Saturday, June 4th, 9.30 – 11.15, at Università di Verona, Room 1.1
Abstract:
”It is the time when the negative falls silent and when in place of men comes the infinite calm (the effervescence) which does not embody itself or make itself intelligible.”
(Blanchot 1995 , The Writing of the Disaster”: 40)
Violence is a matter of senses as much as it is matter of physical or political life. Threat of violence emerges from experiences violent actions. Torture, an extreme form of experienced violence, does leaves its victim even if the physical torture is over. The stress caused by torture is something that cannot be ‘turned off’, after physical suffering is over. This experience is also shared by various other forms of violence. Global representations violence have been visible in recent years, for instance through internet-sites and shared experiences by the tortured[1]. This has made it a highly political matter.
One specific day in London, 26.10.2009, encountered the ‘world’ by two main news. The one was about another bomb in Iraq: suicide attacks killed ca. 147 people and more than 600 were injured (news 26.10.2009). The two car bombs blasted in Baghdad, leaving the streets full of bodies in the morning, as the people were going for work 10.30 am on the first day of Muslim week. This is only one day in the growing net of several consequent days of insane circle of violent activities.
On that same day, the next page represented images of “thriller night”, in which 22.000 fans of Michael Jackson around the world celebrating. People masked themselves as fantasy figures from the horror movies or bloody victims of violent activities. This was an aesthetic undertaking, as the masses in their peculiar outfits were dancing in the memory of the late Michael Jackson. Fiction, fantasy and reality seem to exist more and more often side-by-side, whenever the violence and death is portrayed. This is not a novelty, especially since the images and video clips form 9/11 terrorist attacks or the above mentioned images of torture, position the reality and fiction side by side to each other. Different images of vilence often seem like different parts of the same coin. News photographs look like bad representations of the fictional events portrayed in movies, or in contemporary photography.
In the background of this paper is my manuscript ‘Senses of Violence’, in which I will be looking at different ways to conceptualise and represent violence. The question in the background is in flexible limits between violence, represented as political action and violence represented in fantasy and fiction.
I will start with looking at the German term ‘Gewalt’ (state-power) – that has a central position in works by thinkers, such as Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt or Walter Benjamin (to name only a few). Gewalt is also being used as a synonym for ‘power’ or ‘pouvoir’. One problematic consequence of this it that the simple translation, (Gewalt into power or Gewalt into violence), creates the problem of distinguishing between power and violence. The Gewalt, as political theorists certainly know, is mainly by Max Weber’s discussion on state power. Here it is the state that holds the legitimate monopoly to also use physical power when needed.
Despite the larger work in which different connotations of power has been discussed and differences have been drawn in between power and violence[2], I will launch a self-made concept of power/violence in which the separation vanishes. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his Critique of Violence, the process of establishing law (Recht) is comparable to establishing the (historical form of) power (Gewalt). I am thus using a concept of power / violence, in order to reflect on modern legal system and institutional power. I will point out ways in which legislative process means also a possibility to establish new kind of power/violence -relations. As the law-founding process is immanently a question of power /violence, it is also a political process.
Thus, the first focus of this presentation is conceptual. I will look at this complex bond between power and legitimation in terms of violence. The intimate bond between law and power/violence leads also to abstract authorization of the use of power. This has consequences in understanding the so-called paradox of sovereignty (Foucault), and I claim that we are in the state of need to redescribing the political understanding of sovereign. For instance in the situations in which the use of power/ violence is practiced by non-states, the praxis might lead to the unauthorized use of sovereign Gewalt. The core of the problem of sovereignty is also tied to the understanding of legitimacy of political power.
The aesthetic reflection emerges from the problem of ‘legitimating’ power/ violence. As is seen in the visual representations from the contemporary conflict zones there is always at least two parts that are facing the praxis of state violence – however, the theoretical viewpoint is usually limited to one perspective above the others. I join the theoretical discussion with specific photographic work by Louie Palu. What strikes me in his photographs is the strong individual presence, both in sides of aesthetic observer of the situation, plus the chosen focus of the different shots that bring up the individual, human face from the sites that are filled with military and civil violence. In a way, the object and subject of violence are both portrayed. In some of his images, the subject and object of violence are portrayed, even if they are absent.
This characterizes aspects of the senses of the political as well as moments of experiencing and representing power/violence. In the everyday commentaries, it is quite common to oversee the paradoxical and omnipresent forms of power/violence that is structuring the contemporary political, cultural, and human experience. Violence extends to forms of torture or biological warfare. I claim that it is harder to look at the images of war than to rationalize and read about it. The experience is also characterized by different threats of violence that are both clearly related to global violence but also to the individual experiences, consequences and traces left for generations of victims of political violence.
[2] Including works by Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Hans Morgenthau , Johan Galtung.
