Vesper No. 9 | The Adversary | Fall-Winter 2023
Jacopo Cantalini, Federico Della Sala
The Shield and the Bandit. City, Conflict and
Escape Routes between Loraux and Lorenzetti
Keywords
Stasis, antagonism, city, civil war, defection
The contribution aims to offer an essay based
on the renowned book by French historian Nicole Loraux, La Cité divisée.
L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes, published for the first time
in 1997. Now a classic textbook for those seeking to deepen the understanding
of the complex phenomenon of the city, Loraux’s inquiries focus on how
the Classical Athens of the Fifth century BC made use of public discourse and
representation as a mean to suppress a particular and fundamental institution
of the polis: stasis, that could be roughly translated as
‘civil war’. Loraux reflections on the cradle of democracy in the
moment of its making can help us think civil war and antagonism as deeply
rooted mechanisms in contemporary urban and political experience, thus
revealing decisive and urgent trajectories, unprecedented crossroads and escape
routes to think, envision and act conflict politically otherwise than the
metropolis.
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