General War

General War, as coined by Rousselle in this single occurrence, designates a structural-political condition that is the direct consequence of "generalized foreclosure" — the universalization of the foreclosure of castration/lack across the social field. Where castration normally installs a symbolic lack that opens the space of desire, shared symbolic worlds, and political antagonism, its generalized foreclosure dissolves the very medium in which genuine political conflict — civil war in the classical sense — could take place. General war is therefore not a heightened or more violent form of civil war; it is its structural negation. It operates "across all strata and scales," meaning it is not localized to any particular institutional or political domain but saturates the entire social field, making it impossible for subjects to occupy opposed positions within a shared symbolic frame.

The distinction between civil war and general war maps onto the distinction between a social field structured by symbolic lack and one in which lack has been foreclosed. Civil war presupposes a common symbolic space — a universe of shared signifiers, a shared "truth" — within which antagonistic parties contest the organization of jouissance and power. General war, by contrast, emerges where that symbolic space has collapsed: each subject or group is driven by its singular mode of jouissance, its own "known knowns," with no overarching symbolic register capable of mediating differences. The "function" of general war — to render civil war impossible — is thus not simply a military or tactical objective but a structural effect: it is what happens when the symbolic dimension that makes political opposition legible has been foreclosed at the level of the social order itself.

This concept appears in todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-publishing-2022 (p. 302) and is entirely internal to Rousselle's argument about generalized foreclosure as the defining structure of the contemporary era. It functions as the political-phenomenal correlate of that structural diagnosis: if generalized foreclosure is the structural condition, general war is what that condition looks like at the level of social and political life. As such, it is a specification and extension of the canonical concept of Foreclosure — taking Lacan's clinical mechanism and scaling it to the level of an epoch — and it stands in direct relation to Generalized Foreclosure as its political consequence.

The concept also intersects crucially with Ideology and Jouissance. The canonical definition of ideology emphasizes that ideological formations are effects of discourse and jouissance rather than false consciousness, and that ideology depends on a structural non-knowledge sustained by the big Other. General war names the condition in which even that ideological mediation has failed: without a shared symbolic space, there is no fantasy capable of papering over constitutive antagonism, only the raw collision of singular jouissances. It equally presupposes and inverts the canonical function of Castration: where castration produces the lack that makes shared desire and political negotiation possible, its foreclosure produces a field of isolated, non-negotiable jouissance-positions — the "known knowns" Rousselle identifies as the political grammar of the contemporary moment. General war is thus positioned as the name for what politics becomes when the Lacanian condition of the possibility of politics — symbolic castration — has been structurally withdrawn.

Žižek Responds!Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · 2022 (p.302)

I therefore make a distinction between 'civil war' and 'general war,' with the understanding that the latter runs very deep and occurs across all strata and scales … The function of every general war is precisely to render impossible civil war.

The phrase "runs very deep and occurs across all strata and scales" signals that general war is not an empirical or contingent phenomenon but a structural one — it cannot be located in any particular domain because it has colonized the entire social field. Meanwhile, "render impossible civil war" makes explicit that general war is defined not by what it does positively but by what it forecloses: the symbolic conditions of genuine political antagonism, mirroring at the political level exactly what foreclosure does to the signifier.