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PART I
EMBODIED POLITICS
ENCOUNTERING RACE AND VIOLENCE
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CHAPTER 1
The Body and Political Violence
BETWEEN ISOLATION AND HOMOGENIZATION
Rosalyn Diprose
INTRODUCTION
This chapter explores how ontologies of intercorporeality from the existential phenomenological tradition and its sympathetic critics might enhance our understanding of the operation of legal political violence in liberal democracies. The target of the analysis is not so much obvious kinds of state-sanctioned killing (for example, through capital punishment or war) but the less explicit kind of violence that does not tend to count as such: the violence involved in the political framing of sociality in a way that disables social interaction and the agency of the actors. I argue that not only is this disabling itself a form of political violence, but also that it can incite explicit acts of violence within the populace by fostering fear, divisiveness, social conflict, and/or indifference to difference and to the plight of the less fortunate. My aim is to better understand how a politics of fear and exclusion can have a physical and violent impact, not just on those targeted by the policies, but also on the modes of belonging of those in the community that the policies supposedly protect. To explain the impact of government policy in a democracy in terms of political violence requires that we understand the place of the body in the political and that we understand the political as entailing, not just the institution of government per se, but the broader space of interrelation between other-oriented agents.
The proposition that democratic government policy and its publicity can entail violence addresses the connection between everyday notions of violence as consisting in physical harm (from the breaking of skin and drawing of blood to causing the death of another) and the idea of discursive or symbolic violence, which does not necessarily involve explicitly touching the body of the target. Linking the two notions of violence is facilitated by existential phenomenological accounts of embodiment as well as various philosophies of the body that understand the body as a target of political power. The notion of symbolic violence is a legacy of the phenomenological tradition and its sympathetic critics. In particular, Emmanuel Levinas has argued that politics, law, and conceptualization per se entail violence insofar as such thematization generalizes and categorizes and thereby excludes from consideration or simply erases alterity, the unknowable difference and unique value of particular persons. However, this idea of symbolic violence tends to render all law and conceptualization equally violent toward its targets and says little about the impact of a politics of fear and exclusion on those who are supposedly protected rather than targeted by it. Also, it does not explicitly address the physicality of violence, which itself presents difficulties for a clear definition of violence. On the one hand, while violence must entail some kind of physical turbulence or harm, it should not be assumed that causing physical damage and pain to another’s body is essentially violent: tattoo artists and willing adult participants in sado-masochistic sexual practices, for example, would object to that assumption. On the other hand, to suggest that government policy and its publicity, as well as discourse and categorization in general, can be violent requires some account of how discourse impacts on the body to cause damage of some kind.
Michel Foucault’s thesis on the relations among (political) power, discourse, and the body goes some way toward explaining how government policy can impact on bodies in the sense of normalizing them and rendering them compliant. But can we say that mechanisms of normalization, while transformative of bodies, amount to violence? Since the early 1980s feminist, race, and political theorists have worked up various accounts of the relation between politics and the body to account, if not for the violence of political discourse, at least for the unethical aspect of its normalizing tendencies. This pertains to the uneven distribution of normalizing discourses and how they operate at the level of the body to discriminate against and silence “minority” ways of being. Two main approaches to the relation between the body and normalizing sociopolitical discourse have emerged from this work. One approach explains discrimination and some kinds of violence as arising from the way that the body politic assumes a white, male, heterosexual body such that other modes of embodiment are excluded from, disadvantaged by, or rendered incoherent within the public space of the political. The second dominant approach, especially in much race theory in the United States and in some postcolonial theory in Britain, draws on existential phenomenology (especially Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) and psychoanalytic theory to explain how individuals are impacted by discriminatory public discourse, that is, by a sexist, racist, and heteronormative symbolic order. This covers two kinds of impact: how a discriminatory symbolic order gets embodied to infect our perceptions such that we reproduce those biases in our everyday seeing and being with others; and second, how victims of that discriminatory discourse come to embody their inferior social status in various kinds of traumatized subjectivities.
While my analysis of political violence is sympathetic with some of this work, especially insofar as it draws on the existential phenomenological tradition, it moves the focus away from the impact of symbolic violence on individuals to the level of sociopolitical relations and their enframing by the symbolic order or, specifically, by government policy and its publicity. Second, I depart from any post-Hegelian model of sociality and interrelatedness that views the self-other relation in terms of negation, dialectics, recognition, vulnerability, or hybridity. These other ontologies of interrelatedness imply different understandings of political violence that in turn imply different ways of addressing the problem. Third, the analysis attempts to differentiate between normalization that is part and parcel of conditioning that is not essentially harmful or violent and that we cannot escape completely and the conditioning of sociopolitical relations that damages the fabric of interrelation to a point that could be considered violent and that incites violence.
To do this I begin by outlining Merleau-Ponty’s account of the corporeal basis of both selfhood and sociality, which also provides an account of how we are conditioned by sociopolitical meanings that we inherit (including racist and sexist discourse) and how this conditioning occurs at the level of the body. This account of the relation between the symbolic order and the body suggests that, whatever our conditioning, we are also fundamentally opened to a world of other bodies and hence opened to an undetermined future (that is, symbolic violence is not integral to sociality). The analysis links Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of body-subjectivity and sociality with Hannah Arendt’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s political ontologies that are centered on models of interrelatedness compatible with Merleau-Ponty’s. I will explain this approach to interrelatedness more fully below, but I want to preview two key points. First, all three accounts chart a course between individualism and communitarianism in that neither individual sovereignty nor shared identity is the starting point or the goal of human interrelations. Rather, there is a fundamental separation, uniqueness, or singularity that is signified within and arises from communion with others. Arendt refers to this paradoxical condition of sociality as the “disclosure of natality” within the togetherness of human affairs; Nancy calls it the “sharing of singularity.” Second, for all three the fabric of interrelation is characterized as “potentiality” through “being together,” which, for Nancy, defines democracy or, in Merleau-Ponty’s case, this fabric of interrelation (which he eventually calls the “flesh”) is characterized as corporeal intertwining opening an undetermined future.
This political ontology not only explains how political discourse impacts on bodies in ways that I will elaborate, but also it locates violence in a particular aspect of this impact. Within this paradigm political violence can be understood, not in terms of the effects of the generalization, categorization, and identification that are inherent to government, law, and the typical self-other encounter, but in terms of government no longer providing the conditions that support this potentiality of being together, this dynamic interrelatedness that is characteristic of the fabric of sociality. The analysis goes on to show that, on this model, political violence “resolves” the paradox of the sharing of singularity into one of two poles and it manifests in one of two ways: it either isolates bodies from open encounters with other persons or it attempts to homogenize bodies into a uniform social or national identity. There is also something to say about the impact of isolation and homogenization of some bodies on the wider social fabric. The analysis concludes with brief consideration of the political conditions necessary to avoid both kinds of violence and to enable the recovery of bodies that have been isolated or homogenized by political forces. The key point here is not so much to emphasize the inherent vulnerability to the acts of others arising from our intercorporeal condition, the acknowledgment of which, some argue, should lead to a political community and sense of responsibility that desists from violence. Rather this phenomenological analysis of body politics points to the need to actively “do” community in ways that vigorously foster the sharing of singularity and, hence, diversity and an open future.
SELFHOOD AND SOCIALITY BASED ON THE CORPOREAL SHARING OF MEANING
I begin by deriving, from Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, an idea of democratic political community based on the sharing of meaning through dwelling with others. The aim is to account for how we are ordinarily conditioned by sociopolitical ideas of gender, race, ability, and so on without this entailing harm or violence in any essential way. Nor do we necessarily notice this sharing of meaning: as sociality is based on intercorporeality, the sharing of meaning involved in particular social encounters is not necessarily accessible to conscious reflection (we cannot easily pinpoint exactly why someone appeals to us while others may repel us). Hence, it is not the kind of sharing of meaning implied in a politics based on recognition of individual or group identity. Beyond such differences, the main idea that differentiates this account of interrela...
