Linguistic violence

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Is offensive language some casual and unsystematic phenomenon, or is it regular and pervasive? Does impolite language draw its illocutionary force from conven- tional patterns and norms of social behavior or from irregularities and idiosyncra- sies in language use? How is identity constructed, sustained, debased, and threat- ened in impolite interactions? What role does language about offensive language, or impoliteness metadiscourse, play in offense itself? These questions are some of the fundamental issues on offensive linguistic behavior that Jonathan Culpeper (2011) addresses in Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence.

In Setswana culture, as in most African cultures, proverbs are used to transmit elements of wisdom and popular knowledge as well as social values across generations. In general, many of these proverbs portray women in an unflattering position, as inferior to men and often reflect a real linguistic violence because of the negative axiological values they convey. In our present paper we try to show how proverbs, can influence the semantic and conceptual representations of the notion of woman in Batswana young ladies.

This paper deals with the linguistic discrimination about andalusian speakers. It is a discussion about the need to incorporate the decolonial shift in linguistics. There is a logic of ontological hierarchisation from a metalinguistic hubris of the zero point. Our paper defends the need to eliminate all forms of domination and to finalize with the linguistic and social discrimination that quite speakers suffer.

"Durch Klemperers Fokus auf das Schriftbild und seinen Träger wird der Forschungsgegenstand auf seine Materialität reduziert und unter dem Blick durch die Lupe bis zur Unkenntlichkeit vergrößert. Gerade Klemperer, der mit philologischen Mitteln aufzuklären versteht, der den Ernst der politischen Lage nicht nur begreift, sondern am eigenen Leib akut erfährt, lenkt hier den Fokus auf die Grenzen des Verstehens: Er macht ein materielles Gewebe sichtbar, das vom tödlich gewordenen semantischen Gewebe ablenkt, er lässt die philologische Kontextualisierung des Zeichens in eine Dekontextualisierung übergehen, bis nur noch Fasern und Farben, 'die Einzelparzellen des gelben Gewebes, die Ungleichheiten des schwarzen Aufdrucks' übrig sind.
Im Zentrum seines Interesses steht die Tatsache, dass etwas am Zwangszeichen sich heteronom zu jenem Zwang verhält, den es bewirkt. Klemperer scheut die Nähe zu seinem Gegenstand nicht, er sucht sie geradezu exzessiv, wodurch sich allerdings das Verhältnis von Nähe und Distanz destabilisiert: Durch die Lupe des Philologen betrachtet, rückt der Stern so fern, als würde er, wie bei wirklichen Gestirnen üblich, mit dem Fernrohr studiert. Der verfremdende, Entfernung erzeugende Blick durch die Lupe lässt sich als sprachphilosophisches und machttheoretisches Interesse begreifen, das sich auf das Morsche, jeglicher Letztbegründung entbehrende Moment der sprachlichen Gewalt richtet."

Language is considered as a person's identity, both national and individual, thereby making him/her a part of a whole. Being parts of a whole, everybody feels himself/herself as an ontological entity within a specific community. This, on the basis, makes him/her feel a sense of self-respect and value, which are the principal attributions – though not the only ones – that make people feel as real individuals. Religion, on the other hand, is another sacred area, which should be closed to any debate in terms of its universality or reliability, for such a discussion will probably turn out to be nothing but a verbiage due to diversities in belief systems and religions. In parallel with language, religion, too, is a sign of existence for a person. Apart from that, language and religion share the biggest portion in shaping a nation's culture, which, for sure, is directly related to one's sense of identity and belonging. Nevertheless, these two crucially important facts have been demolished or distorted through colonization processes by the colonial and imperialist powers, which, in turn, have tarnished the very attributions that add to people's individuality. Moreover, while the language and religion problems help the colonizers unstrengthen the colonized more and more, these issues are also abused by the colonizers in order to alienate and assimilate the colonized. This article, hence, aims to demonstrate the colonizers' attitudes against the colonized people's language and religion, correspondingly against their identity and culture, as well as the results of these modes of colonization.

My proposal deals with linguistic aggressions to Andalusian speakers in Social Media. Such linguistic aggressions are produced by social network users. Andalusian speakers are inferiorized, based on their own symbolic capitals, from a logic of ontological inferiorization by group members with social and linguistic privilege and power. The communication presents part of an ongoing qualitative research. My dissertation is based on Twitter tweets, Facebook posts and online newspapers’ reader comments. Andalusian speakers are decapitalised there because they (we) do not speak the legitimated language. Andalusian linguistic variety is relegated to a wrong language, something incorrect. It implicate that Andalusian people possess illegitimated linguistic capitals by Bourdieusian linguistic market on power relations between speakers or their respective groups. In our analysis, we exam the problem from decolonial thought. We conclude that there is a logic of inferiorization and it is a form of the intersecting oppressions.