Framing Embodiment in Violent Narratives (original) (raw)

2019, Phenomenology of the Broken Body

Over the last two centuries the percentage of civilians affected by political violence has increased. The UN estimates that, a century ago, 90% of war casualties were military personnel. By the end of World War II, 65% of casualties were non-combatants. Now, that number has risen to 90%. Ninety percent of war casualties are non-combatants. 1 It would be nice to agree with Canadian psychologist Stephen Pinker that the "better angels of our nature" are winning and the world is becoming a more peaceful place, but a great deal of historical nuance has to be ignored in order to reach that conclusion. 2 At least within the field of political violence, what was once viewed as a major ethical breach has become a norm. 3 Astounding though they are, statistics about civilians killed in political violence barely evoke the individual lives that each digit stands for. As authors in literature , media or humanitarian organizations seek to raise awareness about this violence, they seek ways of evoking the reality of individual human lives, lives that are not just "being lost," as though somehow misplaced from their position in the world, but becoming mired in brokenness, pain and fear around the event of death. The number of stories about these victims increases with the body count. Stories then proliferate on computer screens and television sets, magazines and newspapers, fliers in the mail, recounting the great amount of pain that humans cause one another to suffer , while many readers (and most readers of this book) sit safely thinking. Reading about other people's pain produces a swarm of ethical questions. Are there more or less ethical ways of portraying other people's pain? More or less ethical ways of reading a portrayal of pain? How does directing our attention to pain caused by violence differ from directing attention to the natural pain of disease or accidents? If we read about violence that we find ethically unconscionable, does that reading make any difference for who we are or how we live after we set the reading aside? The same destruction or mauling of a person can become a story of "col-lateral damage," a story of tactical failure, a story of a good woman gone, a story of a mistaken act of trust or just bad luck. It becomes the tragic story a family inherits or a story of mission accomplished. Or it fails to reach the threshold of becoming a story at all.