Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South (review)

Hermann Herlinghaus's new book studies modernity in the global south, specifically in Latin America, through a focus on ethical responses to violence. In it he argues that the most recent phase of modernity has drastically changed affective relations to violence in ways that require new theories regarding the connection between perceptions of violence and the practice of it. In the wake of the enormous influence of Giorgio Agamben's theory of bare life and sovereignty, Herlinghaus returns to its critical source: Walter Benjamin's early work in Critique of Violence (1921), where he first elaborates the idea of blosses Leben, or bare life. Herlinghaus argues that we need to extend Benjamin's analysis beyond its original European-oriented framework to the contemporary moment of global inequities, neoliberal capital, and cultural counterimaginaries. As he explains it: "Endangered human existence has begun to acquire unprecedented shapes of global immanence, and its distribution follows avenues that are as arbitrary as they are paved with cynical common sense, trying to reason away the heightened vulnerability of the world or to close up permeable borders by escalating sovereign rule" (6). These shifts require a rereading of Benjamin, Herlinghaus claims—one that recognizes the ways that neoliberal capitalism reinstates violent practices that had been previously thought of as only linked to earlier phases of capital accumulation.

In addition to being interested in returning to Benjamin as a way to understand the ethical dilemmas of contemporary violence, Herlinghaus is also interested in interrogating recent trends in Latin American literary studies, hemispheric border studies, and comparative literature. He argues that many of the interpretive practices in these fields have failed to recognize how contemporary Latin American narratives of violence—whether in books, on screen, or in song—reveal new aesthetic configurations and new imaginaries that reflect not only the violence of bare life but also the urge to consider nonsecular, quasi-religious responses to such violence. Bringing these threads together—a rereading of Benjamin on violence and new Latin American cultural imaginaries tied to contemporary violence—Herlinghaus develops a series of key theoretical moves. Among them are his theory of how a "war on affect" reflects the most recent globalizing phases of modernity and his notion of "affective marginalities," that is marginality understood not only sociologically but also in terms of the "theater of social emotions and the regulation of their aesthetic coordinates" (9).

An opening section outlines these twin impulses, and the three subsequent sections explore the ways that a revised reading of Benjamin can illuminate Latin American cultural responses to contemporary forms of bare life. The first of these sections focuses on the narcocorrido (the Mexican border songs about drug life)—a form especially suited to this project since these songs delve profoundly into contemporary violence, especially border violence, while also offering utopian imaginaries of resistance, dignity, and rebellion. Herlinghaus considers the narcocorrido to be an example of a "global localization" "whose historical and phenomenological backgrounds calls for the problematization of a notion of cosmopolitanism that is deeply ingrained in the epistemology of modern citizenship" (34). Moving beyond the narcocorrido as ethnographic evidence, Herlinghaus suggests that the narcocorrido phenomenon is especially useful for thinking about a series of crises: the violence of migration, drug culture, and the anachronistic space of illegal border traffic and informal exchange. But this is only part of the picture. Herlinghaus also sees in the narcocorrido a complex aesthetic project that supplies heterogeneous forms of cultural praxis. Violence Without Guilt claims that narcocorridos "have become public agents of an alternative public imagination that not only resignifies but reappropriates space" (58). Herlinghaus finds that the narcocorrido's narrative-rhythmic mode offers its listeners a spatial syntax "that enables a particular sensuous perception of massive uprooting and transnational border crossing" (81). This spatial/sociocultural imaginary has a particular aesthetic mode that Herlinghaus describes as paratactical drama. Here Herlinghaus revises Eric Auerbach's theory of parataxis and considers its presence in narcocorridos...