Abstract

In the world of high diplomacy, negotiations all too often address only the external possibilities of their own institutionalization; recall how the course of the war in Vietnam once seemed to depend on the shape of the table in Paris. The world of intellectual debate, objectively much less consequential and therefore rhetorically all the more grandiose, functions not very differently. The new round of negotiations on the peace movement in this issue of Telos unfolds in an atmosphere less elegant perhaps than that of the boulevards of Geneva where the haute monde of the military bureaucracies promenades, chattering coyly beneath nuclear parasols in front of a crowd transfixed by fear, boredom and an excited anticipation of its own destruction.