Notes Toward an Aesthetics of Violence

Abstract

Author’s Preface. In trying to think about violence, aesthetics and the relation between the two, I found that I had to start over from the beginning. I had to allow my own preconceptions about violence and aesthetics – borrowed from any of a number of places, respectable (like Freud, Elias and Huizinga) and unrespectable (like my personal experiences of violence, and of Hollywood movies) – to be put into brackets, stored away for use at some other time. I had to submit my thinking to a kind of violence. And as for “aesthetics,” since I was sure that I was interested, precisely, in the subjective quality of experiencing violence in an artistic or ritualistic form, I had to put aside presumptions of a thesis, a vision of what violence was objectively, or a knowledge of what the artwork was in its objective, material condition. Hence these “notes,” where Freud, Elias, Huizinga, my personal experience and Hollywood movies all return, but in the condition of hypotheses and observations, from which, someday in the future, I might compose a real “aesthetics of violence.”