by CONSTANCE DEBRÉ
Each of the warring parties has its own definition of peace. Like love, peace is a rhetorical argument, an absolute weapon of language, something you accuse the other of not wanting the moment they refuse your conditions. Peace feels like an imposed submission, humiliation without recourse. And when it occurs, it is always the winners’ version.
We have been led to believe that peace is desirable for the simple reason that it is the ideal to which peoples and nations have always aspired. In the French version of Monopoly, Peace (La Paix) is the most expensive street in Paris. Our world of supermarkets and television, and later of the Internet and smartphones; our society of neurotic consumers; and our communities of small, falsely dissimilar egos would no longer have an adversary, since they had conquered, if not death, then at least war — if only on their…