Interpreting Violence, Violent Interpretations: Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces the key terms of the edited volume: violence, interpretation, narrative, hermeneutics, and ethics. It articulates how interpreting violence refers both to the process of meaning-making involved in understanding representations of violence and to the potential violence involved in interpretive acts themselves. Drawing on the distinction between understanding and explanation, it fleshes out the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics, which emphasizes the unfinalizable nature of understanding and suggests that understanding guided by openness to the singularity of the other can be nonviolent.. The contributors of the volume discuss different forms and levels of violence and explore the possibility of nonviolent interpretation in relation to a range of different ways of narrating violence. The introduction lays out the three sections of the volume. The first, “Representing Violence,” deals with the various representations of violence in literature and discourse, with a particular focus on the ambiguousness involved in the act of representing and on how representation itself can be an act of violence. The second section, “Understanding the Violence of Perpetrators,” focuses on making sense of the acts of those who commit violence. The final section, “Articulating Inherent Violence,” explores different levels of violence with particular attention to the violence that inheres in systems of signification and social structures. Overall, the Introduction explains how the volume provides conceptual resources for thinking about violence in its many forms in times of global crises. Violence ranges from discursive and structural to concrete, embodied violence. In this volume, we explore the ethical potential of literature and other arts in processes of making mechanisms of violence visible while also acknowledging that often good intentions can mask complicity in social structures that perpetuate practices of oppression.