Language and Violence. The ethico-political turn to language after the linguistic turn

Although language has been one of the main issues of 20th-century philosophy, and violence has been at the center of interdisciplinary research at least since the 1960s, remarkably the problem of the relation of language and violence has been largely neglected until the end of the 20th century. In contrast, there has been a significant interest in the questions of linguistic violence and vulnerability in recent years: From insulting utterances and injurious speech, religious and political forms of propaganda and hate speech across structural forms of discrimination to hitherto unknown forms of violence that often go along with new media, we are confronted with a wide variety of different forms of linguistic violence in our everyday life. However, there does not exist a satisfying answer to the question of why we are vulnerable at all to verbal utterances and able to inflict pain and suffering on others by simple words. Though it seems clear that our vulnerability to language depends on the fact that we are linguistic and social beings, a systematic analysis of the complex relation of language and violence as well as of the various ways by which we are constituted as speaking subjects remains a desideratum. While common approaches consider the relation of language and violence as an external one or tend to explain linguistic violence either by the act-like character of speech or to reduce it to a structural violence inherent to language itself, the proposed project breaks new ground by focusing consistently on the complex relation of language and violence. The main thesis is that linguistic violence is not a secondary form of an originally physical violence, but rather a form of violence in its own right in which the intrinsic relation of language and violence becomes manifest and that therefore can serve as a key for a more fundamental understanding both of language and of violence. This is backed by the hypothesis that it is possible neither to gain an adequate understanding of interpersonal violence without considering the role of language, nor to gain an adequate knowledge of language without considering the role of violence. Thus, the project aims at an ethico-political turn to language after the linguistic turn. This turn is by no means just another "turn" in the humanities, but a decisive return to language with regard to its intrinsic entanglement with the ethical and the political an entanglement that has been largely ignored even by 20th-century philosophy of language. The goal of the project is to provide based on the analysis of linguistic violence and vulnerability a non-reductionist account of language and violence that allows us to consider language, along with its cognitive- communicative function, in its subjectivizing and community-grounding dimension, as well as to envisage the different modes and practices by which we are constituted as epistemic, ethical and political subjects.

At the center of the FWF project "Language and Violence: The Ethico-Political Turn to Language after the Linguistic Turn" was the problem of linguistic violence and vulnerability, as it manifests itself in phenomena ranging from injurious and slighting comments to hate speech and propaganda to newly emerging forms of symbolic violence within social media. Against the widespread tendency in philosophy to reduce language to a means of communication and to view the relation between language and violence either as a purely external one or as a strict opposition, it could be demonstrated in a systematic way and through several detailed analyses that language and violence stand in a complex conditional relationship. Just as language has a violent dimension, violence has a linguistic-symbolic dimension, and neither of these aspects can be reduced to the other. Hence, linguistic violence is not a secondary, derivative form of an 'original' physical violence. Rather - and this was a crucial insight of the project - it must be understood as a form of violence in its own right, the detailed analysis of which makes possible a differentiated understanding of both language and violence. Through this methodological and theoretical work, we gained a new perspective on the world-opening, community-establishing, and subject-constituting function of language, which also accounts for its equally injurious and enabling character: Precisely because language opens up the human world, founds social bonds, and constitutes us as recognizable subjects, it can be violent and injurious; at the same time, it is the decisive resource for confronting violence and breaking the circle of violence and counter-violence. Based on these reflections, the project elaborated a non-reductionist account of language that - apart from its cognitive, communicative function - also considers the ethical and political significance of language. This ethico-political dimension of language manifests itself not only in its injurious character but also in such phenomena as testimony, dissent, disagreement, or politically speaking out, which have been analyzed in the course of the project. Against the background of an increasing radicalization and polarization of political discourse, the project developed normative criteria and signposts for the evaluation of political forms of speaking out and the legal assessment of hate speech. Thus, the project made a critical contribution to a comprehensive understanding of language and communication that does justice to the complex challenges of digitalized and mediatized societies of the twenty-first century.