Formless Form: Elias Khoury's CITY GATES [Abwaab al-Madinah] and the Poetics of Trauma (original) (raw)
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Middle East : Topics & Arguments, 2018
Discourse on trauma has re-emerged in an era where media and mobility bring it to global doorsteps. Frameworks for understanding trauma remain dictated by thinking that emerged from Europe’s “great wars” and American deployment to Vietnam. This framework—which sees trauma and the terrible as “out of time” or “other” to a perceived normal daily experience—has formed what critics call the “empire of trauma.” This empire limits how war, violence, and the terrible can be talked about and understood as part of (or not part of) contemporary life. Looking at two trauma narratives, Taḥta shams al-ḍuḥā (2004) by Ibrahim Nasrallah and Bāʾ mithl Baīt... mthl Baīrūt (1997; Trans B as in Beirut, 2008) by Iman Humaydan, the paper gives short readings that disrupt what has emerged as a binary of trauma theory. It shows how repetition and open endings turn everyday/trauma into everyday trauma, then goes on to explore how the novels develop language and generic structures so that they hold—rather th...
The many faces of violence (FWF P 20300)
The Many Faces of Violence: Toward an Integrative Phenomenological Conception Events of extreme violence, such as suicide-attacks, 9/11, or the “return of a new archaic violence,” have recently renewed attention about physical violence. Interestingly, there has also been a reappearance of concern about social, cultural, and structural violence. However, while all these forms have been subject to special studies, interdisciplinary research is still hampered by the lack of a unifying approach. What is missing is a paradigm that allows us to think these forms of violence as aspects of a unified phenomenon. To resolve this deficit and elaborate an integrative conception of violence, this project will use the phenomenological method. Generally viewed, phenomenology studies how we make sense of the world. Our working hypothesis holds that violence is destructive of sense and, on a more foundational level, our bodily capacities of sense-making. We see embodiment as a multi-level phenomenon, beginning with the physical “I can” and proceeding through various levels of cultural, social, and political practices. Given this correlation, we will analyze how violence destroys the ways we make sense of the world and ourselves according to our traditions and institutions. Because such sense structures delineate our world by forming a series of dependencies, we can be exposed to indirect violence, i.e. symbolic, cultural, and structural. To unfold the implications of our research, we will examine specific examples of cultural and political collapse, so-called “cultures of violence,” “coercive environments,” as well as structures of multiple social exclusion. In this context, we will also address the poietic function of violence and analyze how it is used for the formation and expression of identity, involving both individuals and collectivities. As to the traditional equation of sovereignty and freedom, expressions of identity imply determinations of the other in terms of irrationality and threat that can be used to justify one’s own violence. In uncovering this circle of violence and counter-violence, we, finally, seek to rethink our political categories beyond the logic of confrontation that rests upon essentialist misconceptions of our communal being. To construct an integrative approach to violence, our research will present a non-subjectivist phenomenology that enables us to see how violence is destructive of sense. In testing this hypothesis on historic, sociological and anthropological materials, we will ground our research empirically. Thus, we will, in the last analysis, elaborate a methodology for interdisciplinary research that will foster a deeper understanding of the many interrelated faces of violence. Project underwritten by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF P 20300) (1.11.2007 - 30.06.2011)
How political violence shapes life into a form of existence and what happens after it ends? The effects of political violence are unfathomable. Collectively disturbing, these brutal social and political conditions turn sites of lived and shared experiences into sites where the everyday of trying to make sense of what happened predominates. As do the questions of why did it happen, and how are we going to find space for pain and suffering that was left behind in the continuity of days to come. It takes a long time to appreciate, at the level of interpersonal and intersubjective relations, the undying trust of those who share their testimony of their life histories of violence and allow them to take forms of ethnographic accounts. These personal histories, full of intimate detail, spring from exactly the same sources within each individual where the ability to trust itself had been deliberately frayed. Are we living in a world inflicted by an epidemic of lovelessness, one may ask? (hooks, 1999: 7) A world where people's inherent vulnerabilities are lost in a way that pushes people to do what is ostensibly good for bad unconscious reasons, and inflict harm for the good ones? (Rechtman, 2021: 43) Where trauma spreads contagiously-without our being able to trace it consciously-violence takes on the form of a language we are forced to become fluent in as we collectively narrate its origins, escalations, and aftermath to one another, whether or not we ourselves been directly subjected to it. This essay, then, will be an attempt to follow Veena Das' approach to interrogating everyday life as "the place where the ordinary and the extraordinary fade into each other" (2020: 174) and, in so doing, testing the boundaries of ethnographic accounts that try to make sense of an experience of political violence, as well as the way they stretch and pull at the meaning of the language the brute forces utilise. I suggest that violence, even before it is expressed and enacted in the form of extended periods of
Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2019
This article examines the lasting phenomenological consequences of inhabiting “spaces” of exception by rethinking the operation of sovereign violence therein. Taking as its point of departure Giorgio Agamben’s suggestion that the ‘state of exception’ is the ‘rule’ of modern politics, I argue that arbitrary sovereign violence has taken the place of the ‘sovereign decision’ of Carl Schmitt’s original theory. However, recognizing that it is neither enough simply to articulate the institutional grid of intelligibility of the state of exception nor expose the logics of sovereignty that make possible arbitrary violence, it draws on phenomenology, affect theory, and trauma studies to reorient our focus from the sovereign to the subject upon whom sovereign power is executed. Ultimately it proposes a new understanding of modern subjecthood as one of existential insecurity generated by the ‘new age of anxiety’ permeating social and political life today.
Violence is a slippery concept -nonlinear, productive, destructive, and reproductive. It is mimetic, like imitative magic or homeopathy. "Like produces like," that much we know. Violence gives birth to itself. So we can rightly speak of chains, spirals, and mirrors of violence -or, as we prefer -a continuum of violence. We all know, as though by rote, that wife beaters and sexual abusers were themselves usually beaten and abused. Repressive political regimes resting on terror/fear/torture are often mimetically reproduced by the same revolutionary militants determined to overthrow them (see Bourgois, Chapter 56; Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 30; and Fanon, Chapter 58). Structural violence -the violence of poverty, hunger, social exclusion and humiliation -inevitably translates into intimate and domestic violence (Sche per-Hughes, Chapter 33; Bourgois, Chapter 37). Politically motivated torture is amplified by the symbolic violence that trails in its wake, making those who were tortured feel shame for their "weakness" in betraying their comrades under duress. Rape survivors -especially those who were violated with genocidal or sadistic political intent during civil wars (Danner, Chapter 41) often become living-dead people, refusing to speak of the unspeakable, and are often shunned or outcasted by kin and community, and even by comrades and lovers (Das, Chapter 40 and Fanon, Chapter 58).