The thematic issue of Belgrade Circle devoted to "Pure War" was created in the shadow of the regional war raging on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. The contributions gathered in this issue represent an attempt to think through the dramatic questioning arising from the reality of war. This thinking through has brought about a new consciousness of responsibility in those who have dared to speak of the burning issues of the times in a "discourse of concern". Discursive concern could and did legitimize itself as an incentive to a deeper acceptance of solidarity, as a suggestion and mandate for a more fundamental facing of the event of war. This mandate, articulated on this occasion first and foremost theoretically, offers in a dignified way reconstruction of the speech of hope and promise to everybody who has been engulfed by the all-encompassing "banality of evil".

On the other hand, naturally, as each gesture of solidarity, so this one, too, reminds us that the moral principle can never be completely obviated, cancelled or removed from theoretical memory. Moral judgment about evil is not only the irrevocable right of theoretical discourse, it also symbolizes the right to thought as confrontation, to philosophy as ethics. Acts of evil and horror will not be saved from this right even by the monotonous rhetoric of official pacifism: those who wilfully produced war only to call for peace now, when forced to, cannot expect to be showered with touching respect. The great secret of responsibility truly lies in the non-violent singularization of guilt, in the reaffirmation of the ethical principle in the midst of evil.

Apart from the political, legal and moral dimensions of the institution of peace, the far-reaching cessation of hostilities inevitably calls for a responsible review of the figure of war. Many of the articles in this issue of Belgrade Circle move in that direction. They could be seen as contributions to the long history of European discourse about war. Having in mind the significance of this connection, the authors of this issue tried to avoid "naive expressionism" and the fantasm of "pure directness", as well as the "irresponsible reflection" and the idiotism of purely theoretical "speculation" (which comes from a excessive distancing from the object, in this case - war).

Of course, the editors did not mean to suggest a polemic about the emphatic term "pure war". On the contrary, this editorial gesture was meant to attract contributors prepared to demonstrate intellectual, moral and even political readiness to think war from the inside. In spite of the many risks, our authors responsibly tackled the uncovering of the internal structures of war, so that this thematic issue is, among other things, an open call to take an attitude of extreme caution towards every militarist option.

The reality of war in the former Yugoslavia returns us to a neglected question, to a repressed problem which thought can no longer leave aside: Why is each subsequent war, especially the one which has colonized the spaces of the former Yugoslavia, essentially a new reality precisely in its archaism? Namely, why does each new conflict reveal the outlines of all wars heretofore waged, from tribal to civil and global? The answer to this sensitive question doubtless requires a completely new way of addressing war. Futile would be any attempt to approach war exclusively from the outside, to treat it principally as a historical event, social fact, reality of the front and, generally, to approach it as the real facts of the military institutions and practice which surround it. On the contrary, we must return to war as a specific figure, as a characteristic symbolic movement which we believed to have long since departed the horizon of Europe or, if you wish, of civilization. If we wish to rid ourselves of the (self)imposed and very thankless role of "Balkan barbarians", we should consider in complete seriousness the following question: Why did the former Yugoslavia disintegrate in disorder, chaos, violence and war? This question awaits a special kind of rational answer which should definitely remove us from the still insistent vicinity of militant real-socialism and brutal nationalism.

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