Notes on the notion of 'Just War'? Debating war with Walzer, Zizek, Hardt and Negri

The war in Iraq, shadowed by the 'war on terrorism', raises crucial questions concerning notions of justice. This paper gauges the strategies of Walzer, Zizek, and Negri and Hardt, vis-a-vis the Iraq war. Several prominent intellectuals have engaged with the question of the Iraq war; participants in the debate include Beck, Habermas, Chomsky, Badiou, the recently deceased Derrida, Virilio, Giddens, Baudrillard, Agamben and the four figures scrutinized in this paper. The purpose is two-fold: first, to present the opposed strategies of classic rationalism (Walzer), Lacanian psychoanalysis (Zizek), and Deleuzian vitalism (Hardt and Negri); secondly, to discuss the political efficacy or otherwise of specific intellectuals, as well as their dual agendas when intervening in a specific, political issue; namely an overt, official scenario, and a partly hidden, polemical and almost exclusively academic one. The paper also raises the question of what might/should influence our perception of the role of the intellectual analyzing warfare.