The Genealogy of Peace: Notes Toward a Superhero Metaphysics

By ProfessorMattW (after Nietzsche, Camus, Foucault, and the Ghost of Alan Moore)

I. The Invention of Peace

Peace, that immaculate fiction, is one of civilization’s most exquisite delusions.

We imagine it as absence — a world untroubled by conflict — yet in every century it arrives as command, never as condition.

Peace is the propaganda of victors. It exists only where the conquered have forgotten how to scream.

What Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of values” has here completed its metamorphosis: war renamed as virtue. Peace becomes not the still water after the storm, but the glassy surface concealing machinery beneath — the bureaucratic murmur of drones, sanctions, and security clearances.

The modern hero — Peacemaker, Superman, Captain America — is the guardian of that fiction. They do not abolish violence; they professionalize it.

II. The Body Politic and the Body Traumatized

Every empire begins as a wound. Its mythology, if honest, would begin not with triumph but with trauma. The same is true of the hero.

Peacemaker’s body, clad in flag and armor, is a living museum of scars. His nation, likewise.

He is not the cure for violence but its monument.

Camus might have said: the absurd man knows the world is irrational and yet demands meaning; the American man knows the world is violent and yet demands peace.

The result is the same: a perpetual negotiation with despair.

We invent trauma as initiation — a rite of suffering through which the moral self is “forged.”

But this forging is alchemical trickery. Trauma is not wisdom’s seed but its counterfeit: it makes obedience feel like enlightenment.

The soldier’s scar becomes the citizen’s conscience.

III. Derrida and the Trace of the Bullet

Derrida taught that meaning is always deferred — that every word, every sign, is haunted by what it excludes.

Peace, in this sense, is haunted by the ghost of its opposite.

To speak of peace requires the trace of war; to proclaim order requires the memory of chaos.

Peacemaker’s gun, emblazoned with a dove, is not a contradiction — it is the perfect Derridean artifact.

The signifier and its negation entwined, endlessly deferring one another, each giving birth to the other’s necessity.

In this play of différance, peace can never arrive. It can only posture.

The dove flutters not above the battlefield, but perpetually within it — an emblem stitched to the shrapnel.

IV. Foucault and the Carceral Angel

Foucault would remind us that the desire for peace is indistinguishable from the desire for control.

The same institutions that cage criminals also cage compassion.

We do not seek tranquility; we seek surveillance so total it resembles tranquility.

Thus the superhero emerges: a celestial warden, patrolling not prisons but possibilities.

His power is not divine, but disciplinary — an aesthetic of omnipotence built upon the architecture of obedience.

The citizen looks skyward and sighs, relieved to be watched.

Peace, then, is merely the serenity of the observed.

V. Nietzsche and the Hero as Last Man

Nietzsche foresaw it: the “Last Man,” blinking and docile, who says, “We have invented happiness.”

Today he says instead, “We have invented peace.”

He has Netflix, insurance, and a curated outrage. His revolutions are digital, his tragedies bingeable.

The hero he worships is his own anesthetic.

The Übermensch, once the symbol of becoming, now becomes brand ambassador.

Superman sells nostalgia, Batman sells trauma, and Peacemaker — that tragic clown of policy — sells the illusion that blood can be ethically managed.

Nietzsche’s hammer, swung against idols, would now clang against spandex.

VI. The Theology of the Gun

The gun is America’s eucharist.

To hold it is to commune with the divine logic of history: that redemption requires death, and salvation requires aim.

Peacemaker’s weapon, inscribed with the rhetoric of virtue, is the locus of that theology — a sacred object through which violence becomes sacrament.

Each bullet is a syllogism:

1. Peace is good.

2. The enemy opposes peace.

3. Therefore, the enemy must die for peace to live.

It is the oldest catechism in the world.

VII. The Eagle and the Abyss

And what of Eagly, the feathered fool, who hugs his blood-soaked master?

He is the most innocent and most philosophical creature in the series.

He represents, as Camus would put it, the revolt that does not kill — the absurd joy that persists despite absurd cruelty.

Eagly neither legislates nor judges. He simply flies.

He exists outside the grammar of morality, untouched by dialectic, closer to grace than God.

Perhaps this is what Nietzsche meant when he spoke of dancing stars born from chaos — the flight that emerges when the abyss learns to laugh.

VIII. Toward a Future Without Heroes

If there is a conclusion, it is this: peace must be reimagined not as outcome but as ethic.

To seek peace through power is to perpetuate both. To find peace within powerlessness — that, perhaps, is the only revolution left.

Peacemaker’s final revelation — that his trauma was both his curse and his teacher — is the modern condition writ large.

We have mistaken survival for morality, and called it civilization.

The new hero will not kill for peace, nor kneel before it.

He will refuse both war and its aftermath — he will, like Eagly, simply exist beyond the categories that make such madness seem inevitable.

IX. The Postscript of the Absurd

Camus ends The Myth of Sisyphus with the image of the condemned man smiling as he pushes his stone.

Peacemaker, too, smiles — bruised, ridiculous, half-naked, absurd.

He knows now that his peace was a punishment, and his punishment a prayer.

And in that knowledge, perhaps, he becomes free — not of violence, but of the illusion that it could ever end.

Peace, finally, is not the end of war.

It is the beginning of understanding what war was for.