The Many Faces of Violence

The contributions to this volume investigate the problem of violence from various viewpoints. On one hand, they analyze the various faces and forms of violence, on the other, they also seek to carve out generic traits of the very "phenomenon violence." Generally regarded, they share, as also claimed by recent interdisciplinary investigations, a basic phenomenological approach that puts the subject at the centre of analyses of violence. This implies that our contributions engage in the exploration of violence in terms of a perspectival phenomenon, i.e., as suffered, as committed, or as otherwise experienced, e.g., as witnessed violence. Thus viewed, they call upon us to suspend the widespread theoretical insinuation that we are finally able deal with violence as such. Yet, that the meaning of violence is always experienced from a specific perspective, does not entail that we have to acknowledge an unbridgeable abyss separating violence qua "addressed af fection" (Widerfahrnis), violence qua intention, and violence in terms of a codified social event, i.e., an abyss that traditionally divides approaches to violence based either on theories of action or upon theories of discursive construction. Departing from the fundamental phenomenological insight into the intertwining of embodiment and language, our contributions rather demonstrate that the "sense" of violence can be retraced by a recourse into our embodied reasons and the incorporated meaning structures we live in, since it is in these that our manifold vulnerability is at stake. Against this backdrop, our articles show that violence is a relational phenomenon. This implies that its meaning unfolds in between those who are involved in it, but that it can neither be reduced to their intentions, nor be understood solely from their experiences, nor be deduced from overarching viewpoints or orders. Instead of perpetuating the traditional scientific hunt for causation, instead of sliding into still popular essentialisations and instead of drawing back to "thick descriptions," our contributions aim at the exploration of an intrinsic relationship between violence and its "lived experience." To unveil this relationship will help keeping us from contracting violence to its instrumental dimensions, from explaining it functionally, as well as from reducing it to its destructive character, but will help us in return to envisage its poetics and socio-technological functions. Against this background, the contributions to the first part thematize the relationship between sense and violence. They inquire into its everyday meaning, into our habits of understanding it, into the ways our securing symbolic worlds contain it, but they also ask whether it hasn`t always and already permeated and structured these worlds, i.e., they ask whether we need not also acknowledge a "violence of meaning." The contributions to the second part present a variety of applied phenomenological research. They inquire into the various, yet interrelated forms of violence and its supposedly unforeseeable transformations in concreto and, thus, shed further light on the constitutive relationship between sense and violence. The texts assembled in the third part, focus, finally, on the question regarding the forms we are used to handle violence. In this context, the most basic problem concerns the question how to deal with apparently "irreducible violence." In addition to questions regarding the problems of testifying or blanking violence, the overall problem concerns the elaboration of possibilities of minimizing or retarding violence that shall keep us from degenerating into the phantasmal, indeed deeply violent idea of a "final solution" regarding all violence, which all too easily tends to view all factual violence as "senseless" and, thus, to open the floodgates to its violent abolishment.