VIOLENCE

The ‘truth’ of violence

• Jean Améry: "Only in rare moments of life do we truly stand face to face with the event and, with it, reality."

• "Torture is one of those moments”.

Aggresion: animal or human?

Norbert Elias: the civilising process = violencecontrol

increasing state monopoly on violence

Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression (1966)

Aggressive instinct shared with all animals

Erich Fromm: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (sg peculiarly human)

“The blood-spattered... archives of human history, from the earliest Egyptian… records tothe most recent atrocities: cannibalism, animaland human sacrificial practices, head hunting, body mutilating ... this mark of Cain thatseparates man from his anthropoid relatives and allies him with the deadliest carnivores”

(Robert Ardrey: ’The Predatory Transition fromApe to Man,’ 1953)

Niko Tinbergen: “On the one hand, man is akin to many species of animals in that he fights his own species. But on the other hand, he is, among the thousands of species that fight, the only one in which fighting is disruptive . . . Man is the only species that is a mass murderer, the only misfit in his own society.”

• the gentle savage• (Golding: The Inheritors – Neanderthalers and

Cro-Magnonians)

• The study of primates• Lawrence Keeley: War Before Civilization: The

Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996)• war among primates – Jane Goodall: The

Chimpanzees of Gombe (1986); books of Frans de Waal

Violence and aggression in psychoanalysis

• Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle

• the death principle (Thanatos)

• Freud: ‘besides the instinct to preserve living substance, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death.’

• Contradiction:

• death wish (Nirvana principle) vs destructiveness

• pre-Oedipal infancy: Melanie Klein

• oral phase: fantasy of ingesting the object

• love/hate relationship with our first objects

The origin of violence: Cain and Abel (the Ghent altarpiece)

Rubens: Cain and Abel

Georg Grosz: Cain or Hitler in Hell (1944)

• Genesis4: Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, “With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man.” 2 Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.

• Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. 3 In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the LORD.4 And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, 5 but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.

• 6 Then the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? 7 If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

• 8 Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.”[While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

• 9 Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”

• “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

• 10 The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. 11 Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. 12 When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

• 13 Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is more than I can bear.14 Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

• 15 But the LORD said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. 16 So Cain went out from the LORD’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

• 17 Cain made love to his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch.

Some quandaries

• Why did God reject Cain’s offering (sacrifice)?

• How did the brothers know that God had accepted Abel’s offering but not that of Cain?

• Why did God, instead of warning Abel, speak to Cain, seeming to try to prevent him from killing?

• Why did Cain kill Abel?

• Why did God ask Cain where Abel is? Doesn’t he know?

• Why is the first murderer given divine protection, and be allowed to marry, raise a family and establish a community?

• (+ 1: where did Cain find his wife?)

René Girard: Violence and the Sacred

• Cain: the tiller of the soil - Abel: shepherd

• the violence-outlet of animal sacrifice

• violence can be averted only by the presence of a third party, the sacrificial victim

Abel: shepherd -- Cain: farmer • Abel: Hebrew ‘hebel’ (breath, vapour, nothing) –

anything that lives and moves and is transient, including his own life.

• Cain: the verb ‘kanah’ (acquire, get, own property –so: to rule, subjugate

• Midrash: About what did they quarrel? “Come” said they, “let us divide the world.” One took theland and the other movables. The former said, “The land you stand on is mine,” while the latter retorted, “What you are wearing is mine.” One said: “Strip;” the other retorted: “Fly [off the ground].” Out of this quarrel, Cain rose up against his brother Abel.

Hegel: the Lord and the Bondsman(in The Phenomenonogy of Spirit)

• Master and Servant (Herr und Knecht)

• need for recognition (for our certainty tobecome truth) – we need the other

• the other’s recognition (I should have torecognise the other first)

• fight-to-death - fight for prestige (Russianroulette)

situational violence• Randall Collins: Violence – A Micro-Sociological

Theory (2008): “Not violent individuals, but violent situations”

• the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961)

• Hannah Arendt: the banality of evil

• Stanley Milgram’s 1963 exp: teachers and learners

• Philip Zimbardo: prison experiment (Stanford 1971)

• Abram de Swaan: The Killing Compartment: TheMentality of Mass Murder (2015)

Johannesburg from the air

Slavoj Žižek: Violence

• Subjective violence (physical and verbal)

• The universe of meanings

• Objective violence (invisible, slow)

Violence, war, politics

• Clausewitz: War is the extenson of politicalmeasures

• Hannah Arendt: ‘instrumental’ violence

• Hobbes: „Covenants, without the sword, arebut words”

Violence and politics: ‘good violence’• liberation movements, ‘good’ revolutions • Frantz Fanon: “The violence which has ruled over the

ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in is own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters” (The Wretched of the Earth)

• Violence of the coloniser: systematic dehumanisation, animalisation of the native

• Colonialism is “violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence” (61)

measurable violence

• collateral damage

• The human rights principle of proportionality

• a new economy of violence: ‘violence that both kills and saves, a violence that calculates and determines the threshold between life and death’

• the Iraq war: every dwelling space was a legitimate target except for houses with over 30 inhabitants. In this case, President Bush had to be consulted

Organised violence: violence and the law

• (1) law = nomos (division of the world)

• the blindness of the law

• (2) the ruse of the law: binds our own violenceand channels it against us

• (3) the obscenity of the law

Organised/systemic violence

• Lord of the Flies

• Ralph: ‘Rules are all we have’

• ‘This is a good island’

• masks – shedding identity (responsibility)

sacrifice

• René Girard

• Sacrifice is substitution (scapegoat)

• Protects the community

• St. Augustine: Of these two first parents of the human race, then, Cain was the firstborn, and he belonged to the city of men; after him was born Abel, who belonged to the city of God . . . Accordingly, it is recorded of Cain that he built a city, but Abel, being a sojourner, built none. For the city of the saints is above, although here below it begets citizens, in whom it sojourns till the time of its reign arrives, when it shall gather together all in the day of the resurrection; and then shall the promised kingdom be given to them, in which they shall reign with their Prince, the King of the ages, time without end. (City of God 15.1)

René Girard: Violence and the Sacred• Cain: the tiller of the soil - Abel: shepherd • The murder is committed by the one who does

not have the violence-outlet of animal sacrifice at his disposal (the difference bw sacrificial and non-sacrificial cults explains God’s preference for Abel)

• Old Testament: full of rivalries between brothers. Violence can be averted only by the presence of a third party, the sacrificial victim

• Sacrificial substitution depends on its ability to conceal the displacement upon which the rite is based (yet some awareness of the substitution and the original object is also necessary)

Agency and violence

• Améry: "Only in torture does the transformation of the person into flesh become complete. Frail in the face of violence, yelling out in pain, awaiting no help, capable of no resistance, the tortured person is only a body, and nothing else beside that."

• Kafka: ‘The Penal Colony’

• Max Weber: the state is “the rule of men over men based on the means of legitimate, that is allegedly legitimate, violence”.

• Etienne Balibar: the presumption that violence can be eliminated is a constitutive element of our idea of politics