A recent conference on the work and influence of Bat-Ami Bar On, memorialized by Dianna Taylor in this series, highlighted the reach of her work. Courtney M. Miller posted recently in this series on her contribution to that conference. And Lewis Gordon recently published an elegy on the blog in light of that conference. This post is another in what might now be considered a mini-series on Bar On’s work and influence.
(Everyday) Violence
In 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman, who considered the young boy to be dangerous to what he perceived to be his community. Trayvon, in Zimmerman’s mind, did not belong to that community or that space. He had crossed a line where he had become hyper-visible as threatening. His hyper-visibility did not amount to a recognition of his right to appear in the world as who he is or was, or, more specifically, his hyper-visibility covered over his rightful appearance in the world. Coupled with the bias directed at him, Trayvon’s death was not only a clear violation of his right to life, but also a demonstration of the absence of recognition of what Hannah Arendt would call his “right to have rights.” She writes:
We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because for the new global situation.
To recall, Arendt wrote and published The Origins of Totalitarianism in the aftermath of the Second World War to speak to the predicament of the rise of totalitarianism and the superfluidity it produced in terms of material and human resources, which also marked the precarity of the human beings in the production of stateless people and refugees that were suddenly deemed outside the pale of the law. Thus, while in the context of Arendt’s analysis the term adumbrates the situation of stateless (and at that time, rightless) people, Trayvon’s death indicates the absence of the recognition of his potential political agency, which enables one to participate in the freedom of a community. After his death, the “Black Lives Matter” movement began as a praxis resting on the principle of justice to demand the fulfilment of the rights and actual protection of the lives of individuals who are subjected to such violence. Furthermore, Trayvon’s case brings to focus the curious shortcoming of citizenship along with all the legal and political rights it affords its subject: this is the absence of a performative recognition of the right to have such rights.
During what was dubbed the “Summer of Migration” in 2015, the lack of the protection of one’s rights and the consequences of such a lack were once again forcefully revealed to the world upon the dissemination of the image of a three-year-old Syrian boy: Alan Kurdi. Alan’s body was washed ashore on the Aegean Coast in Turkey. It was difficult to pinpoint the perpetrators of the death, though Muwafaka Alabash and Asem Alfrhad, two “human smugglers,” were convicted of causing his death by negligence. Alan’s life was cut short by an event that befell his family on their way to a future possibility. Alan’s death was the subsequent result of an international refugee and border regime that continues to fall short of the actual protection of certain types of lives that find themselves on vessels as a last resort to get to a place where they can build their lives anew.
The third and last image is that of 26-year-old Mohamed Bouzizi, who burned or more aptly immolated himself in Tunisia. His widely published picture shows the outcome of the unnecessary suffering imposed on his life through the confiscation of his livelihood, i.e., the wares he sold as a street vendor, which blocked the possibility of continuing his life and flourishing: his world closed in on him, and he ultimately destroyed this very world.
These violent deaths endow my theoretical interest in the relationship between recognition and visibility with a sense of practical urgency to make sense of justice as a community and within the world. It is true that the obligation to protect citizens (and their rights) and the circumvention of the world of action in a state so inscribed happen via the territorial sovereignty to which the state lays claim in its ability to delimit what happens within its territory. In turn, citizens (and one could argue other residents) are free to act in ways they see fit with the implicit promise of not harming others and living peaceably under the protective shield of positive law. However, both the aftermath of the Second World War and what’s happening today do point to superficial limitations this account poses.
Writing against the background of the “wars and revolutions” of the twentieth century and in response to the recent student uprisings she articulates as a “global phenomenon,” Arendt’s reflection aims to differentiate the confusion of violence with power in the political arena. Politics, for Arendt, is the manifestation of human freedom that transcends the instrumental rationality that accompanies most other human actions that we undertake every day. However, when power is understood through the lens of violence, politics becomes the realm of the legitimate exercise of authority that is often overwhelmed by instrumental interests that turns political action into a mere productive activity whose success is judged by its outcomes. For Arendt, politics is about the possibility of having a world, and being able to appear in it.
All this is to say that for Arendt, agency is linked with freedom and freedom is linked with our concerted action with others. That power always needs numbers, and is different from violence, and sheer force for Arendt becomes key to elaborating on what she understands as the possibility of political agency that is exercised through collective action in a disinterested fashion. For violence destroys not only the possibility of such action, but ultimately the potential for any political agency that rests on the ability to appear and act in the world as these three examples show.
Violence incites speechless horror everywhere: both when rights are being violated in the ongoing refugee crises as well as Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine, and when they are violated in everyday occurrences. It is often the case that we experience violence in the manifestations of unnecessary suffering: the shortcomings of a healthcare system that become even more pronounced during a pandemic makes us think of those who suffer on a regular basis due to lack of proper health insurance, the perpetuation of incarceration and seemingly arbitrary sentencing guidelines make us wonder not only about the incarcerated but those whom they have left behind, and legislation that goes against the equal liberty of all enrages us.
Bat-Ami Bar On reflects on the violence that hits us in the privacy of our homes, or in the publicity of our work and sociality: women who are subject to all degrees of sexual violence, and underrepresented minorities that continue to be threatened and discriminated against. “There is something about violence or some of it that is inarticulable in language,” Bar On writes. She continues:
When I describe my own encounters with violence or other violent events in what seems to me as all the small and striking details that I can pull together, I, nonetheless, feel that there is a residue that exceeds the words that I use and, therefore, is unnamed and, though perhaps expressible in other ways, like painting or sculpting, in some considerable manner, conceptually unknown.
For her, something remains of violence that may be expressed artistically or in other ways even after we think we have articulated our lived experience of violence. Thus, trying to understand and make sense of the event may not result in reconciliation but the need to address what happened. Bar on alludes to Arendt’s “retrospective comment” in the 1966 Introduction to the Origins of Totalitarianism, that
With the defeat of Nazi Germany part of the story [of decades of turmoil, confusion, and plain horror] had come to an end. This seemed the first appropriate moment . . .to try to tell and understand what happened. . . Still in grief and sorrow, and hence with a tendency to lament, but no longer in speechless outrage and impotent horror.
Emerging out of the “speechless outrage and impotent horror” Arendt’s work on “totalitarian terror” can help us address “everyday violence” today. As Bar On states in “Everyday Violence and the Ethico-Political Crisis”:
Everyday violence is more common than rare. It is the violence that is intertwined with, and therefore configures, people’s everyday lives of public or private work, sustenance, recreation, and intimate relations. In the case of a large number of women, rape and battering are everyday violence. For Turks in today’s Germany, everyday violence is a function of skinheads’ neo-Nazi attacks. In Rwanda and Afghanistan, everyday violence is post-colonially spawned by the conflicts of current warlords.
Violence inheres not only in the act of a perpetrator, but also in the fear of threat of such acts. Women and transgender people experience the fear of such threat when they walk out at night. Black men experience the fear of such threat when they are driving or walking on the street. It is true that the direct effects of the actualization of violence as such are horrifying, but so is the indirect effect of such harm that is felt by not just the families and friends of the victims, but also by the rest of the community that finds itself in the grip of structures that make such violence highly probable.
This type of violence pertains to what Iris Marion Young identified as a structural injustice that strips individuals of the power to exercise their agency to be able to make decisions about their own lives. Young’s account of injustice was effective in showing that despite the enhancement in civil rights, there was something amiss about the ability of members of certain social groups to be able to exercise their freedom. Recall the three images I mentioned earlier, in them you will find individuals that belong to certain social groups.
Speechless Horror
Violence invites speechless horror. And speechless horror continues to be a part of our lives at both local and global levels. Notwithstanding the speechlessness, the subject of violence (or the survivor) experiences as well a loss of the world; definitely their own (by their own borders being perpetrated), but also a world of others that can understand them. It is a loss of voice, a loss of one’s representation/visibility in it. Yet this speechless horror is not judgment-less. In the speechless horror with which we observe the body of a boy washed ashore and judge the regime in which such an accident became a potential “everyday” occurrence (through the interception at sea measures and extra-territorialization of borders) to be unjust. We rage and anger over it.
Like Bar On, I find it useful to turn to Young’s analysis of structural injustices to address the “everyday violence” inherent in our social and political structures. Such violence is manifested both in acts of violation (against women, religious groups, etc.) and expropriation (refugees and other displaced peoples). The possible remedy is in the “speechless horror” that allows for an articulation of a forward-looking responsibility.
“Speechless horror” plays a normative role in our judgment of injustices, which I have elsewhere called the affective dimension of reflective judgment. In our ability to feel from the place of the “subject of violence” we can affectively judge the injustices in the world. As such, the political affects of horror, fear, and anger (to name a few of the more “negative” ones) help us articulate the urgency and significance of tending to these everyday occurrences of violence, whether it be on the move, at the border, in the camp, or in our own neighborhood. The outcry of rage at the violence we witness accompanies our judgment of injustice. In turn, our shared sense of justice and judgment, a forward-look responsibility emerges that may perhaps address such the violence (and loss of agency of those targeted) and help recover a world.
This forward-looking responsibility inheres in the capacity and imperative to recreate a world wherein equality without commensurability emerges as fact. Simply put, we usually understand equality through commensurability: value is made commensurable by a sort of fungibility that rests on “sameness.” This is the flattening out of our uniqueness by the equalizing force of (positive) law: each of us as having socially contracted to be equal to the next, and our own sovereign. By contrast, incommensurability maintains the uniqueness of each of us that allows for a relationality that stems from the fact of plurality of existence: that we are all exposed to one another.
Our plurality, as Arendt would call it, is what gives us the ability be equal and distinct at once. The recognition of such plurality is what allows for the capacity to build and rebuild worlds despite our experiences of loss and violence. Such world-creation may be the only antidote to the trauma that results “in a loss of the ability to want or think into the future, a deep disbelief in the possibility of conducting a passionate struggle that is not a life-and-death struggle, and in a profound distrust of people and the power of words.” While on the one hand, world-building requires the necessary reification found in the production of human artifice, which then becomes the material condition of possibility of free action in politics; on the other, it needs human togetherness where human beings can appear to each other in their plurality and uniqueness and exercise their equal political agency. This is a tall order, but one that we must take up through the speechless horror of our judgment of injustices in the world.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.
Yasemin Sari
Yasemin Sari is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Northern Iowa. She specializes in democratic political theory, especially as it relates to human rights, extra-institutional recognition, and the borders between citizen and non-citizen. She has a B.A. and M.A> in Philosophy from Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey) and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta.
