Om produktivt våld : En genealogisk undersökning av dubbelbindningen mellan makt och våld från Hobbes till Agamben

Sammanfattning: Some things do not disappear. Violence is one of them. We are predisposed to think of several forms of violence – especially its collective manifestations – as profoundly destructive activities that ideally should be abolished altogether through laws and rules. However, laws and rules are also often thought to require violence to operate meaningfully. The more destructive the violence one tends to see, the tougher (and more violent) measures one tends to require. What one defines as “violence” is often thought to require some kind of counterforce, which also could be said to constitute “violence”. Indeed, at a deep level, law, order, and violence are often thought to be somehow related, creating a so-called double-bind that informs such important notions as authority and legitimate uses of force. The thesis argues that a contingent but powerful version of this figure of thought, a version which for the purposes of the thesis is named “productive violence”, can be traced back to one of the perhaps most important treatises in political philosophy, namely Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. It is then argued that “productive violence” still resonates with us today, both within academia and politics. In short, “productive violence” has a close relationship to a particular account of law which both takes violence to be foundational and purports to present an antidote to its excesses or otherwise undesirable manifestations. The thesis shows how this figure of thought can be said to be relevant and how it also can be said to be contagious. It does so by illustrating how “productive violence” can be found in various texts by various thinkers. By assembling a collection of texts in more recent political philosophy to trace the development of this figure of thought, the thesis closely reads four thinkers – Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben – whose texts, in both explicit and implicit ways, refer to each other and produce and reproduce this figure of thought. It is then shown how “productive violence” seemingly has had and continues to have a strong hold in contemporary academia and politics. The thesis uses an extreme but illustrative example, namely the political question of military intervention in civil war. By using this example, and by reading studies of international relations, the thesis shows how “productive violence” can be said to have a strong hold on political imagination. Lastly, the thesis suggests that although it is important to not let go of the notion that violence might be important to understand practices of law and politics, future research on violence, especially critical inquiries of political violence, should be aware of how presuppositions of its productive character in relation to order might perpetuate the very predicament that its criticism wants to escape.