Violence

Being black and non‐citizen in South Africa: Intersecting race, white privilege and afrophobic violence in contemporary South Africa

“…This form of madness is a consequence of systemic “racial and gender imbalances in the distribution of wealth, income and opportunity…” stripping poor South Africans of any possibility of living materially meaningful lives (Hardy, 2018; Matthews, 2012; Mbembe, 2007, p. 6). Reading South Africa through the politics of viscerality, he contends that social and political mobilization have become “a politics that deploys the motif of the body such as pain and suffering, anger, grief and fear to perform a certain type of radicalism” (Arendt, 1969; Hardy, 2018, p. 53/54). While South Africans now enjoy some amount of political freedom since the demise of apartheid, new and subtle forms of racial and class hierarchies have uninterruptedly hamstrung attempts to redress the ills of the past and transform the country.…”

Setting struggle in motion: From ‘non-violence’ to revolutionary anti-violence

“…As far as Arendt is concerned, Fanon is one of the 'preachers of violence' who promotes and glorifies precisely the kind of violent activity that she considers to be a political dead end. 18 Instead, she implores her readers to draw on the republican tradition as the proper bearer of the legacy of revolutionary thought and practice. 19 But it is the nature of Arendt's criticism of Fanon that makes it particularly illuminating for our purposes in rethinking the question of violence, non-violence, and anti-violence within conditions of racial-colonial capitalism.…”

“…In fact, such struggles do seem to register when, in the closing paragraph of 'On Violence', Arendt argues that 'disempowerment' is an 'open invitation' to the eruption of violent revolt: Again, we do not know where these developments will lead us, but we know, or should know, that every decrease in power is an open invitation to violenceif only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands, be they the government or be they the governed, have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to substitute violence for it. 24 Although we profoundly disagree with this shallow description of the horror of being denied every meaningful kind of action under colonialism as an existential as well as political robbery of one's human being, 25 as well as the flat equivalence she draws between the 'government' and the 'governed' (an equation that, once again, precisely elides the massive population of the dispossessed that Fanon names the damned), it is nevertheless a mistake to read Arendt as idealizing non-violence or condemning violence as 'evil'. 26 We will return shortly to how an analysis of colonialism can never rest on Arendt's notion of government as 'institutionalized power', and thus any complex analysis of decolonial anti-violence can never be captured by her critique of violence as power's 'opposite', but the nuance that we hope to bring in our own critique of the violence/non-violence dichotomy is poorly served by turning Arendt into a simplistic theorist of 'non-violence'.…”

“…24 Although we profoundly disagree with this shallow description of the horror of being denied every meaningful kind of action under colonialism as an existential as well as political robbery of one's human being, 25 as well as the flat equivalence she draws between the 'government' and the 'governed' (an equation that, once again, precisely elides the massive population of the dispossessed that Fanon names the damned), it is nevertheless a mistake to read Arendt as idealizing non-violence or condemning violence as 'evil'. 26 We will return shortly to how an analysis of colonialism can never rest on Arendt's notion of government as 'institutionalized power', and thus any complex analysis of decolonial anti-violence can never be captured by her critique of violence as power's 'opposite', but the nuance that we hope to bring in our own critique of the violence/non-violence dichotomy is poorly served by turning Arendt into a simplistic theorist of 'non-violence'. Her analysis is rich enough to distinguish between different forms of violence depending on the type and degree of power behind it.…”

“…Her analysis is rich enough to distinguish between different forms of violence depending on the type and degree of power behind it. 27 Indeed, she also recognizes that 'under certain circumstances violenceacting without argument or speech and without counting the consequencesis the only way to set the scales of justice right again' (although we would certainly take issue with her clarification that 'Billy Budd, striking dead the man who bore false witness against him, is the classical example'). 28 And she even argues that to deny these actions for justice would be dehumanizing.…”