Thoughts on Violence and Modernity in Latin America
In Light of Arno Mayer’s The Furies
Dez. 2004
Neil Larsen
I.
A history without violence would, for us at least, be unrecognizable as history. Yet, paradoxically, violence as phenomenon appears to exist apart from the history in which it is omnipresent. Violence seems, almost unconsciously, to found the historical imagination itself and at the same time to exist apart from it, as a moral or metaphysical absolute. In the final analysis this no doubt has to do with the impossibility of disassociating the idea of violence from that of death as physical annihilation. Taken to its extreme, violence could end history by destroying virtually all historical agents. Indeed, it must rank as one of the great historical feats of modernity that is has actualized what was before this merely theoretical possibility and even learned to make us accommodate ourselves to it in our daily lives. Alongside the abstract repugnance it universally merits in the language of official ‘values,’ violence as means and as sheer adaptation advances at a sure and accelerating pace. Whatever they may convey on the level of official historical sanctions, the stories and images of catastrophic violence–whether of Auschwitz or Hiroshima, of the Escuela de Mecánica or El Mozote, or for that matter of Columbine High, 9/11, Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib–inform us just as predictably of the adaptive cost that lived history can be relied upon to exact from its subjects: it is this bad, it will continue, and it will get worse. The real likelihood of violent annihilation becomes for many something to be factored into the equations of contemporary life, as one would a marriage or a retirement, while for the rest its specter becomes a permanent part of the domestic landscape.