(Ir)religiosity

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about violence lately and I think I may do a series of posts on the subject.  To begin I want to simply pose a question: what is violence?  This seems simple to answer but I want to intentionally suspend for a moment the Christian preoccupation — I daresay a fetish — with nonviolence and pacifism as a response only to overtly physical violence.  My reasoning  here is simple.  The Christian doctrine of nonviolence, its goodness notwithstanding, seems to ignore other, perhaps more dangerous forms of violence from which physical violence may or may not be derived.  With that in mind it would be interesting to consider what it might mean to be, in our world, a truly nonviolent person, that is one who denounces more than overt acts of physical violence.  Indeed, expanding our definition of violence calls into question the viability of nonviolence as a normative form of behavior.

So again, without resorting to the more myopic definitions that all to often dominate theological discourse, I ask what is violence broadly defined?

To get the ball rolling, here is a quote from an interview with Slavoj Žižek whose latest book addresses this very subject.

We should shift the perspective and ask, what if some kind of violence needs to go on to keep things the way they are? What if what we think of as violence is a distraction? To understand this, we must distinguish between subjective violence, systemic violence and symbolic violence.

Subjective violence is violence that is actively done, which can be attributed to a certain subject, such as a murderer, the police, a mob, terrorists – you can see who did it.

Systemic violence is anonymous violence. An example is George Soros. He has done wonderful things with his foundation, but if you look at his market speculation with currencies 10 years ago, what was the effect? Hundreds of thousands losing their jobs in south-east Asia. It was a social tsunami. This is anonymous, systemic violence.

And then you have symbolic violence. Today in the West, there is an obsession with harassment. Anything that another person does to you can be harassment. There is something very violent in this extreme sensitivity to another person’s proximity. I’m opposed to the ideology of tolerance, because what we call tolerance is a form of intolerance. (Link)

So let’s developing a working definition of violence.  How would you define it?  Do you agree that it involves more than overt acts of physical violence?  If so, what more should be included?