Notable Absence

In certain circumstances violence – acting without discussion or talking and without thinking about the consequences – is the only way to put the scales of justice right

Hannah Arendt

There was a time when narratives and actions moved through rapid acts of violence. Fairy tales, fables, myths, revolutions, practices and traditions: people were willing to accept violence, as a form of earthly justice, sometimes as a legacy of archaic thought, others as a reaction to a different imminent future perhaps still possible.

How the very definition of violence has changed, what needs to be recovered to identify it, to name and distinguish it, what its nature is and what superstructures have blurred it, often giving it a confused social role, can serve to recognize or disavow it.

Trying to question today the collective and political significance of violence as an act and as a feeling, as an aesthetic form and as a substance, in light of the relationship they may have with power and with the acts that take shape to mark history, leads us to ask how the very concept of violence has changed.

To recall Hannah Arendt's theories to dig a furrow or trace conjunctures, to place these reflections on the present is an attempt to re-signify some actions or practices that appear or disappear, recur or distance themselves from who we are.

The repression of violence from the community passes to the individual. Anger is stifled, a feeling that is often considered socially unacceptable, with the possible consequence of accepting a sealed, immutable destiny that no one opposes anymore.

“Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions may change and do not change does anger arise” (H. Arendt): there are fewer and fewer examples of practices in which fury does not come alive, is suffocated and silenced. Without naming her, we are no longer even able to transform her, to use her as a creative drive for a desperate cry.

We have wondered whether we are nostalgic for violence or whether this absence of it is nothing more than a failure to recognize it, accustomed to an inhuman obedience that makes us be indulgent with a hard and stubborn time that no longer cares for us.