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117 CHAPTER ELEVEN Can We Make Peace?* For Teresa Brennan ‫ﱡﱣﱢﱡ‬ Julia Kristeva Translated by Shannon Hoff The premature death of Teresa Brennan fills me with an immense sadness . I have lost a friend—one who introduced me into the circle of Hannah Arendt’s collaborators and accomplices at the New School, and who could always inspire me with the interest and pertinence of her thought in the domains of femininity, of the sacred, of psychoanalysis. In these moments of grief, it is very difficult to interpret her thought, to reflect and continue the debate. I can only collect myself, reminisce about her, invite all to read and re-read her, and dedicate to her the text presented as part of the Universal Academy of Cultures, at the UNESCO in Paris in December, 2002. Can we make peace? “Peace, peace! When there is no peace.” Thus spoke Jeremiah, the “prophet of doom,” opponent of lies, of false prophets and idolaters who began to prophesize around 627–626 B.C. It was at this time that Deuteronomy was promulgated , Babylon triumphed over Syria, Nebuchadnezzar began his campaign against Jerusalem, and the first deportation took place—as did the plunder of Jerusalem, the captivity in Babylon and the migration of a number of Jews to Egypt: “For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly,/ Saying ‘peace, peace!’/When there is no peace” (Jeremiah 8:11). * Julia Kristeva originally delivered this essay as a session paper at the Sixth International Forum of the Universal Academy of Cultures on December 20, 2002 in Paris, France. Today you ask me if we can make a peace that does not exist. I think of the famous “peace process” of which there remain only disastrous tatters, a legion of “preventions,” “sabotages,” “quagmires,” “standstills,” and other “killings.” I think of the state of latent war, the so-called situation of “insecurity ,” into which terrorism has plunged the world since September 11, 2001, and which was announced long before this fateful day in the big metropoles and in our suburbs by economic misery, the failures of integration, and the ravages of fundamentalism. I am not unaware that “we are making peace” in Paris, and even in New York—that in spite of the oil slicks floating in the Atlantic, nature remains relatively beautiful, that the men and women of the third millennium continue to have children, they contemplate the sunsets and greet the birds of the fields, breathe the flowers at their windows, savor good wine and fine dishes, and dream of the future. I mean to say that for even the most fortunate , today peace seems beyond endangered—a vision of the mind, perhaps even a hallucination, like a transparent film, an evanescent perfume, the wing of a bee, the dream of a sage who imagines himself a butterfly, or of a butterfly picturing itself as a sage. I ask myself if peace was ever before beset by as many “principles of precaution,” if not incredulity. And I wonder. Suppose peace only existed as an object of belief, faith, and love. That is, what if it only existed as an imaginary discourse? This would mean that it possessed some reality, even a definite reality. It suffices to read a novel, see a film, listen to a CD, or participate in a religious rite for this imaginary reality to take hold of us, if only as project or promise: “That peace be with you and with your spirit;” “Amen;” “We depart in peace under the law of silence.” Appeasement is an imaginary process: It drives destructive passions to express themselves in words, sounds, and colors; symbolic productions replace the daily conflicts and wars in order to compose a neo-reality, which is an ideal—often even an idyll, always a sublimation of violence—that we receive as beauty, as a fragment of serenity or peace. The Catholic mass, among many other rites, is a paroxystic example of this appeasement, which made even Marcel Proust dream, when the writer defined every form of art as a “transubstantiation.” He understood by this word that not only the bread and wine changed into the body and blood of Christ, but that their assimilation in the act of consumption—original violence if there ever was any—procures for the communicant a state in which he finds himself fulfilled, once more serene and appeased. If he elaborated through fantasy the murderous...

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