Violence. Brad Evans

TWO

      THEATER OF VIOLENCE

      From Sophocles to soccer, or Donald Trump to Kendrick Lamar, we are all players on history’s bloody stage.

      Our New York Times series of wider dialogues on violence began with the following conversation with the renowned philosopher and writer Simon Critchley—a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City and the moderator of the New York Times forum “The Stone.” Simon is a critical philosopher who is often associated with the anarchist tradition. Throughout his extensive corpus of work, he has raised important questions on the meaning of tragedy, along with the tensions between violence and our metaphysical longings for love and togetherness. In this conversation a range of issues are discussed, from the continued importance of tragedy and how we might make sense of the forty-fifth president of the United States to Shakespeare, soccer, art, and music.

      Brad Evans interviews Simon Critchley

      March 14, 2016

      Simon Critchley is the author of many books, including Bowie, Memory Theatre, and Notes on a Suicide.

       Brad Evans: I want to start the discussion by raising a seemingly basic yet elusive question: what actually is violence? In terms of media spectacles and popular culture, violence seems ubiquitous in liberal societies. Yet the very term “violence” continually escapes meaningful definition and critique. What do you understand by the term?

      Simon Critchley: It is true, “violence” can be used in a very wide and somewhat vague manner. So let me try to restrict our discussion to physical violence of a rather direct form. Let’s say that violence is behavior that uses physical force in order to cause damage, harm, or death to some living thing, whether human or not. It is pretty clear that we are not all going to be able to agree on a definition of violence, but let’s see where this idea of it takes us.

      First, violence cannot be reduced to an isolated act that could be justified with reference to some conception or principle of justice. Here I borrow a line of thought from the historian and cultural theorist Robert Young when he writes that violence “is a phenomenon that has a history.” Violence is not so much a question of a single act that breaks a supposed continuum of nonviolence or peace. Rather, violence is best understood as a historical cycle of violence and counterviolence. In other words, violence is not one but two. It is a double act that traps human beings in a repetitive pattern from which it is very hard to escape. Violence, especially political violence, is usually a pattern of aggression and counter-aggression that has a history and stretches back deep into time.

      This is how I would understand the patterns involving race and racialized violence that have taken on added urgency of late. Violence is not an abstract concept for those subjected to it but a lived reality that has a concrete history. To try to judge the racial violence that defines current life in the United States without an understanding of the history of violence that stretches back to colonization, the forced transport of Africans to the colonies of the Americas, and the implementation of plantation slavery is largely pointless. We have to understand the history of violence from which we emerge.

       In that respect, as your colleague Richard Bernstein has argued, even massive historical events like the September 11 attacks don’t necessarily provoke serious thinking on the problem of violence.

      One way of looking at 9/11—let’s call it the standard way—is that the United States was at peace with the world and then terror came from the sky and the twin towers tumbled. In that view, 9/11 was a single act that required a justified reaction, namely war in the Middle East, the infinite detention of suspected “terrorists” in places like Guantánamo Bay, and the construction of the vast institutional apparatus of Homeland Security.

      But another way of looking at 9/11 is looking at what Osama bin Laden said about the matter. In a 2004 video called The Towers of Lebanon, where he first accepted responsibility for Al Qaeda’s role in the 9/11 attacks, he justifies the attacks by claiming that they were a reaction to the persistent violation of Arab lands by the United States, especially the use of Saudi Arabia as a base during the first Gulf War. Bin Laden even adds that the idea of 9/11 came to him as a visual memory of watching TV footage of the Israeli bombardment of West Beirut’s high-rise tower blocks in 1982. If the “Zionist-Crusaders,” as he pejoratively puts it, could put missiles into towers, then so could Al Qaeda. Thus the idea for 9/11 was born.

      The point is that if we are to understand violence concretely, then we have to grasp it historically as part of a cycle of action and reaction, violence and counterviolence, that always stretches back further than one thinks. If one doesn’t do this, then one ends up like Donald Trump, emptily promising to flatten ISIS with bombs. It’s in this light that we might also consider the Theater of Trump that has exploded with truly disturbing and racially coded violence in recent days.

       If violence shouldn’t be theorized in the abstract, as you rightly insist, we must pay attention to how it is enacted. In this, the importance of theater, which is a recurring theme throughout your work, is often overlooked. What do you think theater has to offer here?

      We live in a world framed by violence, where justice seems to be endlessly divided between claim and counterclaim, right and left, freedom fighter and terrorist, believer and nonbeliever, and so on. Each side appears to believe unswervingly in the rightness of its position and the wrongness, or indeed “evil,” of the opposition. Such belief legitimates violence and unleashes counterviolence in return. We seem to be trapped in deep historical cycles of violence where justice is usually simply understood as vengeance or revenge.

      This is where theater can help, especially tragedy (but I think this is also true of the best movies and TV dramas).

      It is useful to consider the Greeks. The history of Greek tragedy is the history of violence and war, from the war with the Persians in the early fifth century B.C. to the Peloponnesian Wars that run until that century’s end; from the emergence of Athenian imperial hegemony to its dissolution and humiliation at the hands of Sparta. In 472 B.C., in the oldest extant play we possess, The Persians, Aeschylus deals with the aftermath of the Battle of Salamis in 480. It was therefore somewhat closer to the Athenians than 9/11 is to us. More than half of our surviving Greek tragedies were composed after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian Wars in 431. Oedipus the King was first performed in 429, two years after the beginning of the Peloponnesian Wars, during a time of plague that is estimated to have killed one-quarter of the Athenian population. The plague that established the entire environment of Sophocles’s play is not some idle musing. It was very real indeed. It killed Pericles, the leader of Athens, that very same year. The