Dr. Maxwell Kennel

Senior Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Far-Right Studies

Director of Pandora Press and Editor of the Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies Series.

Co-Investigator on the CREATE Project and Affiliate at the Arcand Centre for Health Equity at NOSM University.

Author of Postsecular History (Palgrave, 2022) and Ontologies of Violence (Brill, 2023), and editor of Astrid von Schlachta’s Anabaptists. Trans. Vic Thiessen (Pandora, 2024), and Robert Friedmann’s Design for Living (Wipf & Stock, 2017).

Upcoming book panel on Ontologies of Violence at the American Academy of Religion online meetings in June 2024

I’m very excited and grateful that there will be a panel on my book titled “Violence and Interpretation: Conflicts of Values and Violation in Maxwell Kennel’s Ontologies of Violence” at the American Academy of Religion online meetings in a few weeks.

The Theology and Continental Philosophy Unit will host the panel on Wednesday June 26, 2024 at 3:30-4:45 EST, with registration available here.

Contributors include:

  • Moderator: Jeremy Cohen (he/him), Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, McMaster University
  • David Newheiser (he/him), Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University
  • Eleanor Craig (they/them), Program Director and Lecturer with the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights, Harvard University
  • Sam Shuman (they/them), incoming Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
  • Kieran Way (he/him), PHD Student, Anthropology, University of Toronto
  • Jamie Pitts (he/him), Professor of Anabaptist Studies, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary
  • Response Maxwell Kennel (he/him), Senior Research Associate, Northern Ontario School of Medicine University
  • Q&A. Moderated by Jeremy Cohen.

Abstract/Description

Violence is a commonly used concept in the scholarly and public spheres alike, often serving as a name for violations that span the distance between physical/corporeal harm and symbolic forms of epistemic injustice – which itself is an ideal-type distinction that often obscures continuities between bodily and psychological violence. Yet violence is not a stable name for a set of discrete ways of thinking and acting, but a flexible concept (or keyword) used to identify violations of value-laden boundaries that encircle secular and sacred ideas, individuals, communities, and societies. This means that its definition shifts profoundly with the value-laden politically-saturated boundaries of both its users and critics. Many users of the term avoid defining it clearly, and many critics of the term use its malleable and polemical character to their advantage in what Judith Butler describes as a process wherein “they seek to rename nonviolent practices as violent, conducting a political war, as it were, at the level of public semantics.” (The Force of Non-Violence. Verso, 2020. p.2). 

Violence is never a neutral concept, and it is most often used to name and condemn violations that are determined by the values and priorities of its users. This means that violence – as a concept – is often either treated as a term with one clear and singular definition, or a term that is so radically open to interpretation that it loses its meaning and political efficacy. But rather than abandoning the term to forms of singularization (that ignore its highly diverse usage) or relativization (that bypass the need to defend certain uses of the term against others), Maxwell Kennel’s recent book Ontologies of Violence: Deconstruction, Pacifism, and Displacement (Brill, 2023) argues for a critical theory and political theology of violence that mediates between its value-laden and subjective character, and how the term lends itself to polemical abuse. Ontologies of Violence provides detailed interpretations of Jacques Derrida’s claim that “predication is the original violence” (in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference), Mennonite pacifist political theologians who reject the use of violence against violence (even in epistemological and ontological terms), and Grace M. Jantzen’s late trilogy Death and the Displacement of Beauty (which reconfigures the terms of mortality and natality, and resists the equivocation of language and violence). Building on Kennel’s first book Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) which challenges the violence of the term “post-secular” in its triumphalist presumptions of overcoming secularity, Ontologies of Violence concludes with an argument against the basic ontological violence of assuming that differences will necessarily displace other stable identities – a logic that underpins competitive and zero-sum paradigms that fund violent ways of thinking from right wing panics about population replacement to trans erasing radical feminisms. 

This roundtable session presents, critiques, and extends the approach developed in Kennel’s Ontologies of Violence by gathering scholars of theology, philosophy, and anthropology to discuss the question and limits of violence as a diagnostic and interpretive concept that reflects the values and priorities of its users. Panelists will respond to the book by showing how its paradigm calls the postsecular into question, reframes the category of violence, resists simplistic equivocations between violence and religion, brings Anabaptist and Mennonite pacifisms into broader dialogue with political theology, challenges Derridean approaches to the violence of language, and resists simplistic and violent appeals to nonviolence that place the moralizing burden of passivity onto victims of violent oppression (with reference to the work of Françoise Vergès and Elsa Dorlin).