Afterword: The Phenomenology of Violence and the Politics of Becoming

Abstract

This essay deploys a bricolage of the reflections of Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, William E. Connolly, and Achille Mbembe in order to construct a phenomenology of violence. While much of the essay is a response to the collection's trenchant analysis of the historicity of violence and of the conditions of its representability and narration, its effort is to supplement the conversation about the violence of our contemporaneity with philosophical reflections that appear only fleetingly or are differently inflected in the collection. More to the point, the essay shifts the emphasis from the limits, indeed, violence, of representation to a “politics of becoming” grounded in a fragile transcendence of these limits.