Aspects of violence

Many social scientific accounts of interpersonal violence hold a few basic premises that are in this article contested as being one-sided. The explanation of violence dissolves the intrinsic character of the phenomenon and replaces the singular aspects of violence by a social-scientific explanatory ground. This explanatory social science is in this article called determinism. Supplementing determinism is a formalism of violence, which focuses on the aesthetics of violence and which, in so doing, retains the possibility of violence occurring for no reason other than itself. This kind of violence will be called autotelic violence. Cultural signs seem to justify the idea that violence can be a self-referential act, due to a will to violence. Key Words autotelic violence • theory • will to violence People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast could never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. (Fyodor Dostojevski, The Grand Inquisitor