EDITORIAL Dr. Lars Cornelissen ISRF Academic Editor
O
ver the course of recorded history, the problem of violence has exerted an enormous pull on philosophy and science. What gives this problem its weight is undoubtedly its acute familiarity: all humans experience violence. Indeed, as Judith Butler has argued, to have a body is, by implication, to be exposed to the possibility of violence.1 To think about violence is therefore to think about one’s own embodied, vulnerable, human condition, and this can make the study of violence an unsettling experience. To be unsettled is not, of course, a bad thing: violence should unsettle us, for its pervasiveness and reach are deeply troubling. In thinking through this theme, the present issue of the ISRF Bulletin thus invites its readers to linger a while in the unsettling problem of violence. In spite of its familiarity, violence is exceptionally evasive. What, really, is violence? Although instinctively we are inclined to associate violence with physical force, its reach extends well beyond the realm of the physical, as many writers have convincingly argued. Drawing our attention to structural violence, financial violence, epistemic, sexual, linguistic, quotidian, mental, legal, or symbolic violence, they have shown that violence does not always (or exclusively) work upon the body. Often, violence goes unnoticed, having been eclipsed by other, more spectacular instances of violence or having gone unnamed and thus evading scrutiny. This is why much of the study of violence consists of naming violence. One of the upshots of the intuitive link between violence and physical force is that immaterial violences—or, conversely, violence’s immaterial features—are easily overlooked. Material violence can, after all, have a lasting immaterial afterlife: this is what Brendan Ciarán Browne and Casey Asprooth-Jackson gesture towards with their contribution’s title, ‘Burn/t Out’. Looking into the legacies of violent displacement during 1. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso Books, 2004), p. 26. 4
