The Encyclopedia of Wars is a series of conferences and lectures initiated at the Centre Pompidou in September 2008, with one meeting per month. To do so, I am building up a “War Library”, accumulating all the works, essays, stories, technical books dealing with the subject of war. I do not impose any corpus on myself a priori. I am neither a historian nor a specialist in polemology. I collect sentences, terms, images, numbers. My first job is to read “war books”, to take quotations from them, which feed pre-existing entries or create new ones. It is then an essentially repetitive, mechanical, copyist activity. I am Bouvard or Pécuchet. Of these entries, there are 1031 to date. The first one being Abattre (mort), the last one being Zouave, passing by Abracadabra; Boom; Camping; Hydrography; Tongue (monotonous); Fly (Make); Pastry; Silence (Reduce to); Triperie; Vadrouille (La très grande); Ypres …
Assembled for the first time in an editorial corpus, the full collection of The Encyclopedia of Wars’ conferences is accessible on Switch (on Paper) and will be completed with the new conferences to come at the Centre Pompidou.
Jean-Yves Jouannais
