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
If we define and desire modernity as a progressive stage in humanity's history or as an advance on the part of reason and a retreat on the part of traditions and obscurantism, two main conceptions of violence fall almost naturally into place. The first grants it great legitimacy and expects it to play, if need be, a revolutionary role. As Frederick Engels puts it (1976 [1878]: 235–6), ‘In the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one … the instrument by means of which every social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms’. According to the second, violence will inevitably decline as reason comes to the fore. This latter conception has ...
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