Radical Violence and Radical Hope: Toward a New Political Community under Permanent Exception

In investigating how radical violence destroys the moral, the relational, and the imaginative capacities necessary for a political life, one can find in Arendt, Strong and Matuštík the argument that the violence of today effectively operates not so much through direct harm as through the destruction of the conditions of meaningfulness, judgment, and coexistence. When that is eroded, as is the case with radical diversity and the collapse of shared horizons, there is no longer hope. One is left either with a dissolution into nihilism or with authoritarianism. It argues that customary legal and institutional responses are inadequate because they are based on a world that radical violence has already ruptured. An alternative is proposed via radical hope, an ethical and civic orientation based on openness, responsibility and the ability to envisage a future that lacks the sorts of metaphysical guarantees that anchored radical political projects in the past. It argues that the only way to renew political community in the face of fragility and difference is through radical hope.