As Jan Patočka wrote in the midst of the Cold War, “war as the means of releasing force cannot end”. War has only changed its face, it has turned “cold” through the mutually neutralizing threats of total destruction, but under the surface of suspended fighting it continues as a consequence of modern civilization’s reliance on force. However, this technological overproduction of force, which is no longer covered by a corresponding ideological, political and moral power of sense giving, was also the precondition for the restriction of war to its latent form in Europe for decades. Hence, for Europe and the European peace project, war as the means of releasing force, in a sense, must continue to be effective. It must not cease to produce a subject that has experienced suffering and renounced the heroic, sublime, even sacred ideals which once pushed it into the inferno of modern industrial warfare.
Drawing upon the thought of Jan Patočka, Edmund Husserl and Michel Henry, this talk will explore the pathic “I cannot” in relation to war as a reality that can no longer be covered with meaning, which arguably is the core of the European dispositive of peace that has been constructed since 1945 and which, at least since February 24, 2022, is in a profound crisis.
Albert Dikovich is postdoctoral researcher at the DFG-Graduate School Post-Eurocentric Europe. Narratives of a World Province in Transformation. He studied philosophy and German literature in Vienna and Dijon and finished his doctorate with a study on German political philosophy in the context of the Central European revolutions after the First World War (Den Umbruch denken. Die Politik der Philosophie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg.). His research in political philosophy and intellectual history is currently focused on the European peace project since 1945 and its conflictive relations to the non-European world.
Ludger Hagedorn, IWM Permanent Fellow, will moderate this Fellows' Colloquium.
