We must “traverse the world of violence in all its density”.
Paul Ricœur (1993: 224).
Abstract
This paper raises the question whether language and violence are internally connected. It starts from the experience of violence and from its theoretical interpretation as violence in the context of political forms of life which are challenged by complaints about violence. Such forms of life have to confront this issue because they are supposed to be responsive to claims and demands of others who articulate violence as an experience of violation. Whether a kind of responsive ethos may be based on the suspected inner connection between language and violence is being discussed at the end.
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Notes
Where a violence seconde is justified that would have to be directed against the primary violence in order to achieve non-violence. According to Weil, we find ourselves exposed to this primary violence wherever reason does not prevail (Weil 1950: 57ff.).
From the very beginning, such a “head-on” confrontation of language and violence suggests an antinomy that raises critical counter questions; e.g., if language can be regarded as violence (and violence as language); how language can be present in violence (and violence in language); how language can take the place of violence (and violence can take the place of language). Can language and violence supplement (or substitute) each other? If this holds true, we must suppose that language and violence neither form a contrary antinomy nor simply coincide.
Interestingly, partly long before Rawls (like Jean Wahl), partly at about the same time (like Karel Kosik and the Eastern European Praxis philosophers). Current practical, political and social philosophy seems to remember little of this, as a glance into common introductory works shows.
“Aufheben” in Hegel’s sense.
If one pursues the question, to what extent even classical political philosophy since its earliest days was shaped by the negativity of an experience of violence and the hope of containing, abrogating, or overcoming it, one quickly sees that it would simply be wrong to believe that “verbal” violence was only revealed by speech-act theoretical thinking which, as is well known, taught us “how to do things with words” (J. L. Austin). Even Plato knew a “violence of the mouth”. And after taking a closer look one wonders how it was even possible to believe that the experience of violence has risen to become a prominent subject of political philosophy only with the works of Machiavelli or Hobbes (see Liebsch 2010a).
Wolfgang Sofsky comes up with the very general notion that „no language has a greater power to convince than the language of violence. It does not need to convince and does not leave any question unanswered”. After all, it releases all its power through “its pure assault”. Therefore it would always be evident that, and to what extent, we can speak of violence. It would reveal its meaning by its sheer happening. The author therefore explicitly takes physical violation as his frame of reference. He does not consider that words or silence can also mean a “punch in the face,” that violence can change its appearance and may therefore come across almost unrecognisably (Sofsky 1996: 13, 19).
“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”.
It seems one-sided to me, how Butler reduces the term of ethical violence to a violation experienced through general norms in a life alternatingly described as “particular” (Adorno), but then again as “singular”(Levinas). This can push the life of every single one to the edge of “liveability”. She pays too little respect to the question, if the reference to particularity and singularity, understood as a justification for making exceptions from those norms, could not be a source of violence as well.
According to Butler, we originally experience violence where we are exposed to it absolutely unprotected: during childhood where the affected, still self-finding self cannot even articulate violence as such. This raises complex questions about the time structure of violence, because its meaning as violence is often only realized in a long-term process. This is also true for forms of anticipating violence that for an incalculable time-span derogate or even ruin conditions and chances of life. Here we absolutely need a normative idea of what should never be harmed, for the case that a third notices these forms of violence that cannot be seen as such by those directly affected.
In German I would prefer the notion Widerfahrnis (see Marx 2010).
For the current discussion about “the given” see (Liebsch 2011).
It seems to me, the late Foucault tries to rehabilitate the Ancient Greek philosophy of parrhesia in this sense (see Foucault 2011: 159, 354; 2009: 207, 444).
This is just a suggestion that I would like to add for consideration, knowing that the classic meaning of the term ethos cannot be applied here. This classical understanding would usually refer to routinely well-practised, habitual, and in that sense uncontroversial or self-evident forms of conduct between people belonging to one particular life form (see Butler 2003: 10f.; Liebsch 2009).
One only has to think of the epidemic expansion of the practice to ruin the image and the identity of others through revealing and manipulated exposure. No police in the world and no censorship will ever be able to control the inventiveness of a violence which is never at loss for symbolic means and which has found an unexpected field of new opportunities, yet it shields those responsible from almost all risks of a confrontation with their victims.
Does one have to remind of the brutal collapse of former Yugoslavia when confronted with the rampant European self-righteousness which regularly likes to claim at festive occasions that the necessary lessons have been learned from history? (The reality right before Vienna’s doorstep derides the alleged lessons learned: nothing has been prevented, intervention came too late and with considerable collateral damage, etc.). Besides, an at best pressed reconciliation does certainly not promise any healing (see Ricœur 2004), as well as the special issue no. 24 of the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie titled Bezeugte Vergangenheit oder Versöhnendes Vergessen. Geschichtstheorie nach Paul Ricœur, Berlin 2010.
This is not how one can control or get rid of violence, but rather how one contracts it from behind. Also, speaking and writing about violence cannot promise non-violence, yet it can at least challenge the kind of violence that is hidden in philosophical speechlessness. If practical philosophy—by now long firmly “rehabilitated,” and in whose text books the challenge of violence is often not even mentioned—has really paid heed to this lesson one may put into question, given the undisputed reign of norms that no longer have to fear being challenged or even overcome by claims of experience. As was shown, the revision of the question of what does (not) count as violence forces a reversion to the philosophical weight of dissensual experience that can no longer be dismissed as empirically and therefore also philosophically irrelevant.
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Liebsch, B. What Does (Not) Count as Violence: On the State of Recent Debates About the Inner Connection Between Language and Violence. Hum Stud 36, 7–24 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9260-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9260-6