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On Violence: Paradoxes and Antinomies
Volume 48 No. 1 (Spring 1981)
Arien Mack, Editor
Franco Ferrarotti, Guest Editor


Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information


Introduction (Excerpt)

In the beginning was the word, speech. Essentially, to be human means to speak, communicate, join a conversation. Violence involves something terrible, inhuman. It denies the word. It interrupts the discourse. Violence thus threatens culture as a human fact in its double normative and anthropological meaning, as the final term of a long process of self-development and individual refinement, and as a way of life, a totality of shared and lived experiences and ideas, as group reality. However, there is also a culture which stimulates, justifies, and "aestheticizes" violence, which makes it photogenic, if not quite acceptable, and bestows on it the fascination which is at the root of its hypnotic power. In this sense, violence is a complex question, and an elusive one, which involves different levels and spheres apparently opposed. In view of this, social analysis encounters definite limits and extraordinary difficulties. The temptation to enclose it in the framework of a formal, monocausal definition is strong and understandable, but must be resisted and overcome.

 Any author has the duty, rather than the right, to look back over his shoulder from time to time. It is not always sufficient simply to go forward. Further, however vain and obstructive the shadow of one's own subjectivity may appear, it is still necessary for the growth of awareness of the significance and meaning of the topics one is concerned with. Only thus, perhaps, can one avoid failing victim to the professional deformation of losing the sense of one's own historical horizon and thus ending by equating, almost like making a mechanical tracing, profession and personality, or exhausting ourselves as persons in what we do daily as social actors. Consequently, I refer to the history of my previous book Alle radici della violenza (At the Roots of Violence). I refer to its deep, not immediate, intention, which is probably responsible for the rather unusual fact that essays and articles published in the space of more than ten years seem like chapters written in accordance with a strict logical continuity and a predetermined organic design.

First, there was an analytic intention. There is nothing sentimental about knowledge. It demands toughness because it is above all separation. Critical qualities mean, and entail, the ability, however cruel, to refuse the generous but indiscriminatory embrace. One must choose and catalogue, classify, and construct typologies. The taxonomic criterion may seem external and mechanical, but it is an essential first step--like that of the explorer who puts in the names and draws the contours in the still-tentative map of an unknown continent. Then, certainly, one must interpret, but the first task of inventory, the methodical order brought to chaos and the seeming chance nature of "the infinite richness of life," to use a formula dear to Max Weber, is essential.

There is not one, single violence. In a nutshell, one could say that there is violence whenever the interpersonal dialogue, or any relation between people, is rudely interrupted. The interruption is unexpected, unprepared, unexplained. It happens. The other, the interlocutor, is denied as a person and is suddenly "objectized," reduced to a thing, or the anonymous accessory of the "thing" par excellence, the property of which he is robbed or deprived. The violence typical of our societies, now decreasingly directed against specific individuals as such and increasingly against the agents, the personified bearers of commodities, is in an "ideal-typical" form the practice suited to the fetishism of commodities.

The supreme inhumanity of violence is made clear in this characteristic, that it is the interruption of discourse, not in terms of discourse but in terms of fact: the tape over the mouth, the fist in the stomach, the stab in the back, the bullet as the blind, unilateral message which awaits no reply.

Socrates also reduced the adversary-interlocutor to silence. He outargued him till he had his back to the wall. But the silence Socrates enforced by the cogency of logical argument was based on the power of reason, not force pure and simple. Socrates was not merely aiming at winning. Above all else, he tried to convince. The other was not excluded but invited. The discourse was not blocked, was not entwined in itself, and did not close itself up in the idiosyncrasy of a monologue. It enriched itself, and opened itself to others, presented itself as a public proceeding, an open path. Thought remains thought to the extent that it is a personal reflection which tends to be presented as a discourse between people. From sender to receiver there is no certainty of continuity. The receiver, if he wants (or can), may always reply. Violence, on the other hand, is an act of annulment and closure. It is numbing, and closed in itself. Or else it opens onto the void.

   
Franco Ferrarotti
Guest Editor

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