April 2023
Publisher: Stanford University Press

The twenty-first century has seen a profound militarization of aesthetics, as Western military institutions have co-opted the creative world-making of art and merged it with the destructive forces of warfare. In his book, Martial Aesthetics, Anders Engberg-Pedersen explores the origins of this unlikely merger, revealing that today's creative warfare is merely the extension of a historical development that began long ago. Indeed, the emergence of martial aesthetics can be traced back to a series of inventions, ideas, and debates in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Military thinkers and inventors then adopted ideas from the field of aesthetics about the nature, purpose, and force of art and retooled them into innovative military technologies and a new theory that conceptualized war not merely as a practical art but as an aesthetic art form.

This book demonstrates how military discourses and early war media, such as star charts, horoscopes, and the Prussian wargame, were entangled with ideas of creativity, genius, and possible worlds in philosophy and aesthetic theory (by thinkers such as Leibniz, Baumgarten, Kant, and Schiller). By adopting a historical and theoretical approach, Engberg-Pedersen presents a new frame for understanding war in the twenty-first century.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780804799942