The Violence of Victimhood by Diane Enns (review)

Victims have the potential to victimize. Caught between the experience of violence and the unimaginable affect of such an experience, it becomes difficult not to adopt or fall into logics that justify violence on the grounds of being a victim. Violence becomes repetitive, a sequence of repetition with differences in audience and degree of intensity. Eye for an eye becomes limb for limb, child for child, family for family, ethnic identity for ethnic identity. Political philosopher Diane Enns seeks to interrupt this cycle of violence, of victims making victims. Her book, The Violence of Victimhood, asks the question: Do victims have a responsibility? Shockingly, Enns argues that victims do have a responsibility to their own victims and to those who could potentially become a victim. However controversial, The Violence of Victimhood is an excellent book that complements ongoing research on ethics and ethical judgment in the field of rhetoric while explicating extremely clearly “high theory” from philosophers of communication in Europe, such as Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Enns critically assesses discourses of nation-state founding situations, child soldier narratives, rape narratives, and accounts of genocide to argue that judgment is our responsibility when staking claims to the identity of victim for purposes of political empowerment. Certainly tough to digest at points because of some extreme accounts of violence, Enns’s book makes a welcome contribution to thinking past victimhood as being a ground on which we lay claim to community and political action.

The Violence of Victimhood is introduced as an ambitious project to “explore [victimhood’s] effects in a number of divergent realms” (1). The magnitude of violence in the modern world blurs the lines between guilt and innocence, making it nearly impossible to deal with what remains in the aftermath: victims. Our typical response to victims, the remnant of the aftermath, is that “no one is responsible—and that any one of us would have acted in the same way under such circumstances. We may then wash our hands of the mess and leave it to the law” (1). Enns finds this response unsatisfying because it does not recognize the daily routines, institutional structures, and meta-political pressures that the victim (and we) fully participate in to render the conditions of possibility for violence as the founding practice of political community.

Enns’s most cogent example of everyday complicity comes from the university classroom. Chapter 1 begins as a discussion of Enns’s personal experience of being accused of racism, which quickly landed her at the personnel office and in front of a dean. There are two purposes for this narrative. First, it highlights the personnel management office as a key disciplinary infrastructure that we are subject to on a day-to-day basis, one that is designed to recognize only claims of victimhood as a ground for action. Second, it highlights that if small (“first world”) spaces like personnel offices are political and gain their authority from the ground of victimhood, then they are reproductions of values enshrined in meta-political institutions such as constitutions and social contracts, suggesting that all juridical forms in “western” society are fundamentally based on a ground of victim-hood. One must claim the status of victim to be recognized as legitimate in the juridical order.

If recognition in the juridical order is premised on claims to victimhood, then recognition is limited by social mores, modes of decorum, and cultural assumptions about identity that structure the law. Feminist theory has placed a spotlight on how different languages, idioms, and modes of expression are excluded by law. Theory (more broadly), however, still attempts to lay claim to exclusion as being a form of victimhood that activates guilt and resentment toward those who could be potentially sympathetic to one’s plight (27, 29). Thus, “the moral power of the victim results in death, destruction, and the silencing of dissent” at every level of the juridical and political order (39). The question is not about restoring the victim...