'"Going mad is their only way of staying sane": Norbert Elias and the Civilised Violence of J. G. Ballard' (original) (raw)
Related papers
Violence and Discontents: Ruptures in the Relationship Between Individual and Society
Psychology Research, 2018
Recognized by Norbert Elias himself, the influence of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis on his work is well established. However, Elias relation to Freud’s work raises many questions. If the sociologist turned to it to support his thesis on the civilization process, he did not hesitate to make various criticisms. The last text of Norbert Elias The Freudian Concept of Society and Beyond is the first time when he discusses and analyses the Freudians theory and concepts in his work. The aim of this article is to clarify the terms of this criticism, to explain the intrinsic veracity less than the significance for Elias’s work, and to propose the violence on the body as an effect of the rupture on the relationship between individual and society.
The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2019)
Violence has long been noted to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Traditionally, however, philosophical discussions have tended to approach it through the lens of warfare and/or limit it to physical forms. This changed in the twentieth century as the nature and meaning of ‘violence’ itself became a conceptual problem. Guided by the contention that Walter Benjamin’s famous 1921 ‘Critique of Violence’ essay inaugurated this turn to an explicit questioning of violence, this collection brings together an international array of scholars to engage with how subsequent thinkers—Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin, Butler, Castoriadis, Derrida, Fanon, Gramsci, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Schmitt—grappled with the meaning and place of violence. The aim is not to reduce these multiple responses to a singular one, but to highlight the heterogeneous ways in which the concept has been inquired into and the manifold meanings of it that have resulted. To this end, each chapter focuses on a different approach or thinker within twentieth and twenty-first century European philosophy, with many of them tackling the issue through the mediation of other topics and disciplines, including biopolitics, epistemology, ethics, culture, law, politics, and psychoanalysis. As such, the volume will be an invaluable resource for those interested in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, History of Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Political Theory, Psychology, and Sociology. Table of Contents The Meanings of Violence: Introduction Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala Part I: Political Myth and Social Transformation 1. Walter Benjamin and the General Strike: Non-Violence and the Archeon James Martel (San Francisco State University, USA) 2. Violence, Divine or Otherwise: Myth and Violence in the Benjamin-Schmitt Constellation Hjalmar Falk (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) 3. Violence and Civilization: Gramsci, Machiavelli, and Sorel Robert P. Jackson (Manchester Metropolitan University, England) 4. The Violence of Oblivion: Hannah Arendt and the Tragic Loss of Revolutionary Politics Liesbeth Schoonheim (KU Leuven, Belgium,) Part II: Sociality and Meaning 5. The World and the Embodied Subject: Humanism, Terror, and Violence Stephen A. Noble (Universite de Paris X (Paris—Nanterre), France) 6. Dialectics got the Upper Hand: Fanon, Violence, and the Quest[ion] of Liberation Nigel C. Gibson (Emerson College, USA) 7. Sartre’s Later Work: Towards a Notion of Institutional Violence Marieke Mueller (King’s College London, England) 8. The Original Polemos: Phenomenology and Violence in Jacques Derrida Valeria Campos-Salvaterra (Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Chile) Part III: From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 9. Taming the Little Screaming Monster: Castoriadis, Violence, and the Creation of the Individual Gavin Rae (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain) 10. Judith Butler: From a Formative Violence to an Ethics of Non-Violence Emma Ingala (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) 11. Biopolitics and Resistance: The Meaning of Violence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben German Primera (University of Brighton, England).
"Fighting is the Most Real and Honest Thing": Violence and the Civilization/Barbarism Dialectic
Over the past two decades, the activity of 'cage-fighting' has attracted massive audiences and significant attention from media and political outlets. Underlying the spectacle of these massconsumed events is a growing world of underground sport fighting. By offering more brutal and less regulated forms of violence, this hidden variant of fighting lies at the blurry and shifting intersection between licit and illicit forms of recreation. This paper offers a theoretical and ethnographic exploration of the motivations and emotive frameworks of these unsanctioned fighters. We find that buried within the long-term process towards greater civility rest the seeds for social unrest, individual rebellion and ontological upheaval. By revealing the dialectical relationship between contemporary mechanisms of control and these uncivil performances, we argue these transgressions are a visceral reaction to today's highly rationalized modes of state and social governance. More broadly, we attempt to understand the interrelationship between contemporary controls and sport fighting as a microcosm of the long-running struggle between civility and barbarism. . 1 'Steppin in' was a common term used by fighters to signify entering into a fighting-that is, 'stepping into' the fight space against another. As time in the field progressed, this term was also employed, then, to mean 'stepping out' of their regular life and into another.
The Impact of Violence on Culture in Edward Bond's Early Morning
Journal of Literature and Humanities, 2024
Edward Bond's play, Early Morning, serves as a powerful exploration of violence in society by transcending temporal and cultural boundaries. Rooted in the Victorian era, Bond employs historical characters and anachronistic elements to create a narrative that critiques corruption and brutality through a reflection on contemporary societal challenges. The mixture of realism and stylistic experimentation in the play reveals a timeless commentary on morality, corruption, and societal decay. Bond's masterful blending of historical context with timeless themes invites readers and audiences to draw parallels between the Victorian world presented and the complexities of modern societies. It underscores the role of literature in exposing the darker facets of humanity and serves as a cautionary tale about the enduring nature of human flaws. The universality of violence depicted in the play prompts critical reflections on the human condition. Early Morning investigates the origins of human savagery and gives a striking representation of the aftermath of inappropriate power elements. This article investigates the connection between violence and power as depicted in Bond's play by working inside the system of Michel Foucault's arguments on power and its appearances.
2021
Throughout history, wickedness and aggression have been the main drives that shape man's existence. Whether wickedness and aggression are innate within man or are acquired because of harsh familial or socioeconomic factors is a highly controversial issue. With the collapse of rationalist philosophies and the assumption that man is an empirical transcendental subject, the idea of an autonomous individual who has a free will has also been shattered. Criminal behaviour thus can no longer be attributed to man's free will; an assumption which complicates the psychological and cognitive investigation into the nature of criminal behaviour even more. This paper attempts to investigate the nature of wickedness and aggression as human phenomena through a psychological reading of The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris and Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Tawfik. The psychological reading depends on Freudian psychoanalysis, which has explicitly dethroned the claims about man's rationalism and has set wickedness and aggression as the basic drives in man's life, as a point of departure. Then the psychological reading makes use of the premises of criminal psychology and cognitive behavioral sciences as milestones in the understanding and interpretation of criminal behaviour, and also as an extension of the Freudian revolt against the positivistic methodologies of many psychological disciplines which have for so long depended on inductive and deductive reasoning in their exploration of many heterogeneous cases.
A Desacralisation of Violence in Modern British Playwriting
2014
My thesis journey was initially motivated by an interest in the individual?s search for God, the self and the other (neighbour, men/women and enemy) as represented in the play texts. This call for a personal relationship with the ?other? highlights the individual?s feelings of unease and strangeness at a time when, one might argue, the majority belittles the role of religion, in support of scientific discoveries and human rights. Here, the French philosopher Ren� Girard - whose anthropological and scientific interest in violence, religion and human culture has shaped my research - argues that the progress of humankind would not have become a reality without what he terms sacrifice. Here, I should confirm that the main influence on the early steps of finding my research topic were Peter Shaffer, Slavoj ?i?ek, Julia Kristeva and Mikhail Bakhtin rather than Rene Girard. This thesis explores several interconnected relationships, the most important of which is between humour and violence...