Topology of Violence

Violence is ubiquitous and incessant but protean, varying its outward form according to the social constellation at hand. Violence, Han tells us, has gone from the negative – explosive, massive, and martial – to the positive, wielded without enmity or domination. This, he says, creates the false impression that violence has disappeared. Han first investigates the macro-physical manifestations of violence, which take the form of negativity – developing from the tension between self and other, interior and exterior, friend and enemy. These manifestations include the archaic violence of sacrifice and blood, the mythical violence of jealous and vengeful gods, the deadly violence of the sovereign, the merciless violence of torture, the bloodless violence of the gas chamber, the viral violence of terrorism, and the verbal violence of hurtful language. He then examines the violence of positivity—the expression of an excess of positivity – which manifests itself as over-achievement, over-production, over-communication, hyper-attention, and hyperactivity. The violence of positivity, Han warns, could be even more disastrous than that of negativity. Infection, invasion, and infiltration have given way to infarction.