Dirk Michael Hennrich

Praxis-CFUL, University of Lisbon

The Hyperbolic Realm of Violence. Remarks on Benjamin, Fanon, and Arendt Today

14 March 2023, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

Violence, in its many expressions and manifestations, continually cuts through our existence. As social and political beings, the central powers that influence our everyday life are, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, the violence that establishes the law and the violence that preserves the law, which can only be replaced by pure and divine anarchic violence. Frantz Fanon, in the wake of colonial violence and strongly influenced by Georges Sorel, sees the need for radical violence in the decolonial process. The relationship of colonial violence with decolonial violence must be reciprocal until victory, yet the war continues after the liberation of other future-generating forms in the people and for the people and, so to speak, as the ongoing struggle for utopia. Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, explores her concept of violence not in opposition to law but in relation to power, as a response to the student movements of the 1960s. Incredible parallels can be drawn to the present, such as the response to structural and systemic violence in universities and the response to the predatory violence of states and industrial conglomerates against the Earth’s biosphere. The present attempt consists of a further approach in which the various forms of violence are divided into: i) one that unifies, ii) one that separates, and iii) one that exaggerates, that transgresses the measure, which, as Benjamin showed, intervenes and disintegrates social and moral relations. Using ancient Greek terms, a distinction is made between symbolic violence, diabolical violence and hyperbolic violence, with the aim of bestowing hyperbolic violence the seal of the present. The questions to be resolved are numerous, but first it will be important to distinguish and describe the three aforementioned forms of violence to understand how the dominant one of our present can be recognised and countered in the process of a certain decolonisation of thought.