Violence: A Slippery Notion

Violence provides us with insight as to how we can interpret the relationship between law and violence through the ideas of positive and natural law. He also illustrates the dual function of violence: lawmaking and law preserving. Discipline and Punish, by Foucault, gives us a framework in which we can view violence in the modern form, through discipline. Using surveillance as the means of control, he shows us how discipline rose as a new form of domination, resulting from increased human knowledge about our body and soul. Lastly, Robert Cover"s Violence and the Word takes the common practice of judicial interpretation and shows us the inherent violence that is present in the everyday functioning of our judicial system.

Modern Psychoanalysis, 2003

Although thinkers throughout history have written quite a few pages about hatred, anger, aggression, resentment, etc., the theme of violence has long been treated a little poorly. It is only since the second decade of the last century that intellectuals including, notably, Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, among others, have started to think and write about violence more thoroughly. In the course of the twentieth century, thinkers such as Georges Bataille and René Girard joined them, and today there are many academic disciplines in which violence is an important research topic. Sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, etc. publish in journals devoted exclusively to this theme, and annually organize workshops and conferences worldwide on the theme of violence. Examples of research questions asked by researchers in the recent and highly diversified domain of violence studies are the following: Has violence increased over the course of the history of mankind, or is it rather on the decline? And what about the individual course of life:

This essay will attempt to (re)define the terms of violence in order to produce a useful terminology for the politics of resistance. This will be achieved in three main stages: 1. The proposal of the problem of violence; 2. Investigation of the problem of violence; 3. Solution proposal to the problem of violence. 1. The proposal of the problem of violence In the section The Problem of Violence I will introduce Žižek's distinction of subjective and objective forms of violence. Here I will characterize the main problem that burdens the philosophy of violence, namely, the glossary of violence suffers from inherently partisan and equivocal definitions of terms. In view of that, I will introduce Hobbe's and Freud's descriptions of violence as examples of analytical misrecognition of de facto violence. By discussing W. Benjamin's concept of divine violence I will then stress the philosophical requirement-and difficulty of describing a purely ontological form of violence, which is motivated neither culturally nor politically. 2. Investigation of the problem of violence In the section The Graph of Violence I will introduce a graph, which will allow me to superimpose Žižek's distinction of subjective and objective forms of violence onto Schmitt's distinction of the friend and enemy. This graph will maintain that the scholarly interpretations of violence are often very predictable and conceptually one-dimensional. The brief exploration of Fanon's and Arendt's descriptions of violence will further justify the architecture and terminology of the graph of violence. 3. Solution proposal to the problem of violence In the section The Graph of Affect I will introduce a contrasting graph, which will restructure the terms of violence by way of affect theory. Here I will show how Žižek's distinction between objective and subjective forms of violence utterly dissolves during major political events-effective circulations of affect. The term 'violence' will henceforth be exchanged for the term 'affect' as this will allow me to interpret violence as a form of affect, which is neither superior nor inferior to other forms of political affect-production. I will achieve this by following Massumi's, Bertelsen's and Murphie's descriptions of affect in politics. By focusing on the affect-rather than on violence-I will emphasize the necessity of managing tactical circulation of diverse sets of violent and nonviolent affects within the politics of resistance. The Problem of Violence When analyzing the issue of violence we are struck by the enormous misunderstanding as to what violence is. That is to say, the philosophy of violence lacks clear-cut systematization of specific

2009