Studium Generale Delft, Leon Heuts
My dear friend Ivana Ivković – one of the speakers in the Studium Generale programme War and Rhetoric on April 29 – once told me a harrowing anecdote. The Bosnian capital Sarajevo was under siege by the forces of Radovan Karadžić, who had unilaterally declared the Republika Srpska within Bosnia. It was one of the darkest episodes in the wars that tore Yugoslavia apart – a moral catastrophe in postwar Europe, including the helplessness (or unwillingness) of Europe itself to act. The city was being brutally shelled from all sides; snipers targeted anything that moved.
At the edge of the city stood an abandoned post office, which had become a target for bullets and grenades. On one of its walls, a Serbian nationalist had spray-painted the slogan: “This is Serbia!” Beneath it, a Sarajevan had scrawled in reply: “No, idiot! This is a post office!”
The contrast could not be sharper: a nationalistic cry attempting to redraw borders through violence and ideology, countered by a sober, almost comical correction that lays bare the absurdity of such violent symbolism. In that simple response – “No, idiot! This is a post office!” – you hear a flicker of resistance, or at the very least, a preservation of common sense, of language refusing to play along with the logic of war.
Because hatred, violence, and war begin with language. Slowly, the markers shift. Friends become opponents, then enemies. Migrants are likened to natural disasters (“tsunami,” “flood”), the EU was supposedly created to “screw over” the US, the slur ‘khokhol’ for Ukrainians resurged in Russia before the invasion, and in Gaza we witness how rhetoric and devastating violence walk hand in hand.
Studium Generale is organising a series of events on the theme War and Entropy. We have deliberately chosen the word entropy, because we don’t just want to focus on war itself, but also on everything that precedes it. In physics, entropy describes the degree of disorder in a system: the higher the entropy, the more chaotic and unpredictable the system becomes. In times of war, we witness a kind of societal entropy – meanings shift, structures collapse, noise increases, certainties dissolve.
What in thermodynamics is an irreversible process (“the arrow of time”), gains its own social-political dynamic: conflict accelerates the decay of order, but also of language, values, and trust. Conflicts bring about a mental and moral disintegration. We are witnessing this globally in the erosion of international structures (the United Nations, the international rule of law), which were precisely established to prevent political chaos.
And yet… even in these dark times, is there still a way to find a new kind of order within the disorder – let’s call it common sense – that we can hold on to? How do we resist the growing noise, violence, conflict, and war?
According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy is irreversible. And yet, there are indeed forms of resistance. Life itself – albeit temporarily, as we well know – is already a form of resistance; an organisation of matter that delays inevitable decline. In this programme series, we explore the nature of war, but also such forms of resistance.
In the series War & Rhetoric we examine how language gradually becomes toxic in the run-up to conflict, but also how it can connect and heal. In First-Person War, we look at how technology has changed the battlefield. Drone operators – and we, watching at home via social media – now witness war up close. What does this mean for our experience of war, and is there a way to turn that experience toward something meaningful? During Ethics and Military AI, we ask whether, and how, scientists can take a personal moral stance in relation to war-related research. In the final event, Rob de Wijk, a leading expert on international relations and security, will reflect on the current geopolitical situation, with special attention to the role of a University of Technology.
A special highlight is the so-called Antidebate, led by TU Delft philosopher Madelaine Ley. Precisely in today’s entropic public sphere – where debate has shifted from collective truth-seeking to a spectacle of polarisation, ‘gotcha’ moments, and tribal posturing – the antidebate offers a new form of public exchange. It’s based on deep listening, feeling, and thinking as central values. We are looking for people who want to participate in this experiment! For more information, email L.M.Heuts@TUDelft.nl
‘LANGUAGE AT THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE’
Ivana Ivkovic, Lecture at Studium Generale Delft, WAR AND RHETORIC, April 29, 2025, 17:00 – 19:00, TU Delft Library Central Hall
“It surprizes no one if I say that language can be weaponized. We all know that in times of societal collapse and violent conflict, words that once mediated understanding are used to inflame fear, justify aggression, and divide communities.
But the way in which language operates in times of conflict, or even actively orchestrates conflict, is far from elementary. Today I want to explore this phenomenon through several philosophical lenses – and I will take you on a tour leading to Thomas Hobbes and his warnings about the “war of all against all”, to Hannah Arendt’s insights on how truth and meaning break down, Carl Schmitt’s analysis of the politics of enemies, and Judith Butler’s theory of performative speech. Along the way, we will tie these ideas to modern examples – from populist speech in Trump’s America to propaganda in the Ukraine war, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the collapse of Yugoslavia.
Let’s begin with one of the earliest and starkest views of what human communication looks like when society falls apart: the worldview of Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes: Fear, War, and the Need for Authority in Language
Seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described life without a strong government as a state of relentless conflict – bellum omnium contra omnes, a “war of all against all.” In Leviathan, Hobbes paints a grim picture of what happens when no central authority holds sway: there is “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death,” so that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
In such a condition of universal distrust and fear, meaningful dialogue and cooperation break down. If everyone is an enemy, words are no longer tools for mutual understanding; they become tools for survival. Hobbes portrays a world where no one can trust another’s promises. Even if two individuals speak and make agreements, there’s no reason to believe those words will be kept, because survival instinct dominates. Language becomes an instrument of deceit, and loses its power to reliably communicate.
It goes even further than that: In this state of war of all against all, there is no agreement on the meaning of words. Even when language is not purposefully deceitful, it is ambiguous. This uncertainty breeds misunderstanding, which in turn breeds mistrust and hostility.
Hobbes account echoes the story of the Tower of Babel, in which people are no longer able to cooperate because they do not understand each other’s language. Commonly, we think that people speak different languages and therefore lack mutual understanding. But Hobbes presents an another, unsettling, possibility: people do not understand each other even when they do speak the same language.
There is a perfect illustration of this in an absurdist comedy show made during the collapse of Yugoslavia, called the Surrealist Hitlist. A large part of former Yugoslavia spoke basically the same language, then called Serbo-Croatian. But as Yugoslavia fell apart, everybody got their own official language: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian. The surrealists played a comic scene in which there was a translator form Bosnian to Serbian and Croatian and vice versa. Everybody was saying the exact same sentence over and over. And they still did not understand one another.
Hobbes wrote during the English Civil War – a time of societal breakdown that surely informed his bleak outlook. His response was to argue for an absolute sovereign power to impose order, not just through force but through control of ideology and discourse. Strikingly, Hobbes believed the sovereign’s authority had to extend even over the definitions of words and the framing of narratives – definitions and meanings need to be fixed by political power.. According to Hobbes, a stable peace requires that the ruling power “must control civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers, even the words”. In other words, whoever governs must also govern the language – setting the terms of debate, quelling seditious rhetoric, and establishing the definitions of right and wrong that everyone can agree on. Only by doing so could the sovereign prevent a slide back into anarchic conflict born of miscommunication and inflamed passions.
That’s a tall order, but it tells us that there’s more in the game than just fear mongering and whipping up hatred. In societal collapse, controlling the rhetoric becomes as important as controlling the territory. In 1998, during Milosevic’s rule in Serbia, a media law was adopted that created a special misdemeanor court to prosecute offenses, with the authority to impose heavy fines and confiscate property if the fines were not paid immediately. Human Rights Watch reported that five independent newspaper editors were charged with spreading disinformation because they referred to Albanians killed in Kosovo as “people” rather than “terrorists.”
Notwithstanding Milosevic’s attempts to police language and control the narrative, he eventually lost control and fell during the peaceful uprising in October 2000.
At the same time, not all manipulations of language during conflict seem to follow the Hobbesian playbook of fixing meanings and silencing dissent. Some moves are far stranger: they don’t aim to define truth but to overwhelm it with absurdity. Take, for example, a notorious piece of Serbian propaganda during the siege of Sarajevo, which claimed that Muslim extremists were feeding Serbian children to lions at the Sarajevo zoo. This was not a rational attempt to control the narrative through orderly language.
And today, such top-down media control has become increasingly difficult. In the digital age, language escapes even the tightest state control. Social media platforms, viral misinformation, and decentralized communication networks make it nearly impossible for any one authority to fully dominate the narrative. If absolute control over language is no longer viable, the question becomes: what is the alternative?
This leads us to the darker possibility that Hannah Arendt explored: when truth itself collapses, and society loses its common language of reality, propaganda does not aim to convince — it aims to confuse, to make the distinction between truth and falsehood irrelevant.
Let’s turn to Arendt’s diagnosis of how the collapse of truth and meaning opens the door to violence.
Hannah Arendt: Banality of Evil and the Collapse of Public Discourse
Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish philosopher grappled with how totalitarian regimes use language to enable and conceal horrific violence. Arendt coined the famous phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the startling normality of the language and mindset of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who helped organize the Holocaust. Observing his trial, Arendt noted that Eichmann spoke in clichés and sterile bureaucratic phrases – a jargon that allowed him to commit monstrous acts without feeling monstrous himself. He would use euphemisms like “resettlement” or just follow standard procedures, never frankly naming the murder of millions. This wooden, cliché-ridden language reflected a breakdown of thought. “His addiction to clichés and use of bureaucratic morality clouded his ability to question his actions, ‘to think’,” Arendt writes, and this thoughtlessness made great evil possible. When political language is reduced to empty formulas and propaganda, individuals can perpetrate atrocities by essentially not talking about them honestly to themselves. In Arendt’s chilling words, it was a “word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” – evil so routine it defies our normal use of language to describe or judge it.
Arendt also analyzed how lying and propaganda become normalized in collapsing or extreme societies. In her essay “Lying in Politics” (1972), written in the wake of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, she observed that systematic falsehood by those in power has a cumulative, corrosive effect on the public sphere. Organized lying, she argued, aims not merely to make people believe specific lies, but to make it hard for people to believe anything at all. When leaders and media replace reality with a constant flood of spin, conspiracies, or “alternative facts,” the very distinction between truth and falsehood blurs. The populace becomes cynical and disoriented – skeptical of everything, unable to trust information or engage in rational debate. Arendt noted that a people who cannot tell truth from lies “cannot distinguish between right and wrong” either. In other words, moral judgment collapses along with factual truth. “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth,” she wrote, is not that people believe the lies, but that “the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world…is being destroyed.”
In a society on the brink, this loss of a shared reality is devastating. We have seen worrying echoes of Arendt’s insight in recent times – hence phrases like the “post-truth era”. In polarized democracies, for instance, each side lives in its own media bubble with its own narrative. Consider Trump’s America: President Donald Trump was notorious for his disregard for factual truth and his flood of misleading or false claims. Over time, this contributed to many of his followers believing only his narrative and dismissing all others as “fake news.” By 2020, a large segment of Americans genuinely doubted verified realities (like election results), not necessarily because they had compelling evidence to the contrary, but because the constant rhetorical assault on the very idea of truth had taken its toll. This is Arendt’s nightmare: when public discourse decays so much that argument withers, replaced by blind tribal loyalties and propaganda, society teeters towards conflict. Indeed, the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol could be seen as the culmination of such a process – an eruption of violence fueled by false narratives and a rejection of any common arbiter of truth.
Arendt’s perspective shows us how language reflects the health of the public realm. In peaceful, stable times, we rely on a baseline of shared facts and good-faith dialogue – what Arendt called the space of appearances, where citizens meet as equals to discuss reality. But under the strain of crisis or authoritarianism, that space can be poisoned. Words are used not to clarify but to obfuscate; public speech becomes a theater of propaganda. Truth itself becomes a casualty of conflict. Once that happens, violence often rushes in to fill the void left by reason.
If Hobbes stressed the need for authority to shape language from the top down, Arendt shows the dark side of that coin – authority manufacturing a false reality to serve its aims, and thereby shattering the common world that language is supposed to build.
Now, let’s turn to Carl Schmitt, who offers a very different angle – one that takes conflict itself as the essence of the political, and thereby sheds light on why in crises we often see the world reduced to an stark us-versus-them rhetoric.
Carl Schmitt: The Friend–Enemy Distinction as Political Language
Carl Schmitt, a German legal theorist writing in the early 20th century (and controversially affiliated with the Nazi regime for a time), argued that at its core “the political” is defined by the distinction between friend and enemy. In his 1932 work The Concept of the Political, Schmitt famously asserted that all politics comes down to identifying an enemy and rallying around opposition to that enemy. Normal legalities and moral norms become secondary when a group faces an existential threat. Who is a friend and who is an enemy? – Schmitt thought that question overrides all others in times of intense conflict or crisis. He wrote that the enemy need not be morally evil or personally hateful; the enemy is simply whoever is “existentially something different and alien” such that extreme conflict with them is possible. In a Schmittian lens, politics is not a debate in parliament – it’s a life-and-death struggle where each side portrays the other as a dangerous “other” that must be defeated.
A very early example of this kind of rhetoric can be found in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, in the famous Corinthian speech. When the Corinthians try to persuade the Spartans to wage war against Athens, they depict the Athenians as fundamentally different and existentially threatening: restless, aggressive, scheming, and incapable of living peacefully with others. This portrayal goes beyond criticizing specific actions; it constructs an image of an adversary whose very nature is incompatible with coexistence. In doing so, the Corinthians turn political rivalry into existential enmity – exactly the move that, centuries later, Schmitt would theorize..
This worldview helps explain the rhetorical transformation in conflicts: language becomes very black-and-white. There is no room for gray when you are either friend or foe. During wars or civil strife, we often see this Schmittian logic take hold. Leaders and media start defining everything in binaries: patriots vs. traitors, believers vs. infidels, allies vs. axis of evil. For example, in the Cold War and the War on Terror, American presidents often lapsed into stark Schmittian terms. George W. Bush, after 9/11, declared “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” leaving no space for neutrality. Donald Trump repeatedly labeled the press as “enemies of the people”, echoing an ominous historical trope. In doing so, he was casting journalists – traditionally a check on power – as a hostile other in the eyes of his supporters. This friend-enemy language simplifies the world and justifies extraordinary measures: if the media are an “enemy,” then perhaps jailing reporters or ignoring them could seem justified.
In modern conflicts, the friend/enemy dichotomy is visibly at work. Look at Russian state rhetoric about Ukraine, (which Tony van der Togt will address at length): it constantly emphasizes that Russia’s friends (loyal citizens, “liberated” Ukrainians in occupied areas) must band together against Russia’s enemies (Ukrainian “Nazis,” Western conspirators). By framing it as Russia versus a neo-Nazi existential threat, Putin’s regime activates historic Russian fears (the Great Patriotic War against Hitler) and leaves little room for dissent – anyone opposing the war can be smeared as siding with the enemy.
Lastly, I want to bring in Judith Butler, whose work on performativity and language offers a more philosophical (but very relevant) take on how words themselves “do things” in times of conflict – sometimes with deadly effect.
Judith Butler: Performativity and the Power of Language to Shape Reality
Judith Butler, an American philosopher, is best known for her work on gender and performativity – the idea that identities are continuously produced and reinforced by repeated speech acts and behaviors. But her insights into language go beyond gender. Butler has argued that language is not just a passive vehicle for ideas, but a form of action in itself. In her book Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), she examines how utterances (like insults, slurs, or slogans) can performatively enact social realities – they can wound, injure, they can shame, they can inaugurate a change in status.
In times of societal unrest or conflict, Butler’s perspective encourages us to see that speaking is a form of doing. Rhetoric doesn’t just reflect a pre-existing conflict; it actively shapes the conflict. For example, when a leader repeatedly calls a minority group “terrorists” or “vermin,” that speech act is performatively putting those people into the category of enemy, potentially giving a green light to treat them as such. Butler would note that such labels have real force – they “constitute” the social identity of the targeted group in the public imagination. Over time, those words can make violence seem acceptable or even necessary, as the group has been verbally transformed into a threat or a non-human entity.
One of Butler’s concerns is how certain populations are made “unreal” or “ungrievable” through language. In her book Frames of War (2009), she discusses how media and political discourse frame some lives as valuable and others as not. For instance, during a war, the deaths of the enemy are often talked about in impersonal statistics or demonizing terms, while deaths on one’s own side are memorialized with names and stories. This rhetorical framing has moral consequences: if we never hear the humanizing stories of those on the other side, we begin not to acknowledge their suffering at all. They become life that does not matter – not grievable if lost.
We saw this tragically in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Hutu extremists controlling radio broadcasts described Tutsis not just as military foes but as subhuman “cockroaches” and existential enemies of the Hutu people. By the time the violence started, this language had primed tens of thousands of ordinary Hutus to see their Tutsi neighbors no longer as neighbors at all, but as evil creatures to be exterminated. As The Atlantic recounted, “What began with dehumanizing words ended in bloodshed”. Once the enemy has been rhetorically cast outside the realm of humanity and morality, anything goes.
A recent and widely cited example of dehumanizing war rhetoric dates from 2023, when Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” This remark was made during the early stages of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. While some have argued that the term “human animals” referred specifically to Hamas militants, the broader context suggests that the language was applied to the entire population of Gaza. The result of such language, in line with Butler’s argument, is a widening empathy gap, making escalation more likely because empathy – normally restraining violence – has been stripped away by words.
Butler would likely emphasize that these utterances gain force through repetition and circulation. So, this is not a type of language that communicates some meaning and aims to convince the audience. Think of it rather as water that carves its way through the rock, a gradual erosion of the barriers of shame and shock.
However, Butler also points out that performative language can just as well be claimed by oppressed groups, who reclaim slurs or change the narrative through their own speech. For example, consider how Ukrainian people and leaders have used language as a tool of resistance in the face of invasion. President Zelensky’s speeches, spread on social media, turned him into a symbol of defiance – he famously said “I need ammunition, not a ride,” framing the Ukrainian stance in words that galvanized international support. This is an example of how courageous rhetoric can transform a conflict as well, by inspiring unity and resolve. Likewise, protest movements around the world (which Butler has written about, like Occupy or Black Lives Matter) use slogans and chants to bring new realities into being – like asserting the value of Black lives against a culture of devaluation. So performativity cuts both ways: it can entrench hate, or it can solidify resistance and solidarity.
In short, Butler teaches us that language has a world-making power. In societal breakdowns, some will use words to make a world of ‘us vs. them’, ‘kill or be killed’, while others might attempt to use words to hold onto a world of common humanity. Butler reminds us that every slogan or slur is doing something – building a reality – and that we, as participants in language, have the agency to contest those realities.
Words can lead to violence and war, yes, but can words lead out of it? The way out of the darkness begins with reclaiming language – naming the truth, rejecting dehumanization. The question is: how can we strengthen the kind of speech that can withstand crisis, so that our public discourse – that fragile bond between us – does not collapse, but remains a path that leads back to understanding.”
