Unit for Criticism SCT Fellow, Summer 2025
At the Cornell summer School of Criticism and Theory in summer 2025, I participated in Professor Fadi Bardawil’s Terms of Violence seminar. I must confess at the outset that, personally, it was not easy to delve into the critical theory of violence with a clear conscience in the present moment. What is the point of theory at a time when actual genocides are live streamed, and we have to pretend that life goes on as usual? I decided to take the question with me to Ithaca. As I dwell upon my time at the SCT in hindsight, I realize I don’t have a conclusive answer. Instead, the SCT gave me a different, and perhaps more instructive, set of questions to work out: What kind of critique do we need to account for our historical present? What about our world has been missed or misread by our earlier critiques, bringing us to where we are?
The seminar was oriented by Fanonian and Marxist intellectual traditions. In the very first week, Etienne Balibar’s oeuvre helped us set the stage for our quest, by emphasizing the failure of the Hegelian thesis on violence’s convertibility – via its political institutionalization – into justice. It was straightforward to recognize that colonial ontology is non-relational, Manichean, and inherently, violent: Franz Fanon’s timeless lesson. The more difficult, and pressing, task was to appreciate the limitations of 20th century anti-colonial and revolutionary politics, which generated its own forms of authoritarianism and internal colonialisms. It turns out that the Hegelian master was never purely a Western master. And when friends of the colonized, like Jean Paul Sartre, sought to restore the dialectic by replacing Hegelian abstractions with existential philosophy, they still ran the risk of overlooking the phenomenology of racialized bodies. Fanon’s lesson: as long as the dialectic remains broken, the potential for violence remains intact. Via Ato Sekyi-Otu, we figured that Fanon’s answer to the dialectic broken by colonialism is an anti-colonial praxis that centers our particularities and differences. That is, for Fanon, anti-colonialism is another name for learning to struggle together and live with our differences – differences that neither exploit nor dispossess, differences that take into account how colonial capitalism feeds upon racializing and gendering techniques. Thus, Fanon’s violence is not counter-violence, it is anti- (Balibar) or non- (Butler) violence that seeks to dismantle violence. It is Walter Benjamin’s divine violence, a violence against violence. It was also helpful to be reminded by Professor Bardawil that in its aspiration for clarity at the cost of rigor, critical theory can entail a violence of its own. That is, if it does not recognize the contingencies out of which our histories of the present have emerged. The way out? Neither history nor theory can do without the other.
In the second half of our seminar, we took up the colonial-capital entanglement at the structural level, and we started where all critical thought on capitalism must start: Marx’s unparalleled insight into the so-called primitive accumulation. Foregrounding capitalism’s intrinsic need to dispossess living bodies and expropriate land/nature, reducing both into factors of production for its surpluses, we proceeded to an immanent critique of Marx and Marxisms (a truly Marxist act!). We read Silvia Federici’s The Caliban and The Witch to put in perspective how capitalist accumulation is unthinkable without patriarchal oppression and its gendered hierarchies; Robin D.G. Kelley’s work helped stretch the notion of settler colonialism to the transnational/global scale; and Sandro Messandra’s writings brought in a single analytical frame global enclosures (Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession) and extractivism, on the one hand, and economic neo-liberalization and financialization, on the other. These connections enabled us to think capitalism and settler-colonialism as integrally linked and premised upon multiple forms of symbolic and structural violence. In turn, demonstrating how liberal politics of recognition is just the latest form of colonial rule, a lesson taught by Glen Coulthard’s account of Canadian state’s relationship to indigenous communities in his book, Red Skin, White Masks. We ended the seminar by bringing our intellectual labor to bear upon the ongoing genocidal violence in Palestine, that will continue to haunt us even when there is nothing left to be livestreamed. We read Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Details and watched Elia Suleiman’s movie The Time That Remains: both masterpieces that grapple with the “ordinariness” of colonial violence, showing how it permeates deep into the human psyche and acts affectively and atmospherically.
The SCT was an unparalleled experience. I could not be more grateful to the Unit for providing this opportunity to graduate students. If physical violence is always preceded by symbolic violence, as Butler notes in The Force of Non-Violence, then learning to think clearly must precede any politics of anti-violence. The six-weeks that I spent at Cornell have helped me to think a lot more clearly about our contemporary issues.