The Reflective Dialectic of Speech and Violence in Thucydides
This study traces textual elements into Thucydides’ Histories, elements that lead to the emergence of another problematic concerning the reading of becoming that his work recounts. More explicitly: this study focuses on the becoming when this last bypasses or even avoids, its reduction to the universal, to the representation, in the context of pseudo-dialectic of the universal and the concrete; it is about the becoming-war, the becoming-war whose prominent references are speech and violence that allows, indeed, the potentiality to be read in a radically different way, and, consequently, to be restored as a continuum of becoming as a becoming-continuum. This reading is attempted into the context of another, entirely new, dialectic that stands far from the pseudo-dialectic of the universal and the concrete and its different forms (Platonic, Hegelian, Marxist{ic}): it is attempted into the context of a reflective dialectic that, in Histories, takes the form of the reflective dialectic of speech and violence; of the reflective dialectic not of the representations but of the crystallizations of speech and violence; the fact, though, of the revealing of this dialectic, allows, in its turn, the restoration of materiality, gravity, depth and corporeality of the perception of becoming by the subject.
This restoration, that is succeeded through the reflective dialectic of speech and violence, seems offering the historical reality, and so, the historical potentiality to the subject of denying the reduction of perceiving the world in the superficiality and lightness of the universal / the representation as well as of denying his subduction to the universal that – as it also derives from Histories – annuls in various ways, textually, axiologically, cognitively and ontically the subject-concrete. Still, exactly because of those two reasons mentioned above, the reflective dialectic of speech and violence has the power (dynamis), and thus the potentiality (dynasthai), of being a paradigmatic scheme of achieving the social and political praxis of the subject as directand spontaneous, in the social and political becoming-war, either smartly concealed or roughly revealed war.
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