Citation

MacLeish K. BioSocieties 2019; 14(2): 274-299.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group -- Palgrave-Macmillan)

DOI

10.1057/s41292-018-0127-y

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The basic structure of contemporary military biopolitics, in which military bodies and minds are kept alive and allowed to die, entails both an institutional problem of how to shore up life that is exposed to harm and a cultural problem of how to reckon with a routinized trade in life and death that happens not incidentally, but on purpose. Amidst this tension, the military psyche becomes both an inhabited, embodied site and an imaginative point of reference for the question of how to feel about war. This article takes stock of the contemporary landscape of war-related mental affliction via three relatively novel interventions: military suicide prevention, the framing post-traumatic stress as "moral injury," and resiliency training meant to inoculate soldiers against the stress of the battlefield. Drawing on a range of clinical and media sources and ethnographic research with post-9/11 military personnel, I show how each of these efforts constructs specific forms of war-related psychic destruction as objects of public and institutional concern, normalizes the institutional arrangements that produce it, and informs public perceptions of what war is by constructing figures of what it does to those who fight it. © 2018, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature.

Language: en

Keywords

Suicide; War; Resilience; Biopolitics; Moral injury; US military