Violence and the subject

ABSTRACT Violence confronts us increasingly, everywhere: how are we to make sense of it? Its ubiquity begs the question of analytical differentiation. This article seeks to open the field by suggesting a fivefold typology: violence as loss of meaning; violence as non-sense; violence as cruelty; fundamental violence; and founding violence. The idea of analytically differentiating between types of violence cannot avoid the fact that sometimes victims are also perpetrators in other ways, and that even violent activity is not conducted only by essentially violent subjects. Violence needs to be connected to modernity and to problems of identity formation and not only to personal or collective risk. KEYWORDS actors • desubjectivation • perpetrators • subjectivation • victims • violence Violence evokes three main types of response from its witnesses. These correspond to the three major analytical approaches specific to political science and the social sciences. A first approach consists in seeing violence as a response, the behavioural reaction of actors expressing, for example, their frustrations in a situation that has become unbearable or too unfavour-able for them. There are numerous studies in the field of sociology, social psychology or political science that insist, for example, on the idea of relative deprivation, as Alexis de Tocqueville (1967) anticipated when he observed that popular discontent rises to the point of violence when prosperity increases. He noted that those parts of France which were about to become the chief centres of this revolution were precisely the parts of the territory where the work of improve-ment was most perceptible (...) So it might be said that the more intolerable the French found their position, the better it became. A second very different approach, is to see violence as a resource mobil-ized by an actor. In this instance, the actor is defined by calculations, persona