This thesis concludes that Gabriel Marcel’s notion of the spirit of abstraction provides us with important insights regarding how and why the Republican army was able to repress the community of...Show moreThis thesis concludes that Gabriel Marcel’s notion of the spirit of abstraction provides us with important insights regarding how and why the Republican army was able to repress the community of Canudos as viciously as it did. As put by Blundell, “The process of abstraction, which Marcel also refers to as primary reflection, “is, roughly speaking, purely analytical and (…) consists, as it were, in dissolving the concrete into its elements.””(p. 59). Once one of those elements is accorded, “isolated from all other categories, an arbitrary primacy, we are victims of the spirit of abstraction.” (Marcel, p. 155-156). By connecting his battle against the spirit of abstraction with issues such as fanaticism, the role of (communication) technology and the press, violence and war, religion and historiography, Marcel provides us with a unique perspective to use when analysing conflicts such as the Canudos War. Especially his emphasis on the role of language in the process of justifying war turned out to be particularly useful. As put by Johnson, “Naming, says De Certeau, is not “the ‘painting’ of a reality any more than it is elsewhere; it is a performative act organizing what it enunciates. It does what it says and constitutes the savagery it declares. (…) To understand subalternity thus is to side with the argument that it is a discursive effect.” (p. 30). Words, so it seems, are the primary vehicle through which the spirit of abstraction manifests itself.Show less
