Phenomenological Reflections on Violence: A Skeptical Approach

214 Pages·2017·1.164 MB·English

by  James Dodd

Phenomenological Reflections
on Violence
Following up on his previous book, Violence and Phenomenology , James
Dodd presents here an expanded and deepened reflection on the problem of
violence. The book’s six essays are guided by a skeptical philosophical atti-
tude about the meaning of violence that refuses to conform to the exigencies
of essence and the stable patterns of lived experience. Each essay tracks a
discoverable, sometimes familiar figure of violence, while at the same time
questioning its limits and revealing sites of its resistance to conceptualiza-
tion. Dodd’s essays are readings as much as they are reflections; attempts at
interpretation as much as they are attempts to push concepts of violence to
their limits. They draw upon a range of different authors—Sartre, Levinas,
Schelling, Scheler, and Husserl—and historical moments, but without any
attempt to reduce them into a series of examples elucidating a comprehen-
sive theory. The aim is to follow a path of distinctively episodic and provi-
sional modes of thinking and reflection that offers a potential glimpse at
how violence can be understood.
James Dodd is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The New School for
Social Research, USA. He is the author of V iolence and Phenomenology
(Routledge 2009).
Studies in Philosophy
Edited by Robert Bernasconi,
Pennsylvania State University, USA
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
43 Heredity, Race, and the Birth of the Modern
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44 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault
A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’
Chloë Taylor
45 Husserl’s Constitutive Phenomenology
Its Problem and Promise
Bob Sandmeyer
46 The Mystical in Wittgenstein’s Early Writings
James R. Atkinson
47 Violence and Phenomenology
James Dodd
48 The Dialectical Tradition in South Africa
Andrew Nash
49 Sartre and the Moral Limits of War and Terrorism
Jennifer Ang Mei Sze
50 Bioregionalism and Global Ethics
A Transactional Approach to Achieving Ecological Sustainability,
Social Justice, and Human Well-being
Richard Evanoff
51 The Ethics of Need
Agency, Dignity, and Obligation
Sarah Clark Miller
52 Phenomenological Refl ections on Violence
A Skeptical Approach
James Dodd
Phenomenological Reflections
on Violence
A Skeptical Approach
James Dodd
First published 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dodd, James, 1968– author.
Title: Phenomenological reflections on violence : a skeptical approach /
By James Dodd.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series:
Studies in philosophy ; 52 | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017000539 | ISBN 9780415791892
(hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Violence. | Phenomenology. | Skepticism.
Classification: LCC B105.V5 D625 2017 | DDC 179.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000539
ISBN: 978-0-415-79189-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-21217-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
The Question of Intelligibility: Three Threads
of Inquiry 1
Six Essays on Violence and Philosophy 11
1 Concepts of Violence 15
Violence and Scarcity 15
Structural Violence 18
Symbolic Violence 25
Subjectivity and History 29
2 Violence and Nonviolence 40
Instrumentality 43
Nonviolence 51
The Problem of Constitutive Violence 57
3 Violence and Religion (on Levinas) 62
Deep History 62
Intentionality and Decomposition 68
Redemptive Violence 73
Religiosity, or: The Condition of the Hostage 77
“As if Under a Leaden Sun” 80
The Non-Violent Violence of Religion 84
vi Contents
4 The Metaphysical Root of Violence (on Schelling’s
Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom) 91
Freedom and System 96
Freedom as Spirit 101
Freedom and Individuation 104
Collapse 107
5 Total War: The Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars 114
War and Revolution—1789–1812 116
The True War (Fichte)—1812–1815 123
The Real War (Clausewitz)—Aftermath 131
War and History 138
6 The War Writings of Max Scheler and Edmund Husserl
(1914–1918) 146
Writings in a Time of War 146
Genius of War (Scheler) 150
“Not und Tod sind heute Erzieher” (Husserl) 162
Philosophy in Times of War 176
Postscriptum 185
Bibliography 187
Index 195
Preface
Taken together, the Introduction and further six essays collected here repre-
sent an attempt to expand and deepen the reflection on violence pursued in a
previous book published under the title V iolence and Phenomenology .1 The
basic conclusion of that work was that violence—taken for itself, purely on
its own terms—is inherently problematic with respect to the conditions for
its meaning, or sense. This does not mean that violence is always meaningless
or senseless. On the contrary, violence consistently finds some articulation
or other that integrates it into an order of understanding, even if at the same
time it is also often accompanied by an experience of its utter senselessness.
The point of V iolence and Phenomenology was instead to show how, from
a philosophical perspective, a ny meaning that we may appeal to in order to
understand violence is inherently unstable, resulting in a tendency to waver
between radically antagonistic expectations of the sense or senselessness
of violence. Another way to express this is that violence is p roblematically
unsaturated with respect to its meaning: it either appears to be radically
dependent upon external sources to render it comprehensible, or it appears
to itself form the basis for a radical decision with regard to the question of
sense. Accordingly, the reflections on violence in Violence and Phenome-
nology were organized around the contrast between a purely instrumental
conception of violence, which emphasizes the former tendency, and a con-
ception of violence as constitutive of meaning, which emphasizes the latter.
Violence and Phenomenology began, perhaps more by showing than
explicit formulation, to develop a philosophical posture with respect to the
myriad problems of violence, one that will be further developed here. This
posture can best be described as a species of s kepticism . By skepticism I
mean an exercise of philosophical imagination that projects from any belief,
any articulated position, the possibility, even necessity of reaching for an
understanding of its very opposite—and then back again—in order to avoid
becoming the dupe of settled and transparent beliefs. The problematic,
unstable character of the meaning of violence described in V iolence and Phe-
nomenology justifies such skepticism, broadly construed, as the most ratio-
nal response to the problems of violence, in that it allows us to navigate the
inevitable double risk of expecting t oo much or too little from violence. On
viii Preface
the one hand, the purely instrumental conception of violence, anchoring the
meaning of violence externally in motivations and projected ends, whether
political, religious, psychological or cultural, concludes that the unsaturated
character of violence amounts to its inherent “stupidity” when taken on its
own terms, and thus risks oversimplifying the complex relation between
violence and the human capacity for free decision and self-determination.
On the other hand, the conception of violence as the origin of its own mean-
ing, which embraces the idea of a deep bond between freedom and violence,
takes this unsaturated character of violence to be the site of a gesture of rad-
ical freedom, a space in which nothing has or can be decided outside of the
pure expression of a fundamental rejection of a given order of things. This in
turn risks embracing violence as if it were a solid ground of determination, a
concrete act of freedom, thereby falling prey to the inevitable distortion that
violence chronically inaugurates.
The fundamental philosophical gesture of V iolence and Phenomenology
was not to c hoose between one or the other conception, but instead to sug-
gest that there is no way out of this double risk, that both instrumental and
constitutive conceptions of violence together constitute a circuit basic to the
problematic character of freedom. More, to insist on a r esolution of this
tension would fundamentally miss the inherent challenge of violence for
philosophy: namely, the challenge of inhabiting the horizon of problematic
freedom embodied in the phenomenon of violence in a manner that allows
for the development of a genuine hermeneutics of violence, one that avoids
the pitfalls of seeking uncritically all-too ambiguous “solutions” that prom-
ise an exit out of its contradictions that, in the end, can never be delivered.
It is thus important to emphasize that what is meant by “skepticism” in
this context does not amount to the denial of some knowledge claim or
another—or to the belief that, in this case, violence is something that cannot
be understood or explained. For we have no choice in the matter. We must
understand violence, and in many particular instances we achieve an under-
standing that is sufficient both analytically and practically. The aim here is
instead to cultivate a particular philosophical a ttitude , to think of skepticism
as a perspective, a style of philosophical imagination, and not just a position
or an argument.
More specifically, the skepticism embraced in these essays also differs
in turn from some aspects of most classical forms of skeptical philosophy,
whether Pyrrhonian or Academic in spirit, while affirming others. Above all,
skepticism here is not the pursuit of a state of equilibrium among competing
passions or beliefs; nor is it the establishment of some inner peace of a taraxia,
fortified by an epekho, a suspension of affirmation or denial. In short, the
aim here is not the rejuvenation of that ancient project of self-discipline that
would offer us an escape from the mental torments of doubt and wounds
suffered from the battleground of our desires. It is rather the essential Pyr-
rhonic gesture of skepsis as i nquiry that is decisive here, that capacity for
a free suspension of judgment, but without any pretense of cutting oneself
Preface ix
cleanly off from the force of one idea, one argument or the other. Thus the
fundamental gesture of e poché remains essential to these reflections, but
where epoché means the refusal to over-commit to tendencies or conceptions
that nevertheless remain influential, even compelling, in recognition of the
inherent possibility that any such commitment will ultimately be challenged
from within by the inevitable force of its opposite. If there is a moral dimen-
sion to this posture, it lies in the recognition that our commitments are
chronically opaque to us, that, to quote Maurice Merleau-Ponty describing
the skepticism of Montaigne (and Pascal), “we are interested in a world we
do not have the key to.”2
Epoché , s kepsis , are thus here deployed not for the sake of ataraxia , but
instead for phenomenology—but here too with some important caveats.
Any reflection on violence faces the immediate problem of its inherently
protean character, above all its relation to distortion, ambiguity, and insta-
bility of form. This is perhaps most true of a properly phenomenological
reflection. In violence, phenomenology is so to speak faced with something
that seems to resist its own phenomenality, or that refuses to conform to
the exigencies of essence and the stable patterns of lived experience. One
might even suggest that the deep connection between violence and freedom
is embodied precisely in the manner in which lived experience chronically
fails to articulate the meaning of violence. The lived experience of violence
is of a jarring contrast to order, to the very sense of things; it is a disruption
of continuity, one that pushes us towards an encounter with the potential of
our freedom, or the facticity of our being as a being-towards our possibilities
that stands in tension with the very coherence of the world. Classical phe-
nomenology exercises an epoché with respect to the naïve commitment of
consciousness to the pre-givenness of the world, in order to make way for an
attitude that would allow for an elucidation of the phenomenality of things.
Here, by contrast, we are concerned with a much more complex species of
phenomenality, one that does not offer itself to thematization by way of
the mere suspension of our naïve acceptance of it as something woven into
the pre-givenness of the world—on the contrary, here it is a question of the
limits of phenomenality, of the limits of the very structures that allow for
something like an experience of the world at all.
This problematic, protean character of violence as a manifestation of the
limits of worldly existence not only calls for an exercise of a skeptical phil-
osophical imagination, one operating under an e poché in which reflection
seeks to gain its footing amidst the pull of competing conceptions of violence.
It also demands a cultivated wariness with respect to the very desideratum
of a s ystematic analysis, one that would demand, once and for all, a basic
vocabulary of definitions with which to submit particular examples to anal-
ysis and elucidation. The philosopher needs to be wary, for the dimension of
free being that intimates itself in violence consistently points to a trenchant
inadequacy of concepts . It points not to their total failure, but instead to a
pressure emanating from the matter itself that disrupts conceptual closure,