Bibliography – Philosophy and Violence

The experience of violence

The Body in Pain – Elaine Scarry
- Philosophical work that attempts to articulate the phenomenon of pain, beginning with the premise that pain “destroys” language. Essential work.
Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon
- Thematizes the effects of violence both on the native and the settler.

“Violence: Direct, Structural, and Cultural” – John Galtung
- Classic article from the Peace Studies field that draws a distinction between direct violence and structural violence.
Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor – Rob Nixon
- Recent work that articulates the concept of “slow violence” to understand the way that environmental health outcomes are a kind of violence that unfolds over time (like higher rates of cancer in poor communities, for example).
“Tracking Epistemic Violence” – Kristie Dotson
- Gives a concept of epistemic violence as a kind of failure to hear the vulnerabilities of the speaker in conversations that result in the silencing of people who testify from oppressed positions in society.

Red, White, and Black – Frank Wilderson
- Wilderson’s text focuses on political “antagonisms” in the United States, and he touches on violence to discuss how black people are subject to gratuitous violence, which is to say violence that has no higher meaning or can be recognized as accidental.
Slavery and Social Death – Orlando Patterson
- Patterson makes the novel argument that slavery is fundamentally a phenomenon of social death, and not primarily one of forced labor. In the course of his argument, he analyzes the history of slavery, and touches in particular on the way that the slave is subject to violence without any kind of protection or even recognition that they are suffering violence.
Scenes of Subjection – Saidiya Hartman
- Hartman examines the history of slavery by focusing on the daily forms of “subjection” that slaves experienced, arguing that slavery wasn’t only about clearly violent acts, but occurred in every day ways that weren’t immediately visible.

“Critique of Violence” Walter Benjamin
- Foundational work that argues all violence is either law-making or law-destroying, and introduces the concept of divine violence which would shatter law without instituting a new one. Touches on police violence.
Weird John Brown – Ted Smith
- Uses John Brown as an example case to think through various issues touching on kinds of law and the justification of violence.

Violence – Slavoj Žižek
- Very readable set of reflections on violence and how it is perceived. Žižek distinguishes usefully between subjective, objective, and systemic violence, along with the ways that these forms interact with one another.
Violence and Civility – Étienne Balibar
- Balibar attempts to theorize politics as a kind of antiviolence by taking up extremism, capitalism, and genocide.
“The Paradox of Political Violence” – Mark Muhannad Ayyash
- Takes up Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon to thematize the difficulty of separating politics and violence, drawing on Foucault to conceptualize political violence as a paradox.

On Violence: A Reader – Bruce Lawrence and Aisha Karim
- Excellent philosophical reader from a variety of sources on violence.