Horner's Corner

Educative Violence

Towards the end of On Violence, Arendt makes the following side-remark without developing it any further:

“For better or worse — and I think there is every reason to be fearful as well as hopeful — the really new and potential revolutionary class in society will consist of intellectuals, and their potential power, as yet unrealized, is very great, perhaps too great for the good of mankind. But these are speculations.”

You could hear an echo of this idea, which we may call “intellectual violence,” in Agamben’s early (and still untranslated) essay, “On the Limits of Violence.” Following in Arendt’s footsteps, he begins by admitting that on the face of it any link between violence and politics seems contradictory, because politics is the sphere of language, of persuasion, from which brute violence is strictly excluded. Nevertheless, Agamben argues that today we are witnessing with our own eyes the emergence of a new phenomenon that he calls “linguistic violence.” Probably the most obvious example for the way by which the modern age transforms the apparatus of language into a special form of violence is propaganda (in late capitalism, we seem to prefer the terms “public relations” or “advertisement”). Violence can become an integral part of language at the moment in which language crosses the thin line between rational persuasion and psychological manipulation. On the other hand, one could add that today it becomes clear how certain acts that we would traditionally call “violent” — from independent terrorist attacks to established wars — are nothing but twisted means of persuasion or manipulation of public opinion. Linguistic means and violent means — which were completely separated in Arendt’s mind — therefore enter a dangerous zone of indetermination, where the expression “linguistic violence” no longer appears to be contradictory at all. Agamben further claims that even the modern world of letters could be suffused with the sort of powerful linguistic violence that already led Plato to call for the banning of poetry from the Greek city. Agamben therefore treats Sade as an example of an author who exercised, by means of his writings, a form of intellectual violence that

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notes for the coming community: Educative Violence.

Agamben and Banksy

“There is no Virgil to guide us in this Inferno,” reads a graffito in Agamben’s neighborhood, which he takes his visitors to see with what seems like a mixture of pride and self-effacement. He claims that when the paint began to fade, he asked one of his friends to reinforce the lines in red spray. After the job was done, the friend added a stencil of a black rat sitting on a step at the bottom right of the sentence (click to enlarge).

I took a picture of this wall almost a year ago, but only this morning I came to notice the similarity of this little rat and the insignia of Banksy, the greatest street artist in the world today, who is currently completing (like always, incognito) a series of works in various locations around my neighborhood. “Like most people,” Banksy writes, “I have a fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up together. That all the vermin will get some good equipment and then the underground will go overground and tear this city apart.” Note, also, that “rat” is an anagram of “art.” I have little interest in the question whether Agamben and Banksy know each other personally or not. What interests me here is the basic philosophy that they both share.

More here:

notes for the coming community: Agamben and Banksy.

Agamben