Summary
Contents
Subject index
“La Violence introduces us to French social theory at it best. An ambitious book becomes a major, indeed a fundamental investigation into the most cruel social relationship of our time. It tells the truth.” – Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University
Violence is an ever-present phenomenon – obstinately resistant to interpretation. This text offers new tools to understand and analyze violence, presenting a new approach based on the subjectivity of the actor, and on the relation between violence and meaning.
The first section discusses violence and conflict, violence and the state, and violence and the media. This provides critical context for developing a new paradigm – in the second section – that gives more importance to the concept of the subject than more classical paradigms. The text distinguishes different possible relations between the meaning of action and violence and proposes a new typology of the subjects involved in violence. It gives particular emphasis to discussing cruelty, violence for violence sake, and “pure” violence.
The relationship between conflict and violence; the place of victims, and the role of the media all shape new forms of violence. This text is an engaged response to these new forms that presents a convincing interpretation and new tools that will be essential for researchers in the social sciences.
Introduction
Introduction
The classical approaches are, on the whole, reluctant to concentrate on the act of violence and therefore concentrate either on analysing the conditions that encourage action or acting out, or on studying the actor, who is reduced to being a sociological variant on homo economicus who is defined solely by his calculations, strategies and, ultimately, interests. They take no interest, or very little interest, in the meaning of the action or orientations that the violence might be expressing.
If they did so, they would soon find themselves in difficulties. The initial characteristic of action is usually that it appears to be distorted or transfigured, when compared with what it would be if violence were not an integral part of it. There appears to be an ...
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