Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 277–300; Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1967); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Penguin books, 2001); Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008).
Arendt subjects the transgressive function of violence to critique. Although she admits the agency of riot and rebellion, Arendt explicitly disputes the political potentiality of violence or its capacity to produce political power. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harvest Books, 1970).
By “bare life” Benjamin means not the life of the deprived, but private life deprived of the dimension of the common.
In pre-monotheism, the various gods existed as receptacles of material sacrifice, which confirmed the centrality of mere life insofar as it was mere life’s desire for the best meat that made the burning of that same meat a sacrifice worthy of the name. In Genesis, by contrast, Abraham’s potential sacrifice of Isaac functions as an attack on this same faculty of mere life—for what could be more instinctually desirable than the well-being of one’s child? Where polytheistic sacrifice confirmed mere life, monotheistic sacrifice denied it utterly.
Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
Žižek, Violence; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), especially the chapter “Melancholy Gender / Refused Identification.”
Žižek, Violence.
Slavoj Žižek, “Are the Worst Really Full of Passionate Intensity?,” New Statesman, January 10, 2015 →.
Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 157–82.
A frequent practice of socially engaged art institutions.
In fact, no progressive cultural institution would acknowledge such nonrecognition of the socially bereft, when so much effort is invested into social work. However, the remedy here is not theoretical or conceptual; it can only be practical and sensuous.
Georg Lukács, ‘”Bolshevism as a Moral Problem,” in Social Research 44 (1977): 416–24.