State Violence and Moral Horror

Jeremy Arnold

Description

Can state violence ever be morally justified? In State Violence and Moral Horror, Jeremy Arnold critically engages a wide variety of arguments, both canonical and contemporary, arguing that there can be no justification. Drawing on the concept of singularity found in the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Arnold demonstrates that any attempt to justify state violence will itself be violent and, therefore, must fail as a justification. On the basis of this argument, the book explores the concept of "moral horror" as the experience of living amidst and acquiescing to unjustifiable state violence. The careful explanation of arguments from across the spectrum of political theory and exceptionally clear prose will enable both advanced undergraduates and more general readers interested in political thought to understand and engage the central argument. State Violence and Moral Horror is a unique contribution to the growing literature on violence and will be of interest to political theorists and philosophers in both the analytic and continental traditions, philosophers of law, international relations theorists, law and society scholars, and social scientists interested in normative aspects of state violence.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Legitimacy and Violence in Contemporary Life and Political Thought

1. The Strengths and Limits of Philosophical Anarchism

2. The Strengths and Limits of the Paradox of Politics

3. The “Concept” of Singularity

4. Singularity and the Impossibility of Justifying State Violence

5. Moral Horror

(In)conclusion

Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 06 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438466774
• Langue: English

Extrait

State Violence and Moral Horror
STATE VIOLENCE AND MORAL HORROR
JEREMY ARNOLD
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arnold, Jeremy, 1980-
Title: State violence and moral horror / Jeremy Arnold.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016051108 (print) | LCCN 2017021167 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438466774 (e-book) | ISBN 9781438466750 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Political violence—Moral and ethical aspects. | State, The—Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC JC328.6 (ebook) | LCC JC328.6 .A76 2017 (print) | DDC 323/.044—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051108
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Legitimacy and Violence in Contemporary Life and Political Thought
1 The Strengths and Limits of Philosophical Anarchism
2 The Strengths and Limits of the Paradox of Politics
3 The “Concept” of Singularity
4 Singularity and the Impossibility of Justifying State Violence
5 Moral Horror
(In)conclusion
Notes
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK really began some twenty-one years ago in the interdisciplinary humanities program at Cleveland High School in Reseda, California. I want to thank all my teachers there, specifically Richard Coleman, Marty Kravchak, Ray Linn, the late Mike Miller, and Howard Wilf.
My time as an undergraduate at Berkeley was life altering, both in class and with my extended family in and around the HoG: Katy Ansite, Eli Batchelder, Matias Cudich, Katie Feo, Mike Kokorowski, Jeff Neilson, Erin Peacock, John Rauschenberg, Anita Sarrett, Sookoun Song, Jon Stan, and Arjun Varma. A special, genuine debt is owed to Mark Pedretti and Fred Dolan. Mark chastised me for producing work beneath my abilities. After doing better, he told me that if I kept at it, I would be very good someday. I don’t know if that is true, but I will never forget the lesson and the encouragement. Fred, in the usually small classes in the Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley, blew me away. He appeared to have read everything and to have something of interest to say about what he had read, and this became a model of what a scholar should be.
I earned my PhD from the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins. I cannot imagine a more intellectually diverse, vibrant, supportive, and friendly community of faculty and graduate students across a number of departments. In seminars, epic symposia at Charles Village Pub, and weekly barbecues on Cresmont Avenue, I met some of my best friends and began to think seriously. There are too many names to list, but for their friendship and intelligence I would like to thank in particular Alex Barder, Shlomit Barnea, Adam Culver, Kevin Darrow, Bill Dixon, Tom Donahue, Christie Ellis, Marc Fishel, Stefanie Fishel, Daniela Ginsburg, Simon Glezos, the late and missed Joshua Gold, Jake Greear, Jairus Grove, Rob Higney, Anatoli Ignatov, Jacqui Ignatov, Suvi Irvine, Alex Lefebvre, Daniel Levine, Jennifer Lin, Noora Lori, Michael McCarthy, Paulina Ochoa, George Oppel, Nobutaka Otobe, Chas Phillips, Luke Plotica, Brighu Singh, Terukazu Morikawa, Mina Suk, Lars Tonder, Joyce Tsai, Ittai Weinryb, Drew Walker, Dylan Weller, and Melanie White.
I need to thank especially Jane Bennett, Jennifer Culbert, William Connolly, Hent de Vries, Richard Flathman, Joel Grossman, and Paola Marratti. What I have learned from each of them cannot be reduced to ideas. Dick was the chair of my dissertation committee, and he remains, even after his recent death, a loud, growling presence in my mind. He is one of the few people to have read a complete draft of this manuscript (despite being ill at the time) and he was, as always, encouraging. Dick, along with my other advisors, Bill Connolly and Jennifer Culbert, are and always will be exemplary.
The University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore is happily a very nice place to work. The best part is that I get to talk every day to a diverse group of scholars, from theoretical chemists to biosemioticians, anthropologists, rhetoricians, physicists, and literary critics. Thanks to my colleagues, I always get to feel like a beginner, amazed at what there is to know and reminded of my profound ignorance. In particular, I thank Mark Brantner, Donald Favareau, and Peter Vail for their conversation and friendship.
Thanks to David and Doris Wong, Bennett Wong, and Lynn Sim for all of their love and support during the last several years in Singapore.
I thank my parents, Marci and Gary, and my older brother, Mathew, and younger sister, Jennifer, for, well, everything.
I met my fellow political theorist and wife, Mabel Wong, at Johns Hopkins. For the past twelve years we have helped each other handle dissertations, disease, death, disappointment, and other difficulties. We have had some good times, too. Now, with our son, Isaac, every day brings with it new forms of joy and terror. Neither thanks nor acknowledgment are sufficient, but this is not the place to say more.
INTRODUCTION
LEGITIMACY AND VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
AMID THE PROLIFERATION of already present and emerging catastrophes in the human world and on the Earth we share with other beings, the one to which I feel most compelled to respond is not new at all: the pervasiveness of violence in human life. This has become a pressing issue for me, which is partly a consequence of the usually imperceptible—because so assimilated to the everyday—fact that over the past twelve years or so my country, the United States, has been constantly at war in various parts of the world. Of course, depending on how one defines war , the United States has been at war almost constantly for (at least) the past seventy years. But it is not just the United States. I was born in 1980, and in just my lifetime numerous genocides have taken or are taking place in Rwanda and Sudan and in the Balkans and in El Salvador and the Congo; Iraq and Iran engaged in a horrific, deadly war; Israel has been a cause and focal point of regional violence; Syria is not only undergoing a civil war but also apparently seeking to destabilize Lebanon (again); and the list could continue. The presence of violence in our world and our lives is undeniable.
But war is only the most visible manifestation of violence. Nation-states maintain their internal security through legal systems that entrench violence within the homeland. Consistent police brutalization within minority communities; a deeply racialized judicial system, including the uneven (to say the least) use of a (morally dubious) death penalty; the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act and various suspensions of constitutional guarantees and rights; and the extreme violence of jails are features not only of the United States but of many of the “advanced developed” countries of the world (to be sure, not all of these features apply in each country). Then, of course, there are the acts that the legal system aims to prevent and prosecute, violent acts that for Americans seems so peculiarly American, including recent events in Colorado, Texas, and Virginia as well as the long and continuing history of racial, gender, sexual, and other forms of violence.
It is a disturbing realization that we live our lives as we do, as we can, not only amid violence but from it and thanks to it. Of the many conditions of human existence that form our background or lifeworld, perhaps no condition is so invisibly present as violence. Yet few conditions of human life are so potentially damaging to our conception of the human being—of its autonomy, capacity for morality, rationality, prudence, and so on—as violence. For this reason, among others, we hide violence in various ways, physically and intellectually, by confining violence to specific demarcated spaces (even if they never can contain that violence) and by justifying violent acts by calling them legitimate. Many of us may be able to accept that we cannot contain violence or keep it away from us completely. But how many of us would be able or willing to accept that there is no morally justified violence, that is, that all the acts of violence that sustain our lives in common are immoral, unjust, wrong? What would it entail for our lives and politics to accept, if it is indeed the case, that all of our violence, the violence that sustains our modes of being-in-the-world, is unjustifiable? Would it require us to stop that violence? If not, then on what grounds might such violence continue?
These brief comments, claims, and questions form the context and the ethical, political, and personal impulse or motivation for this book. This context has pushed me to articulate a critical theoretical response to that violence, one that can provide a starting point for challenging and hopefully reducing the amount of violence in human life. However, what concerns me most is the violence of the state, for it is the state that claims, more than any other entity or individual, and more exclusively, that its violence is legitimate, morally justified, distinct from the violence of (almost) all nonstate actors.
I argue in this book that there is no possible moral justification for a specific sub