Violence and Interpretation: Conflicts of Values and Violation in Maxwell Kennel’s Ontologies of Violence

Violence is a commonly used concept in the scholarly and public spheres alike, often serving as a name for violations that span the distance between physical/corporeal harm and symbolic forms of epistemic injustice - which itself is an ideal-type distinction that often obscures continuities between bodily and psychological violence. Yet violence is not a stable name for a set of discrete ways of thinking and acting, but a flexible concept (or keyword) used to identify violations of value-laden boundaries that encircle secular and sacred ideas, individuals, communities, and societies. This means that its definition shifts profoundly with the value-laden politically-saturated boundaries of both its users and critics. Many users of the term avoid defining it clearly, and many critics of the term use its malleable and polemical character to their advantage in what Judith Butler describes as a process wherein “they seek to rename nonviolent practices as violent, conducting a political war, as it were, at the level of public semantics.” (_The Force of Non-Violence_. Verso, 2020. p.2). Violence is never a neutral concept, and it is most often used to name and condemn violations that are determined by the values and priorities of its users. This means that violence - as a concept - is often either treated as a term with one clear and singular definition, or a term that is so radically open to interpretation that it loses its meaning and political efficacy. But rather than abandoning the term to forms of singularization (that ignore its highly diverse usage) or relativization (that bypass the need to defend certain uses of the term against others), Maxwell Kennel’s recent book _Ontologies of Violence: Deconstruction, Pacifism, and Displacement_ (Brill, 2023) argues for a critical theory and political theology of violence that mediates between its value-laden and subjective character, and how the term lends itself to polemical abuse. _Ontologies of Violence_ provides detailed interpretations of Jacques Derrida’s claim that “predication is the original violence” (in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics” in _Writing and Difference_), Mennonite pacifist political theologians who reject the use of violence against violence (even in epistemological and ontological terms), and Grace M. Jantzen’s late trilogy _Death and the Displacement of Beauty_ (which reconfigures the terms of mortality and natality, and resists the equivocation of language and violence). Building on Kennel’s first book _Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) which challenges the violence of the term “post-secular” in its triumphalist presumptions of overcoming secularity, _Ontologies of Violence_ concludes with an argument against the basic ontological violence of assuming that differences will necessarily displace other stable identities - a logic that underpins competitive and zero-sum paradigms that fund violent ways of thinking from right wing panics about population replacement to trans erasing radical feminisms. This roundtable session presents, critiques, and extends the approach developed in Kennel’s _Ontologies of Violence_ by gathering scholars of theology, philosophy, and anthropology to discuss the question and limits of violence as a diagnostic and interpretive concept that reflects the values and priorities of its users. Panelists will respond to the book by showing how its paradigm calls the postsecular into question, reframes the category of violence, resists simplistic equivocations between violence and religion, brings Anabaptist and Mennonite pacifisms into broader dialogue with political theology, challenges Derridean approaches to the violence of language, and resists simplistic and violent appeals to nonviolence that place the moralizing burden of passivity onto victims of violent oppression (with reference to the work of Françoise Vergès and Elsa Dorlin). The roundtable will be presided over by [redacted1], followed by a response from [redacted2], focusing on the complexities of Anabaptist and Mennonite pacifism that the book presents. [redacted3]’s response will provide anthropological resources for thinking against the problems of protective and possessive approaches to violence, while [redacted4] will draw upon his recent work on healing in Black sacred politics as a form of antiviolence. [redacted5]’s response shows how the paradigm of the book stands in relation to colonial violence and frameworks of resistance, and [redacted6] will ask how Derrida's analysis of violence might help us address the threat to pluralist democracy posed by authoritarian populism. The roundtable will conclude with a response from the author that focuses on socially accountable definitions of and approaches to violence, and a Q&A with all panelists.