The violent nature of language: Language is a tool exactly like a knife

Abstract

The concept of violence can be usefully enriched taking advantage of Thom’s theory of morphogenesis, based on the catastrophe theory. The reader has to be patient, the concepts of catastrophe theory are difficult but I think they are rewarding, because they permit us to grasp the naturalness of violence as an ordinary semiophysical process. Furthermore, in the framework of catastrophe theory it is easy to understand the constitutive violent nature of language, as we already stressed in the previous chapter taking advantage of a merely philosophical perspective. Nevertheless, should the reader find this theory excessively complicated or fatiguing, she could pass over its detailed explanation and get acquainted with it from the subsequent references and, maybe, eventually come back to the more complete description I am about to undertake.