Some, perhaps the most pessimistic, might think that the very first object conceived by humans as a tool was, in fact, a weapon. Stanley Kubrick surely thought so—about famous pessimists, at least—or so it seems suggested in the even more famous opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Pessimism aside, artifacts and studies confirm the hypothesis that weapons were among the first “invented” or “discovered” objects by Homo sapiens.
Certainly, there came a moment when Homo sapiens realized that any object could potentially be a weapon—even if, especially in the future, not all weapons could properly be considered “objects.” And without a doubt, the object-weapon has always sparked endless fascination in the human imagination, as boundless as the forms it has taken over time and across circumstances: from the sharpened stone to the smart bomb, from the submarine to the biological weapon.
There was a time in world history when war ceased to be a model for interpreting reality. There was. Or at least, that is what we were told. We were raised with the idea that war belonged to cinema, at most to television, and almost always late at night. War was mythological, even when smart bombs fell just a few kilometers from us.
Then we actually grew up and realized it had not been an era, but rather a brief moment. And it wasn’t the world—it was a small piece of this world, pretending to be a continent that geography could not support.
A moment, roughly a decade, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 2001. During that decade, speaking of war directly had become inappropriate. A metaphorical language was required, increasingly technical, demilitarized, sanitized: peacekeeping missions, humanitarian interventions, international relief operations… Global military spending had indeed contracted, to the benefit of social, health, and cultural investments.
It was with September 11 that we returned to speaking of war. Not that conflicts in the world had ever truly ceased, but politics began once again to openly adopt war as a model, as a solution. Likewise, without delay, the economy returned to heavily investing in the arms market, surpassing post-Cold War spending records.
Only the enemy had changed nature. Terrorism is the enemy of the new millennium: lacking a defined identity—physical, social, psychological, territorial—it can be anyone, anywhere. A perfect enemy for a war without end.
Here begins—or rather, resumes, in an extreme form after a brief pause—the era of borders, controls, and security. In 2001 starts, or rather restarts, a real Odyssey running parallel to an imaginary Iliad, unfolding in images before it can be told in words. An Odyssey that is not in space, but in the desert.
