This book’s six essays are guided by a skeptical philosophical attitude about the meaning of violence that refuses to conform to the exigencies of essence and the stable patterns of lived experience. They are readings as much as they are reflections; attempts at interpretation as much as they are attempts to push concepts of violence to their limits. They draw upon a range of different authors and historical moments, but without any attempt to reduce them into a series of examples elucidating a comprehensive theory. The aim is to follow a path of distinctively episodic and provisional modes of thinking and reflection that offers a potential glimpse at how violence can be understood.

Phenomenologies of Violence presents phenomenology as an important method to investigate violence, its various forms, meanings, and consequences for human existence. On one hand, it seeks to view violence as a genuine philosophical problem, i.e., beyond the still prevalent instrumental, cultural and structural explanations. On the other hand, it provides the reader with accounts on the many faces of violence, ranging from physical, psychic, structural and symbolic violence to forms of social as well as organized violence. In this volume it is argued that phenomenology, which has not yet been used in interdisciplinary research on violence, offers basic insights into the constitution of violence, our possibilities of understanding, and our actions to contain it. Contributors include:Michael D. Barber, Debra Bergoffen, Robert Bernasconi, James Dodd, Eddo Evink, Kathryn T. Gines, James Mensch, Stefan Nowotny, Michael Staudigl, Anthony J. Steinbock, and Nicolas de Warren.

This book pursues the problem of whether violence can be understood to be constitutive of its own sense or meaning, as opposed to being merely instrumental. The central figures considered include Clausewitz, Schmitt, Arendt, Sartre, Jünger, Heidegger, and Patocka.

This edited collection explores the problem of violence from the vantage point of meaning. Taking up the ambiguity of the word ‘meaning’, the chapters analyse the manner in which violence affects and in some cases constitutes the meaningful structure of our lifeworld, on individual, social, religious and conceptual levels. The relationship between violence and meaning is multifaceted, and is thus investigated from a variety of different perspectives within the continental tradition of philosophy, including phenomenology, post-structuralism, critical theory and psychoanalysis. Divided into four parts, the volume explores diverging meanings of the concept of violence, as well as transcendent or religious violence- a form of violence that takes place between humanity and the divine world. Going on to investigate instances of immanent and secular violence, which occur at the level of the group, community or society, the book concludes with an exploration of violence and meaning on the individual level: violence at the level of the self, or between particular persons. With its focus on the manifold of relations between violence and meaning, as well as its four part focus on conceptual, transcendent, immanent and individual violence, the book is both multi-directional and multi-layered.

In this highly original volume, Gunnar Karlsson offers new answers to the question concerning the relationship between belonging to a specific sex as a male and striving for a masculine identity. This book offers a uniquely psychoanalytic and phenomenological perspective on masculinity. Karlsson considers masculinity and traditional masculine ideals through a psychoanalytic lens before taking phenomenological concepts to chisel out the relationship between sex and gender. This perspective is developed throughout the volume to inspire readers to further their understanding of traditional gender assignment – female, male and intersex – in light of gendered characteristics such as femininity and masculinity. Chapters span topics such as the characteristics of typical, so-called “phallic masculinity”, its allure and psychogenetic explanation, as well as looking at what phallic masculinity disregards. Throughout, Karlsson maintains that phallic masculinity is unattainable, as it seeks to escape the existential conditions of helplessness, vulnerability, and dependence. He makes the case for the importance of considering the notion of ego-identity in the field of sex/gender studies, encouraging a liberation from gender stereotypes. Psychoanalytic and Phenomenological Reflections on Masculinity will be of great interest to researchers, clinical psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as anyone interested in masculinity, gender studies and the relationship between sex and gender. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Can political violence create freedom? What if the cost of violent liberation is too high? How does one even calculate that when the status quo is a condition of sustained violence? From reactionary movements globally to the everyday violence that makes the present moment so cruel, understanding political violence remains a difficult, multidimensional problem. This edited volume brings together essays by political theorists, intellectual historians, and other social scientists to reflect on these classic questions anew. The chapters in this volume revisit major political theorists of anticolonial violence like the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh, the American George Jackson, and the Kurdish Abdullah Öcalan. They also revisit canonical yet misunderstood writers like the French syndicalist Georges Sorel and the American feminist Valerie Solanas. Beyond major figures and intellectuals, the volume also features contributions on pressing contemporary debates like climate change, police violence, and the violence of speech. Together, these essays reveal political violence to be first and foremost an experimental, theoretical activity which has both enabled and frustrated the ambitions of the left. This book will be beneficial reading for students and researchers of Political Science, History and Sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of New Political Science.

Excerpt from Reflections on Violence Reflections on Violence was written by Georges Sorel in 1915. This is a 311 page book, containing 102306 words. Search Inside is enabled for this title. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.