Afterword: The Phenomenology of Violence and the Politics of Becoming

Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.

—Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France 1975 –1976

By focusing on the violence of death, I want to look at the forms through which it is accomplished, the manner in which it embraces all substantiality—indeed, to the point where it has penetrated almost everywhere and virtually nothing escapes it, since to a large extent, it has become the normal state of things.

—Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony

It always remains an option to reopen talk, prophecy, philosophy and poetry. . . . Strike a blow, anyone can do that, but who is able to talk and who knows how to do so?

—Jean-Luc Nancy, "Consecration and Massacre"

The conceptual chiasmus of narrative violence and the violence of narrative" produces in its wake an eloquent demonstration of how violence has become "a structural feature of our contemporaneity" generated and sustained by powerful practices of signification (Gana and Härting, in this issue). I share my collaborators' complex sense of the dangerous reciprocity between violence and narrative and applaud their attention to the latter's simultaneously legitimating and insurrectionary functions. Much of the critical discourse on the subject of violence concentrates on its spectacular, traumatic, redemptive, or unprecedented character, mapping the trajectory of the human subject in extremis and representing violence itself as the marker of the limits of narrativity and historicity. This collection of essays is not immune to these tendencies, partly because these models of violence continue to have explanatory value, but also because the authors perceive and exploit the necessity of beginning with these assumptions before dismantling them. In other words, it is the function of narrative to organize, contain, and even probe acts of violence, but something ineluctable, even irreducible, eludes its best efforts. It is to the credit of the contributors that they abide by their faith in narrative, despite their own compelling accounts of its dubious, compromised, and inadequate character. The essays' unflinching analysis of the concealed violence of narrative concludes with their collective determination to pose the following questions: If narrative cannot comprehend the enigma that the eventuality of violence poses, how can it nevertheless serve as an ethical injunction and a political imperative? Why is narrative both the "poets' and murderers'" (with apologies to Derek Walcott) weapon of choice?

The essays are persuasively organized under rubrics that are themselves suggestive of narrative progression. "Mimetic urgencies" demand "mimetic responsibilities"; atrocity, silence, trauma, exile, madness, and loss inhabit the language of affect in the exemplary narratives under scrutiny; and the essays struggle to resist the twin lures of spectacle and humanitarianism in their own ardent elaboration of the ethics and politics of narrative violence. Editors Nouri Gana and Heike Härting's admirable introduction delineates the contexts within which the essays find their (dis)place(ment) and explains the crisis in witnessing contingent upon the event of violence. Their theorization of narrativity complements the detailed exploration of events and their narrative inscriptions in the essays. However, the distinction between narrativity as a condition of historicity and narratology as a hermeneutic becomes lost because narrative, as the essays understand it, is both cause and symptom of the contemporary crisis of representation. The individual essays are subtle and provocative, but their reason for insisting on the specificity of narrative in contradistinction to an all-encompassing category such as discourse or, indeed, representation, is unclear.

The emphasis on how and why narrative violence occurs and on its historical effects and psychological affect within each text enriches our comprehension of each author's significance but at the expense of formulating a political unconscious and cultural imaginary of violence in the Middle East and Africa. I suspect that simply treating each analysis of different parts of the Middle East or Africa as a piece of the puzzle would be inadequate, as would extrapolation from the essays' potent thematization of loss or exile or death or...