Violent Attachments

Kotef, Hagar

Abstract

Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism, I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. This analysis refuses the assumption that violence is in conflict with (liberal) identity, and that, therefore, the endurance of violence of liberal states/societies is dependent upon mechanisms of active blindness (or denial, deferral, and other forms of dissociation). I argue that this assumption, which is shared by many critiques of violence, fails to perceive that people can desire the violent arrangements supporting their communities. They therefore fail to address political settings wherein violence is an affirmative element of political identities.

Citation

Kotef, H. (2019). Violent Attachments. Political Theory, 48(1), 4-29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719861714

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 10, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Jul 25, 2019
• Publication Date: Jul 25, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jul 1, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 1, 2019
• Journal: Political Theory
• Print ISSN: 0090-5917
• Electronic ISSN: 1552-7476
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 48
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 4-29
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719861714
• Keywords: violence, denial, settler colonialism, Israel/Palestine, visibility, subject formation
• Related Public URLs: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx