The Time of Violence: Deconstruction and Value

Essays on the Politics of Bodies. I am interested in this paper in exploring the ways in which we may see violence both as a positivity and as the unspoken condition of a certain fantasy of the sustain ability of its various others or opposites, peace, love, and so on. Rather than simply condemn or deplore violence, as we tend to do regard ing the evils of war and suffering and the everyday horrors, we believe we can amelio rate it. I want to raise the question of violence not simply where it is most obvious and mani fest?in the streets, in relations between races, classes, sexes, political oppositions (though I hope what it will raise today does not avoid these issues); but also where is it less obvious, and rarely called by this name, in the domain of knowledges, reflection, thinking, and writ ing. I want not simply to condemn it, but to explore its constitutive role in the establish ment of politics, of thought, of knowledge. For this reason: that, as intellectuals or philoso phers (they are not always, or are only rarely, the same thing), we play a part in various struc tures of violence, whether we choose to or not, not only in our daily but also in our pro fessional and intellectual lives. But it is rare that we have the intellectual resources by which to think the level of our investment in the very violences that constitute our relations to work. I want to use some of the rather sen sitive and self-conscious resources provided by Jacques Derrida to look at the very violence of