Violence & Body: Reflecting Our Own Limits and Beyond

The focus on symbolic violence, as discussed by Pierre Bourdieu, has been displacing the meaning of physical violence, confluencing the studies of violence for a new ontological place, in which its limits – the structural causes, and beyond – its systemic relations, play fundamental roles, as Johan Galtung argues. In general, the physical dimension of violence has been often underestimated by the coercive control of contemporary human life. Fear and uneasiness, in their socially constructed hybrid positions, play a fundamental part in this coercive movement. The processes of decolonization of everyday life, as Frantz Fanon has worked with, have shown to be a form of confrontation, re-appropriating and transforming their own visions of the social world, open spaces to act on their relationships. This confrontation reallocates the conceptions of violence to other margins, transposing its facts and even its actions to converge on systemic complexity approaches in their own historical-geographical perspectives and praxis. Such approaches bring into the discussion transdisciplinary ways as the explanatory self-control of violence, discussed by Travis Hirschi or also Judith Butler, with her critical thinking of non-violence, and the revolutionary violence as a counter-subjective violence raised by Slavoj Žižek and not to forget Jacques Rancière analyzing how a new politics of aesthetics disrupts the way we reduce violence into mediated forms. Considered the current growing role of violence in its multidimensions as a tool to control, including the academic space, this session seeks to open a place for transdisciplinary dialogue around the systemic view on violence.