ABSTRACT
Beginning with the sixteenth century Renaissance portraitist Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, the goal was to capture the ways in which not only contemporary Diplomacy Studies but also its forerunners have tried to formulate the limits of diplomacy and the challenges facing this field. However, even this ultra-political fantasy eventually failed, turning diplomacy into a delusional metaphor under which no impossibility could persist. Returning to the name diplomacy, one can claim that the history of diplomacy begins with the French Revolution, not because there was any specific meaning assigned to the concept at that point in time, but because it allowed for the creation of diplomacy as an anti-democratic democracy: a pathological negation of the part-of-no-part that is the prerequisite for modern liberal democracy, supplanting it with democracy on the nation-state level.
