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Dear All, thank you for being here with you and being able to take part in the
discussion.
The violence we are talking about is not a spontaneous act, it is an act of
intended traumatization (to use a concept I found in the books of French
ethno-psychoanalyst Françoise Sironi). All examples that came up, historical as
well as current ones, were realized not by singular persons but by groups. They
were part of a political will or strategy, part of an attempt to empower the
own group and to kill others and destroy their subjectivity, the integrity of
their life, their body, their psyche, their social and material environment.
Political violence, I think, always is as much a material as an theatrical act:
in wars between nations as well as in civil wars, in the terror against groups
of a society that a state organizes or tolerates as well as in violent acts by
people who consider themselves as liberation fighters.
The first chapter of Frantz Fanon’s „Les damnés de la terre“, which is not
exactly translated by „The Wretched of the Earth“, is titled „De la violence“,
the English translation is „Concerning Violence“. Fanon describes the colonial
world as dominated by violence. Violence always means: to refuse the
recognition of the other as human subject. There is an inherent double-bind or
performative contradiction in it which seems to engender a necessity to be
explicitly enacted: Lacking any legitimation for his attempt to occupy a world
inhabited by others the colonizer tries to refuse and denial the subjectivity
of the other, to dehumanize her. But before this attempt to dehumanize the
other begins the already took place a certain recognition, a recognition that
the other is human, that she is a living being that already has addressed me
and even has touched me. In my view this notion by Emmanuel Lévinas that the
other always already has touched me and that I’m therefore always already in
the position of answering (of responsibility) is key for the understanding of
violence. There is a threatening moment in all social relations, at least as
long as we think ourselves as „one“. (And here certainly can be found a reason
why violence is practically always gendered.)
Concerning violence is also about the question how to overcome this
double-bind, how to deal with traumatization, how to deal with it without only
repeating the violence. Fanon’s book is about the impact of violence on all
human beings that get in touch with, on the perpetrators as well as on the
victims, of the impact it has on their psyche and on their bodies, on their
affects and emotions, on their thoughts, their dreams, their longing. And one
important reason of this lasting impact of violence is exactly the denial of
recognition and the lack of mediation that is in the core of the theatricality
of violence. Violence aims to produce an image of negation that occupies the
victim, that colonizes the space of its subjectivity. (Isn’t subjectivity first
of all a free space to relate images, thoughts, emotions, memories of being
affected in an always and continuously new way, to dramatize, as Gilles Deleuze
calls it his „Difference and Repetition“). It is part of what Michel Foucault
called the „Reason of Torture“ that violence is public but unspoken. That it is
exposed, performed and hidden at the same time. Diana Taylor speaks of
percepticide when she analyses the strategies of terror in Latin America during
the 70ties and 80ties.
The first resistance then against violence is: to speak about it. To find
images and words to communicate and to bind it, to symbolize it. In our
discussion Jon McKenzie already referred to Walter Benjamin’s statement that
there is no document of civilization that is not a document of barbarism at the
same time. It is a figure of thought, a truth that includes art: poetics,
images, theatre. If there is a theatricality of violence: can we really be sure
that theatre, art, film, literature does break with the repetition compulsion?
Reinhold Görling
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