On Violence

On Violence

A Reader

  • Author: Lawrence, Bruce B.; Karim, Aisha
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822337560
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822390169
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2007
  • Month: December
  • Pages: 592
  • DDC: 179.7
  • Language: English
This anthology brings together classic perspectives on violence, putting into productive conversation the thought of well-known theorists and activists, including Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Osama bin Laden, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Hobbes, and Pierre Bourdieu. The volume proceeds from the editors’ contention that violence is always historically contingent; it must be contextualized to be understood. They argue that violence is a process rather than a discrete product. It is intrinsic to the human condition, an inescapable fact of life that can be channeled and reckoned with but never completely suppressed. Above all, they seek to illuminate the relationship between action and knowledge about violence, and to examine how one might speak about violence without replicating or perpetuating it.

On Violence is divided into five sections. Underscoring the connection between violence and economic world orders, the first section explores the dialectical relationship between domination and subordination. The second section brings together pieces by political actors who spoke about the tension between violence and nonviolence—Gandhi, Hitler, and Malcolm X—and by critics who have commented on that tension. The third grouping examines institutional faces of violence—familial, legal, and religious—while the fourth reflects on state violence. With a focus on issues of representation, the final section includes pieces on the relationship between violence and art, stories, and the media. The editors’ introduction to each section highlights the significant theoretical points raised and the interconnections between the essays. Brief introductions to individual selections provide information about the authors and their particular contributions to theories of violence.

With selections by: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Osama bin Laden, Pierre Bourdieu, André Breton, James Cone, Robert M. Cover, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Engels, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Mohandas Gandhi, René Girard, Linda Gordon, Antonio Gramsci, Félix Guattari, G. W. F. Hegel, Adolf Hitler, Thomas Hobbes, Bruce B. Lawrence, Elliott Leyton, Catharine MacKinnon, Malcolm X, Dorothy Martin, Karl Marx, Chandra Muzaffar, James C. Scott, Kristine Stiles, Michael Taussig, Leon Trotsky, Simone Weil, Sharon Welch, Raymond Williams

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • General Introduction: Theorizing Violence in the Twenty-first Century
  • Part 1: The Dialetics of Violence
    • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
    • Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring
    • Karl Heinrich Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
    • Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence (The Wretched of the Earth)
  • Part II: The Other of Violence
    • Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule
    • Adolf Hitler, The Right of Emergency Defense (Mein Kampf )
    • Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet
    • Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
    • Raymond Williams, Keywords; Marxism and Literature
    • Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
    • James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance
  • Part III: The Institution of Violence, Three Connections
    • Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
    • Linda Gordon, Social Control and the Powers of the Weak (Heroes of Their Own Lives)
    • Del Martin, Battered Wives
    • Bruce B. Lawrence, The Shah Bano Case (Shattering the Myth)
    • Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence (Reflections)
    • Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory
    • Robert M. Cover, Violence and the Word
    • Chandra Muzaffar: Human Rights and the New World Order
    • René Girard, Violence and the Sacred
    • James Cone, Liberation and the Christian Ethic (God of the Oppressed)
    • Sharon Welch, Dangerous Memory and Alternate Knowledges (Communities of Resistance and Solidarity)
    • Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force
  • Part IV: The State of Violence
    • Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
    • Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
    • Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
    • Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Savages, Barbarians, and Civilized Men (Anti-Oedipus)
    • André Breton and Leon Trotsky, Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art
    • Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing
    • Kristine Stiles, Shaved Heads and Marked Bodies: Representations from Cultures of Trauma
    • Osama bin Laden, Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places / Roland Jacquard, In the Name of Osama Bin Laden: Global Terrorism and the Bin Laden Brotherhood
    • Elliott Leyton, Touched by Fire: Doctors without Borders in a Third World Crisis
  • Copyright Acknowledgments
  • Index

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