The essays collected in this volume deal with one central theme: How do we now make sense of existence in a world that is constantly threatened by destruction of sense. The contributors, exploring answers to this complex problematique from different disciplinary perspectives maintain that the
question concerning the sense of existence and its destruction is essentially tied up with the question of violence: violence as radical destruction of sense for and of existence. Responses to this question, however, can be as irreducible and singular as can they be varied and multiple.
Taking up the religious and linguistic forms of violence as their main focus, these essays argue that the place of violence in our contemporary historical condition has accelerated to an ever immeasurable measure, and that this demands urgent responses from intellectuals and activists alike.
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Weight of Violence
PART I
1. Gérard Bensussan: On Violence: Mimesis, Death Instinct, and Alterity
2. Andrea Potesta: The Experience of Silence: Derrida and the Language of Negative Theology
3. Jason Wirth: Stupidity, Madness, and
Malevolence: Schelling, Deleuze, Flaubert, and Musil and the Problem of Violence
4. Aïcha Liviana Messina: 'No Eye has Seen it': The Renewal of the Human Condition in Marx and Lévinas
5. Maria Joao Cantinho: The Necessity for Clean Air and Space is Stronger Than Any Kinds of Hatred: An Essay
on the Concept of Violence in Walter Benjamin
6. Saitya Brata Das: Tears Are Not Yet Wiped Away on All Faces
7. Mike Grimshaw: The Concrete Violence of History and the Apocalyptic Messianic Dwarf
8. John Frow: Kingdom-Come: Eschatology and Apocalypse
9. Clayton Crockett: Capital
Violence
10. Soumyabrata Choudhury: St. Paul, Gabriel Naudé, Antonin Artaud : Three Violent and Delicate Exceptions to Law and Liturgy
PART II
11. Rustam Singh: Roots of Violence: Jiva, Life, and Other Things
12. Asha Sarangi: Violence of/on Languages: The Political Topography
of Linguistic Nationalism in South Asia
13. Selma Sonntag: The Violence of Linguistic Cosmopolitanism
14. Prachi Gurjarpadhye Khandeparker: Carrying out a Region Beyond: Religious Violence in Partition Narratives
15. Veena Sharma: Conflict a Site for Perpetuation of Traditional
Values
Index
About the Editors and Contributors
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Saitya Brata Das is Assistant Professor at the Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Soumyabrata Choudhury is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi.
Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese
