War, Virtual War and Human Security - 2007 Programme Session 1

Joint Session 1: Critical Assessments
Chair: Alejandro Cervantes-Carson

Sublime Violations: Trauma Literature and the Search for Transcendence through Violence
Marie-Luise Kohlke
University of Swansea, United Kingdom

Trauma literature constructs the violated body as the simultaneous site of total abjection and unlooked for transcendence. The confrontation with the self’s imminent annihilation, with the individual’s violent transformation into absolute other-in-death, exercises a peculiar fascination for victims and witnesses. If only in glimpses, it affords access to the sublime, often mediated through representations of symbolic pietas, martyrdoms, and revelations. In what I term “sublime violations” victims paradoxically embrace suffering, abjection, and otherness as both a reaffirmation of humanity under threat and an intimation of divinity. Via a range of trauma novels, including Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Pat Barker’s Ghost Road, this paper delineates the problematics of encoding the sublime in the violated body. Questions to be explored include the following: To what extent does the trope celebrate passive victimhood rather than offer an active politics of resistance and re-humanisation? What are the ideological implications of appropriating the bodies of the dead for an aesthetics and/or iconography that recycles religious scripts so often implicated in political and ethnic violence? How far does the transfiguration of violated bodies into gateways to the sublime empty out suffering, perpetrating further symbolic violence?

The Heathlands of Humanity
Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

Contemporary discussions of violence, war and conflict tend to place a distinctive emphasis on the celebration and appreciation of difference - social, cultural, ethnic, and religious differences.Yet in wrestling with the underlying causes of violence and war we need to pay attention to a neglected yet equally important and no less vital concern - the question of what we have and what we share in common. My argument will be that we need to understand the contexts of what it is to be human before we can properly come to grips with the questions of why human beings are capable of such artistry as war and violence. In particular, my argument will be that it is not until we understand the body as the common point of shared reference that any headway can be made in making sense of violence and war.

The Value of Violence
Cheri Carr
The University of Memphis, Tennessee, USA

Though they are called “post-Structuralists,” such a designation can only be used to draw together this now passing generation of French thinkers because it is so indeterminate. A less vague way of thematizing the point of view that thinkers as diverse as Derrida, Foucault, Blanchot, Levinas, Kristeva, and Deleuze have in common could be produced based on their shared conception of violence as constitutive of thinking itself. Perhaps the reason such a characterization has not been suggested is its obviously controversial implications. If we describe violence as a necessary moment in the structure of thought, it raises the question of whether violence, in the pursuit of thought, is not just sanctioned but endorsed. As Nietzsche put it, violence would “provide a training for the mind” of a “nation of thinkers.”
Our primary focus, however, will fall on Gilles Deleuze, who, in his seminal work Difference and Repetition, describes violence as the fundamental condition of thought, but also allows a reading of this violence that shows it to be quite different than the violence of abuse. Deleuze’s is a violence of creation rather than destruction: a violence that shares the same perspective as that from which friends are enemies and enemies friends: that of critique.
Of course, if it is possible to talk of violence in a non-pejorative way, the question still remains as to why one would want to. Our argument is that what Deleuze achieves by it is a reversal of the value of violence. By locating violence in the very constitution of thought he valorizes a certain type of experience, drawing it away from the context of identification with victimization and using it instead to produce a theory built on difference. People who have experienced abusive violence can no longer be stigmatized on this view, as they gain a unique and valuable perspective as a result of it. He is thus enacting a shift, through discourse, in power relations. And this, ultimately, is another way of fighting abusive violence – not of licensing it.