Stuck in Suffering: A Philosophical Exploration of Violence

Abstract

This article considers and evaluates some of the elastic applications of the term 'violence'. Some of the most well-known applications are structural, symbolic, epistemic, psychosocial, and linguistic violence. Should these phenomena be understood as violence-proper or are these merely provocative hyperbole? Some scholars are openly resistant to these elastic applications, arguing that calling these phenomena 'violence' is no more than conceptual carelessness. The question we are interested in is why people continue to be drawn to the image of violence to typify certain phenomena that cause suffering. We identify that it is the temporal extension (i.e. the experiential duration) of the experience of stuckedness in suffering that unifies these conditions. In close, we offer some reflections on the relationship of law to (what is called) violence and where it can mitigate stuckedness.

Registering Time in Recognising Torturous Harm: Figuring the Single, Plural and Historical in Torture's Adjudication

“…This generally focuses the law on acts rather than impacts, perpetrators than survivor-victims. For Mardon and Richardson-Self (2022: 114), this produces the ‘exemplar image of violence [as] roughly that of deliberate physical acts of non-consensual force by a perpetrator occasioned against a subject’. The law's task, they continue, becomes one of establishing motivations and circumstances of the violence and less so on the survivor-victim's ongoing suffering.…”