On Violence

Bruce B. Lawrence is the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion at Duke University. He is the author of The Qur’an: A Biography; New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life; and Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence. He is the editor of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden and Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip-Hop (with miriam cooke).Aisha Karim is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Saint Xavier University. She is a coeditor of Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader.

“This volume provides a long-needed anthology of major writings related to the subject of violence. The readings include excerpts from classic contributions of Marx and Freud along with pieces by modern thinkers such as Girard and Bourdieu and social activists from Gandhi to bin Laden. The selections are skillfully chosen to address a central theme, that violence always takes place in a context. The readings explore the idea that social, internal, ritualized, and other forms of violence are part of the processes of life and not necessarily anomalies. This is a thoughtful and arresting set of essays on an important topic that will be useful in the classroom and much discussed in the public forum.”-Mark Juergensmeyer, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence “[T]his anthology is a triumph of editorial serendipity.” - Steven Poole (The Guardian) “Even though its tone is unremittingly gloomy, reading through On Violence reveals an impressive selection of thinkers about this vexed subject. The brilliance of this collection lies in the editors’ courage to include unpalatable writings alongside noble ones.” - Tim Roberts (M/C Reviews) “Offering an eclectic roster of voices on the subject, this useful reader also raises the suspicion that the history of violence is a red herring. The pervasiveness of violence makes it difficult to distinguish violence from change, or history itself. Violent change requires some kind of ethical marker to make narrative sense as history. Violence is never morally or politically neutral: context is everything.” - Priya Satia (TLS)

• Acknowledgments ixGeneral Introduction: Theorizing Violence in the Twenty-first Century 1Part I. The Dialectics of Violence 17Phenomenology of Spirit / Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 27Anti-Duhring / Friedrich Engels 39Capital: A Critique of Political Economy / Karl Heinrich Marx 62Concerning Violence (The Wretched of the Earth) / Frantz Fanon 78Part II. The Other of Violence 101Actors Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule / Mohandas K. Gandhi 110The Right of Emergency Defense (Mein Kampf) / Adolf Hitler 127The Ballot or the Bullet / Malcolm X 143Critics Selections from the Prison Notebooks / Antonio Gramsci 158Keywords; Marxism and Literature / Raymond Wiliams 180Outline of a Theory of Practice / Pierre Bourdieu 188Domination and the Arts of Resistance / James C. Scott 199Part III. The Institution of Violence: Three Connections 215Familial Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego / Sigmund Freud 226Social Control and the Power of the Weak (Heroes of Their Own Lives) / Linda Gordon 245Battered Wives / Del Martin 255Legal The Shah Bano Case (Shattering the Myth) / Bruce B. Lawrence 262Critique of Violence (Reflections) / Walter Benjamin 268Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory / Catharine MacKimmon 286Violence and the Word / Robert M. Cover 292Human Rights and the New World Order / Chandra Muzaffar 314Religious Violence and the Sacred / Rene Girard 334Liberation and the Christian Ethic (God of the Oppressed) / James Cone 351Dangerous Memory and Alternate Knowledges (Communities of Resistance and Solidarity) / Sharon Welch 362The Iliad, or the Poem of Force / Simone Weil 377Part IV. The State of Violence 391Leviathon / Thomas Hobbes 399The Origins of Totalitarianism / Hannah Arendt 416Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison / Michel Foucault 444Savages, Barbarians, and Civilized Men (Anti-Oedipus) / Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 472Part V. The Representation of Violence 491Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art / Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky 498Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing / Michael Tuaussig 503Shaved Heads and Marked Bodies: Representations from Cultures of Trauma / Kristine Stiles 522Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places / Osama Bin Laden; In the Name of Osama Bin Laden: Global Terrorism and the Bin Laden Brotherhood / Roland Jacquard 539Touched by Fire: Doctors without Borders in a Third World Crisis / Elliott Leyton 547Copyright Acknowledgments 555Index 559