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Refractions of Violence

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Berkeley historian and critic, Martin Jay, offers sixteen reflections on violence and reactions to it. He aims the book against "Sorelian threnodies to [the] redemptive power [of violence]" (10), referring to French social theorist Georges Sorel's "Reflections on Violence" (1908) that argued for the myth of a general strike to frighten capitalists into concessions for workers. He is rightly worried that today "violence... looms ever larger as a feature of human interaction" (10). In the chapters that follow, he cites some modalities of violence prefiguring our own violent turn but focuses mainly on examples from the news or his own experience. The subjects are varied and interesting, and they are treated with some originality. We learn about Walter Benjamin's complicated refusal to mourn the carnage of World War I; the inefficacy of Berlin's new Peace University to reduce violence today; a wealthy German leftist atoning for his father's Nazi fortune through his own harrowing kidnap experience; the inability of historians to date the end of the Holocaust as a testament to that horror's continuing trauma in our lives; a Jewish colleague's deathbed conversion to Anglicanism as a blow struck for reconciliation and peace; and Jay's rejection of violence inspired by religious or quasi-religious belief, as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and 9/11. Some entries don't quite fit the rubric. For example, his fascinating analysis of "blind justice," which finds that there is always a kind of violence done in the name of justice, whether algorithmic or decisionist, nonetheless is not devoted to specific acts of violence. Or his essay on "astronomical hindsight," which reminds us that the light we receive from other worlds is always a trace of a reality that once was, even if it no longer exists. This fact of physics helps us to evade the claims of synchronic self-sufficiency made for virtual reality today. Apparently, according to Jay, even the late Jean Baudrillard had to admit that there is more to our current reality than mere simulacra produced by a seductive media. Once recast as at least a partially grounded reality, the present day invites us to mourn or even, in spite of its ramifying violence, "to wonder at the survival of the seemingly dead past" (131). Other essays contain similarly surprising positive judgments about violence, such as the claim that transgressive body art "may be a version of somaesthetics that has something to teach democracy after all" (176) or that "rights talk [i.e., human rights] has often functioned as a legitimation for violent resistance to oppressive authority" (161). Jay is rightly cautious about these judgments because he knows these practices--in artistic and political action, respectively--have led to violent outcomes he cannot condone.

This book is well worth reading, for it shows how difficult it is to treat violence objectively, as just another inevitable dimension of the human condition. Inexorably, under Jay's steady hand, we are drawn into a series of perplexing questions about the nature and function of the violence surrounding us. To be sure, Jay himself condemns virtually all forms of violence he treats. He concludes that in today's world, "only a dialectics that...honors the irreducible value of individual lives can hope to have any emancipatory effect" (187). How to enact this dialectics of honor in a world of mounting global terrorism against "guiltless victims" (187) and a continuing academic onslaught against the "traditional conception of the [human] subject" (187) are questions Jay, quite properly, raises but does not answer. He is scrupulously honest that he can't answer them because we live "in an age of increasing opacity and incoherence" (10). Perhaps this book, and others like it, will help us recover our bearings.