ΣΧΕΣΗ ΒΙΑΣ ΕΞΟΥΣΙΑΣ : ΑΝΑΛΥΣΗ ΤΩΝ ΘΕΣΕΩΝ ΤΗΣ XANA ΑΡΕΝΤ ΣΤΟ ΒΙΒΛΙΟ ΤΗΣ ΠΕΡΙ ΒΙΑΣ ΚΑΙ ΚΡΙΤΙΚΗ ΤΩΝ ΤΡΟΠΩΝ ΘΕΩΡΗΣΗΣ
Date Issued
November 15, 2022
Type
Μεταπτυχιακή Διπλωματική Εργασία
Abstract
Hannah Arendt was one of the leading political theorists of the twentieth century who grappled with the role of violence in public life. Yet remarkably, despite being perhaps the most pressing issue of its time, this topic has rarely been explored. In On Violence she deepens our understanding of Arendt's conception of the role of violence by offering a critical reading of her work and using it as a challenge to think about how we might engage with contemporary ideas.
Arendt is generally thought to exclude acts of violence from the "political", based on her supposed idealization of ancient democratic politics. Ashcroft argues that Arendt has been widely misunderstood by both critics and proponents in this regard. Examining Arendt's thinking on violence in key examples of political practice such as contemporary Jewish politics and the French and American revolutions, it is argued that what Arendt opposes to political violence is the use of violence to determine politics, an idea central to modern sovereignty. What Arendt criticizes is not violence per se, but the misuse of violence and misinterpretations of what politics is.
Arendt argued that violence is not part of politics because it is instrumental. Her position has spawned a vast body of scholarship, most of which falls within the realism-liberal divide. Taking these discussions as a point of departure, this essay addresses violence in Arendt's work from a different perspective. Her interest lies not in Arendt's theory of violence in the world, but in the function that violence performed in her work, that is, in the constitutive role of violence in her thought. She argues that the concept of violence allowed Arendt to make important distinctions that serve to catalyze the categories that make up her political philosophy and, in particular, the categories of public and private. More specifically, she argues that the concept of violence in Arendt's work is the a priori background against which both the public and private spheres should be defined. In this thesis, the main positions of Arendt's book, On Violence, will be examined, as well as brief analyzes of Arendt's theorems and the corresponding paradoxes.
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