`<html> <title> Cultures of Violence </title> <head> <META name="description" content="Cultures of Violence"> <META name="description" content="Comparative Literature"> <META name="description" content="Comp Lit"> <META name="description" content="Conference"> <META name="description" content="Graduate Student"> <META name="description" content="Irvine"> <META name="description" content="UC Irvine"> <META name="description" content="University of California, Irvine"> <META name="description" keywords="Cultures of Violence, cov, university of california irvine, graduate student conference, conference, critical theory, psychoanalysis, academic conference, cultures of violence irvine"> <style type="text/css"> .abstractsbar {position:absolute; top: 10; left: 20; z-index:1; border: 0px; decoration: none;} .abstractsbutton { position:absolute; top: 490; left: 20; z-index:1; border= 0; visibility: visible; } .announcements { position:absolute; top: 515; left: 275; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .biosbar {position:absolute; top: 10; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0;} .biosbutton { position:absolute; top: 454; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .cfpbar { position:absolute; top: 10; left: 715; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .cfpbutton { position:absolute; top: 310; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .cov { position:absolute; top: 10; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .keynotesbar {position:absolute; top: 10; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0;} .keynotesbutton { position:absolute; top: 382; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .maintextbackground { position:absolute; top: 14; left: 275; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .mapsbar {position:absolute; top: 10; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0;} .mapsbutton { position:absolute; top: 562; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .panelsbar {position:absolute; top: 10; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0;} .panelsbutton { position:absolute; top: 418; left: 19; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .poster { position:absolute; top: 515; left: 715; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .schedulebutton { position:absolute; top: 346; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .schedulebar {position:absolute; top: 10; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0;} .screeningbar {position:absolute; top: 10; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0;} .screeningbutton { position:absolute; top: 526; left: 20; z-index:1; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .text { width: 390; height: 413px; position:absolute; top: -1px; left: 270px; font-family: "trebuchet ms"; font-size: 10; font-weight: normal; color: #888888; text-align: justify; padding: 5; padding: 15; z-index:3; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .textbold { width: 390; height: 482; position:absolute; top: 30; left: 265; font-family: "trebuchet ms"; font-size: 10; font-weight: bolder; color: white; text-align: left; padding: 5; padding: 15; z-index:2; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; } .textbold1 { width: 408px; position:absolute; top: 519px; left: 8px; font-family: "trebuchet ms"; font-size: 16; font-weight: bolder; color: #888888; text-align: left; padding: 10; z-index:2; border-width: 0; visibility: visible; height: 66px; } .text1 {width: 390; height: 100; position:absolute; top: 320; left: 0; font-family: "trebuchet ms"; font-size: 14; font-weight: normal; color: white; text-align: left; padding: 10; z-index:2; border-width: 0;} .text2 {width: 390; height: 482; position:absolute; top: 60; left: 265; font-family: "trebuchet ms"; font-size: 12; font-weight: normal; color: #888888; text-align: justify; padding: 5; padding: 15; z-index:2; border-width: 0;} .style1 {color: #FFFFFF} .style4 {color: #999999; margin-left: 15px; font-size: 11;} body,td,th { font-size: medium; } a:link { text-decoration: none; } a:visited { text-decoration: none; } a:hover { text-decoration: underline; } a:active { text-decoration: none; } body { margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; } .style9 {font-size: 12px} .style10 {color: #CCCCCC} .style11 {font-size: 80%} </style> </head> <body> <body bgcolor="black">
<div class="textbold"></div> <div class="text"> <div style=" width:411px; height:482px; overflow:auto;"> <table width="390" height="457" border="0" id="text";> <tr> <td height="453" bordercolor="0"><div align="justify" class="style11"><body bgcolor="black"> <p class="style10"><strong>Paper Abstracts (ordered alphabetically by participant):</strong></p> <p class="style10"> Ryvka Bar Zohar<p> <p class="style10"><strong> The Affective Economies of Zionism</strong></p> <p class="style4"> In his article "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims," Edward Said points out that Zionism has been fetishized by its decontextualization and the refusal of its proponents to see the history that made it. From this he calls for an examination of Zionism both genealogically, in relation to European nationalism and colonialism, and as a system of accumulation of land and power, and does so in that article as well as much of his later works. Said and those who followed him felt the impetus to "speak truth to power" in order to counteract Zionism, and this is indeed the same tactic used for the most part by the Israeli left, from NGOs documenting human rights abuses to the 'new historians' who uncover unseen or concealed archival materials. While this work has no doubt been informative, it may also serve to further entrench Zionism in a deterministic historical narrative, this time as the "dark underbelly," creating a paralysis and melancholia among the left, and a reactionary ownership and justification for the crimes of Zionism on the right. <p> <p class="style4"> In this paper, I use Said's project as described above as a point of departure. I take seriously his call by tracing a genealogy of Zionism as a system of affective accumulation. Zionism was developed through a rhetoric of shame in diaspora Jewry and pride in Zionism's proposed replacement, the 'new Jew' and the colonization of Palestine. It grew through the circulation of this rhetoric, which provided a language through which Jews could understand and describe the Jewish experience in Europe and elsewhere, and gained more meaning as it circulated. It is this affective dimension of Zionism that has created the basis for all of its effects at which the truth telling is directed, so it is at the affective dimension that interventions must be made.<p> <p class="style4"> As the affective economy of Zionism becomes clear through this genealogy, I propose an alternative investment as a way of de-centering Zionism as a force in our lives. Zionism is a project that has positioned itself to be haunted by the ghosts of Jewish victimhood in Europe. Intentionally conjuring the ghosts of other histories, especially those that have been suppressed in the service of Zionism, can be a way to open up new possibilities for new identifications in the future. These possibilities, I believe, are beginning to be explored in new literatures and political projects calling for Mediterraneanism in contrast to Zionism. This new Mediterraneanism calls for a reclamation of a space and time in which the Mediterranean region can once again thrive as a regional power. More importantly, it is being evoked primarily as an alternative to the deadlock of Zionism and in opposition to U.S. imperialism. I end the paper by stringing together some moments which I believe lend the possibility of a new subjectivity to inhabit, so that the collective can view the Zionist project and especially the Nakba as a shameful act, and move forward to inhabit a new and restorative identity. <p><p> <p> <p class="style10"> Lisa Barksdale-Shaw<p> <p class="style10"><strong> DRIVEN TO VIOLENCE: Avenging Victimization & Forging Justice in Contemporary British Drama</strong></p> <p class="style4"> Gloria Steinem observes that, from pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence-- and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.  Not unlike their Elizabethan predecessors in revenge dramas, contemporary British dramas find sympathetic and non-threatening characters which are compelled by visual or physical manifestations, to commit acts of violence. I argue that, these characters are driven to violence to achieve a type of retribution from their victimizers. This desire to seek revenge is played out most vividly in Martin McDonaghs The Pillowman, Roy Williams' Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads, and Kwame Kwei-Armahs Elmina s Kitchen. These dramas provide fascinating illustrations of wronged victims who, in seeking their vengeance, emotionally and physically move through a cours! e of events from states of non-violence to those of violence. In actuality, by the time the victims raise their hands or voices in anger or in violence, the audience supports this uncharacteristic shift. The words, behaviors, and images of violence that provide threads throughout the plays not only prepare the victims for the shift, but prepare the audience as well. Yet, in seeking this retribution, the victims are able to form, even if imperfectly, their own sense of justice. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Brechtje C.M. Beuker<p> <p class="style10"><strong> A Need to Tell? Theater, Violence, and the Destruction of the Psychological Narrative</strong></p> <p class="style4"> In this paper, I examine in how far narrative strategies are indispensable for our dealing with violence and how contemporary (European) theater negotiates our need to tell stories of violence and our need to question the role of narration in the production of violence. In her recent essay collection Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler criticizes how the practice of remembering and explaining the events of September 11 relies heavily on personal narratives (of Mohammed Atta, Osama bin Laden, individual victims etc.). In her view, the focus on the responsibility or suffering of single agents obscures broader issues of political and economic conditions and structural violence. Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, who continuously aims at unmasking various forms of structural violence, is equally critical of the role narration plays in dealing with violence. In order for her theatrical work to form a counterforce to the numerous TV-stories providing the dominant framework within which we perceive and make sense of violence, she develops a dramaturgy that destructs the common psychological narrative, thus disrupting familiar representations of violence.<p> <p class="style4"> Taking Jelinek s work as well as that of German filmmaker, performance artist and theater director Christoph Schlingensief as a starting point, I show how so called postdramatic (or postmodern) theater undermines -in the spirit of Benjamin- the general conception of violence as a means-to-and-end as well as the clear distinction between perpetrators and victims. By doing away with characters and plot, it precisely calls into question such conceptions. Nevertheless, in terms of a critique of violence, the destruction of the traditional Aristotelian model is not without risk. As Butler acknowledges, personal narratives seem a necessary tool for us to identify with those involved in violent acts. The lack of psychologically motivated individuals in postdramatic theater, I argue, probes the mechanisms through which empathy is generated and runs the risk of leaving the reader/viewer indifferent to the violence and suffering with which s/he is confronted. As a final point, I discuss how the fact that theater is essentially a chronological medium with live performers can and is being used by directors as a means to balance the problems arising from the destruction of the traditional drama. After all, in order to narrate violence, theater does not have to rely on fictional models alone, but can make use of the performance situation as well. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Michelle Cho<p> <p class="style10"><strong> Feeling the Way of the Intercepting Fist: Violence and Fantasy in Once Upon a Time in High School</i> </strong></p> <p class="style4"> As in the case of other films in which violence and masculinity are interpreted as being co-constitutive (e.g., Fight Club, Straw Dogs), detractors have expressed the concern that Once Upon a Time in High School: The Spirit of Jeet Kune Do (2004) is a glorification of violence, per se. In response to this view, I would point to the polyvalent multiplicity of registers of violence in the film: an aestheticized, redemptive, romanticized violence associated with individual agency, institutional violence and its deployment in reproducing systemic inequalities and docile yet menacing bodies, and the violence that secures sexual difference and produces gendered subjects through the perpetuation of the sexual division of labor. On account of this plurality of registers, the film has also been criticized for failing to present a coherent critique of violence. Such a failure is forgivable, I think, since instead of presenting a broad, general indictment of violence, the film addresses the complexity of the relationships between violence, fantasy, trauma, subjectivation, and the body. Indeed, the multiple registers of violence in Once Upon A Time can provide a helpful schema for a reading that would allow us to clarify these relationships as well as the operations of genre and history in the film. First, the film¹s critique of institutional/systemic violence might be enriched by attention to the elements of the film that index the persistence of psychic wounds associated with the period of dictatorship. In addition, the film¹s relationship to the function of fantasy that constitutes the appeal of the martial arts genre, as well as the curious nostalgia that the film evokes, might be illuminated by a consideration of the film¹s aestheticization of heroic violence. And finally, the violence that establishes sexual difference might be interrogated to confirm the thorough penetration of the realm of fantasy by the ideology of normalization. The film is neither a critique nor a glorification of violence, or, for that matter, masculinity. Its treatment of violence is emphatically spectacular, corporeal, and above all, educes affect. Accordingly, the primary function of violence is neither representational nor narrative‹the point is neither to reenact history nor to facilitate an integrated narrative arc. In this essay, I would like to examine what the film accomplishes in its rhetorical address to a Korean viewing public by highlighting its local, historical concerns at the same time that it renders the boundaries of culture permeable through its transcultural tropes and its citation of internationally legible film genres. What does it do when it draws forth in its audience not-quite-nameable feelings (something like the visual pleasure of spectacle and the psychic pleasure of identification, both developing out of a cumulative ground of nostalgia for youth, indignation over memories of the past, and dissatisfaction with the present) and channels these feelings by means of the martial arts revenge fantasy? How does the film create forms of sociality and collectivity by providing a new space for affective experiences? How is the structure and operation of fantasy, and hence, psychic reality, affected by film? The larger contexts of this reading are the relationship between cinema, fantasy, collectivity, and affect. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Jessica Collier <p> <p class="style10"><strong> Going Nowhere Fast: Education of African-American Women in History and in Harriet Wilson's <i>Our Nig</i></strong></p> <p class="style4"> It is now a common trope explicitly set forward by cultural critics like Henry Giroux and Pierre Bourdieu but addressed much earlier in Jean-Jacques Rousseau s Emile as well as in the work of the American Transcendentalists that education is an inherently violent practice, while it is also a common trope that denying any particular ethnic, socioeconomic, or gender group the opportunity for education is another form of cultural aggression. The presence of these supposedly contradictory concepts often marks the antebellum African-American experience, a situation in which, historically, formal education was most often used as a means of control and was bounded by the felt necessity to educate up until the point of maximum social productivity without nurturing undesirable stirrings of independence, discontent, or self-empowerment.<p> <p class="style4"> This paper will look at the way in which education is treated in Our Nig, an autobiographical novel written by Harriet E. Wilson, a free black woman, and published in the United States in 1859. A landmark of African-American literature, one of the first known novels by a black woman, Our Nig nonetheless defies the iconic democratic notion, central to the vocabulary of American and African-American studies, of education as uplift. <p> <p class="style4"> The question of what constitutes education and whether education does in fact function as a mode of entrÈe to free society in a profoundly racist and classist world are central to Our Nig. The novel demonstrates that the irrelevance of the educational system to someone like Frado, the novel s protagonist, who works to educate herself only to be stalled again and again by her circumstances, makes it a cultural institution that further stifles and limits the African-American, female subject. The overarching critical tendency to read the book and Harriet Wilson (for we read her as much as we read Our Nig) as primarily black and secondarily female focuses attention on the questions of literacy and spiritual education so often invoked in slave narratives. Yet the question of female education also looms large, with Frado s nightmarish domestic situation acting as a violent parody of domestic education.<p> <p class="style4"> Unlike more commercially successful narratives by (mostly male) African-American writers, Our Nig does not present the theme of education as a means of uplift in a democratic society, but as a relatively hopeless undertaking. By looking at the state of education for women and blacks in the mid-nineteenth century a state characterized by a violence that goes beyond the traditional notion of education as destructive to the individual and at the passages in Our Nig that deal with formal and religious instruction, this paper attempts to show that Wilson s novel, while it presents a young black woman working to exercise agency over her situation, also presents the ways in which that agency is necessarily limited and often violently suppressed. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Joshua R. Coonrod<p> <p class="style10"><strong> The Safety of Children: An Analysis of Why Children are Kept Safe from Harm in Horror Narratives</strong></p> <p class="style4"> It can be argued the Friday the 13th series finds one of its most powerful moments in its sixth film. Serial killer Jason Voorhees walks into a cabin full of sleeping children, machete in hand. He peers under a bunk bed to find two shivering young boys. And the killer  known for viciously dispatching anyone without rhyme or reason  walks away. Apparently, the only people safe from his mayhem are those under the age of sixteen.<p> <p class="style4"> Teenagers and children have always had a complex relationship with the horror genre. As Ian Conrich points out in his article, Seducing the Subject: Freddy Krueger, Popular Culture and the Nightmare on Elm Street Films , the very children that are supposedly targeted in horror films are often the people most likely to relate to the films  killers. While Conrich points out particular reasons children identify with Fred Krueger (including Freddy s comic manner, his fantastic powers, and relating to him as an other ), he pays little attention to the idea that children are not actually hurt in these films; they tend to operate in a safe space. When looking at successful horror franchises, it is rare to see a child actually die. <p class="style4"> In this paper, I question why children are afforded this safety. Is it simply a commercially driven decision made by Hollywood studios that are worried paying mainstream audiences do not want to see kids die? Or it an attempt to prove there is some kind of moral code in these films that relies so heavily on gruesome depictions of murder? When analyzing children s roles in horror films, their treatment tends to correlate to conservative notions that Mark Jancovich argues define the horror genre. Children are safe because they are too young to drink, steal, or have sex; it is not until they become teenagers that they can be punished for these offenses. <p class="style4"> The safety of these children still begs other questions, though: why are children used for these intense scenarios if audiences are relatively sure they are safe? What is the difference between a child being terrorized and actually dying in a horror film? Do they ever die in horror films? I will be incorporating texts that deal with both horror film and children and violence in culture. Conrich s article will be combined with sources such as Carol Clover s Men, Women and Chainsaws, as well as entries from the Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Poltergeist series, in order to establish the conventions horror films apply to children. I will also work with texts such as Sisella Bok s Mayhem and Jeffrey Goldstein s Why We Fight: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment in order to discuss more generalized approaches to how children typically interact with violence. My goal is ultimately point to how the horror genre has created a specific relationship in how it deals with children, how it depicts them, and how it relates to them, and to show how the relationship varies from how other media depict the intersection of children and violence. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Jesse Cross<p> <p class="style10"><strong> Writing the Self in the Americas</strong></p> <p class="style4"> The work I hope to bring to this conference is an examination of Kurt Vonnegut s 1969 novel <i>Slaughterhouse-Five</i>, which is the author s attempt, in his words, to "report what he had seen" as a prisoner of war in the World War II firebombing of Dresden. This book s autobiographical dimensions have been largely overlooked on account of a fictional narrative that seems to intervene  and to largely replace  the promised story of the author s Dresden experience. My account, by contrast, suggests that the novel s intervening fictional narrative is essential to the book s autobiographical character, providing a new understanding of the brief and evasive characterization of the Dresden firebombing that concludes the book. <p class="style4"> This reading of Slaughterhouse-Five begins with an extended examination of the scene in which Vonnegut approaches a portrayal of what he witnessed in Dresden, a concluding scene that comes closest to his stated autobiographical aim for this book. This scene is one in which the destruction and loss of life produced by the bombing, often intimated in the text, is nonetheless absent. It is my suggestion that, in a close reading of this scene, what instead emerges is Vonnegut s documentation of this event s excision from memory, a forgetting figured as a reiterative act of violence performed upon the dead at that site. Through this depiction, moreover, Vonnegut presents himself as having been both initially complicit in, and subsequently subject to, this act of erasure. <p class="style4"> The fictional narrative that leads up to this confession, I then suggest, constitutes Vonnegut s attempt to write himself into a position of authorial resistance to the Dresden event. Drawing on de Certeau s observations of various ways that historiographic writing can perpetuate the production of proper  spaces form which acts of violence can be perpetrated, I claim that Vonnegut s fictional narrative serves in part to systematically undermine such proper  spaces. Furthermore, in this act Vonnegut can be seen as attempting to build a political community around a shared rejection of such proper  spaces. The narrative, that is, can be read as chronicling various sites of exchange that have a poetic content that is not only irreducible to the commercial exchange within which they occur, but that hold the potential to produce a certain type of breakdown within that exchange. In trying to build a political community around this experience of oneself as what de Certeau calls a user  or consumer,  I claim that Vonnegut is offering an alternative to the Cold War east/west binary that he can be seen critiquing throughout the book. And it is this production of a responsible authorial self that has written itself into a place of ethical resistance against the memorial excisions of the proper,  this production of an authorship no longer complicit in the bombings at Dresden, I ultimately want to suggest, that is for Vonnegut the essential precondition of his confession to his initial complicity at that site. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Michael Cucher <p> <p class="style10"><strong> Development as Counter-Insurgency in John Womack Jr.'s <i>Zapata and the Mexican Revolution</i> </strong></p> <p class="style4"> In the Preface to Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, John Womack Jr. explains the strategy that drives his account of the peasant uprising from Morelos: It is not an analysis but a story because the truth of the revolution in Morelos is in the feeling of it, which I could not convey through defining its factors but only through the telling of it.  Motivated in part because the text (first published in 1968) continues to function as the definitive history of the original Zapatista insurgency for many scholars, particularly in the US, this paper investigates Womack s representation of the feeling  of the rebellion. To what extent, after all, does the historian s claim that he is able to represent Zapatismo only in terms of its emotional content constitute a form of violence? <p class="style4"> While countless representations of the Mexican Revolution chronicle an era of violent upheaval in which a dizzying array of factions fought for the right to chart their nation s future, the work of Ranajit Guha and many others investigates the ways in which historians often enter into complicity with the violence they describe, especially when the legacy of a peasant insurgency is at stake. Following both Guha s analysis, and more recent scholarship in the field of Latin American subaltern studies particularly the work of MarÌa Josefina Saldaña-Portillo this paper argues that the developmentalism at the heart of Euro-US historiography is one of the principle vehicles through which the brutal legacy of European expansion manifests itself in the production of contemporary knowledge. Enrique Dussel suggests, "[t]he fallacy of developmentalism consists in thinking that the path of Europe s modern development must be followed unilaterally by every other culture," and while John Womack represents himself as sympathetic to the Zapatistas  cause, his story  seems to rely on inherited, European models of the nation in order to define both the successes and the failures of the movement. Throughout the text, Zapatismo is represented as successful  only insofar as the rebels become willing to eschew their local priorities in the interest of participating in the construction of a representative, national democracy with its headquarters in Mexico City. Read from a subaltern studies perspective, it becomes clear that the paradigm of national development casts an unannounced but decisive shadow over the historian s narrative. In fact, it is in the misrecognition and/or erasure of insurgent alternatives to the Euro-US model of national politics that the developmentalism of contemporary historiography performs its greate! st violence. <p class="style4"> In an effort to recuperate the political possibilities of Zapatismo, this paper positions Zapata and the Mexican Revolution against El Caudillo del Sur,  a mural painted by Roberto RodrÌguez Navarro just meters from the site of Zapata s birth in Anenecuilco, Morelos. If Womack s text seems determined, to a significant extent, by its developmental bias, RodrÌguez Navarro s visual representation of Zapata and the campesino rebellion offers a different perspective. In fact, this paper reads El Caudillo del Sur  as representing an insurgent perspective, which suggests that political "victories," and even alternative conceptions of the nation, can be found outside the framework of national politics as they are currently understood in the Euro-US imaginary. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Theresa Erin Enright<p> <p class="style10"><strong> Part of Panel entitled "The Politics of Vulnerability: Spinozan Affect and Violence" </strong></p> <p class="style4"> In his recent book, Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy forwards the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity, or conviviality  as a relational ethic of living in proximity to difference without reverting to the violence and brutality of ethnocentrism and racism. An unorthodox version of humanism, conviviality suggests that "multicultural ethics and politics could be premised upon an agonistic, planetary humanism capable of comprehending the universality of our elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other." In a similar fashion, Judith Butler, in Precarious Life, also investigates the possibilities of a non-violent politics written from the acknowledgement of vulnerability for violence is  she says "always, an exploitation of that primary tie, that primary way in which we are, as bodies, outside ourselves and for one another." (<p class="style4"> Both these thinkers identify the need to counter violence of the past and present with a sense of shared responsibility that is premised upon an exposure to otherness. This corporeal vulnerability enables action, empathy, and solidarity at the same time that it renders people both subjects of violence and agents of violence. Butler notes the ambivalent nature of our porous embodiment, saying, "The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well" (26). This paper aims to read this ethic of vulnerability and openness to others in light of Spinoza s conception of affect. It will examine how affective politics can be a useful in theorizing conviviality and grief, and how Spinoza can help us to understand the precarious relations to otherness that so often lead to violence and pain. It will also look at the potential of Spinozan ethics to underwrite a politics of relation that promotes non-violent encounters between bodies. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Jordan Hayes <p> <p class="style10"><strong> The Eighteenth-Century Myth of Constructive Force </strong></p> <p class="style4"> Foucault notes in the essay The Subject and Power,  that, In itself the exercise of power is not violence  although the bringing into play of power relations does not exclude the use of violence any more than it does the obtaining of consent.  Within the interstice between the categories of power relation and relation of violence lie moments defined by the use of force. I view an agent s use of force as an attempt to create a lasting social bond with an other  through the threat of violence. Western culture makes sense of such seemingly contradictory impulses through representations, stories and images. Ellen Pollak notes that fiction, when read as a form of ideological myth, enables certain logical contradictions to be presented plausibly.  My study in this area employs major canonical works of the eighteenth century to delineate a paradigm that is of both immediate and historical relevance: The myth of constructive force. <p class="style4"> In this paper I will discuss two texts from the eighteenth century: Aphra Behn s Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe s Robinson Crusoe. Defoe s novel presents an emblematic case of a fiction wherein force is represented as a valid strategy to create power relations. The character of Crusoe uses force to constitute such social relations across all gulfs of difference, be they religious, ethnic, or national. In light of both the cultural context of the day and recent scholarship, I find that violent force, as depicted in Robinson Crusoe, functions as a way for English Christians to include non-English non-Christians within the hegemonic bounds of their own understanding. That the terms of this inclusion are predicated upon submission, a qualified form of consent, moves me to offer the term subaltern power relation  to describe the type of social bond portrayed in Robinson Crusoe. <p class="style4"> My reading of Aphra Behn s Oroonoko will explore the destructive potential of force, for Behn s shorter work depicts the possibility of its cultural misuse. When the character of Oroonoko resists a subaltern power relation, the slave-holding class of the colony of Suriname submits him to a relation of violence in order to maintain order. I will elucidate the manner in which the colonial society of the novel depends upon an institutionalized, commodified form of the subaltern power relation portrayed more simply in Robinson Crusoe. Reliance on the commodified subaltern relation of colonial slavery carries with it a narrowing of ideological vision on the part of the colony at large, despite the cases of moderate personal sympathy to Oroonoko described by Behn, and the interests of the slave-holding elite seal Oroonoko s fate. Unlike Crusoe s Friday, Oroonoko offers his consent, ultimately, only to the culture of violence offered by the British colonists. <p class="style4"> Taken together, these novels offer a bifurcate model of the use of force. I will argue in my discussion of these literary representations that the constructive potential force may be seen to have is only possible within the context of the violence it promises. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Katrin Hakkinen <p> <p class="style10"><strong> William Blake and his idea of liberation in the 1790s </strong></p> <p class="style4"> This paper will examine William Blake s writings in the context of the uses of the language of liberty by loyalist, pro-reformist and radical authors in their attempts to justify the human costs involved in promoting their respective political programs. The analysis of Blake s early play, which exposes the propagandistic use of the term liberty , and his later poem Europe (1794) permits me to conclude that despite his distinctive radicalism Blake was critical of the rhetoric of necessary (war) sacrifice and refused to offer handy rationalizations of revolutionary violence. <p class="style4"> What a number of various radicals shared with the conservatives was a belief in the efficacy of a single, calculated blow, conceived to be delivered as an act of retributive justice. According to this vision, the attainment of a state of liberty was a matter to be resolved by warfare in which the victor, by force, if necessary, was the one who had a final and thus the most legitimate say in the definition of liberty, or any other expedient political value. It is this logic of such dialectical exterminations and its underlying materialism that Blake first criticizes in his Europe and Book of Urizen, and later elaborates upon in The Four Zoas. The latter poem in particular, shows Blake s concern with the idea of revolutions as enterprises in which certain ind ividuals endeavor to sever themselves from something they ultimately seek to destroy. <p class="style4"> }i~ek has argued that revolutionary violence is never a means by which a non-violent harmony may be established on the contrary, authentic revolutionary liberation craves violence in and of itself and not the outcome of that violence. The Four Zoas likewise dramatizes revolutionary change as being generated by such a desire for severance and segregation. This is most conspicuously embodied in the strand of narrative that deals with the conflict between Luvah/Orc and Urizen. Interestingly, }i~ek points out affinities between this desire and Christian love, whereas Blake traces the roots of the problem to various linguistic codifications disseminated through the medium of letterpress books. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Amalia Herrmann <p> <p class="style10"><strong> Heidegger, National Socialism, and Philosophical Responsibility </strong></p> <p class="style4"> After World War II, Martin Heidegger never expressed a need to think through the violence of National Socialism despite his personal, political involvement in it. Instead, other than the odd reference to the manufacture of corpses  in concentration camps, his comments subsumed this history under the question of the proper relation of humans to technology (remarking at one time that National Socialism was moving in the right direction toward this question, the Nazis just weren t good enough thinkers). But Heidegger s unthinking of responsibility is not merely personal denial, and the question of philosophical responsibility cannot here be sectioned off into the realm of biography. His writings re-conceptualize the possible effectivity (and, by implication, responsibility) of philosophy. <p class="style4"> In this paper I will examine how Heidegger s early concept of guilt and later conceptions of responsibility introduce a view of causality that makes it impossible for the thinker, as thinker, to be responsible for political or social violence. By defining guilt  as a non-moral, non-theological concept, and returning to a supposedly Aristotelian concept of being responsible for,  he departs from the usual model of cause and effect, which he critiques as productivist metaphysics. His new view of a-causal thinking corresponds to his shift (in the mid-1930s) from a language and more-than-rhetorical exaltation of battle, struggle, danger, and salvific destruction, to the declaration that philosophy does not effect,  cannot produce any immediate effect in the world. On the one hand, he deftly uncouples thinking from real-world action and consequences (if philosophy cannot do  anything, the philosopher cannot be responsible for any violence done in the name of a cause he furthered); on the other hand, he reserves for thinking the greatest potential for preparing (the elect few) for the future  quietly, indirectly. My paper will thus trace the connection between his concepts of causality and his implicit view of the political role and efficacy of the philosopher, incorporating his strange postwar discussion with former student Karl Jaspers on German and individual guilt and the three centuries of destruction  to come. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Alexander Keller Hirsch <p> <p class="style10"><strong> To Be Held Out Into the Nothing: the Ethics of Violence in Spinoza and Heidegger </strong>Part of Panel entitled "The Politics of Vulnerability: Spinozan Affect and Violence"</p> <p class="style4"> To be human, Heidegger tells us at the beginning of "What is Metaphysics," is to be "held out into the nothing." We beings are "thrown" into finitude suspended, poised between the void of that nonbeing out of which we have emerged in birth and into which we will inevitably return in death. In making the oblivion and darkness of the nothing our own, Heidegger goes on to say, we realize our most proper possibility,  which brings us to others, forges community. Community is what fosters wonder  at the world, community is what makes us capable of dwelling within the space of mystery. Wonder is what ends violence. To be held out into the nothing is to end violence. <p class="style4"> This essay seeks to deepen Heidegger s aphorism, not only to come to terms with what violence is, or how wonder, the revelation of the nothing,  obstructs violence, but also to ask more specifically what it means to be held out into?  Using Spinoza s Ethics, and particularly his avowal that we are in  as well as of  God,  the essay concludes with a political theology of ethical violence. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Don Kingsbury<p> <p class="style10"><strong> The Divine Fires of Potentia: Ethical Violence in Antonio Negri and Enrique Dussel</strong></p> <p class="style4">The recent work of Enrique Dussel, most notably his 20 Tesis de Política, borrows heavily from the Spinozist currents of Antonio Negri, in particular on the differentiation of political power into categories of Potentia and Potestsas. This differentiation, which might analogously (and roughly) be described as the difference between constituent, grassroots power and constituted, top-down command is for both thinkers the optic through which to think the political as well as the determining scale of ethico-political action. This is the point where these thinkers diverge, in that Negri denies both the utility and efficacy of Potestas in his construction of the Œmultitude¹ whereas Dussel sees Potestas, or the in his terms the institutionalization of popular power, as a necessary if ephemeral moment in the liberation of humanity. This paper operates in the interstice, or perhaps in excess, of these Spinozist variations. Drawing on recent events in Mexico, particularly the ongoing popular insurgency in the southern state of Oaxaca, as well as the so called Œdual presidency¹ that has emerged around the elections of 2006, I will develop an uneasy comparison of each author¹s conceptualization of ethical, popular violence. I will focus particularly on the unit of sovereignty and its normative placement in each author¹s politico-ethical system. Sovereignty, then, operates as the ultimate arbiter of what qualifies as popular, or ethical, violence in Negri and Dussel as well the point of contention between them. In the end, I will avoid taking either side in the debate, but will rather point to the consequences of each theorization of ethics, violence, and sovereignty in the current milieu.

<p class="style10"> Peter Leman<p> <p class="style10"><strong> The Violence of Justice / The Justice of Violence: The Critique of Law and Empire in Augusta Webster's <i>The Sentence</i></strong></p> <p class="style4"> While much of Augusta Webster s genre-spanning work deals with issues of domesticity, motherhood, and the social conditions of women in 19th century England, her late verse drama The Sentence is one of her most explicitly political compositions. Set in ancient Rome during the reign and in the court of the infamous emperor Caligula, the play tells the story of two lovers whose illicit relationship indirectly causes the death of the wife who prevents their union. The play ends withh Caligula enacting justice on the unsuspecting lovers, but it is justice tainted by the emperor s violent and sadistic means. Furthermore, the question of justice is rendered highly problematic in the emperor s self-conception as both political sovereign and the highest emanation  of deity. <p class="style4"> In my paper, I argue that in the figure of Caligula, Augusta Webster dramatizes a central conflict between two traditional schools of thought in the philosophy of law: natural law, in which law is derived from divine law, and positive law, in which law is the command of the sovereign. In exploring how this conflict functions in her play, I attempt to situate Webster s work in the context of 19th century discourse on the nature of law, as well as her own connections to the legal field. Of the few biographical facts available, we know that Webster s husband was a lawyer and a law lecturer at Trinity College in Cambridge. Furthermore, John Austin, considered by many to be the creator of legal positivism, published his most essential work The Province of Jurisprudence Determined in London in the earlier part of the 19th century. From Webster s play, it is clear that she understood the new concept of legal positivism and, further, the difficulties it posed in the face of the more traditional idea of law as theologically grounded. Her articulate and imaginative rendering of this conflict not only reveals the controversial nature of legal positivism, but also her perspicacious understanding of the character, sources, and abuses of power, as well as the uncanny continuity (in terms of power and the violence of empire) between ancient Rome and Victorian England. I will thus also consider her engagement with the myths and politics of empire alongside that of recent postcolonial critics who assess the extent to which legal positivism has contributed to corruption and violence in the former British colonies. <p class="style4"> Christine Sutphin has called The Sentence an arresting work,  and William Michael Rossetti considered the play to be one of the masterpieces of European drama.  Such a judgment is better left to individual readers, but it is unquestionable that Webster s play tells an engaging tale that offers a fascinating and timely critique of the violence that can result in the often confused space where theology, law, and power converge. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Jeffery Marino<p> <p class="style10"><strong> Violence Beyond Good and Evil </strong></p> <p class="style4"> In the current historical conjuncture where theories of a global culture often coincide with a decidedly schizophrenic rhetoric of violence, a rhetoric which is currently deployed by the United States government simultaneously as the instrument of human emancipation as well as the barbarous implement of those left in the wake of Modernity, it has become necessary to theorize a practical ethics of violence. Although the phrase, "ethics of violence" invokes discussions concerning the ethical justification and/or prohibition of violence, either in its systemic character as a manifestation of state power or in its idiosyncratic form as it applies to the individual, this paper considers any such debate to be at an impasse until the problem of defining an ethics appropriate to the present is rigorously engaged. This means envisioning an ethics that supersedes the hobbling limitations of an eschatologically conceived notion of moral right and is therefore capable of understanding violence beyond, as it were, good and evil. <p class="style4"> Drawing from a selection of recent political and theoretical production concerning the work of Benedict de Spinoza, which most notably includes interventions from Gilles Delueze, Antonio Negri, and Pierre Macherey, I argue that a revaluation of Spinoza s Ethics is the necessary point of departure for any productive theorization of what is progressively becoming a global culture of violence. This study of Spinoza s Ethics takes a distinctly meta-critical form, developing a brief intellectual history of Spinoza s (anti)philosophy and surveying the relatively recent turn to Spinozism in critical theory, particularly the remarkable role of Spinozism in revolutionary thought. Following what seems to be a critical consensus that Spinoza is a univocal thinker and thus resists the dialectic (indeed Hegel himself regarded Spinoza to be resolutely un-dialectical), I argue that the univocal character of Spinozian thought opens up the possibility for a crucially nee! ded re-conceptualization of violence a re-conceptualization that is ironically dialectical in form and necessarily radical in content. By introducing a conception of violence beyond good and evil this paper works to counter a dangerous slippage in the rhetorics of violence currently being marshaled by the United States government in order to maintain its status as a global hegemon. (<p><p> <p class="style10"> Mia L. McIver <p> <p class="style10"><strong> Necessity Knows No Law: Atrocity, Political Theology, and Biopolitics in <i>Mother Courage and Her Children</i> </strong></p> <p class="style4"> Necessitas non habet legem ("Necessity knows no law") is the catchphrase for Agamben s definition of the state of exception, a justification uttered by the sovereign for his suspension of society s legal underpinnings. Brecht gives the line to Eilif in Scene Two of Mother Courage, during which Eilif recounts his massacring a group of peasants. Trapped and outnumbered, Eilif cleverly deceives his foes by pretending to bargain with them for the cattle, and takes advantage of their confusion to attack. In Scene Nine, he is executed for performing a similar deed in peacetime, though we quickly learn that it is not, in fact peacetime: war broke out three days ago. <p class="style4"> That an act of bravery in war is considered an atrocity in peace is perhaps not surprising. What is more interesting is that the definitions of war and peace are thoroughly unstable, and that apprehension of a shift in states is always belated, far behind the times. Much to his detriment, the context of Eilif s crime has not yet caught up to him, and a civilian death is murder rather than heroism. In exposing the arbitrariness of such designations, Mother Courage thematizes and critiques the idea of a perpetual social war. In the play, we learn that peace is like the hole in a piece of cheese: it disappears once the cheese is consumed, implying that war not only consumes objects and bodies, but is itself an object to be consumed. Brecht s drama exposes such life-giving violence as philosophically incoherent. In this paper, I present the main argument of my dissertation s epilogue: living off war is an adequate definition of a Foucauldian biopolitics, and Mother Courage shows us the other side of sovereignty s collusion with biopolitics: the view from the bottom up, when the pinnacle is far out of sight. We see sovereign suspension not as it impacts law but as it impacts survival apart from law. Necessity, transferred from top to bottom, is connected to the survival of the individual body rather than to the survival of the social body. <p class="style4"> Mother Courage s conflation of politics with war in Scene Three is symptomatic of this attitude: "As a rule you can say victory and defeat both come expensive to us ordinary folk. Best thing for us is when politics get bogged down solid." That a suspension of political discourse obstructs the progress of a war is a Clausewitzian idea, and my ultimate argument is that Mother Courage s affinities with Clausewitz, formal ironies, and narrative of attrition ask us to reject Foucault s concept of permanent and all-pervasive war, in favor of delimitations and delineations between states of war and peace that sustain culture through adherence to the rule of law, however primary we find the violence of right to be. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Jed Murr <p> <p class="style10"><strong> To "Shake Dixie's teeth loose": Lynching, Liberal Nationalism and Racial Capitalism in Langston Hughes's "Silhouette" </strong></p> <p class="style4"> Recent scholars of lynching have sought to understand lynching as in the words of Philip Dray more than simply "an aberrational form of racial violence" or a "frenzied abnormality"; instead, they view it as a complex intersection of conceptions of race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as overlapping discourses of normativity, legality, taboo, performance, whiteness and cultural-political stricture within the United States. I suggest that the "social philological" reading strategies advanced by Rachel Blau Duplessis provide a useful and potentially enormously generative approach to lynching poems that enables an analysis of lynching not as unusual racial violence committed at the social, political, or geographical margins of the US social formation, but as, in the words of Jaquelin Goldsby, "the image that compresses the horrific brutality of Americ! a's racial history with regard to African Americans into a single act" (246) as, in other words, a constitutive element in the reproduction of the liberal nationalist state and racial capitalism. In a reading of Langston Hughes's brief and enigmatic poem, "Silhouette," I argue that, as lynching poetry achieves recognition of that compression which is to say, as it points up the centrality (not marginality) of lynching to American social life it simultaneously requires that we not think "racial history" and lynching specifically without thinking (or rethinking) the complex and uneven interconnections of race, class, gender, and sexuality that pervade every aspect of the U.S. social formation. Put otherwise, the lynching poem demands that any world-historical critique of racial capitalism be grounded in a recognition of the ways in which to borrow from Stuart Hall "the central issues of race always appear historically in articulation, in a f! ormation, with other categories and divisions and are constantly crossed and recrossed by the categories of class, of gender and ethnicity" and sexuality. Finally, I suggest that such a reading requires that we interrogate how extreme, publicly-sanctioned racial violence and its overt attachments to white supremacism under the lynching regime have been recoded and restructured (rather than left behind) in the contemporary moment, when official racisms have given way to the myth of color blindness and the hyper-visibility proffered by lynching has been transformed and divided into the hyper-visibility of the figure of black criminality and the simultaneous "invisibility" of the black body within the prison industrial complex. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Kate Olson <p> <p class="style10"><strong> Infanticide, Cannibalism, Rape, and Mutilation: the Uneasy Equations of Violence and Gender in John Gower s Confessio Amantis </strong></p> <p class="style4"> The Ovidian myth of Philomela appears throughout medieval literature in an array of languages and genres. Critical work on medieval adaptations of the myth focuses primarily on the representation of Tereus  rape and mutilation of his sister-in-law, Philomela, and her reaction: she weaves the crimes into a tapestry that she sends to her sister, Procne. Feminist work on the myth has celebrated Philomela s artistic response to her experience of violence1 and critiqued specific representations and aestheticizations of rape, often using the scene to assess authorial misogyny and sympathy (or lack thereof) for rape victims.2 With the exception of articles by E. Jane Burns and Carolyn Dinshaw, critics sidestep the myth s bloody conclusion: in order to avenge Philomela, Procne kills her son, Itis, and prepares him as the main ! course at a private feast for Tereus. <p class="style4"> In his fourteenth-century Confessio Amantis, John Gower s treatment of the myth captures the representational anxiety concerning Ovid s equation of rape and infanticide by undermining the ways in which courtly literature associates masculinity with violence and femininity with passive victimization. After a contemplative prologue on the decline of England, Gower places his Middle English poem firmly in the courtly love genre of the Romance of the Rose, the allegorical story of a lover s pursuit of a rose, and the work of Andreas Capellanus, who describes in details the rules for the lover. Amans, the protagonist, is a self-pitying lover whose prayers are answered when he encounters the God and Goddess of Love. The Goddess decides to test Amans  devotion to her; to do so, she calls upon her high priest, Genius, who uses stories and ! classical myths to confess Amans and evince the characteristics of good and bad lovers. <p class="style4"> In this essay, I examine the tensions between Genius  framing of the infanticide and cannibalism as a calculated response to rape and mutilation and his subsequent avoidance of any reference to Procne s use of violence in his final moralization of the myth for Amans. Genius narrates the myth faithfully, but his gloss focuses his audience on the rape and the ways in which the story vilifies Tereus as an anti-model for Amans; he ignores the complex, fluid relationship between gender and violence that his tale has suggested. I suggest that the infanticide confounds the association of women with passive victimization and men with abusive violence at the heart of the courtly code; in this myth, Tereus becomes a victim of symbolic rape as his wife tricks him into ingesting their son and Procne becomes an infanticide and rapist, using violence to achieve revenge. By having Genius paint a nuanced picture of the ways in which gender and violence are aligned and then res! ist the implications of his own tale, Gower critiques the tension between acts of female violence and the ways in which courtly literature imagines and contains the relationship between violence and gender. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Nimanthi E. R. Rajasingham <p> <p class="style10"><strong> Violence Against Women: the Beginnings of a Debate in Sri Lanka </strong></p> <p class="style4"> By 1982, a Sinhala film called Dadayama (the hunt) was released in Sri Lanka, in which its protagonist is brutally murdered by her lover while she is in an advanced stage of pregnancy. This film is a remake of an incident that occurred in 1958, where an actual woman, Adeline Vitharne is murdered by the Vilpattu national park. <p class="style4"> By 1984, one of the most prominent Sri Lankan feminist collectives in Sri Lanka at the time, The Voice of Women, had used the film to discuss the issues of violence against women. The cover of their special issue on this topic had visuals from the film of the protagonist s murder. <p class="style4"> By the mid 1980s the feminist movement had come to mobilize around the issue of gendered violence as a new and pressing issue that needed urgent focus. The film Dadayama became a primary site of discussion for this issue, while the actual incident of the late 1950 and a publication of this murder case in the 1970s marked Adeline s death as nothing more than a murder. By the 1980s, this murder had transformed itself clearly to being about sexualized violence, about rape and about her pregnant feminized body. <p class="style4"> This was also a time when the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict had begun in the post-1983 ethnic riots, now referred to as black July, where the dominant ethnic group in Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese, killed and burnt the properties of thousands of its numerically small national group, the Tamils. In the aftermath of this riot, armed struggle by groups of Tamils for a separate state had begun and marks the beginning of one of the most protracted ethnic conflicts in the world. <p class="style4"> By this time too, the Sri Lanka economy had changed for the first time from a closed national regime to an open capitalistic economy. Market and economic conditions and perceptions of change heightened tensions of how increased consumerism and capitalism will impact society. This anxiety was clearly reflected, in many of the political debates of the time. <p class="style4"> How might one understand the manner in which gendered violence or what was labeled at the time violence against women  came to be a focal point for the feminist movement? This paper will investigate the feminist movement s links to larger patterns of change within the Sri Lankan context, (identity/ethnic politics, an open and increasingly privatized economy) and to trends of global change (increased indebtedness through loans, NGOization of the service industry). This paper will also investigate the following questions: Why did gendered violence come to be an issue for the women s movement at this time? What changes in the Sri Lankan context enabled this? How does violence against women mark a change in the kinds of debates the Sri Lankan feminist movement came to espouse thereafter? For example, how does the category of gender and class come to be elided by gender and identity politics? This paper will also look at how international trends within the feminist movement and globalization came to change the contours of the feminist debates in the post-1980s juncture. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Erik Rangno <p> <p class="style10"><strong> Fathers and Sons at the Crossroads of Culture: Parricide in Freud, Girard, and McCarthy </strong></p> <p class="style4"> In my talk I will try to understand the relationship of patricide and infanticide to the production of culture more generally by examining three modern critiques of Oedipus and Laius at the crossroads: Freud s psychologization and enculturation of it in such works as Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents, Rene Girard s anthropological revision of Freud in Violence and the Sacred, and Cormac McCarthy s literary mythologization of familial violence in Blood Meridian and The Road. My point will be to show that, different from other forms of violence, parricide occupies a special place in our imagination: it is alternatively seen as the most intimate and the most inhuman of acts. Literal and symbolic forms of parricide, insofar as they provide the link between our particular family s fate and ou! r civilization s future, are essential to the development of an ethical and viable culture. In Blood Meridian, for example, McCarthy connects the fate of civilizations with the generational conflict between fathers and sons. The descendants of a culture or a family must actively wrest their inheritance from their living fathers; this struggle, if missing for even a single generation, voids culture of its accessibility and its meaning. <p class="style4"> The act of witnessing is crucial to the eventual transformation of violence into non-violent culture. In Oedipus the King, there is the shepherd who comes forward to tell Oedipus the bad news, followed by the witness at the crossroads who confirms that Lauis was slain by him. In The Women of Trachis Heracles insists that the gods oversee and bear witness to his patricidal request. In Freud, by contrast, the super-ego itself is birthed by witnessing and responding to the id s desire to kill the father. And in Girard, the child witnesses the cultural conduct of his literal and symbolic fathers, those in authority, so as to learn how to rebel against them. Blood Meridian argues that violence requires a total commitment on the part of the participant and any attempt to sit in judgment of it causes one to break with history and to bear false witness against one s self. In marked contradistinction to all of the above, however, The Road exp! lores the possibility that love and death rather than murder might be enough to keep culture moving. The child, then, becomes his own witness and in doing so neither forgets his father nor succumbs to the will of a larger one; he can speak not only to the ghosts of the past, but to present and future men and women. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Annette Rubado-Mejia <p> <p class="style10"><strong> Civil Violence and Politics in the film City of God </strong></p> <p class="style4"> City of God, a film released in 2003 to international critical acclaim, depicts the history of the government created slum outside Rio de Janeiro named City of God through the last 3 decades of the 20th century. This slum differs from resident erected shantytowns in that it is purposefully isolated from the metropolis and for its role as a disciplinary locale established to confine poverty, homelessness and crime to the periphery. City of God both effectively captures the violence that exceeds and undermines the civil struggle for hegemony and, through its formal features, transmits the numbing effects of that violence to the viewer. However, its attempts to explain that violence remain paradoxical by both emphasizing sociopolitical features and using ontological criteria which elide the political implications of its portrayal. Because City of God represents urban violence as intelligible, it is helpful for thinking about how this violence and its executors relate with civil society and the state. <p class="style4"> In this paper, I use the movie to think through spatial and ontological frames for understanding violence and to discuss the relationship between civil society, politics and violence. In particular the film s portrayal of the history of violence in the City of God neighborhood provides an important exploration of the interactions between marginalized and disenfranchised peoples with the state which I use to critique Hans Enzensberger s analysis of urban violence in Civil Wars: from L.A. to Bosnia. In Enzensberger s thoughts on civil war politics is framed as the cornerstone of a civil civic society and war is represented as the breakdown of the order and reason provided by politics. The movie shows how political institutions of the state (principally the police) purposefully maintain some in a state of war by not allowing them access to civil conditions and then condemns them as animals or barbarians. The opposition between civil society and war is destabilized in the movie on two major fronts: the political institutions are shown to act perpetuate disorder and violence and the hoodlums portrayed in the film sometimes provide a structure and security to the residents of the slum which creates a different form of civil society while a sort of war is being waged with the police. <p class="style4"> I explore how this destabilization and the restabilization of the break between civil society and war can be interrogated, understood and theorized through Roberto Esposito s concept of the impolitical, Hannah Arendt s notion of the between and Antonio Cornejo Polar s account of heterogeneity in Latin America. Ultimately, I argue that the contrasting narratives of the geopolitical focus on locale and the interpenetration of state and civic violence and the focus on individual actors as exemplary of particular traits registers the heterogeneity Cornejo Polar has identified as an important mark of the power relations that shape cultural production. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Amy Rust <p> <p class="style10"><strong> Hitting the "Verite Jackpot": The Ecstatic Profits of Freeze-Framed Violence </strong></p> <p class="style4"> Kill Bill, The Passion of the Christ, and The Devil s Rejects have recently earned places of privilege in the history of cinematic violence and in the cultural debates that accompany it by permitting us to see more in the way of corporeal brutality. For those who find it objectionable, this more represents an unmanageable and twofold gratuitousness not only do we, as spectators, see too many images of violence, but the graphic quality of their views means that we also see too much. A look at Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or The Wild Bunch (1969) reminds us, however, of the extent to which the visual code of such contemporary cinematic brutality is indebted to a seeing more that goes back to the circumstances of another code s, the Production Code s, demise. Before its conversion to a G-M-R-X rating system in 1968, the Hollywood Production Code restricted images of brutality and possible gruesom! eness  to the clichÈs of clutch-and-fall deaths and strategic cutaways. With its fall in the midst of increasingly mediated social violence, as well as film industry recession, corporate conglomeration, and the solicitation of a newly conceived youth market,  a new philosophy of visibility emerged, one which, for many critics, spectators, and cultural watchdogs precipitated another fall into the too many and too much of today s supposedly unredeemable "ultraviolence." <p class="style4"> In the meantime, another set of images those of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American troops at Abu Ghraib also exemplified a will to visibility not uncommon to the late 1960s and 1970s, when images of war and social unrest became a regular feature of television journalism in the United States. But what do we make of these historical recurrences? Of the shared visibility of corporeal violence in The Wild Bunch and Passion? Of the collision of documentation and entertainment at Abu Ghraib and in Haskell Wexler s Medium Cool, a narrative fiction  set in the riotous streets of 1968 Chicago? Such is the aim of this paper to begin to ground a way of seeing images of violence in the present through an exploration of seeing more s historical emergence in the cinema of the past.<p class="style4"> More than simple historical comparison, however, I propose a thoroughgoing examination of the very technologies new to commercial American filmmaking, though influenced by earlier documentary and avant-garde traditions that are responsible for the too many and too much of late 1960s and early 1970s violence. Among these technologies are those that extend cinematic brutality in space and in time, including multiple-speed montage, squibs (small explosive devices) and artificial blood, zooms, and the particular focus of this presentation: the freeze frame. Citing the immediacy and authenticity of photography, relative to cinema s own abstract and unyielding duration, the freeze frame figures fantasies of ecstatic experience that approach the ecstasies (murder, rape, violent death) it likewise depicts. After all, as with the technique that renders it, ecstasy, too, implies standing outside everyday experience, violently wrenched from! dominant forms. Unexpectedly erupting in the midst of cinema s regular unfolding, the freeze frame renders not only the loss of diegetic self-possession, but figures the interruption of spectatorial mediation  as well. What we have, then, is a meeting of form, content, and spectatorial experience within a fantasy of ecstatic violence. <p class="style4"> Such a discovery moves the form and logic of violence itself to the center of my investigation. An evident orientation, perhaps, but one surprisingly overlooked by the leading literature on cinematic violence, which frequently turns to larger narrative structures or authorial intent to frame what it otherwise deems senseless sadistic excesses. Viewing these excesses  as constitutive, not exceptional, reveals their cultural significance as a visual rhetoric  one that figures the broader historical fantasies about vision and violence that characterize the era to which the freeze frame belongs. Thus by using Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968) and Gimme Shelter (Albert & David Maysles, 1970) to explicate the freeze frame s narrative as well as non-narrative turns, I argue for the cultural significance of the freeze frame in a period of increasingly graphic violence, tracing how it comprises a matrix of ecstatic ! fantasies explicitly thematized by these films, including rock and roll, the occult, and photojournalism. More than a symptom of our culture s violent faith in the visible, however, technologies like the freeze frame also unwittingly trace its doubts. Among these are the violent blind spots that line any fantasy of vision, invisibilities which the visual rhetoric of post-Code violence cannot help but recall, since one attack at visibility only beckons infinitely more. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Matthew Schilleman <p> <p class="style10"><strong> The Violence of the Game </strong></p> <p class="style4"> In my presentation I will address the question: what is violence in a game? Of course many scholars have already explored various representations of violence in games. This paper departs from that line of investigation by reframing the issue into a philosophical inquiry that treats the game at the structural level. I argue that violence in games consists of a particular form of inter-subjective relations that force players to enter, and subsequently commandeer, their opponents' decision cycles. To arrive at this idea, I will work through several texts/theorists. I will set the stage by introducing the theories of military strategist Colonel John Boyd, from whom my paper receives its inspiration. His concepts of time, decision cycles, and the OODA loop define to a great extent the structure of violence in cybernetic paradigms, which include games. I will then complicate Boyd's own thought by placing him in dialogue with Lacan and Hegel, drawing especially on Lacan's essay "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty." Bringing these diverse thinkers together, I endeavor to show how they can help us imagine a mode of violence that inheres within the structure of the game itself. But by pushing this line of reasoning even further, I hope to demonstrate that this mode of violence is itself aporetic in nature, and that when we follow it to its logical conclusion, we realize that the neither can the game provide closure for its players, nor can game and its constitutive subjects be extricated from each other. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Rebecca Schuman <p> <p class="style10"><strong> So ein recht vernichtender Schlag : Linguistic Self-Annihilation, "Pure Means" and Robert Walser s Jakob von Gunten</strong></p> <p class="style4"> In Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence), Walter Benjamin insists that in order to judge the concept of violence that is, Gewalt, a violence  that does not necessarily predicate bloodshed it must be removed from its ends (Zwecke), and thus the justification or justness of them. This, according to Benjamin, requires us to judge violence itself as pure means (Mittel). At its conclusion, the Kritik turns both toward the eschatological and the labyrinthine: "Die g–ttliche Gewalt, welche Insignium und Siegel, niemals Mittel heiliger Vollstreckung ist, mag die waltende heiþen" ["Divine violence, whose sign and seal but never whose means is execution, may be called 'the sovereign' kind"]. This conclusion demands an examination of the pure  meaning of the word Gewalt by breaking it down to its root verb walten,  which means both to reign  and "to depose." Thus, the telos of the Kritik der Gewalt seems to be a call for an even closer critique of Gewalt. In this paper I will discuss why carrying Benjamin s critique to fruition in this way becomes self-annihilating, illustrating my discussion by using elements of self-annihilation in the puzzling narrative voice in Robert Walser s novel Jakob von Gunten. These passages will reveal themselves as literary representations of Benjamin s Gewalt in its purest,  most essential form that is, at its most devoid of context and its most self-annihilating. Further, Jakob von Gunten s deliberately anti-heuristic elements, themselves expressions of Gewalt, make the work emblematic of the German modernist movement. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Tamara Lea Spira<p> <p class="style10"><strong> "Remembering" Trauma, Imagining Transformation: The Psycho-Affective Economies of Globalization and a Juxtapositional Poetics of Violence and Survival </strong></p> <p class="style4"> In this essay, I juxtapose Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988), Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1993) and Gloria Anzald™a's Borderlands/ La Frontera (1987), all three of which attempt to perform the labors of remembering  different historical traumas of conventionally consigned to the temporal past. Produced within a historical context signified by neoliberal globalization and the prison binge  of the 1980s, I foreground the historical conjuncture of the texts' production as a moment of immense geopolitical transformation transnationally in which the globalization of capital, neoliberal market privatization and de-industrialization contributed to conditions for an intensified set of discursive and material regimes, characterized by the diminishment of the welfare state, increased militarization and the expansion of carceral regimes  to multiple forms of global lockdown,  transnationally (Alexander and Mohanty; Agathangelou, D. Rodriguez, M. Davis, AY Davis, Sudbury). For example, as Alexander and Mohanty claim, the aforementioned global realignments and fluidity of capital  have lead to further consolidation and exacerbation of capitalist relations of domination and exploitation,  or, to use their terms recolonization  (Alexander and Mohanty, xvii). Additionally, as critical scholars of African American history and Black Studies have argued, the prison binge  of the 1980s has simply exacerbated slaveries of the present in the wake of the failed project of Emancipation (DuBois, Binder, Dayan, Hartman, AY Davis). <p class="style4"> Framed within this context, I am interested in the psycho-affective subjective logics and erotic economies that underwrite these geopolitical transformations and intensified relations of racism and exploitation, with particular attention to how global realignments of power have organized and been organized through affect, the body, feeling, and the senses. To this effect, I bring together critical African American and postcolonial theories of affect in order to read the imaginative, aesthetic structures of these geopolitical shifts through the writings of Morrison, Anzald™a and Allison, all three of whom frame their literary explorations around notions of remembering  historical traumas and corporal, psychic violences (Spillers, Hartman, Lorde, Fanon, Tadiar). I ask: What does this call to remember  slavery, colonization and sexual trauma say about the erotic economies and subjective, cultural logics of this historical moment of immense geopolitical and economic transformation? How might this draw towards remembering  violences conventionally consigned to the temporal past embody cultural and political commentary upon the contemporary context of their creation, signaling an intervention and counternarratives to the voracious, stifling conditions of political despair and crisis narrated above? What theories about the affective economies of globalization emerge from and are embodied in the form, content and narrative structure of the texts themselves? <p class="style4"> In addition to their shared (yet variegated and differentially occupied) historical context and thematic turn  to (and complication of) memory,  Morrison, Anzald™a and Allison all articulate multiple and differing aesthetics of survival, hope and political transformation, which are also central to my inquiries. This juxtapositional reading is thus also attuned to how the creative, imaginative complexities of these writings help to gesture towards and open up (multiple) poetics and aesthetics of survival, hope and political transformation. In closing, I comment upon the psychic, political and aesthetic strategies these texts offer for interventions into contemporary crises of permanent war, global lockdown, ever ravenous slavery and Empire. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Evan Calder Williams <p> <p class="style10"><strong> Shock Affects </strong></p> <p class="style4"> The violence of horror films is commonly understood in moral terms, as an effect of determinate subjectivities. However, this account proves unable to address either the horror film's potential for critical negativity or the spectator's joy before the incommensurability of radically disjunctive violence. I propose that a morality of effective violence should be replaced by an ethics of affective violence. My investigation proceeds along two convergent lines of thought, Spinozist affective ethics and the Italian giallo horror films of Dario Argento and Mario Bava. By turning to Spinoza in the face of extreme representational violence, it becomes possible to formulate an understanding of horror film as a dark mirror in which our joy and fear manifest the currents of our political unconscious. <p><p> <p class="style10"> Aaron Winter <p> <p class="style10"><strong> "Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones"</strong></p> <p class="style4"> ('Violence' isn't a novel metaphor for describing non-physical acts of (coercion or abuse, but its use has become increasingly mundane in the (past 40 years, especially in the discourse of the academic (humanities; before Foucalt and Derrida, this conference's "attempt to (examine different forms of violence be they physical, psychological, (institutional, technological, critical, or representational" would (scarcely have been intelligible. I fear that, in their wake, we have (grown far too careless with this term. (<p class="style4"> (Consider the following excerpt from Anne McClintock's book <i>Imperial (Leather</i> : ( ("It seems important to me... not to read the contradictions of (colonial discourse as a matter of textuality alone. What Gayatri (Spivak calls, in an apt phrase, 'the pla! nned epistemic violence of (the imperial project' was also, all too often, backed up by the (planned institutional violence of armies and law courts, prisons and (state machinery. The power of guns, whips and shackles, while always (implicated in discourse and representation, is not reducible to 'the (violence of the letter'." (<p class="style4"> (Here is a striking example of the cart leading the horse. The (violence of guns, whips, and shackles arrives in McClintock's (construction as an elaboration of the violence of armies, law courts, (and prisons, which is itself tendered as a supplement or corollary to (the violence of the episteme, apparently the better established (concept, given that something close to an apology, "it seems... to (me," is required to qualify it. McClintock cautions that "physical (violence," or what the layman calls, simply, violence, is in fact (irreducible to "epistemic violence." Well, certainly. But why! all (the gymnastics to arrive at such an obvious statement? (<p class="style4"> line It is tempting for specialists in representation, as we all are, to (overemphasize the importance of representation. A cynic would (observe that this overemphasis is useful in dramatizing projects, (like academic conferences, that face strong competitive pressures and (perhaps nagging doubts about their own broader relevance. This is (not particularly fair. Sticks and stones break bones, but words do (hurt, albeit in a different way, and they do help to manufacture (contexts in which sticks and stones cause hurt, as books like (<i>Imperial Leather</i> aptly demonstrate. (<p class="style4"> (Thus my objection is indeed <i>semantic</i>, but it is not therefore (<i>pedantic</i>, as I will demonstrate by looking at two cases in which (the cultural critic can work most effectively by drawing strong (differentiations between acts of violence per se and acts of (metaphorical violence. My first case is the Great Baltimore Riot of (1812, incited by a ne! wspaper editor's criticisms of the War of 1812 and his satiric ad hominems against its architect, President (Madison. Through this case I will show how, until quite recently, (Europeans and Euro-Americans drew very hazy distinctions between ("physical, psychological, institutional, technological, critical, and (representational" violence, if any at all. My second case is the (recent controversy over the cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed (published in the Danish newspaper <i>Jyllands-Posten</i>. This is another (case of "representational violence" committed within a context of ("physical violence" and reciprocated by "physical violence," and as (such it demonstrates some of the dangers of diluting the term ('violence' by overuse.<p><p> <p class="style10"> Tim Wong <p> <p class="style10"><strong> An Eye for an I? </strong></p> <p class="style4"> In Judith Butler s Giving an Account of Oneself, she questions what we do when we ask a moral or legal subject to give an account of himself or herself. In this text, Butler views subjectivity  as narrative that is constantly in excess, something that is irreducible and should remain irreducible rather than being arrested into one single interpretation. She says,  &in the name of ethics, we require that another do a certain violence to herself, and do it in front of us, offering a narrative account, or indeed, a confession &  This violence to the self is the foreclosure of one s narrative. It is the complete  response to the question, who are you?  which is not only a violence performed from the outside by the judicial system, but a violence that is produced within the account ! of the subject of confession. <p class="style4"> In Foucault s, About the Concept of the Dangerous Individual  in Nineteenth Century Legal Psychiatry, he begins with an example of a criminal charged with five rapes and six attempted rapes. He is asked by the courts to do exactly what Butler claims should not be done. He is asked to account for himself and his actions. He refuses to answer which complicates the operation of juridical system, but not to the degree that homicidal monomania does. In the event of homicidal monomania, a notion classified by 19th century French psychiatrists, the crime happens only once with no motive and no traces of the subject s normal  character. The actions of five rapes and six attempted rapes were enough to establish, from the outside, a kind of consistent narrative based on repeated action and behavior. With homi! cidal monomania a crime/criminal that has no history, the subject of punishment becomes nebulous. Additionally, with homicidal monomania, the criminal  has no recollection of the crime and cannot therefore claim it as his own. <p class="style4"> This phenomenon of the amorphous legal subject occurs within Genet s The Maids. The Maids was based on the 1933 criminal trial of the Papin sisters. Christine and Lea Papin were domestic servants who murdered their employer and her daughter, removed their eyes and mutilated their bodies with a hammer and a knife. In this short play, the dynamic relationship between the characters not only leads up to the opacity of one subject, but also the limitless interchangeability, substitution, and disintegration of three different characters. In a close reading of Genet s play, the sisters, Solange and Claire, and their mistress, become different personalities at different times, and at instances, several personalities at once. <p class="style4"> This paper will explore the problems and paradoxes of constructing a culpable narrative subject in the instances of homicidal monomania and ambiguous character relations. With Butler I will ask what it means for a juridical system to do violence to a criminal  and what it means for a subject  to do violence to himself by answering the law s demand for a personal account. Then I will ground Butler s work in juridico-psychiatric discourse with Foucault s case studies on homicidal monomania. Finally I will further complicate the attempt to establish a guilty subject  by using The Maids to obscure the boundaries between violent subjects  and the victims  of those violence crimes. <p><p> </div> </body> </html>