This article addresses the ambivalent role of violence in liberation struggles by staging a mutually enriching dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon. It challenges the binary distinction between justifiable resistance that allows for only short-term, instrumental use of violence, and unwarranted resistance where violence is intrinsically justified as a creative, organic life-force of the oppressed. Instead, it discusses the constitutive role of violence as a condition of possibility of politics – highlighting the impossibility of separating the bloody moments of (...) revolution from the constitution of the political community as a space of public freedom. The reconstructed debate on the relation between violence and freedom presents a fresh perspective on the justifiability and costs of violent resistance in circumstances of radical inequality and the extent to which liberation may remain an ongoing project to sustain the fragile achievement of freedom. (shrink)

Este ensaio expõe parte de uma pesquisa sobre a relação entre natureza e política,com ênfase nos processos de naturalização da vida humana na filosofia políticacontemporânea. O totalitarismo e o domínio total em Hannah Arendt é o aspecto dapesquisa sobre o qual iremos nos deter neste texto. Partiremos do totalitarismo como categorianarracional. Apresentaremos a novidade da forma totalitária de governar; sua base napassagem da questão judaica ao mal radical; as alterações, relacionadas ao tema do poder,serão expostas a partir dos elementos tipificadores (...) do totalitarismo segundo Arendt:massificação, propaganda, movimento-organização, solidão e campos de concentração. (shrink)

This article investigates a significant problem in contemporary critical theory, namely its failure to address effectively the possibility that a campaign of political violence may be a legitimate means of fighting grave injustice. Having offered a working definition of ‘political violence’, I argue that critical theory should be focused on experiences of injustice rather than on ideals of justice. I then explore the reasons as to why, save for some intriguing remarks on retrospective legitimation, Jürgen Habermas has not addressed this (...) issue directly. While Axel Honneth's recognition theory may have greater potential here, the absence of explicit consideration of the matter by him leaves considerable work to do. I introduce five questions in the concluding section that provide a starting point in setting out an appropriately stringent, normative test for claims that support violent action against injustice. (shrink)