Life, emergent: The social in the afterlives of violence

Contemporary Political Theory, Nov 2017

Amy Swiffen

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Life, emergent: The social in the afterlives of violence

part of Springer Nature. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals Life, emergent: The social in the afterlives of violence 0 Yasmeen Arif University of Minnesota Press , Minneapolis, 2016, 212 pp , USA 1 notes , ISBN: 9781452953076 2 Amy Swiffen Concordia University , Montreal, QC H3G 1M8 , Canada This is an interesting book that makes many thought-provoking claims related to theories of biopolitics and the role of affect in the constitution of the social. Drawing on ethnographic methods, the author explores a series of case studies of what are dubbed the 'afterlife' of catastrophic mass violence, as in war and various other forms of communal and ethnic conflict. She finds that the particular form of pathos that emerges after such violence creates a system of 'emotional relationalities' that are productive of the forms of life (or bios) that live on in the afterlife of those incidents (p. 20). Pathos is defined as collective 'witnessing and alleviating' of suffering (p. 20). The concept is used to define a system of affective relations that emerge in these afterlives, structuring the kinds of subjectivities and identities that develop among the survivors. The theoretical resources invoked to establish this framework are many, but centrally the author is indebted to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Gilles Deleuze. Foucault's notion of a dispositif is particularly important as in the final pages of the book the author reveals that what has been at stake in each chapter is an instance of the 'event-afterlife' paradigm/dispositif. For Foucault, a dispositif defines an ensemble of heterogeneous elements, such as institutions, urban designs, laws, regulatory decisions, political statements, moral and ethical ideas, that are related to each other through a certain system of relations defined by discourses of knowledge/ power. The unique feature of the event-afterlife dispositif that this book puts forward is the idea that the system of relations that connect the elements in a dispositif may not only relate to knowledge/power, but also to collective affect. Each chapter offers a case study of an historical case of mass violence, the forms of collective pathos that followed, and how individuals and communities live on through differently negotiating the relationalities that are constituted through that pathos. An important aspect of the analysis is the idea that the way that suffering is collectively witnessed creates a set of affective relationalities that constitute the social. In this sense, each chapter presents an example of the event-afterlife - dispositif, distinguished by unique forms of pathos and bios, ‘or forms of life and the social relationalities in which those forms emerge’ (p. 172). Chapter one focusses on the implementation of the Special Court of Sierra Leone (SCSL) after the end of Sierra Leonean Civil War in 1999. The SCSL was unique in being the first hybrid court set up under the national jurisdiction of the government of Sierra Leone and the jurisdiction of the United Nations under international law. The mandate of the SCSL was to prosecute violations of human rights defined in international law and violations of the law of Sierra Leone. The author takes the workings of the SCSL to represent a form of collective witnessing, or as she writes, ‘a particular articulation of pathos and a bios’ (p. 40). The pathos lies ‘in the trade between law and humanitarian sentiment’, which constitutes an ‘international social’ (p. 40). Within this form of the social, bios includes those whose experiences are defined (or not) as crimes and constituted as ‘punishable bodies’ within these terms (pp. 40, 62). These forms of pathos and bios are different from those discussed in chapter three, which looks at the ‘afterlife’ of anti-Sikh violence that gripped Delhi in the days following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Ghandi on 31 October 1984. In that case, gendered norms split survivor communities, which also occupied different areas of the city. For men from the Bhogal area, for example, values such as ‘resilience and work ethic’ that are ‘emblematic’ of Sikh identity become ‘a resource that they draw their sustenance from’ (p. 130). Arif notes that these men expressed themselves through ‘an anchoring in their group identity rather than speaking of personal hardship’ (p. 130). In contrast, for the women who were widowed during the massacre and live in a widows’ colony the suffering is ‘undoubtedly private’ (p. 131). Although very different, in both the case of the Sierra Leonean Civil War and the aftermath of the Sikh massacre in Delhi, the form of collective witnessing that emerged created affective relationalities that allowed new possibilities for living on, while foreclosing others. This ambivalent aspect of the event-afterlife dispositif was constant throughout the case studies. The juxtaposition of different forms of pathos in each chapter sheds (...truncated)


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Amy Swiffen. Life, emergent: The social in the afterlives of violence, Contemporary Political Theory, 2017, pp. 1-3, DOI: 10.1057/s41296-017-0176-1