Abstract

Political philosophy ought to go beyond the schmittian legacy and the lexicon of the State. By way of exploiting some intuitions of Arendt and Foucault, the essay acknowlegdes the inadequacy of the concept of 'order' and, above all, of 'war', inclusive of the category of the 'enemy' and focused on the 'ontology of the warrior'. The author emphasizes the fact that the horrorist forms of contemporary violence are in need of a new nomenclature, able to mobilize political philosophy - and what is left of its imaginative ability - on the figure of the defenceless victim. It is indispensable to interrupt the semantic continuity of the modern political frames of intelligibility, examining the epoch from the perspective of a "history of destruction".