On Violence: A Reader - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082233769X ISBN 13: 9780822337690

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2007

Synopsis

This anthology brings together classic perspectives on violence, putting into productive conversation the thought of well-known theorists and activists, including Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Osama bin Laden, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Hobbes, and Pierre Bourdieu. The volume proceeds from the editors’ contention that violence is always historically contingent; it must be contextualized to be understood. They argue that violence is a process rather than a discrete product. It is intrinsic to the human condition, an inescapable fact of life that can be channeled and reckoned with but never completely suppressed. Above all, they seek to illuminate the relationship between action and knowledge about violence, and to examine how one might speak about violence without replicating or perpetuating it.

On Violence is divided into five sections. Underscoring the connection between violence and economic world orders, the first section explores the dialectical relationship between domination and subordination. The second section brings together pieces by political actors who spoke about the tension between violence and nonviolence—Gandhi, Hitler, and Malcolm X—and by critics who have commented on that tension. The third grouping examines institutional faces of violence—familial, legal, and religious—while the fourth reflects on state violence. With a focus on issues of representation, the final section includes pieces on the relationship between violence and art, stories, and the media. The editors’ introduction to each section highlights the significant theoretical points raised and the interconnections between the essays. Brief introductions to individual selections provide information about the authors and their particular contributions to theories of violence.

With selections by: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Osama bin Laden, Pierre Bourdieu, André Breton, James Cone, Robert M. Cover, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Engels, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Mohandas Gandhi, René Girard, Linda Gordon, Antonio Gramsci, Félix Guattari, G. W. F. Hegel, Adolf Hitler, Thomas Hobbes, Bruce B. Lawrence, Elliott Leyton, Catharine MacKinnon, Malcolm X, Dorothy Martin, Karl Marx, Chandra Muzaffar, James C. Scott, Kristine Stiles, Michael Taussig, Leon Trotsky, Simone Weil, Sharon Welch, Raymond Williams

About this title

About the Author

Bruce B. Lawrence is the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion at Duke University. He is the author of The Qur’an: A Biography; New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life; and Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence. He is the editor of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden and Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip-Hop (with miriam cooke).

Aisha Karim is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Saint Xavier University. She is a coeditor of Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader.

From the Back Cover

"This volume provides a long-needed anthology of major writings related to the subject of violence. The readings include excerpts from classic contributions of Marx and Freud along with pieces by modern thinkers such as Girard and Bourdieu and social activists from Gandhi to bin Laden. The selections are skillfully chosen to address a central theme, that violence always takes place in a context. The readings explore the idea that social, internal, ritualized, and other forms of violence are part of the processes of life and not necessarily anomalies. This is a thoughtful and arresting set of essays on an important topic that will be useful in the classroom and much discussed in the public forum."--Mark Juergensmeyer, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of "Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ON VIOLENCE

A READER

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3769-0

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................................................................................................................ixGeneral Introduction: Theorizing Violence in the Twenty-first Century.....................................................................................................................................................1PART I. THE DIALECTICS OF VIOLENCE........................................................................................................................................................................................17Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit....................................................................................................................................................................27Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dhring............................................................................................................................................................................................39Karl Heinrich Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy..............................................................................................................................................................62Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence (The Wretched of the Earth).............................................................................................................................................................78PART II. THE OTHER OF VIOLENCE............................................................................................................................................................................................101Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule......................................................................................................................................................................110Adolf Hitler, The Right of Emergency Defense (Mein Kampf).................................................................................................................................................................127Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet.......................................................................................................................................................................................143Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.....................................................................................................................................................................158Raymond Williams, Keywords; Marxism and Literature........................................................................................................................................................................180Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice..........................................................................................................................................................................188James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.....................................................................................................................................................................199PART III. THE INSTITUTION OF VIOLENCE: THREE CONNECTIONS..................................................................................................................................................................215Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego...............................................................................................................................................................226Linda Gordon, Social Control and the Powers of the Weak (Heroes of Their Own Lives).......................................................................................................................................245Del Martin, Battered Wives................................................................................................................................................................................................255Bruce B. Lawrence, The Shah Bano Case (Shattering the Myth)...............................................................................................................................................................262Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence (Reflections).......................................................................................................................................................................268Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.......................................................................................................................................286Robert M. Cover, Violence and the Word....................................................................................................................................................................................292Chandra Muzaar, Human Rights and the New World Order......................................................................................................................................................................314Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred......................................................................................................................................................................................334James Cone, Liberation and the Christian Ethic (God of the Oppressed).....................................................................................................................................................351Sharon Welch, Dangerous Memory and Alternate Knowledges (Communities of Resistance and Solidarity)........................................................................................................................362Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force..............................................................................................................................................................................377PART IV. THE STATE OF VIOLENCE............................................................................................................................................................................................391Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan..................................................................................................................................................................................................399Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.............................................................................................................................................................................416Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison...........................................................................................................................................................444Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Savages, Barbarians, and Civilized Men (Anti-Oedipus)..................................................................................................................................472PART V. THE REPRESENTATION OF VIOLENCE....................................................................................................................................................................................491Andr Breton and Leon Trotsky, Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art................................................................................................................................................498Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing..................................................................................................................................503Kristine Stiles, Shaved Heads and Marked Bodies: Representations from Cultures of Trauma..................................................................................................................................522Osama bin Laden, Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places / Roland Jacquard, In the Name of Osama Bin Laden: Global Terrorism and the Bin Laden Brotherhood.....................39Elliott Leyton, Touched by Fire: Doctors without Borders in a Third World Crisis..........................................................................................................................................547Copyright Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................................................................................................555Index.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................559

Chapter One

WHAT BINDS THE READINGS IN THIS SECTION is a vision of history as a dialectical unfolding through relations of domination and subordination that may, or may not, produce a degree of freedom from these relationships. Yet, as Marx suggests, the possibility of freedom in the form of a new or different society will still be marked by the violence that inaugurates it.

All four of the readings excerpted in this section reflect revolutionary moments in world history: Hegel belonged to the period of the French Revolution, while Marx and Engels belonged to the period which saw the ripening and elaboration of the working-class revolution, even though the 1848 European revolutions failed to secure for the working classes the social and economic gains that Marx and Engels had envisioned. Fanon belonged to the period that saw the widespread decolonization that followed World War II and also the rise of anti-European nationalisms.

These readings highlight the relationship between violence and the economic world orders of their respective historical junctures: violence and feudalism in Hegel, violence and capitalism in Marx and Engels, and violence and imperialism in Fanon. Not only do these selections represent the revolutions of their times, but they also encapsulate the dialectical nature of those historical revolutions.

Consider Hegel. For Hegel the establishment of self-consciousness in the bondsman involves two moments of fear. The first moment of fear entails a containment of self-consciousness in relational space (with respect to the lord), while the second moment results in a crystallization of that space into a nonrelational, independent space. It is in this second moment that the bondsman changes. He is no longer the bondsman in relation to the lord: because he labors, he achieves independence through the independence of the product of his labor. At both moments, he fears death, but with a difference: in the first moment his fear of death finds its mediating object in the lord, while in the second moment his fear is immediately of death itself.

The bondsman's fear of the lord is "the beginning of wisdom." It is wisdom because the bondsman recognizes that his self-consciousness needs another in order to exist. It is at this moment that fear becomes a means of containing self-consciousness in a relational space; and it is this containment in space that marks its existence. But once self-consciousness becomes arrested in this relational space, that is, servitude in relation to the lord, servitude becomes its essence. The first moment of fear not only forms the self-consciousness of the bondsman but also establishes servitude as the condition of being, of life itself, and not simply as a mode of living. He exists because he is a bondsman, and for that reason he seeks to preserve his status of bondsmanship, fearing that it is only through this status that he can preserve his life.

This anxiety to preserve his status, and thus his life, produces the second moment of fear, the fear of death, "the Absolute Lord." The bondsman responds to this fear of death by producing the thing that he works on, a thing that now becomes the essence of his self-consciousness. In other words, the bondsman becomes an independent consciousness through work. He no longer needs the lord to rearm his existence, for in this second moment he achieves bondsmanship, and thus existence, through production of the thing itself.

Further, the production of work entails the manufacturing of consent in and by the bondsman. The bondsman must give his consent for fear of his life. It is in the production of this thing that the continuation of his life lies; "thinghood is the essential characteristic" for his consciousness, Hegel argues, yet it is this very thing "which holds the bondsman in bondage; it is his chain from which he could not break free in the struggle." Existence means voluntary servitude.

The terror of death which the bondsman experiences and which becomes objectivized and exteriorized in the product of his work also becomes the mediatory force between absolute freedom, or anarchy, and government, which is "nothing else but the self-established focus ... of the universal will." Freedom and control thus stand in direct opposition to each other in a life-and-death struggle. They constitute moments of a dialectical movement from the death of all distinction, of the individual self-consciousness and will in absolute freedom, to the reestablishment of the universal will through government. Such a movement is a halt, but it is a temporary halt, for as soon as this seizure of self-consciousness in its "allotted sphere" takes place, the dialectical movement begins all over again. There is no escape from that perpetual circularity through which social groups and classes move until they are again arrested into relational spaces of differentiation. Both movement and arrest must be preserved as negations of each other. "The negation coming from consciousness," argues Hegel, "... supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded, and consequently survives its own supersession."

Absolute freedom, or anarchy, far from being an unqualified good, contains within itself its own death. For as soon as this "flat, commonplace monosyllable," which characterizes the universal will, is established, the unison fulfills itself in the establishment of the universal will through government, which, by definition, is a "victorious faction." Distinctions between this victorious faction and other factions are reconstituted, and with the return of these distinctions, individual self-consciousnesses also return to their state of containment in "allotted spheres." Universal will vanishes, and with it, absolute freedom.

Absolute freedom, then, is terrified of its own essence, its own work, or death. This "terror of death is the vision of this negative nature of itself." Stricken with terror at this vision of its own death, absolute freedom organizes itself into government, which results in its death by other means: since government is nothing "else but a faction," "victorious against other factions." The universal will passes into specific wills, and difference is reestablished. Terror thus becomes the force which drives the universal will first into arresting itself within a relational space of factions, then leads to its death in the reconstitution and recontainment of specific wills into "allotted spheres" marked by difference and distinctions. There is no escape from death, only from the choice of one means to death by the embrace of its opposite.

Despite its metaphysical pessimism, the Hegelian system does value the product of work and the social distinctions arising from division of labor. Only labor and its effects ward o the threat of a violence that lacks consciousness even of the self and of the violence done to one's whole being. Yet in the feudal schema, in bourgeois society, the threat of violence is seen to rest on production itself. It is this inversion of the Hegelian dialectic that appears prominent in Marxist thought. According to Engels, Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic "upon its head; or rather, turned o its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet." Locating the origins of capital in the process that he dubs "so-called primitive accumulation," Marx points to violence as a historical necessity in the evolution of capital. Capital is the original sin that "comes [into the world] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt."

Marx describes primitive accumulation as the "prehistory of capital"; it is not the "result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure." Look at the historical transformations in Britain in "the last third of the fifteenth century and the first few decades of the sixteenth," he observes, where one finds an example of the classic form taken by the process of primitive accumulation. It begins in England via "the rapid expansion of wool manufacture in Flanders and the corresponding rise in the price of wool." This prompts the new nobility, for whom "money was the power of all powers," to embrace with full force the transformation of communal arable land into sheep walks. They advocate the subsequent clearing of estates, which takes a most drastic form in the Scottish Highlands. Marx calls attention to the plight of Scottish clansmen who were deprived first of their land, then of their fishing rights, before being hurled into the labor market as free and rightless workers. The results were twofold: the concentration of the means of production-for instance, land, sheep, tools, money-in the hands of a few, and the creation of a mass of producers who had to work for the elite class in order to provide the barest minimum of subsistence for themselves.

It is not just in this forced clearing out of the people that the violent nature of primitive accumulation manifests itself; indeed, violence and force become necessary in order to compel these expropriated people to work and to conform to the discipline of the working day. Gradually, the worker is made to accept the discipline necessary for the capitalist mode of production. And in this process the elite makes use of the legal apparatus of the state and compels the workers through "grotesquely terrorist laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labor." Indeed, the emergent bourgeoisie uses the power of the state to regulate wages, effectively forcing workers into the limits suitable for making a profit while also lengthening the working day.

This creation of a proletariat, in Marx's view, requires comparison with the category of slavery. The workers' condition was effectively that of slaves. Marx paraphrases Isaac Le Chapelier, "rapporteur of the Committee" on the law in the French Penal Code, in order to advance his argument: "Every combination by the worker," noted Marx, "was 'an assault on liberty and the declaration of the rights of man.'" The former slave masters were now the entrepreneurs, while the workers were denied all but the fiction of liberty. They were not to be "permitted to inform themselves about their own interests, nor to act in common and thereby lessen their 'absolute dependence,' 'which is almost a state of slavery,' because by doing this they infringe 'the liberty of their former masters, who are the present entrepreneurs.'"

Indeed, the phenomenon of slavery is what makes primitive accumulation what it is. The compulsion to work created by the expropriation of these human beings finds its ultimate manifestation in precisely this analytic of slavery; it is not coincidental that Marx talks of wage labor as wage-slavery. Just as the process of primitive accumulation creates poverty, it transforms the poor into wage-slaves, actual slaves, and what Marx calls "slaves of the parish," comprising those poor people who could be employed by anyone "willing to give them food and drink and to find them work." Capitalist production from the fifteenth century on is like primitive accumulation, but it is worse. It is worse because the external force and violence of the latter are now internalized in the former: whereas during the stage of primitive accumulation, the worker has to be compelled, by circumstance, by law, or by violence, to work for another, the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the redundancy of this external use of force, for the worker has internalized the discipline necessary to earn wages; his dependence on the capitalist system itself becomes the driving force to work.

It is not coincidental that the simultaneous fostering of wage-labor and slavery in Europe, because of the growing demand for labor, is accompanied by the growth of slavery in the colonies. The capitalist mode of production corresponds to the emergence of the colonial mission; indeed, it could not have been made possible without the colonial era. In this sense, colonialism, by its very essence, reifies a form of primitive accumulation that is antecedent to the capitalist mode of production but is also instrumental to the success of the latter. That the colonial enterprise depended on an element of primitive accumulation becomes clear precisely in the role that it played in the slave trade and in the employment of slaves on plantations. While colonies such as India provided the grounds for loot and plunder, and later indentured labor to work on plantations in India itself and in Africa, the African colonies for a long time provided the labor power in the form of slaves, either kidnapped, or bought and sold by their own princes and chieftains, to work on the plantations in the Americas: "The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there." Although Marx is primarily occupied with the developed form that primitive accumulation takes in Britain, namely, the capitalist mode of production, he is nevertheless quite unambiguous that colonialism and slavery as its byproduct depend on, even as they demonstrate the power of, primitive accumulation.

While Marx speaks of slavery in the colonies as the "pedestal" on which wage slavery was built in Europe, Engels talks about the rise of slavery in Europe as a foundation for the Greek and Roman empires, and through these empires, for world civilization. Indeed, Engels makes the self-consciously "heretical" claim that slavery was "a great step forward" for world history, in the sense that at a certain juncture, "the advance to a society based on class antagonism could be accomplished only in the form of slavery," not simply because slavery meant that the prisoners of war who earlier would have been killed were now at least spared their lives to be incorporated as slaves into the labor power of the victorious faction, but also because the inception of the institution of slavery entailed an advance toward a society based on class antagonism, which was a step toward the anticipated and hoped-for Marxist ideal of the working-class revolution-the stage at which the worker would take control of the means of production.

In Anti-Dhring, written as a tirade against a then contemporary socialist, Eugen Dhring, Engels argues that the economic is a far more fundamental force for subjugation than the political (while Dhring had argued the reverse). Citing several historical examples, Engels asserts that capital has a logic of its own, that the use of force is merely the means to the ends, that is, economic power; speaking of the bourgeois revolution, Engels suggests that it happened because the "political conditions in France had remained unaltered, while the economic conditions had outgrown them." The bourgeois revolution was needed to create political conditions in which "the new economic conditions could exist and develop." As an illustration of the dialectical progression of history, Engels cites the history of warfare. He suggests that each innovation in the history of militarism had been effected because it was instrumental for economic gains. But, by the very same token, such innovations could take place only if a certain amount of economic power could be staked, which would "help force to victory without which force ceases to be force."

The prior necessity of economic power in effecting advances in military technology, however, becomes an economic burden on states. Engels suggests, first, that innovation in weaponry has created a situation wherein any "further progress which would have any revolutionizing influence is no longer possible." But second, and more important, he argues, militarism has reached a stage when it will collapse "by the dialectics of its own evolution," the weapons and their maintenance having become so expensive that they constitute an excessive economic burden on the states. Engels points to the modern warship, a "lavish waste of money," in his view, because it has been developed to such perfection that it is both "outrageously costly and unusable in war." The state now has to pay for one warship what it used to pay for a whole fleet of ships; hence, the cost of the production and the operation of warships has become prohibitively expensive. And what has happened in the navy is also happening in the army, with the result that it, too, is bound to fall into ruin.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082233769X
• ISBN 13: 9780822337690
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 590
• Editor: Lawrence