Abstract
That the senselessness of violence – violence no longer a mere political means to a justified
end outside it – is omnipresent in today’s world: the realization of this truth appears to have made
obsolete today the conventional understanding of violence as mere political means. That the Greeks
thought “bia,” which means violence, in its close proximity with “bio,” which means “life,” speaks
not surprisingly a truth whose manifestation we perceive today more clearly than ever before, albeit
the mode or manner of this manifestation today was perhaps not known to the Greeks. Taking
F.W.J. von Schelling’s reflection on evil and violence as the point of departure, this paper seeks to
understand the relation between life and violence anew and attempts to show that at the heart of the
phenomenon of evil lies the enigmatic and fascinating question of the image.