Simon Gros

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Yuval Kremnitzer’s lecture intervenes in a familiar moral certainty—war’s futility—by converting that certainty into a determinate philosophical problem: the mismatch between war’s overwhelming gravity and the thinness of the concepts and speech-forms through which modern publics try to grasp it. Its distinctive contribution lies in treating this mismatch as more than a rhetorical discomfort. The talk argues that war’s “senselessness” designates an ontological negativity that resists conceptual capture because it stands in intimate proximity to contradiction, the negative element internal to thinking itself. By pursuing war via its resistances—perceptual, essential, purposive, historical—the lecture seeks a method for approaching the contemporary predicament, where war increasingly appears as “self-conscious” negativity that internalizes its own unreasonableness and thereby frustrates inherited routes toward ending it.

The outer frame already performs the thesis it will later name. The introduction (conference convenor, institutional affiliations, the announced forthcoming book on authority, technology, and the digital obscene) places the speaker at a junction of political-philosophical diagnosis and media-technical attention. Yet Kremnitzer begins by refusing the comfort of credentials and even the comfort of the customary opening courtesy: he offers thanks, then immediately treats the ritual of thanking as a symptom of the very difficulty he is about to thematize—how hard it is “to think, to talk, and even listen to talk” about war. The lecture’s first movement thus turns back on its own condition of possibility: war appears as an object that demands urgency and action, while philosophy appears as “meandering” inquiry, apparently superfluous beside what seems obvious: that one ought to be “done with” war. This is not staged as an anti-intellectual gesture; it is staged as a methodological self-constraint. If the discourse on war is saturated with readymade formulas, then philosophical work begins by exposing the “excruciating gap” between the existential threat and the vacuity of the language available for it. The claim “war is senseless” is deliberately chosen as an almost intolerable banality, so that the lecture can test whether this banality is merely a spent cliché or whether it harbors, in condensed form, a conceptual truth.

The composition sequence is announced with unusual explicitness. Kremnitzer states that he will “dwell” on the emptiest pronouncement—war as a “negative thing”—then “pour some substance” into it by shifting from moral negativity (negative feelings, moral repugnance) to “a straightforward ontological sense.” He then specifies three “senses” compacted into the title, and the lecture proceeds as an ordered unfolding of these senses. First, senselessness names perplexity and opacity: the fog of war, the lack of a clear notion of its “going-ons,” war as muddled affair that muddles. Second, senselessness names conceptual deficit: the problem of defining war, the want of a concept adequate to its phenomenon. Third, senselessness names teleological collapse: the difficulty of describing war as the achievement or realization of human ends, the absence of a definitive accomplishment that would count as war’s “achievement.” These three threads are presented as mutually implicating; the point is not to list them, but to show that war’s resistance to sense-making is multi-registered and systematic.

From the outset Kremnitzer insists that naming war senseless does not contribute to mystique. He explicitly disavows any withdrawal into ineffability. The lecture’s guiding wager is that one can “wrest” a characterization of war “from and by means of the obstacles it lays in the way of reason,” so that negation becomes method rather than excuse. This is the first major displacement within the work: the initial discrepancy between solemnity and cliché is displaced into a positive program. The emptiness of the cliché becomes the entry-point into a determinate via negativa: war is to be approached through its negative relations to the “fundaments of our conceptual thought.” The lecture thereby performs a characteristic dialectical inversion without presenting it as a neat reconciliation: what first appears as philosophy’s inadequacy becomes philosophy’s diagnostic advantage, precisely because war is already bound up with the negative element of thinking.

The talk’s second movement justifies this methodological choice by establishing an “affinity” between war and negativity internal to thought. The reference to Heraclitus is not introduced as historical ornament; it functions as an origin-scene for the claim that war is “common” and justice strife, that becoming and passing-away occur through strife. Kremnitzer draws from this origin-scene a proposition about the saturation of thinking by war: even in peace, “thinking is suffused with war,” a constant effort to “contain” war. Containment here carries a double sense that becomes architectonic for the remainder: containment as restricting war’s overflow into total engulfment; containment as internalization, assimilation, the making-war-part-of-thought. This double sense is significant because it frames the talk’s subsequent claim that war cannot be grasped as an object simply standing over against a subject. War lies at the background as condition and threshold of experience and cognition, so that it cannot appear as an ordinary object. Yet this condition-status does not entail complete unintelligibility; it entails a distinctive intractability that can be delimited and thereby become philosophically legible.

Hegel’s Phenomenology episode of the “fight to the death” is deployed to exhibit, at once, war as a symbolic monad of dialectic and war as that which dialectic must both traverse and supersede. The argument is not a simple allegory—war equals dialectic—though Kremnitzer briefly leans on that analogy. The deeper point is structural: self-consciousness emerges only against the backdrop of a conflict that threatens mutual annihilation, and only when that annihilation is “superseded” by an unforeseen consequence: the relenting of one side and the triumphing of the other, through which life “prevails on both sides” and the narrative of freedom can begin. War here is presented as “of no significance” in itself, as a “vanishing mediator” that mediates by vanishing. The formulation is intentionally stark: mediation is nothing but its vanishing. Kremnitzer then sharpens the negative logic by speaking of “two negations”: for the “absolute form of negation” that propels thinking forward to emerge—a negation that negates itself—war as the first negation, the splitting of the middle term into extremes, must “give way.” This is already a thesis about the teleology of war within a philosophy of spirit: war appears as the medium through which spirit loses itself, and the overcoming of war’s immediate negation becomes the condition for higher forms of mediation.

Yet Kremnitzer’s subsequent move displaces even this Hegelian domestication of war. He uses Hegel to articulate a fundamental point, then immediately reorients it: war “precedes” thought and “conditions it”; it cannot appear as object because it functions as threshold of experience and cognition. Here the lecture’s earlier insistence on war’s conceptual resistance becomes grounded in a claim about contradiction. War presents itself as “an image of something elemental” that testifies against itself: a real contradiction. Kremnitzer inserts a brief encounter with the logician’s admonition that there is “nothing” to conceive in the idea of something both being and not being so-and-so. War, however, places human beings in an experiential posture that forces the thought of contradiction: “in the midst of war we are at one and the same time living and not living,” on the verge of death, only retrospectively discovering “who and what remains.” This is not offered as mysticism; it is offered as the experiential pressure that produces a philosophical demand: how is a real contradiction to be thought?

At this point the lecture’s composition becomes almost scholastic in its announced gradation: intuition (experience), then essence, then purpose, then the relation to human nature and history, culminating in the Kant–Hegel debate and its contemporary updating. The method is cumulative and “ascending,” yet it also repeatedly undermines the stability of each register by showing that war refuses to remain confined within it. The first register—intuition—proceeds from everyday language: “war breaks out.” Kremnitzer treats this idiom as phenomenological evidence. War “breaks out” rather than begins; it has an onslaught yet lacks a definite onset; one enters without knowing how one will emerge. Planning persists, yet an “inalienable current of sheer contingency” persists throughout. The decisive conceptual pressure emerges when the temporal determination of outbreak turns out to be unstable: in war, contingency appears predestined; circumstances appear as the “materialization of necessity.” War is said to have broken out “in a particular moment,” yet that moment is reinterpreted as one link in an ongoing causal chain, suggesting that war had been “lurking at the background all along,” ready to erupt. The outbreak thereby retroactively produces the impression of immemorial presence. War reveals behind historical time a “mythic time,” a time of fate and eternal recurrence. War appears as “return of the repressed,” the reappearance of something that never had an antecedent present. The consequence is radical: war has neither beginning nor end; it may break off, conclude, only “for the time being,” until the next outbreak.

The lecture intensifies this temporal negativity by associating war with an eschatological horizon. In “the darkest sense,” war is “our end”: human beings are the creatures capable of bringing their end upon themselves. At outbreak one glimpses a “primordial past,” an “absolute past” that was never a present, and one also glimpses a “primordial future,” a preordained finish, “the end of all ends” that life postpones. This temporal structure is important because it displaces the conventional idea that war is a discrete episode between peacetime intervals. War appears as a temporality that disrupts ordinary chronology: it is entered as if sudden, experienced as if always already there, concluded as if provisional, and oriented toward an end that threatens to become absolute.

The spatial determination seems, “at first sight,” clearer: war takes place in a circumscribed area; it involves borders; it discriminates front and rear; it relies on maps, surveys, demarcations; it is the site where the effort of establishing borders by violent means takes place. Yet this clarity too is displaced. War is “an occasion of disorientation” in thought. It is “ab initio” a crisis of containment: it threatens to spread to further fronts; the differentiations between front and rear, friend and foe, become porous. War thereby oscillates between the most generic and the utterly idiosyncratic: between a generality that repels singularization and a singularity that precludes generalization. This oscillation is treated as a structural feature: war is a “constant” of human history with a flattening force that renders everyday differences indifferent, and yet war’s lived reality is traumatic, undigestible, untransmittable; the closer one gets, the less “experience” in the ordinary sense applies. Those at the front endure atrocities that resist biographical integration and linguistic expression. The lecture thus uses the concept of experience to articulate a paradox: war is overwhelmingly general—collective, epochal—while also radically singular—idiosyncratic, personalized, circumstantial.

From this paradox Kremnitzer derives the next major claim: war possesses an “excessive form of identity” and yet has “no essence,” no ipseity (first-mention gloss: self-sameness, the selfhood by which a thing is itself). War becomes an “anti-essence.” The lecture here relies on a long-standing conception of the concept as the power to determine essence; war appears as the object that defeats this power through a negative relation to essence. Yet again the point is not that war is unrelated to essence; it is that its relation is “essentially negative.” War functions, in Hegel, as a trial by fire for whatever presents itself as quintessential. In war one is compelled to attest what is essential, what is worth fighting for, worthy of ultimate sacrifice. War lacks its own essence, yet embodies a necessity tethered to the affinities human beings bear to various essences on which they depend; war reveals these essences’ instability and vulnerability. The Heraclitean image returns in transformed form: like fire, war is an anti-principle. It is not the ultimate principle; it tests principles, pushes them toward perishing, adapting, crystallizing. War thus speaks to an indefinitely recurring need to validate a form of life and re-evaluate lives.

This transition from essence to purpose is presented as almost immediate: to ask what is essential is to ask what is worthy of constituting a purpose, the object of pursuit. Yet war appears above all without a purpose. Here Kremnitzer stages an intentionally naïve proposition: “nobody wants war.” He anticipates the empirical objection—security industries, rulers whose survival depends on perpetuation—and nonetheless insists on taking the claim at face value. This insistence is not sociological innocence; it is conceptual strategy. The claim is meant to bring to light war’s experienced character as an “alien will,” as if from a higher order, from without. War appears as fate, divine decree, historical inevitability—expressions treated as equivalent insofar as they indicate a necessity laid upon human beings as unnegotiable, and a will to which one must either accede or resist. The decisive question becomes: why, under what conditions, when war is not “the objectification of our will,” does one affirm it, rally behind its cause, identify will and consent with what forces itself upon us? How is resistance possible?

The lecture’s answer begins by diagnosing the insufficiency of protest. Avowing disagreement does not pierce the structure because “nobody wants war” already belongs to war’s logic. War is “waged on us by the enemy,” and yet between the “big Other”—fate, God, history—and the “small other”—the enemy—war is decided. Their confusion is an “inextricable facet.” The intelligence failure to predict outbreak is symptomatic of this structure: interpreting the enemy’s intents, locked in a mirroring relation (“either me or him”), is at bottom an attempt to divine the moment when the enemy arrives at the conclusion that the alien will of a superior order now “calls the shots.” Deterrence works because neither side wills war; deterrence fails because a point arrives when another will becomes decisive. War is thereby joined or avoided through an “impregnable calculation” aiming to pinpoint when the enemy turns from threat into instrument of war. The structure yields a grim rationality: calculation persists, yet calculation concerns the moment when calculation becomes irrelevant because necessity is experienced as decree.

Kremnitzer then intensifies purposelessness by revisiting familiar strategic formulas only to subordinate them to a more paradoxical claim. He briefly invokes the view of war as continuation of policy and the inversion that politics continues war by other means, then insists that war is not simply a means to a further end. War is principally a means to an end that opposes it: a reluctant means in service of order. War is waged “for the sake of peace,” typically unjust peace maintained by force. Because war’s means is antinomic to its end, it can become an end unto itself, “a black hole of sacrifice.” This is a crucial displacement: purposelessness is not mere absence of ends; it is the structural propensity of the means–end relation to invert when ends are unclear. The less clear a society is about what is essential, the more unsettled its sphere of purposes, the more sacrifice becomes self-authorizing. Sacrifice becomes testimony and evidence that something exists for which it is made, especially when that something cannot be named. War thereby supplies a proof of purpose by consuming purposes. The lecture treats this inversion as both anthropological and political: war can manufacture conviction through sacrifice even as it destroys the content that would justify conviction.

At this point the lecture lets the problem of war’s purposelessness merge into the problem of technology. War is “the central manufacturer” of means and instruments: the nursing ground for technology, the order of means whose presumed function is to enable the realization of ends. Technological proliferation occurs more significantly in campaigns for mutual annihilation than in peaceful “domination of nature.” Peaceful benefit is often a collateral effect of the war machine. This is named, with deliberate irony, as the “cunning of history,” a process in which, where human purposes are fated to doom, a different kind of purposiveness—parasitic on human ends—accelerates as progress. The Biblical image of beating swords into plowshares is treated as quasi-empirical description of technological conversion, provided one remembers that the conversion does not stop at swords and plows, but continues to nuclear weapons and sustainable energy, and that this continuity raises the formidable question of terminal point. Here the lecture’s earlier eschatological hints return in a technological register: the advancement of means under war conditions brings into view the possibility of an ultimate terminus, a final war, as an immanent product of instrumental rationalization.

The transition to “human nature or history” is staged as an inquiry into thresholds. War is described as an “aura” at the threshold between nature and history: a vestige of nature in culture, or a symbol of culture in nature. Modern political philosophy is invoked in a compressed gesture: the identification of the natural condition of mankind with the state of war, the war of all against all, the conception of war as nature-within-man requiring sovereign order to hold it in check. Yet from a zoological perspective war appears as culture-within-nature, a sophisticated organized violence whose social complexity could measure species sophistication: alliances, subterfuge, contraptions. War belongs to both nature and culture and to neither; it attests to the impossibility of their straightforward co-articulation. Nature and culture are neither separate nor unified; conflict constitutes their relation.

This threshold-analysis prepares the Kant–Hegel debate as the lecture’s main historical-philosophical hinge. Kremnitzer presents the debate as responding to war as negativity and as addressing modern war’s relation to modernization: the role of modern institutions in propagating and taming war. Kant’s Perpetual Peace is read as explicitly drawing on the aura of war as nature’s cunning (a secularized providence). War, as a phenomenon of natural history, manifests a process by which egocentric inclinations lead gradually toward rational collaboration. War’s senselessness—the failure to serve even selfish purposes—appears as such an unreasonable scandal against reason that it summons reason to take arms against it. War, in its negativity, becomes a self-positing call for its own end, a minimal quasi-natural imperative to find more reasonable ways of handling things. The famous title, borrowed from a satirical graveyard caption, is treated as revelatory: death’s horror imposes a cultural handling (funerary rites), and war’s scandal demands action to put it to rest, lest it haunt to the grave. War pushes toward cultivation and modernization, including technological advance; Kant’s example is the domestication of horses for military purposes. From the participants’ viewpoint war means removal of constraints; from the species’ standpoint war is domestication.

Kremnitzer then brings Kant’s cosmopolitan orientation into view through the analogy between civil society and international relations. In the absence of a global state, what “law in the absence of law” can exist between peoples and states? Commerce and war. Civil society as society of strangers, constituted by self-interest and competition, can nonetheless give rise to collaborative order; Kant’s cosmopolitan horizon draws from this model.

Hegel’s inheritance is presented as both continuity and critique, and the lecture’s rhetorical device of funeral analogy becomes the medium through which the difference is articulated. Hegel distinguishes the absolute need to end wars from the idea of being done with war once and for all. Just as burying the dead is not doing away with death, but a communal practice through which finitude becomes ingredient of social continuity, war becomes integral to historical life. The difference is grounded in divergent assessments of modern institutions’ roles. For Hegel, an overzealous attempt to rid the social body of what surpasses individual life can lead to war; ways of living tend toward stagnation and ossification. Kremnitzer cites the familiar passage from the Philosophy of Right about peace extending civil life, establishing spheres, producing rigidity, and the unity of the body being essential. He acknowledges the familiar interpretation of war as necessary jolt, disease restoring health, but insists one must note what throws the state out of balance and what “state” is at issue.

Here Kremnitzer introduces a triangulation that later becomes decisive for his diagnosis of contemporary war: family, civil society, state. The modern state mediates between the oldest institution, the family, and the “uncanny” modern institution of civil society. It mediates between primal attachment preceding subjectivity and the forward-facing institutionalization of self-interested individuality. If, in Kant, civil society within a state models international relations, Hegel appears more aware that the trajectory reverses: in modern societies, a logic of relation between groups infiltrates the group. War breaks out, on this telling, when the logic of civil society overexpands and dominates, a tendency associated with capitalist societies. The state is then called on to provide the dimension of the whole with primacy over parts, but does so through a negative of the family: sacrificing offspring. The state manifests itself in war, increasingly as it lacks substance and validity beyond this manifestation; the less it finds institutional means of mediating between family and civil society, the more it appears in war. Kremnitzer names this as a chronic problem for capitalist society.

At this juncture the lecture pivots to its contemporary claim: “war today” is best understood as “self-conscious negativity,” internalizing and redoubling its own negativity. The talk now displaces the classical debate into a diagnosis of a specific epochal configuration. Kremnitzer marks three “novelties” introduced in the twentieth century: world war (spatial boundlessness, involving major powers, earth-shaking aftermaths, empire-collapse and state-formation); cold war (a novel configuration whose pretext is preventing hot war and planetary catastrophe, incorporating the “ought not to be” of war into war’s logic); and the war on terror (temporal boundlessness, literally endless wars without constitutive terms of conclusion, victory, defeat). The last is likened to chronic war waged by the immune system, a metaphor that directly challenges the Hegelian disease analogy. The chronic is not a passing crisis that strengthens; it is a deteriorating condition with little hope of cure short of miracle. The commonality across the novelties is the “unearthing of [war’s] own antinomic nature,” its autogenous antagonism to limits in space, scope, time.

The lecture then ventures a synthetic diagnosis of the present “deep into the twenty-first century”: an exceptionally malignant combination of the novelties. The global struggle for hegemony is a crucible whose overheating means mass annihilation. Contemporary conflict is fought in equivocation between perpetual war on terrorism and global war, moving toward an absolute terminus, the final war to be avoided at all costs. Kremnitzer treats the ambiguity—whether one is in world war or on its brink—as crucial. The present is an epoch of overt self-conscious contradiction: war is fought explicitly to prevent a graver war, and yet each day of fighting approaches the very war one claims to avoid. War in general is a limit condition; the present war is war “on limits,” self-consciously raising the question of war’s limits.

The concept of proxy war becomes the lecture’s key concretization of this self-conscious contradiction. Proxy war is interpreted beyond the usual sense of great powers fighting through proxies. It becomes war “by approximation”: a very real war that is simultaneously an approximation of a bigger war. Proxy war relies on and erodes the distinction between actual and potential war. Kremnitzer extends the language of MAD into a verb-form: a “maddening” war in a dual sense—driving interpreters crazy and turning mutually assured destruction into a condition continuously approximated in the name of avoiding it. The consequence is a multi-dimensional erosion of limits: geographical limits endangered as wars spill over spatially; scope expands through levels of violence approaching mass destruction; temporal limits collapse through wars with no end in sight, blocking passage into new political arrangements.

In a decisive return to the lecture’s earlier Hegelian vocabulary, Kremnitzer reframes the present as a crisis of mediation. If war is a vanishing mediator, contemporary war appears as mediation that will not vanish; equivalently, mediation becomes continuous vanishing, a “show of impotence.” A war that will not end in accord continuously disempowers mediation in the narrow sense of diplomacy and in the broad sense of conversation and negotiation. The lecture then identifies another internalization of negativity: an irrational willingness to sacrifice life becomes integrated into deterrence supposedly grounded in safeguarding life. Prestige and the willingness to sacrifice become ingredients of deterrence: the other must know one is unpredictable, “crazy,” untethered to survival interests, as the way to survive and prosper. Honor and life become interlocked; the negativity of war is integrated into practice and discourse.

At this point the lecture abandons abstract neutrality in a controlled way by inserting a horrifying example drawn from the speaker’s “own country.” He cites Bob Woodward’s report of President Biden scolding Prime Minister Netanyahu: “You have no strategy.” Kremnitzer’s interpretation is not that Netanyahu is a “super evil genius.” The point is structural: in a self-conscious war reality, having no strategy can function as strategy. He then names Netanyahu’s “avoidance of any settlement,” turning “I prefer not to” (Bartleby) into a form of state power: by avoiding an end, Netanyahu allegedly shapes a desired war-frame as civilizational struggle, sidestepping the local traumatic conflict. Postponing the end becomes a way to remain in power. Here the earlier Hobbesian motif is reactivated: the deep-rooted conception that civilian unity under rule of law is prerequisite for war against foreign enemies, and that failing to provide security is the clear violation of the sovereign pact. Kremnitzer claims that in today’s “maddening reality,” prolonging war indefinitely becomes a strategy for avoiding the consequences of dramatic failures of the sovereign pact; war is waged indefinitely to keep the populace “impotent,” torn between necessity to fight and powerlessness to remove failed government. Civil society clashes with state power; revisiting Hegel’s triangulation becomes urgent.

The lecture’s closing sentence displaces even the earlier ambition to “end war” into a more local, practical, and paradoxical formulation. If contemporary war is war on limits, ending a war entails the ability to draw a line, to establish a limit “from within.” The limit is “right here,” wherever one manages to draw it. This closing recapitulates the entire arc: from the vacuity of slogans to the demand for determinate delimitation. “War is senseless” thereby becomes less a verdict than a methodological imperative: one confronts war’s resistance to conceptualization by producing, within each conflict’s deadlocks, a limit that interrupts war’s internalization of its own unreasonableness.

The question period functions as a final compositional layer that both confirms and modifies the lecture’s strongest claims. A questioner points to Netanyahu’s stated goals—destroy Hamas, liberate hostages—and suggests the impossibility of complete military destruction, raising the possibility that “no strategy” is strategic perpetuation. Kremnitzer responds by refusing demonology and by refining his earlier point: conflicting goals can be rational strategy because they provide a pivot for ending—once the enemy is “destroyed as much as you can,” the other goal can be advanced. The novelty arises when the logic flips: the signal to the world and to one’s population that returning citizens no longer has “real power” allows indefinite continuation toward “absolute victory,” known by all to be an abstraction whose unattainability can function as its power. In this exchange, Kremnitzer displaces the individualized figure (Netanyahu) back into structural logic: goals, their incompatibility, and the rhetorical conversion of humanitarian minima into negotiable collateral.

A subsequent question challenges the lecture’s portrayal of war as irrational excess by invoking Clausewitzian rationality—strategic objectives, rational players, hope for rational endings. The worry is that emphasizing irrationality diminishes prospects for peace; perhaps realism and strategy are closer to peace. Kremnitzer’s reply is a compressed restatement of his core thesis in a new register: war’s irrationality emerges from an excess of rationality. The belief in a purely calculated self-interested rationality represses real contradictions; repression yields return of the repressed “tenfold” from the real. He gestures toward Hegel’s insistence on an irrational element within government (monarchy by birth) as an institutional acknowledgment that rationality alone, if absolutized, rebounds as intensified irrationality. The intent is not to abandon rational action; it is to resist naïve confidence that statecraft can proceed as business under the assumption that contradiction remains merely logical and never real. He claims this is empirically evident: believing too naively in rational businesslike state relations yields more war.

A final intervention foregrounds capitalism and civil society: if civil society (the sphere where Hegel analyzes capitalist relations) becomes the self-perpetuating mediator that wages war while the state “vanishes,” then Hegel’s theory fails today, and the analysis should be expanded. Kremnitzer distinguishes analytic diagnosis from practical improvement and offers a crucial clarification: the state does not disappear; it stops mediating. It begins thinking in civil-society terms, and that is “its way of failing to mediate.” This response retroactively re-centers the lecture’s triangulation as the key to its contemporary diagnosis: the pathologies of war on limits are tied to a deformation of mediation, where the institution charged with producing the whole internalizes the logic of the sphere it should mediate, thereby losing its mediating capacity and leaving war to assume the role of distorted unifier.

Across its full sequence, the lecture’s method can be seen as a deliberate staging of displacement. The opening cliché is displaced into ontological claim; the ontological claim is displaced into a multi-registered via negativa; the negative registers of experience, essence, and purpose are displaced into institutional-historical analysis; the Kant–Hegel debate is displaced into twentieth-century transformations that internalize war’s antinomies; the abstract diagnosis of self-conscious negativity is displaced into the concrete mechanism of proxy approximation and the impotence of mediation; the closing appeal to drawing a line displaces the question of whether and when to end wars into the question of how limits can be instituted from within specific deadlocks. The Q&A then displaces the lecture’s most potentially totalizing formulations back toward structural contingency: the interplay of conflicting goals, the operationalization of abstraction, the feedback loop between rationalization and irrationality, and the institutional failure of mediation under civil-society logics. The result is a philosophical characterization of war that neither sanctifies war as metaphysical destiny nor reduces it to calculable instrumentality. War appears as a real contradiction that infiltrates speech, time, space, ends, and institutions, and whose ending, in the present configuration, requires a practical act of delimitation capable of interrupting war’s tendency to make its own unreasonableness into the engine of its continuation.

The lecture’s internal economy becomes clearer if one attends to the way its successive registers—experience, essence, purpose, history—operate less as separate “topics” than as mutually destabilizing lenses that repeatedly force the same problem to reappear under altered determinations. Kremnitzer’s guiding supposition is that war’s resistance to sense-making is not an accidental opacity added onto an otherwise intelligible object, and it is not a merely psychological reluctance to look. The resistance belongs to war’s mode of being, and thus to the mode of access by which thought expects to secure its objects. In this respect the lecture proceeds as a critique of the tacit epistemic contract that ordinarily governs political discourse: the expectation that, with sufficient information, the object will become transparent, the causal chain reconstructible, the aims articulable, the endpoints describable, and practical reason thereby equipped to decide. War is treated as the phenomenon that repeatedly breaks this contract while forcing language to continue performing as if the contract remained intact. The “banality” of war talk is therefore not simply moral callousness; it is also a structural compulsion to speak in forms that presuppose conceptual mastery, even while war systematically undermines that mastery.

This becomes visible already in the initial insistence that “war is senseless” names a “conceptual blunder” inherent in the concept of war. The phrase is carefully chosen: a blunder is a mistake, yet it can be instructive in revealing what makes a mistake seem necessary. The lecture thereby places itself in a lineage of critique that treats conceptual failure as evidence. When Kremnitzer describes the three senses of senselessness—perplexity, lack of concept, lack of definitive achievement—he effectively posits that the ordinary concept “war” is internally fissured. The fissure shows itself as an oscillation between the demand for immediate action and the incapacity of speech to rise to the level of that demand. The urgency is practical, while the intelligibility is conceptual; war forces their divergence into consciousness. The talk’s method accepts this divergence and treats it as a datum: philosophy is required to tarry with the divergence because it is itself part of the object. Hence the deliberate refusal to “mystify” war. Mystification would stage the divergence as an ineffable sacredness; Kremnitzer stages it as a determinate negativity that can be followed, even if it resists closure.

The notion of “containment” marks one of the lecture’s most productive conceptual tensions. Containment means preventing overflow; containment means internalizing what threatens overflow. These two senses correspond to two possible attitudes toward war in thought and politics. One attitude seeks external boundary-setting: keep war “there,” keep it limited, keep it from touching the conceptual and moral core of the community. The other attitude recognizes that war already inhabits the community’s forms of thinking, its institutional arrangements, its technologies, its patterns of consent; containment therefore requires assimilation, the taking-into oneself of what one wishes to limit. The lecture’s argument repeatedly slides between these senses, and the slide is not an equivocation; it is a claim about war itself. War is presented as the phenomenon that defeats merely external containment precisely because it operates as condition. If war lies “at the background of thinking,” then even peace-time rationality becomes, in a certain sense, an ongoing operation of containment: a struggle to keep the war-like element of contradiction from erupting into unbounded violence. This is why Heraclitus and Hegel can be invoked without turning the lecture into historical exegesis. Their role is to establish, within the tradition, that strife belongs to the grammar of becoming and to the engine of conceptual transition. War is therefore neither purely external event nor merely empirical episode; it functions as a limit-condition whose presence is disclosed when limits are threatened.

The Hegelian interlude on the fight to the death accomplishes a second displacement whose stakes remain active through the rest of the lecture. Kremnitzer presents war as “vanishing mediator,” then uses this to claim war “in itself” is “of no significance.” The phrase is intentionally provocative, and its function is diagnostic. It does not deny the suffering and destruction of war; it denies that war contains within itself a determinate meaning that could justify it as such. War mediates by vanishing; its meaning lies in what emerges through its supersession. The very structure of dialectical transition becomes an implicit norm: if war’s negativity is to be philosophically legible, it is legible in how it is overcome, in what it yields to, in what it makes possible by ceasing. This dialectical norm then becomes the foil for the lecture’s later diagnosis of contemporary war as “mediation that will not vanish.” The early Hegelian figure is thereby introduced in a form that makes its later reversal intelligible. War as vanishing mediator belongs to a world where negation is expected to generate determinate transformation and then withdraw. Contemporary war appears as a deformation of this expectation: negation persists, multiplies, internalizes its own contradiction, and thereby disables the very progression that dialectic had used war to symbolize.

The lecture’s treatment of contradiction further clarifies this. Kremnitzer suggests that logicians tell us there is nothing to conceive in contradiction; war shows contradiction as lived reality. The formulation “living and not living” is a compressed attempt to name the experiential structure of being-on-the-verge: existence oriented toward the possibility of its immediate cancellation. The philosophical point is not that war produces metaphysical paradoxes for their own sake. The point is that war forces human beings into a temporal posture in which the determination of the present becomes unstable: the present is lived under the sign of retrospective verification. Only later will one “find out who and what remains.” The present is thereby haunted by an anticipatory negation that has not yet been actualized, while still functioning as decisive. This is one reason the lecture repeatedly returns to hindsight and premonition. War, in Kremnitzer’s description, is not simply dangerous; it is structurally oriented toward the question of remainder, survival, and the post-factum determination of meaning. This temporal structure helps explain why war resists ordinary conceptualization: concepts assume stable objects; war makes the object itself depend on future remainder.

In the register of intuition, the everyday idiom “war breaks out” becomes evidence for a deeper thesis about beginnings and ends. Kremnitzer draws out the tension between suddenness and causal chain: the outbreak is said to occur “in an instant,” and yet it is always retroactively embedded in necessity, in a chain that makes the instant seem merely a link. War’s onset thereby becomes a peculiar kind of pseudo-origin: an event that creates its own prehistory. The talk’s language of “lurking” and “ready to erupt” indicates a structure of latent presence. Once war is actual, it seems to have been always possible, hence always already there. The consequence is the emergence of “mythic time,” fate-time, recurrence-time. Here the lecture is staging an ontological claim through phenomenological description: the temporality of war is not simply the temporality of events; it is a temporality that reorganizes the sense of time itself, producing a background in which ordinary temporal distinctions lose their authority. The phrase “absolute past which was never a present” is, in effect, a philosophical attempt to name the sense that war discloses a depth of time that eludes everyday presentness. The corresponding “primordial future,” the “end of all ends,” indicates that war also discloses a horizon of finality that presses into the present as possibility.

This temporal account is then paired with a spatial account that initially seems more graspable—borders, fronts, maps—and is then destabilized by the crisis of containment. The porousness of front and rear, friend and foe, is not merely an empirical observation about asymmetric conflict. It functions as a conceptual diagnosis: war is defined by transgression of borders and then by redrawing borders, yet its very operation undermines the stability of border as concept. War, as the attempt to establish limits by violence, is also the phenomenon that spreads, multiplies fronts, dissolves differentiations, and thereby threatens the very logic of boundedness that it ostensibly serves. This is a crucial tension because it anticipates the later theme of war “on limits.” The early account of war’s spatial disorientation provides the experiential basis for the later claim that contemporary wars increasingly erode geographical, scalar, and temporal limits.

The oscillation between generic and idiosyncratic introduces a further conceptual pressure that the lecture later redeploys in its institutional analysis. War is described as constant of history, flattening differences, devastatingly indifferent. War is also traumatic, untransmittable, singular in the most concrete sense: who experiences it, and where, and under what exposure? The closer one gets, the less the category “experience” applies, because the integration of the lived into a coherent biographical chronicle becomes structurally difficult. The point is not merely the psychological trauma; the point is the failure of narration and integration as such. War thereby attacks the very form in which a life becomes intelligible to itself and to others. This means that war’s generic historical character is purchased at the cost of singular devastation that resists generalization. The lecture’s insistence on this oscillation is part of its method of refusing two temptations at once: the temptation to dissolve war into general historical laws, and the temptation to dissolve war into ineffable singular horror. War becomes the phenomenon in which generality and singularity fail to secure each other; they undermine each other’s stability, and this mutual undermining is itself part of war’s negativity.

The concept of “anti-essence” intensifies this by bringing the problem of identity into view. War has “excessive identity” and “no essence.” Excessive identity means that the name “war” gathers an enormous range of phenomena under one heading, exercising a kind of conceptual violence: it names and thereby flattens. Yet war has no essence in the sense that it cannot be captured by a determinate inner principle that would explain its necessity or purposiveness. Kremnitzer’s use of the phrase “trial by fire” signals a transposition: war has no essence of its own, and yet it compels the disclosure of what others take to be essential. War functions as a test of essence, an ordeal for principles, values, forms of life. It reveals instability, vulnerability, the need for revalidation. War thus becomes ontologically parasitic: it gains its grip through the essences to which humans are attached, and yet it undermines those essences’ claims to stability. This parasitism helps explain why war can be experienced as “alien will.” War draws on what matters to human beings, and in drawing on it it can appear as decree, inevitability, fate. War’s necessity is thus experienced through the fragility of what humans deem essential.

The move into purpose then reveals the central paradox of consent. “Nobody wants war,” taken seriously, becomes a key to understanding deterrence, intelligence failure, and the strange point where war is “decided.” The lecture’s distinction between the “big Other” and “small other” is intended to indicate that war often appears as decision without decider. War is attributed to the enemy, yet the enemy is simultaneously imagined as compelled by necessity, by historical inevitability, by fate. Each side imagines the other as arriving at the moment when necessity calls the shots. The rationality of deterrence resides in mutual unwillingness; the irrationality emerges when an alien will becomes decisive. The lecture thereby complicates the standard opposition between rational war and irrational war. It proposes a structure in which rational calculation is precisely the medium through which irrational necessity is experienced as emerging. The calculation is aimed at predicting the moment when calculation ceases to govern. This is why the lecture insists that protest is insufficient: avowing disagreement does not touch the structure whereby each side experiences war as something that forces itself, even while it is enacted through decisions.

The claim that war is waged “for the sake of peace” introduces yet another displacement of the standard means–end account. War is an antinomic means: it serves an end that opposes it. This antinomy makes war apt to become end unto itself. The “black hole of sacrifice” is therefore not an incidental pathology; it is a structural possibility grounded in the instability of ends. When ends are unclear, sacrifice becomes the proof of ends. War becomes a machine for producing the appearance of meaning through the expenditure of life. Kremnitzer’s formulation that sacrifice becomes “testimony and evidence” is important because it identifies a quasi-epistemic function of violence: it produces certainty where articulation fails. This also ties back to war’s resistance to speech: where language cannot name the essential purpose, sacrifice supplies a mute demonstration that something essential exists. War thus becomes a perverse epistemology of the essential, one that grounds conviction in blood and loss.

Technology then enters as the material correlate of this inversion. War accelerates the proliferation of means; peace then consumes these means as benefits. The lecture’s invocation of the “cunning of history” is not presented as a consoling theodicy. It is presented as an ambivalent mechanism: where human ends are ruined, a different purposiveness accelerates. The conversion of swords into plowshares becomes an empirical description of technical conversion, and the continuation into nuclear weapons introduces the question of terminal point. Technology thereby connects purposeless war to the possibility of final war. The proliferation of means intensifies the stakes of war’s limit-status: if war becomes capable of ending “all wars” by ending the species, then the relation between means and ends is transformed at the species level. The end that war serves—peace—now appears under the shadow of an end that war can enact as absolute termination. The lecture’s later emphasis on MAD and “approximation” is already prefigured here: the capacity for total destruction reorganizes the rationality of war, making prevention of worst-case catastrophe a central justificatory structure even as war becomes the vehicle of approaching catastrophe.

The threshold between nature and culture then deepens this by showing that war cannot be cleanly assigned to either domain. In political philosophy war appears as nature-within-man requiring sovereign control. In zoological perspective war appears as culture-within-nature, organized complexity. The lecture’s conclusion that nature and culture are neither separate nor unified in war indicates that war stages the failure of a foundational modern distinction. War thereby becomes a privileged site for seeing how the human animal belongs to nature and produces history, and how the production of history carries natural residue that resists governance. This threshold-analysis directly supports the later institutional claim about modern mediation: institutions attempt to stabilize the relation, and war is the site where their stabilization breaks down.

The Kant–Hegel debate is therefore not treated as a scholastic dispute. It is treated as a conceptual prism through which modernity’s institutional hopes and failures can be refracted. Kant’s “cunning of nature” offers a way of reading war’s senselessness as self-calling for its own end: war scandalizes reason and thereby summons reason to institutionalize peace. Civil society’s model—commerce among strangers—suggests a pathway for international order without global state. Hegel inherits the cunning motif as “cunning of history,” yet refuses the expectation of being done with war once and for all. The funeral analogy underscores a deeper anthropological claim: social continuity incorporates finitude; war, analogously, becomes incorporated as a recurring moment in historical life. Yet Kremnitzer does not leave the matter at this generality. He insists on the mediating structure of modernity: family, civil society, state. War emerges when mediation fails, and mediation fails under the overexpansion of civil society’s logic, the dominance of private interest. The state’s manifestation in war increases as it lacks substantive validity elsewhere. This is the lecture’s critical pivot from classical philosophy to contemporary diagnosis: modern institutions do not merely tame war; they can propagate war through their internal pathologies.

When Kremnitzer turns to twentieth-century novelties and speaks of war becoming “self-conscious,” he is effectively claiming that war has learned to speak in the language that once opposed it. The cold war internalizes the imperative to prevent hot war within the logic of war itself; the war on terror internalizes the absence of ends and thereby normalizes endlessness; world war internalizes global scope. War becomes “conscious of itself” insofar as the contradictions once disclosed by philosophical reflection—limitlessness, purposelessness, means–end inversion—become explicit features of war discourse and practice. This is why Kremnitzer repeatedly stresses “incorporation” and “redoubling.” War does not merely present contradiction; it duplicates contradiction within its own rationale. The discourse of preventing a worse war becomes the medium through which escalation proceeds. Proxy war becomes the mechanism through which the distinction between potential and actual war is preserved and eroded simultaneously. The concept of “approximation” thus functions as a category of contemporary war rationality: war is waged as if it were a controlled approach toward catastrophe undertaken for the sake of avoiding catastrophe.

The account of mediation’s impotence is then the institutional correlate of this self-conscious negativity. Diplomacy as mediation depends on the possibility that war will vanish into an accord, that negotiation will have determinate stakes and endpoints. When war is endless, when it is fought on the precipice, when it approximates catastrophe under the banner of preventing catastrophe, mediation is deprived of its telos. Mediation becomes continuous vanishing because each attempt at mediation is dissolved by the war’s internal logic of escalation and deferral. The lecture’s formulation that a war that will not end “disempowers” mediation in the broad sphere of conversation is particularly significant. It implies that war’s ontological negativity now invades not only politics but also the conditions for speech. The opening theme—the vacuity of talk about war—returns here with altered meaning: the emptiness is no longer merely cliché, it is structurally produced by a war-form that deprives speech of efficacy.

The lecture’s late example concerning Netanyahu then functions, within the internal logic of the argument, as a case where the war’s self-conscious negativity intersects with the crisis of sovereign legitimacy. Kremnitzer’s point that “having no strategy can function as strategy” belongs to the earlier analysis of purposelessness and sacrifice, now specified in governmental terms. If the sovereign pact is judged by security provision, then dramatic failure threatens legitimacy. Prolonging war indefinitely becomes a way to suspend the moment of reckoning. War is thereby used to keep the populace torn between external threat and internal powerlessness. The lecture’s earlier triangulation returns: civil society in direct clash with state power; the state internalizing civil society’s logic; mediation failing. The example is meant to show how the war on limits becomes intertwined with the politics of domestic legitimacy, and how war’s endlessness becomes instrument of governance through paralysis.

The final claim—that ending a war entails drawing a line, establishing a limit from within—should be read as the lecture’s attempt to convert its negative ontology into a practical criterion. If war is senseless because it resists conceptualization and undermines purposiveness, then ending war cannot be treated as mere application of general principle. Kremnitzer explicitly says the resistance of war to sense-making “requires” confrontation with specific deadlocks in each conflict. The concluding emphasis on drawing the limit “right here” therefore indicates a shift from discovery to institution. Limits are not found in the object as if nature had inscribed them; limits are produced through action capable of interrupting war’s self-propagating rationales. This closes the circle with the opening critique of discourse: philosophy is justified insofar as it helps specify where and how a limit can be drawn, where speech and negotiation can regain efficacy, where purposes can be re-articulated without being swallowed by sacrifice.