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Can there be Costless War? Violent Exposures and

(In)Vulnerable Selves in Benjamin Percy's "Refresh,
Refresh"

Magdalena Zolkos

To cite this article: Magdalena Zolkos (2011) Can there be Costless War? Violent Exposures and
(In)Vulnerable Selves in Benjamin Percy's "Refresh, Refresh", Critical Horizons, 12:2, 251-269,
DOI: 10.1558/crit.v12i2.251

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[CRIT 12.2 (2011) 251-269] Critical Horizons (print) ISSN 1440-9917
doi:10.1558/crit.v12i2.251 Critical Horizons (online) ISSN 1568-5160

Can there be Costless War? Violent

Exposures and (In)Vulnerable Selves in
Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh”
Magdalena Zolkos
Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy University of Western Sydney, Australia
m.zolkos@uws.edu.au

Abstract: The technological transformation of the conduct of war, exempli-

fied by the American employment of drones in Afghanistan and in Iraq,
calls for a critical reflection about the fantasies that underpin, and are in
turn animated by, the robotic revolution of the military. At play here is
a fantasy of a “costless war” or a “sterile war”, that is such act of military
state violence against the other that is inconsequential for the self. In other
words, the seductive appeal of the “costless war” fantasy rests on the desire
to develop a self that is invulnerable in the face of violence. Importantly,
it is a desire explicitly projected towards a particular American future (of
an imagined warfare, or of a super-power status), but also one that is con-
nected to a lacking critical reflection about the intersubjective aspects of
violence in the debates about America’s post-9/11 military involvements.
This article reflects critically about the fantasy of the “costless war” and
about its underpinning politics of invulnerability from a perhaps unlikely
angle of literature. In a close reading of a short story by Benjamin Percy
called “Refresh, Refresh” (2008), it explores its narrative insights into how
acts of violence, which are undertaken far from home, inevitably return to
affect and damage, perhaps beyond repair, the subject at home. Impor-
tantly, the return of violence in Percy’s story occurs within the domain of
the everyday and the mundane, not of the exceptional, and testifies to the
despair experienced by young males “abandoned’ by their military fathers.
My interpretation draws also on theoretical explorations of the connection
between violence, intersubjectivity and vulnerability, based on the ideas of
Emmanuel Levinas on the subject’s ethical captivity by the suffering of the
other, and on Judith Butler’s recent “uses” of the Levinasian ethical project
in her writing about the post-9/11 America.
Keywords: intersubjectivity; post-9/11; technology and war; theory/litera-
ture; Violence; vulnerability.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.
252  MAGDALENA ZOLKOS

The Robotic Revolution of the Military and the Fantasy of “Costless War”1

Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) is an umbrella-term used by the Ameri-

can Federal Aviation Administration and by the American Department of
Defence to describe a cluster of systems and vehicles operated without a
human pilot or crew onboard. It includes unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs),
or drones, which are either operated remotely or, increasingly more often,
controlled autonomously. UAVs have been used for a variety of functions,
including reconnaissance, attack missions, and, when equipped with elec-
tromagnetic sensors, remote sensing.2 The warfare use of drones by the US
in both Afghanistan and Iraq has spurred journalistic interest largely, though
not exclusively, in connection with the discourse of “targeted killings” in the
“war against terror’. UAVs were used in the tribal regions of Afghanistan, in
Pakistan and in Yemen (where no US troops are stationed) in the killings of,
for instance, Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of Taliban group in Pakistan, in
August 2009, and, six months later, of his successor Hakimullah Mehsud.
The UAVs were also used in detection of weapon smuggling, such as the
Operation Seventh Veil across the Iraqi-Syrian border.3
In Wired for War. The Robotic Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first
Century Peter Singer argues that we are currently witnessing a technologi-
cal and operational revolution of warfare that has vast socio-political impli-
cations.4 The crux of the legitimizing discourse of the UAVs use has been
that it lessens the costs of war. Partly, this has been an economic argument,
which, perhaps paradoxically, given the high costs of the production and
operation of drones, emphasizes their efficiency and accuracy. Partly, it has
also been an argument about the human cost of warfare (which within that
calculative logic is de facto inseparable from the economic appraisal). While
important critical interventions into that debate have arisen, both question-
ing the claimed efficiency and accuracy of the drone use, and insisting on
more nuanced and complex understanding of the category of the “human

1. I would like to thank the members of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy for their
generous and helpful engagements with this text on multiple occasions. Many thanks also to
the participants of Vulnerability: A Symposium at the University of Otago in November 2010
for an insightful discussion of this text, as well as to Sarah Sorial, the editor of the special issue
of Critical Horizons, for her directions and support, and to the two anonymous reviewers for
comments and suggestions for improvement.
2. P. Singer, Wired for War. The Robotic Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century (New
York: The Penguin Press, 2004).
3. P. Chatterjee, “Iraq War Logs: America’s Virtual War”, The Guardian (25 October, 2010).
4. Singer, Wired, 326–43.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

 CAN THERE BE COSTLESS WAR?  253

cost”,5 I ask what fantasy underpins, and is in turn animated by, the robotic
military revolution. The probing of the connection between the military-
economic investment in robotics on the one hand and a totalising, or hege-
monic, “imaginary scene” that impacts these technological developments on
the other has been a rather underdeveloped aspect of the critique of war.6
Some analysts of the socio-political consequences of the robotic warfare
have pointed out the prospects for lowering the “threshold of violence”
in war. This is underpinned by the seductive imaginary of achieving a
“risk-free”, “predictable” and non-violent war.7 With the use of robotics in

5. Pratap Chatterjee, an investigative journalist and senior fellow at the Center for American
Progress, has discussed the question of the drone use in the context of the WikiLeaks’ release
of The Iraq Warlogs, on Democracy Now, 25 October, 2010, titled “WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs
Expose US-Backed Iraqi Torture, 15,000 More Civilian Deaths, and Contractors Run Amok”.
Specifically, Chatterjee mentions Task Force ODIN (the name of a Norse god, but also an
acronym for “Observe, Detect, Identify, and Neutralise”) that used the Warrior Alpha drones
to “observe” and detect cases of bomb planting in Diyala province, which were then followed
by armed aircraft and missile strikes. The operation was declared highly successful by General
Richard A. Cody, whom Chatterjee quotes: “We are successful. Not only can we observe them,
like the Greek god Odin, who was supposed to have all knowledge, we can also destroy them”.
Chatterjee argues that the use of drones has been wrongly associated with “the ability to be
able to pinpoint and kill […] specific high-value targets”, whereas the WikiLeaks’ documents
corroborate claims about high numbers of casualties; the defects of electronic intelligence; and
various operational inefficiencies. See also Chatterjee’s article in The Guardian, 25 October,
2010, where he writes: “The US military would also be well-advised to look at a new poll
that has just been released by the New America Foundation that shows that the drone war in
Pakistan has resulted in deep anger throughout the mountainous border region. More than
three quarters of those polled oppose the drone strikes, and a similar proportion has come to
the conclusion that the US is trying to destroy Islam. Partly as a consequence, almost six in
10 believe that attacks are justified against the US military. The title of the survey says it all:
‘US-led drone war is self-defeating’ ”.
6. Laplanche and Pontalis define fantasy as “imaginary scene in which the subject is a protago-
nist, representing the fulfilment of a wish (in the last analysis, an unconscious wish) in a
manner that is distorted to a greater or lesser extent by defensive processes”. J. Laplanche and
J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 314–19.
7. Slavoj Žižek has described the phenomenon of striving for war with limited violence threshold
as evocative of a larger late capitalist trend of production that deprives good their “malignant
property”: “coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol, […] virtual
sex as sex without sex, […] warfare with no casualties […] as warfare without warfare, […]
politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics’ and, perhaps, “today’s
tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness – the
decaffeinated Other”. The point is, of course, that this “malignant property” is also a “con-
stitutive property”, or the substance, and its removal renders it vacuous; the product contains
“the agent of its own containment”. It is that logic that underpins the emerging discourse of
humanitarianism or “pacifist militarism”: war is legitimized insofar as “it really serves to bring
about peace, democracy, or to create conditions for distributing humanitarian help” (in other
words, insofar as it counters or defeats war). S. Žižek, Homo Sacer as the Object of the Discourse

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

254  MAGDALENA ZOLKOS

warfare there potentially emerges “a future where the US is more willing

to fight but only from afar, where it is more willing to punish by war, but
less to face the costs of war”.8 The idea of a “costless war” connotes thus
acts of military violence where the self remains removed from the actual
enactment of violence (physically, technologically and psychologically),
and hence is unaffected by it. In the “costless war”, as Mary Dudziak
suggests, killing is not only virtual, but also “virtue-less” – it requires no
courage, no heroism, no sacrifice – and thus perhaps also brings no glory.
Dudziak has argued that “[d]rones are a technological step that further
isolates the American people from military action, undermining political
checks on […] endless war”.9
The fantasy of the “costless war” furnishes an imaginary of violence that is
“sterile” in the sense of being uncontaminated by what otherwise constitutes
the dimensional complexity of violence, namely its inter-subjective terrain.
To put it in terms of the late-capitalist paradox, as articulated by Slavoj
Žižek’s formula of “Other without Otherness”, at stake is an imaginary scene
that represents wish fulfilment of violence without violence. The seductive
appeal of the “costless war” fantasy rests therefore on the desire for the self
that remains invulnerable and unaffected in the face of violence – tightly
sealed from the suffering of the other. The subject acquires the capacity to
bring about an act of harm or destruction on the other that remains, ulti-
mately, inconsequential for the self.
Some critics of the implications of the warfare robotic revolution for
the democratic processes have looked at these developments from the per-
spective of the disjunction that between the public and the military, as
well as between the defence and foreign policy.10 Notably, the creation of
distance between the American subject and the act of military violence has
not resulted in public indifference to, or emotional disinvestment in, the
American wars. One example to the contrary is the popularity of the video
genre of the so-called “war porn”, which depicts real combat footage of the
encounters between the troops and the insurgents; a trend that Pasquinelli
has called the “morbid fetishization of war imagery”.11 This suggests that

of the University (25 September, 2003), accessed on 2 November, 2010 at http://www.lacan.

com/hsacer.htm; S. Žižek, “Multiculturalism Masks an Old Barbarism with a Human Face”,
The Guardian (3 October, 2010).
8. Singer, Wired, 316.
9. A. Etzioni, “Unmanned Aircraft Systems. The Moral and Legal Case”, NDU Press. National
Defence University, JFQ 51 (2010): 71.
10. Singer, Wired, 317–20.
11. M. Pasquinelli, “Warporn! Warpunk! Autonomous Videopoiesis in Wartime”, Sarai Reader
05: Bare Acts (Amsterdam: Sarai, 2005), 496.

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 CAN THERE BE COSTLESS WAR?  255

emergent is perhaps a different kind of engagement with the spectacle of war,

rather than disengagement. The subjective positions of a drone-operator,
geographically removed from the attack target by thousand of miles, and
of a spectator of a graphic video footage of violent military action share a
common “grammar”. It is constituted by the technological construction of
their respective positions, as well as by the larger framework of the politics
of invulnerability – the phantasmatic, but no less real, workings of the state
power that render the subject unaffected, or impermeable, by the act of vio-
lence against the other. The aim of the article is to explore what is at stake
in such politics of invulnerability, or, in other words, what is the cost of the
costless war.

War, Violence, Intersubjectivity

Jane Mayer in “What Are the Risks of the CIA’s Covert Drone Program?”
quotes recent scientific studies of the psychological effects of virtual warfare
on drone-operators.12 The tests have shown that the level of stress and trau-
matization among those who conducted attacks in a virtual mode on remote
targets have not been lower than among the soldiers who were directly
engaged in combat with a relative physical proximity to their targets. In
other words, the subjective immunization (expected from the tactics of the
robotic warfare) against the effects of engagement in military violence has
not materialized. Curiously, the lacking empirical psychological evidence has
not rendered the appeal of the costless war fantasy invalid. On the contrary,
its imaginary scene of wish fulfilment seemed to persist in futuristically
oriented discourses of military “predictions” and “anticipations”.13 While
the idea of the costless war has been articulated in an explicit projective and
futuristic form, its current illusory productions and imaginary evocations
are constitutive of particular material and collective psychic reality effectu-
ated by the politics of invulnerability.
This article undertakes a critical investigation of the fantasy of costless war
as the animative imaginary force behind the politics of invulnerability from
the (perhaps unlikely) angle of literature. More specifically, it offers a close
reading of a short story by Benjamin Percy called “Refresh, Refresh”.14 Femi-

12. J. Mayer, “What Are the Risks of the CIA’s Covert Drone Program?”, The New Yorker (26
October, 2009).
13. Mayer, “What Are the Risks”.
14. B. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, in B. Percy, Refresh, Refresh (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008),
3–20.

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256  MAGDALENA ZOLKOS

nist critics, including Judith Butler,15 Vivianne Jabri,16 Kimberly Hutchings17

and others, have written extensively about the formation of political and
ethical subject positions the removal (real and imaginary) from the scene
of violence. For Butler, operative in post-9/11 American war is the “denial
of vulnerability”, which is being institutionalized in various “fantasies of
mastery”.18 In turn, Jabri writes about the distinctively late-modern elimi-
nation of the demand for self-sacrifice in warfare as an “aspiration for war
in the absence of injury to the self ”, so that “the infliction of injury [on
the other] may take place in the near absence of harm to those perpetrat-
ing the act”, also known as “risk-transfer warfare”, or, in different political
discourses, “humanitarian warfare”.19
The problematic of war has been closely linked with questions of political
violence. Elaine Scarry has famously argued that war bridges two domains
of human experience: the domain of contest and the domain of harm-doing
to the bodies and properties of others.20 Jabri has argued for an understand-
ing of war as “injurious”, both in corporeal and societal terms.21 For Jabri,
the violence of war cannot be seen as consisting of “extra-social elements”,
but, on the contrary, as “located in a society”, a “product of that society”,
and a significant factor in the “formation and transformation of that soci-
ety”. War is thus “constitutively social” and its violence is manifest in areas
of public and private life that far exceed the military domains, including
“the everyday, […] the routine, [and] the mundane order of things”. The
violence of war, therefore, is political not only in (a) being motivated by
politically contingent aims of invasion, conquest, and expansion, and (b)
in its dependence on the development of different techniques and strategies
of “injurious impingement”,22 but also (c) in so far as it preys on the social
and psycho-somatic vulnerability of human body.
In its emphasis on the intersubjective dimension of violence, the femi-
nist critique of war has recognized that the subject herself/himself becomes

15. J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2005); J. Butler,
Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).
16. V. Jabri, “Critical Thought and Political Agency in Time of War”, International Relations
19 (2005), 70–79; V. Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
17. K. Hutchings, “Making Sense of Masculinity and War”, Men and Masculinities 10(4) (2008),
389–404.
18. Butler, Precarious Life, 29.
19. Jabri, War, 11.
20. E. Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1985), 63.
21. Jabri, War, 11–25.
22. Butler, Precarious Life, 20.

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 CAN THERE BE COSTLESS WAR?  257

affected and permeated, or, to but in Butler’s terms, that the subject comes
“undone”, by/in the violent act against the other. Drawing on the critical
theorizing of war in the writings of Butler and Jabri, I turn to the unsettling
literary depictions of violence by Benjamin Percy in his collection Refresh,
Refresh (and in particular to the opening story under the same title). I trace
how the allegedly “removed”, “sterile” or “costless” acts of injury in war that
are undertaken away from home and in the name of the protection of home,
return and haunt the subject at home. As a contribution to the critique of
war violence, my reading points at the auto-immunitary logic, which has
been at work in the costless war fantasy, specifically, but not exclusively, in
the context of America’s invasion on Iraq. Within the parameters of the
auto-immunitary logic, the US government, which seeks to pre-empt and
eradicate specific modality of (“terrorist”) violence through invasive military
action, paradoxically, regenerates violence through radicalization and mili-
tarization of those whom it targets. I argue that auto-immunity operated
also in Percy’s story (though in less causally obvious or direct way) insofar as
America’s war engenders violence also among those whom it claims to pro-
tect, and whose identification and loyalty it demands. In “Refresh, Refresh”
it is a generation of young male adolescents who have been “abandoned” by
their working-class fathers in the military. They are “abandoned” not only
in the sense that they live without parental supervision and with the unful-
filled acute desire for the father’s presence, but also in the sense of being the
“invisible subjects” (until the moment when they are recognized as ready for
military conscription) – in other words, they are “larval subjects”,23 unfold-
ing from their juvenile and incubated forms into a state of “readiness”.
At the background of the critical discussions that point out how the figure
of the Iraqi, Afghani or the Arab Other becomes subject to de-humanizing
tactics, my reading might appear not only provisional, but also precarious,
as it risks re-investing in the category of the already all-too-visible American
subject. The intention is not to distract from the cataclysmic consequences
of the US post-9/11 wars for the Iraqi and Afghani people. The aim is not to
re-invest in the privileged subjective categories, but to re-figure the (alleged)
subjects of invulnerable politics, which moves away from the fantasies of
mastery and towards ethical consideration of war violence through the prism
of relational and inter-subjective vulnerability.

23. As Sinthome writes in a blog entry, drawing on Jacques Rancière’s idea of those who are “part
of no part”, “larval subjects are creatures in the process of becoming or development that
have not yet actualised themselves in a specific form”. Sinthome. “A Brief Note on Rancière’s
‘Police’ ”, Larval Subjects (12 September, 2006), accessed on 2 November, 2010 at http://
larval-subjects.blogspot.com/2006/09/brief-note-on-rancieres-police.htm

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(In)Vulnerable Selves

Benjamin Percy’s stories in the collection Refresh, Refresh are narratives of

ordinary human lives that are marked and transformed by violence in most
intimate, private, and often surprising, ways.24 Violence figures in these sto-
ries not so much as their “topic” or “thematic”, but a formative (and often
destructive) force behind the subjective constitution of their protagonists.
The opening story, “Refresh, Refresh”, offers a first-person account narrated
by an adolescent boy, Josh, who lives in Tumalo (an unincorporated commu-
nity in Deschutes County in Oregon). His father – together with the major-
ity of other able-bodied men of certain age in town – has been deployed to
fight in Iraq. Josh tries to makes sense of the sudden loss of paternal presence
through accumulation of private memories and media images observed on
the television. He constructs elaborate imaginary scenarios, borrowed from
the televized news about the war and from Hollywood cinema, about the
American soldiers’ heroic deeds in distant and unreal places. The “official”
image of father-hero is contrasted with flashback memories of the father
from before the war. In the boy’s memories, the father emerges not simply
as an ordinary and unheroic figure, but also as someone who is never quite
at home in the family settings. Everything about him appears to Josh either
excessive or inadequate: his look, his addictions, improper manners and
awkward social habits.25
The important detail about Tumalo – an otherwise remote, small and
peripheral community – is that it hosts a military base of the 2nd battalion,
34th marines. The military presence greatly affects the infrastructural orga-
nization and the social composition of the town. The natural conditions of

24. Benjamin Percy is a young American author, who has published two collections of short
stories, The Language of Elk and Refresh, Refresh. Percy has won a few literary prizes early-
career writers: the Pushcart Prize, and the Plimpton Prize (both for the short-story “Refresh,
Refresh”, which was also published in the 2006 edition of The Best American Short Stories).
Percy teaches creative writing at the Iowa State University. He grew up in Oregon, and most
of his stories are characteristically placed in small towns of the High Desert region in Central
Oregon.
25. Cf. the following excerpt: “My father wore steel-toed boots, Carhartt jeans, a T-shirt advertis-
ing some place he had travelled, maybe Yellowstone or Seattle. He looked like someone you
might see shopping for motor oil at Bi-Mart. To hide his receding hairline he wore a Josh
Deere cap that laid a shadow across his face. His brown eyes blinked above a considerable nose
underlined by a grey moustache. Like me, my father was short and squat, a bulldog. His belly
was a swollen bag and his shoulders were broad, good for carrying me during parades, and at
fairs, when I was younger. He laughed a lot. He liked game shows. He drank too much beer
and smoked too many cigarettes and spent too much time with his buddies, fishing, hunting,
bullshitting, which probably had something to do with why my mother divorced him and
moved to Boise with a hairdresser/triathlete named Chuck”. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 7.

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 CAN THERE BE COSTLESS WAR?  259

Tumalo area and its desert environment approximate those of Afghanistan

and Northern Iraq. Interestingly, this re-figures Tumalo from a position
of a remote and peripheral place into one of proximity to the war, and
transforms the community into a military training ground. America’s war
on Iraq, in a variety of manifestations (soldiers’ stories, military presence,
training, etc.), becomes an integral element of Josh’s childhood life. He
reminisces: “throughout my childhood I could hear, if I cupped a hand to
my ear, the lowing of bulls, the bleating of sheep, the report of assault rifles
shouting from the hilltops”.26 At that time, the fathers living in Tumalo had
been enlisted as part-time soldiers, which was regarded by their sons as an
ordinary fact of life – relatively minor and not particularly consequential.
For the sons, it meant the fathers’ occasional disappearances on weekend
to do their military training and, on the return, their transient adoption of
the incomprehensible military vernacular. These passing traces of paternal
military involvement become coded in the childhood memory as he fathers’
incomplete and reversible masculine transformation – a role performed and
discarded – completed with a return to the known place: “[t]hen a few days
would pass and they would go back to the way they were, to the men we
knew: Coors-drinking, baseball-throwing, crotch-scratching, Aqua Velva-
smelling fathers”.27 But, the narrator continues,

[n]o longer. In January, the battalion was activated, and in March they
shipped off for Iraq. Our fathers – our coaches, our teachers, our bar-
bers, our cooks, our gas-station attendants and UPS deliverymen and
deputies and firemen and mechanics – our fathers, so many of them,
climbed onto the olive green school buses and pressed their palms
to the window and gave us the bravest, most hopeful smiles you can
imagine, and vanished.28

The image of this sudden, cataclysmic event, which effaces the boys’ lives
of the paternal presence, operates in the text in a metaphoric relation to an
event that took place in Tulamo many years earlier, the falling of a meteor.
The meteor had left behind an enormous crater, “five thousand feet wide
and three hundred feet deep”, which the boys refer to as “the Hole in the
Ground”. Its impenetrable hollowness becomes a signifier of their psychic
loss; the no-place where the traumatizing effects of the paternal disappear-
ance – unforeseen, precipitate and, insofar as it already foreshadows death,

26. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 8.

27. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 5.
28. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 5.

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260  MAGDALENA ZOLKOS

irreversible – can take place. Resting at the edge of the Hole in the Ground at
night, Josh contemplates “how something can drop out the sky and change
everything”.29
Natural environment plays an important role in Percy’s stories. It is not
simply a background setting for the stories to unfold, nor representation
of psychic dangers and difficulties that the protagonists must overcome.
Rather, nature becomes intertwined with the (inter-)subjective domain, in
particular as regards the experience of violence. The natural environment
in Percy’s stories is not exactly representative of some aspect or experience
of the self, but, on the contrary, by being so obviously larger than human
lives (or what Butler calls human “knowing and choosing”),30 it portends
the limits of representative figuration. In Percy’s stories, nature demands
modalities of engagement that exceed individual calculation or fantasies of
mastery. The Hole in the Ground becomes for the boys of Tulamo, the only
possible site where violence can be staged and acted out, precisely because it
proves to be irreducible to the adolescent projections of their psychic loss,
abandonment and void. Just like the Hole, the narrator’s mourning and
violence remain, to an extent, incomprehensible and inscrutable to him;
they exceed him:

At first, when my father left, like all of the other fathers, he would
e-mail whenever he could. He would tell me about the heat, the gal-
lons of water he drank everyday, the sand that got into everything, the
baths he took with baby wipes. He would tell me how safe he was,
how very safe. This was when he was stationed in Turkey. Then the
2nd Battalion shipped for Kirkuk, where insurgents and sandstorms
attacked almost daily. The e-mails came less and less frequently, with
weeks of silence between them.

Sometimes, on the computer, I would hit refresh, refresh, refresh, hop-

ing. In October, I received an e-mail that read, “Hi Josh. I’m OK.
Don’t worry. Do your homework. Love, Dad”. I printed it up and
hung it on my door with a piece of Scotch tape.31

The repetitive motion of the button “refresh” on the computer screen is

not unlike the Fort-Da game of Freud’s grandson, where the child aims to
assume some control over the maternal disappearance (and return), and thus

29. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 5–6.

30. Butler, Precarious Life, 21.
31. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 7–8.

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 CAN THERE BE COSTLESS WAR?  261

to deal with loss that is beyond his control. Here, the undertaken action
“refresh” becomes a function of prompting the paternal return insofar as it
can bring about a message that will confirm the pattern familiar to the boy
from before the war: the knowledge of disappearance that is temporary, of
loss that precedes the regaining of the father’s presence, and of estrange-
ment that is a merely fleeting phase. It is therefore the succinct message of
the email, with all it so obviously conceals, that, perhaps paradoxically, is
also most revealing of the irreversible consequences of what has occurred.
There is no return of the father from before the war; known and familial.
The pivotal place of that message in the story has to do with the fact that
the omnipresent adolescent violence in Tumalo becomes expressive of the
boys’ (hopeless) rebellion against the irreversible loss of the father (and not
just of the specific father, but all other source of paternal authority) – against
the irreparable injuries of war.
In “Refresh, Refresh” this abrupt disappearance of the conscripted fathers
from their sons’ lives coincides with an eruption of violence in the Tumalo
community. There is, in other words, a complex connection between the
boys’ recourse to violence and the fathers’ war. Percy’s narration takes differ-
ent trajectory than the ones offered in the literary depictions of adolescent
violence that arises with the withdrawal of the “civilizing” law of the father
(as in Golding’s Lord of the Flies), or as a formative rite of passage or coming-
of-age. Rather, in “Refresh, Refresh” the violent acting-out is expressive of
the same mechanism as the repetitive clicking on the “refresh” button: it
codes the nonacceptance of the irreversibility of the damage done, directly
or indirectly, in/by the war. To paraphrase Butler’s words, the engagement
in violent acts becomes for the boys “a way of relocating the capacity to be
violated always elsewhere”.32
After school Josh and his friend Gordon box. The initiative comes from
Gordon, who wants to be able defend himself against other bullying teenag-
ers (“the football players”). However, the initial defensive intention gradu-
ally recedes to gives place to darker and destructive emotions of rage and
fury. Josh and Gordon paint their faces in military colours, and the fighting
acquires seriousness that transforms the boxing practice into the perfor-
mance, and the performance into combat:

[o]ne time Gordon hammered my shoulder so hard I couldn’t lift

my arm for a week. Another time I elbowed him in the kidneys and
he peed blood. We struck each other with such force and frequency
the golden gloves crumbled and our knuckles showed through the

32. Butler, Frames, 178.

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sweat-soaked blood-soaked foam like teeth through a bustled lip. So

we bought another set of gloves, and as the air grew steadily colder we
fought with steam blasting from our mouths.33

And, a few months later, in the winter,

Gordon and I fought in the snow, wearing snow boots. We fought

so much our wounds never got a chance to heal and our faces took
a permanent look of decay. Our wrists had swollen, our knees ached,
all our joints felt full of tiny dry wasps. We fought until fight-
ing hurt too much, and [then] we took up drinking instead. […]
Nobody asked for our ID and when we held up our empty bottles
and stared at our reflections in the glass, warped and ghostly, we
knew why.34

The escalating aggression and viscerality in the boys’ physical confrontations

become both expressive of their despairing mood and sense of powerlessness,
as well of their self-injurious and self-destructive desires:

This was October, when Gordon and I circled each other in the back-
yard after school. We wore our golden boxing gloves, cracked with
age and letting off flakes when we pounded them together. Browned
grass crunched beneath our sneakers and dust rose in little puffs like
distress signals.

Gordon was thin to the point of being scrawny. His collarbones poked
against his skin like a swallowed coat hanger. His head was too big for
his body and his eyes were too big for his head and the football players
– Seth Johnson among them – regularly tossed him into garbage cans
and called him E.T. He had had a bad day. And I could tell from the
look on his face – the watery eyes, the trembling lips that revealed, in
quick flashes, his buckteeth – that he wanted, he needed, to hit me. So
I let him. I raised my gloves to my face and pulled my elbows against
my ribs and Gordon lunged forward, his arms snapping like rubber
bands. I stood still, allowing his fists to work up and down my body,
allowing him to throw the weight of his anger on me, until eventu-
ally he grew too tired to hit anymore and I opened up my stance and
floored him with a right cross to the temple. He lay there, sprawled

33. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 8–9.

34. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 16–17.

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 CAN THERE BE COSTLESS WAR?  263

out in the grass with a small smile on his E.T. face. ‘Damn’, he said in
a dreamy voice. A drop of blood gathered along the corner of his eye
and streaked down his temple into his hair.35

In this passage, the vivid description of Gordon’s socio-physical frailty

codes his vulnerability to the violent touch of others and marks his body
as impressionable – as given over, exposed and available to others. Perhaps
more important still is that the narrator Josh becomes captivated by this
bodily vulnerability. If the dominant affects of that scene are emphatic and
compassionate, as well as affectionate, these clearly do not originate in the
subject. Rather, the encounter with Gordon demands from Josh certain
capitulation, first, in the face of the other’s need to act out aggression and
inflict harm, and, then, in response to the need to be wounded.
Internal to the many descriptions of violence in “Refresh, Refresh” is the
tension between, on the one hand, the Tumalo boys’ need to injure, and
thus to guard or re-locate oneself as a potential object of violence, and, on
the other hand, the strong self-injurious and self-destructive desires. The
desire to submit to and suffer physical violence doubtlessly carries for the
subject the promise of a sensory (and thus physically tangible) manifesta-
tion of violence to which the abandoned boys have already been subjected
to, but which plays out as an unbearably transient and fugitive psychic
experience. That psychic experience originates at the site of the paternal
disappearance – the violence of warfare, which is waged far away from home
and as a protection of home. The boys’ aggression, ruthless fights and bul-
lying, excessive drinking and the casual sex are activities linked together by
a shared grammar of self-injury. Most evocative of that desire to damage or
destroy oneself becomes a winter escapade to the Hole in the Ground. Josh
and Gordon use the crater’s edge to sledge down “so fast [that] our minds
emptied and we felt a sensation at once like flying and falling”.36 The oxy-
moron of “flying and falling” connotes an experience that is central to the
self-injurious desire: bringing oneself to the immediate proximity of harm,
or (here) death – the thanatic reality of the Hole in the Ground – which
evokes combined euphoric and cataclysmic sensations. Both sensations con-
tribute to the moment of psychic release, or escape, thus allowing the boys,
for a moment, to not be.37

35. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 6–7.

36. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 16.
37. The pathophysiology of adolescent self-harm, which can develop in situations of either dis-
sociation or hyper-stress, is recognized as different from suicidal behaviour.

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Violent Exposures

Butler writes in Precarious Life that mourning can do its work once it has
been acknowledged that the self cannot remain invulnerable to violence, but
that “by the loss one undergoes, one will be changed, possibly forever”.38
Percy’s story substantiates that claim in that for the “abandoned” boys of
Tumalo, the mourning for the lost fathers is further connected to the rec-
ognition that their own working-class lives become directly affected by the
politics of invulnerability. Their “larval subjects” would in time unfold to
replicate the lives of their fathers (in the story the boys come to recognize
the new conscripts as “people like us, people who were angry and dissatisfied
and poor”).39 In other words, the subjects’ construction (and destruction)
through the remote violence of war, which, with the fathers’ disappearance,
becomes also most proximate, has additional political consequences that
manifest with the gradual unfolding of the “larval” subjects. The male ado-
lescent body is marked as sought after insofar as it is capable of participating
in war and inflicting violence.
In this context, an important figure in the story is Dave Lightener. Light-
ener is a recruitment officer, whose job also involves announcing the soldiers’
death to their families. For Josh and Gordon, Dave belongs to the kind of
“vulturous men”, who “scavenged whatever our fathers had left behind”. In
response to Lightener’s approaches to recruit Josh and Gordon a patriotic-
military interpellations of American masculine subjectivity, the narrator
discloses:

[w]e hated him for his soft hands and clean uniform. We hated him
because he sent people like us off to die. Because at twenty-three he
had attained a higher rank than our fathers. Because he slept with the
lonely wives of soldiers. And now we hated him even more for mak-
ing us feel ashamed.40

Lightener’s address is powerful and “injurious” in spite (or, perhaps, because)

of the fact that the protagonists are deeply of the class and economic power
relations that mark their positions as, respectively, that of privilege (Light-
ener’s) and that of detriment (the Tumalo boys). The affect of shame is
put to work to ensure subjective submission and obedience through dis-
cursive mobilization of military masculinity. What shame declares here is

38. Butler, Precarious Life, 21.

39. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 9.
40. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 10, 11.

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the “nakedness” of the subject. As Agamben suggests, drawing on the essay

De l’évasion by Emmanuel Levinas, shame “does not derive […] from the
consciousness of an imperfection or a lack in our being from which we take
distance, [but] is grounded in our being’s incapacity to move away and
break from itself ”.41 What the boys of Tumalo experience with the claim
that Lightener makes on their nationalistic and filial loyalties, is nothing
short of the undoing of the subject who proves unable to “move away and
break from [oneself ]” – the subject “has no other content than its own
desubjectification”.42
In the final scene of the story, on a winter evening, the boys find Dave
Lightener waiting for them at the steps of Josh’s house, wearing a black band
around his arm – a clear indication that he is to announce the father’s death.
Importantly, the declaration is never made, and the message, which Josh has
dreaded, and yet anticipated throughout the story, is not given. The boys
attack Lightener, abuse him physically, and kidnap him on their motorbikes.
They take him to the Hole in the Ground:

The moon shined and the snow glowed with pale blue light as we
smoked cigarettes, looking down into the crater, with Dave at our feet.
There was something childish about the way our breath puffed from
our mouths in tiny clouds. It was as if we were imitating choo-choo
trains. And for a moment, just a moment, we were kids again. Just a
couple of stupid kids. Gordon must have felt this too because he said,
‘My mom wouldn’t even let me play with toy guns when I was little’.
And he sighed heavily as if he couldn’t understand how he, how we,
had ended up here.

Then, with a sudden lurch, Dave began struggling and yelling at us in

a slurred voice. My face hardened with anger and I put my hands on
him and pushed him slowly to the lip of the crater and he grew silent.
For a moment I forgot myself, staring off into the dark oblivion. It was
beautiful and horrifying. ‘I could shove you right now’, I said, ‘And if
I did, you’d be dead’.

‘Please don’t’, he said, his voice cracking. He began to cry. ‘Oh fuck.
Don’t. Please’. Hearing his great shuddering sobs didn’t bring me the
satisfaction I hoped for. If anything, I felt as I did that day, so long

41. G. Agamben, The Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books,
2002), 104–105.
42. Agamben, Remnants, 104, 106.

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266  MAGDALENA ZOLKOS

ago, when we taunted him in the Mountain View Mall parking lot:
shameful, false.

‘Ready?’ I said. ‘One!’ I inched him a little closer to the edge. ‘Two!’ I
moved him a little closer still and as I did I felt unwieldy, at once wild
and exhausted, my body seeming to take on another twenty, thirty, forty
years. When I finally said, ‘Three’, my voice was barely a whisper.

We left Dave there, sobbing at the brink of the crater. We got on our
bikes and drove to Bend and we drove so fast I imagined catching a
fire, like a meteor, burning up in a flash, howling as my heat consumed
me, as we made our way to the Armed Forces Recruiting Station where
we would at last answer the fierce alarm of war and put our pens to
paper and make our fathers proud.43

Vulnerability, Violence and Political Subjectivity

From the perspective of Levinasian ethics of alterity, Dave Lightener’s face

interpellates the Tumalo boys both to violence and to non-violence. It at
once invokes the “temptation to kill and an interdiction against killing”,
locating Josh and Gordon in that “mixed and conflicted position of a subject
who is injured, rageful, disposed to violent retribution”.44 Butler, drawing
on Levinas, locates the emergence of subjectivity in the tension between the
“fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence”.45 Impor-
tantly, the tension of that position is not located in the subject since she/
he cannot, in both chronological and constitutive sense, pre-exist that pri-
mary tension of being both the agent and an object of violence. Rather, it is
located in that prior inability to “move away and break from” (the address
of ) the Other, which operates in the text of “Refresh, Refresh” as the shame-
ful affect that renders the subject “naked” (uncovered, unguarded, vulner-
able) in the face of the Other.
In the quoted final part of the story it is crucial that Lightener never
declares the father dead. Lightener’s only verbalization in that passage is a
plea for mercy – an expression of unconditional capitulation vis-à-vis the
uncontrolled eruption of violence. The spontaneous act of overpowering
and silencing Lightener is the boys’ desperate attempt to stage resistance to

43. Percy, “Refresh, Refresh”, 20.

44. Butler, Frames, 172, 171.
45. Butler, Precarious Life, 136.

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 CAN THERE BE COSTLESS WAR?  267

the formulaic utterance of condolences, which postulates grief as a patriotic

response and seeks to contain and transform it into a platform of further
military-masculine mobilization.
The shared vulnerabilities that Dave Lightener and Josh embody in that
concluding scene mean that, momentarily, they are constituted vis-à-vis one
another through, on the one hand, their capacity for violence (the capacity
to injure the other) and, on the other hand, also through their susceptibility
to violence and the injurious action of the other. The representations of the
physical precariousness of the body form in Percy’s story intricate connections
with socio-political modes of “injury” – dispossession, exploitation, and pri-
vation. While in “Refresh, Refresh” the synergic capacity to inflict harm and
to remain susceptible to harm is depicted with a narrative specificity charac-
teristic of literary representations, I suggest that it demonstrates a larger point
about human vulnerability and the reciprocal workings of violence. It precisely
that “truth” about violence and vulnerability, which is being obliterated in the
imageries of the costless war, and in the politics of invulnerability that they
animate. The reciprocities and returns of violence leave no one in the story
unharmed; neither those exposed to it, nor those complicit with it.
In arguing that war violence is irreducible to the situations of the battle-
field or to the military domain more generally (be it remote and “virtual”
or proximate and “real”), I have sought to use Percy’s striking short-story to
illuminate the location of violence at the cross-roads of inter-subjectivity,
politics and ethics. Benjamin Percy’s depiction of the “abandoned” Tumalo
boys as larval subjects shows how violence permeates across socio-political
boundaries and across human bodies, and how it strikes at the heart of what
(in the official military discourses) one has sought to protect through war:
the peaceful, i.e. non-violent, American home. In contrast, the mastery
discourses of the costless war fantasy build on the normative assumption
that war violence can be compartmentalized, controlled and unidirectional
(always working away from the subject). Perhaps, what is at stake in these
repudiations of vulnerability is nothing short of a question of what it means
to be human if, within these literary representations and the critical theo-
retical voices about war, different modes of humanity are so tightly linked
to the recognition of the reciprocal workings of violence.
It remains to be asked how, within that conjunction of violence and vul-
nerability, one could think non-violence – not as the demarcation of the
domain of invulnerable self, but, rather, as an inquiry into the significance
of the singular moment when one refrains from violence. In this alternative
imaginary setting, non-violence is not the inactive or passive binary opposite
of violence, but an ethical, and possibly political, action. Could sparing Dave
Lightener’s life by the Tumalo boys be thought of as an act of non-violence?

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Perhaps not, since its significance is subsequently obliterated by their sub-

mission to the military masculine subject positions, into which they have
been interpellated. Their own conscription into the military shares common
grammar with their earlier self-injurious and self-destructive actions. How-
ever, the narrative also suggests that any act of political non-violence must
emerge from within the recognition of vulnerability as affirmation of the
violent exposure of the self to the Other.
I conclude with a passage quotation from a final story in the collection
Refresh, Refresh, “When the Bear Came”, where in my opinion Percy comes
closest to imagining such violent encounter between the self and Other.46
My suggestion is that “When the Bear Came” gestures towards the ethics
of relational and communicative potentialities that arise from shared vul-
nerability. Notably, it is a story about an encounter between a human and
a non-human Other – a bear whom the narrator (also an adolescent man
from Tumalo) obsessively seeks to find, catch and violently pacify. When
the encounter finally occurs, and the desire to kill the bear becomes a real
possibility, the man facing the bear finds himself affected and “undone” by
the encounter, beyond his control and calculation:

I was just out of its reach, but not so far that I couldn’t feel the air
move, displaced by its claws. It wrestled with the rope a moment, like
a dog bothered by a leash, then returned its attention to me. A low
growl rumbled from deep its throat. I could feel its eyes, like two heavy
weights, on me. It was hungry. And I imagined what its jaws would feel
like working around my skull, or through my belly, my flesh sinking
into the dark oblivion of its stomach.

We stayed like this for a time, looking at each other, each afraid and
hateful. Minutes passed and the stars wheeled above us and I slowly
brought my shotgun down from my shoulder and held it before me.
‘I should kill you’, I said, a gentle sort of loathing in my voice, ‘You
son of a bitch, I should kill you dead’.

I could feel the blood pounding through my heart and I could hear
the air filling and emptying its lungs. I tried to breathe with the bear
and soon our breathing fell into a rhythm where our lungs worked
in perfect time with the wind, with the shifting of the branches and
shadows. It was as if a rhythm had been beating all along, the rhythm

46. B. Percy, “When the Bear Came”; B. Percy, Refresh, Refresh (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008),
225–49.

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of the land, and finally I had found it, here in the peace of the dark
woods, with only one slug and twenty feet of rope between me and
absolution.47

Magdalena Zolkos is Research Fellow in Political Theory in the Centre for Citizenship
and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney. She is the author of Reconciling
Community and Subjective Life. Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of
Jean Améry and Imre Kertész (New York: Continuum, 2010), and co-editor of Action and
Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt (New York: Continuum,
2011). She is currently working on a book project about the figure of pariah in political
thought, where she investigates the relationship between marginality, sacrality, and
liminal conditions of the body in the formation of political community.

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© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.