A violence properly political: discourse, discrepancy, and discursive agency
Date
1999
Authors
Youssef, Maisaa
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Abstract
The conventional discourse on violence in terms of lawful/unlawful use of force is premised on the modem liberal nation-state and the concomitant social contract as a given. This is especially troubling in a global environment which is witnessing a proliferation of collective forceful aggression within, against, and outside the (outdated) nation-state. 1 want to argue that violence undertaken on a collective level (or which speaks for/against collectivities) cannot be adequately understood in the conventional and dominant terms of instrumentality or ontology. Drawing on the works of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Rene Girard, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler and others, I argue that violence has a politically discursive potential. For violence, emancipatory violence as well as persecuting violence, is possible in that space of discrepancy between historical conditions of domination/difference and the narratives which maintain such conditions and transforms them continuously into natural relations in the structure of society.