Abstract

In order to test the relationship between language and aggression, it may be useful to travel between the folds of a typically human phenomenon, with wide historical-geographical spread, still well present in the world and in Italy: torture. One of the essay’s central theses consists in the idea that the relationship between torture violence and verbal symbolic practices is particularly profound. It is an anthropological practice that does not merely express human cruelty since, at least in the West, it has taken on a precise epistemic and political function. In order to understand the issue, it will be necessary to rewind the tape: to start from ancient Greece and focus attention on a specific aspect of the problem. The essay will focus on the archaeological reconstruction of cultural practices related to the semantics of the Greek verb «basanizo».