Idea Of Violence Research Articles

Split in bhakti, United in bhakti

Jaimini’s Book of the Horse Sacrifice (Jaiminīya Āśvamēdhikaparvan) is a late mediaeval Vaiṣṇava text that is unusual for several reasons. In this article we examine the interplay of violence, devotion and ritual in the Sanskrit vorlage and its Kannada transfiguration—the Jaiminibhārata of Lakṣmīśa (ca. 1500 CE). Violent emotions or extreme feelings are deeply imbricated in South Asia religious discourse. Extreme feeling is entangled with the history of texts that emerged as a result of interreligious and intra- religious debate. Our article puts forth the idea of violence as a mode of bhakti devotion, and we historicize the emergence of violence-as-bhakti in the Vaiṣṇava context, using the tale of Mayūradhvaja from Jaimini’s Book.

Beyond the Legacy of Absolutism: Re-examining Jean Bodin’s Idea of Anti-Tyranny Violence

ABSTRACT The longstanding debate over Jean Bodin’s (1530–1596) Six Books of a Commonweale—whether it championed an ideology of absolutism or pioneered a normative doctrine of the modern sovereign state—has profoundly influenced our understanding of Bodin’s intellectual legacy. This article challenges the influential absolutist reading by re-examining Bodin’s ideas of violence against tyrants. Proponents of the absolutist interpretation often view Bodin’s rejection of resistance against the tyrant as compelling evidence of his defense of absolutism, suggesting that this stance negates the constitutional constraints imposed by fundamental and natural laws on the sovereign. However, this article contends that such a reading is overly simplistic. A closer analysis of Bodin’s nuanced perspective reveals that he does not remove the constitutional limitations established by both fundamental and natural laws. Instead, Bodin posits that sovereigns who violate these higher laws could face either domestic resistance or a just war of punishment. Thus, labeling Bodin merely as an absolutist ideologue is inappropriate, as it risks overshadowing the profound intellectual legacy he offers as a serious political thinker, jurist, and the father of modern state theory.

Sexuelle Gewalt gegen Kinder und Jugendliche in der Familie

As part of the process of coming to terms/working through the past with sexual violence by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual abuse in Germany, a study was conducted on the offence context of the family. Oral and written reports from adults who were affected by and witnesses of sexual violence in childhood in the context of the family were analysed. The study was linked to previous work and discussions on social silence and ideas of violence in the family as a private matter. The findings show that the violence often started early, was accompanied by other forms of violence, and ranged from severe physical violence to manipulation without the use of physical violence. The perspectives of survivors on their experience as a child are of particular importance. They show that children depend on family members and their interpretation of boundary violations and violence. When children and young people experience violence, ideas and structures of upbringing, family and gender roles have a direct impact. A central experience of many of the survivors was that they were not taken seriously. This intertwining of family, childhood and violence has not been sufficiently researched so far. Moreover, perpetrators’ perspectives and silence often prevailed in families and institutions; even as adults, most of those affected often experienced little support and recognition.

Trajectory of religious radicalization

 The article discusses the stages of radicalism in Kazakhstan, the external and internal factors that led to terroristic activities within the country’s territory and to the departure of individuals - sometimes entire families - to the combat zones in the Middle East. The author suggests that the universality of contemporarily neo-fundamentalism may be successfully conceptualized in terms of “deterritorialisation” and “deculturation” coined by a French political scientist Olivier Roy. The article also attempts to precise the key problems related to the concept of “radicalization”. Being wildly used in scholarly literature, here it is an umbrella term to describe various means to turn the worldview of an individual or a community to make it extreme, militant and violent. The author argues that there cannot be a single depiction of a radical nor a universal path of radicalization. The trajectory of radicalization is constantly evolving. It is crucial to bear in mind that radicalization is not a process independent of person’s worldview, on the contrary, it is all about socialization of an individual, his/her deliberate drawing into a new worldview. Moreover, the empirical data contained in the article show that the ideas of violence are not propagated. The ideologues of radical organizations preach the values of different nature such as religious education, aid to the coreligionists, building of the brotherhood, idealized life in an ideal society. Key words: radicalization, neofundamentalism, jihadism, the Islamicisation of radicalism

Факторы трансформации политического ислама в мировой политике: возникновение насилия и терроризма

The article studies factors of transformation of political Islam and reasons for its “tightening” in the modern context. On the basis of the ideas of social constructivism, the author traces the main milestones in the evolution of political Islam and the formation of its radical branches that orient towards violence and terrorism. The article examines nine mega-events that ultimately determined the specifics of the modern union of Islam and poli tics — the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the September 11 attacks (2001), the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the “Arab Spring”, and the establishment of political Islam with a “Turkish face”. The author demonstrates that after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Islam began to gradually transform from the social phenomenon into the world-political factor. Initially, this tendency was observed in the intellectual and ideological spheres, but then penetrated practical politics. The article identifies four models of modern political Islam — Shiite, Salafi-jihadist, Takfirist-jihadist and moderate political Islam. According to the author’s conclusion, the attitude towards violence within these models is largely determined by the peculiarities of the formation, geographic ambitions and goals of the respective branches. The Shiite branch of political Islam that has established in Iran justifies violence for solving defensive tasks and appeals mainly to the categories of justice and protection of the oppressed. Salafijihadist and Takfirist groups, in essence, see violence as a key instrument for implementing the commandments of Allah and rebuilding the world on the principles of Sharia. The moderate political Islam (as shown by analyzing the case of Turkey) completely rejects violence, and religion remains largely a social phenomenon, although it is used for political purposes, in particular, to attract the electorate. On the basis of his analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that the idea of violence as an inherent element of political Islam is erroneous, but at the same time he points out risks of the increasing significance of this factor.

Discussion of "Brother's Keeper: Robert Smithson's Anti-Elegiac Pictures"

Discussion of "Brother's Keeper:Robert Smithson's Anti-Elegiac Pictures" Jane Hanenberg (bio) "History decays into images […]" – Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project Dr. Boettger's vivid and absorbing paper about Robert Smithson links us to an abundance of psychoanalytic ideas. We read of grief and mourning in Smithson's work. We learn about a life devoted to writing and art. We are also introduced to Robert Smithson's early paintings, which are depictions of a psychic relationship to a sibling he never met. Her paper expands our thoughts about the complexities of mourning, especially in the life of the replacement child. As we are faced this year with the convergence of pandemic losses and the pressing need to reexamine historic losses, Dr. Boettger also develops our thoughts about grief and the complexities of mourning. I'll begin exactly where our presenter does in her 2010 book about land art, entitled Earthworks. The subtitle, Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, takes me to days of undergraduate study in New York when we demonstrated frequently to protest the carnage of the Vietnam War. We counted our country's losses weekly. In the mid-sixties, the pop artist and sculptor Claus Oldenburg dug a trench in Central Park. He informally titled it Hole. It measured six feet long and seven feet deep. Was it a minimalist "hole," a fundamental shape which Oldenburg sculpted in negative space? Or, was it a grave pit which signified the tragedies of the war? This tension, between creation and mourning, is a central theme in Smithson's work and is the topic of this discussion. We learn that Robert Smithson's body of work was audacious and dark. The critic Peter Schjeldahl called it "poetically sublime" (Schjeldahl, 2004, p. 198). The paintings have deeply religious and spiritual qualities. The blood and suffering they depict can be seen as psychic representations of the dead Harold [End Page 595] and his blood disease. Related to medieval depictions of Jesus' suffering, they are the imagistic descendants of the legacy of Grunewald's 16th century crucifixion, which shows Christ's agony in graphic detail. Some of the images of Smithson's work with full-frontal presentation and luminous color recall the religious clarity of Byzantine mosaics. I wonder, though, if their art historical, more modern cousins may be the German Expressionists. These artists, Otto Dix, Emil Nolde and Max Beckman also made raw and vivid paintings using a symbolic iconography of spirituality and death. They all painted crucifixions. At the turn of the century, these artists felt muzzled by strict bourgeois mores of the previous era and the idioms of naturalism. They found themselves transforming religious themes into a visual vocabulary that expressed anxiety and existential doubt. The works that resulted were, like Smithson's religious paintings, fiercely emotive, and shocking. I recall these artists now since they, like Freud, were deeply affected by the trauma of the First World War. Like Smithson, they painted the unstaunched blood of grief. Psychoanalysis offers many ways of understanding the psychic underpinnings of art and the artist's own relation to it. As you have seen in the photographs of his consulting room, Freud surrounded himself with an audience of art objects and was devoted to the art of antiquity. In understanding the artist, Freud cited sexuality and the drives. Melanie Klein gave us the idea of violence in infantile fantasy and the importance of destruction in all creative productions. Winnicott introduced the idea of play, a creation itself, as a serious and essential activity. He reminded us that artists of all kinds experience an inherent dilemma which belongs to the coexistence of two desires; the urgent need to seek the other and the still more urgent need not to be found. This paradox speaks to the oceanic experience of an artist at work in the studio; time becomes limitless and unbounded. In 1915, when Freud wrote Mourning and Melancholia, two of his sons were on the front lines. The book served as a transformational object for him. His fear for his sons and his mourning for the victims of the war created a work of the mind. His hypothesis, long held...

Representações sociais dos/as professores/as acerca da violência contra mulher: uma análise estrutural

O presente estudo se propõe a identificar as representações sociais da violência contra as mulheres entre professores/as da rede pública em cidades no sertão de Pernambuco. Participaram da pesquisa 60 profissionais dos três níveis da educação básica: educação infantil, ensino fundamental e médio. Para coleta de dados, foi aplicado um questionário de evocação livre e hierarquização de palavras, e as informações foram posteriormente organizadas em um quadro de quatro casas, que permite inferir o núcleo central e o sistema periférico de uma representação social. Os resultados mostraram que entre as palavras que compõem o núcleo central estão crime, crueldade, machismo e medo, que evidenciam o caráter normativo da representação, baseada na ideia da violência como uma construção sociocultural. O termo educação presente na segunda periferia aponta a importância da escola como agente de socialização na formação dos/as alunos/as. Conclui-se que os/as professores/as devem ser capacitados/as para fazer parte da rede de enfrentamento, compreendendo que a violência contra as mulheres é uma questão pertinente para o currículo escolar.

How Can We Love Our Enemies When We Kill Our Friends? Shifting the Theological Debate Over Violence

AbstractViolence is often thought of in terms of intentional, discrete actions, and in the debate between so‐called “neo‐Anabaptists” and “neo‐Augustinians” this has often been the focus, especially around actions like policing and war. However, this idea of violence is insufficient and, intentionally or not, obfuscates forms of violence like the “slow violence” of destructive economic arrangements that harm not only enemies but friends as well. Through an investigation of the apparel industry this article addresses the too‐narrow understandings of violence that implicate theologians themselves in the “systemic” and “slow” violence inflicted through exploitative economic arrangements and systematic environmental degradation. The violence of the contemporary political economy compounds exponentially when one considers not only the human costs of global industry but also the toll it takes on the planet, which in turn affects the world’s poorest people no matter their geographic location or type of work. How might various sides of the more traditional argument find common ground for doing justice around these forms of violence in which they already daily participate, rather than giving the majority of attention to actions taking place periodically (or speculating about violence that may not even happen)? In short, violence is not just the realm of militaries, it is the reality of our global political economy, and this must be addressed by theologians of all types and traditions.

¿Por qué si hay tanta violencia en el camino ellas siguen migrando? Antropología, violencia y migración

This article aims to construct an anthropological route to explore migration in transit through the framing of violence and gender and the feminist category of lived experience. The analysis is situated in relation to a continuum of violence that poor migrant central American women face from early in their lives and not just when migrating. Arguments are supported by a multi-sited ethnography approach and the idea of violence as a constitutive life element producing oppressive relationships of women before, during, and after the migratory experience.

Introduction: Escaping the Nation? National Consciousness and the Horizons of Decolonization

This special issue emerges from the debates around the ideas of violence, liberation, and national consciousness. The catalyst that prompted us to interrogate both the necessity of the nation-state form within decolonization, and the need to excavate and illuminate what Gary Wilder (2015, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, xi) called “non-national orientations to decolonization” was provided by Frantz Fanon’s reflections on national consciousness. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (2004, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 179) states that “[n]ational consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.” The immediate and obvious question that took shape was: what exactly is national consciousness, and how is it different from nationalism? Taking Fanon’s prompt, the contributions to this special issue launch the following provocations: what anti-colonial imaginaries and projects existed that did not envisage the end of colonialism as the beginning of nationalism? How and to what extent do these anticolonial imaginaries and projects confront the postcolonial settlements of the contemporary global order? Last but not least, what are the limits/traps of attempts to escape the nation?

Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid by Louise Meintjes

Reviewed by: Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid by Louise Meintjes Imani Sanga Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid. By Louise Meintjes, with photographs by TJ Lemon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. [xii, 338 p. ISBN 9780822362500 (hardcover), $94.95; ISBN 9780822362654 (paperback), $26.95; ISBN 9780822373636 (e-book), price varies.] Photographs, notes, references, index. Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid presents a detailed account of various ways in which Zulu ngoma (which involves singing, drumming, and dancing) mediates sociopolitical life and shapes how individuals relate to each other, to different social assemblages (e.g., racial, ethnic, and gendered), and to national and global politics. Ngoma aesthetics is shown to be inextricably interwoven with sociocultural and politicoeconomic life experiences in postapartheid South Africa. The book is a pleasurable read, especially in the way it weaves together detailed ethnographic narratives, historical accounts, and theoretical explication. The book is also enjoyable because photographs of ngoma performances, taken by a renowned award-winning photographer T. J. Lemon, correspond well with and supplement the descriptions. Together they make us imagine the sounds and movements of the pictured performers. Shaped by South Africa's history of migrant labor, ngoma participates in defining and expressing manhood and masculinity through the culture of competition, evocation of praise names, and eloquent and controlled voicing of anger and power. Louise Meintjes discusses how Zulu ngoma dancers use their voice and body movements to project themselves as warrior-soldiers (or amasosha). The music constructs the figure of a musical warrior-soldier through a number of performance acts: the drum-steady groove, dancers' kicks and dancers' uniforms, and the nicknames that reference guns and military ranks, among other things. According to Meintjes, "the blend of military styles, sounded, gestured, adorned, personalized, and differently figured in various contexts, marks the soldiers' performance of violence as performance" (p. 103). Likewise, Meintjes shows how the militarized and competitive performance of Zulu ngoma helps articulate Zulu ethnic identity and solidarity as well as mediate competitive party politics involving the African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party, especially during the turbulent transition years (around 1992 and 1994). She illustrates her arguments with direct quotations from dancers' speech or songs. For example, to describe how bitter experiences of violence inform the lyrics of ngoma songs, she presents a moving excerpt quoted from the dancers' song: "When will these things be over? When will this business of aiming guns at us be over? Houses are on fire. When will these things be over? Things are against the black person. When will these things be over?" (p. 145). She uses this excerpt to demonstrate how participants utilize ngoma's repetitive musicopoetic form to reflect and express their personalized feelings about their everyday encounter with violence. Ngoma enables these participants to carry their experiences and ideas of violence into entertainment. "Dancers finesse their encounters with violence through ngoma, and on behalf of their art" (p. 146). Dust of the Zulu also provides a rich discussion of how ngoma dancers address issues related to HIV/AIDS. [End Page 683] Specifically, Meintjes shows how ngoma dancers balance between the culture of secrecy and silences, on the one hand, and collective and individual acts of care, on the other. While dancers try to combat the social stigmatization, alienation, exclusion, and humiliation of HIV/AID victims through socially sanctioned reticence about the illness, they also strive to take care of the suffering or weakened individuals. This ambiguity is also evident in ngoma aesthetics. On the one hand, ngoma aesthetics cherish and depend on the dancers' display of strength, agility, and endurance; hence bodies weakened by illness are antithetical to ngoma aesthetics. On the other hand, in order to take care of their weakened bodies, infected persons also may shift their artistic expressions from virtuosic and rigorous dancing to vocal performance. As Meintjes explains, "A politics of silence coupled with a poetics of ambiguity enables people to take care of others socially while each figures out his or her relationship to the affliction and so his or her plan of action" (p. 197). She also argues that the culture of silence and continued participation in ngoma performance enables...

The Art of Murder and Ars Rhetorica: De Quincey’s Essay as Mock-Encomium

The Art of Murder and Ars Rhetorica: De Quincey’s Essay as Mock-Encomium Roxanne Covelo (bio) Introduction: Blackwood’s, murder, and rhetoric One of the thornier problems of “on murder considered as one of the Fine Arts” is its liberal mixing of real and fictional violence. In the essay, which appeared in the February 1827 edition of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, De Quincey mixes examples from the Bible and Antiquity with murders having taken place not long ago in modern Britain, cases that his readers would no doubt remember vividly and to which he refers by name.1In spite of the potential sting of its subject matter, however, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” was warmly received upon publication, and has remained one of De Quincey’s most popular essays ever since. This is perhaps for the very simple reason that it is genuinely funny. Even for contemporary readers, its comedy is something more than the proverbial sum of tragedy and time. And yet this essential feature of “On Murder”—its unlikely humor—is rarely explored in discussions of the essay. If it is mentioned at all, such acknowledgments often consist of no more than an offhand allusion to the “satirical” nature of the work, though just what is being satirized remains unclear. Most often, the word satirical is being used merely as a synonym for humorous, with only a handful of critics having undertaken seriously the task of approaching “On Murder” as satire and of identifying its object. These critics include John Whale,2Joel Black,3and Frederick Burwick,4 [End Page 309] who have each suggested that De Quincey may be critiquing the morbid voyeurism of British reading audiences, or that “On Murder” may constitute a satire of Kant’s aesthetic theory. However, for reasons that will become clear, this reading of “On Murder” as hidden attack is not wholly plausible, and the essay’s humor is better described as parodic rather than satiric in aim. The idea of his condemning readers’ fascination with violence, especially, is difficult to believe for anyone familiar with De Quincey’s personal interests and body of work; and, in any case, the sanctimony of an indictment of public morals would hardly have been de bon ton in the pages of Blackwood’s. Nor was the conceit of murder-connoisseurship particularly shocking or new. On the contrary, it was a common source of fun at the magazine, and the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” series, one of Blackwood’s more experimental endeavours, had already touched on the idea of murder-connoisseurship some years earlier. Robert Morrison cites the “Noctes” installment of April 1824, by John Wilson, as a possible source, given that Wilson speaks both of fires and of crime as possible aesthetic subjects, as De Quincey would likewise do in “On Murder.”5But there is also an earlier “Noctes” installment, from the May 1823 edition, in which contributor Gibson Lockhart makes light of the same subject.6The piece opens with one character explaining how he has come to town solely in order to watch a very promising hanging. “You like to see such things?” asks another; “[y]ou take pleasure in them?”7He replies that he does, and a third character chimes in that he has seen over a hundred different hangings, “besides plenty of shootings—and all manner of outlandish doings—guillotine—sword—axe.”8What follows is a lively critical discussion of good and bad public executions, and the merits of one form over another (“a beheading for my siller,” opines one speaker).9Clearly, the idea of violence as spectacle—and of the critics at Blackwood’s discussing that spectacle as they would any new book or performance on offer—was a running joke at the magazine, into which “On Murder” inserts itself merely as one more, fuller iteration. One parodic form in particular, that of the mock-encomium, allows us to account for the essay’s humor in a way that does not rely on a target of [End Page 310] attack. The mock-encomium was a literary exercise that borrowed the form of the ode in order to praise a...

Das Maß der Gewalt. Normalität und Exzess von körperlicher Gewalt als historiographisches Problem

AbstractThis paper deals with the question, how an abstract practice like ‘violence’ can be measured. On a methodological level, there are two possibilities: On the one hand, a quantitative approach that tries to determine homicide rates allegedly allowing comparisons over regions and time. On the other hand, there is a qualitative approach that analyses key concepts like ‘cruelty’ in order to define the limits of acceptable violence. However, both approaches have clear shortcomings. This article proposes another perspective: Using the example of France in the later Middle Ages, it scrutinises contemporary ideas of violence as they were expressed in chronicles and treatises. By focussing on decidedly negative descriptions of violent acts, we can pinpoint several characteristics that show which cultural aspects were of special importance for the contemporaries, e. g. the social standing of the people involved, the context of the act itself as well as the physical integrity of the nobles’ bodies.

The Present of an Illusion: José Revueltas and the Moral Voice of Dissent

This work presents an analysis of the intellectual and political legacy of Mexican writer Jose Revueltas in an attempt to properly assess the relevance of his thought and work. This can be elucidated through his literary and political work as an heterodox communist, who always placed words before weapons, although he toyed with the idea of violence as the midwife of History and defended its revolutionary role. His time in prison as well as his differences with the Soviet Union and the Mexican Communist Party influenced his Marxist outlook and provided him with a different set of answers to the questions posed by the failures of the October Revolution. Cognitive democracy, a concept developed by Revueltas and alienation theory (in which capitalist society affects not only the working classes but every manifestation of human life)) constitute his legacy. His life is also a cautionary tale about religious commitment and politics.

The Semiotics of Strategy: A Preliminary Structuralist Assessment of the Battle-Map in <em>Patton</em> (1970) and <em>Midway</em> (1976)

This essay offers a preliminary examination of the battle-map as depicted in two films about the Second World War: Franklin J. Shaffner's biopic Patton (1970) and Jack Smight's epic Midway (1976). In these films, maps, charts, or tableaux (the three-dimensional models upon which are plotted the movements of battalions, fleets, and so on) emerge as an expression of both martial and cinematic strategy. It is argued that the battle-map emerges as a crucial isomorphic element. It features as a prop to signify command and to relay otherwise complex strategic plottings, giving audiences a glimpse into how military strategy is formed and tested: a traditional 'reading' of the map. Conversely, the map is a device of foreshadowing and a sign of command's profound limitations. It is thus resolved that the battle-map is as much a sign of the subjective as the objective.

Violence as a human condition: Recent contributions from the German social sciences

Raume der Gewalt by Jorg Barberowski; S Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 2013, 272 pages, 19.99 [euro], cloth ISBN 978-3-10-004818-9 Topologie der Gewalt by Byung-Chul Han; Verlag Matthes und Seitz, Berlin, 2011, 192 pages, 19.90 [euro], cloth 978-3-88221-495-6 Vertrauen und Gewalt. Versuch uber eine besondere Konstellation der Moderne by Jan Philip Reemtsma; Hamburger Edition, Hamburg, 2013 [2008], 576 pages, 20.00 euro], cloth ISBN 978-3-86854-270-7 'Cats scratch, dogs bite, men kill' (Ruth Kluger) The phenomenon of violence still presents a unique challenge to social theory. Recent discourses on terrorism open new fields for conceptualising the phenomenon. However, it is still the experiences of the 20th century which continue to shape theoretical reflections on violence: the two world wars, the totalitarian political systems of Stalinism and National Socialist Germany, the German concentration camps and Soviet Gulag, Hiroshima and Nagasaki--the list is by far not exhaustive. Ruth Kluger, a survivor of the German concentration camp system, offers a short and lapidary account of these excesses of violence. In a conversation with Jan Reemtsma, she stated that, 'Cats scratch, dogs bite, men kill' (Reemtsma, 2013[2008], p. 15). Her statement expresses both the factuality and the incommensurability of violence in human experience. Violence is beyond explanation, and perhaps there is nothing to explain in the first place. In Kluger's statement, violence becomes a human condition. The three books under review here address the idea of violence as a human condition. All of them start from the observation that violence has far from disappeared from human experience. Yet this observation poses a problem. It is not easily reconciled with the foundational norm of modernity that violence should no longer be a part of social life. Each in its own way, the three books try to make sense of this observation and the problems which it poses for social theory. Broadly speaking, the authors reflect on three main questions: first, why does violence persist in spite of the central promise of modernity that it should disappear from our societies? Second, how do social theory and everyday practice interpret and deal with this incongruity between expectation and experience? Third, what are the specific forms of violence in (late) modernity and the more generic insights they offer about the phenomenon? The authors tackle these three questions to various degrees, from different individual and conceptual vantage points. In this review essay, I discuss their insights, reflect on the challenges violence poses to social theory, and, at the same time, outline some generic reflections on violence based on these books. All of the three books which I discuss were originally published in German, and only Reemtsma's has so far been translated to English. The three books draw to a considerable degree on sources in German language, some of which have not been translated to English either. For this reason, all of the translations of direct quotes from German to English are my own. The history of the 20th century certainly points towards a specific German experience of violence. Indeed, this history is important for the analyses of the books by Barberowski and Reemtsma. For the former, it also figures as an explicit autobiographical reference to family history. However, my aim with this review is not to suggest that there is a specific 'German' approach to theorizing violence. Rather, I seek to render accessible these authors' reflections to an English language readership. The German social sciences have a long and rich tradition of social theory on violence. Jorg Barberowski's Raume der Gewalt (Spaces of violence) explores violence as a spatial concept. A historian and philosopher whose research focuses on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, particularly for the Stalin era, much of his empirical material relates to German and Soviet history. …

Illuminismo e rivoluzione: il problema della violenza

Rethinks the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, taking as its starting point the recent interpretations proposed by Jonathan Israel. Partially refuting Israel’s thesis, the aim of the article is to highlight the differences between the political languages of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Firstly, it shows that it is impossible to draw a linear genealogy from radical Enlightenment to Girondinism and from Rousseau to Jacobinism; secondly, it emphasizes that one of the main novelties of the Enlightenment lay in the idea of violence as one of the foundations of modern political discourse. But if the philosophes acknowledged this element in an anthropological and historical perspective, they put it aside as far as politics was concerned; indeed, it became the enjeu of political ideology during the years of the Terror.

Violent Times

Violent Times Michael Wood Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence. Paul Sheehan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 232. $99.00 (cloth). Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism. Deaglán Ó Donghaile. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 260. $86.00 (cloth). Great War Modernism: Artistic Response in the Context of War, 1914–1918. Edited by Nanette Norris. Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016. Pp. viii + 247. $80.00 (cloth). At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland. Sarah Cole. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv + 377. $73.00 (cloth). Violence as an act seems so immediate as to be almost ungraspable, and yet violence as a word is easy to use, curiously amenable to almost any manipulation. Do violent emotions have anything to do with violent deeds, or is the very question a form of category mistake? Is anyone in love with violence, or does all of our undoubted fascination go to its displaced or metaphorical avatars? Is state violence the same kind of activity as violence against the state—or is the use of the same word a tendentious equation meant to unsettle the establishment? Conversely, is the reprehensible violence of others different from the necessary violence we ourselves use? Is war violent or is it just … war? Is the bombing of Guernica violent in a way in which the pitched battles of World War I were not? Can we measure violence historically? Are some centuries more violent than others, and how would we know? When [End Page 671] are force and violence the same and when are they different? And what about power, or might, both of which seem to belong to this aggressive family? Not all of these questions can be answered, but it is worth allowing them to trouble us. The four books under review have different ways of negotiating this trouble, intelligent and well chosen in each case, and each decides wisely, in the end, to let the trouble lie. Sarah Cole in particular arrives at a sense of violence as a model of what we cannot deal with, and this seems a very good place to get to—if you have shown in detail how a whole set of writers failed ideally, as Samuel Beckett might say, to cope. Not mastering violence, or even the idea of violence, if you have the requisite patience and imagination, may be the perfect way to explore it without being mangled or swept away. English writers of the early twentieth century liked to talk about violence. Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis said they were not interested in tragedy unless it could “bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb.”1 Lewis defined a vortex as “a violent central activity attracting everything to itself, absorbing all that is round it into a violent whirling—a violent central engulfing.”2 There is something helpless, almost näive, about the verbal gesturing here—as if violence would not come when it was called, however insistent you made the summons. In Lewis’s sentence especially, the triple repetition weakens rather than reinforces the claim. There is no promise of violence in the proposition, just the waving of an adjective in the air. In this context the phrase “Word War I,” which appears in Great War Modernism, looks more like an epigram than a misprint (185). Do we need to distinguish between language that wants to conjure up violence, to be violent, and language that seeks to represent acts of violence in the historical world? This would be one way of drawing a line between Paul Sheehan’s book and Deaglán Ó Donghaile’s: the first is largely about metaphors, and finds plenty of violence in Oscar Wilde and Henry James; the second explores the interest of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature in dynamite and terror. There is common ground, though, which is why the line is helpful but not definitive. Sheehan’s book is balanced between aestheticism and aesthetics, both seen as violent, and each section ends with a close study of a text, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) in the first case, Heart of Darkness (1899...

Violence and New Media Ethics

Who could have imagined the speed and depth of new media until Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was overthrown by an upsurge resulted from an acute civil resistance or until the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi? No doubt, the Arab Spring was germinated in a virtual world and further escalated into the “real.” In this scenario, it can be said that the ego (of the civil society and of the youth bearing new spree of freedom) opposes the conscious recall of repressed unpleasant experiences that ultimately culminates in a new era (or a different era, if not new). The upsurge, in this sense, is an epitome of “constructive violence.” But then again, the series attack on Buddhist monasteries and Shrines in Ramu, Bangladesh in reaction against a Facebook image of desecrating the Quran gives us a different glimpse regarding the versatility or charisma of new media. Hence, drawing two examples that cover both the constructive and destructive milieu of new media, the paper is designed to address the concept of new media ethics and the idea of violence the new media bring forth. Keeping “violence” under a broader aspect the paper illustrates what kinds of ethical issues may arise from the consumption of new media and technology. It sheds a light on the popular argument that technology is ethically neutral or ambivalent. Finally, the paper takes into account the behavioral aspects of individuals and community when they are blessed (or cursed?) with overt CMC (Computer Mediated Communication).

José Revueltas: el presente de una ilusión

Este trabajo presenta un análisis del desarrollo intelectual y político de José Revueltas en un intento de valorar adecuadamente la relevancia de su pensamiento y obra. Esta se deja entrever en la obra literaria y política de un comunista heterodoxo que, a pesar de lucubrar con la idea de la violencia como partera de la Historia y defender su función revolucionaria, puso siempre en su actuar político las palabras antes que las armas. Sus estancias en prisión, así como las diferencias con la Unión Soviética y el Partido Comunista Mexicano, influenciaron su formación marxista para dar respuestas distintas a las del resto de sus camaradas a los retos planteados por el fracaso de la Revolución de octubre. La democracia cognoscitiva, en la cual la crítica es parte fundamental, y una teoría de enajenación donde la sociedad capitalista afecta no solo a los trabajadores sino a todas las manifestaciones de la vida humana, son parte del legado de Revueltas. Su vida también es una lección cautelar sobre la entrega religiosa a la acción política.