Description
Book SynopsisPrimary texts on violence, from Freud to Gramsci to Foucault, from Ghandi to Osama bin Laden.
Trade Review“This volume provides a long-needed anthology of major writings related to the subject of violence. The readings include excerpts from classic contributions of Marx and Freud along with pieces by modern thinkers such as Girard and Bourdieu and social activists from Gandhi to bin Laden. The selections are skillfully chosen to address a central theme, that violence always takes place in a context. The readings explore the idea that social, internal, ritualized, and other forms of violence are part of the processes of life and not necessarily anomalies. This is a thoughtful and arresting set of essays on an important topic that will be useful in the classroom and much discussed in the public forum.”—Mark Juergensmeyer, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of
Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence“[T]his anthology is a triumph of editorial serendipity.” -- Steven Poole * The Guardian *
“Even though its tone is unremittingly gloomy, reading through
On Violence reveals an impressive selection of thinkers about this vexed subject. The brilliance of this collection lies in the editors’ courage to include unpalatable writings alongside noble ones.” -- Tim Roberts * M/C Reviews *
“Offering an eclectic roster of voices on the subject, this useful reader also raises the suspicion that the history of violence is a red herring. The pervasiveness of violence makes it difficult to distinguish violence from change, or history itself. Violent change requires some kind of ethical marker to make narrative sense as history. Violence is never morally or politically neutral: context is everything.” -- Priya Satia * TLS *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
General Introduction: Theorizing Violence in the Twenty-first Century 1
Part I. The Dialectics of Violence 17
Phenomenology of Spirit / Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 27
Anti-Duhring / Friedrich Engels 39
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy / Karl Heinrich Marx 62
Concerning Violence (The Wretched of the Earth) / Frantz Fanon 78
Part II. The Other of Violence 101
Actors
Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule / Mohandas K. Gandhi 110
The Right of Emergency Defense (Mein Kampf) / Adolf Hitler 127
The Ballot or the Bullet / Malcolm X 143
Critics
Selections from the Prison Notebooks / Antonio Gramsci 158
Keywords; Marxism and Literature / Raymond Wiliams 180
Outline of a Theory of Practice / Pierre Bourdieu 188
Domination and the Arts of Resistance / James C. Scott 199
Part III. The Institution of Violence: Three Connections 215
Familial
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego / Sigmund Freud 226
Social Control and the Power of the Weak (Heroes of Their Own Lives) / Linda Gordon 245
Battered Wives / Del Martin 255
Legal
The Shah Bano Case (Shattering the Myth) / Bruce B. Lawrence 262
Critique of Violence (Reflections) / Walter Benjamin 268
Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory / Catharine MacKimmon 286
Violence and the Word / Robert M. Cover 292
Human Rights and the New World Order / Chandra Muzaffar 314
Religious
Violence and the Sacred / Rene Girard 334
Liberation and the Christian Ethic (God of the Oppressed) / James Cone 351
Dangerous Memory and Alternate Knowledges (Communities of Resistance and Solidarity) / Sharon Welch 362
The Iliad, or the Poem of Force / Simone Weil 377
Part IV. The State of Violence 391
Leviathon / Thomas Hobbes 399
The Origins of Totalitarianism / Hannah Arendt 416
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison / Michel Foucault 444
Savages, Barbarians, and Civilized Men (Anti-Oedipus) / Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 472
Part V. The Representation of Violence 491
Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art / Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky 498
Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing / Michael Tuaussig 503
Shaved Heads and Marked Bodies: Representations from Cultures of Trauma / Kristine Stiles 522
Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places / Osama Bin Laden; In the Name of Osama Bin Laden: Global Terrorism and the Bin Laden Brotherhood / Roland Jacquard 539
Touched by Fire: Doctors without Borders in a Third World Crisis / Elliott Leyton 547
Copyright Acknowledgments 555
Index 559
