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.