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Violence, psycho.

Article Excerpt
"ALL FORMS OF VIOLENCE ARE QUEST FOR IDENTITY." Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Me: Lectures and Intereviews, ed. by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003), 266.

These external presuppositions--the real of a violence founding the system and none the less disavowed once the system reaches the level of its self-reproduction--play the role of a "vanishing mediator": they must disappear, become invisible, if the system is to maintain its consistency and coherence. (1)--Slavoj Zizek

Violence and life are inseparable, even if one hopes that life will win the incessant war waged by these two phenomena against one another. At once weapon and defeat, violence is erratic. It advances, for lack of a better aim, with spitefulness, there where words failed or did not know how to produce an effect.

Violence can be material as well as immaterial. Bloody, destructive, it is the reality of war, crime, passions. Insidious, invisible, violence lies at the heart of human destinies, of broken subjectivities that are wounded, suffocated.

This issue examines the different faces of violence. Our aim is net to treat it as a social, political, or psychological phenomenon. Violence is at the centre of artistic practices themselves. Here, it is thought; its origins and consequences weighed; in sum, violence is here exposed.

To expose violence is net to transpose it or to theatricalize it. Beyond cruelty itself, there is the reiterated cruelty of acknowledging the existence of violence, its reality, as is posited by Clement Rosset in Le principe de cruauté. (2) This doubling of violence must also be accompanied by a third movement that consists in finding the means to combat it. Art is one of...

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