The Actual Murder with Words, a Discussion of Violence in the Enlightenment, Romanticism...and After

grantor: University of TorontoEnlightenment: reason, emancipation, progress. Romanticism: the irrational, rebellion, return. These two constellations describe not merely historical epochs but attitudes of culture from which modernity seeks to escape and to which it ceaselessly returns. Although their notions of violence are much at odds, they each presuppose a vision of the other with which they contend. This thesis seeks to articulate their ideas about violence and its place in their thought. Part I: The successes of seventeenth century 'mathemata' gave Enlightenment luminaries cause to feel a door to the prison cell of existence had opened. Newton's emulators set to work confident that knowledge would dispel ignorance and violence; and an enormous tide of Reason is unleashed, sucking up into it all the counter-currents it produces. Belief that acts of will can fashion the correspondence of 'reality' to the 'true' engenders a preoccupation with the flight of the possible over the grounds of the probable. However, Reason's tide eventually turns and, secularizing its own myth, begins to hear the voices of those counter-currents that have all along fed its progress. Under the spell of an imagined future in which violence would be erased, Enlightenment discussions of the subject are marked by a significant absence. Into this frame the art of Goya explodes: with a new urgency he paints its light as dark. No longer merely the image of reason, light is also the conscienceless instrument of executioners; no longer purely irrational, darkness also limns an evil that 'reasons' its overthrow of my 'natural' instincts. Part II: In 'Beloved' a catastrophic past is repeated and re-presented, bringing to fruition the promise of emancipation in the active-passive injunction: be good, be-loved. Accession to this covenant is effected through the 'cut' in which the rhythm of the given is disturbed by the giving that guarantees the equilibrium of all givens. Opening to the pledge is manifest in a bodily exposure of precisely that which violence aims at: the you beyond every denomination. The sounding of this exposure is a pure assignment that renews time. In it the possibility of a past repaired, forgiveness and fecundity are revealed.Ph.D