Abstract
Is violence senseless or is it at the origin of sense? Does its destruction of meaning disclose ourselves as the origin of meaning? Or is it the case that it leaves in its wake only a barren field? Does it result in renewal or only in a sense of dead loss? To answer these questions, I shall look at James Dodd’s, Hegel’s, and Carl Schmitt’s accounts of the creative power of violence—particularly with regard to its ability to give individuals and groups their sense of self-identity. I shall also follow up on Peg Birmingham’s suggestion that Socrates’ defense at his trial points to an alternate source of our self-identity—one that is ultimately less barren.
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Notes
For a fuller account of how violence is destructive of sense, see Mensch 2008.
For the three moments of standing out, standing open, and standing in see Heidegger 1967: 80–83, 92–93.
As Patočka expresses this: “The constant shaking of the naïve sense of meaningfulness is itself a new mode of meaning, a discovery of its continuity with the mysteriousness of being and what-is as a whole” (Patočka 1996: 61).
Violence, in other words, cuts short this question. In Dodd’s words, “violence is a kind of collapse of the question (where I stand, my honor, what I believe, what ‘needs to be done’ to protect my interests, and so on) into a decisive moment in which the subject seeks to extricate itself from the process of mediations that inevitably comes with the determination of selfhood” (Dodd 2009: 138f).
All translations from Hegel are my own.
The qualification, “for the most part” (überhaupt) is made since, for humans, self-consciousness is more than desire. The point of “Lordship and Bondage” is to show how this “more” comes about.
The translation is that of The New International Version of the Bible, which is available online at http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians+2&version=NIV.
In the case of the Buddha, this self-affirmation limits itself to the nothingness at our core. What exceeds this is taken as illusion. The self-worth claimed by this self-affirmation thus points in a different direction than that of a Socrates or a Christ. For Christ, such nothingness is understood in worldly terms. In emptying himself, he affirms himself as having a worth that transcends the world. The same holds for Socrates with the vision of the afterlife he puts forward in the Phaedo. The self of this afterlife is, in some sense, identified with the ideas (eidei) and, hence, with philosophy.
For the application of this principle to the National Socialist Regime, see Schmitt 1935, where Schmitt writes, “Endlich haben die typisch liberalen Trennungen und Dualismen vom Legislative und Exekutive, in der Gemeindeorganisation von Beschluß- und Verwaltungs- oder Ausführungsorganen ihren Sinn verloren. Die Gesetzgebungsbefugnis der Reichregierung ist ein erstes bahnbrechendes Beispiel dieser Aufhebung künstlicher Zerreißungen. Überall muß das System der Verantwortungsverteilung und Verschiebung durch die klare Verantwortlichkeit des zu seinem Befehl sich bekennenden Führers und die Wahl durch Auswahl ersetzt werden” (1935: 35).
Conrad describes this lack of content as a devouring emptiness: Marlow describes Kurtz speaking, “I saw him open his mouth wide [to speak]—it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him” (Conrad 1989: 99).
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Mensch, J. Violence and Selfhood. Hum Stud 36, 25–41 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9265-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9265-1