One of today's most widely read philosophers considers the shift in
violence from visible to invisible, from negativity to excess of
positivity. Some things never disappear-violence, for example.
Violence is ubiquitous and incessant but protean, varying its
outward form according to the social constellation at hand. In
Topology of Violence, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han considers the
shift in violence from the visible to the invisible, from the
frontal to the viral to the self-inflicted, from brute force to
mediated force, from the real to the virtual. Violence, Han tells
us, has gone from the negative-explosive, massive, and martial-to
the positive, wielded without enmity or domination. This, he says,
creates the false impression that violence has disappeared.
Anonymized, desubjectified, systemic, violence conceals itself
because it has become one with society. Han first investigates the
macro-physical manifestations of violence, which take the form of
negativity-developing from the tension between self and other,
interior and exterior, friend and enemy. These manifestations
include the archaic violence of sacrifice and blood, the mythical
violence of jealous and vengeful gods, the deadly violence of the
sovereign, the merciless violence of torture, the bloodless
violence of the gas chamber, the viral violence of terrorism, and
the verbal violence of hurtful language. He then examines the
violence of positivity-the expression of an excess of
positivity-which manifests itself as over-achievement,
over-production, over-communication, hyper-attention, and
hyperactivity. The violence of positivity, Han warns, could be even
more disastrous than that of negativity. Infection, invasion, and
infiltration have given way to infarction.
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