“Violence and Interpretation: Conflicts of Values and Violation in Maxwell Kennel’s Ontologies of Violence.” Theology and Continental Philosophy Unit. Wednesday June 26, 2024 at 3:30-4:45 EST.
Contributors:
- 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
Response
First of all – to Eleanor, Sam, David, Kieran, Jamie, and Jeremy – thank you so much for taking time (that most value-laden thing) out of your busy work schedules, lives, and career transitions, to read my book and then respond to it in such serious, thoughtful, and constructive ways. It is a dream come true to have a panel on my book at the AAR, and I feel lucky to be in the company of scholars and friends who care about what it means to think about violence in these specific ways. Thanks also to Anthony and Marika for accepting this panel under the auspices of the Theology and Continental Philosophy Unit at the AAR. I really appreciate that.
I will now respond to each interlocutor, a bit out of order, in ways that I hope spur your thinking and our conversation.
I’ll begin by responding to Eleanor who discusses liberal fables of violence in relation to the state, most of which position the state as the governing body with a monopoly on the use of supposedly legitimate force and violence. Police violence, incarceration, funding genocide – whatever it may be, the state tells what Eleanor rightly calls a “fable” about itself, a nice story that makes people feel better, allowing them to sleep at night because some “adult in the room” has violence at their disposal in order to protect them, whether in the form of a sidearm, a prison industrial complex, or military force.
Eleanor asks about how the violence that inheres in everything (for Derrida) does not contrast with physical violence, but influences it in reciprocal way, and I think – in the book – I focus on challenging the contrast between physical and ontological violence, at times at the expense of showing their often-hidden continuities. More on this below.
Eleanor also mentions the ethical problems that ensue when reciprocal accountability isn’t possible – and this is an enormous problem, one not addressed in the book, and it’s related to the problem I am tasked with understanding in my current work in medical education reform in the Canadian North. In my work on Social Accountability, I notice that in order to hold anyone to account for the violations that constitute violence, some shared values or common measures must be present. And these common valuations of some things over others, are impossible without social bonds of trust and the communities that both form and are formed by those social bonds. But the question remains: who is it on to initiate and sacrifice for such commonality?
This is also why Sam’s response is so important and provocative. Community bonds determine what we think violence is and how we respond to it. But it is the character of those social bonds of trust in communities that have the greatest influence on how we think about violence. If those bonds are defined by – for example – fascist appeals to blood and soil, then the term violence or its cognates will often be used in reactive, defensive, destructive, and murderous ways. Even thinking of social bonds in terms set by kinship or the sacredness of the land sometimes risk justifying violence in defense of those value-laden and symbolically imagined terms.
For Sam, Levinas’ appeal to the face-to-face relation as a ground for ethics risks being embroiled in volkish forms of Gemeinshaft, underpinned by nostalgia for a golden age of pure community (that really never was). This is what Miranda Joseph calls “the romance of community” – where the social bonds that we form become part of our appeals to coherence and meaning, making the concept of community ripe for abuse as it is used as a persuasive tactic to authorize other claims, from the peaceful to the violent.
Sam also asks why I do not call Derrida and Levinas “Jewish philosophers,” and to this I can only say that my lack of identifying them as such reflects my own lack of confidence in entering the debate and conversation on to what degree, or in what ways, Levinas and Derrida are representatives of Jewish philosophy – and in some way, it is a holdover from the dissertation and my sensitivity to how my committee members would respond to any claim of this kind.
But the point remains. How can one “turn the face on its head” and resist violence without appeals to communities of romanticized and nostalgic coherence?
David’s response also asks this question in the broader context of so-called western pluralistic democracies. David says that “social bonds are under serious threat in many places” and asks what we should do “when we find that social bonds have broken down, not because the parties insist upon binary thinking but because trust has been repeatedly violated.” On this, I think that it is ruptures in the social adhesive of trust that constitute a form of violence (like when governments betray their people, or institutions fail their constituencies), and also define what counts as violence (because if there is no longer any trust or expectation of trust, it is hard to say what social bonds are being violated).
I think David’s second point is also fascinating – that “there’s no need to keep the future unforeseeable” or to reduce Derrida’s thought to a desire for openness rather than seeing openness as “woven into the world, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.” This makes sense to me in a few registers, and yet I still notice Derrida’s anxiety about closure, which I now notice is not the same as a desire for openness… and I want to know more about how David’s reading of Derrida “between determinate judgment and indeterminate critique” relates to violence. The inevitability of disjunctive thinking makes sense to me, but I would argue that even a futile resistance to binaristic thinking is essential for resisting violence, not from the standpoint of pure indeterminacy, but from – as David says – the standpoint of agonism and conflicts of values, that keep judgment in motion rather than resting in fantasies of stasis or ideologies of safety, security, and certainty. Here of course, I am sidestepping a deeper interpretive question about Derrida, which we can return to later.
I think David’s last question is most important. He asks: “Does this account of violence enable us to call racist, sexist, and authoritarian acts violent? What guidance does it give about whether and how to resist them? How might it speak to those moments when social bonds are a source of physical and spiritual threat?”
To provide a brief answer: yes, and no. In the book, I wanted to provide a theory that took seriously the subjective character of violence without abandoning it to mere subjectivity or relativity. To do this meant offering an account of violence as the violation of value-laden boundaries, which on its face remains agnostic about what those values are. I think it’s important to stick with this agnosticism for a serious period of time, before making that important decision to defend a particular set of values and boundaries. This delay in judgment can help us see the diversity of accounts of violence. I hope that my paradigm helps us to see that we do not all agree on what constitutes the violences of racism, sexism, and authoritarianism. Only when we see each manifestation of violence as a truly contested term, can we take real and contextual steps to resist it. Violence calls for both interpretation, and then principled and active resistance, and careful mediations that dignify both.
This brings me to Kieran’s response, because he thematizes resistance in a specific context – Thunder Bay, a city where I also live, and which is on the Fort William first Nation, signatory of the Robinson Superior Treaty.
To respond to Kieran’s opening questions, I’ll say that:
- If some form of violence is what sustains a colonial relation, what response(s) does it demand?
- I think the answer is a form of nonviolence that is really antiviolence – which opposes violence with actions that could be interpreted as violence by some.
- How is colonial violence different from other forms of violence that we cannot escape or control, and how do we describe these differences?
- I think that colonial violence entangles ontological, epistemological, and corporeal violence in unique ways that mask one kind in the other kind, leading to violations of Indigenous cosmologies, ways of knowing, and everyday forms of life, all at once (but masked by each other). Resisting such violence means doing things that the colonizer will inevitably interpret and experience as violence, in ways that require careful distinctions between justifiable counterviolence and unjustifiable counterviolence.
- What would it mean to attempt to live non-violently, not only against these violent conditions but also toward a postcolonial or decolonial relation?
- To live in a nonviolent way will depend on what values one holds and defends, meaning that blockading a railway crossing or reoccupying stolen land will seem violent to some and peaceful to others. What matters is how these intersecting violations are contested and negotiated, rather than an ultimate decision about who is or is not violent.
- How might those who “say no” to colonial violence invite us to repair or transform our relations with others? What forms of violence, despite these efforts, might those who do so fail or struggle to overcome? Can advocating for non-violence in the face of these conditions create its own problems, including harm, injury, or death, and therefore come to resemble violence itself?
- I think that repair, healing, and reconciliation are only possible when oppressors can get over themselves and accept that they have violated something sacred and valuable – without that, no repair is possible. Without the possibility of reinterpreting what one experiences as violent, no repair or healing is possible.
I want to respond further to Kieran’s reflections on Anishinaabe constitutionalism and the work of Aaron Mills, especially his desire to unmake the established liberal order and work against the population-level violence of colonialism and its structural closures, but I want to take more time to read those sources, so I’ll conclude my response to Kieran by saying that retributive violence is also a matter of interpretation – in that what gets labelled as “retribution” is not always proportionate or similar enough to compared to the initial violation, as we see in the most genocidal way in Gaza today.
Turning to Jamie’s response, Ihave been reflecting on how most of my book addresses how we think about violence before it happens, while it happens, and very briefly after it happens when it is being interpreted. But the next question is: what needs to happen after violence and its specific violations have been understood and interpreted (or even resisted), in terms of response and repair? This is why I appreciate how Jamie has highlighted the need to define and conceptualize values and boundaries.
When I use the term “values” I am doing something that postliberal theologians have long railed against, by using neutral and neutralizing terms that supposedly offend against the particularity of communities and traditions. When Jamie says “the lack of further specification does raise questions about the adoption of Max’s argument by particular traditions or communities of moral inquiry” I know what he means, but I just don’t think that the language of values in any way inhibits the use and interpretation of my paradigm by particular communities. I use the term “values” because its accessible and open ended, and therefore usable and interpretable. I think this is defensible, in part, because there are no longer many communities that are monoliths with singular histories and languages that actually fit the mold of those who privilege particularity, and even the most particular and contextual interpretive community still needs a relatively neutral language so that an understanding can be shared amidst its diverse constituency. Mennonites are an excellent example, in that there was a time when the typical Mennonite was a man farming in Pennsylvania, but now the average Mennonite is a woman in Ethiopia. So communicating across those differences still requires some neutral-ish language, in addition to a chorus of particular languages and terms.
Although I don’t sympathize with the critique of values language that comes, for example, from someone like Charles Taylor, I do take Jamie’s larger point: violence ought not be psychologized in a way that misses its material character, both in terms of how violence is done in material ways, but also how violence violates the material conditions we need to live well together. Value is indeed always related to materials and economies, and this is actually why I think the language of value is so important. Value is always material, and never fully abstract – for example, in the value-reserves held by money and debt, or the weight-bearing sunk-cost investment that we have in violable boundaries around our properties and possessions.
So, when Jamie tells the story of Mother Eberly, I see how there are both relational materialities and physical resources at play when the familial bonds of trust were violated between her and her son. Underneath valuing molasses is Eberly’s valuing of trust. Trust being broken violates social bonds, and how we interpret and respond to those violations is what counts. Perhaps a different parent would not see this as a violation at all, but a consequence of low trust in the first place, or risk. Ursula Jost’s vision also shows how spiritual and material values coincide, proving that the two are related and showing that it is an interpretive act to accord values to something in the first place. Jamie is so right to say that “values” always have a material dimension, but I would suggest that this is the case even when it appears that values are ontologized or epistemologized into the abstract realm. For example, when one’s own cognitive boundaries are violated, it is still a matter of time, energy, psychological resources, emotional resources, to recover from something like a re-traumatizing event that triggers traumatic memories. I can only agree, when Jamie says that “The materiality of violence is therefore not only an issue of whether physical blows are involved, but also concerns how a particular violation undermines the material conditions necessary for the pursuit of one’s interests,” with the caveat that this is the case even when it appears as if violence is purely occurring in the abstract ontological register.
Dr. Maxwell Kennel 