We are delighted to invite you to the conference Perpetual Peace Project which will take place in Warsaw, 9th November 2022.
The Perpetual Peace Project has never been a traditional acade-
mic philosophical debate about, for or against, Kant’s political philosophy. Instead, over the past fourteen years and three major international curatorial initiatives, we have employed the preliminary and definitive articles from Kant’s 1795 treatise Toward Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden) to stage several major interventions between philosophers, diplomats, and artists to challenge our institutional knowledges around the idea of peace. Consequently, the firstprinciple of the 2008 initiative with the United Nations was: “The Perpetual Peace Project is predicated on the belief that no one institution or individual can clearly claim or guarantee a mastery of the concept of peace” (See Principles). Because the first event in this new phase, reinstated to address the idea of perpetual peace in the immediate context of the war in the Ukraine, is a gathering of mostly academic philosophers and theorists, we have asked our main speakers today to respond to the following provocation:
If, as Deleuze says, philosophy and only philosophy can lay claim to concepts, can philosophy today lay any claim to the concept of peace? Or has this concept or idea been relegated to what Foucault described as the “military-diplomatic apparatus” (dispositif) that belongs to the biopolitical mechanisms of “security”? Moreover, given the fact that most of the disciplinary and technical knowledges that deal with issues of global and regional security do not belong to academic philosophy, but are mostly located within the periphery of the state apparatus itself, the question of contemporary philosophy’s relation to idea of “perpetual peace” needs to be re-examined, especially in light of the war in Ukraine.
Click here to view the conference program