(Ir)religiosity

I had every intention of reading through Žižek’s latest book on violence and relating it to my thoughts in the previous posts.  But I’ve been super busy and had some trouble getting my hands on the book (trouble with Amazon, but that is a different story).

Incidentally, I was reading through Caputo and Derrida’s Deconstruction in a Nutshell last night for a totally different project and ran across a provocative quote.  I thought I float it and see what your reactions are.

A little background.  The book has two parts.  Part I is the transcript of a round table discussion that took place at Villanova University in 1995 between Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and others.  The point of the discussion was to dispel many of myths and false understanding of Derrida’s thought and the project of deconstruction.  The book is fascinating in that respect.  If you’ve ever tried to read Derrida you know that he is not the easy thinker to understand.  The discussion provided a rare moment of transparency.  Part II is an extended commentary on the discussion by John Caputo.

The immediate context of this quote has to do with the setting and format of the discussion.  Captuo notes that the discussion is, in a way, violent towards Derrida.  Derrida, a native French speaker, was asked to spontaneously and succinctly answer, in English, questions regarding a philosophy that he has not only dedicated his life toward, but one that he repeatedly insists defies short, sound-byte type definitions.  Captuo playfully asks forgives for the “multiple violence” placed on Derrida, for forcing him to answer in a foreign language (OK, I have to admit that I find Derrida’s English to be much better than mine!) questions about his thought that simply cannot be adequately expressed in an hour and a half.

Ok, enough of that.  Here’s the quote.

“There is no pure non-violence, but only degrees and economies of violence, some of which are more fruitful than others.”

Interesting.  No doubt he is right.  I find it particularly interesting — and I’ll probably pick this up in a later post — that many of us tend to focus on nonviolence only apropos to physical violence.  Which is ironic considering most of us will never have a real chance to exercise that nonviolence by choosing not to act physically violent towards the other.  We do, however, have all sorts of chance to act nonviolently and fail to do so.  In fact, I would argue that most times we simply fail to recognize the violence in which we participate or perpetrate.  It never shows up on our radar screen.

I’m not saying this to suggest that I am categorically against nonviolence.  Quite the opposite.  I am, for all intents and purposes, a theoretical pacifist, falling just shy of absolute pacifism (I’ll take this up later on too).  I use the word theoretical here to point toward the absurdity of my calling myself a nonviolent person in reference to a specific type of violence (physical) while simultaneously engaging and participating in numerous other forms of violence.  It could even be argued that nonviolence, in terms of its opposition only to physical violence, serves as a sort of religious fetish that precludes us from confronting the other forms of violence in which we participate.  If that is true then perhaps we should hold our physically nonviolent dogma a bit more loosely in order to become more holistically nonviolent.

But I’m already getting ahead of myself.  I’m interesting in what you think of the quote.  Agree?  Disagree?  Don’t care?  What are your thoughts?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Allowing Ourselves to be Deconstructed (blakehuggins.com)
• Friday is for Quotes: John Caputo on the Interplay Between Philosophy & Theology (blakehuggins.com)
• If Derrida could Tweet (crosscut.com)