The Distinctiveness of Violence: From the Social Body to the Body Politic

Abstract

The last two chapters began a detailed look at violence with its own distinctions, in order to illuminate the topic of this book: how politics expresses itself through violence and violence through politics. The first of these chapters asked whether we can make ‘sense’ of violence, drawing on phenomenological philosophy, in particular. The second explored whether violence is innate, instinctive or learned. It showed how scientists have gradually uncovered the emotional/cerebral circuits which manage our responses to the social world, and how that social world generates stored memories of painful experiences and threats, affecting the delicate balance of these circuits. It drew attention to the potential epigenetic effects of psychic pain. However, while aggression might be latent in the biological body as a positive mechanism for addressing fear and danger, it is the social body, the body in its varied social relationships, that potentially transforms this into violence. It is the social context which gives violence the varied social and cultural meanings that underpin its potency. What is recognized as violence varies across time and space. This contingent social component together with much greater understanding of the biology of aggression, makes it possible to explore more deeply the meanings of violence which inform the body politic, including the meanings violence generate independent of apparent ends and goals. If social factors turn the positive circuits for response to danger into the negative use of aggression against others (sometimes and sometimes not defined as violence), how is violence reproduced through politics? By assuming a primarily biological intractability to violence, politics gives foundation to political collectivities—the ‘body politic’—which in turn structure and normalize our violence reproducing social relationships. An alternative is to build politics on the premise of the vulnerable rather than the masterful body, and to address the violences which enhance our vulnerability.