Violence
This note is about the concept of violence. It is related to Justice.
Violence is about causing harm. As all change results in harm as well as in benefits, we can say that all encouraged or imposed change is - or can be - a form of violence.
Symbolic violence is a relationship between social groups with different power. (cf. Pierre Bourdieu)
Epistemic violence causes harm when one group does not understand others due to ignorance.
- Exclusion
- Silencing
An example is the epistemic violence against the nonhuman life through the construction of human superiority and the resulting divides in through and action between human and animal, reason and nature, knowledge and instinct, etc.
Epistemic violence constraints how subjects and others can know themselves, communicate about their situations, and determine their own possibilities.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66–111. London: Routledge, 1994.
- Ontological violence
- Epistemological violence
- Symbolic violence
Oksala, Johanna. Foucault, Politics, and Violence. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012.
Violence is the inevitable precondition of any consensus
Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. New York: Verso, 2000.
War
Cf. 'war on animals' and words that transform animals into food: beef, pork, veal, seafood. These words hide the personal and structural violence towards these animals.
Look at the causes of violence (speciesism, oppression).
Cf. Clausewitz on war as political intercourse by other means.
Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. The War Against Animals. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
“…more farmed animals are slaughtered in one week than the total number of people killed in all wars throughout human history” The Gray Area with Sean Illing: The Green Pill
Banwell, Stacy. The War Against Nonhuman Animals: A Non-Speciesist Understanding of Gendered Reproductive Violence. Cham: Springer, 2023.
Kochi, Tarik. ‘Species War: Law, Violence and Animals’. Law, Culture and the Humanities 5, no. 3 (2009): 353–69. https://doi.org/10/chxbxp.
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