Just revolutionary violence: on the possibility of novelty in political life

Abstract

This thesis addresses two interrelated issues. The first is how we come to think and enact the possibility of overturning the political order in which we find ourselves. This is of particular issue when we consider that our situations always over-determine our possibilities for thinking and acting. The second issue involves the question of how revolutionary violence can be said to be just, or in other words how the act of violence can avoid reinscribing a state of affairs only superficially different from the violent one it sought to overturn. I address these issues using the works of Frantz Fanon and Alain Badiou, two figures in the existential-phenomenological tradition. Fanon’s phenomenological account of oppression gives us a concrete context for thinking the conditions of revolutionary action as presented by Badiou’s ontology. I argue that Badiou’s ontology can account for the lived experience of political oppression as well as the possibility revolutionary violence, despite its “Platonic” idealism.