Description
What is peace? What is conflict? Drawing on the Lacanian–Althusserian tradition and Alenka Zupančič’s What IS Sex?, this paper argues that neither peace nor conflict exist as stable ontological categories. Instead, they form a single, continuous field—a warpeace continuum—analogous to spacetime: curved, warped, and observer-relative. Just as gravity bends spacetime, ideology bends warpeace, shaping what counts as “peaceful” or “conflictual” in specific historical and symbolic configurations. Yet the ideological curvature at stake here is not driven by positive ideologies such as nationalism or capitalism alone. Rather, it stems from what I call negative ideology: the set of unconscious strategies through which subjects and institutions contain, fantasise about, or disavow the contradictions and failures of symbolic structures that promise order. Negative ideology names the effort to fill the constitutive lack around which both war and peace are organised—an absence that functions as the missing signifier of the international. This paper develops a theory of negative ontology as the repressed condition of conflict and peace processes. By examining how peacebuilding discourses attempt to symbolically seal the void of the Real it shows that such efforts reproduce the very antagonisms they seek to overcome. Recognising the negative ontology of warpeace reveals that peace is not the negation of war but its fantasmatic continuation: the scene where ideology manages the failure to achieve closure. Releasing this repression, I argue, allows us to approach peace not as a goal but as an ongoing confrontation with the Real that sustains the political.
