tolerate, while asking how such violence serves to authenticate and disqualify the real meaning of lives.
So where does this leave us intellectually? Rather than encouraging a debate about the true meaning of violence, I’d like to deal with your final question by proposing the urgent need to think against violence in the contemporary moment.
As Simon Critchley intimated in a very powerful piece in “The Stone” in 2011, breaking the cycle of violence and revenge requires entirely new political and philosophical coordinates and resources to point us in alternative directions.
I’d like to add to this discussion by drawing attention to Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker, which is still arguably one of the most famous human embodiments of philosophical and critical inquiry. The symbolic form given to Rodin’s isolated and contemplative sculpture alone should raise a number of critical concerns for us. Not least the ways in which its ethnic, masculine, and all too athletic form, speaks to evident racial, gendered, and survivalist grammars.
But let’s consider for a moment what the thinker is actually contemplating. Alone on his plinth, the thinker could in fact be thinking about anything. We just hope it is something serious. Such ambiguity was not, however, as Rodin intended. In the original 1880 sculpture, the thinker actually appears kneeling before The Gates of Hell. We might read this as significant for a whole number of reasons. First, it is the “scene of violence” which gives specific context to Rodin’s thinker. Thought begins for the thinker in the presence of the raw realities of violence and suffering. The thinker in fact is being forced to suffer into truth.
Second, there is an interesting tension in terms of the thinker’s relationship to violence. Sat before the gates, the thinker appears to be turning away from the intolerable scene behind. This we could argue is a tendency unfortunately all too common when thinking about violence today. Turning away into abstraction or some scientifically neutralizing position of “objectivity.” Yet, according to one purposeful reading, the figure in this commission is actually Dante, who is contemplating the circles of hell as narrated in The Divine Comedy. This is significant. Rather than looking away, might it be that the figure is now actually staring directly into the abyss below? Hence raising the fundamental ethical question of what it means to be forced witness to violence?
And third, not in any way incidental, in the original commission the thinker is actually called “the poet.” This I want to argue is deeply significant for rethinking the future of the political. The Thinker was initially conceived as a tortured body yet also as a freethinking human, determined to transcend his suffering through poetry. We continue to be taught that politics is a social science and that its true command is in the power of analytical reason. Such has been the hallmark of centuries of reasoned, rationalized, and calculated violence, which has made the intolerable appear arbitrary and normal. Countering this demands a rethinking of the political itself in more poetic terms, which is tasked with imagining better futures and styles for living among the world of peoples.
TWO
THEATER OF VIOLENCE
From Sophocles to soccer, or Donald Trump to Kendrick Lamar, we are all players on history’s bloody stage.
Our New York Times series of wider dialogues on violence began with the following conversation with the renowned philosopher and writer Simon Critchley—a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City and the moderator of the New York Times forum “The Stone.” Simon is a critical philosopher who is often associated with the anarchist tradition. Throughout his extensive corpus of work, he has raised important questions on the meaning of tragedy, along with the tensions between violence and our metaphysical longings for love and togetherness. In this conversation a range of issues are discussed, from the continued importance of tragedy and how we might make sense of the forty-fifth president of the United States to Shakespeare, soccer, art, and music.
Brad Evans interviews Simon Critchley
March 14, 2016
Simon Critchley is the author of many books, including Bowie, Memory Theatre, and Notes on a Suicide.
Brad Evans: I want to start the discussion by raising a seemingly basic yet elusive question: what actually is violence? In terms of media spectacles and popular culture, violence seems ubiquitous in liberal societies. Yet the very term “violence” continually escapes meaningful definition and critique. What do you understand by the term?
Simon Critchley: It is true, “violence” can be used in a very wide and somewhat vague manner. So let me try to restrict our discussion to physical violence of a rather direct form. Let’s say that violence is behavior that uses physical force in order to cause damage, harm, or death to some living thing, whether human or not. It is pretty clear that we are not all going to be able to agree on a definition of violence, but let’s see where this idea of it takes us.
First, violence cannot be reduced to an isolated act that could be justified with reference to some conception or principle of justice. Here I borrow a line of thought from the historian and cultural theorist Robert Young when he writes that violence “is a phenomenon that has a history.” Violence is not so much a question of a single act that breaks a supposed continuum of nonviolence or peace. Rather, violence is best understood as a historical cycle of violence and counterviolence. In other words, violence is not one but two. It is a double act that traps human beings in a repetitive pattern from which it is very hard to escape. Violence, especially political violence, is usually a pattern of aggression and counter-aggression that has a history and stretches back deep into time.
This is how I would understand the patterns involving race and racialized violence that have taken on added urgency of late. Violence is not an abstract concept for those subjected to it but a lived reality that has a concrete history. To try to judge the racial violence that defines current life in the United States without an understanding of the history of violence that stretches back to colonization, the forced transport of Africans to the colonies of the Americas, and the implementation of plantation slavery is largely pointless. We have to understand the history of violence from which we emerge.
In that respect, as your colleague Richard Bernstein has argued, even massive historical events like the September 11 attacks don’t necessarily provoke serious thinking on the problem of violence.
One way of looking at 9/11—let’s call it the standard way—is that the United States was at peace with the world and then terror came from the sky and the twin towers tumbled. In that view, 9/11 was a single act that required a justified reaction, namely war in the Middle East, the infinite detention of suspected “terrorists” in places like Guantánamo Bay, and the construction of the vast institutional apparatus of Homeland Security.
But another way of looking at 9/11 is looking at what Osama bin Laden said about the matter. In a 2004 video called The Towers of Lebanon, where he first accepted responsibility for Al Qaeda’s role in the 9/11 attacks, he justifies the attacks by claiming that they were a reaction to the persistent violation of Arab lands by the United States, especially the use of Saudi Arabia as a base during the first Gulf War. Bin Laden even adds that the idea of 9/11 came to him as a visual memory of watching TV footage of the Israeli bombardment of West Beirut’s high-rise tower blocks in 1982. If the “Zionist-Crusaders,” as he pejoratively puts it, could put missiles into towers, then so could Al Qaeda. Thus the idea for 9/11 was born.
The point is that if we are to understand violence concretely, then we have to grasp it historically as part of a cycle of action and reaction, violence and counterviolence, that always stretches back further than one thinks. If one doesn’t do this, then one ends up like Donald Trump, emptily promising
