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Phenomenological Reflections on Violence Following up on his previous book, Violence and Phenomenology , James Dodd presents here an expanded and deepened reflection on the problem of violence. The book’s six essays are guided by a skeptical philosophical attitude about the meaning of violence that refuses to conform to the exigencies of essence and the stable patterns of lived experience. Each essay tracks a discoverable, sometimes familiar figure of violence, while at the same time questioning its limits and revealing sites of its resistance to conceptualiza- tion. Dodd’s essays are readings as much as they are reflections; attempts at interpretation as much as they are attempts to push concepts of violence to their limits. They draw upon a range of different authors—Sartre, Levinas, Schelling, Scheler, and Husserl—and historical moments, but without any attempt to reduce them into a series of examples elucidating a comprehen- sive theory. The aim is to follow a path of distinctively episodic and provi- sional modes of thinking and reflection that offers a potential glimpse at how violence can be understood. James Dodd is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research, USA. He is the author of V iolence and Phenomenology (Routledge 2009). Studies in Philosophy Edited by Robert Bernasconi, Pennsylvania State University, USA For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com 43 Heredity, Race, and the Birth of the Modern Sara Eigen Figal 44 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’ Chloë Taylor 45 Husserl’s Constitutive Phenomenology Its Problem and Promise Bob Sandmeyer 46 The Mystical in Wittgenstein’s Early Writings James R. Atkinson 47 Violence and Phenomenology James Dodd 48 The Dialectical Tradition in South Africa Andrew Nash 49 Sartre and the Moral Limits of War and Terrorism Jennifer Ang Mei Sze 50 Bioregionalism and Global Ethics A Transactional Approach to Achieving Ecological Sustainability, Social Justice, and Human Well-being Richard Evanoff 51 The Ethics of Need Agency, Dignity, and Obligation Sarah Clark Miller 52 Phenomenological Refl ections on Violence A Skeptical Approach James Dodd Phenomenological Reflections on Violence A Skeptical Approach James Dodd First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of James Dodd to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dodd, James, 1968– author. Title: Phenomenological reflections on violence : a skeptical approach / By James Dodd. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Studies in philosophy ; 52 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017000539 | ISBN 9780415791892 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Violence. | Phenomenology. | Skepticism. Classification: LCC B105.V5 D625 2017 | DDC 179.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000539 ISBN: 978-0-415-79189-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-21217-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 The Question of Intelligibility: Three Threads of Inquiry 1 Six Essays on Violence and Philosophy 11 1 Concepts of Violence 15 Violence and Scarcity 15 Structural Violence 18 Symbolic Violence 25 Subjectivity and History 29 2 Violence and Nonviolence 40 Instrumentality 43 Nonviolence 51 The Problem of Constitutive Violence 57 3 Violence and Religion (on Levinas) 62 Deep History 62 Intentionality and Decomposition 68 Redemptive Violence 73 Religiosity, or: The Condition of the Hostage 77 “As if Under a Leaden Sun” 80 The Non-Violent Violence of Religion 84 vi Contents 4 The Metaphysical Root of Violence (on Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom) 91 Freedom and System 96 Freedom as Spirit 101 Freedom and Individuation 104 Collapse 107 5 Total War: The Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars 114 War and Revolution—1789–1812 116 The True War (Fichte)—1812–1815 123 The Real War (Clausewitz)—Aftermath 131 War and History 138 6 The War Writings of Max Scheler and Edmund Husserl (1914–1918) 146 Writings in a Time of War 146 Genius of War (Scheler) 150 “Not und Tod sind heute Erzieher” (Husserl) 162 Philosophy in Times of War 176 Postscriptum 185 Bibliography 187 Index 195 Preface Taken together, the Introduction and further six essays collected here repre- sent an attempt to expand and deepen the reflection on violence pursued in a previous book published under the title V iolence and Phenomenology .1 The basic conclusion of that work was that violence—taken for itself, purely on its own terms—is inherently problematic with respect to the conditions for its meaning, or sense. This does not mean that violence is always meaningless or senseless. On the contrary, violence consistently finds some articulation or other that integrates it into an order of understanding, even if at the same time it is also often accompanied by an experience of its utter senselessness. The point of V iolence and Phenomenology was instead to show how, from a philosophical perspective, a ny meaning that we may appeal to in order to understand violence is inherently unstable, resulting in a tendency to waver between radically antagonistic expectations of the sense or senselessness of violence. Another way to express this is that violence is p roblematically unsaturated with respect to its meaning: it either appears to be radically dependent upon external sources to render it comprehensible, or it appears to itself form the basis for a radical decision with regard to the question of sense. Accordingly, the reflections on violence in Violence and Phenome- nology were organized around the contrast between a purely instrumental conception of violence, which emphasizes the former tendency, and a conception of violence as constitutive of meaning, which emphasizes the latter. Violence and Phenomenology began, perhaps more by showing than explicit formulation, to develop a philosophical posture with respect to the myriad problems of violence, one that will be further developed here. This posture can best be described as a species of s kepticism . By skepticism I mean an exercise of philosophical imagination that projects from any belief, any articulated position, the possibility, even necessity of reaching for an understanding of its very opposite—and then back again—in order to avoid becoming the dupe of settled and transparent beliefs. The problematic, unstable character of the meaning of violence described in V iolence and Phe- nomenology justifies such skepticism, broadly construed, as the most ratio- nal response to the problems of violence, in that it allows us to navigate the inevitable double risk of expecting t oo much or too little from violence. On viii Preface the one hand, the purely instrumental conception of violence, anchoring the meaning of violence externally in motivations and projected ends, whether political, religious, psychological or cultural, concludes that the unsaturated character of violence amounts to its inherent “stupidity” when taken on its own terms, and thus risks oversimplifying the complex relation between violence and the human capacity for free decision and self-determination. On the other hand, the conception of violence as the origin of its own meaning, which embraces the idea of a deep bond between freedom and violence, takes this unsaturated character of violence to be the site of a gesture of radical freedom, a space in which nothing has or can be decided outside of the pure expression of a fundamental rejection of a given order of things. This in turn risks embracing violence as if it were a solid ground of determination, a concrete act of freedom, thereby falling prey to the inevitable distortion that violence chronically inaugurates. The fundamental philosophical gesture of V iolence and Phenomenology was not to c hoose between one or the other conception, but instead to suggest that there is no way out of this double risk, that both instrumental and constitutive conceptions of violence together constitute a circuit basic to the problematic character of freedom. More, to insist on a r esolution of this tension would fundamentally miss the inherent challenge of violence for philosophy: namely, the challenge of inhabiting the horizon of problematic freedom embodied in the phenomenon of violence in a manner that allows for the development of a genuine hermeneutics of violence, one that avoids the pitfalls of seeking uncritically all-too ambiguous “solutions” that promise an exit out of its contradictions that, in the end, can never be delivered. It is thus important to emphasize that what is meant by “skepticism” in this context does not amount to the denial of some knowledge claim or another—or to the belief that, in this case, violence is something that cannot be understood or explained. For we have no choice in the matter. We must understand violence, and in many particular instances we achieve an understanding that is sufficient both analytically and practically. The aim here is instead to cultivate a particular philosophical a ttitude , to think of skepticism as a perspective, a style of philosophical imagination, and not just a position or an argument. More specifically, the skepticism embraced in these essays also differs in turn from some aspects of most classical forms of skeptical philosophy, whether Pyrrhonian or Academic in spirit, while affirming others. Above all, skepticism here is not the pursuit of a state of equilibrium among competing passions or beliefs; nor is it the establishment of some inner peace of a taraxia, fortified by an epekho, a suspension of affirmation or denial. In short, the aim here is not the rejuvenation of that ancient project of self-discipline that would offer us an escape from the mental torments of doubt and wounds suffered from the battleground of our desires. It is rather the essential Pyr- rhonic gesture of skepsis as i nquiry that is decisive here, that capacity for a free suspension of judgment, but without any pretense of cutting oneself Preface ix cleanly off from the force of one idea, one argument or the other. Thus the fundamental gesture of e poché remains essential to these reflections, but where epoché means the refusal to over-commit to tendencies or conceptions that nevertheless remain influential, even compelling, in recognition of the inherent possibility that any such commitment will ultimately be challenged from within by the inevitable force of its opposite. If there is a moral dimension to this posture, it lies in the recognition that our commitments are chronically opaque to us, that, to quote Maurice Merleau-Ponty describing the skepticism of Montaigne (and Pascal), “we are interested in a world we do not have the key to.”2 Epoché , s kepsis , are thus here deployed not for the sake of ataraxia , but instead for phenomenology—but here too with some important caveats. Any reflection on violence faces the immediate problem of its inherently protean character, above all its relation to distortion, ambiguity, and insta- bility of form. This is perhaps most true of a properly phenomenological reflection. In violence, phenomenology is so to speak faced with something that seems to resist its own phenomenality, or that refuses to conform to the exigencies of essence and the stable patterns of lived experience. One might even suggest that the deep connection between violence and freedom is embodied precisely in the manner in which lived experience chronically fails to articulate the meaning of violence. The lived experience of violence is of a jarring contrast to order, to the very sense of things; it is a disruption of continuity, one that pushes us towards an encounter with the potential of our freedom, or the facticity of our being as a being-towards our possibilities that stands in tension with the very coherence of the world. Classical phenomenology exercises an epoché with respect to the naïve commitment of consciousness to the pre-givenness of the world, in order to make way for an attitude that would allow for an elucidation of the phenomenality of things. Here, by contrast, we are concerned with a much more complex species of phenomenality, one that does not offer itself to thematization by way of the mere suspension of our naïve acceptance of it as something woven into the pre-givenness of the world—on the contrary, here it is a question of the limits of phenomenality, of the limits of the very structures that allow for something like an experience of the world at all. This problematic, protean character of violence as a manifestation of the limits of worldly existence not only calls for an exercise of a skeptical philosophical imagination, one operating under an e poché in which reflection seeks to gain its footing amidst the pull of competing conceptions of violence. It also demands a cultivated wariness with respect to the very desideratum of a s ystematic analysis, one that would demand, once and for all, a basic vocabulary of definitions with which to submit particular examples to analysis and elucidation. The philosopher needs to be wary, for the dimension of free being that intimates itself in violence consistently points to a trenchant inadequacy of concepts . It points not to their total failure, but instead to a pressure emanating from the matter itself that disrupts conceptual closure,