The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding (review)

Inquiring critically into violence from a feminist perspective, The Subject of Violence has broad philosophical and theoretical ambitions. Bat-Ami Bar On attempts to understand the subject of violence—both those subjected to violence and violence as a subject of reflection—and combines this with a quest for an ethico-political language that goes beyond clichés. The author also relates violence to the problems of trauma, bearing witness, and extreme or limit events, in particular the Holocaust, or what she (following Arno Mayer) terms the "Judeocide."

Despite her desire to avoid standard idioms, Bar On accepts the now widespread notion that extreme violence exceeds understanding and may reduce its subjects tosilence. But, in a necessarily paradoxical gesture, she also attempts to provide understanding of violence and, in a sense, to make it speak. Her approach arrives at no new terms or concepts but rather takes the form of an intricate, self-questioning discourse that, as Bar On herself notes, cuts across different genres. Combining theoretical analysis with autobiography, the author takes account of elements of her own personal experience that have larger ethnographic implications, especially for women. In this vein, she discusses her turn to martial arts and the role of her Israeli background in shaping her complex subject position, including her sensitization to violence and her affinity with Hannah Arendt, whose thought is discussed and emulated in this book. Like Arendt, Bar On tries to think "without banisters," in a self-qualifying, give-and-take form that she describes as "messy and disordered" (p. 27). A more generous reading might see Bar On's mode of thought as autobiographical and theoretical in a somewhat different sense, providing a running record of an internalized, at times circuitous, seminar-type discussion in which Arendt is a privileged guest and the reader a participant who is provoked to enter into dialogue and debate with Bar On herself.

Bar On's book is consistently well-informed and thought-provoking. The footnotes provide a valuable source of references, especially in feminist scholarship. The author's engagement with Arendt is particularly intricate, in part because Arendt herself disclaimed any affiliation with feminism, retaining a more classical philosophical notion of discourse as transcending, or at least working through, subject positions and particular perspectives. Bar On maintains that Arendt was a feminist nevertheless and that feminism itself can have universalistic horizons while not disclaiming the specific circumstances of women and the embeddedness of thought in interacting subject positions (based on gender, sexual orientation, class, race, nationality, profession, and so forth).

Bar On insists that a discourse on violence must itself be affected by violence (p. 28). But the obvious question is how precisely the discourse, and those putting it forward, are affected by their object or subject of study—how what might be termed a transferential relation is empathically negotiated or engaged. This question is important for the nature of testimony and bearing witness in the case of both the victim or survivor and the secondary witness. At times Bar On seems to accept as the only possibilities the prevalent dichotomy between a deceptive attempt at totalizing narrative or theory, on the one hand, and enacting or acting out violence or its symptoms, on the other. The former type of narrative or discourse in effect denies the violence or trauma that called it into existence, constituting a leveling normalization, or what Eric Santner has termed narrative fetishism in "the construction and deployment of a narrative that is consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called the narrative into being in the first place" (quoted in Bar On, pp. 107-108). The latter seems to restrict non-normalizing or non-fetishistic responses to posttraumatic symptoms (silence, dissociation, melancholia, depression, hysteria, obsession, paranoia) and more or less unmediated, uncontrolled, indeed compulsive repetition. Bar On quotes James Young in ostensible agreement with this formulation:

It is almost as...