try to establish, or to tentatively draw some type of criteria of, when and how violence ... Relating violence and harm brackets the assessment of their reasons, .... perspectives, especially the victims' perspective, have in our understanding of .... violence is merely instrumental, it does not by itself have any sort of privilege that.
Harm and violence: Does the notion of harm help us to define violence and non-violence? Carlos Thiebaut. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain I. When we think of violence, it seems we are trapped between its being an inevitable form of action, response, or behavior, which seems almost “natural,” and the doubts and criticisms it raises when considering even its instrumental nature. When assessing violent means for some sort of justifiable end or circumstance, we try to establish, or to tentatively draw some type of criteria of, when and how violence should, or should not, be used. In the very issue of violence, we seem trapped between nature (albeit human nature) and morals, between ends and means, a centuries-‐old conflict that does not easily square sometimes with our post-‐Kantian, post-‐Enlightenment normative theories that question the
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independence of means in relation to ends This is because violence seems to be such a powerful instrument that it seems to acquire full independence by itself and thus it sometimes acquires the character of a full type of action all by itself. Richard Bernstein’s illuminating Violence. Thinking without Banisters has placed this conflict under the clear light shed by five thinkers from the 20th century. I am particularly interested in his understanding of the persistent and protean quality of violence, his reflections on the justification and limits of violence, and especially, the doubts that may assail us in different circumstances and cases regarding the dichotomy of violence and non-‐violence in political action. I will also try to explore these questions, not in descriptive or genealogical or etiological terms, but in normative terms, and suggest that if we think of violence –not only, but paramountly of political or public violence—from the perspective of a tentative theory of harm such as I will be sketching, we can gain some insight regarding that almost unsolvable conflict between violence and non-‐
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violence. What may be interesting about thinking of violence from the perspective of a theory of harm (or from the perspective of harm generally) is that its obvious instrumental character, which Bernstein so Arendtianly analyses, fades to the background and leaves its factual character naked in the fore. By factual character, I mean what violence does, how it does it, why it does it, with what effects, and to whom. Relating violence and harm brackets the assessment of their reasons, motivations and justifications such as could be assessed from both the perspective of the agent of violence and a detached third-‐party spectator, and brings to the fore its nude reality as a way of a human interaction that hurts and inflicts a certain kind of negativity upon persons. The perspective of harm, vis-‐à-‐vis the perspective of justification, makes us perceive these interactions from the perspective of the sufferer or the victim. Certainly, from a general and objective description, violence is an action or attitude that pushes a point in a discussion, establishes a state of affairs or defines an interaction; normally, violence is a substitute for agreement or even tolerant disagreement, and so on. But, above all, I would contend, it creates a bond of negativity between the sufferer and she who inflicts it. And it is this bond of negativity that can be subject to modal and moral scrutiny. If “ϕ should never happen again (it was not necessary for it to happen, etc.)” is a tenable proposition, and if ϕ is a violent action, behavior or institution, its sheer facticity deploys its negative, harmful nature and calls for subsequent actions (judgment, refusal and so on). Regardless of its instrumental nature, or of the possible justifications it may call for, if a violent action would per se be subject to these judgments, we would have reasons to draw it out from the mere sphere of what is contestably justifiable or unjustified and place it in the realm of practical reason, to what must not happen again. II. Let me first try to sketch what I understand as a normative frame for a theory of harm and, in doing so, I will be returning to the relationship between harm and violence. In the last part of my paper, I will then be using the case of terrorism in Spain to assess this connection between a theory of harm, as I will be sketching it, and violence in more specific terms.
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When we name an action, behavior or institution as harmful, we are making an exercise in judgment. We place their negative forces and effects –such as hurting, despising, or whatever-‐-‐ in a set of peculiar modal spaces. Our judgment of something as harmful first takes it out of the realm of what is necessary and places it in the realm of what need not have happened, of what could not have happened; it could have been otherwise. As Shklar put it, focusing directly on the issue of justice, we turn inevitable misfortunes into reparable injustices. That something can be otherwise breaks the naturalness and taken-‐for-‐grantedness of that negativity –slavery, for example, or war and domination—that, to a certain moment in time, had been taken to explain and even justify how things stood. But this first modal shift into the realm of possibility, of alternative possibilities, still does not fully capture the meaning of harm. To underscore the refusal or resistance to that very negativity, our judgments about harm significantly introduce a second modal displacement of what is considered harm into the realm of a new kind of necessity, into the realm of practical necessity. When we claim “Never again!”, we are condensing a more complex judgement in these words and, significantly, an attached commitment: that through our actions, never again, to no one, in no place, are these types of actions to happen again. Judgments of harm thus incorporate a double modal shift and move us from the realm of seeing something negative as not necessary and avoidable to the modal realm of action and practice (hence the term “practical necessity”). With the first modal shift, we articulate perception and attentiveness; with the second, action and concern. I would contend that, amongst failures and contingencies, when we judge something as harmful, and in spite of other meanings we are implying both the counterfactual and the normative claims, “normative” meaning, in this context, a commitment that expresses concern and a call to action. A longer story could be told about these different meanings, for example in legal discourses, and how, nevertheless, ordinary language retains this paramount moral significance.
These modal shifts do not take place in a vacuum nor do they belong merely
to theories and interpretations that can only reconstruct experiences of harm and that, hopefully, can empower resistances to their negativity. They do not advene to these experiences themselves from the outside, so to speak. They are part and parcel of these experiences, of what suffering, acting and judging subjects undergo
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and do. I would claim that, above and beyond the particular and contextual processes that constitute experiences of harm –of seeing and experiencing something as harmful and of resisting and opposing it—they are at their conceptual core.
Certainly, not everything seems to be susceptible to being understood as
harmful. Before turning more specifically to the relevance that the different perspectives, especially the victims’ perspective, have in our understanding of harm , it may be useful to elaborate a bit more about the negative character of these forms of interaction. The term “harm” seems to entail an array of semantic meanings to which we attach the generalized category of negativity. I have referred to physical and moral forms of harming in the examples of slavery, war
and domination. It is relevant to note that this polymorphism of harm parallels what Bernstein calls the protean quality of violence. As with this latter case, there is no closed list of semantic meanings for harm, i.e., of what things or types of things have ended up being understood under the category of harm, thus expressing some sort of social and moral condemnation and refusal. It rather seems that different societies at different moments have incorporated actions and practices that were initially not deemed harmful to the list of avoidable conditions that are subject to moral condemnation and subsequent legal prohibitions or protections. Think, for example, about the classical examples of slavery, torture, destitution on the bases of gender and ethnicity, and so on. Also think about issues that in different societies are yet-‐contested candidates for moral condemnation or legal prohibitions, such as same-‐sex relationships and their institutionalization, child labor, certain forms of punishment and penal institutions. Still, think about things which even in advanced societies are not yet subject to our moral condemnation, though some would surely argue for their being included in this category of what should not have happened and should never happen again, such as the relationship of humans to other living creatures or societal practices concerning the sustainability of our natural world. It does seem, then, that there is no fixed trait that defines what is considered negative in our experiences and judgments of what is harmful. Rather, it seems that a long, by no means clear or linear, process –perhaps a contingent learning-‐process—has accumulated or even
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lumped together practices and actions that have been considered sufficiently relevant to make them subject to being included in the list of what we consider harmful. Moreover, I do not think we have a theory of what is relevant, of what has become relevant to be understood as harmful. It is probably a web of accumulated experiences and judgments, of both situations and reasons that end up drawing the constellation of what we call harmful. For example, think about the negativity of what had been experienced –and still is—before the Declaration of Human Rights and the complex sets of reasons and circumstances that allowed for its proclamation. But, in spite of lacking a general theory of the negativity of harm, there are different ways to map the semantic meanings attached to the notion of harm. For example, we can elaborate a theory of human rights in different philosophical traditions and reconstruct different specific harmful actions, practices, institutions or situations thereof. In those different philosophical perspectives-‐-‐ for example, in pragmatism and in certain strands of the liberal tradition-‐-‐, we could also find intuitions regarding how and why such actions, practices or situations prevent, diminish or handicap certain core human values, such as human flourishing. We can even accompany these perspectives with historical lessons regarding how certain forms of pain or suffering, not to mention human deprivation and destitution, are conditions that can no longer be thought of as unavoidable, and, thus, are harmful. Violence itself is a trait of these possible conditions, actions, behaviors and institutions, for example, the violence inflicted in the prevention of human flourishing in women or when different ways of subjugation are enforced in colonial circumstances. Even seemingly non-‐violent actions and institutions –as in the case of peaceful forms of domination or colonization—can be seen as exercising forms of structural violence that, as I have just said, prevent the human flourishing of the persons and groups that are subject to them. In all these cases, violence may be thought of as paralleling or accompanying what we agree to think of as harmful.
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However, we may doubt that violence would be, by itself, a general category of what should always be avoided. Many authors have shown that violence is sometimes justified and Bernstein reminds us at different moments of his book how Arendt thought of this characteristic as something that points to its mere instrumental character. A violent action or reaction would extract its justification, or its lack thereof, from the justified character of the aims it seeks to attain. What is interesting in this line of argument is that this justification of violence parallels the necessity and unavoidability of those actions that were previously thought of as not pertaining to the realm of harm. For example, slavery was considered a natural condition, necessary and unavoidable, and thus justified in the eyes of slaveholders and sometimes to the slaves themselves. The modal shift I am underscoring in the experience and refusal of harm relates directly to this moment in which something that was previously thought of as justified can be shown to be unnecessary, as it should have been otherwise. What I am now hinting at is that even what we may consider justified violence, as in the case of self-‐ defense or in the supposedly justified cases of ius ad bellum, may be cases that are also susceptible to being thought of as something that can be drawn away from their supposed naturalness or as something justified in the eyes of their agents. If violence is merely instrumental, it does not by itself have any sort of privilege that it can receive from the justified ends to which it serves. Self-‐defense, for example, is not an overall justification for violence as its instrument, not even in justified wars –and I am now recalling John Rawls’s reflections on Hiroshima and even Michael Walzer’s doubts concerning the bombings of German cities in the last moments of WWII. If an exercise of judgment is always necessary in defining the ends of action, a stricter judgment is needed when the justification of one of its most powerful instruments, violence, is the case. Again, this parallels what we consider to be harm. Harm, I said before, is as multifarious as violence. It may even encompass a wider scope of actions, behaviors and institutions. But if it deploys the type of modal shift I am underlining, its multifariousness can be cut down to its bones, to the conceptual and judgmental structure we display in considering whatever ϕ we are facing precisely as harmful. Similarly, the protean nature of violence that Bernstein so
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insightfully analyzes might also be cut down to some sort of modal and moral core structure that might shed some light regarding its refusal or even its domestication. I am not saying that we can get rid of our violent “inner demons” by way of a conceptual blow from the powerful “better angels of our nature,” to use Steven Pinker’s metaphors. Perhaps in the same way as harm continues to be inflicted and that there are harms yet unnamed as such, violence will continue to dwell amongst us. But in both cases, I would suggest, we can detect and refine our experiences and our refusals. The continuous debate between violence and non-‐ violence, and especially in the public sphere, can receive some illumination by it. Let me move on to try to elaborate a bit more what an understanding of harm could afford to this understanding of violence. What I will be suggesting is that, contested though it might be, when we, our moral community –hopefully a cosmopolitan moral community-‐-‐ understands and terms some action, behavior or institution as harmful, it does so by integrating different experiential perspectives and judgments. Using a highly stylized version of the experience of harm, I would suggest, as much of the current literature has done, that experiences of harm are displayed in a triangle of three basic figures: the victim, the perpetrator and the bystander. Certainly, there are all sorts of victims, perpetrators and bystanders, but I will not elaborate now on these differences that have been described and analyzed in an extended cartography in the fields of gender and race studies, labor exploitation, war, political domination and other cases of societal structures that inflict harm on persons. In spite of the infinite differences of persons and processes, the language of positions or figures allows us to focus on the main relationships that constitute experiences of harm and how they are fleshed out in distinctive emotions, perceptions, thoughts and overall attitudes that embody the architecture of harming. It may be worthwhile, thus, to say a word on this distinctiveness. The victim is the recipient of harm, she who, in a first-‐person attitude, can give witness to her suffering, to her exploitation, she who is wronged and she who can always testify to the existence, the quality and the extension of her wound. Not only does the victim bear her testimony, the victims centrally define the particular negativity of harm. We could justify this assertion by appealing to two parallel
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considerations: in the first place, some harmed predicaments are more clearly seen as such from the privileged point of view of those who undergo the negative conditions and effects of certain actions, practices and institutions (something that does not exclude their also being able to be described and acknowledged from other different points of view, as that of a concerned spectator), and, in the second place, the opposition, the protest and the refusal of that negativity, as lived and experienced by the victims, is what would finally give force to the practical imperative of its avoidance. The perpetrator, to which I will be returning in a moment, is she who, by action or omission, inflicts the wound, be it physical, emotional and/or social, and who has been mainly understood as the subject of responsibility attributions and the locus for the analyses of complex emotions such as remorse or atonement. The figure of the bystander or, as I would prefer to call her, the third party, is more complex. The third party can certainly be seen as a passive or an active accomplice, as has been analyzed in different fields and theories. But it would be a mistake to identify the third party figure with an active or passive accomplice. Following, for example, Hume’s or Kant’s aesthetic paradigms, the spectator certainly tends to be seen as she who, in the distance, considers herself safe enough to be the subject of aesthetic taste or of aesthetic judgements. Her distance safeguards her from the storming waters of harm, to use the Enlightenment and Romantic metaphor of a shipwreck seen from the safeness of the shore that Blumenberg so well depicted, and allows her all the superior benefits of objectivity. But distance need not be thought of in these terms, which tend to forget the redeeming role that objectivity –for example, in truth claims—may play in the normative resolution of harm. If the third party certainly incorporates distance, it is also the figure that allows for judgment and assessment. For example, as I have argued elsewhere, distance is precisely what allows for the epistemic processes of self-‐strangeness that by de-‐ centering the victim’s understanding of herself turns her endurance and passive resistance into active resistance. What I am hinting at is a privileged link between the victim’s perspective and her suffering and endurance, and the third figure and her attitudes towards the negativity of harm. Thus, and in the first place, we need to recast this idea of distance in non-‐culpable terms if we are to understand the
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very idea of resistance or opposition on the victim’s part. In the second place, without it we could not give any sort of rational rendering of the perspective of the community in which harm experiences are elaborated and normatively solved, nor could we make sense of the type of analysis in the social sciences and in the philosophical –or legal and political—reconstructions like the one we are engaging in right now.
I may now return briefly again to the agent that inflicts harm, the
perpetrator. In the first place, though the perpetrator addresses the victim basically through her actions –recall Scarry’s analysis of torture—hers is a peculiar form of second-‐person attitude. In torture, the victim is both a recipient of an action directed at her by the perpetrator and a means towards the torturer’s own interests. The perpetrator is a paradigm of self-‐centeredness and she brings into her own realm of action the victim as one of her objects. Hers is, so to speak, a parasitic second-‐person attitude. She does not address the victim to build something with her, but to undo her world. She needs the victim, and addresses her and harms her as a resource for herself. In the second place, and beyond this motivational understanding, the figure of the perpetrator significantly appears once the scenario of the second modal shift I spoke of before is set, that is, when she is considered in the light of normative demands that, at a certain point, make responsibility attributions appear. Demanding these responsibilities requires a normative standpoint and a normative subject: the moral, legal or political community that is able to articulate the normative standpoint and to which the victims, all sorts of bystanders and the perpetrators belong in their different and distinctive positions. In the third place, and mainly due to this constitutive role of the normative and communal perspective, the figure of the perpetrator has been the main subject of the discussion of a wide array of what I would call conversional emotions and attitudes, such as repentance or atonement. These emotions and attitudes are the threshold for the perpetrator’s reintegration into the political and moral community.
In the discussions about violence, some of these three figures have been, I
would say, underscored and some others have received less attention. In some
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cases —in gender violence—the victim’s predicament has been rightly highlighted, whilst in political violence either the perpetrators or the third parties have normally focused much of the attention. In understanding, for example, political violence –as in Arendt’s rebellions or in Fanon’s anticolonial struggles as Bernstein has analyzed them—the reasons of the violent agents come to the fore for their assessment. The agents of violence can been seen sometimes both as victims of a political, economic and social oppression and as active participants that it would be misleading to call perpetrators. In these cases –such as colonialism—it is somehow difficult to use these terms. Yet, as I will be arguing later on in dealing with terrorism, they sometimes perpetrate actions that inflict wounds, that cause pain, that harm communities and persons. Though, generally, what we could call somehow misleadingly “private” violent interactions have focused on the victims, ideological or political violence has tended to pay more attention to the agents, or perpetrators, to their reasons or to their possible justifications. The third party, be it a passive or active accomplice, or be it the theoretical understanding that a concerned spectator could display, has also tended, I would say, to be disregarded. The third parties tend to be collapsed into the role of the perpetrators –recall the Goldhagen debate concerning the Nazi crimes or even the ensuing, and in my view mistaken, debates around Arendt’s Eichmann—or even into the role of victims. I would even suggest, when the third party is a concerned spectator, her active role as a member of the experience of violence has tended to be disregarded. For example, I strongly agree with Marcuse and Rose, as Bernstein has presented their analysis, that the dramatic historical experiences of Germany in the late tens of the past century are the hermeneutical background against which Benjamin elaborated his much debated text. One has only to read the last articles written by Rosa Luxemburg and even her last letters to Clara Zetkin to realize what the meaning of the general strike was and how that meaning even had the overtones of an almost apocalyptical radicalism that, in different terms, appear in Benjamin’s lines. What I am trying to argue is that even the role of the theoretician and the analyst has not infrequently been stripped of the historical and social contextuality and the embodiment that characterizes a concerned spectator in the experiences of harm and, I would add, also in the experiences of violence.
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If arriving at a communal accord around understanding something to be
harmful requires, in different, complex processes, the collaboration of diverse voices and the presence of the three stylized figures I have mentioned, I would suggest that something similar is needed in the case of the assessment of violence. A communal discursive agreement, with the implication of all the three figures, as embodied in more complex and mixed social and personal positions, is needed in order to understand the roots of violence. If our implicit and explicit notions of what is harmful have been achieved by 1) taking into consideration the wrongs suffered by the victims, the responsibilities of the perpetrators and even the different roles and assessments of the concerned spectators and 2) reaching communal definitions whose conceptual structure has the modal architecture I have suggested, a normative understanding of violence might require the same understanding. It would require appraising the violent act in its very facticity and not seeing it as endowed with a derivative, instrumental character –and in this, I am afraid, I take some distance from Bernstein’s Arendtian position. In considering such action, we should attend to whether its apparent or initial justification stands the test of its non-‐necessariness and whether it is susceptible to be the subject of a clear, categorical refusal. In order to proceed thus, we should consider whether all the relevant voices are heard, whether the violence suffered and the violence inflicted can both be encompassed in the violence judged by the relevant moral community. III. However, this formulation may be insufferably abstract and imprecise. Perhaps I have rushed to it, losing sight of the real dilemmas and the difficult choices and judgments that we face vis-‐à-‐vis violence. Let me spell out some of the meanings implicit in what I am trying to formulate by way of an example in which, I would think, I have been a concerned spectator, at least in my condition as a Spanish citizen.
In the early 1960s, still under the dictatorship of General Franco, the
Basque nationalist and independent movements adopted an underground military structure and agenda that immediately proceeded to carry out violent actions –
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from bombings to kidnappings, from assassinations of politicians and the military and police personnel—that had different, and opposed meanings for the different perspectives involved. Whilst, along almost Fanonian lines, the members of the clandestine organization –basically ETA—viewed their actions as justified according to their goals -‐-‐the end of the dictatorship, which was taken as a military invasion, and the independence of the Basque country split between Spain and France -‐-‐broad segments of the anti-‐dictatorship movements sympathized with the Basque independence movement and bracketed any explicit condemnation of their tactics. Both Third International arguments and, as I said, almost Fanon-‐like analyses were relevant in the attitudes of this third party of concerned spectators. Things started to change in the mid-‐1970s after the death of the dictator and the new democratic Spain was starting its development. But in those early years, violent actions, assassinations, extortions and kidnappings increased whilst doubts started to arise in the midst of the Basque independent movement. As also happened in Ireland, different groups and organizations abandoned their almost military obedience and turned to democratic, non-‐violent means to achieve their goals in the new constitutional context. But there was no widespread acknowledgement of the harm done to the people assassinated nor any sign of apologies to their families. These have had to wait until very recent times, almost forty years later. In the 1980s, the aforementioned third, concerned parties -‐-‐that is, neither the Basque violent actors nor their immediate targets—started to draw away from the more or less active support of those actions and goals, but it took over ten years to clearly condemn what it took so many years to label as terrorism. (It is interesting in this regard that it took several more years to have other democratic countries and the public, both in Europe and abroad, to follow in such condemnation, as also happened with the Irish IRA in the US). And, as I have just said, only very recently erstwhile terrorists have started to acknowledge the harm inflicted on now democratic politicians and members of the armed forces in the dark years. What I think is relevant in this whole process is a three-‐fold dynamic that has been evolving in these fifty years. In the first place, something important
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changed in the assessment of violence and its apparently instrumental character on the part of its immediate actors. Still in an instrumental frame of mind, violence left its justified status in a democratic society. This has not amounted to a loss of hegemony –in Gramscian terms—of the radical left in the Basque country; rather it has been, I would suggest, one of its driving forces. The abandonment of violence first and its explicit condemnation later has even allowed for a growing support that is open to political debate. However, above all, I would suggest it has, though very recently, opened up the road to different processes in which the previous violent actors face the victims of their actions. It is not infrequent that public processes of atonement and demands of forgiveness fall prey to political interests that shed shadows on their sincerity. It seems that –as is happening now in the Basque case—private, immediate face-‐to-‐ face interactions between previous perpetrators and their victims are, though more difficult, also more transparent for that sincerity and for a real reconciliation. I am doubtful with regard to this dichotomy of the public and the private, though I would also have suspicions regarding some public exercises of atonement. I think that these “private” interactions of victims and perpetrators have a public dimension: they are the touchstone of public process of public reconciliations. But obviously, they do not only require a change in the actors of violence themselves, who are now able to embody the modal shifts in their experience –ϕ was not necessary and not justified, it could been otherwise, it must be otherwise in the future—I have been taking about. It also requires parallel processes in the victims themselves. The victims of ETA’s violence have played different roles in these fifty or sixty years. Their justified demands for justice and reparation have frequently adopted a stringent tone of retribution and even retaliation and revenge, and it has also been frequent that different victims’ associations have moved along political lines that have tried to set their own particular agendas in the Basque democratic process in ways, I would contend, that have blocked the Basque reconciliation process. Obviously, as always in a democratic setting that allows for wide political disagreements, all sorts of contested issues arise. In the case of Spain, both in the Basque country and more recently in Catalonia, the nationalist and independent
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movements, their ideologies and the deep political problems that arise for the very understanding of the Spanish nation itself, intermesh with the understanding of the previous violent moments. In the same way that the perpetrators had to relinquish their previous understandings and justifications in order to achieve a new, different understanding of their lives in a process of atonement that allows for a new public process, the victims themselves and their families have had to undergo a parallel process of understanding their own previous experiences. This, obviously, has been no easy task, and a whole new set of emotional, ideological and political conversional attitudes have also had to take place, as has also happened with the third parties, the concerned spectators and the different analyses and reflections that have taken place nationwide. In the very same way, though at different levels, in which previous justifications of violence and previous demands regarding its terrible effects readjust to new contexts, a widespread, new understanding of terrorist violence has also come to the fore. The obvious, simple fact that the deepest and all-‐encompassing political disagreements need not adopt violent expressions in a democratic context strips naked the sheer fact of violence and brings forth a deeper understanding of what democracy is about. Violence is, thus, the triad of the violence suffered, the violence inflicted and the violence judged. I would suggest that the clue is the violence that has been judged, the way in which violence has been subject to a new modal and moral understanding and the way in which the process itself also requires the experiential input of the different perspectives involved. I would not like to sound too optimistic or naïve, though I think I have been true to the Basque process, stylized though my description has been. We have many counterexamples of how violence resists its being incorporated under what I have sketched as a theory of harm experiences; the Balkan War in Europe itself or the ongoing Syrian civil war are very close, still at hand. But these counterexamples and the possible positive example of the Basque case can be taken as cases of Arendt’s thoughts, which Bernstein has underlined so clearly in his book, regarding the instrumental character of violence in opposition to what she calls power. Power, in my case, would be the Basque and Spanish non-‐violent
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self-‐understanding, and power was what failed in the ex-‐Yugoslavia and is failing or has been contested in Syria. The failure of power, or of active legitimation, to put it in different terms, opens up the exercise of violence, not just of instrumental violence related to an immediate goal for some segment of society, but a global collapse into violence as is happening now in the Syrian civil war, as in all civil wars. Let me finish with a recent case that points to this global failure of Arendtian power and the general collapse into violence. The lesson I would like to extract is that in these cases, in which violence appears as the paramount, immediate trait of a conflict, it resists being understood as harm. Paradoxically, the sheer facticity of violence, which would allow it to be understood as harm, and thus opposed as such, only deploys a radical lack of normative understanding. Last September 3rd, a Syrian surgeon, Mohamed Abyad, 28 years old, was assassinated near Aleppo. He was a member of Médicins sans Frontières and a known non-‐religious, anti-‐fundamentalist militant, especially sensitive to the mistreatment of women. It seems –so I have been told—that one of the Islamic fundamentalist parties in the ongoing civil war against the Syrian regime thought it unbearable to have someone who had a different world-‐view near its ranks, even in the task of medical assistance, concerning what the assassins considered a central issue of their own motivations and interests. Perhaps we may sympathize with the Syrian opposition and even more generally with the Arab Spring, but Abyad´s assassination in the hands of his co-‐members of the Syrian opposition points to a deeper issue: the ways in which war or generalized violence leaves the darker side of our nature unleashed. Maybe there are obvious, almost immediate reasons for the condemnation of Abyad’s assassination and that any type of intellectual task would just reduce itself to the backing of all necessary measures to enforce the legal prosecution of the murderers and to the expression of closeness and mourning with his family, friends and organization. But perhaps there is also something in his case, as in so many cases worldwide, that pushes us to think what it means for violence to be thought of as an instrument in political, moral and cultural disagreements and why in certain circumstances –such as the ongoing Syrian civil war—violence makes all legal or moral restrictions collapse.
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Wars are not only exercises in violence for whatever reasons may be deemed to be justifiable or necessary by the contesting parties; they are spaces of action in which core moral and political presuppositions fall apart. They are spaces of violence that appear in their sheer facticity and that require a particularized and specific attention above and beyond their apparent justifications. They are the occasion of the unleashing, as I have said, of all moral restrictions, of all moral communities of understanding. From a normative point of view, violence is not only subject to its assessment in its instrumental nature (i.e., when it can be considered legitimate given legitimate ends) but also in its very nature of jeopardizing morality itself, the moral, or more generally, the normative space itself. Like vengeance, it appears when the law is said to have failed –as a justification of the re-‐instauration of foregone law, as the balancing of odds due to the absence of law or of its impotence. Violence appears in the absence of a politically or publicly shared morality that is said to have failed or that it is deemed to be in danger. Violence is, like vengeance, the instrument ready at hand to reinstitute or to institute anew what could be a failed order or, in the Arendtian sense, a failed form of power. But then, the crucial element of vengeance comes to the fore: in vengeance, the only normative criterion available to the avenger is herself: she is the measure of the wound she has suffered and she is the only possible assessor for its cure. The avenger thinks of herself and justifies herself as a victim, not as a perpetrator of violence against her offender. This violence is, thus, instrumental for vengeance, which is taken as instrumental for justice. But what the avenger may take as an instrument for justice –be it sheer violence or even a cold and silent retribution—cannot be taken by us, or by the relevant moral community, in those very terms. In the same way Abyad’s murder, be it motivated by vengeance, by political cleansing or by whatever reasons the murders may have had, cannot be taken to be justified by those motivations. The acts of violence, naked in their facticity, ask for a further and more radical understanding. Although violence seems to share with vengeance an instrumental nature vis à vis the failure of law, or morality or power, it seems to draw its force for the agents, but only for them, from whatever mediating structure (war, vengeance) stands before such failure or absence. A third, concerned party is moved to judge how these mediating structures appeared and were endowed with their powerful force and how, given the shattering force they have, they could have been avoided and should be avoided. If, in all the cases I can think of, these mediating structures appear as responses to some sort of failed
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implementation of social or shared normative rules, to the Arendtian lack of power, to the absence of the Kantian kingdom of ends, that lack and this absence become the only guidelines available for us or for the relevant moral community. If the Basque experience, in the positive sense, and the Syrian experience, in its negative side, both point to the building up of Arendtian power and to its destruction, and if in these cases violent actions appear as clearly-‐cut silhouettes of a negativity against normative understandings, they do so because they acquire some traits of what I have been calling harm. ϕ, in this case Abyad’s assassination by the hands of the very intolerance he had been denouncing his whole life but on whose side he was nevertheless working, was not necessary, need not have happened, and –this is what is striking in all counterfactual normative claims—it should never happen again, though it had already happened, without relief, without consolation.
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