Between “Lack of Power” and “Freedom”: On the Political History of the Concept of Acrateia (oorpaTeia)

The article deals with the Greek concept of acrateia (йкратЕш) and the political history of its usage from Antiquity till the 21st-century philosophy. We insist that there is a relation between the connotations of this concept prevailing in texts and those political and cultural contexts that served as their conceptual landscapes - especially the political discourses of power. We focus on the specific political consequences of the procedure, which produces and fixes connotations of concepts, and try to problematize power discourses optics within the theoretical framework of our research based on the historical analysis of the political history of using acrateia as a concept and on the hermeneutic analysis of the philosophical texts in which this concept was defined and implemented. Within the given perspective, related concepts and historical contexts of their usage are compared; the methodological and conceptual potential of the concept “acratic optics” is established as a possible synonym for the concept “anarchist optics” to allow the productive and detailing elaboration of its meaning by emphasizing its philosophical foundations. Relying on the Greek texts by Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and others, we have made an effort to review the range of conventional meanings of various morphological forms of the concept “acrateia” (especially negative ones) to show the possibility of their implicit potential redefining in terms of the positive sense of “freedom”, without “reducing” these meanings to the “lack of power” or “incontinence” only, which discredited, caricaturized and destructed the possible positive meanings of acrateia as “freedom”, “independence”, or “absence of power” like in the related barbaric word “acratia” (акрат(а). Thus, two acratic modalities in official political and philosophical discourses are discovered and analyzed in the article. One of them is the negative meaning “incontinence” or “lack of power” in terms of the power discourse: in its framework, the multi-stage modalization of the concept’s meaning established only the negative potential of this word. The other one, which we try to reconstruct using the hermeneutic analysis of the Ancient Greek sources, is neutral or positive one. We introduce the procedure of a “step-by-step definition” for political designation of concepts, which shows that the positive sense of this word is possible, and even mention the example of its usage in the neutral sense by Aristotle in Meteorology to prove that its neutral meaning was also fixed in ancient times. We hope the article could contribute to shedding the light on the non-obvious or intentionally hidden senses of the word “acrateia” as well as of its paronymic terms “acratic”, “acratia”, “acrates”, etc. As a result of the present study, we redefine the “redefined” term and try to return to the investigated concept its initial meanings, especially those acquired “apophatically” during the long political history of its existence.

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