The Intimate Lives of Violence and Resistance

Abstract

The Intimate Lives of Violence and Resistance Paul Martorelli (bio) Harini Amarasuriya, Tobias Kelly, Sidharthan Maunaguru, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic, and Jonathan Spencer (eds). The Intimate Life of Dissent: Anthropological Perspectives. London: UCL Press, 2020. 224 pp. £25.00 (pb). ISBN: 9781787357785. Hagar Kotef. The Colonizing Self Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 320 pp. $27.95 (pb). Paper ISBN: 9781478011330. The Intimate Life of Dissent and The Colonizing Self both challenge the liberal story that politics requires leaving behind those intimate spaces populated by individuals with unique identities, kinship networks, and emotional ties. They disrupt this story by foregrounding the intimate relations that constitute political subjects who both reject and accept violence. Their emphasis on subjectivity's relations to violence undermines the iconic image of dissent—the lone individual, who, when confronted with violence, must act against it because their conscience cannot stand it. And so, both books make room for ways we might resist violent orders by confronting our intimate attachments instead of denying them. The Intimate Life of Dissent focuses on dissenting subjects. Broadly speaking, each essay examines how a person or persons object to violence. The book relocates the dissident back within the social relations that produce them and make possible their dissent. The goal is to render intelligible modes of violence and dissent that exceed liberalism's frame by analyzing dissent's intimacy. In some essays, "intimacy" appears as a link "to the experience of familiarity within friendship, family, and love" as in Amarasuriya and Spencer's study of the Sri Lankan activist Joe Seneviratne's life.1 However, this collection theorizes intimacy "as going beyond that [everyday understanding]—opening up what Lauren Berlant has described as a 'range of attachments' that 'links the instability of the individual lives to the trajectory of the collective.'"2 For example, Oustinova-Stjepanovic's essay examines the uncomfortable intimacy of the all-encompassing collective of totalitarian Soviet Russia. McGranahan's work approaches these attachments from the other direction by emphasizing the intimate idiosyncrasy of detail in the diary of the Tibetan dissenter Rapga Pangdatsang. Although each uses a different frame of intimacy to construct different subjects of dissent, The Intimate Life of Dissent reveals how dissidents "are not simply lone individuals with abstract ideals…[who] act solely as moral individuals alone against the world, weighing up what is good and right to do in the face of violence, coercion and domination."3 The autonomous political subject, who follows nothing but their own conscience, turns out to have been "shaped and given meaning through the dense flux and flow of relations with friends, children, parents, siblings, lovers, comrades and others."4 Our intimate lives are essential to our political ones. Many have argued that what happens in our intimate lives is political (e.g., feminist critiques of domestic violence and the exploitation of women's work in the home). This collection illustrates how our political lives often depend on our intimate ones. [End Page 1155] For example, how would you answer the question: When does dissent occur? Do not imagine an abstract dissident, though. How would you, with your social contexts and relationships, respond when confronted with overwhelming wrong? You might be willing to put your life on the line to stop police brutality. But would you risk your life for an abstract principle like "justice"? Would you risk your friend's life for either a concrete project or an abstract principle? Would you endanger your students' lives? Our political subjectivity, our identity as dissidents, "is both enabled and constrained by our intimate relations."5 To understand the dissident and their dissent requires understanding the intimacies that make them possible. The Colonizing Self works with a similar premise. Kotef uses the intimate relations of the home, as both a physical place and a set of affective attachments, to better understand the violence generated and sustained by settler colonialism. Kotef develops her argument within the context of Israel/Palestine. But her analysis of subjects constituted through violence offers a foundation for theorizing other cases of settler colonialism and other subjectivities attached to the violence that makes them possible.6 I read Kotef as interested...