Will to Language, Culture, and Power. Dániel Berzsenyi and his Martial Poetry

In his article “Will to Language, Culture, and Power” Gábor Vaderna investigates different discourses of violence in early 19^th-century Hungary. According to Norbert Elias, violence has not disappeared from modern society but the individual has transferred the institution, opportunity, and protocols of violence to the state. There are also aesthetic consequences of this process. The question is whether institutionalized violence was a tool of power to stabilize modern societies or rather it was in fact a threat to aesthetic beauty. From the analysis of a poem by the Hungarian poet, Dániel Berzsenyi (1776–1832), written in wartime, Vaderna concludes that the Central European noble classes perceived a tension between the eternal virtue and real history. The exercise of power, the possession of violence and the nation-building potential of culture were closely intertwined in their political language.