Ana Palacios
Ñ, October 17, 2009
daily insecurity of international conflicts, violence has ceased to be hidden. Two recent books examine, from philosophy and psychoanalysis, the paradox is raised as a solution generating responses to combat the very thing.
social violence, gender violence, criminal violence, discursive violence. All spheres of life are surrounded by a phenomenon that if something has been lost finally today is its hidden. His presence is felt in all sorts of social unrest in private criminal acts, the daily insecurity and international conflicts. Means multiply it to infinity and the speeches that try to fight it, question it or even understand it end in a kind of tautology that says more about who states that on the very subject of reflection.
is possible that one of the central problems of all thinking about violence rests, as noted by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek (Slovenia, 1949) in his book Six marginal reflections " in direct confrontation with it produces something inherently disconcerting in the observer and that this confusion is to pivot the same horror that causes violent action and immediate empathy with the victims. Thus, it would require a first distance to allow a dispassionate conceptual analysis and away from the initial traumatic impact. However, in this context should not all move in the cold grasp of the facts, because you can not ignore the testimony of victims provides an element of truth that can not be obtained otherwise. The testimony of a raped woman, says Žižek, becomes true in part because his confusion, his inconsistency and their emotions. So what is appropriate to try an approach to the problem of violence is for him to separate the subjective violence exerted by an agent on a victim-targets two types of violence: violence "symbolic" embodied in language and its forms, it has to do with the imposition of a universe of meaning and violence "system that is inherent in the system, which includes not only direct physical violence but also the more subtle forms of coercion imposed relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence " . In this sense, systemic violence, he says, as the famous "dark matter" of physics, the counterpart of the visible subjective violence, but which can not analyze what otherwise would seem to be " irrational explosions of subjective violence " .
What Zizek, with acute awareness of the manipulations and ideological movements shows is that if approached from a liberal tolerant attitude, a massive and absolute opposition to violence from its most brutal, as the mass murder, to the expressions ideological violence, like racism, hatred or sexual discrimination, it is at less suspicious and symptomatic. It is as if the stress on the scandal and was working urgently to hide or divert for more comprehensive reflection of the phenomenon of systemic violence of capitalism. From here you can interpret more subtle movements and attitudes of the "new co-Munist liberal" whose icons would be Bill Gates and George Soros. They lead an army of pragmatic liberal-tions for whom it is only concrete problems to be solved: poverty in Africa, the situation of women in Islam or the religious fundamentalist violence. The key to this position is that to solve these problems are needed media and, consequently, to be taken before and, given the experience of failure of collectivism or statism, you can only rely on private initiative. This is an aspect that confirms how the attack on the subjective violence obscures the fact that it is the very system that produces it.
At the other end of the rope ideology is also necessary to account for religious or fundamentalist violence and suicide attacks has become a major source of death worldwide. This alternation of violence and counter-measure gives just a vicious circle where it generates the very thing we are fighting. These attacks are carried out on behalf of a given absolute sense by religion. We can say that their aim is to Western lifestyle that is based on modern science. A science that the West was built over the centuries and which faced the east so abrupt, giving them no choice but to erect "the shield of fundamentalism, this restatement psychotic, delusional and incestuous understanding of religion as direct divine reality, with all the horrific consequences of such an assertion implies " .
However, culmi-nating point of his argument of Zizek reached in the analysis of the blasts in the suburbs of Paris in 2005. Compared with the May 68 riots, the first thing that jumps out is his total lack of any prospect. There was no specific demands, but "only resistance in the recognition, based on a vague and inarticulate resentment . What results then is an act of violent protest that demands nothing and rejects the hermeneutic intention of finding a hidden meaning or deep. Here we are in the more specific topic of postmodernism, the "crisis of meaning" , ie the disintegration of the link between truth and a sense that modernity held in the dialectic established between religion and science. This violence is a "Passage to act" , an impulsive movement to the action that can not be translated into speech or thought. Is in any case, a collective message that reaffirms their presence in the act of pure violence, resulting in a social fear that a collapse of the structure is consumed at any time.
is precisely in this lack of sense and reason where anchor, from a psychoanalytic perspective Silvia Ons in his book "Violence / s" which highlights the proliferation and ubiquity, the multiplication of violence that manifests itself not only in the daily tragedies, but, especially, in the way that modern man has to interpret the world. Argentina author emphasizes the disappearance of borders and the emergence of violence that have no strategies: "Devoid of ideological frames, without the old frames that could notionally give a reason, results in the current violence, violence itself " . Thus it is seen not only in the attack on the similar, both the criminal and politically, but she looks back to the subject itself and the proliferation of accidents and child abuse and juvenile overflow.
opposed to the violence of the nineteenth century, whose foundations were questioned Benjamin in "For a critique of violence" (for the just and unjust, legitimacy or illegitimacy in the first mo-ral) today charged with lack of ideologies that justify or frame the approaches to the violence. This is like a roadblock because of labor demands that human trafficking or child rape. From the "God is dead" Nietzsche, who had already surfaced in the "everything is permitted" Dostoevsky and Lacan reformulated "if God does not exist, nothing is permitted", the relationship of violence with morality is revealed. Ons
takes this issue on the slope of Lacanian discourse and notes that we live in an era marked by the crisis of reality, where the speeches are separated from it "to proliferate uninhabited" . This is leading to an unbridgeable gulf between what is said and what is done. For the psychoanalyst this decoupling would be the sign of our times. Consequently, we perceive a loss of legitimacy of power and what remains is an anachronistic ethic proclaims immutable value-able. There is a fall that opens the nihilism manifested in the collapse of the speculative pyramid in which systems are maintained philosophical and moral. This erosion of values \u200b\u200bwas the necessary condition, in Nietzsche, for processing and creation of new values \u200b\u200b "respect the diversity of life" . But it is also true that there is another way, inconsequential man, whose fate is to miss the loss of any foundation, sinking into an infinite nothing. It is the hollow man, the man of our time, and devoid of historical markers, only points to the collective identifications and tends to segregate and reject what does not fit in this area. In this way
identifications and collective reflection is also located on the panic that has its roots in the Freudian tradition with the psychology of the masses. In his work Freud assigns the word "panic" to the anguish of the masses orphan of that driver who represented the ideal of T ideal linking individuals together. To Ons, this anticipation is found the crux of the issue: panic in front of the imminence of danger is given to the disappearance of what seemed to dampen it. The social, governing and contains the individual, crumbles, and the fall of common ideals produces a state of fragmentation and homelessness. Our age presents the confluence of the loss authority and the absence of ideological constructs capable of directing the subjects.
Paul Virilio, a book entitled precisely "Panic City" (Thrush Books, 2006), considers that, at present, attacks and accidents substitute for war in production of a permanent state of alert would be matrix panic in the cities. For him, the realization of an enemy is not clear and convincing as the opponents of a war and lost the political nature of what was considered a city are the elements that lead to a state of fear and anxiety. The city, was once the heart of our civilization, has become the heart of the failure of humanity.
So on one hand, broken borders, globalization, globalization in the establishment of a capitalism that regulates unequal exchanges, on the other, voluntary closures and detentions to the perception of external threats, and elsewhere, the emergence of tensions resolved in the terms of the violent and expand upon the dissolution of the difference between public and private. The effort to give them a sense even when it appears fragmentary and fleeting, realizes the need to locate, define and understand this aspect increasingly least exceptional modern life.
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