Violence in Roman Egypt. Ari Z. BryenЧитать онлайн книгу.
new technologies for both mass production and mass destruction (or, depending on one’s perspective, for both simultaneously). These technological developments, claiming to emerge under the banner of progress, culminated in two events: industrialized genocide in bureaucratically rationalized and technically sophisticated death camps, and the nuclear attacks on Japan. The rapidly changing technological horizon was joined to an increase in political consciousness (not least in scholarly circles) of the fragile and sometimes dubious bases of political power and sovereignty. This political consciousness was linked to the technological changes in large measure through the writings of the Frankfurt school, whose emphasis on total critique was rooted in Marx and Nietzsche, but when translated into an American landscape (not least through the work of Marcuse) came to serve as a catalyst for the intellectual and political revolutions of the late 1960s, and from there has informed contemporary critical projects.31
The experience of comprehensive destruction in general, and of a technologically sophisticated genocide in particular, guided inquiry. While this appeared in a variety of manifestations, one place to start would be with Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, in which, through attempting to explain Nazism as a species of “radical evil,” she argued that the nature of the concentration camps—spaces in which “everything is permitted”—led to a form of human experience that defied the categories of language, law, and even ethical thought. Tellingly, “crime” is her point of reference:
We attempt to understand elements in the present or recollected experience that simply surpass our powers of understanding. We attempt to classify as criminal a thing which, as we feel, no such category was ever intended to cover. What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the mass production of corpses? We attempt to understand the behavior of concentrationcamp inmates and SS-men psychologically, when the very thing that must be realized is that the psyche can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man; that indeed, psyche, character, and individuality seem under certain circumstances to express themselves only through the rapidity or slowness through which they disintegrate. The end result in any case is inanimate men, i.e., men who can no longer be psychologically understood, whose return to the psychologically or otherwise intelligibly human world closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus. All statements of common sense, whether of a psychological or sociological nature, serve only to encourage those who think it “superficial” to “dwell on horrors.”32
The link here between the tremendous violence of the concentration camps and the problem of moral (or legal) judgment, if not explanation, is brought to the fore through recourse to the language of religion (Lazarus). These links are critical: totalitarianism, through its vision of technologically perfected and socially dis-embedded modernity (camps), opens up a space in which men can finally realize their Enlightened potential (anything and everything)—only to find that this transgression of previous limits is in fact a species of nihilism which erodes even the categories of understanding. Hence, the recourse to the language of the miraculous, and in particular, to the image of Lazarus, a man who moves across the space of life and death. The image of Lazarus is key to Arendt’s argument in more ways than one: not only is he something miraculous in the sense that he cannot be understood according to traditional categories (if at all), but insofar as he can be understood, it is in the sense that his resurrection marks the boundaries between life and death that Arendt’s Nazis disregarded: namely, in ways which require a transcendental policing ironically missing in the modern and disenchanted world. Arendt is not unique here in linking violence and late modernity with the language of religion and miracle, or in linking this package of features to a claim that totalitarian violence challenges our power to understand and describe. Arendt is less clear, however, on whether it is actually in the nature of violence that it confounds such categories, or whether this is an optical illusion of sorts—that is, that extreme violence only appears to be incapable of description or cognition.
Arendt’s claim that totalitarian violence challenges our categories of understanding did not emerge from a vacuum. It is part of a larger conversation on the nature of reason and enlightenment that played out over the course of the mid-twentieth century among thinkers as diverse as Heidegger (Arendt’s teacher) and those of the Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School of critical theory). In many respects our current discourse on (and discomfort with) violence is linked to this discussion as much as it is to our legal categories, albeit in the former case perhaps more tangentially. The basic claim—shared by Heidegger and the Frankfurt school—was that the instrumental, scientific reason prized by the Enlightenment had become fundamentally dehumanizing. It is this dehumanization that is productive of violence,33 and not just particular acts of violence against particular individuals, but, because the violence perpetrated on the vulnerable is actually a species of self-hatred,34 this instrumentally rationalized system promotes a violence which pollutes all participants in it. As Adorno and Horkheimer put in it in the section of Dialectic of Enlightenment dealing with anti-Semitism:
The enlightened self-control with which adapted Jews effaced within themselves the painful scars of domination by others, a second kind of circumcision, made them forsake their own dilapidated community and wholeheartedly embrace the life of the modern bourgeoisie, which was already advancing ineluctably towards a reversion to pure oppression and reorganization into an exclusively racial entity. Race is not, as the racial nationalists claim, an immediate, natural peculiarity. Rather, it is a regression to nature as mere violence, to the hidebound particularism which, in the existing order, constitutes precisely the universal. Race today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual, integrated into the barbaric collective. The harmonious society to which the liberal Jews declared their allegiance has finally been granted to them in the form of national community. They believed only that anti-Semitism disfigured this order, which in reality cannot exist without disfiguring human beings. The persecution of the Jews, like any persecution, cannot be separated from that order. Its essence, however it may hide itself at times, is the violence which today is openly revealed.35
Reason—true reason, not coldly instrumental reason—can critique this system, but fundamentally, in its modern, technological instantiation, “Enlightenment is totalitarian.”36
There are two important moves here: first, the extension of the violence of totalitarianism from death camps to the entirety of late modernity meant the opening up of a vast territory in which one could locate, expose, and critique the violence that was now revealed to structure everyday life and practice. And the experience of the twentieth century meant that this could be extended beyond the boundaries of Europe proper to include the European colonial experience writ large (and the thorough nastiness of the violence of nineteenth-century colonization and twentieth-century decolonization made this task both easier and more timely).37 Additionally, the sense that the demise of Nazism in World War II did not in fact end the progress of modern totalitarianism, but simply allowed it to appear in newer and seemingly more benign clothes, necessitated turning critical attention to modern society and exposing its violence through an analogous process of critique.38 A sense that violence lurked in every corner and was a central social ordering principle (and a morally questionable one, in contrast to Weber, who was only pessimistic) resulted in the profusion of the use of the term today, in which we find, to draw from the table of contents of one recent collected volume, that there is, at the very least, state violence, structural violence, everyday violence, symbolic violence, interpersonal violence, and gendered violence.39 In its specific manifestations, violence can be anything from punching another individual in the nose to anything generally coercive or even unpleasant (and here we can include all forms of social ordering), on the assumption that order is possible either because (a) it ultimately rests upon the eventual likelihood of violence, regardless of whether such violence is ever actually employed; or (b) because ordering proceeds from power, and power in itself is reducible to acts of violence.40 In this process of marking things as violent and exposing them to the critical gaze there was never any need to produce a method by which types of violence could be disassociated from one another: since all forms of violence could be equally traumatizing (and therefore equally valid opportunities to expose the dynamics of power), a system of distinguishing which forms of violence might be more important than others would have been fundamentally an imposition of power, and hence