Texts included:
1) Hannah Arendt
A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence [1969]
2) Ann Stoler
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power [2010]
3) Mahmood Mamdani
Making sense of political violence in post-colonial Africa [2003]
4) Achille Mbembe
Necropolitics [2003]
5) Zygmunt B...
1) Hannah Arendt
A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence [1969]
Power can no longer be measured with wealth; amount of violence no longer reliable indication of strength
Criticizes previous relation between war & politics and violence & power
Marx: aware of violence, but secondary role
New Left
- under Marx
- rules out use of violent means
- connected with the ‘weird suicidal development of modern weapons’
- against both Western representative democracies & Eastern one-party bureaucracies
- use Progress as described in the 19th C (A: not suitable for these new trends; critiques: )
- not simple one future of mankind, does not offer anything to the individual life
- burning desire for justice
- we must think about chronological unfairness
- Positive thing: serve as a guide for action in the future
If history is a chronological process, violence is the only possible interruption, making true what preachers of violence claim (which in
reality, has shown to be wrong!)
Revulsion against violence: only extremists are yielding to a glorification of violence
Sorel: nothing more violent than the famous myth of the general strike (A: nonviolent politics)
Sartre: ‘violence is a cure-all for most of our ills’
Fanon: A: manages to stay closer to reality, has some significance
- We must not neglect the significance of revolutions & rebellions
- Those who are being violent dream of violence
Participatory democracy
= one thing A does support from these preachers of violence; the council democracy
Violence in the political realm
General belief: violence is nothing more than a manifestation of power
Rule by Nobody
= bureaucracy, neither the few nor the many can be held responsible
General belief: command-obedience relationship
Others: support of people granting institutions power
,Distinction of power & violence
- Power stands always in need of numbers
- Violence relies on instruments
- We must distinguish notions such as power, strength, force, might, authority, violence (if not: blindness to the reality they
correspond to)
- Power is not a matter of command and obedience, and thus no equation to violence
Revolution (to illustrate this difference)
Revolutions are not simply being ‘made’
- Obedience is not determined by commands but by opinion (armed uprisings don’t take place when unnecessary) + numbers of those
who share it
- E.g. French revolution: example of revolutionary situation that did not became a revolution because nobody wanted to seize power
Power
- Essence of all government
- Violence is not; it is instrumental
- Those with no power will never have enough power to use violence
- Peace is an absolute
- Power is inherent to the existence of political communities
- Power is always the primary and predominant factor when combined with violence
- Violence can always destroy power
- When power is being lost: rule by sheer violence
- Effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely upon degree of social atomization (=disappearance of organization opposition)
- Power and violence are the opposite: where once rules absolutely, the other is absent
Roots and causes of violence
Absence of rage and violence is a clear sign of de-humanization (e.g. concentration camps)
We only react with rage when our sense of justice is offended
Most effective violence, where there is no individualization
Death = most antipolitical experience there is
- Power & violence should not be interpreted in biological terms
- like Fanon does: necessary violent negotiation of everything that stands in the way of the will-to-live
Sick society
= riots are symptoms as fever is symptoms of disease, only promote violence in the end (=critique by A)
,Racism
Organic metaphors are even more dangerous here as it would mean it is fraught with violence
Violence is then the logical, rational consequence of racism = explicit ideological system: dangerous according to A.; whereby a racist
ideology is used to justify racism in the streets
Danger of violence
- practice of violence will always be a means that overwhelmed the end
- “ changes the world, but the most probably change is a more violent world
Bureaucratization of public life
- Where everyone is deprived of political freedom because of the rule of Nobody
What makes a man political: his faculty to act (= all properties of creativity ascribed to life)
Every decrease of power is an open invitation to violence
, 2) Ann Stoler
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power [2010]
Combining the anthropology of women in understanding colonial expansion & consequences for the colonized: imperial authority and racial
distinctions were fundamentally structured in gendered terms
Colonial elites aren’t simply a homogenous community of common interest
The regulation of sexual relations was central to the development of particular kinds of colonial settlements and the allocation of economic
activity within them:
- Implementation of concubinage (colonized women as the concubines of European men; instead of importing European women)
Straddled division of ruler and ruled because of mixed-bloods
- Impoverished Indo-European women living in situations where boundaries of companionship, concubinage and paid-for-sex are
blurred
- Replaced by prostitution or marriage between full-blooded Europeans
Restrictions on European women in the colonies
- Very little opportunity to marry with soldiers
- Men had to remain un-married up until the age of 35y
White prestige = basic feature of colonial thinking; gloss for different intensities of racist practice, gender-specific and culturally coded
Administrative strategies of social engineering, colliding or constraining people’s choices & private lives underlie the demographics & sex
ratios (not the other way around)
European women
- Initial role when imported: tighten ranks of white communities, clarify boundaries, mark out their social space
- Higher need for privacy resulting in new distinctions of race (unclear whether this demand came from male or female population) =
more distinguished spatial segregation
- Colonial discourses about them: highly contradictory: blaming them for not respecting racial distinctions ànd being too racist
- Charged with reshaping the face of colonial society; the bearers of redefined colonial morality (wrong assumption!)
What European women had little resonance and effect until their objectives coincided with a realignment in both racial & class
politics in which they were strategic
- “Black Peril”: the professed dangers of sexual assaults on white women by black men; highly sexualizing black men
- Very race-specific race laws (rape of black women/rape by white men were not classified as rape by the law)
- But in general: very little evidence of rapes that were committed
- Rape charges against colonized men were often based on perceived transgressions of social space (e.g. seeing a white woman that is
The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:
Guaranteed quality through customer reviews
Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.
Quick and easy check-out
You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.
Focus on what matters
Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!
Frequently asked questions
What do I get when I buy this document?
You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.
Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?
Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.
Who am I buying these notes from?
Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller JillKoch. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.
Will I be stuck with a subscription?
No, you only buy these notes for $5.32. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.
