Hannah Arendt noted in 1969 that Georges Sorel's remark in 1906 -- that "the problems of violence still remain very obscure" remained true.[1] An additional half-century has elapsed since Sorel made his observation, but his remark remains true. The essays in this dossier place multiple perspectives on the problems of violence in proximity with each other, in an effort to explore some genealogies of violence and its relationship to "the political." In late 2009 at the Humanities Initiative at New York University, a small group of NYU scholars convened an interdisciplinary panel of speakers who had provocatively addressed the topic of violence in their work.[2] Our goal, as suggested by the title of the panel, was to "think through...>>
Thinking Through Violence
A new series beginning in May, 2011.
Based on a panel convened in 2009 under the auspices of the Humanities Initiative at New York University, the essays in this dossier move away from the assumption that to treat violence as an enduring phenomenon in its own right, with its productive and repressive qualities, is to endorse it. Rather, observing both its persistence and its specificity across varied contexts, the authors ask what kind of work violence does, and how diverse readings of violence, including the act of naming it, are necessary in attempting a counter-intuitive genealogy of the phenomenon and its implications for politics.
Dossier edited by Elena Bellina, J. Martin Daughtry, Crystal Parikh, Arvind Rajagopal and Magdalena Sabat. Transcription by Magdalena Sabat. Essays by Arvind Rajagopal, Allen Feldman, Banu Bargu, Drucilla Cornell, and Mary Louise Pratt.
Image caption: abbas amini, 2003. Lightjet print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, 60 x 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist, phil collins.
My remarks are structured around a consideration of four images.[1] These images will, I hope, enable us to confront the question of violence, of a specific kind of violence, by bringing it to us in its (almost) immediate actuality, in the material traces it leaves on the human body. The first one belongs to Sevgi Erdogan. She was a former political prisoner in Turkey. This photograph was taken on the 250th day of her hunger strike, close to her death. By that point, she had been reduced to little more than a skeleton. The second photograph shows Osman Osmanagaoglu. He was a former political prisoner in Turkey as well, again on the brink of death after months of self-starvation....>>
In my work, I have defended a nonviolent ethic through Derrida and Levinas, which begins with the commandment, "thou shall not kill." But this ethic certainly does not end there. My book The Philosophy of the Limit gives us a sustained defense of such an ethic, as does my most recent book, Moral Images of Freedom. Such an ethic, however, need not advocate a politics of nonviolent violence; indeed sometimes, such an ethic is, paradoxically, actually a mandate for certain kinds of violent political action. In what follows I would like to address some of the questions given to us by the organizers in the context of a question asked by Judith Butler in Precarious Life. Butler writes: The...>>
My ethnographic work in Northern Ireland and South Africa and on the current war on terror has been an engagement with forms of life, communities, subjects, and silenced sovereignties, navigating, drowning, surviving, and dying, within ecotones[1] of informalized state violence. By informalized violence I refer to de-centered warfare prosecuted by paramilitarized and decriminalized para-state proxies and surrogates in procedural mufti and armed with built in warrants of indemnification and deniability. I term this development the "becoming-nonstate-of-the-state" -- an apparatus of political virtualization and spectrality invested in the production of vicarious power rather than the practice of law conserving violence, classification, or discipline. This is war by proxy in which the state manipulates and enacts its mastery over its own...>>
If you work on Latin America then you know that there is a field of study there called "violentology," and there are specialists whom you call violentólogos, particularly in Colombia, where the question of violence has become a kind of constructing principle of social theorization. I find violence very unsatisfying as an object of study. We intellectuals use the term all the time as if we knew and agreed on what it is, what the term refers to. But in fact I think the concept of violence doesn't have contours for us -- perhaps that is something we can discuss. Violence has scenarios, like the ones we have been discussing, it has nodes, but I'm not sure what its...>>
Michel Foucault observed that, although the head of the king had been cut off, in political theory the king remained in his place.[1] For Foucault, theory did not appear able to think about politics without an organizing center, although in fact the character of sovereignty was changing decisively with the growth of bureaucracy and capitalist imperialism. Sovereignty had one set of meanings at home, and another in the colonies, and these were sutured together through violence in ways that liberal theorists seldom grasped. However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent disappearance of the only viable opposition to the world domination of the capitalist state, some of the raisons d'état for preserving sovereignty's fictions obtain no...>>
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