Peitarchy, relativism and violence
09
Jun
More than 100 years after Sorel wrote Réflexions sur la violence (Paris, 1908)
and 50 years after Giorgio Agamben’s text On the Limits of Violence (Nuovi Argomenti, n. 17, 1970) this discussion seems to be the order of the day, the latest events and the vision of a polis now without tolerance and diplomacy has taken hold of warlike minds.
Agamben, recalling Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, wrote: “To be political, to live in the polis, meant first of all to accept the principle that everything should be decided by word and persuasion, and not by force and violence” (Agamben, 1970, pp. 154-174) and used the concept of Peitarchy, a particular understanding of its relationship to politics and truth, that is, the belief that truth itself had the power to persuade.
In order to justify powers and make authoritarian governments legitimate, the sophists used rhetoric as an art and technique to distort the truth, and Plato had watched helplessly as his master Socrates was condemned to death.
To Socrates’ question about what knowledge is, Theaetetetus sees it as Geometry and other arts, and Socrates replies ironically: “It is noble and generous, for they ask for something simple and you offer multiple and diverse things”.
Socrates’ first demand is that Theaetetus abandon his initial ideas, which appear in conjunction with the ideas of appearance, truth and soul, and the second is to abandon the idea of “familiarity” that we have things, and we must abandon it because: “It seems to me that he who knows something perceives what he knows, and to say the thing as it now manifests itself, knowledge is nothing more than sensation.”
That’s why Sorel, Agamben and Hannah Arendt can be taken up again today. Arguments about war are nothing more than justifications for violence, when violence itself is already a break with the truth, as the popular saying goes: “the first thing that dies in war is the truth”.
The response to Operation Spider’s Web, which Russia carried out by attacking civilian targets without discrimination (in photo, a residential area), targets that on a large scale were also a response to the terrorism of the Hamas group, and the news this weekend that Miguel Uribe, a pre-candidate for the presidency of Colombia, has been heavily attacked and is in a very serious condition, is nothing more than the limits being crossed.
Both in Europe and the Middle East, the escalation of war is already a reality. In America, politics is beginning to break the limits of dialog and persuasion, and it’s a step towards the worst.
There is no shortage of hope and calls for peace, but they are being suffocated by weapons.
Plato. 2010. Teeteto (Theaetetus). Translated by Adriana Manuela Nogueira and Marcelo Boeri. Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2010.
