Violence: Introduction to the Special Issue

Does anyone like studying violence? I’m not convinced. Violence is one of the most discussed topics in the humanities and social sciences. It cuts across disciplinary boundaries, regional specializations, archives, and methodological approaches. It lends itself to earnest reflection, and nobody really doubts its worthiness for analysis and reflection. Even so, it is hard to avoid the impression that most scholars study violence the way an oncologist studies cancer: as a contribution to prevention and treatment. We study violence to eliminate it. Academics are perhaps not a demographic group inclined to use violence for political ends, even those for whom a certain realism means they accept its intractability in modern life. There is always an “ethical and epistemic difficulty of conceptualizing and theorizing violence without justifying, absolving, or condemning it,” writes Arno Mayer, but that difficulty must be met.¹ That is the burden that separates scholarship from apologetics, insight from ideology.

Or is it? This special issue of New Political Science considers the history of the Left, a tradition that includes ordinary people—radicals, intellectuals, organizers, activists—who believed a superior analysis of political violence could not disavow good faith questions abouts its use. Can violence create freedom? What if the cost of violent liberation is too high? How can one even calculate that cost when the status quo is already a condition of sustained violence? These are not questions easily answered. But they are questions born of a desire to understand a reality already violent, to weigh its contradictions, and to discover freer futures. It is difficult to achieve fundamental social transformation without political violence, but violence can sometimes undermine the ideals it aims to secure. At the same time, choosing nonviolence sometimes means choosing the status quo’s endemic violence, its ordinary inhumanity. This double-bind is “a genuine tragedy,” according to the philosopher Maurice Merleau–Ponty, conditioning every modern revolution whether its protagonists know it or not.² An adequate analysis of political violence requires we work with these double-binds: that we accept, if not condone, that violence has sense, that it answers to real impasses, and that moralistic proscriptions can dim our vision rather than enhance it. No doubt we have to keep violence at a distance to study it, but keep it too far away and there won’t be much left to understand.

One reason violence has never been easy to approach is because it is not an object but a relation. The relations signified by “violence” are so manifold that scholars have needed an ensemble of qualifiers: “domestic,” “structural,” “interpersonal,” “gender-based,” “racial,” “redemptive,” “symbolic,” “psychic,” “exterminationist,” “divine,” “brute,” and “slow” violence.³ The proliferation of qualifiers calls to mind Hegel’s “bad infinity,” an accumulation of discrete observations that do not add up to an intelligible whole. There is no underlying essence here, no center of gravity. Calling violence an “essentially contested” concept understates the matter. Anyone charged with defining violence in their research will know the special anguish that comes from this impossible task.⁴

There is, however, another reason why analyzing violence today can seem like chasing shadows, one that frames this issue in the proper light: the lingering conceptual aphasias of Cold War social science. The revolutions of the twentieth century made understanding all forms of violence urgent. Any scholar who was trying to understand the bombs exploding in 1960s Montgomery and Algiers had to find the right language to talk about violence. It is no coincidence, Matthew Shafer observes in this special issue, that so many canonical accounts of violence are concentrated in a definite time frame: Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) and On Violence (1970), Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964), Newton Garver’s “What Violence Is” (1968), or Johan Galtung’s “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research” (1969). For midcentury critics, violence’s unavoidability was a starting point for systematic reflection, a first fact with which to reckon.

Yet the consolidation of a liberal ideological consensus towards the century’s end made confronting this first fact difficult. Consider the United States. There, sanitized memories of the Civil Rights Movement and an abiding creedal faith in constitutional stability combined to make civil disobedience, not political violence, a more compelling epicenter for antistatist reflection.⁵ The long reach of the Vietnam War military draft reinforced this tendency.⁶ By the 1980s, it became a truism that civil disobedience’s fidelity to spiritual ends over instrumental goals conferred it a moral seriousness that political violence lacked.⁷ Political violence came to look “dehumanizing,” a product of “ideology,” a repudiation of “pluralism.” Even now, Pınar Kemerli notes below, when political violence is addressed by English speaking scholars, it is usually to reintegrate it into an account of the superiority of nonviolent politics. For better and worse, this era of revolutionary thought and action is better recalled in the names of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi rather than, say, Valerie Solanas and Ho Chi Minh.

The United States is not exceptional in this regard. Similar aphasias about violence afflicted France in the late 1970s. In the name of anti-totalitarianism, for instance, ex-communists like François Furet and nouveaux philosophes like Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner denounced the radicalism of soixante-huitards on behalf of “humanism” and a moralistic liberalism clairvoyant about supposed left-wing fascism.⁸ Broadcast on the new television sets then conquering French living rooms, these men spent evenings warning French viewers that all ideologies, whether communism or tiers-mondisme, led inevitably to terror and violence.⁹ West German radicals, from Christian groups to the ecological Left, also embraced nonviolence as a central plank of progressive politics. Fatigue with the Red Army Faction’s terrorism, a world organized for mutually assured destruction, and then NATO’s double-track decision in 1979 made this repudiation of violence politically and intellectually sensible.¹⁰

There is much to commend in strands of committed pacifism. No viable left-wing politics today is possible without an antimilitarist pillar. We must insist on this. But one way or another, the intellectual cultures of postwar liberalism constructed political violence—its layers of meaning and the necessity of its use—into an enigma. Once liberalism achieved ideological hegemony by 1989, the problem-space shared by critics from Fanon to the New Left seemed to slip away, displaced by more tractable social science efforts to model violence as if it were like any other behavior: voting, protesting, acquiescing. This was true despite efforts like that of the Caucus for a New Political Science, which was founded in 1967 to critique these very tendencies.¹¹ In the most troubling cases, public intellectuals and elites came to define liberalism’s “others” by their use of violence for political ends. Confident experts explained political violence was a barbarism practiced by those yet to join their new world order: Muslim terrorists, ethnic communities in post-socialist states, ecological activists, or the darker citizens of “urban jungles.”¹² The fetishization of value-neutrality in social science exacerbated matters. Designed as it was to inoculate the educated public against “value-laden ideologies,” it turned out to be a lousy prophylactic since many elites condoned aerial bombardment and Agent Orange to pacify liberalism’s “others” anyway.¹³ Efforts to make the world safe for democracy, when not just sheer hypocrisy, amounted to an ethics of self-repudiation, a commitment to saying “no more” after each payload of bombs.¹⁴ This, too, made political violence into an enigma.

Decades have passed, but I believe the questions that preoccupied twentieth-century revolutionaries remain fundamental. Can the immediate use of political violence reduce violence in the long run? Who ought to be the “self” of violent self-defense? Can violence create space for freedom, or will violent means always tarnish its ends? Approaching questions about political violence as an artifact of an “Age of Extremes” would be an enormous mistake.¹⁵ If anything, our crisis-ridden conjuncture has given these classic questions new urgency. The capitol attack in the United States on January 6, 2021 confirms, as few other events could, that we now live in a period of civic strife not seen since the 1960-70s—the very context which produced so many canonical texts on violence. Now is the time to revisit fundamental questions about violence, just as earlier radicals had to do. Analyses about the fascism of the resurgent global Right must be integrated into the central task of internationalists, progressives and socialists today: the transformation of existing social conditions into future conditions for peaceful, flourishing democratic life. The critic’s task ought to be to peel back the layers of ideological obfuscation that have made studying violence so difficult for decades, and to confront these questions for our own times without romance or amnesia.

The figures and movements treated in this special issue stage and experiment with violence for good and ill: the Americans Valerie Solanas and George Jackson, the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh, the Kurdish Abdullah Öcalan, the French Georges Sorel, the jurists litigating police violence and the environmental saboteurs of today seeking to mitigate climate catastrophe. They can serve as reference points for understanding the politics of violence anew. Then as now, knowing whether violence can convey us to a more equal society depends on finding a perspective that can grasp the existing violence of contemporary society adequately. “What is the nature of our society?” and “what is to be done?” can only ever be answered in tandem. These are not the questions liberal culture usually asks, but they are the ones that matter. That is the premise of this special issue.

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New Political Science has released special issues dedicated to violence before. Prior issues sponsored topics like militarism (2008) and the Black Panthers (1999). In 2012 (Volume 3, Issue 2), the journal organized a symposium on Galtung’s concept of structural violence. These special issues complement the journal’s countless articles on violence, critical perspectives on power, and ecumenical socialist politics.

The present issue builds on this previous work. Nevertheless, these essays enjoy a distinct profile thanks to two shared characteristics. Contributing authors are emphatic that we approach political violence as an experimental, theoretical activity. Political violence is neither the product of ideological dogmatism nor of blind necessity. Instead, it is an activity of testing, verifying, and reinterpreting the shape of reality by observing how it resists or bends to our wills. One might even say that revolutionary violence combines a method of apprehending reality and a manner of acting on it. Kevin Pham suggests as much in his study of anticolonial “exploratory” politics below; Kellan Anfinson explains that we might need such an exploratory, experimental politics of violence to respond to climate catastrophe.

These essays also treat violence as a fraught response to situational uncertainty. Even in its most considered and carefully orchestrated instances, revolutionary violence is a gamble. Its patron is Fortuna, not Necessity. There is no theory in the world precise enough to justify any particular instance of killing; there is no quantity of empirical knowledge capable of predicting the medium and long-term consequences of insurrection, revolt, or assassination. There will always be a chasm between what can know and what we feel we must do. Paradoxically, the more powerful our theoretical perception, the darker the depths of the chasm. Honest acknowledgment that a given political conjuncture is up for grabs, that its future remains probabilistic—therein lies the opportunity to use violence for political ends. We see this theme emphasized in a set of excellent contrasting cases below: Abigail Moore’s analysis of how police violence is shaped by perceptions of potential violence; Nolan Bennett’s analysis of George Jackson’s sporadic and spontaneous violence, “foco” style; and in Rose Owen’s analysis of Valerie Solanas’s insurrectionary gamble to shoot Andy Warhol.

The following essays can thus be interpreted as a concerted effort to undo some of the conceptual aphasias Cold War thought and social science propagated about political violence. They repudiate two hegemonic assumptions: those who use political violence are blind puppets of ideology, and that violent actors are confident actors, certain of themselves and the world. It turns out political violence can be an open-ended activity—a “willing embrace of a future illegible,” “the hiatus of freedom that opens history into futurity,” to borrow Brandom’s words. Its experimental and contingent dimension is what makes violence so fraught and intractable; it is also what makes it worth studying.

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This issue opens with Kevin Pham’s “Violence and Vietnamese Anticolonialism.” The essay’s historical site is colonial Vietnam; its argument is sourced in the writings of critics responding to the French empire’s violence. It can be tempting to assume that recipients of colonial violence are afflicted with paralyzing victimhood, even fatalism. Foreign powers often violate the dignity of their colonial subjects with a contempt characteristic of impunity. What can be said in the face of such cruelty? The provocative answer Pham describes is: nothing—at least to the colonizer. But among violence’s recipients, new words and actions can be exchanged.

Through textual exegesis, Pham shows how colonialism’s violence incited Vietnamese leaders like Phan Boi Chau and Ho Chi Minh to an “exploratory” and then “committed” politics. Exploratory politics was directed inward. Critics like Ho, Chau, and Phan Chu Trinh “had to think about their indignation, lend it meaning, explain it, and ask what should be done about it.” This “exploratory” politics could, and did, convey many intellectuals from royalism to republican vistas. Chau was a national reformer advocating the restoration of a Vietnamese emperor before 1907. By the end of the First World War, he was convincing his fellow subjects that they, and not the king, embodied Vietnam.

A “committed” politics followed suit after the 1930s. Confronted with the Paris Peace Conference’s broken promises, Ho pleaded in print and speech that his fellow Vietnamese abandon nonviolence. Peaceful demands for liberal rights under French colonial rule had proved impotent and ineffectual. What Vietnam needed, Ho believed, was a disciplined politics guided by the conviction that national sovereignty could only be regained by expelling the French. This committed politics did not fully extinguish its exploratory counterpart. Ho wanted the Vietnamese to commit to a revolutionary morality, but that morality entailed self-criticism and self-transformation. Even when Vietnamese revolutionaries chose violence, their “committed” politics remained an experimental politics of self-fashioning.

Pham’s reconstruction of a Vietnamese “exploratory” and “committed” anticolonial politics is a significant contribution, and not only because it illuminates a struggle English-language scholarship usually overlooks. It may be true that violence shuts down the possibility of politics between those who use it and those who receive it. But Pham helps us see that, in anticolonial contexts, much more must be said. Colonial violence dissolves the space of politics between the colonizer and the colonized, yet it simultaneously initiates new patterns of communication and organizing among the latter—including, sometimes, new uses of violence. Pham’s essay moves us beyond classic views of violence as antipolitical. Violence is better understood as a force-field that redistributes where politics is happening and among whom.

A similar set of concerns appear in Pınar Kemerli’s essay, “Revolutionary Self-Defense as a Rival Ethics of Nonviolence: Rojava and Kurdish Liberation.” Like Pham, Kemerli focuses on an anticolonial movement conspicuously absent from decolonization studies and comparative political theory: the Kurdish liberation struggle. Kurdish activists have been struggling against the Turkish state since the early 1980s under the banner of an “offensive people’s war.” For that reason, the United States and European organizations have long classified the Kurdistan’s Workers’ Party or PKK as a terrorist organization to be condemned. In a dispiriting twist of fate, liberal elites have recently warmed to Kurdish liberation movements. The price of that rehabilitation has been a thorough distortion of their emancipatory vision. Liberals like the Clintons reduce the PKK to resistance fighters against ISIS or “Kurdish women kicking-Islamist ass” in Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan.

Kemerli’s essay challenges these superficial celebrations of the PKK by returning our focus to Rojava’s revolutionary “democratic confederalism.” Democratic confederalism is an ecological, feminist, and stateless vision of collective autonomy. It names a program for collective flourishing that is worth defending with violence, because it opposes everything represented by the Western elite now offering condescending praise to Kurdish fighters.

Kemerli locates democratic confederalism’s pillars in the evolving revolutionary thought of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK and a radical steeped in the ecological anarchism of the American Murray Bookchin. After 1999, Öcalan shifted his understanding of decolonization away from a territorial pursuit of a Kurdish state and towards a struggle for democratic municipalism. This shift was a theoretical and not merely strategic achievement. Where Öcalan once conceived decolonization’s violence in terms of an “offensive people’s war,” now the PKK speaks of “revolutionary self-defense.” Revolutionary self-defense obviously repudiates moralistic prescriptions for nonviolence. At the same time, it entails a violent collective politics on behalf of a peaceful, stateless society organized according to power-sharing principles, council-democracy, and a women-led ecological politics that brings together public health and the devolution of social power. Because this anarchist vision is incompatible with a statist liberal international order, it requires the “democratization of the means of violence”: “it aims to ensure that the diverse ethnic and religious groups that participate in revolutionary autonomy are prepared to defend themselves from external and internal threats and interventions.”

No doubt this vision is anchored in the historical specificities of Kurdish and Turkish struggles over modernization and ethnic cohabitation. Even so, its significance is wide-reaching. It could be productively theorized in dialogue with the workers’ council movements that flourished in Europe after the First World War.¹⁶ Conceptually, Öcalan’s prescription of revolutionary self-defense scuttles old binaries between violence and nonviolence. The paradox, and the promise, of Kurdish “revolutionary self-defense” lies in how it contributes to harm-prevention and reconciliation. Kemerli invites us to consider whether the PKK’s revolutionary self-defense might in fact be “the revolutionary ethics of nonviolence that we all need today.”

Kemerli contrasts the PKK’s revolutionary self-defense with its better-known counterpart among black American radicals. It is thus helpful to read her essay together with Nolan Bennett’s essay which follows. Bennett analyzes the polarizing politics of George Jackson: black radical, prison activist, and author of Soledad Brother (1970) and Blood in My Eye (1971). In “George Jackson’s Perfect Disorder” Bennett situates Jackson’s vision of violence—one bound to love and kinship—within the latter’s analysis of modern “captive” society.

Jackson, Bennett shows, uses “captive” in an expanded sense. Jackson belonged to a generation of radicals who viewed African American peoples as an internal colony, a subject population of the United States analogous to those living under alien rule elsewhere. Little surprise that, like Vietnamese and Kurdish revolutionaries, Jackson finds violence an acceptable response to captivity. After all a captive society is one where courtroom protests of innocence are meaningless exercises, voluntarist theatrics in a society where everyone is already a conscript of capitalist and fascist social relations.

Yet Jackson’s politics moves in the opposite direction of Ho Chi Minh’s “committed” politics: it aims, not to transform the self, but to “channel” the self’s energies towards intercommunal love and insurrectionary violence. Love and violence are not opposites, Jackson suggests, but parallel ways of directing one’s internal psychic resources. To forge bonds of intimacy with comrades and to strike at the enemy are interconnected practices, braided together as if “in a double helix.”

Jackson’s politics of violence surprises in yet another way: it undercuts scripts of redemptive violence. Redemptive violence is a ubiquitous language of individual and collective agency, especially in United States history. It conjoins violent self-assertion with a theology of vindication and finality. Jackson, Bennett shows, eschews any vison of forthcoming redemption by treating revolutionary violence as a force of permanent uncertainty. Fascists will only fear violence if its outbreak remains unpredictable and imminent. This implies that revolutionaries are uncertain about their own violence, too. Unlike conceptions of violence which emphasize calculated victory, Jackson’s violence is not concerned with his or society’s vindication. Violence is a principle of “perfect disorder,” an act of creative improvisation that, like a spark, can inflame mass insurrection.

Bennett’s analysis of Jackson’s politics is important, because it troubles some Cold War oppositions responsible for making revolutionary violence into an enigma. Jackson’s “double-helix” looks incomprehensible from the standpoint of platitudes which stipulate love and violence are opposites. If we struggle to see how Jackson put the two together, that’s on us, not him. The same is true for his rejection of redemptive violence. If American civic culture balks at Jackson’s “perfect disorder,” that is probably because Richard Slotkin is right: redemptive violence is one of America’s most cherished myths.¹⁷

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Decolonization is a natural enough context for assessing violence’s use for emancipatory ends. Such contexts have a clear occupying power, neocolonialism and structural racism notwithstanding. Ho Chi Minh knows the name of French colonial administrators, Abdullah Öcalan is perfectly aware Turkish security forces are imprisoning him, and George Jackson can point his gun at the fascist cops of “Amerika.” But what about contexts where the enemy’s identity is harder to discern? How does violence work in situations where the forces of antagonism are too diffuse to name or too pervasive to see?

The essays by Eric Brandom and Rose Owen form a suggestive pair, because they analyze the work of violence amid such opacity. Brandom’s essay, “Violence and Resistance to the State: Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence,” revisits Sorel’s infamous writings on violence and the “general strike.” Owen’s essay, “A World Without Men: Valerie Solanas and the Feminist Uses of Violence,” reconstructs Solanas’s forgotten lessons and her equally infamous SCUM Manifesto. Both Sorel and Solanas believed violence’s use disambiguated the identity of oppressors. Nothing quite revealed the depths of a person’s conviction than forcing them, literally, to put skin in the game. Violence was like a chemical reagent; once added, it clarified a hazy solution and made its elemental—and immiscible—components crystal clear.

It is fitting this special issue features essays on Sorel and Solanas. Both were crucial set-pieces for Cold War liberalism’s depiction of revolutionary violence as irrational, intolerant, and totalitarian. Cold Warriors like James Burnham, Isaiah Berlin, and Raymond Aron were simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by Sorel.¹⁸ Solanas, for her part, became a convenient pretext for contemptuous dismissals of “man-hating” feminists. Owen calls her “the conservative strawman of the women’s liberation movement.” Casting these two figures as prophets of violence permitted a subset of postwar liberals to strengthen their own self-presentations as realists, opponents to the dogmatic “—isms” of the twentieth century.

Judith Shklar, political theorist and former APSA President, was typical when she dismissed Sorel’s writing as irrational action for action’s sake serving no political program.¹⁹ Shklar rehearsed Jean Jaurès’s position, which Brandom quotes: “Force is the night, it is the unknown.” The virtue of Brandom’s remarkable essay is to explain how incomplete this classic rendition of Sorel is. It is true that by the end of Sorel’s 1908 Reflections on Violence, violence as pure revolt “slid into praise of anything that seemed exterior or opposed to the Republican state.” But Sorel did not start there. His book was borne from real conflicts within the Left over the role of the State, and it was nourished by Sorel’s conviction that the State, more than anything else, imposed the violence of rationality onto the contingency and creativity of workers’ production.

One of Cold War liberalism’s signature beliefs was that turbulent mass politics and totalitarian statism were functionally complementary. Even Hannah Arendt identified the first as the precondition for the second; both announced the disintegration of classes into masses, civil society into impassive egoism.²⁰ Yet if “violence in the context of labor conflict takes on special meaning,” as Sorel argues and Brandom emphasizes, then revolutionary proletarian violence is anything but a photocopy of State “force.” It is not true that proletarian violence and state terror are instances of a uniform phenomenon called “violence.” Proletarian violence is in defense of producers’ autonomous lifeworld. It is conducted “within the collective frame of the labor dispute—ultimately class struggle,” hence it enjoys “meaning and honor.” It expresses a collective autonomy designed to counteract the heteronomy of the State and its top-down modernization programs. The echoes with Öcalan’s program of revolutionary self-defense here are real and worth exploring.

For similar reasons, Sorelian violence enhanced one’s moral vision. Electoralism muddied class cleavages by design. The uncompromising scissionism of proletarian violence made class struggle visible once more. Hence proletarian violence was nothing like its commonplace description as the fruit of mass delirium or ideological blindness. Quite the contrary. Nothing clarified the conflicting values of modern life better, Sorel believed, than workers’ drawing a line (or a picket) and daring someone like Georges Clemenceau to cross it.

Brandom’s reassessment of Sorelian violence reveals an extraordinary irony: “Violence can do the job Sorel assigns to it only within a liberal and broadly representative, or at least responsive, state.” Proletarian violence both critiqued and presupposed liberal representative politics; this was, Brandon suggests, a peculiar liberal pluralism. When Sorel was at his best, these nuances made him a perceptive and sui generis theorist of revolutionary violence. It is true, Brandom shows, that Sorel did not conclude the Reflections at his best. Sorel wanted to behead the state, and by the end “he made a mess of it.” Yet it is precisely his best moments which have become difficult to reach. The layers of interpretation Sorel’s texts have accrued over decades—not least as the progenitor of fascism—have grown so thick.²¹

Rose Owen presents us a similarly elusive Valerie Solanas. Author of the SCUM Manifesto prescribing gendercide for men, Solanas is perhaps best known for shooting Andy Warhol in June 1968. The shooting catapulted her to extraordinary notoriety and polarized the feminist movement. Solanas became, Owen suggests, a kind of “‘Rorschach test’ that fractured feminism into liberal and radical camps.” Betty Friedan denounced her, defending male allyship as compatible with feminism. Others like Ti-Grace Atkinson and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz celebrated Solanas, leaving NOW to form their own organizations like The Feminists and Cell 16. Like Sorel, Solanas’s advocacy of violence enhanced her reputation and placed some of her most provocative theoretical insights out of reach.

Owen helps us find our way back to those insights. This requires a daring interpretative strategy. The SCUM Manifesto’s prescription of gendercide can look so absurd, so much like satire and ironic inversion, that it can be tempting to lean into its rhetorical style as a way of disavowing the stubborn fact that, at bottom, the SCUM manifesto endorses feminist violence. To such rhetorical readings, Owen raises a million-dollar question: “What do we miss if we read the manifesto as satire?” What kinds of questions for feminism remain unasked if we assume the manifesto was engaged in outrageous comedy? Rhetorically “subversive” readings might perform interpretative virtuosity, but they might also be smokescreens to hide “the discomfort of engaging with a text that calls for violence, and an author who makes good on that promise.” If one avoids looking squarely at Solanas’s violence, then even her most sympathetic readers will “fail to see her argument for violence as a world-making project, and her critique of alternative feminist tactics, like separatism, as a turning away from the world.”

This is the heart of Owen’s argument. A “straight reading of the text,” Owen argues, leads us back to a forgotten path for feminism. There are feminists who claim women as victims of violence, there are feminists who critique a world saturated with male violence, and there is Solanas: someone who endorsed feminist violence to create a new utopian world for women. This path is forgotten, ironically, even by Solanas’s most sympathetic readers. Atkinson and Dunbar-Ortiz replaced Solanas’s prescription for guerilla warfare with the language of women’s “self-defense.”

Readers of New Political Science will no doubt find Owen’s essay provocative. Owen herself acknowledges as much. Yet even readers unsure about a “straight reading” of the SCUM Manifesto ought to admire Owen’s thesis that Solanas’s admirers and critics have interpreted her manifesto in ways that helped feminism avoid, rather than confront, the question of violence for feminism. It helped them avoid, rather than confront, the place of male allies in the feminist movement. And it helped them avoid assessing the practical and theoretical limitations of a nonviolent feminist politics. These questions cannot even be posed unless feminists “lean into their discomfort, to look at those figures, like Solanas, who disrupt the assumed opposition between violence and feminist politics.”

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I would contend that what Owen believes feminists must do with Solanas, this special issue does for several movements and critics. Revisiting Solanas, Ho, Jackson, Sorel, and Öcalan is one way to undo the patterns of culture and thought that make these figures into theoretical enigmas and objects of liberal contempt. By stigmatizing revolutionary violence, by isolating it from civil disobedience, and by exaggerating its “totalitarian” character, twenty-first century liberals deflect attention from the questions that matter. What is to be done? What kind of violence is required to combat a “captive society” that is already cruel to so many people? Revisiting how older generations answered these questions is not an exercise in antiquarianism. We must find our way back to fundamental questions about violence, because we need to ask them anew for our own times.

Incidentally, the final trio of essays do this. Abigail Moore’s essay, “Policing Potential Violence,” explores how American jurists created a framework to adjudicate—and absolve—cases of police violence. This framework—“potential violence”—grows from the confluence of two sources, one legal and another cultural. On one hand, American jurists have changed over time the legal justifications for police use of violence. Where they once cited statistical or holistic appraisals of a situation’s violent probabilities, now, thanks to a series of Supreme Court cases, an officer’s subjective perception of threat offers the primary evidence. Potential, not actual threats of violence absolve police use of force. On the other hand, these legal shifts towards “potential violence” unfolded within a wider “racial field of vision” that already predetermined black male bodies to be potentially violent.

For Moore, these legal and cultural discourses work in tandem like a dialectical knot: “the legal discourse of potential violence as due cause for the use of deadly police force intersects a cultural discourse that marks Black men as having the constant potential for violence embedded within their physical being.” Hence subjective, racially biased perceptions of police officers are transmuted into objective standards for “reasonable” assessments of threat in moments of uncertainty. In turn, this corpus juris which identifies “potential violence” as justified pretexts for police force contributes to subjective perceptions that all black men, because they are “potentially violent,” are legitimate targets for colorblind uses of force—even when someone like Rodney King lies bleeding on pavement. Moore’s essay concludes with an important takeaway: in addition to contemporary outrage at specific law enforcement agencies, judges, and juries, “an equally important target of critique is the specific legal discourse of potential violence, written by Supreme Court interpretations of the Fourth Amendment without consideration of cultural racial bias.”

As its title suggests, Kellan Anfinson’s essay “Climate Change and the New Politics of Violence” tackles the urgent and vexing matter of climate violence. There is something frustrating, Anfinson argues, about the way climate activists and critics talk about violence. Even as climate change becomes more complex, even as it accelerates existing patterns and invents new forms of violence, “the climate movement has simplified it through a consensus for nonviolence as the only path to change.” This consensus tends to express the ideological consciousness of liberal reformers living in carbon intensive geographic centers. We can also find it, however, among more perceptive and thoroughgoing environmental critics like Extinction Rebellion. For Anfinson, moralistic and strategic defenses of nonviolence obscure how climate change has already placed everyone in a situation of war whether they know it or not. These defenses of nonviolence make it harder to ask questions adequate to our situation. What forms of life are worth protecting from others? Whose quality of life must be diminished on behalf of the future? Whose side are you on?

To be sure, there are critics who believe nonviolence is an unrealistic strategy for climate activism. Yet here, too, discomfort with violence reigns. Andreas Malm concedes that the environmental movement must resort to violence, but he nevertheless confines it property destruction and sabotage. That is obviously a rhetorical evasion; violence becomes a metaphor. Rebecca Solnit correctly points out the global ultra-wealthy produce the bulk of carbon emissions. In so doing, however, she undersells the significant contributions of global middle-class consumers. Her image of a two-sided class war bypasses what Anfinson emphasizes is key: that the entire “carbon-intensive infrastructure from which all Western lifestyle classes live” is a form of violence. We are at war, not only with the ultra-wealthy, but with ourselves. Mitigating climate violence may require “self-violence.”

Anfinson’s essay makes a significant contribution, because it emphasizes that nonviolent climate activists are underestimating how difficult, even impossible, nonviolence really is. Rather than fumbling through debates about violence and nonviolence, it is better, Anfinson concludes, to move forward with “hybrid strategies of both violence and nonviolence.” That would at least occasion a more honest conversation. When it comes to environmental collapse, our questions today must pertain to tactics and political form. These questions are difficult, but they are only answerable if violence is confronted head-on, shorn of the rhetorical evasions that would reduce it to a summum malum or property destruction.

The final essay in this issue also turns our focus towards the present and future. Matthew Shafer’s “Silence is Violence, and So Is Speech” analyzes contemporary controversies over “linguistic violence.” The term itself dates to the 1960s when violence ceased to exclusively designate illegal bodily harm and property destruction. According to Shafer, the exhilarating political critiques prompted by the new social movements and decolonization struggles occasioned new and expanded uses of “violence.” The question “What is violence?” became a subject of political contestation and negotiation. New and adjacent terms, like “structural violence,” “institutional racism,” and “male supremacy,” emerged to connect individual actions and behaviors to social structures that patterned unequal life opportunities. “When violence had been imagined only in terms of direct bodily harm, it was hard to see it in language,” Shafer observes. But expanded notions of violence in circulation permitted critics to wonder if “language and violence might turn out to be much more tightly intertwined than classical liberalism (and its jurisprudence) had ever thought possible.”

This is the context, Shafer suggests, from which two approaches for thinking “linguistic violence” emerged: “discourse and power” and “speech and harm.” “Discourse and power” replaced Marxist theories of “ideology.” The approach analogized the way languages made certain phenomena legible or visible, incommunicable or misrepresented, to “structural” patterns of hierarchy and social regulation. “Speech and harm” provided an inverted mirror. The latter approach theorized linguistic violence by drawing on Anglo-American analytical philosophy and emphasized the “words that wound.” Here the emphasis lay on “what words do, beyond what they only say.” Its best theorists tended to be legal theorists like Catherine Mackinnon and Mari Matsuda whose critiques of pornography and racist hate speech are now canonical.

For Shafer, our contemporary cultural politics inherits these approaches, not as incompatible theoretical paradigms, but differing “conceptual registers” for public debate. They can and do connect around a swirl of claims that “silence is violence.” At the same time, today “our cultural fights about language are so full of promise and peril because they play out in the unstable space that stretches cross and between the two registers of concern.” The two registers cannot be united through abstract conceptual work. The tensions between them are not philosophical but political and material. It is difficult to hold “discourse and power” together with “speech and harm” perspectives, because they are expressions of the material conflicts and contradictions that make language a battlefield in the first place.

Shafer is adamant we approach conceptual disputes over violence as reflections of the social contradictions which fracture our society. His essay’s conclusion therefore leaves us with an urgent, important challenge: how must our critiques of violence, whether as “discourse and power” or “speech and harm,” transform to become adequate to language’s mediation through digital technologies, communications engineering, and “the commodification of information?” How can our theories of “linguistic violence” become adequate to the evolving technological realities of language itself?

* * *

Walter Benjamin’s famous 1921 essay, “Toward the Critique of Violence,” includes a passage that warrants close reading. He writes,

For the question, “May I kill?” begets an unshakeable answer in the form of the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” This commandment blocks the deed as though God were “preventing” it from happening. But just as it ought not truly be fear of punishment that compels one to comply with the commandment, so the commandment remains inapplicable to, incommensurable with, the completed deed. No judgment of the deed follows from the commandment. And thus, neither the divine judgment of the deed nor the basis for this judgment can be foreseen. For this reason, those who base the condemnation of every violent killing of a human being by fellow human beings on the commandment are wrong. The commandment exists not as a standard of judgment but as a guideline of action for the agent or community that has to confront it in solitude and, in terrible cases, take on the responsibility of disregarding it.²²

Injunctions against violence do not tell anybody much of anything, least of all how they should act. Nobody contemplating the use of violence for political ends needs to be told in tedious detail that violence is proscribed. That proscription is presupposed as background knowledge when figures like Ho or Jackson or Öcalan choose to set it aside. And telling someone after the fact that violence is prohibited is an empty gesture, which is to say: denouncing violence by normative fiat is always an empty gesture.

I have chosen to conclude my introduction with this passage from Benjamin to forestall any misinterpretations about the spirit of this edited issue. In a political culture such as ours, so keen to approach politics as if it were a collection of moral puzzles to be solved, it is conceivable that some readers will see the following studies as an apology or an excuse for political violence. It is conceivable, even likely, that such critics will prescribe even more liberalism, even more nonviolence, even more normative proscriptions in response. Running the risk of those complaints is, at any rate, an occupational hazard for anyone who writes on violence.

No contributor to this special issue is unaware that violence gambles with the prohibition “Thou shalt not kill.” Except for Jackson—but maybe even him, too—the point is that the line between redemptive violence and redemption from violence is so fine that violence must sometimes be used to find it. Probably, as Brandom reminds us, one will make a mess of it. Certainly most anticolonial movements did, despite their best efforts as Pham indicates. But it does no good to insist on nonviolence as if one were not already in a “captive society,” in a situation of war or “structural” violence.

One more remark to frame the following essays. In Herman Melville’s poem, “Shiloh,” published in his 1866 Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, there is a taut line recently treated by the literary critic Michael Warner: “What like a bullet can undeceive?”²³ As soldiers both North and South lay dying, they realize, too late, that distinctions like foe and enemy are insensate. “Foeman at morn, but friends at eve/Fame or country least their care.” Warner finds in this line a clue to the fatal dilemma Northern liberal intellectuals confronted after the American Civil War. Their “moral framework,” he writes, “had provided both the rallying language for the war and a powerful incitement to repudiate war, even their own war.”²⁴ This is why the poem looks away from violence and presents the soldiers as wounded. Their suffering is what matters.

From the perspective of this special issue, there is something else revealed in “Shiloh” that is more important: a bullet only undeceives after someone fires it. Melville may have wanted his American readers to renounce violence for a cause, any cause, but “Shiloh” suggests that disillusionment is an achievement won, a consequence of having acted without the aid of poetic foresight. For those who seek a revolutionary transformation in the here-and-now, wisdom from the owl of Minerva isn’t much use. Melville’s supreme sight is a gift for another day that comes too late.

Our task is to do what “Shiloh” does not: to look at violence squarely rather than skip to the suffering which might later redeem or condemn it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Duong

Kevin Duong is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. There he teaches topics in democratic theory, French intellectual history, gender and sexuality, and the history of the left. He is the author of The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France (Oxford UP, 2020) and several articles on 19th and 20th century political thought. Kevin can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1 Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 73.

2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969 [1947]), 66.

3 Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–191; Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 2003); Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992); Camille Robcis, “François Tosquelles and the Psychiatric Revolution in Postwar France,” Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016): 212–22; James Martel, Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2012); Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95, no. 8 (1986): 1601–1630; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

4 Murad Idris has described how definitions of violence, war and peace are “parasitical” on “insinuate” concepts that historically travel with it, like justice and friendship; Idris, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

5 Alexander Livingston, “‘Tough Love’: The Political Theology of Civil Disobedience,” Perspectives on Politics 18, no. 3 (2020): 861–866; Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry, eds., To Shape a New World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Aziz Rana, “Colonialism and Constitutional Memory,” UC Irvine Law Review 5, no. 2 (2015): 263–288.

6 Robert Paul Wolff, “On Violence,” The Journal of Philosophy 66, no. 19 (1969): 601–616; Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Brandon Terry, “Conscription and the Color Line: Rawls, Race, and Vietnam,” Modern Intellectual History 18, no. 4 (2021): 960–983; Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

7 Erin Pineda, Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

8 Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Bergahn Books, 2004); Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).

9 Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

10 Jeffrey Herf, “War, Peace, and the Intellectuals: The West German Peace Movement,” International Security 10, no. 4 (1986): 172–200; Terence Renaud, New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 285–288.

11 Clyde W. Barrow, “The Political and Intellectual Origins of New Political Science,” New Political Science 39, no. 4 (2017): 437–472.

12 Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in America in 1970s America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).

13 Jeanne Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

14 John Carlos Rowe, “Culture, US Imperialism, and Globalization,” American Literary History 16, no. 4 (2004): 575–595.

15 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage, 1996).

16 James Muldoon, ed. Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics (New York: Routledge, 2018).

17 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).

18 James Burnham, The Machiavellians (New York: John Day Co, 1943); Isaiah Berlin, “Georges Sorel,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 296–332.

19 Judith Shklar, “Bergson and the Politics of Intuition,” The Review of Politics 20, no. 4 (1958): 634–656.

20 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 305–340.

21 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

22 Walter Benjamin, “Toward the Critique of Violence,” in Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, eds. Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021), 39–61, at 58.

23 Herman Melville, “Shiloh,“ in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1866), 63–64, at 63. Michael Warner, “What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 41-54.

24 Warner, “What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?,” 42–43.