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From violence to terror: beyond instrumental violence in Hannah Arendt´s
(Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Mazowieckiej w Płocku (Polonia), 2017) Varela-Manograsso, Agustina; Filosofía
Hannah Arendt, victim and witness of totalitarian violence, confronted the glorification of violence with her philosophical and political theory. However, she was not a pacif ist, because she was aware that “under certain circumstances violence is the only way to set the scales of justice right again” [Arendt, 1970, p. 64]. This ambivalence reveals the boundless character of violence in any attempt to conceptualize it. When she defines violence, she does it in instrumental terms in two complementary ways: violence requires instruments, and it is instrumental in itself . Meansend rationality crosses the phenomenon of violence, and this is why the question about decency of means appears to be essential. However, Arendt knew that the own dynamic of violence tends to go beyond its own limits in which it would remain enclosed. This paper aims to recover those tools provided by her work to analyze the overwhelming and generative character of violence which, abandoned to its own logic, loses the distinction between means and aims. This is a type of violence that it is not a means, but an end in itself, and, in Arendtian terms, is no more instrumental violence because it turns into “total terror”: an indiscriminate violence which becomes its own purpose.