€¦ · Web [email protected]. OUTLINE. Understanding political violence involves many...

ECPR JOINT SESSIONS 2016Pisa, April 24 – 28, 2016

IMAGINING VIOLENCEThe Politics of Narrative and

Representation

PROGRAMMEDIRECTORSDr Mathias Thaler Dr Mihaela MihaiChancellor’s Fellow Senior Research FellowUniversity of Edinburgh University of [email protected] [email protected]

OUTLINEUnderstanding political violence involves many different theoretical and practical operations: from examining the social macro-structures that both enable and constrain actors engaging in violence, to investigating the motives and drives of individual perpetrators. A myriad of disciplinary approaches, both in the social sciences and the humanities, contribute to the study of political violence. One aspect, however, has received relatively little attention, even though it is central to a holistic approach to political violence: the faculty of imagination. This workshop brings together political theorists, IR scholars, historians, as well as comparativists to interrogate the role that imagination can play in understanding past, as well as on-going, instances of political violence.

LOCATIONTBCFORMATThe workshop will last the whole period of the Joint Sessions. You are expected to be present and engage in constructive discussions during all four days, not just on the day you present your own paper. Each sessions lasts 90 minutes, so please prepare an introductory talk of no more than 30 minutes. Since this is a pre-read event, we ask all participants to share their papers in advance of the workshop to enable productive conversations. The deadline for sending us your paper is April 15, 2016.

Workshop Programme ECPR Joint Sessions 20161

mailto:[email protected]


ScheduleMonday April 25

Theorizing the Imagination

Time Presenter Paper TitleChair /

Respondent

8:45–9:00 Mihaela Mihai & Mathias Thaler Welcome and Introduction

9:00–10:30

Maria-Alina Asavei

The Art and Politics of Imagination: Remembering Mass Violence against Women

Mihaela

10:30–11:00 Coffee Break

11:00–12:30 Mihaela Mihai Epistemic Injustice and

the Artistic Imagination Maria-Alina

12:30–13:30 Lunch Break

13:30–15:00

Alexandre Christoyannopou

los

Sparking the Pacifist Imagination by Depicting the Familiar as New: The Subversive Potential of Leo Tolstoy’s “Defamiliarisation”

Maša


15:30–17:00 Maša Mrovlje

Existential Aesthetic Judging Sensibility, Worldly Recognition and the Political Significance of Narrative Imagination

Alexandre


Tuesday April 26Violent Frames


Respondent

9:00–10:30 Bronwyn Leebaw

The Laughter of the Unreconciled: Jokes and Humor in Narratives of Atrocity

Alex


11:00–12:30 Alex Livingston The Cost of Liberty: Du

Bois’s John Brown Bronwyn


13:30–15:00 Yves Winter Machiavelli and the

Imagination of Cruelty Anders


15:30–17:00

Anders Berg-Sørensen

“Submission”: Ambiguity, Hypocrisy and Misanthropy in Michel Houllebecq’s Imaginary Politics

Yves


Wednesday April 27Histories of Violence

Time Presenter Paper TitleChair/

Respondent

9:00–10:30

Verena Erlenbusch

Re-Imagining Terrorism: The Case of Late-Imperial Russia

Mathias


11:00–12:30 Mathias Thaler

The Stains of Innocence: Genealogy, Non-Combatants and Terrorism

Verena


13:30–15:00 Tim Markham

Banal Phenomenologies of Violence: Media Work Cultures and Audience Engagement with Distant Suffering

Mihaela


15:30–18:30

Ali JonesEmbodied Narration in Post-War West German Autonomie

Hugh

Hugh McDonnell

“Tetanus of the Imagination”?: The Presence of Vichy France in the Algerian War of Decolonization, 1954-1962

Ali

The workshop dinner takes place on Wednesday at 7:30pm at the Osteria dei Cavalieri, located at Via S. Frediano, 16.


Thursday April 28Artistic Interventions


Respondent

9:00–10:30 Cynthia Milton

Art As Evidence: Artistic Representation, Memory and Curation in Post-Conflict Societies

Eliza


11:00–12:30 Eliza Garnsey

Representing Transitional Justice as Cultural Diplomacy: South Africa’s ‘Imaginary Fact’ at the Venice Biennale

Cynthia


13:30–15:00 Anja Mihr

How Films, Social Media and Novels Channel the Transitional Justice Process

Anna


15:30–17:00 Anna Schober

Imagining “Everybody”: Political Popularisation as Triggers of Enthusiasm and Hate

Anja


Participants

Name Affiliation & Contact Paper Title

Maria-Alina Asavei

Charles University Prague

[email protected]

The Art and Politics of Imagination: Remembering Mass Violence against Women

AndersBerg-

Sørensen

University of Copenhagen

[email protected]

“Submission”: Ambiguity, Hypocrisy and Misanthropy in Michel Houellebecq’s Imaginary Politics

AlexandreChristo-

yannopoulos

Loughborough University

[email protected]

Sparking the Pacifist Imagination by Depicting the Familiar as New: The Subversive Potential of Leo Tolstoy’s “Defamiliarisation”

Verena Erlenbusch

University of [email protected]

Re-Imagining Terrorism: The Case of Late-Imperial Russia

Eliza Garnsey University of [email protected]

Representing transitional justice as cultural diplomacy: South Africa’s ‘Imaginary Fact’ at the Venice Biennale

Ali Jones University of [email protected]

Embodied Narration in Post-War West German Autonomie

Bronwyn Leebaw

University of California, Riverside

[email protected]

The Laughter of the Unreconciled: Jokes and Humor in Narratives of Atrocity

Alexander Livingston

Cornell [email protected]

The Cost of Liberty: Du Bois’s John Brown

Tim MarkhamBirkbeck, University of

[email protected]

Banal Phenomenologies of Violence: Media Work Cultures and Audience Engagement with Distant Suffering

Hugh McDonnell

University of Amsterdam

[email protected]

“Tetanus of the Imagination”?: The Presence of Vichy France in the Algerian War of Decolonization, 1954-1962















Mihaela MihaiUniversity of [email protected]

k

Epistemic Injustice and the Artistic Imagination

Anja Mihr University of [email protected]

How films, social media and novels channel the Transitional Justice Process

Cynthia Milton

Université de Montréalcynthia.milton@umontr

eal.ca

Art as Evidence: artistic representation, memory, and curation in post-conflict societies

Maša Mrovlje

University of St Andrews

[email protected]

Existential Aesthetic Judging Sensibility, Worldly Recognition and the Political Significance of Narrative Imagination: Confronting the Tragic Nature of Political Affairs

Anna SchoberGiessen Universität

[email protected]

Imagining “Everybody”: Political Popularisation as triggers of Enthusiasm and Hate

Mathias Thaler

University of [email protected]

k

The Stains of Innocence: Genealogy, Non-Combatants and Terrorism

Yves Winter McGill [email protected]

Machiavelli and the Imagination of Cruelty














AbstractsMARIA-ALINA ASAVEI: The Art and Politics of Imagination: Remembering Mass Violence against Women

This paper addresses the topical role of artistic memory in the work of redress from political repression and historical injustices by focusing on the ways in which memory and imagination slip into one another resisting the violence against women. The argument I intend to put forth is that artistic memory work can foster collective memory and collective representations of the traumatic past which overcome the traditional individual representations. To this end, this paper aims to explore various instances of contemporary art productions which deal with the memorialization of violence against women in armed conflicts and political repression. The traditional preference in legal tradition for individual memory in reestablishing justice (the traditional rules of evidence in transitional justice focus on individual memory) offers less space for collective representations and collective memory. However, as legal scholars (Osiel 1999, Lopez 2015) posit, the judicial system should also consider collective memory in the context of transitional justice. By examining artistic memory work which deals with violence against women, this paper will illuminate the great potential of artistic practice to convey an active remembrance of the painful past which facilitates the encountering between individual and collective memory, as well as witness and post-witness representations. At the same time, this paper attempts to highlight the connection between memory and imagination in artistic work which ensures a commitment to remember the past in the light of the “never again”. In this light, imagination is not memory’s opposite but a tool that opposes further injustices and collective oblivion. Through imaginative practices the distant witnesses acquire a certain type of experiential knowledge. Therefore, the artistic memory work discussed in this paper does not just transmit information (“this happened there”) but allows the viewer to experience imaginatively “what it is like to be this or that in that situation”.

ANDERS BERG-SØRENSEN: “Submission”: Ambiguity, Hypocrisy and Misanthropy in Michel Houllebecq’s Imaginary Politics

The day of the deadly attack on the Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, January 7, 2015, the French author, Michel Houellebecq published his already contested novel, Soumission


(Submission). That day Charlie Hebdo had a satirical feature on the cover ridiculing Houellebecq’s novel that was accused of Islamophobia. In the novel Houellebecq writes about how France in 2022 get a Muslim president, Mohammed Ben Abbas, who wins the election against Marine le Pen from the National Front, and how the new president islamizises French state and society. Except for Islamism and nationalism other political ideologies have failed articulating political visions that are able to generate support and stability in the citizenry. The aim of the paper is to read Michel Houellebecq’s Submission as a diagnosis of a current ideological crisis in European democratic culture and the passionate reactions to Houellebecq’s book as contesting political thought-practices mapping the ideological landscape in Europe today from below. The paper will pay special attention to the ambiguity in Houellebecq’s criticism of Islamism and nationalism, his picture of the hypocrisy of liberal democrats and his misanthropy as regards the role of democratic citizens in future politics. Furthermore, the paper will question whether the satirical point of view that Houellebecq adopts constitutes an adequate point of departure for invigorating democratic imaginations. The argument is that the kind of negative ideological diagnosis that Houellebecq depicts could include potentials of how one could imagine political life otherwise. The question is just whether this is the case in Houellebecq’s Submission. How does a literary representation of democratic imaginations produce meaning, reflection and points of orientation, and how does it work in Houellebecq’s imaginary politics?

ALEXANDRE CHRISTOYANNOPOULOS: Sparking the Pacifist Imagination by Depicting the Familiar as New: The Subversive Potential of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Defamiliarisation’

In the last thirty years of his life, Leo Tolstoy wrote countless books, essays and pamphlets expounding his newly-articulated views on violence, the state, the church, and on how to improve the human condition. Since then, these ‘Christian anarchist’ views have often been forgotten, ignored, or dismissed as utopian or naive. Nonetheless, his writings on themes such as the cycle of violence, the continuity between means and ends, and state violence have inspired many, including Gandhi and later pacifists, numerous Tolstoyan communities, and Christian anarchists. One of the reasons Tolstoy inspired so many was his application his literary skills – in particular the technique of ‘defamiliarisation’, or looking at the familiar as if new – to shake his readers into noticing the absurdity and incoherence of hegemonic justifications for violence, admitting


their implicit complicity in such violence, and recognising the process which had numbed them into accepting that complicity. The aim of this paper is to consider the appeal of Tolstoy’s anarcho-pacifist writings and in particular his use of ‘defamiliarisation’, by illustrating his deployment of that device, by discussing its political potential as an activist tool, and by reflecting on the wider influence of Tolstoy’s political thought.

VERENA ERLENBUSCH: Re-Imagining Terrorism: The Case of Late-Imperial Russia

This paper aims to draw attention to the role of the scholar’s imagination in problematizing terrorism through narrative and representation by way of re-imagining traditional accounts of terrorism in late-imperial Russia. I focus on the political historiography of Lev Tikhomirov, one of the leading figures of the revolutionary organization Narodnaia Volia, and argue that the revolutionaries conceive of Russian history as a history of struggle between a Russian people of peasants and a foreign race constituting the nobility. In this war between the ruling and ruled races, or classes, terrorism emerges as a tactic of revolutionary struggle. Based on a re-reading of the debate between Leon Trotsky and Karl Kautsky on the role of terrorism for communism, I further examine the transformation of this discourse of class struggle into a discourse of State racism against the class enemy, which occurs at the moment when the revolutionaries seize state power in the Bolshevik revolution.

ELIZA GARNSEY: Representing transitional justice as cultural diplomacy: South Africa’s ‘Imaginary Fact’ at the Venice Biennale

While transitional justice policies and practices have become fundamental to the ways in which countries emerging from conflict engage with international institutions and international norm compliance, artistic production and participation has become a radical form of political representation in times of political transition. The Venice Biennale influences the development, market, and reputation of the contemporary art world, but it is also a highly networked exercise in cultural diplomacy and state-building. How a state displays itself at the Biennale can effect how that state is perceived on the world stage. The purpose of this paper is to explore South Africa’s participation at the 2013 Biennale in which the country exhibited Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive. In the case of South Africa—as I argue


throughout the paper—the Biennale provides a platform from which the country seeks to continue to heal its internal wounds while constructing itself as an archetype of political transition in order to share its experience with the international community, but also arguably to re-establish international recognition and capital. Key patterns of representation reveal how the narratives of transitional justice emanating from the South African Pavilion establish this dual foreign policy image. These patterns relate to how certain artworks imagine the country’s violent past and use archives to explore how this past affects the present. The paper arises out of an eight-month period of participant observation fieldwork at the Biennale, which included over seventy semi-structured interviews with artists, exhibition organisers, government representatives, and visitors to the Biennale. The research is firmly interdisciplinary, situated between art theory and international relations.

ALI JONES: Embodied Narration in Post-War West German Autonomie

The German Autonomists (Autonomen) formed in the shadow of the student protests of 1968, the long “red decade” from 1969-1977, and the terrorism of the Red Army Fraction (RAF) and affiliated cells in the 1970s. Rejecting the Marxism of 1960s Italian Operaismo and Autonomia, and coalescing in the Berlin house squatting movement from 1981 to 1984, German Autonomie became a multifaceted movement concerned with embodied praxis, squatting, self-determined politics of the first person, personal militancy, and the use of symbolic violent protest. Hamburg’s autonomous movement flourished after the Berlin squatting scene waned in the mid 1980s. After the iconic Rote Flora cultural centre was squatted in 1989, it became the centre of radical German left-wing protest identity, and has come to represent an utter refusal of all state interaction, even extending to communication, contracts, discourse, and language. Within this negation, the Autonomists sought to develop physically embodied ways to symbolically express their resistance of state ideology. This paper juxtaposes Autonomie in the 1980s and 90s to the more explicitly violent RAF terrorist attacks in the 1970s. Relying on Foucault (1981-84), it offers a contrast to this standard history of post-war violence by arguing that the Autonomists instead imagine themselves to be engaged in political negation via self-formation as symbolically resistant political subjectivities. It considers whether this imagined refusal of state power is merely solipsistic, or if their embodied negation of political power and language can actually be read as a new aesthetic form of fruitful


political protest and communication after the refusal of language. Overall, the paper focuses upon Autonomist violence, which Dieter Rucht (2003) explains has largely transformed into ritualized theatre and performance. It thus investigates not how scholars of narration can represent violence, but rather how representative violence itself has become a form of embodied symbolic narration.

BRONWYN LEEBAW: The Laughter of the Unreconciled: Jokes and Humor in Narratives of Atrocity

What is the role of laughter, jokes, and humor in narratives of atrocity? Scholars have studied testimony and storytelling as avenues for mediating emotional responses to atrocity, such as grief and rage. Less attention has been giving to laughter in atrocity narratives—to the nervous or defiant laughter of perpetrators, to witness accounts of having been laughed at by their abusers, or to humor as a strategy of resistance. This paper investigates how laughter informs the role of storytelling in relation to what Arendt refers to as reconciliation “with reality.” It argues that attention to laughter in narratives of atrocity offers a basis for exposing and confronting denial and a neglected avenue for recovering political agency. Building on Arendt’s discussion of storytelling and insights on the logic of humor from social psychology and drama, the first section investigates what laughter conveys about the relationship between political reconciliation and the passage of time. The capacity to laugh--to laugh again, to laugh together, to know when it is appropriate to laugh-- is seen as evidence of reconciliation and a decisive break with the past. Conversely, inappropriate, awkward, or callous laughter in stories of atrocity can signify the rejection of a break with the past. The second section examines laughter and jokes in confessional narratives of atrocity gathered by the veteran organization, Winter Solider, and dramatized in the film, The Act of Killing. The third section analyzes the role of laughter in victim testimony, focusing on the testimony of witnesses at Canada’s TRC who integrated humorous tales of resistance into narratives of suffering and loss. I conclude by reflecting on how the capacity to imagine possibilities for community, agency, and resistance may be informed by attention to the range of possibilities for laughter.

ALEXANDER LIVINGSTON: History, Imagination, and Violence in Du Bois’s John Brown

This paper examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s John Brown as a turning point in his thinking about the use of force in the struggle for African-


American liberation. I call it a “turning point” not only to mark a periodized transition in Du Bois’s developing socialism but also to underscore the ways Du Bois wrestles with the question of violence in this work, turning on it from a plurality of imagined perspectives. Du Bois portrays John Brown alternatively as a prophet, a slave in revolt, a laborer exploited by industrial oligarchs, a member of the talented tenth, and a white outsider to the struggle of African Americans to model the vicissitudes of political judgment concerning the use of force. Confronting John Brown’s ultimate conclusion that “the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression, even though the cost be blood,” I argue that Du Bois’s perspectival approach to judgment marks an important alternative to both a political moralism that abstracts from questions of consequences and a political realism that brackets claims of right. This essay demonstrates how taking Du Bois’s repudiation of both moralism and realism seriously troubles not only his own earlier attempts to domesticate the politics of revolt in Souls of Black Folks, but also more recent attempts to police the boundaries of violence and non-violence in contemporary political theory.

TIM MARKHAM: Banal Phenomenologies of Violence: Media work Cultures an Audience Engagement with Distant Suffering

There is a consensus in the academic literature that Western audiences are disengaged from the human suffering they encounter in their everyday media use. Whether this is a product of the commercialization of news or mediation itself is debated, but it is broadly agreed that ordinary people do not care as much as they should about faraway victims of political violence, war and injustice. Ongoing research investigates what can be done to reconnect audiences, which in theoretical terms hinges on the recognition of the full subjectivity of distant others. In particular, recent theorizations of violence drawing on Charles Taylor and ultimately Adam Smith have emphasized the role that imagination might play in fostering understanding of the subjective experience of violence in a manner unconstrained by conventional, dominant modes of political subjectivity. In contrast, this paper contends that both the pathologization of audience responses to mediated violence and the remedies intended to shake people out of their indifference rest on a misconception of how the recognition of other subjectivities plays out in quotidian life. It does so by way of an investigation of the experience of media practitioners who self-evidently do care about others: journalists and media activists in Beirut, Lebanon, whose work focuses inter alia on the casualties and refugees of the war in


neighboring Syria. Seen at the level of the everyday, this experience can be similarly lacking in revelation, but its meaningfulness is not undermined by its banalities. The paper concludes that the dearth of intense moments of subjective recognition in ordinary contexts of media consumption is both rational and ethically defensible.

HUGH MCDONNELL: “Tetanus of the Imagination”? The Presence of Vichy France in the Algerian War of Decolonization, 1954-1962

In recent years, scholars in the fields of French Studies and Memory Studies, as well as historians, have all paid increasing attention to the connections between the experiences of Vichy France and the Algerian war of decolonisation. This paper aims to contribute to this burgeoning field in making two contentions. First, that in large part this scholarship has been limited to intellectuals and cultural production, and requires broadening out to compare how other actors imagined this past in the present: combatants, politicians, religious and political activists, “ordinary people”, and foreign observers. Second, I argue that more work needs to be done in discerning the modes and forms in which this absent past was made present in what has come to be thought of as the quintessential event of European decolonisation. To this end, the paper examines the value of approaches such as “multidirectional memory” and “knots of memory”, Albert Camus’s call for an imaginative approach to history through what he termed “the eyes of the body”, Walter Benjamin’s concept of a constellation, Primo Levi’s notion of the crystallisation of (traumatic) memory, and Simone de Beauvoir’s charge – addressed to the French public during the Algerian war with reference to the experience of Nazism – of a “tetanus of the imagination.” The paper presents a comparative analysis of the motifs that characterised manifestations of imagination of France’s Vichy past during the Algerian conflict: trauma, of course, but also haunting, debt, disorientation, tragedy, freedom, the cohabitation of presence and absence in imagination, reconfigured perceptions of temporality, fidelity, the relationship between justice and violence, and the meaning of the concept of a generation in post-war France.

MIHAELA MIHAI: Epistemic Injustice and the Artistic Imagination

Epistemic injustice makes the object of a rich literature at the intersection of several fields of philosophical and scientific enquiry. While Melissa Fricker’s 2007 book Epistemic Injustice triggered a flurry of responses, the topic has been of sustained interest in feminist, critical race and post-colonial studies. This literature


focuses on identifying the individual and structural causes of epistemic injustice, on examining the effects on the immediate victims and the community as a whole and on delineating solutions to this complex problem. This paper seeks to contribute one more potential solution and suggests that artworks can, under certain circumstances, play an effective role in revealing and problematizing the causes and impact of epistemic injustice and of the other forms of injustice to which it is inextricably related. Building on insights from the philosophy of art, it argues that artworks’ epistemic functions – cognitive-conceptual, experiential and moral – can help us understand how epistemic injustice functions in conjunction with other forms of injustice and imagine how we can mobilize politically against it. An illustration based on Audre Lorde’s poetic work shows the plausibility and salience of the theoretical proposal.

ANJA MIHR: How films, social media and novels channel the Transitional Justice Process

Films, media, social media and novels have since long influenced any TJ process around the world. The fact that films or TV series such as ‘Cuenta me como pasa?’ in the post-Franco era in Spain, or the TV series Holocaust in post-war Germany have let to direct or indirect impact on TJ measures and the democratic culture in these countries, may not be surprising. But the time and the sequenzing of these novels or films and their consequence impact is. Whereas we find a number of documentaries, features, novels and social media activities to remember and atone with the past injustice shortly after conflicts, war or the dictatorship; then they usually do not lead to widely discussions or public debate. Instead novels, theater plays or films about past wrongdoings and injustice do trigger atonement only after some decades. This is the time when they target the second generations. They have most impact when directing to a new generation that has no direct relationship with the past wrongdoings, but use them to issue political debates about moral and democratic behavior that are important for political and democratic reforms and regime consolidation. This paper will give some examples from Latin America and Europe on how these means impacted the TJ process over a longer period of time.


CYNTHIA MILTON: Art as Evidence: artistic representation, memory, and curation in post-conflict societies

This paper focuses on the work of several artist-witnesses from post-conflict societies in order to develop a theory and methodology about artistic representations in the aftermath of violence in a comparative analysis. The principal theoretical argument underlying this study is that art, as a form of communication that witnesses and recounts, may help us understand historical narratives of experience in “limit events,” a phrase that refers to extreme societal violence. By expanding the historian’s and social scientist’s scope of inquiry to include artistic representations as a form of “truth‐telling” in the aftermath of violence, this paper presents an innovative analytical model for the study of memory, truth, and violence, and tries to address some of the silences left in the wake of more official forms of inquiry, such as truth commissions and trials, and more “traditional” methodologies, such as textual analysis and oral history. Thus, this paper calls for an expansion of the archive to include other repositories of memory and history (LaCapra, 1998; Milton, 2014; Stern, 2004; Taylor, 2003). Furthermore, this paper questions how art may witness and represent human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and genocide, and how this art may contribute to the curation of difficult pasts in exhibitions and regional museums (Lehrer, Milton, and Patterson, 2011), and the implicit goals of such spaces as fostering democratic values, human rights, and national reconciliation. By choosing to focus on artistic/visual memory, with an eye to comparisons from other world regions, I hope to illuminate the ways in which art can recount the past, and indeed how venues of art can have an impact upon memory discourses in the public sphere, that is, the ongoing memory battles that take place within the cultural domain.

MAŠA MROVLJE: Existential aesthetic judging sensibility, worldly recognition and the political significance of narrative imagination: Confronting the tragic nature of political affairs

The paper explores the relevance of literary imagination to understanding and responding to political violence by drawing on the existential aesthetic judging sensibility – in particular the work of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus – and its ability to direct attention to the specifically political, world-disclosing potentials of narrative. First, it examines the epistemological and ontological premises that underlie the recent vigilant, yet contested arguments


for the ethical and political promise of narrative form, particularly its (in)ability to approach the plurality, ambiguity and unpredictability of human affairs. Thereby, it attempts to disclose why the question of intersubjective recognition as the main concern of the narrative approach becomes so pressing and at the same time so fraught with difficulty. Second, the paper brings the existentialists’ aesthetic sensibility into conversation with the contemporary narrative turn. If the recent discourse on narrative manifests a lingering predominance of the epistemological, moral concern with ensuring a proper way of grasping and responding to others’ experience (of suffering and injustice), the existential narrative-inspired judging orientation emerges as distinct for remaining loyal to the perspective of human plurality. In this way, it is argued, it is able to foster worldly forms of recognition and bring into existence, on the debris of history, again a space for politics among plural equals. The existentialists’ plural, representative focus thus reveals the distinct political significance of literary imagination in its ability to confront the seemingly ineliminable spectre of complexity, violence and suffering haunting political affairs not by abandoning politics to the law of tragic necessity, but by constantly illuminating the possibilities and limitations of political action as they inhere within the emerging bounds of our shared world. Third, the paper concretely illustrates the proposed political promise of literary works as spaces for politics by an engagement with Camus’s play The Just.

ANNA SCHOBER: Imagining “Everybody”: Political Popularisation as triggers of Enthusiasm and Hate

Visual culture and art are often thought to enter the arena of politics and violence as a transforming or even as a “healing” tool. Nevertheless, visual figurations are part of political, public life in much more ambiguous ways: they are also active agents in ongoing conflicts. The present paper addresses popularisation practices in current, western democratic societies since the late 1960s, the visual figurations coined in this process and how they address and involve their public. It shows that for today’s political mobilisation “classical” popularisation figures such as “the worker” or “the (new) woman” are mostly a thing of the past. Contemporary audiences view their heroism and universalism sceptically. Nevertheless, contemporary agenda-setting subjects also have to coin versions of such particular-universal figures in order to address as large a public as possible. These figures are now, however, often borrowed from marginal worlds: they appear in the form of imaginative adoptions of the migrant and the clown, the outlaw and the villain or of


particular historical personalities such as Guy Fawkes, who became the common face of the Occupy movement. In this paper I investigate such figures through which contemporary political movements and agenda setting entities compete for the attention of “all of us”, and in particular the emotional mediating role they play in the contemporary transnational public sphere. The focus is on the “ambivalence of imagination” (Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand), i.e. the ways in which these figures stir desire and enthusiastic adoptions, allowing people to build temporarily affective cross-border communities and solidarity, but at the same time how they can become catalysts of resentment, hate and violence too. In analysing this double-edged dynamic the paper refers to the work of such different political and social theorists such as René Girard and Pierre Rosanvallon.

MATHIAS THALER: The Stains of Innocence: Genealogy, Non-Combatants and Terrorism

This paper claims that genealogies can play an important role in engaging the imagination of scholars who research political violence. In general terms, we may characterize genealogies as providing a critical lens through which specific concepts or practises that are frequently perceived as natural and a-historical can be shown to have contingent and contested origins. Genealogies propose counter-histories that complement, challenge and correct standard narratives of the emergence of concepts and practices. The paper uses this counter-historical framework to achieve a clearer sense of what is involved in so-called object-focused definitions of terrorism. This specific class of definitions of terrorism foregrounds the kinds of target typically attacked by terrorist actors. Any attack that intentionally targets non-combatants can accordingly be described as terrorist. This makes both state and non-state actors potential candidates for spreading terrorism. While the paper refrains from directly questioning the merits of this definitional strategy, it employs a genealogical perspective and draws on recent findings in feminist literature to problematize the notion of ‘innocence’. As various authors have demonstrated, the figure of the non-combatant possesses a peculiar history that has rarely been attended to: starting with Hugo Grotius’s description of who should be spared violence in war, the non-combatant’s normative character is based on distinctly gendered presuppositions that are rendered invisible in the extant definitions of terrorism. Consequently, we need to adjust our argumentative approach if we wish to propose that terrorism can be best captured by the


targeting of those who are innocent. The paper concludes by teasing out the wider implications of genealogy for reflections on political violence. It maintains that counter-histories de-familiarize widely held assumptions about foundational values and thereby facilitate a more realistic commitment to norms such as the protection of non-combatants.

YVES WINTER: Machiavelli and the Imagination of Cruelty

In contrast to political liberals who disavow the role of cruelty in politics, Machiavelli insists on the centrality of cruelty to state-formation in early modern Europe. Drawing on The Prince I argue that, for Machiavelli, cruelty is a non-coercive modality of violence. In contrast to coercive forms of violence that obtain political effects by compelling recalcitrant subjects, cruelty establishes political effects through the use of spectacular and gratuitous violence that is publicly performed and addresses third-party audiences. We tend to think that states seek to hide the cruelty of their repressive apparatuses, but Machiavelli suggests that such disavowals are only one among multiple political strategies. If The Prince theorizes cruelty from the point of view of princes, the Discourses and especially the Florentine Histories offer a perspective on cruelty from the point of view of the people. In these texts, it becomes clear that for Machiavelli, cruelty is a form of violence typically directed against social superiors. Cruelty is a mode of violence that target the particular class-dependent values of the grandi, namely their conceptions of honor, privilege, social prestige, and reputation. Machiavelli, I argue, derives his theory of cruelty from Seneca and the Roman Stoics. For these authors, cruelty is characterized by irrationality and degradation, a modality of violence that attacks the dignity of its target. I contend that Machiavelli adopts a modified neo-Roman conception of cruelty, even though he narrows what counts as irrationality and excess. In order for cruelty to perform this political function, it must be mediated by sensation and imagination. While Machiavelli does not have a coherent political psychology, he is influenced by three main theoretical traditions (Roman rhetorical theory, Lucretian natural philosophy, as well as Renaissance debates about mental images), which collectively shape his conception of images and appearances.


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