Thinking Violence and Rhetoric

Erratum

American culture is gripped by an obsession with violence. From hate crimes to violent video games, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Gaza, from action films to the death penalty, it seems our most pressing and controversial contemporary issues have violence as a common theme. And even as the traumas of 9/11 begin to blur slightly in our national memory, we nonetheless continue to return to the images and the sense of panic associated with that day as the exemplar of the senseless and devastating pain of violence.

Although these visible acts of violence are undoubtedly both compelling and horrifying, they tend to distract our attention from underlying forms of violence that generate both violent acts and our efforts to maintain peace. Slavoj Žižek calls these less visible forms of violence “objective violence,” and he describes them as being embodied in our language and in the functioning of our political and economic systems. Unlike “subjective violence,” the violence that is outwardly recognizable and “is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things,” objective violence, on the other hand, “is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”¹ It is not merely that objective violence is more difficult to see than subjective violence, Žižek explains, but that “the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking.”² Thus, in the face of overwhelming violence, Žižek exhorts us not, as we are often enjoined to do, to take immediate action, but rather to pause to think and learn.

In a similar fashion, each of the four books I review here advocates thoughtfulness about violence and seeks to move beyond a reaction to its horrors. By considering the relationship between rhetoric and violence, specifically as it is manifested in American culture, these authors each challenge us to take a step back from violent actions to understand violence’s functions in the construction of identities, in social movements, in our system of justice, and in discourses of tolerance. In the face of our preoccupation with violence, these authors move beyond simple condemnations of violent actions, suggesting instead that there is something to be learned, for instance, from the way the leaders of reform movements respond to violent actions by their radical members, from our personal and national impulses toward vengeful retaliation, or from the deployment of tolerance discourse to legitimize violent actions of the state.

By engaging thoughtfully with violence, these authors not only promote new understandings of violence itself, but also suggest various relationships between violence and rhetoric. Does rhetoric provide a means to forestall or prevent violence? Does rhetoric act as a catalyst that can produce or inflame violence? Can the use of rhetoric undo the damage of violence? Can rhetoric reinterpret violence’s effects, or potentially resignify the harms done by violent acts? Can rhetoric legitimate the use of violence for progressive purposes? Does rhetoric itself act violently? Of course, none of these authors offer a comprehensive or conclusive answer to any of these questions, nor do they provide solutions to the problems of violence with which our culture is currently preoccupied. Instead, and more usefully, they present situational arguments and conditional conclusions, some of which are provocative and potentially incendiary. In other words, they provide us with the opportunity to (re)consider...