The site for Centro per la Riforma dello Stato has materials from a seminar entitled Il mestiere delle armi, la pace di domani with interventions from Tronti, Negri, Dal Lago, Hardt, Guareschi, and others. Some of this material was published earlier in Posse and Conflitti globali.
The piece by Tronti revisits Raymond Aron's 1962 text Paix et guerre entre les nations, as does this text by Eric Alliez. In particular, there is an attempt to think past Aron's famous cold war phrase 'impossible peace, improbable war'. Toward the end, Tronti recalls Swiss military historian J.J. Langendorf's Éloge funèbre du général August-Wilhelm von Lignitz. Lignitz was a Prussian general who after the Battle of Valmy began to see the enemy as kind of Kantian noumenon, beyond delimitation. Between Aron's symbolic figures of the diplomat and the soldier, there emerges the partisan, the guerilla.
Lignitz apparently was a friend of Kleist and loved the section of On the Marionette Theatre where the fencer faces off against a bear but, despite his agility, cannot defeat the beast. Langendorf draws the parallel with Kutusov's defeat of Napoleon. 'Intelligence', he writes, 'is not necessary for war, just a deep calmness of being and force'. So Tronti adds: today we must counterpose the wolf of war not with the dove but the bear of peace.
I wonder what the point of this foot work is? A questioning of the emergent dogma that war is peace? A sense of war and peace oscillating between two uncontrollable extremes? The notion that the neutralisation of war through politics cannot occur after the death of politics?
Allegorical indeed.
