Editorial

Dr. Lars Cornelissen ISRF Academic Editor

Over 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. 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 the Northern Ireland conflict, they hold out that many victims of arson continue to experience the aftereffects of those traumatic moments in the present. They are not always recognised as victims of the conflict, however, as their experiences are overshadowed by more highly visible forms of violence, such as bombings, killings, or disappearances. Here, working through the conflict’s legacy requires both coming to terms with the past’s continued intrusions into the present and a struggle for wider recognition of those intrusions.

Violence’s detrimental effect on the mind is also the subject matter of Deana Heath’s piece, which explores the occasional eruptions in post-conflict contexts of what she terms ‘reworlding violence’. Such violence is defined by the attempt, by a humiliated post-colonial subject, to respond to the ‘unworlding’ violence of colonial rule by equally destructive means. By meeting destruction with more destruction, the perpetrator of reworlding violence becomes the mirror image, as it were, of the coloniser. In such cases, violence and the mind have become so intimately interwoven that it becomes nigh impossible to tell the two apart.

The relation between violence and mind is not unidirectional, however: rather than always eating away at reason, sometimes violence is buoyed by it. This is one of the implications of Cian O’Driscoll’s work. Studying the ‘just war’ tradition, he asks why it might be that its defenders have tended to ignore the concept of military victory and its relevance to the justness of warfare. By its very definition victory implies a loser, which in turn reveals the bare truth of warfare: that, in the final analysis, the strongest contestant prevails. This makes just war theorists uncomfortable, attached as that tradition is to the notion that war may be theorised in a disconnected, neutral, and abstract manner. By effacing victory—as well as, by implication, defeat—they effectively sanitise or rationalise the violence that is inherent to war. Here, mind moulds violence rather than the other way around.

Charles Stewart takes us in a slightly different direction, exploring the various ways in which the past is experienced as history. Comparing everyday historical inquiry to its academic counterpart, he notes that, in everyday settings, the past tends to interrupt the present particularly acutely in times of crisis or upheaval. As societies face hardships, people are often led to remember past crises and collective traumas, collapsing the past and the present. We might say, then, that today’s troubles have a tendency to bring yesterday’s violences to mind.

As a means of lightening the otherwise somewhat solemn tone of this Bulletin, Keir Martin (accompanied by Erin Kavanagh’s brilliant drawing) provides an irreverent take on the state. Psychoanalysing the state and laying bare what we might call the déraison d’État, he concludes that the 21 st -century state is best understood as a neurotic parent incapable of respecting its citizens as autonomous adults.

In short, this Bulletin seeks to untangle the complex and puzzling relationships between mind and violence. In doing so, it sets the stage for the ISRF’s upcoming Annual Workshop, which is to be held between the 29 th of September and the 2 nd of October and which will address the question of violence. It is our hope that, by stimulating engagement with this topic, the ISRF will make a contribution—however modest—to the important work of reflecting collectively on the nature of violence.