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Economies of Violence: Race, Pathology, Capital, Reason

Submitted to Program Units
1: Philosophy of Religion Unit and Political Theology Unit

Maureen Kelly, Bard HS Early College Manhattan, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This panel challenges the presuppositions that have underwritten the “return of the religious” as a historical and conceptual phenomenon. This return, we argue, is based on a tacit equation of religion and violence that has not only defined modern European philosophy but is also complicit with liberal forms of reason and governmentality. Against this equation, we strategically reinhabit the canons of modern philosophy and political theology. Considering the domains of pathology, capital, reason, and race, we offer a more capacious understanding of violence in both its negative and positive valences. On our readings, violence in its economic and transcendental instantiations is more insidious than often recognized. At the same time, it may be undervalued as a resource for critique and struggle. In all cases, we aim to think violence independently of its dialectical relationship to non-violence in order to face its perils and promises head on. 

Papers

  • Zoe Anthony, University of Toronto

    Nietzsche's “War Praxis," Violence, and the Instinct for Healing

    Abstract

    This paper explores Nietzsche’s conceptualization of violence as a physiological concept, manifested in degrees of “defense and attack.” This paper situates itself between three areas: Nietzsche’s conceptions of health and sickness, literature on violence within a Nietzschean framework, and broader discussions of health, sickness, religion, and violence. I argue that Nietzsche views the “instinct for violence” as a measure of health, but with certain conditions. By offering an interpretation of Nietzsche’s four-point “war praxis,” and by exploring the counterintuitive proposition that healing requires an instinct for “war,” it argues that disease, for Nietzsche, is not an abnormality but a distorted relationality to reality, rectified by regaining the capacity for war. 

  • William Underwood, Oberlin College and Conservatory

    The Epoch of Annihilation: On the Formal Violence of Capital

    Abstract

    In the first volume of *Capital*, Marx famously describes the historical advent of capitalism as a kind of horror story. Nourished by colonial wars, enslavement, and the massacre of indigenous populations, capital constitutes and sustains itself through a near-limitless exercise of violence, conceivable in both physical and ideological terms. This paper investigates another modality of violence proper to capital, namely, formal violence: the diffuse, but titanic power by which human and non-human entities are constrained to appear as species of value. I develop this concept through the juxtaposition of two related, but distinct treatments of formal violence in the respective work of contemporary philosopher Jean Vioulac and Karl Marx. For Vioulac, formal violence constitutes a quasi-ontological subreption of humans’ essential purposive activity. Re-reading Marx, however, we come to see that formal violence operates on two levels, naming both a structure of phenomenality and the ruse of its false critique.

  • Kirsten Collins, University of Chicago

    Black Masks, White Masks: Structural Violence in Fanon and Genet

    Abstract

    In On Violence, Hannah Arendt defines violence as a tool wielded to serve particular interests, and unjustifiable on universal moral grounds. Drawing on Arendt’s response to Frantz’s Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and its role in justifying what she terms the “violence” of Black Power political strategies in the 1960s, I turn to Fanon’s earlier Black Skin, White Masks to define the structural violence of racism excluded from Arendt’s definition. Showing how Fanon’s text exposes the racial hierarchy that sacralizes the notion of the human, I place his text in conversation with Jean Genet’s play, The Blacks. Arguing that both works expose the structural violence of race, the rituals that maintain it, and the difficulty of countering it, I show that they both position literary and performative excess as a violence that can counter this structure from within the conventions that maintain them, and give rise to unpredictable political action.

  • Matthew Peterson, University of Southern California

    The Impossibility of Nonviolence: Metaphysics after Derrida

    Abstract

    In 1964, Jacques Derrida published an extensive commentary on the then-little-known Lithuanian Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The text was an emphatic celebration and devastating critique of the latter’s attempt to break with the inherent violence of philosophical language through recourse to religious sources. Sixty years after the initial publication of “Violence and Metaphysics,” I argue that this essay still contends that the best we can ever hope for is mitigating violence. In dialogue with Martin Hägglund, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Jean Vioulac, I address its contemporary purchase along the axes of politics, technology, and religion. On my reading, religious concepts are insufficient to break the complicity between theory and technological-political oppression. At the same time, the thought of God is ineluctably produced by war and violence. These problems converge around the question of Zionism, a theme in the background of Derrida’s questioning that today must be explicitly submitted to its demands.

Responding
Daniel Schultz, Whitman College
Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Podium microphone

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

2 Hours
Schedule Info

Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Tags

violence
capitalism
Race
health
sickness
critique
metaphyiscs
derrida
deconstruction
marx
Fanon
Nietzsche
pathology
body
Marxism
capital
technology
Form
racism
Genet
Zionism

Session Identifier

A23-130