Abstract
Violence is essential to religion, while religion holds the promise of transcending violence. The designation religious refers not to a type of violence, but to a specific issue of violence, namely the claim to higher (theodical) justification. This religious aspect is not confined to religion; it is also evident in the secular domain. A critique of religious violence needs to show the gap between violence and its justifications, experienced affectively in horror. This horror in response to the unspeakable is structurally akin to mystical experience, the temporal structure of which indicates the failure of the theodical justification for violence.
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Notes
Benjamin (1986, pp. 287, 300).
Benjamin (1986, p. 297).
See Staudigl (2014).
See Dodd (2009, pp. 21–31).
Such retrospective judgements are not by that token in any way mistaken, on the contrary the coming to understand a past harm as violent is necessary for change in the present.
Heidegger (2012, p. 385).
Ricoeur (1983, pp. 54–55).
Arendt (1958, pp. 236–243).
Sartre (1993, p. 173).
Dodd (2014, p. 44).
See Ó Murchadha (2016, pp. 326–327).
Arendt (1994, p. 178): “violence administered for power’s (and not law’s) sake turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate.” In the present context law means the worldly, power the divine understood only as the manifestation of power.
In this sense, I would want to modify Arendt’s account whereby violence can be justified (but not legitimated) by appeal to the future (Arendt 1970, p. 52). Such justifications of violence are instrumental, but they break down in the face of the non-instrumentality of violence, the tendency of violence to undermine the very end which supposedly justify it.
On the unworldly nature of such cruelty see Scarry (1985, p. 34).
Girard (1977, p. 2).
Ibid., p. 17.
Barth (2006).
Manoussakis (2017, p. 108) speaks of the “desire to haste the coming eschatological perfection” as a “desire to do away with the burden of waiting.”
Leibniz (1990, p. 74).
See ibid, p. 88. This is above our reason, not however reason as such, according to Leibniz. Reason is a divine gift and God’s reason understands all things, ibid., pp. 106–107.
Ibid., pp. 94–95.
Ibid., p. 99.
Ibid., p. 120.
Ibid., p. 127.
Ibid., p. 128.
Ibid., p. 129.
Ibid., 135.
Ibid., p. 178.
Ibid., p. 207.
Otto (1958, pp. 12–30).
Ibid., p. 189.
Ibid., p. 161.
The totalitarian regimes of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany also demonstrate this. The future to come becomes simply an ideological chimera hiding the fundamentally destructive nature of the regimes, for which the future will simply be a continued iteration of the present.
The “Last Instructions of 9/11” notes found in the suitcase of one of the hijacker, Mohamed Atta, contains the following and similar statements: “Forget and become oblivious to that thing called ‘this world’,” “Do not be afraid to ask God that he would grant you [the rank of] martyr, as you advance without retreating, patient and hoping for God’s reward,” “strike in the manner of champions who are not desirous of returning to this world,” “Do not take vengeance for yourself, but strike every blow for God Most High.” Juergensmeyer and Kitts (2011, pp. 83, 87, 88).
Sartre (1993, p. 171).
See Ricoeur (2004, pp. 452–456).
See de Warren (2014, pp. 224–225).
Otto (1958, p. 17).
Turner (1995, p. 258).
Ibid., p. 259.
Quoted in ibid., p. 273.
John of the Cross (1922, p. 96).
Ibid., p. 98.
Ibid., p. 117.
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Ó Murchadha, F. Violent times, the horror of the unspeakable and the temporality of religious experience. Cont Philos Rev 53, 287–302 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09490-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09490-0