Reflection on Violence

The Histories of Violence website was launched on 11 September 2011 and on it are some amazing quotes  from some of the greatest thinkers of our time that give pause for thought:

The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting. This suffering demands the continued existence of art even as it prohibits it. It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice

Theodore Adorno

The unspoken terror permeating our collective memory of the Holocaust is the gnawing suspicion that the Holocaust could be more than an aberration, more than a deviation from an otherwise straight path of progress

Zygmunt Bauman

The twentieth century, industrial scale killing has been practiced in the belief that the survivors will live in a better world than has ever existed

John Gray

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened – that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death

George Orwell

Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter

Michel Foucault

Make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason

Barack Obama

Together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible in-distinction

Giorgio Agamben

The worst, the cruelest, the most human violence has been unleashed against living beings, beasts or humans, and humans in particular who precisely were not accorded the dignity of being fellows

Jacques Derrida

The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting. This suffering demands the continued existence of art even as it prohibits it. It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice

Theodore Adorno

We are a society vigilant about evil and that's probably because we agree in full or in part with the sentiments expressed by these thinkers. We know what humans have done in the past and will continue to do to each other. We understand the nature and extent of our depravity & cruelty and although we will not tolerate evil deeds by others we have to admit that on some level and given the right circumstances we might behave in exactly the same ways ourselves if we feel physically threatened by another. I've written little about evil in my life and have difficulty in separating it from  its binary opposite. For evil in one instance may be perceived as good in another.  I feel, as many others might, that all we can do is observe the pain and anguish experienced by many in the world.

According to Giorgio Agamben we are born as bare life (bodies) that are transformed by the State into good life - that is, we become inculcated into politics and morality. Indeed 'ethics of bare life, that is, natural life politicized through its irreparable exposure to sovereign violence and death (Agamben, 1998: 88). But some people whilst still living, are reduced to bare life - their rights removed from them and those who kill them have impunity, because as bare life these people are considered non-human and evil. I watched with horror at the thousands of people who died in the Libyan war and the recent atrocities in Syria, and I consider the way we in Australia are treating refugees and asylum seekers, all appear to be reduced to this status of non-human, just bare life, without rights, without sovereignty. But you might argue that they have surrendered that sovereignty when they left their own land; their choice.

Amidst this world which appears to be always spinning out of control we have remembered again 11 September and the words delivered by Barack Obama at his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism, it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason .(Obama, 2009) .

Alright, if the films we make and the television series we watch are any indication or reflection on who we are as a people then we must admit that most are filled with violence of some kind and we accept somehow that this is normal, usual.  A recent television drama entitled *The Vikings* depicts some of the extreme violence throughout that history that Obama was talking about. But violence came closer to us this week when the guides of several Australian trekkers were slashed to death in Papua New Guinea. 

We associate violence with evil and rightly so, but there are other kinds of evil, like Sarin, the unseen, tasteless, colorless, odorless substance that kills people and was used against people in Syria on 21 August this year. I have no answers, but I would argue that if we do, as Obama has done, accepted the imperfections of man, then surely this might be a place to begin to think anew about humankind and how we can make life better for all.

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press: Stanford.