War, in the broadest sense, is a battle about the power to define and definitions, that are not carried out at the center of words but at their very margins. But what can words do, as soon as the state of war has become a rule and a normality worldwide?

In December 2006, London-based architect and writer Markus Miessen went to meet political theorist and Professor of Political Theory Chantal Mouffe. In a series of conversations at Westminster, he used his current investigation into ‘conflict- and non-consensus-based forms of participation as a form of alternative spatial practice’ as a starting point to question Mouffe about democratic life and her understanding of what she calls ‘conflictual consensus’.

Markus Miessen
Chantal, you have written extensively on the struggle of politics and the radical heart of democratic life. Could you please explain to us the main thesis of your latest book “On the Political”?

Etienne Balibar is professor in Paris X Nanterre and University of California, Irvine. He was invited to participate in the first edition of the Dictionary of War but unfortunately could not make it to Frankfurt. Instead he has sent us as his contribution an essay entitled: "Politics As War, War As Politics - Post-Clausewitzian Variations". It is the text of a public lecture he gave at the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, on May 8, 2006.

The new war, post-modern war, permanent war -- almost every major military operation over the past 15 years has evoked a new debate about the new character of war. After 9-11 state of war has turned into a normality. Five years of global war have turned the world upside down, in a way that the extent of the ongoing changes cannot be fully conceived yet.

On June 2 and 3 the first edition of DICTIONARY OF WAR will take place as a collaborative platform for creating concepts on the issue of war. At four public, two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin 100 concepts will be invented, arranged and presented by scientists, artists, theorists and activists.

Derek Gregory has publish an excellent new legal/geographical analysis of Guant?namo Bay: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=9540

The German architectural weekly magazine reviews the Archipelago of Exception conference in its last issue.

The spanish daily newspaper El Pais has published a review of the Archipelago conference last thursday and friday in CCCB in Barcelona.

Anselm Franke made available the full program of the Archipelago of Exception symposium from november 10 to 11, 2005, in CCCB Barcelona. Video recordings from the conference will be available here right after the event.

An earlier version of this paper by Tom Keenan was given in February 2005 at a conference in honor of Jacques Derrida jointly organized by Peter Goodrich of the Cardozo Law School and Anselm Haverkamp of New York University. Scroll down to find the PDF verison attached

If sovereignty is the power, granted by a juridical order, of proclaiming an exception to this order – as Carl Schmitt said – and if the state of exception proclaimed by a sovereign is a moment at which life is abandoned by the law, forsaken, and exposed to violence that the law does not punish – as Giorgio Agamben explains – then large-scale disasters challenge the very principle of sovereignty.