THE RHETORIC OF EXCLUSION: WORD, VICTIM, AND PUBLIC VIOLENCE – FROM ANCIENT BANISHMENT TO DIGITAL EXECUTION

Abstract

This article presents a philosophical analysis of the rhetoric of exclusion as a specific form of public violence that operates primarily through speech acts and does not require institutional legitimation, formal recognition, or ritual procedure. The study proceeds from the central premise that public violence emerges within the domain of language, which gradually loses its dialogical nature, ceases to function as a medium of communication, and becomes an instrument for assigning guilt, designating the “superfluous”, and delivering a verdict without the possibility of appeal. In such a configuration, the subject remains visible and present within the public sphere, yet is entirely deprived of the capacity to respond, thereby transforming ordinary aggression into symbolic, public, and irreversible violence.

The theoretical framework combines several key concepts: J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, P. Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, M. Foucault’s analysis of discursive power and normalization, and R. Girard’s theory of the sacrificial mechanism and scapegoating. On this basis, the article traces the historical transformation of practices of exclusion – from ancient institutionalized forms (ostracism, the ritual of the pharmakos, the trial and execution of Socrates), in which violence was structured by procedure, collective responsibility, and symbolic closure, to contemporary decentralized rhetorical regimes operating within digital public space. Particular attention is paid to how, in the digital era, violence loses the character of a discrete event with a defined subject, beginning, and end, while retaining high effectiveness through distributed responsibility, collective silence, strategies of non-involvement, and the mechanisms of cancel culture, which operate through repetition, archiving, and the continuous reactivation of the past.

The central methodological principle of the study is politropicity, drawn from the Homeric tradition and interpreted through the figure of Odysseus. Politropicity refers not to cleverness or deceit, but rather to the ability to navigate complex situations where speaking plainly can be risky and language serves as a tool for control and manipulation. It constitutes a strategy for preserving meaning, subjectivity, and the possibility of return under conditions in which speech ceases to be dialogical and becomes a unilateral act of designation. The figure of Odysseus thus functions not merely as a literary image, but as a principle of thought and resistance, enabling passage through zones of exclusion without accepting their rules as final.

The conclusion argues that the philosophical analysis of the rhetoric of exclusion does not offer moral prescriptions or protective strategies but performs a crucial function of resistance: the restoration of distinctions between speech and verdict, aggression and violence, silence and neutrality, presence, and inclusion. It is precisely the capacity to distinguish and to name the mechanisms of public violence that renders them visible, prevents their naturalization as a “natural” order of things, and opens a space for critical reflection in conditions where publicity increasingly functions as an instrument of selection and exclusion without acknowledging its own destructive force.