Abstract
This paper lays the groundwork for developing a thorough-going phenomenological description of different phenomena of violence such as physical, psychic and structural violence. The overall aim is to provide subject-centered approaches to violence within the social sciences and the humanities with an integrative theoretical framework. To do so, I will draw primarily on the phenomenological accounts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz, and thereby present guiding clues for a phenomenologically grounded theory of violence.
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Notes
This refers to recent positions emphasizing the subject’s openness to the appeal of what escapes its constituting power. For instance, Bernhard Waldenfels’ “responsive phenomenology” (2002) and Jean-Luc Marion’s “phenomenology of donation” (2002) both seek to overcome the limitations of traditional phenomenological approaches to selfhood, intersubjectivity, and otherness.
I adopt parts of this enumeration from Richard Kearney (2003), who shows the necessity of “reinvestigat[ing] practices of defining ourselves in terms of otherness” (p. 5), indeed of a manifold and irreducible otherness, but emphasizes the dangers of loosing contact with an infinitized, completely transcendent other.
As Husserl (1970) holds, they are accessible as “originally inaccessible” (p. 114).
I deal with this general omission of violence in the phenomenological tradition in depth elsewhere (Staudigl 2005, pp. 45–63).
For Merleau-Ponty (1968a) “institutions” are “les événements d’une expérience qui la dotent de dimensions durables” (p. 61).
If the lived body’s pre-objective integrity is not only shaken but shattered, e.g., in torture, it will not easily be recovered completely. According to Betsy Behnke (2003), the rushed attempt to embody such violations will result in a violation of the subject’s patterns of worldly embodiment (p. 11), enforcing, e.g., a “splitting of the ego” (Freud 1997, pp. 210–213), or other dissociating strategies. Here violence delimits our schemes of interpretation and unmakes the structures of the subject’s world-view (Scarry 1987, pp. 27–59). If a given societal background does not provide substitutive ways of sense making in this situation, such a modification of the subject’s interpretive patterns may affect it to the extent that it traumatically encloses itself within a “finite province of meaning,” it never actively acceded to according the “accent of reality”. As research on PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) shows, work which aims at reestablishing the subject’s pre-reflectively lived openness to the world, or “embodiment work” to use Behnke’s term, is essential to overcome the radical consequences of such extreme forms of violence.
Undoubtedly violence might quite often not be realized as such if it is “socially silenced” and rendered “unspeakable” (Behnke 2003, p. 8). It is, consequently, still a desideratum to develop attention to those forms of violation from a phenomenological viewpoint. According to Behnke (2003), this would require nothing less than an “alternative theory of embodiment,” which is able to detect the most invisible violations of embodiment as functioning beyond the embodiment of visible violations (p. 11).
As a matter of fact this reciprocity is essentially asymmetrical, attesting to a “broken we.” We should thus take into account a generic asymmetry of self- and hetero-typification which might result in the fact that intended violence can, on the one hand, not be apperceived as violence, or that, contrarily, a non-violently intended action might be considered as violence (Hitzler 2003, pp. 106–7).
To my understanding, it is consequently not by coincidence that violence is neither seen as a problem nor even mentioned in the vast majority of works on Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty (1964) exemplifies this insight into our “interworldly being” in his “Note on Machiavelli.” In this text he analyzes the irresolvable correlation between force and law (p. 212), which leads Machiavelli to consider “history as a struggle and politics as a relationship to men rather than principles” (p. 219), and affirms the necessity to study our relationships to power “at a level deeper than judgement” (p. 213).
Helmut Wagner (1970) defines relevance as “the importance ascribed by an individual to selected aspects, etc., of specific situations and of his activities and plans” (p. 321).
If, as it might happen in facing excessive violence, the “pragmatic bent” is broken, other provinces of meaning might be substituted in order to uphold a consistent world-view. But by succumbing to the relieving function of its interpretive potential the subject might turn into a self caged up in the traumatic logic of such a “finite province of meaning,” as already stated. By critically reassessing Sofsky’s (1999) analyses of the order of terror in the concentration-camp, Martin Endress (2004) shows how a “switch” from “structures of the life-world” into “structures of a survive-world” is realized (pp. 188–197).
I owe this example to personal communication with James Mensch during his stay in Vienna, August 2006.
According to Merleau-Ponty (2002) the “lived body” is endowed not only with an “affective presence and enlargement for which objective spatiality is not [...] even a necessary condition” (p. 172), but—inasmuch as it is “our general medium for having a world” (p. 169)—also with the ability to “take its place in the realm of the potential” (p. 125).
See Endress’ (2004) detailed proposal, which focuses on the potential of socio-phenomenological methods for a sociological approach to violence (pp. 197–200).
To strengthen this thesis, which Merleau-Ponty and Schutz support, one would have to explicate the whole spectrum of existential relationships established between the idea of human autonomy as based on the experience of the inaugural bodily “I can” and these entities. Schutz’s (1970b) theory of the “idealizations of ‘and so on’ and ‘again and again,’” which is closely related to his theory of relevance (pp. 28–29), provides us with an appropriate explanatory model.
On this distinction between “speaking word” and “spoken word,” see Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 229).
Given its objective non-definability, the nomination of dignity among the basic human rights points exactly at this pre-normative dimension of human interaction.
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Acknowldegments
This article is part of the project Phänomen Gewalt, funded by APART, Austrian Academy of Sciences. I would like to thank the IWM, Vienna, for offering me a Visiting Fellowship to work on it, and finally James Dodd, James Mensch, David Nichols, and Vern Walker, as well as two unknown referees, for their comments on earlier versions of this article
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Staudigl, M. Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Violence: Reflections Following Merleau-Ponty and Schutz. Hum Stud 30, 233–253 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9057-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9057-6