ABSTRACT
If by the end of the eighteenth century the name diplomacy constituted the foundation for a post-revolutionary archi-politics –– thus turning diplomacy into a figure for an anti-democratic democracy by denying the problem of the rabble –– then this tale surrounding the origins of proper diplomacy seemed, from its very inception, to be haunted by its own mortality. Diplomacy’s death sentence, declared almost in the same breath as the concept’s birth, has continued to haunt the writing on diplomacy until this day. Considering that ultra-political diplomacy should be defined by a certain fetishistic repetition, the subject’s relationship with the object will be defined by a perverse structure. At the very point at which archi-political diplomacy seems to end, a form of spurious infinity also marks the introduction of a fetishistic element: turning the already given law into something which must be pronounced in every instance.
