Introduction: Reading Violence

VIOLENCE RIPS THROUGH OUR EXISTENCES, singular and plural, social, individual, and collective. It marks every turn of our lives and every historical occasion. Peace, yearned for in everyday existence, is endlessly disrupted by violent words or deeds. When Baudelaire writes, “Sois sage, ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille,” in “Recueillement,” he knows there is no calm, no silence, no more than a choice between vulgar violence and our own immediate, perhaps more exquisite one. Violence is there, even before language, before it invades language with its presence. It is an ineffable of our existence, and yet something we choose endlessly to try to represent in language. It is as if by containing violence through language, through word and image, through text, through ideological constructs, we could somehow mark it and circumscribe it. To understand war, terror, crime, horror is somehow to say reason may be superior, language may have the upper hand, words and ideas may mark out a territory. Not a territory safe from violence, but one in which violence may be contained.