(Ir)religiosity

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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?

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In response to my last post, Andrew offers what I a think is a good working definition for violence.

For me, and I suspect for others, violence is most easily described the way the concept Force is described bythe formula “force equals mass times acceleration.” Another way to state this is to say “force is the quantity that, when applied to a mass, produces acceleration.” In this way, I think it is both simplest and most comprehensive to describe violence by its effect rather than its myriad causes.

Violence is that property which, when applied to an entity (be it an entelechy, social structure, or any other kind of object) through some action or process, produces injury or damage.

I agree.  Violence — be it subjective, systemic, or symbolic — is that which causes injury or damage to, and demands the subjugation of, a particular autonomous entity.

I would also want to draw attention to the fact that this definition allows some emphases that have — at least in Christian theology — often been ignored.  Here I am thinking particularly of the violence of language and the violence of ideology especially as it pertains to certain Christian concepts (e.g. evangelism, missiology, nonviolence, etc.).  It would seem, if we are to accept this definition, that insisting upon ideological and linguistic conformity — as these ideas at lest in there more traditional forms tend to do — would be to do violence to the other and thus undermine the Christian project altogether.

I say this only to return to another question:  I wonder, can these concepts be freed from ideology and re-appropriated in such a way that does not perpetuate violence against seemingly potential ideological converts?  I want to suggest that somehow they can.  This will be something I explore in another post.  For now I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

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?

May we remember the whole King.

This is why I love Jon Stewart.