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INTRODUCTION

HUMANS IN DARK TIMES

Writing in the late 1960s, Hannah Arendt conjured the term “dark times” to address the legacies of war and human suffering. Arendt was not simply concerned with mapping out the totalitarian conditions into which humanity had descended. She was also acutely aware of the importance of individuals who challenge with integrity the abuses of power in all their oppressive forms. Countering violence, she understood, demands sustained intellectual engagement: we are all watchpersons, guided by the lessons and cautions of centuries of unnecessary devastation.

Mindful of the importance of Arendt in terms of thinking about violence, we deploy the phrase “humans in dark times” not as a description of something definitive but as a provocation. Just as we recognize that there are varying degrees of pain and suffering when it comes to the saturating capacities of oppressive power, so we also recognize every age has contingent problems that often reveal the worst of the human condition. As a result, we do not subscribe to the conceit that our times might be quantitatively deemed “lighter” on account of some triumph of liberal reason or its veritable retreat. Instead, we pursue the ways in which new and old forms of violence appear in the contemporary moment, what this means in terms of emphasizing the political urgency and demands of the times, and how we might develop the necessary intellectual tools to resist what is patently intolerable.

Across the world today, it is possible to witness the liberation of prejudice, galvanized by the emergence of a politics of hate and division, that plays directly into the everyday fears of those seduced by new forms of fascism. Such a condition demands purposeful and considered historical reflection. But here we immediately encounter a problem: if fighting violence and oppression demands new forms of ethical thinking that can be developed only with the luxury of time, what does this mean for the present moment when history is being steered in a more dangerous direction and seems to constantly accelerate?

Just as humans are not naturally violent, peace is not impossible. But in order for us to ethically develop styles of living that are suited to the twenty-first century, echoing the challenge set by Walter Benjamin, it is imperative that we develop a critique of violence that does ethical justice to the subject. To bring out the best in us, we have to confront the worst of what humans are capable of doing to one another. In short, there is a need to confront the intolerable realities of violence perpetrated in this world.

So we need to begin by recognizing that violence is not some abstract concept or theoretical problem. It represents a violation in the very conditions that constitute what it means to be human as such. Violence is always an attack upon a person’s dignity, sense of selfhood, and future. It is nothing less than the desecration of one’s position in the world. And it is a denial and outright assault on the very qualities that we claim make us considered members of this social fellowship and shared union called “civilization.” In this regard, we might say violence is both an ontological crime, insomuch as it seeks to destroy the image we give to ourselves as valued individuals, and a form of political ruination that stabs at the heart of a human togetherness that emerges from the ethical desire for worldly belonging.

Victimization is but one part of the human condition. We also have the capacity to think and imagine better worlds. To accept violence is to normalize forms of coercion and domination that violate the bodies of the living. Through the subtle intimacy of its performance, it brings everything into its orbit such that the future can only appear to us as something that is violently fated. Every trauma left upon the body or psyche of the individual is another cut into the flesh of the earth.

In order for violence to be accepted there is a need for normalization. Such normalization depends upon immunization, like a surgical strike penetrating the body with such ruthless efficiency we no longer see it as being violence. While we might see cruelty as painful, we can reason beyond this, hence beyond the violence itself, for some greater political good. The violence in this regard is overlaid with a certain metaphysical cloak whose mask of mastery covers the desecrated body with a virtuous blood-soaked robe. That is to say, violence is also an intellectual and pedagogical force, underwritten by formidable schools of thought whose very purpose is to hide things in plain sight.

We also know that violence is always mediated by expressed dichotomies of permissible and impermissible actions. Some forms of violence can be fully reasoned and excused, while others clearly go beyond the tolerance threshold. Let’s connect this directly to the intimate realities of violence today. What we have witnessed since 9/11 has been a notable public shift in the modalities of violence from spectacular attacks (in which humans were often removed from representations of the crimes) toward violence that is more intimate and individualizing. Such violence seems to actually be more intolerable for us as the intimacy addresses a different register. While both are abhorrent, images of exploding towers are arguably easier to deal with than the more focused types of suffering we now witness, from unarmed black men being killed by white police, to civilians—including children and the elderly—being slaughtered during “imprecise” U.S. military operations in places like Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan, to courtroom testimonies of more than 160 women who were assaulted by a doctor. There is something about the raw realities of intimate suffering which affects us on an all too human level.

Such intimacy has also fed into and in many ways been driven by the pornographic violence of popular culture. Movie franchises, children’s cartoons, and video games in particular seemingly excel in commercializing—and thus normalizing—the intimate possibilities of violence. Violence should be intolerable. Instead, it is mass-marketed, promoted, and sold as entertainment.

Yet it would be far too reductive to say that people have become inured to violence. The fact that people may turn away from violence or try to switch it off is arguably an all too natural reaction to its forced witnessing. The challenge is how to find meaningful solutions to the raw realities of violence that don’t simply end up creating more anger, hatred, and division. People are certainly frustrated that the seemingly daily exposure to violence doesn’t become a catalyst to steer history in a more peaceful direction.

It was with this shared appreciation for the importance of rethinking violence that, in September 2015, we began the project leading to this book. Following an initial meeting in New York City, Natasha proposed an interview with Brad for the New York Times philosophy forum “The Stone.” The resulting conversation, “Thinking Against Violence, ran in the Times in mid-December 2015 and appears as chapter 1 in this collection.

The interview’s success in the Times made the public appetite for a broader discussion about violence urgently clear. We were also acutely aware that there was no point in discussing violence unless something could be done about it. If violence undoes any idea of humanity we might want to sustain and develop, we need to learn how to undo violence—even if that means interrogating what we mean by “humanity.” But such undoing is not going to come about from the voice of a single individual. Violence demands a conversation with somber and honest reflection.

And it was with this conversational ethos in mind that we envisaged a series of conversations as a truly trans-disciplinary mediation with artists, writers, and cultural producers that would bring critical thought to bear on violence. Violence cannot be countered by retreating back into academic enclaves that privilege certain vantage points. Nor can the idea of the so-called “aesthetic turn” in politics be undertaken if the work of artists is merely appropriated to make a theoretical point. A conversation on violence demands creating an ethical platform based upon reciprocity, where the voice of the contributor is recognized as being a genuine and viable form of political intervention. Just as we don’t think that politics can be reduced to electoral procedures, so the call for more compassion, dignity, and love in the sphere of the political demands seeing art itself as integral to the political field. Hence, while the New York Times series (which successfully ran throughout 2016) largely featured renowned critical scholars, the ongoing Los Angeles Review of Books series continues to develop the conversation in more artistic but no less important directions.

“Humanity is in crisis,” Zygmunt Bauman told us in one of his last interviews before passing away, “and there is no exit from that crisis other than the solidarity of humans.” We hope this collection offers the critique—and the solidarity—adequate to our dark times.

—Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard