work A Clockwork Orange7 by Anthony Burgess to unpack the narra- tive of violence and non-violence contained therein to show that despite attempts to reform ...
The Meanings of Violence
Violence has long been noted to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Traditionally, however, philosophical discussions have tended to approach it through the lens of warfare and/or limit it to physical forms. This changed in the twentieth century as the nature and meaning of ‘violence’ itself became a conceptual problem. Guided by the contention that Walter Benjamin’s famous 1921 ‘Critique of Violence’ essay inaugurated this turn to an explicit questioning of violence, this collection brings together an international array of scholars to engage with how subsequent thinkers—Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin, Butler, Castoriadis, Derrida, Fanon, Gramsci, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Schmitt—grappled with the meaning and place of violence. The aim is not to reduce these multiple responses to a singular one, but to highlight the heterogeneous ways in which the concept has been inquired into and the manifold meanings of it that have resulted. To this end, each chapter focuses on a different approach or thinker within twentieth and twenty-first century European philosophy, with many of them tackling the issue through the mediation of other topics and disciplines, including biopolitics, epistemology, ethics, culture, law, politics, and psychoanalysis. As such, the volume will be an invaluable resource for those interested in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, History of Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Political Theory, Psychology, and Sociology. Gavin Rae is Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Experienced Research Fellow at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. He is the author of Realizing Freedom: Hegel, Sartre, and the Alienation of Human Being (2011); Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze (2014); The Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas (2016); and co-editor (with Emma Ingala) of Subjectivity and the Political: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge: 2018). Emma Ingala is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy and Vice-Dean of Academic Organization in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. She specializes in post-structuralist thought, political anthropology, feminist theory and psychoanalysis, and is the co-editor (with Gavin Rae) of Subjectivity and the Political: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge: 2018).
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The Meanings of Violence From Critical Theory to Biopolitics Edited by Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala
First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rae, Gavin, 1982– editor. Title: The meanings of violence : from critical theory to biopolitics / edited by Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Taylor & Francis, 2018. | Series: Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 116 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018039561 | ISBN 9781138570207 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Violence. Classification: LCC B105.V5 M38 2018 | DDC 303.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039561 ISBN: 978-1-138-57020-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-70376-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
ContentsContents
Acknowledgmentsvii
Introduction: The Meanings of Violence
1
GAVIN RAE AND EMMA INGALA
PART I
Political Myth and Social Transformation11 1 Walter Benjamin and the General Strike: Non-Violence and the Archeon
13
JAMES MARTEL
2 Violence, Divine or Otherwise: Myth and Violence in the Benjamin-Schmitt Constellation
31
HJALMAR FALK
3 Violence and Civilization: Gramsci, Machiavelli, and Sorel
48
ROBERT P. JACKSON
4 The Violence of Oblivion: Hannah Arendt and the Tragic Loss of Revolutionary Politics
65
LIESBETH SCHOONHEIM
PART II
Sociality and Meaning85 5 The World and the Embodied Subject: Humanism, Terror, and Violence STEPHEN A. NOBLE
87
vi Contents 6 Dialectics Got the Upper Hand: Fanon, Violence, and the Quest[ion] of Liberation
103
NIGEL C. GIBSON
7 Sartre’s Later Work: Toward a Notion of Institutional Violence
129
MARIEKE MUELLER
8 The Original Polemos: Phenomenology and Violence in Jacques Derrida
148
VALERIA CAMPOS-SALVATERRA
PART III
From Subjectivity to Biopolitics169 9 Taming the Little Screaming Monster: Castoriadis, Violence, and the Creation of the Individual
171
GAVIN RAE
10 Judith Butler: From a Normative Violence to an Ethics of Non-Violence
191
EMMA INGALA
11 Biopolitics and Resistance: The Meaning of Violence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben
209
GERMAN PRIMERA
Bibliography229 Contributors248 Index252
Acknowledgments
AcknowledgmentsAcknowledgments
The production of an edited volume is the result of extensive collaboration. This obviously involves the authors included, but also extends to others. To this end, the editors would like to thank all those who participated in the international conference ‘The Meaning of Violence,’ held at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in March 2017, at which the majority of the papers included here—albeit in earlier, much reduced form— were first presented. At Routledge, we would like to thank our editor, Andrew Weckenmann, and his assistant, Alexandra Simmons, for their support and professionalism throughout the process, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Finally, we acknowledge that this volume forms part of the activities for the following research projects: (1) the Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Project ‘Sovereignty and Law: Between Ethics and Politics,’ co-funded by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration under Grant Agreement 600371, the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitivity (COFUND2013-40258), the Spanish Ministry for Education, Culture, and Sport (CEI-15-17), and Banco Santander—more information about the research project can be found at https://sovereigntyandlaw. wordpress.com/—and (2) ‘Pensamiento y representación literaria y artística digital ante la crisis de Europa y el Mediterráneo,’ reference number PR26/16-6B-3, funded by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Banco Santander.
Introduction
Gavin Rae and Emma IngalaIntroduction
The Meanings of Violence Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala
The twentieth century witnessed the development of a range of intellectual movements that introduced new methodologies to challenge many entrenched theoretical assumptions, categories, and conclusions. One of the fundamental issues that was taken up was the question of the nature and meaning of violence. While violence has long had a place within Western philosophy—one only has to think of the discussion of the relationship between sovereignty and warfare in early modern philosophy or of those who proposed the use of violent means to effect revolutionary change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the twentieth century ushered in something new: a focus on the meaning of violence itself, which, in turn, depended upon a questioning of the conditions that make violence possible. Critical theorists, phenomenologists, deconstructionists, structuralists and post-structuralists, psychoanalysts, and biopolitical theorists, to name but some of the dominant methodological frameworks developed throughout the century, turned, at different times and for different reasons, to the question of violence to not only highlight its role in human existence, but to also make sense of it. This turn to violence1 was, of course, underpinned and supported by political events, including the First and Second World Wars, the existence of concentration camps, the horrors of totalitarianism, the ongoing Cold War, anticolonial struggles, and the rise of nationalism and globalization, as well as social alterations, such as the increasing emphasis on gender (in)equality and the rise of queer theory and identity politics, that sought to show the ways in which social norms were inherently exclusionary and repressive of certain social groupings and ways of life. These events led to, at least, two conceptual developments: First, the growing recognition that violence cannot be reduced to warfare or its physical form, and, indeed, that its physical variety is not the fundamental one. By highlighting that violence does not just operate through, but is constitutive of, intersubjective relations, institutions, language, logic, and subjectivity, the conclusion reached was that, far from being a local and contingent phenomenon, violence is a ubiquitous and even necessary aspect of the human condition.
2 Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala Second, the ubiquity of violence means that it does not and cannot have a merely repressive, negative function, but must also be inherently creative. This does not only entail the notion that violence clears a space from which to subsequently create alternatives, but the stronger claim that there is something about violence itself that is creative and so necessary for the generation of linguistic, physical, and/or social entities. To outline these developments, the various chapters in this volume focus on a different ‘school’ of thought or thinker within twentieth and twenty-first century European philosophy, while many of the chapters deal explicitly with the issue through the mediation of other topics and disciplines, including biopolitics, culture, epistemology, ethics, law, politics, and psychoanalysis. Although the contributions focus on thinkers within the European tradition, a number of them (Gibson, Mueller, and Noble, for example) link the discussion to non-European political events, while the contributors are also geographically and culturally diverse, encompassing different (1) countries and education systems; (2) continents (Europe, Latin America, and North America); and (3) hemispheres. This diversity provides non-European perspectives on European thinkers, extends the scope, depth, and perspectives offered, and demonstrates the global nature—both conceptually and geographically speaking—of the engagements that have and continue to take place with regards to the question of the meanings of violence. It is important to note, however, that the aim is not to produce a unified theory or definition from these analyses; the heterogeneity of the various chapters is maintained to demonstrate that violence is (1) a multifaceted and ubiquitous aspect of human existence; (2) not simply repressive, exclusionary, or destructive, but also inherently creative; and (3) a nexal concept, insofar as an analysis of violence is mediated by and tied to other concepts, which, in turn, permits the study of violence to act as a lens through which to inquire into those concepts.
Structure of the Book While Georges Sorel’s 1906 work Reflections on Violence2 is, arguably, the first work of the twentieth century to openly and extensively engage with the question of violence, it does so within and from a Marxist framework that explicitly aims to overthrow the capitalist State. Rather than engaging in an analysis of violence per se, it presupposes a meaning of and purpose for violence. For this reason, this volume is guided by the contention that it was Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay ‘Critique of Violence’3—a work that discusses Sorel—that truly brought to the fore the problem of the meaning of violence and, indeed, the question of the positive or negative function of violence, in a way that was foundational for later discussions of the issue.
Introduction 3 Properly understanding its foundational status does, however, require a distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ senses of the term. The former implies that a particular event grounds and influences all that emanates from it. If this were true, Benjamin’s analysis would not only be that which brought the question of the meaning of violence to the fore, but would also be that which defines later analyses by virtue of being their point of reference and discussion. This does not hold in the case of some of the thinkers that this volume engages with. For this reason, this volume is based on a ‘weak’ sense of ‘foundation,’ wherein Benjamin’s essay is understood to have most fully instantiated the turn to the study of the different types and meanings of violence, without necessarily being discussed, pointed to, or referenced by subsequent analyses of the concept. Starting with Benjamin’s essay, the volume proceeds in a broadly chronological order that passes through Carl Schmitt to Antonio Gramsci’s neo-Marxism, Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, and the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre— which are separated by a chapter on the post-colonial theory of Frantz Fanon—before moving to the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, the psychoanalysis of Cornelius Castoriadis, the post-structuralist feminist theory of Judith Butler, and the biopolitical theory of Giorgio Agamben. These traditions and thinkers have been chosen because they represent some of the major approaches within twentieth and twenty-first century philosophical thinking and entail figures who have undertaken extensive engagements with the meaning and nature of violence. The chronological development of the chapters is complemented by conceptual groupings and orientations—political myth and social transformation, sociality and meaning, and subjectivity and biopolitics—manifested through its threepart division that is designed to not only bring coherence to the various chapters, but also show that ‘violence’ operates at a nexus. Thus, Part I, titled ‘Political Myth and Social Transformation,’ contains four chapters on Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Antonio Gramsci, and Hannah Arendt that question the meaning of violence through the mediation of the myth and forms of socio-political transformation. In Chapter 1, James Martel engages with Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ by focusing on the issue of the general strike developed therein to determine its suitability as a model for political anarchism. Distinguishing between ‘archism,’ as a model of political authority based in a foundational logic or rule, and ‘anarchism’ as that which challenges that foundation, Martel argues that the general strike is anarchic because it radically and non-violently (in a particular Benjaminian sense) deprives the State not only of recognition per se, but also, more specifically, its claim to be in the only position from which to judge and order the world. This position of judgment, which Martel links to Derrida’s notion of the ‘archeon,’ is one that normally serves as the bastion of archist—or
4 Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala foundational—authority because there is no judgment prior to it and no space or time before or after it from which to offer an alternative judgment. Insofar as there is no real authoritative basis for this judgment, this space of judgment corresponds to Benjamin’s notion of mythic violence (more accurately, it serves as a source for that form of violence). Although modeled on God’s own power of judgment, Martel claims that Benjamin holds that God actually evacuates the heavenly archeon by endlessly postponing judgment day. Accordingly, human beings too have a chance to avoid the earthly archeon and its violence with the general strike being a critical vehicle by which this avoidance can be accomplished. With this, Martel engages with the foundation of State and legal authority, the relationship between the theological and secular, and demonstrates that Benjamin offers a non-foundationalist approach to politics. In Chapter 2, Hjalmar Falk moves beyond Benjamin’s essay by linking it to the thought of Carl Schmitt. First outlining the controversial relationship between Benjamin and Schmitt through their respective work on myth in early modern philosophy and reading it against the context of the debates surrounding the notion of political theology in German thought around the year 1920, Falk subsequently suggests that, for both, the question of the relationship between immanence/transcendence, and indeed the issue of mediation itself, are not ‘merely’ religious issues, but take on wider political significance. Having explained what both thinkers understand by this, Falk argues that both agree that myth, violence, and history are intimately bound together: violent events—which are inherently political—give rise to myths, which in its turn induce meaning and hence politics into history. With this, Falk shows the ways in which, for Benjamin and Schmitt, violence and myth intertwine to create a world of meaning, one that is intimately linked to our political categories. In Chapter 3, Robert P. Jackson turns to the work of Antonio Gramsci to examine the relationship between violence and the ethical-political, which also delineates the ways in which (political) myths operate to create a society. Guided by the notion that, for Gramsci, political thought should seek to elaborate the dialectical unity between force and consent, Jackson focuses on Gramsci’s relationship to Niccolò Machiavelli, Benedetto Croce, and Georges Sorel. Arguing that Gramsci takes up Machiavelli’s use of militaristic terminology, but balances it with aspects of Croce’s thought on the relationship between ethics and institutional religion and Sorel’s understanding of political myth, Jackson concludes that, for Gramsci, only the creation of political myth (as opposed to that of religion or ethics) is able to mobilize the strongest inclinations of a people and so create a violent force that can cleave the social fabric. With this, he ties violence and myth to politics, the generation of society, and social transformation. In Chapter 4, Liesbeth Schoonheim continues to engage with the question of violence and political change by focusing on Arendt’s narrative of the demise of revolutionary politics as manifested through the role and
Introduction 5 possibility of the council system of government. While noting that most commentators focus on The Human Condition4 (published in 1958) and On Violence5 (published in 1970) to conclude that Arendt insists on a strict separation between violence and power, Schoonheim concentrates on a number of other texts from the 1950s and 1960s to argue for a very different and much more nuanced picture of the violence-power relation. More specifically, she maintains that this reconceptualization is dependent on a re-evaluation of the notion of ‘action,’ which is gradually reconfigured as the mediating factor between the two. Because different forms of action are possible, so too are different forms of the violence-power relation. Therefore, rather than focus on the loss of revolutionary politics, Arendt ultimately challenges us to engage in action to bring it about; with this being tied to reconceptualized forms of violence, non-violence, and power. Part II of the volume, composed of four chapters and titled ‘Sociality and Meaning,’ takes up the question of the relationship between violence, sociality, and epistemology through the lens of the phenomenological and post-colonial traditions, before turning to Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist critique of phenomenological treatments of the issue wherein violence is not simply understood to operate through social relations, but is constitutive of the meaning defining those social relations and, by extension, the onto-genesis of meaning itself. In Chapter 5, Stephen A. Noble engages with Maurice MerleauPonty’s controversial and often-ignored work Humanism and Terror6 and, in particular, the question of whether socio-political violence can be permanently overcome. To do so, Nobel first turns to the literary work A Clockwork Orange7 by Anthony Burgess to unpack the narrative of violence and non-violence contained therein to show that despite attempts to reform the main protagonist’s propensity to violence, violence always returns. Linking this insight to the socio-political realm through Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror, Noble first situates the work within Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre and identifies his relationship to, among others, Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, before going on to outline the emphasis that Merleau-Ponty places on the permanence of violence within the socio-political world. The point is that, while we may wish to affirm a politics of non-violence, violence is actually an inescapable aspect of the socio-political sphere; one that, no matter how much we may wish to escape from, continues to inform and shape the world we inhabit. Having been mentioned in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s work, the next two chapters focus on Frantz Fanon’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s thinking on violence. In Chapter 6, Nigel C. Gibson engages with the former to challenge the often-repeated and long-held interpretation that Fanon simplistically affirms violence as that which is socially and psychologically liberating and therefore a fundamental part of the anticolonial struggle. Instead, Gibson emphasizes the complexity and dialectical character of Fanon’s
6 Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala thought, wherein violence is tied up with questions of objectification, alienation, mystification, and self-understanding. The quest for liberation is not and cannot simply be a violent one, wherein an oppressor is violently rejected and thrown off, but is one in which the oppressed engage in constant and conscious practices of self-reflection; action that nevertheless always takes place in relation to violence received from oppressors. As a consequence, violence is tied up with self-knowledge. With this, Gibson provides a nuanced account of Fanon’s thought on violence that challenges us to think about how colonial subjects act in relation to their colonizers; a topic that also brings us to think about ourselves in relation to our Others. In Chapter 7, Marieke Mueller engages with Jean-Paul Sartre’s thinking on violence. To start, she points out that Sartre accepts that violence is inherent to the socio-political world and notes that the nature of Sartre’s treatment of this issue has generated significant debate in the literature. To contribute to this discussion, Mueller argues that new and valuable insights can be gained if we distinguish between Sartrean violence as an ‘act’ and as a ‘situation.’ By claiming that there is a decided increase in emphasis on ‘situational’ or ‘institutionalized’ violence in Sartre’s later thought, she turns to Sartre’s last major published work, The Family Idiot,8 to show that he affirms an anonymous form of violence that is not only independent of a stable oppressor-oppressed relationship, but is also self-perpetuating because it turns those formerly subjected to it into its future agents. Mueller concludes that Sartre, therefore, implicitly accounts for institutional violence, but also for a self-perpetuating form of structural violence that depends on human praxis, from which it also acquires some degree of independence. With this, she demonstrates the original nature of Sartre’s later approach to violence, its relevance for an understanding of contemporary society, and the intimate relationship between institutional and symbolic forms of violence. In Chapter 8, Valeria Campos-Salvaterra moves the debate from phenomenology to the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and his analysis of violence as this is developed from his critical readings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the phenomenological thinkers Edmund Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas. From these engagements, she suggests that, for Derrida, violence is a condition of possibility of meaning, with this being manifested most clearly in his early notions of ‘original violence,’ ‘transcendental violence,’ and ‘arche-violence.’ Claiming that meaning is generated from an irreducible form of exclusionary violence, she argues that Derrida shows that ‘violence’ cannot simply be reduced to physical or political forms; these are dependent on a more primordial form that generates the meaning that defines them. For this reason, Campos-Salvaterra claims that Derrida shows that violence is far more pervasive than usually thought and uses this to deconstruct any pretensions within Western philosophy regarding the existence of a unitary, absolute truth grounded in a pure, simple origin.
Introduction 7 Part III, composed of three chapters and titled ‘From Subjectivity to Biopolitics,’ moves past phenomenological-post-colonial-deconstructionist approaches to post-structuralist and biopolitical ones. Generally speaking, these engage with the role that violence plays in the creation of the subject and what (political) action might be taken to confront such violence. In Chapter 9, Gavin Rae explores Cornelius Castoriadis’s claim that violence is not only necessary to the formation of individuality, but also integral to its experience. He shows that, for Castoriadis, the individual is composed of a tension between the screaming little monster called the psychic monad and the social imaginary of its society. The survival of the former depends upon its taming by the latter. This is both a violent process done to the psyche and one that it actively participates in. By starting from a monadic core that is subsequently broken-up by the socialization process, Rae claims that, in Castoriadis’s logic, violence implies any imposition on the enclosed autism of the psychic monad, which leads Rae to conclude that the violence at play can, depending on the social imaginary that the psyche exists within, be physically received from others, but it always entails somatic and symbolic forms. With this, Rae shows that, for Castoriadis, the experience of violence is an undesirable but necessary—though not sufficient—one for the psyche’s development, an inevitable consequence of the psyche’s relationship to the somatic and social-symbolic spheres of its being, and a continuing feature of the existence of the individual as it struggles to reconcile the asocial demands of its psychic monad with the norms and social imaginary significations of its society. However, whereas Castoriadis holds that violence is integral to the formation (and hence being) of the subject, Emma Ingala (Chapter 10) argues that Judith Butler questions this in her analysis of the relationship between violence and non-violence. While Butler initially focused on the violence of norms, power relations, processes of subjectivation and identities, Ingala notes that from around 2001 she started to consider the violence that, by taking advantage of the precarious or vulnerable condition of every life, distributes the values of lives and even determines what counts as a life. Against those who claim that this alteration marks a fundamental rupture within Butler’s oeuvre, Ingala insists that there is a unity to it, insofar as both periods are underpinned by a common inquiry into the conditions and effects of violence in order to fight against its multiple declinations. From this, Ingala argues that (1) Butler operates with an underlying conception—albeit not a universal definition— of violence that traverses both periods of her work wherein violence is understood to entail the stabilization or petrification of a particular worldview that is thereinafter represented as natural and definitive. Nonviolence, on the contrary, is conceived as the interruption or suspension of this stabilization, as an opening to other possible worlds; (2) far from establishing a pristine demarcation between violence and non-violence,
8 Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala Butler’s thinking accounts for the nuances, co-implication, and complexity of these notions; and (3) Butler’s understanding of non-violence as an interruption and a mobilization of what is petrified relates non-violence to the practices of critique and interpretation. With this, Ingala concludes that Butler’s analysis reveals the complexities inherent to the notion of violence and its relationship to non-violence, affirms the need to continuously inquire into the conditions that define both terms prior to designating actions or things in either way, and affirms a practice of non-violence incarnated in the systematic dismantling of petrified ontologies to make room for other modes of being and, in general, a livable life. In Chapter 11, German Primera examines Giorgio Agamben’s notion of biopolitics by focusing on his analysis of the ambiguous relationship between violence and metaphysics. In particular, Primera argues that this relation takes place through, what he calls, the ‘signature of violence,’ which is defined by an economy between what Primera calls the common and proper; the former referring to that which appears as the ground of a phenomenon, the founding and unconditioned element of discursive formations; and the latter to what is founded, the conditioned element. Primera argues that, somewhat paradoxically, Agamben holds that it is the proper that founds the common; that is to say, it is the founded element that founds its own founding ground. He goes on to claim that this underlying structure both organizes and produces every conceptual discursive formation in the West. From this, Primera focuses on the new elements that are brought about by Agamben’s philosophical project for our understanding of ‘violence’ and its relationship to the political; namely, the notions of ‘inoperativity’ and ‘destituent power’ which work together to expose and render inoperative the differential structures of the common and the proper that lie at the core of the political foundation of the West. With this, Primera concludes that Agamben’s political project is not orientated around the long-privileged logic of domination, wherein political change is premised on one force or logic overcoming another to establish its primacy, but on a violence that deactivates the dominant logic without foreclosing the opening this creates by automatically instantiating an alternative. Violence is not then simply prohibitive or impositional, but can be linked to the openness of creative possibility.
Notes 1. This ‘turn’ shows no signs of abating; indeed, it has in many respects accelerated and deepened in the twenty-first century, as witnessed by the sheer number of books recently published on the topic. See, for example: Richard Bernstein, Violence: Thinking without Bannisters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); Richard Bessel, Violence: A Modern Obsession (London: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); James Dodd, Violence and Phenomenology (New York: Routledge, 2013);
Introduction 9 Brad Evans and Terrell Carver, eds., Histories of Violence: Post-war Critical Thought (London: Zed Books, 2017); Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2000); Dustin Ells Howes, Freedom without Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Paul Kahn, Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008); Leonard Lawlor, From Violence to Speaking Out: Apocalypse and Expression in Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Steven Miller, War after Death: On Violence and its Limits (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2009). 2. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, edited by Jeremy Jennings, translated by Thomas Ernest Hulme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 236–252. 4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 5. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970). 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. John O’Neil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 7. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 1st ed., 1962 (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1975). 8. Jean Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, 5 volumes, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981–1994).
