Lichtenberg-Kolleg - The Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study

Representing Violence: History, Politics and Theory
(June 10, 18 & 19)




Despite periodic reassurances, the hope that was promised and guaranteed by the twin processes of modernization and secularization has amounted to very little in the 20th and the 21st centuries. The force of ethnic, racial, religious and national identities remains as potent as ever, transcending, and often nullifying, the combined influence of factors such as reason, science and democracy. It is also ironical that despite the universal claims of the secularization and modernization thesis, the persistence of violence has remained one of the most powerful elements that casts its spell unmindful of ideologies, regimes and nationalities. The works of Hannah Arendt, Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Konrad Lorenz, Ernest Jünger, Ambedkar and Gandhi have been significant attempts in the past hundred years to conceptualize and understand violence. While these texts have enriched our understanding of various textures of violence, we are also constantly assailed by the sheer inventiveness and novelty of forms of violence. The ways in which political regimes and social groups tend to refine, perfect and practice violence seem often to suggest the inadequacy and obsolete state of our conceptual and theoretical apparatuses.

This workshop would be an attempt to take stock of the ways in which we understand violence but also the manner in which our ability to write about violence can be honed and perfected. One way of doing this is to re-evaluate the histories of violence and their efficacy. 		Do we really need to revisit extant accounts of violence that are already available to us? Are all the orthodoxies, self-images and myths that help in understanding violence been adequately interrogated? Another way of examining the question is to suggest alternative ways of looking at the phenomenon and propose additional tools to make sense of violence and its representation. These two sets of questions can only be answered through a thoroughgoing reappraisal of theories, historiographical practices and conceptual universes within a comparative framework.


gujarat riot 2002
Victim of anti-Sikh riots, 1984



Please find here the workshop programme as pdf-files:
Programme Monday, 10 June 2013
Programme Tuesday and Wednesday, 18 & 19 June 2013


The workshop was initiated by Prof. Jyotirmaya Sharma (Fellow 2012/13) and Prof. Dr. Martin van Gelderen (Director of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg).






ABSTRACTS


Part I – Monday, 10 June 2013


Part II – Tuesday, 18 June 2013


Part III – Göttinger Streitgespräche zu Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit – Wednesday, 19 June 2013
(in cooperation with the Zentrum für Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit Forschung)






Charles Briggs – Infanticide, Narratives, and the Limits of the Human


Much research on narrative and violence treats their relationship as immanent, an assumption widely shared across professional specializations (media, medical, legal, social-scientific, etc.) and by laypersons. Acts of violence seem to require particular sorts of narratives, whose performance and inscription represents violent events and/or produces particular types of effects, such as the individual and collective acts of healing associated with truth and reconciliation commissions.


This paper views this process of constructing narratives of violence from a problematic location, stories about women and sometimes men convicted of infanticide. My archival and ethnographic research, largely conducted in Venezuela, has followed these narratives through newsrooms, police stations, courtrooms, living room, streets, and prisons. Narratives of infanticide, which generate widespread attention, become stories about stories—narratives that recount how the story of the crime unfolded naturally and automatically from material and corporeal evidence, and the words of relatives, neighbors, doctors, detectives, defendants, and the vox populi. These constructions of discourse about violence create a very limited range of subject positions, generate standardized scripts for persons interpellated in each slot, and make it difficult to advance counter-narratives, thereby inscribing the legitimacy of state institutions. I developed collaborations with women interviewed in prison to construct counter-narratives, not alternative renditions of “the facts” but critical, reflexive accounts of how such narratives get constructed that attempt to open up new possibilities for reentering the realm of the human.


One of the most striking features of these narratives is their mobility—the way they not only move between police stations, courtrooms, newspapers, television stations, social media, the Internet, and informal conversation but often capture the imaginations and the emotions of most Venezuelans in a single day. Here I look at features of particular narratives that appear to imbue them with this quality of iconicity (seeming to be direct reflections of events) and with mobility—at the same time that other narratives, such as those told by women accused of infanticide, are so readily denied truth values and rendered immobile.


Since they have performatively constructed the limits of violence, affect, gender, and the human since the eighteenth century, infanticide narratives can illuminate broader issues of narrative and violence.



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Dirk Moses – Combining Structure and Affect in Explaining Political Violence


A feature of recent work on genocide has been global mapping of violence, whether since antiquity of the European middle ages (e.g., Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur [2009]; Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, 3 vols. [2005-]). Inspired by the realist intuitions of (some) international relations scholars scholarship and Wallerstein’s world systems theory, Levene, for instance, posits the ‘rise of the west’ as the dynamic agency that forces other states, especially declining empires or semi-peripheral nation-states, to drastic measure to maintain or regain their geopolitical status in a competitive international system. One of these measures is the environmental devastation that states cause when they desperately exploit natural resources to sustain their vulnerable economies. Another is genocide, whether caused by forced modernization, as in the Chittagong tracts in Bangladesh, or against minorities accused of colluding with neighbouring enemies at crisis moments. Another approach is the methodological individualism of psychologists who explore the structural creation of perpetrators only in relation to peer pressure and obedience to authority in local contexts (Erwin Staub, The Roots of Evil [1989]); Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust [2002]; James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing [2002]; Steven K. Baum, The Psychology of Genocide: Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers [2008]). Before them all, Hannah Arendt and the Frankfurt School attempted to bridge the structure/agency (affect) binary by resorting in different and often contrary ways to various concepts, ranging from the 'banality of evil' and psychoanalysis (‘the authoritarian personality’). In India, Ashis Nandy has also attempted to link broader process of modernity, including colonialism, to the psychic lives of oppressors--perpetrators and victims. This paper will critically explore these attempts and relate them to contemporary approaches trauma in the psychological and psychiatric literature.



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Michael Puett -- Myths of Violence in China


This paper will explore indigenous Chinese notions of violence. I will begin by discussing the visions of violence that underlay several myths in China concerning humans, ghosts, and gods. I will then turn to the different ways these narratives have been appropriated in Chinese history. I will argue that by doing so we will get a glimpse of some of the complexities of visions of violence in China. I will conclude by suggesting some of the theoretical implications of taking these indigenous notions of violence seriously.



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Peter van Nuffelen -- The blood spilled before altars: Ancient mirrors and modern masks.


The category of religious violence is in scholarship closely linked to the period known as Late Antiquity (AD 300-600), when Christianity established itself as the dominant religion in the Mediterranean. Since the Reformation, the assessment of the role played by violence in this process lies at the core of understandings of Christianity and its history. Late Antiquity is therefore often a vicarious battleground for modern concerns.

This problematic situation is not helped by the fact that little reflection is spent on the notion of violence, its representation, and its meaning in this period. As modern concerns are imported into the period, so are modern conceptions.

This paper tackles these issues from two angles. Modern problems of interpretation will be illustrated in the first part of the paper with a discussion of the modern concept of voluntary martyrdom, which has become extended to encompass all forms of martyrdom: all martyrs are sometimes said to present themselves voluntary to their executioner. Such a view rests on very modern ideas about human behaviour, and disregards the textures of meaning that violence was seen to inscribe on late ancient bodies.

In its second part, the paper will analyse two classical, early fifth-century representations of religious violence: Severus of Minorca’s account of the conversion of the Jews of Minorca; and that of Rufinus about the destruction of the Serapeum. It shall be argued that modern analyses tend to project patterns of causality and categories of violence onto these texts. What happens especially in modern analyses is a homogenisation of violence, whereas these texts consciously construct different forms of violence.



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Jyotirmaya Sharma -- `My religion is less violent than yours’: Myth, history and the Representation of Violence


In an essay titled `Which religion is more peace-loving?', V.D. Savarkar, the Hindu nationalist thinker, argues that Gandhi's portrayal of Islam as essentially a peace-loving faith contradicts history and experience. Selectively using a letter Gandhi wrote in Young India, Savarkar argues that Hinduism alone has the credentials to be primarily a religion of peace, while the history of Islam in India and elsewhere has been one that is red in tooth and claw. In the case of Gandhi and Savarkar, what is in contention is not only the manner in which individuals and societies recall the past and engage with their own histories, but also the ways in which violence tends to be represented. Such histories and representations become part of shared myths and are pressed into service at times of crises and conflict. The violence at the time of the Partition of India and in independent India can be seen as the tension between two ways in which memory and myth come face to face and, one of these triumphs.



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John McCormick -- Legitimate and Illegitimate Uses of State Violence: Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann on the Nazi 'Behemoth'


"The Fuehrer Protects the Law" was Carl Schmitt's first full-scale endorsement of the National Socialist State. In this address to German lawyers, Schmitt justified Adolph Hitler's recourse to apparently illegal violence during the bloody "Roehm Purge" in 1934. Drawing upon his own critique of liberal pluralism from the Weimar Era, and the specter of the allies' treatment of Germany under the Versailles Treaty of 1919, Schmitt makes Hitler's seemingly antilegal bloodletting actually fully lawful under circumstances where such violence is exercised by a properly legitimated leader who defends the Volk's "right to life."

Toward the end of the Second World War, Schmitt's former student, Franz Neumann, in Behemoth, criticized the arbitrary violence committed by the Nazi State, and excoriated Schmitt's justification of the latter. In my paper, I would like to explore the extent to which Neumann's critique relies perhaps too heavily on Schmitt's own criticisms of liberal pluralism to be fully successful. Moreover, I focus on a very specific tension in Neumann’s treatment of Schmitt within the text of Behemoth: On the one hand, his explicit, determined effort to render Schmitt’s Weimar legal and political theory inherently Nazi, and, on the other, the ways that Neumann’s narrative--especially its invocation of authors very closely associated with Schmitt, such as Hobbes and Donoso-Cortes--actually liberates Schmitt’s Weimar writings from National Socialist taint.

In conclusion, I bring together elements of both Schmitt and Neumann's work to formulate a more coherent criticism of arbitrary state violence.



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Liisi Keedus -- Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin: Philosophical Reflections on the Ideological Basis of Political Violence


These three European émigré political philosophers spent most of their working lives in the context of increasingly practically oriented post WW II American political science that sought scientific solutions to the problem of violence, be it violent revolutions that had recently ravaged and were still ravaging the world, the possibility of acceleration of the conflict of the Cold War, or simply explaining the causes of such wide acceptance of totalitarian regimes in Europe, with a view to avoiding history repeating itself. Arendt, Strauss and Voegelin by contrast – burdened by the same predicaments – turned to the distant history of Western political thought. All three provocatively argued not only that ideologically-based political violence was rooted in specifically modern conceptions of the theory-practice relation, but that it was precisely due to contemporary social scientists’ adherence to the same presumptions that made them definitively unable to grasp the causes, let alone solve the problem of violence. What was their reasoning behind such conclusions? What – if any – relevance do their reflections bear on contemporary attempts to understand and speak about violence?



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Tommaso Giordani -- On the need for violence: Sorel and the degeneration of capitalism


The purpose of this paper is that of making sense of the role of violence in Sorel’s most famous book, the 1908 Reflections on Violence. The issue is often misunderstood and relegated to the supposed ‘irrationalism’ and ‘vitalism’ which apparently characterise Sorel’s work. In the paper I propose a synthetic outline of the development of Sorel’s syndicalist theory from the beginning of the century until 1908, arguing that its focal point is a reflection on the timeliness of Marxism in a period of capitalist decadence and statist expansion. The problem, similar to the one faced by Bernstein a decade before, is solved by Sorel through a conceptualisation of class struggle whose aim is the defeat of the state and the re-instauration of the clash between capital and labour. I argue that it is within this context that it is possible to understand the need for violence defended in Sorel’s Reflections.



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Raphael Gross -- November 1938 - The Case of Herschel Grynszpan


On November 7th, 1938, at the German embassy in Paris, a desperate Jewish youth, Herschel Feibel Grynszpan, fired five shots at the diplomat Ernst Eduard vom Rath. The attack became an excuse for an unprecedented wave of violence against hundreds of thousands of German Jews and their apartments, businesses and synagogues throughout the German Reich.

Despite the many years since his attack on vom Rath, whether Herschel Grynszpan was a child of his time, a disturbed young man, a murderer acting for personal reasons or a hero, continues to be judged in very different ways. The talk will tell the story of Herschel Grynszpan and discuss the different perspectives on his case.



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Cesare Cuttica -- Shifting violence and shifting targets: Jesuits, Puritans and the mob in early modern France and England


My paper focuses on political and theoretical debates carried out in France and England in the period from ca. 1580 up to ca. 1650. Centre stage will be a series of texts (treatises, sermons, pamphlets etc.) devoted to attack through a variegated spectrum of images three main targets – the Jesuits, the Puritans and the many-headed multitude – as groups that pursued, encouraged and justified violence as a legitimate means to achieve political goals. From endorsement of resistance theories to justifications of regicide and tyrannicide the three (often loosely defined) categories mentioned above will be taken as examples of how violence was depicted in political thought, especially at three significant historical moments. The years 1589, 1610 and 1649 saw the killing of three monarchs – tyrants according to some – in France and England, respectively. What caused these murders? How were they received in the two countries and, to a certain extent, beyond? What justifications were set out to defend the legitimacy of these extraordinary acts? What counterattacks did they provoke on the part of those who saw them as execrable actions? What legacy did the controversies surrounding them have? To these questions my paper will attempt to provide an answer. Amongst the thinkers whose works will be here examined are Robert Bellarmine, Francisco Suarez, John Milton, Robert Filmer, Claudius Salmasius and a good range of less-known figures too.



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Martin van Gelderen -- In the Eye of Providence: Violence, Arminianism and Calvinism


The 1619 Synod of Dordrecht was a watershed for European Calvinists. For a decade followers of the Leiden theologian Jacobus Arminius argued against the idea of predestination, that God divided mankind unconditionally into elect and reprobate. The alternative Arminian concept of salvation looked at the interplay between man’s will and God’s grace in different ways. The Arminian struggle was in vain. The 1619 Synod affirmed predestination as a core dogma of European Calvinism. These theological debates entailed a heated dispute on the relationship between ‘civil’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ authority. Was the church, as Calvinists claimed, autonomous in deciding theological controversy, or, was it, as Hugo Grotius argued, as public institution part of the commonwealth and subject to civil government? This paper explores the role of violence in the rhetorical strategies of Arminians and Calvinists. Whilst Calvinists clung unto predestination by arguing through assertio, Arminians followed the line Erasmus had adopted in the debate with Luther, insisting on the principle to deliberate in utramque partem to cast doubt on Calvinist certainties. More specifically the paper explores why and how both parties lost themselves in the heat of the debate and decided, against all principles of Calvinist church discipline, to adopt satire and libel as rhetorical strategies. Visual Calvinist satire is at the heart of the paper.



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Presentations by John McCormick, Matthias Roick and Philip Hölzing


Five centuries ago, the Florentine humanist Niccolo Machiavelli wrote Il Principe, The Prince, perhaps the most famous –and infamous-- text in the history of European Political Thought. Against all currents of humanist political thought Machiavelli seemed to argue that in order to maintain their princely status and be successful rulers, princes should not always act in accordance with the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude. It may in fact be prudent for a prince to merely appear virtuous, to be dishonest, to lie and cheat, and as some of the most notorious passages suggest, to resort to violence as a tool of politics.
This Streitgespräch reassesses the role of violence in Machiavelli’s political thought.

The opening statements come from three highly innovative Renaissance scholars and political theorists. John McCormick’s study, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge, 2011) fundamentally reassesses Machiavelli’s political thought and decisively intervenes into current debates over institutional design and democratic reform. Matthias Roick’s study of Giovanni Pontano’s ethical thought is forthcoming with Brill and Philip Hölzing’s study Republikanismus und Kosmopolitismus: Eine ideengeschichtliche Studie (Campus Verlag, 2011) offers a fine and sweeping overview of Republican thought—from Cicero to Machiavelli to the present.



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