Description
In 2016/2017, the journal of 'Critical Military Studies' was kind and willing enough to host a written exchange concerning the nexus of pleasure/military-service between myself (Catto 2017) and Jesse Crane-Seeber (2016/2018). While these exchanges were productive – in the sense, that, they allowed for a delineation of various theoretical tangents within the ongoing debate – they did not produce any definitive (or, even tentative) sense of where the pleasures concomitant to military service derive from or what sort of affects they entail for the 'soldierly-self'. This paper is intended as a further address to this ongoing question/problem. Beginning from the observation that Feminist Security Studies' (FSS) commitment to the 'personal/political/international' nexus (Enloe 1989) seems the ideal place to begin our interrogations, the paper goes on to show that the 'productive' image of the subject within FSS actually prevents us from taking soldiers seriously as subjects of pleasure. From here, we will go on to see that it is, in fact, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan (1997/1998) – particularly as they apply to the matter of 'the desiring subject' – which can allow us to fully enact the FSS ethos of 'the personal is political' vis-a-vis contemporary armed forces' personnel. In unpacking these psychoanalytic considerations, we will not only come to see what it is we are actually talking about when we invoke the 'pleasure' of military service, but we also come to understand the symbolic/unconcious structure of the soldier as a pleasure-seeking subject. In this vein, we will conclude via a consideration of how narrative methods, informed by certain psychoanalytic ideas/practices, can indeed provide us a more effective means to capture the ethos of FSS in our engagements across/throughout the emerging field of Critical Military Studies.
