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Die paradoxe Realität des Krieges mag sich jeder Definition entziehen, doch stellt der Krieg einen konstitutiven Aspekt der abendländischen Kultur dar und eröffnet in historischer Perspektive ein weites Spannungsfeld verschiedener Wissensmodelle und Traditionen. Einerseits als Kunst oder gar als Wissenschaft behandelt, andererseits als bloße technische Fertigkeit beschrieben, erscheint Krieg als immer neue Konfiguration unterschiedlichster Formen und Diskurse. Schon Clausewitz bemerkte, dass alle Definitionen eher unbefriedigend seien, denn der Krieg sei ein »lebendiger, reagierender Gegenstand«, dessen Systematik nur schwer mit dem Schematismus der Künste und der Wissenschaften verglichen werden kann. So will die Tagung »Krieg in Worten« den Wechselwirkungen von Krieg und seinen spezifischen Wissensformen nachgehen, die den Kriegsdiskurs von der griechisch-römischen Antike bis zur frühneuzeitlichen Wissenskonfigurierung begleitet und charakterisiert haben. Dabei soll insbesondere versucht werden, der schriftlichen Dimension des Diskurses über den Krieg nachzugehen, innerhalb dessen eine Antike erst konstruiert wird. Denn die Auseinandersetzung mit einer exemplarischen, normierenden und immer gültigen Antike hat sich einer erhöhten Symbolizität gerade in dem Moment bedient, in dem die technologischen Entwicklungen Fortschritte versprachen, die die Kriegsprozesse radikal zu verändern drohten. Somit wird Krieg im Sinne von »Transformationen der Antike« als Kreuzungspunkt unterschiedlicher Disziplinen und Methoden verstanden. Although the paradoxical reality of war may elude any definition, it represents a constitutive dimension of Western culture which, when seen in a historical perspective, exposes an area of productive tension between various traditions and models of knowledge. Sometimes treated as an art or even a science, sometimes described as a mere technical capability, war represents a constantly renewable configuration of a wide range of forms and discourses. Clausewitz himself observes that no single attempt at defining the phenomenon can be entirely satisfying; war is a ‘living, reacting object’ whose systemic workings do not lend themselves to straightforward comparison with the arts or sciences. It is in this sense that the conference ‘War in Words’ seeks to explore that interplay between war and various forms of knowledge which has characterized discourses on war from Greek and Roman antiquity to the new configurations of knowledge which arose in the early modern period. Particular emphasis will be placed on textual aspects of the discourse of war and on its construction of a specific ‘antiquity’, for it was precisely in a period in which technological developments held out the promise of progress that ‘antiquity’ became especially significant as an exemplary, normative, and eternally valid principle. In short, this conference approaches war as the point of intersection between a wide range of disciplines and methods, an exemplary ‘transformation of antiquity’. The event, like all events at the ICI Berlin, is open to the public, free of charge. The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin. If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management., War in Words: Transformations of War from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, Conference, conference, ICI Berlin, 17–19 April 2008

the theory of translation, on the one hand, balances precariously upon the high wire stretched tautly between two linguistic axioms, both of them unassailable, both of them evident upon reflection, and the two of them in appearance mutually exclusive: the absolute unattainability of exact synonym ity, and the absolute certainty of universal translatability. However broadly or narrowly we understand the activity of translation?whether more uni versally (as the various meanings of the Greek term ?ppriveuco suggest and as most linguists have come to accept since Roman Jakobsons seminal article of 19591)) as any transference of meaning whatsoever between one semiotic system and another, be it within one language ("intralingual"), between two languages ("interlingual"), or between two different symbolic codes ("intersemiotic"), or only as the everyday miracle of the communicative in tercession performed by mediators operating between two different natural languages for the benefit of their linguistically less proficient fellows?it is both a datum of experience, and a postulate of theory, not only that there is not and cannot be any single term in one language for which a single precise equivalent, in any other language or for that matter in its own one, can ever