I come to Maxwell Kennel’s Ontologies of Violence: Deconstruction, Pacifism, and Displacement as a genderqueer bisexual disabled Latinx Mennonite creative writer and literary critic who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA, the ancestral lands of the still living, still sovereign Lenape people. I also come to the book as a fellow scholar within the broad field of Mennonite studies who has a BA in Religion and reads theology on the side. I think of my writing as “ordinary theology,” which Stephanie Chandler Burns calls “the type of theological reflection engaged in [. . .] within everyday life” whether you are an academic theologian or not.1

Also, perhaps most significantly, I read the book and am writing this essay in December 2023 within the context of the ongoing anti-Palestinian genocide by the Israel Defense Forces, which feels like an era-defining occurrence and inevitably colors my thinking about violence. In this way the book feels immediate. I cannot separate my reading from what is going on in the world. In line with ordinary theology’s focus on everyday experience, here are a few reflections on how Ontologies of Violence relates to my life and thinking.

I begin with this description of my positionality partly because its elements have direct relevance for how I experience violence in my life, and partly because one of Ontologies of Violence’s elements that fascinates me most is its discussions of language’s violence, so I wonder what kind of violence I am committing by writing said description. For example, some people believe that land acknowledgments perpetuate colonial violence because merely acknowledging that you are on stolen land does nothing to return the land.2

Ontologies of Violence “attempts to critically analyze the complex relationships between the religious, secular, political, and theological terms that continue to animate both the scholarly and public discourse on violence,” so it is a book about words and their power and meaning.3 I have previously thought about the violence of language from an environmental and economic standpoint. I share Di Brandt’s concern when she describes the “ravaging of forests” that results from paper production, and Nathan Snaza’s concern that reading involves “forms of discipline that are always violent” because of the economic privilege required to access reading time.4 But I have not thought much about the question of whether language is inevitably violent that Ontologies of Violence considers at length, and I am grateful that it has made me do so. The idea that language is inherently violent fills me with despair, and yet, even as I type these words I am doing so in a colonizer’s language, perpetuating the effects of that colonization. Language is the tool we have, so we have to use it. Being aware of language’s violence at least helps me think about how to use it in a way that will cause as little harm as possible. As the book’s discussion of Peter C. Blum’s work notes, “‘it may be a matter [. . .] of saying “No” to violence, even though this saying does not itself escape violence’” (128, emphasis in the original). I am heartened by the book’s turn to Grace Jantzen’s work and her belief that the cynicism expressed in the above quotation might not be warranted, and her suggestion of possible alternative forms for dialogue to take (e.g., 155).

However, despite my appreciation for Jantzen’s hopefulness about discourse, I find myself frequently despairing about pacifism’s effectiveness for creating social change. I was raised Mennonite, and though I left Christianity two decades ago, I still believe pacifism is the proper ethic for my own life. But I no longer believe it is acceptable for me to advocate for pacifism as a universal ethic even though I would love it if everyone chose pacifism for themselves. This shift in my thinking came about gradually, and it was caused by reading non-Mennonite literature (that’s what I get for being in the world and of it!), but a Mennonite writer planted the seed for it. During the question-and-answer session of a panel at the 2002 Mennonite/s [sic] Writing Conference at Goshen College, David Waltner-Toews said he began to question absolute pacifism because of Nelson Mandela’s advocacy of revolutionary violence. It blew my mind to hear a Mennonite writer whom I idolized say this. I didn’t know it was possible for a Mennonite to think in such a way, and I was shocked that he had the guts to admit it in front of other Mennonites. I disagreed with Waltner-Toews at the time, but the possibility his admission presented stuck like a splinter in my brain that resurfaced when I was studying for my PhD exams seven years later. As I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Alice Walker’s Meridian,5 I found myself agreeing with the violence that African American characters in the novels commit against white characters in response to racism. These reactions surprised me because of my pacifism, so I decided to explore them further by writing a dissertation about African American violence against whites in novels from the 1970s.6 Although I concluded that the novels all ultimately repudiated the violence they contained, the questions they raised stuck with me. I began to realize that requiring nonviolence in all situations is itself a form of violence because it erases the experiences of the oppressed. Ontologies of Violence seems to acknowledge this idea in the statement that “it is clear that there cannot be a straightforward path of nonviolence for those who understand the depth of violence against women and all those who have been and continue to be violated by those who wield patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist power” (208–9). In whatever context, the oppressed are the ones who get to decide what the appropriate response to their oppression is, not their oppressors. This, I think, is the knowledge that Mandela gave Waltner-Toews that I was not yet able to understand as a 22-year-old.

My belief that violence that I cannot condemn might be possible in some instances (See how tortured that syntax is? I still feel uneasy articulating this belief out loud.) has been refined and, I suppose, confirmed, by my explorations of other spiritual expressions, such as that found in Walt Whitman’s work. Whitman’s long poem “Song of Myself” is one of my sacred texts because of how it envisions an inclusive society that in today’s terms would be queer, feminist, and decolonial. The poem’s celebration of life resonates with Ontologies of Violence’s description of Jantzen’s concept of “natality” (e.g., 163), and it certainly affirms Genesis 1’s naming of creation as “good.” But as part of this celebration, “Song of Myself” acknowledges death as a part of life (“to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier”),7 and violence as a frequent and normal pathway toward death.8 That is, violence is not necessarily what Kennel calls a cosmic “violat[ion]” of a “boundary” (e.g., 17), even if it is unethical in many instances. Whitman’s acknowledgment is perhaps related to Jacques Derrida’s concept of “‘life death’” that Ontologies of Violence documents (64). Akin to “Song of Myself,” the Tarot, which I consult on most mornings, emphasizes seeking balance in one’s life (or, to use biblical language, “To every thing there is a season” [Ecclesiastes 3:1]) rather than advocating for specific ethical positions, even though it also posits that some actions are ethical and some are not.9 The question shifts from “should violence exist?” to “how do we respond to violence in ethical and restorative ways?” My personal pacifism has become less hopeful, which makes me sad, but I find some comfort in Kennel’s analysis of how some Mennonite thinkers wrestle with the possibility that complete peace is an impossibility (e.g., 140).

In light of my experiences learning about the possibility of justifiable violence from African American writers, and thinking about my experiences with Mennonite racism as a Latinx person, as I read Ontologies of Violence, I thought to myself “this is a lot of discussion about violence that draws on white writers’ thoughts about it even though most of the violence in the world is committed against people of color.” The book’s dearth of sustained conversation with BIPOC interlocutors seems especially glaring considering its raising of the question “[h]ow to respond to those who react to difference as if it were necessarily dangerous?” as part of its “central theme” (99–100). This is an essential question in the US’s current political landscape (and, I think, in Kennel’s Canadian one, though I don’t feel that I have the knowledge or authority to speak to that context in depth), one that I wrestle with every day as a queer person of color while I consider how to respond to the rhetoric of demagogues such as the previous president of the United States and the current governor of Florida. When I think of these men, I begin to understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s willingness to join an assassination plot against Adolf Hitler despite Bonhoeffer’s pacifism.10 I don’t like that these thoughts present themselves, but they do. Am I doing violence to myself through them? Regardless of the answer, Ontologies of Violence’s general lack of dialogue with BIPOC thinkers repeats an upsetting Mennonite tendency. Although the Conclusion briefly mentions some writers of color–most notably in its discussion of Elsa Dorlin’s work on self-defense (204–7)–the positioning of these mentions causes them to feel perfunctory. I wish that the book would at least acknowledge the issue of its main interlocutors’ positionalities earlier (it does a good job of naming Blum and Huebner as Mennonite and Jantzen as Mennonite-ish, but in such a way that does not question the traditional construction of Mennonitism as white). There is a lot of writing about violence by BIPOC authors that Ontologies of Violence could converse with. For instance, I wish that it chose to include more sustained discussion of Dorlin’s ideas, or Frantz Fanon’s.

Ontologies of Violence documents how “Jantzen insists that the term ‘violence’ be used in a way that is responsible and responsive to the corporeal violence of killing” (160). We must talk about violence in the flesh, not just on the page. I agree with this bodily focus because I have suffered acute physical effects from the emotional violence of the US’s political discourse since the 2016 election. Jantzen’s insistence on paying attention to actual bodies is a queer notion that feels inflected by early queer theory’s emphasis on the physical, especially the sexual.11

The queerness of her thought leads me to another area I wish Ontologies of Violence would explore more. Kennel writes that Jantzen’s assertion “‘that violence occurs [. . .] when difference is perceived as dangerous’” bears significant resemblance to the poet Audre Lorde’s argument “that racism, sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia each extend from the same root, [. . .] the equation of difference and danger” (158, emphasis in the original). Kennel’s use of work by a creative writer to illuminate Jantzen’s philosophical work excites me. Kennel also cites Jantzen’s description of Sappho as a theorist of “beauty” created in the here-and-now via “love” (162, 178–79). However, none of these citations investigate how the affinities between Jantzen’s writing and Lorde’s and Sappho’s might relate to the three writers’ shared lesbianism. What role does their lesbian epistemology12 play in how they understand violence? (More discussion of this issue could also be a way to dialogue further with Elsa Dorlin’s work.)13 There are places where such investigation could occur. For example, Ontologies of Violence’s discussion of how Jantzen’s advocacy of the “path of flourishing and natality” in Sappho’s work presents an alternative to the way of war because of Sappho’s willingness to “t[ake] women’s experiences seriously” (171) resonates strongly with queer theory’s envisioning of a new society.14 Despite this lack of engagement, Ontologies of Violence’s discussion of Jantzen’s work reaffirms my belief that if there is any hope for our society, it lies with queers and the queer (sorry, straight people! 😉 ). I hope Kennel keeps writing about Jantzen and investigates the queer elements of her writing more. Ontologies of Violence provides a good foundation for Kennel’s future work to build on.

Discussions and analyses of violence and peace all too often proceed as if the meanings of both terms are self-explanatory or self-evident, as though both speaker and hearer understand the same thing by each respective term. To carry on in this way is to remain unaware of meanings that these terms may carry in their wake, meanings that in themselves may be significantly different than any surface glance might reveal. This concern, especially as it relates to our understanding of violence, animates Maxwell Kennel’s new book, Ontologies of Violence: Deconstruction, Pacifism, and Displacement, part of Brill’s Political and Public Theologies: Comparisons, Coalitions, Critiques.

Kennel’s book opens with his understanding of violence as a “concept that loosely names a constellation of social and political problems that cause pain, suffering, injury, harm, and death [. . .] best understood as a diagnostic concept that implies the violation of value-laden boundaries and reflects the core values of both its users and critics” (1).1 Such an understanding gives Kennel considerable range for his explorations, since it “points toward something that inheres within and follows from how we think the world is (ontology), how we speak about the world (language), and how we hold our knowledge of the world (epistemology)” (191). This take on violence is embedded in Kennel’s political theology, which he deliberately distances from (some) confessional expressions of political theology, expressions which understand and use political categories solely for theological ends. Kennel puts forward an approach that seeks to be both postreligious and postsecular, “if those terms represent movements away from simplistic distinctions between religious and secular forms of life and toward more complex and contextual approaches to a world of conflicting values and norms,” all to “avoid setting up religion and secularity in competitive terms” (3). Identifying Kennel’s understanding of violence is important here, as it provides a locus for considering how we might better come to grips with the social and political dimensions of violence; his project takes up the work of Jacques Derrida, several Mennonite thinkers (Chris Huebner and Peter Blum), and Grace Jantzen as a way of challenging “the notion that the world is essentially a violent place in which things necessarily exist at the expense of other things and boundaries will inevitably be violated by antagonistic displacements” (13). I want to engage several dimensions of this project that deserve particular attention, namely Kennel’s characterization of Mennonite ontological peace, the role of displacement in Jantzen, and then I will raise some questions about Kennel’s conclusions, especially regarding the notion of social accountability.

For Kennel, Jacques Derrida’s notion of ontological violence leads the way. I’m not qualified to offer much comment on Kennel’s long, close reading of Derrida except to say that Kennel is keen to protect Derrida against too-easy misreadings, especially regarding the danger of reducing Derrida’s famous assertion that “predication is the first violence” to some kind of narrow notion that speaking and/or writing is violent and therefore Derrida is guilty of promoting the peril of paralysis (24, 52). Kennel finds in Derrida a resistance to premature closure, a commitment to remaining open to the future, a critique of oppositional thinking, and a direct challenge to the problem of those who claim some kind of purity regarding speech, practice, or understanding or practice of violence and peace. Having avoided these kinds of reductions by going “through the crucible of reading him in detail” (65), Kennel then is able to deploy Derrida’s work on violence as a kind of criterion or at least an important point of comparison for subsequent discussions of the work of Mennonite philosophical theologians Chris Huebner and Peter Blum, and that of Grace Jantzen.

Kennel detects in Huebner and Blum related (but not identical) an inward turn in Mennonite thought, focusing on thinking about ontological peace and a pacifist approach to epistemology, positive developments that deepen Mennonite thought beyond discussions of war. Kennel writes, approvingly, that “contemporary Mennonite theologians articulate pacifist, nonviolent, and nonresistant values by negating both quietist passivity and violent action and asserting ‘third ways’ or ‘middle ways’” (83). But Kennel thinks that this turn in Mennonite theology could be strengthened considerably in at least two ways. Having established a nonreductive and largely positive description of Derrida’s approach to violence, Kennel presses both Huebner and Blum to recognize more fully just how close they are to Derrida, that there are significant affinities with Derrida they would do well to capitalize on further. This argument is proffered in conjunction with an analysis of how Mennonite theologians, part of the Radical Reformation, engage with Radical Orthodoxy, especially as represented in the work of John Milbank. Here Kennel, describing Milbank’s work in fairly harsh terms, it must be said, claims that Mennonite theologians display entirely too much “reticence to sharply critique Radical Orthodoxy,” a stance which downplays “the major differences between the greater traditions of ‘Radical Reformation’ and ‘Radical Orthodoxy’” (80).

So, Mennonites should capitalize on their unrealized affinity with Derrida and recognize much more clearly the deep and important differences that exist in comparison to Radical Orthodoxy, especially as articulated by John Milbank. Fair enough . . . My interest here is not to adjudicate whether Kennel’s take on these matters is exactly right. I’m more interested in asking whether this approach to Mennonite peace theology runs the danger of focusing so much on ontology and epistemology that other more fundamental dimensions of that theology fall from view in ways that are potentially distorting. One of those fundamental dimensions of Mennonite theology in the work of both Huebner and Blum, Kennel’s primary Mennonite interlocutors, is the practice of the faithful following of Jesus Christ in discipleship. I hasten to acknowledge that Kennel knows that Jesus cannot be ignored in Mennonite theology. In his broad framing and characterization of the Radical Reformation, he references “their normative reading of the life of Jesus Christ [. . .] a pacifist figure who represents a ‘third way’ between, but radically apart from, the two options of passivity and violence” (87, 88). But here, as in other places in Kennel’s argument, that central role of Jesus is mentioned but not developed much further. For example, to describe Jesus as being primarily a “pacifist figure” is not wrong but doesn’t capture a much fuller and deeper theologically developed Christology in Mennonite thought. Kennel comes tantalizingly close to recognizing a more expansive Mennonite Christology when he is describing Stanley Hauerwas’s engagement with John Milbank as part of the larger concern to characterize the relationship between Radical Orthodoxy and the Radical Reformation. Kennel quotes Hauerwas’s depiction of Milbank: “What drives Milbank’s display of the ontological relationship between nonviolence and narrative is not the epistemology and ontology of postmodernism. Rather, it is Jesus Christ, through whom we learn of God as Trinity, who is the fundamental ontological claim that must shape all other claims” (97). Hauerwas’s description of the ontological role of Jesus in Milbank’s thought can be extended to Mennonite theology, but that is not the case in Kennel’s treatment of the role of Jesus in Mennonite theology. He briefly mentions Blum’s work on Jesus (131), and characterizes Mennonites as being interested in “the pursuit of peace and the imitation of Jesus Christ” (141), which is too thin a description of the Christology of Mennonite theology. While there isn’t space in this short essay to give any kind of adequate account of Mennonite Christology, I want to refer to one of the sources Kennel uses in his book, namely Chris Huebner’s A Precarious Peace, to hint at the role of Christology within his philosophical theology. The book addresses issues of identity, theoretical closure, violence, ecumenism, and ontology (among others) in conversation with Radical Orthodoxy, and other philosophers such as Paul Virilio, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor, to name a few. Throughout these engagements, Christology rises to the surface in brief and more sustained ways, showing in various ways that peace is a gift given in Jesus Christ, an approach that refuses the reduction of Jesus to a pacifist exemplar who is to be imitated.2 In a direct engagement, Huebner complains that Milbank’s theology is “insufficiently christological to the extent that it fails to pay adequate attention to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.” Huebner admits that such a critique may be overstated, but nonetheless not without merit, since in his view, “Milbank’s Christology is problematic to the extent that it appears to relativize the significance of the identity and character of Jesus.”3 This book also includes a sermon titled “Putting Ourselves in Question: The Triumphal Entry and the Renunciation of Triumphalism,” in which Huebner makes the sermonic case that if we confess that Jesus is Lord and master, we have to not only “have our lives transformed on the basis of a redefined model of lordship,” but we must “begin to participate in a way of life that renounces mastery,” “of learning how to give up the temptation to be in control.”4

My point in making these specific references to Huebner’s work is not to adjudicate between his and Milbank’s work, or to defend his ontological arguments more broadly. Instead, I’m using these observations as a sample that reveals the significance, the “weight,” as it were, of Christology within Mennonite theology, even and maybe especially in the work of philosophical theologians such as Huebner and Blum. Whatever affinity there may be between Mennonites and Derrida, and whatever opposition there may be to Radical Orthodoxy need to give an adequate account of the Christology and its fundamental shaping power to which I’m referring. As important and generative as the highlighting of ontology may be, and Kennel’s book does an admirable job of doing just that, I worry that isolation of ontology may result in the relativization of other crucial dimensions of any approach to violence. Indeed, Kennel’s conclusion seems to say as much, when he recognizes, but without much commentary, the importance of “bringing the ethical and political reading of Jesus Christ to bear on ontological and epistemological terms [. . .]” (195). And, in his concluding “suggestion,” Kennel importantly recognizes that “the real problems of violence cannot be solved only by means of ontology and epistemology,” since “violence cannot be adequately addressed without moving back into the realm of the practices and effects that are downstream of violent ontologies [. . .]” (212).

There are of course other avenues of engagement with Kennel that are worth pursuing, such as the constructive contribution of Grace Jantzen (whose work is too often ignored by Mennonite theologians), the question of the importance (or not) of the church, the question of whether Milbank and Hauerwas are as guilty of framing the relationship of religion and secularity as conflictual as Kennel suggests, whether Kennel’s vision of being both postsecular and postreligious can give an adequate account of religion and secularity as noncompetitive, and if the notion of “social accountability” (202) can carry the freight of shaping a normative vision for the society in which we find ourselves.

Overall, I hope I have been clear in communicating my overall recognition of the importance of this project, and my gratitude to Maxwell for another fine scholarly contribution to questions of how we might live together as human beings in ways that seek the common good. Perhaps he will extend the work done here by “bringing the ethical and political reading of Jesus Christ to bear on ontological and epistemological terms [. . .]” in ways that do not use political categories for theological ends.

Max Kennel invites Mennonite philosophical theologians (and others) to “giv[e] an account to others of what value-laden boundaries are violated when we say violence has taken place” (166). A preliminary step, which may go some way to taking up that invitation, might be to offer an account of the concept of “value.” For all the weight this concept carries in Kennel’s argument, he does not define or theorize it. (“Boundary” also deserves conceptual elaboration, but that is not the focus of this response.) I’m going to take some steps toward a Mennonite “theory of value” that, I hope, will simultaneously clarify what are some of the value-laden boundaries that Mennonites might have in mind when we say that violence has taken place.

“Value” in Max’s Argument

The concept of “value” (or, commonly, “values”) has a prominent place in Kennel’s argument. He scours the pages of Jacques Derrida, John Milbank, Mennonite philosophical theologians, and Grace Jantzen to identify their “values” because, he argues, these values reveal the heart of their understandings of violence. These figures at times “share values” (17, 68, 117, 119, 158) and at other times their values diverge. Diverging values undergird diverging views on violence.

Kennel unpacks his account of violence in the following lines: “Each time the term ‘violence’ is used or criticized, an implicit normative order that places boundaries around certain values is established. Violence is defined by the violation of value-laden boundaries. Without the notion of the violation, the concept of violence is incoherent. Without boundaries, nothing is violated and no violence can be identified or opposed. Without values, boundaries are meaningless because they do not bound off or bind back anything valuable, much less something that one would desire to protect against violence. The concept of violence depends upon the notion that there are some things worth protecting around which violable boundaries can and should be maintained” (121).

Although Kennel does not define “value” or “values,” he uses the terms consistently to talk about a person or group’s high “priorities” (115), concerns, or cares—whatever it is that someone takes to be of significant importance. This pattern of usage may be sufficient for Kennel’s “diagnostic” purposes (16), but the lack of further specification does raise questions about the adoption of Kennel’s argument by the various intellectual and religious traditions he engages. From a Mennonite perspective, the emphasis on concerns and so forth may lead to an overly psychologized or spiritualized conception of value that underplays value’s persistent materiality. This, in turn, may lead to a neglect or undertheorization of violence’s material character. In other words, if we miss how “value” is always in some sense material, and we see violence as primarily about a violation of boundaried values, then we may miss the material dimensions of violence.

Toward a Mennonite Theory of Value

Mennonite theorists often give methodological priority to historical narratives. I’m accordingly going to tell two stories from the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition and relate them to some core Mennonite commitments through the centuries. (The term “Anabaptism” describes both the diffuse sixteenth-century movements out of which the Mennonite tradition developed, and the umbrella of a larger, continuing tradition that Mennonites are one part of.)

Story 1: Mother Eberly’s Coin

The first story points to a link between matters of psychological and material concern. Veronica Ulrich Eberly and her six children migrated in 1727 from the Palatinate area in the German Rhineland to Pennsylvania. Born in Switzerland in 1685, Eberly and her husband Heinrich planned a new life for their family free from the persecution that they experienced as Mennonites in Switzerland and southwest Germany. But after changing ships in Rotterdam, Heinrich claimed to need to go back for something on shore. He never returned. Mother Eberly, as she came to be known, was left to tend to her family during the Atlantic crossing and later in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Mother Eberly’s son Jacob, married and dedicated to farming his mother’s land, occasionally visited the village of Lancaster for supplies. One day Mother Eberly drew from her few funds and gave Jacob a small coin to purchase molasses for her at the village store. He took the coin but used it to purchase a cowbell, which he “rang [. . .] exuberantly as he approached home.” His mother, though, “was so disappointed that she wept bitterly.”1

Mother Eberly wept bitterly because her values were violated. These values could be defined in two ways. First, as a concern that her request for molasses be honored. Perhaps she really wanted shoo-fly pie. Or perhaps she just wanted her son to show some respect and follow through with her request. In these cases, attributing “values” to her describes her as interested in and caring about sensory pleasure and solid familial relationships. It’s easy to see how a violation of these values would lead to bitter weeping, especially given her history of depravation and abandonment.

But we’d be missing something if we neglected to see that the violation was also material or economic. Whatever his intentions or expectations, Jacob essentially stole from his mother, deepening her material depravation. Material depravation limits Mother Eberly’s capacity to pursue her desires. It is reasonable then to say that she not only values good food and family, but also economic stability—her value is not only psychological but also material.

Story 2: Ursula Jost’s Vision

The second story suggests that “spiritual” values, such as desire for God, are related to material conditions.

In 1524 Ursula Jost was living in Strasbourg with her husband Lienhard. She began to see visions, first of “the glory of the Lord” coming upon her and unfolding as “a beautiful wreath above” her.2 Other visions were of divine power and apocalyptic judgment, though often employing images drawn from ordinary life.

In a vision that seems to expand on Revelation 22, Ursula saw a “pretty green tree, which had many thousands of branches.” A fountain sprung from the tree, but two “well-dressed” men stopped it up with some dirt and the water began to flow directly from the branches “a thousandfold.”

Here’s how the vision ends: “And then I saw that there came a great host of people who were from the common folk. They drank the drops which ran off the branches, and they were all satisfied. And I saw that they had raised their hands and their heads to God the eternal Father, and to him gave the highest praise and thanks.”

Ursula and Lienhard became part of the community led by the Anabaptist missionary Melchior Hoffman. Hoffman published Ursula’s visions, and they became popular wherever he ministered. Her writings also became known to civic authorities, who opposed her influence.

Ursula’s vision connects a spiritual desire for beauty and mystical communion with the divine with ordinary material interests. The vision delights aesthetically—well-dressed men cause water to flow from the branches of a pretty green tree. These aesthetic qualities can perhaps be conceived of spiritually, as a further unfolding of the beautiful wreath of God’s glory. But the result of the men’s intervention is more than aesthetic or spiritual. It is the satisfaction of the common folk’s thirst, leading to mass worship. Again, Ursula’s spiritual interests or values are intertwined with material interests.

The Stories and the Mennonite Tradition

The entwinement of psychological, spiritual, and material values is intelligible against the background of the larger Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. Two features of this tradition stand out here. The first is the insistence that faith in God must take visible form as a transformed life. Values, in other words, shouldn’t remain only on a psychological or spiritual level, but should take material shape in the form of communal and personal practices. That leads to the second feature, in which material sharing has often been regarded as the highest of communal practices, the chief practical expression of love of God and neighbor. From early Anabaptist revolutionary peasants to Amish barn-raisings to the Ten Thousand Villages global fair-trade network, the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition has placed the wide distribution of material value at the center of its conception of what it means to pursue one’s highest psychological and spiritual concerns.3 A Mennonite theory of value therefore insists that “values” always have a material dimension, and that the achievement of one’s values always relies—to some extent at least—on a set of material conditions.

Value and Violence

This Mennonite theory of value has implications for Max’s theory of violence. If “violence” names the violation of value-laden boundaries, and the protected values always have a material dimension, then violence too always more or less strikes at one’s material interests. The materiality of violence is therefore not only an issue of whether physical blows are involved, but also concerns how a particular violation undermines the material conditions necessary for the pursuit of one’s interests. A Mennonite “account [. . .] of what value-laden boundaries are violated when we say violence has taken place” starts with the observation that, whatever else they are, value and violence are always also material. If this is the case, then a more substantive, and not merely diagnostic, understanding of violence may be warranted.

Given where the world is at, this seems like a good time for a book about violence. Each day we see images from Gaza that show horrific suffering, and there is much more we don’t see—in Gaza but also Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, and elsewhere. Beyond the destruction wrought by war, there is also terrible violence to be found in places that are supposedly at peace.

To take an example close to home, Australia (where I live[d when this response was written]) is a well-run country with widespread access to health care and other social supports. However, immigrant and Indigenous communities remain subject to grinding disadvantage entrenched through years of cruelty and neglect. These disparities are intensified by authoritarian leaders who stoke racial resentment for political advantage.

The pattern is repeated in many parts of the world: authoritarians are on the rise, democracy is under threat, and the rights of women, sexual minorities, and many others are in retreat. Because this feels like an emergency, I found it helpful to read Ontologies of Violence by Maxwell Kennel. As I’ll describe, its analysis of violence strikes me as clarifying, but I found the questions it left me with to be particularly helpful.

To my mind, the key insight of the book is that we cannot exclude violence completely, but that doesn’t mean we need to abandon it as a category of analysis or critique. The argument focuses on three sets of resources: the deconstructive philosopher Jacques Derrida, the Mennonite theologians Chris Huebner and Peter Blum, and the feminist theorist Grace Jantzen. The book is careful to acknowledge the differences among these thinkers, but it makes a convincing case that they agree that peace cannot be possessed or assured. By tracing the way violence persists in unexpected places—for instance, in the languages we speak—Kennel complicates simplistic appeals to violence while still taking violence seriously.

I’m no expert on Huebner, Blum, and Jantzen, but I did write a book about Derrida—and from that perspective, I appreciate the sensitivity of Max’s analysis. He observes at one point that “purity is a central problem for Derrida” (193), and I think that’s exactly right. In my reading, one of Derrida’s deepest instincts is that things are always more complicated, especially the distinctions we draw. Max ably develops this point in relation to religion and secularity: although some people insist that they stand on one side or the other, the secular and the religious are tightly intertwined.

The book elaborates on this insight by staging a sensitive conversation between Derrida and his Mennonite interlocutors. I found this part of the book to be particularly illuminating. Intuitively, I have sometimes thought that Derrida’s analysis of violence resonates with the Radical Reformation, but Kennel’s argument makes the connection concrete. Beyond its implications for intellectual history, this argument brought into focus a normative question that has been troubling me for some time.

The final sentence of the book issues a call to remediate violent oppositions by “forming and reforming social bonds of trust.” I find this suggestion appealing, but I’m regularly reminded that social bonds are under serious threat in many places. The book left me wondering what we should do (if we accept its argument) when we find that social bonds have broken down, not because the parties insist upon binary thinking but because trust has been repeatedly violated. Is reconciliation always required, on Kennel’s account, or are we sometimes called to engage in conflict?

Although Kennel’s analysis of violence draws upon Derrida, I think Derrida underlines the limits of reconciliation as an ideal. If I’ve understood correctly, Kennel argues that Derrida critiques oppositional thinking in order to refuse closure and keep concepts open. This seems pretty central to the book’s reading of Derrida, and it is also common to other interpreters of Derrida. I myself have said similar things: after all, my first book takes deconstruction as a discipline that resists closure to preserve the possibility of hope.

In my reading, however, there’s no need to keep the future unforeseeable, as Kennel suggests (40), for this is simply what futurity means on Derrida’s account. Nor would I say that Derrida desires openness, as Kennel does (201). In my reading, Derrida thinks openness is woven into the world, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Although Derrida emphasizes the theme of welcome and hospitality, he is also clear that you should not welcome every stranger into your home—as he observes, if you do then your loved ones may come to harm. In my reading, Derrida doesn’t stand on the side of openness, per se, but in the tension between determinate judgment and indeterminate critique.

In my reading, Derrida thinks disjunctive thinking is inevitable for the same reason that violence, metaphysics, presence, and closure are inevitable: we cannot inhabit a state of pure indeterminacy, and so the challenge is to keep judgment in motion. As Chantal Mouffe and Bonnie Honig have argued, this is a pretty good description of democratic contestation, which involves the continual renegotiation among conflicting claims. From this perspective, I think Derrida offers us tools to engage in critical, polemical, even physical acts of resistance while resisting the danger of ideological closure.

I’m not sure whether Kennel and I disagree about Derrida, so I will be interested to hear what he thinks. More broadly, I’m not confident I know what the book indicates about the larger question I’ve raised. Does this account of violence enable us to call racist, sexist, and authoritarian acts violent? What guidance does it give about whether and how to resist them? How might it speak to those moments when social bonds are a source of physical and spiritual threat? Since these questions are urgently pressing, I’m grateful for the chance to join this important conversation.

Reading Maxwell Kennel’s book, Ontologies of Violence,1 as I conduct ethnographic research on Indigenous (Anishinaabe and Cree) efforts to challenge the colonial relations entangling a range of institutional spaces, including a library, a church, and educational organizations, in Thunder Bay, Canada, has been greatly rewarding. A primary strength of Kennel’s book is that it expands, decenters, and sharpens our consideration of violence across contexts like these, from which dominant concepts of violence, including those we carry ourselves, might be unmade. By loosening our grip, or any sense of possession we feel toward the concept, Kennel’s book frees us to look for novel forms of human flourishing that invocations of violence seek to protect, while also making room for others to name violations unacknowledged by authority. The question, then, is how to move from the naming of violence to reconciliation and build relations that acknowledge violence has indeed been done.

Kennel’s book therefore allows us to engage flexibly but critically with diverse settings within which prevailing orders, including our own liberal ontology, upheld and extolled as an engine of progress, freedom, and tolerance, normalize ways of relating that others name as violent, and offers a way forward without prescribing how exactly this should be bounded. Kennel, in other words, opens and invites readers toward a deeper, more sensitive assessment of how value-laden boundaries are violated across lifeworlds, while also exploring the politico-ethical question of how one should respond after violence is invoked. As my own research clarifies, however, vigilance with regard to how history allots the authority to make these invocations, and therefore summon others such that a mutual determination is made that violence has taken place, is also important. Because as recent denialist responses to Residential School gravesites in Canada demonstrate,2 an acknowledgment of violence in history is often the starting point for any substantive discussion of reconciliation today. It is, relatedly, the removal of violence from the past, especially the notion that it was beneficent or necessary, which prevents us from seeing, accepting, and repairing surrounding destruction.

Indeed, one of the most urgent questions that Kennel’s book raised as I read it alongside conversations with my interlocutors is how colonial violence is a different and unique, and therefore specifically destructive form of violence, but also how colonialism shapes the way we conceptualize violation and our own moral boundaries. After all, despite eschewing a stable definition of violence and therefore possessing it over others, Kennel suggests, via Grace Jantzen, that we must nonetheless be able to distinguish the force of a word from that of a bomb. I agree with Kennel, and yet questions persist. How do we do this? On what basis are these evaluations or agreements formed? What criteria are invoked? And is it true that the force of weapons, such as bombs, is always incomparable to that of words? For example, does the force of a word, such as “savage,” and the concept out of which it grows, of an uncivilized, often violent subject in need of improvement, not carry a force similar to that of a bomb? How does Ontologies of Violence assist us with this process of developing agreement, differentiation, and specification? And how would Kennel articulate the importance of doing so?

I ask these questions because I believe that a continuous feature of colonial violence can be pinpointed, and that developing agreement around this is important not only because it affords intellectual coherence in the face of mounting obfuscation but also because it is politically necessary. There are, of course, risks to reduction. However, finding resemblance in a violent global process, such as settler colonialism, can also reshape where and how violence is located, experienced, and responded to, allowing differentiated populations to develop common cause and reconceptualize the problem space we inhabit as well as the horizon toward which we move. This can also lead us to the conclusion that the concepts we lend authority are limited by the very histories of violence we study or inherit, preventing us from considering the present through all of the concepts that make up life around us. This is something I think about often as an anthropologist, whose discipline is deeply imbricated with colonial knowledge production, but which also values the emic, and I wonder how the force of this history shapes Kennel’s writing process and the sources from which he draws.

I raise all of this because colonial violence is unique in its capacity to remove entire populations, and especially specific types of persons within them and their sources of knowledge, out of time, but also of fixing them in place. In turn, concepts through which many colonized persons articulate violations of their own morally laden boundaries are not only sliced through and overrun, but also contained in zones of otherness outside of which they cannot travel or gather authority in relation to others. Without this freedom, especially following the arrival of modernity, the persons who connect others with these concepts, for example in Canada’s Indigenous communities, including Elders and Knowledge Keepers, are in turn eliminated, contained, or expected to wither away, until their concepts are abandoned or replaced by those that “truly” secure flourishing (but in actuality advance dispossession). Think, here, of reserves or Residential Schools, institutions through which Indigenous persons have been coerced and conscripted into a liberal, capitalist, theologically destructive Christian relation to the world, and within which grounded forms of knowledge are denied any worth.

I have reckoned with the construction of these hierarchically mediated boundaries and the (en)closures that result during my time in Thunder Bay, when, for example, Elders, Chiefs, and senior staff members are invited to “advise” and “consult” institutions on their relationships with Indigenous persons. Rarely, however, are these persons given discretion over an institution’s broader strategic mission. Indigenous persons, in other words, are afforded authority to advance inclusion and therefore fulfill Canada’s multicultural promise, but not to engender processes of transformation. Indeed, if a sentence, unattributed to a single person and instead a composite of many conversations, captures a consistent sentiment expressed to me over the past two years, it is this: “we have answers, too.” By drawing our attention to the wide range of answers that we often close ourselves to and seeking out his own through a generous, multidisciplinary ethic of reading, Kennel helps us imagine but also see why life is enriched beyond closure.

The question then becomes how we face a violently ordered world, especially if it threatens survival, whether through deaths at the hands of the police, disproportionately high suicide rates, or even climate change. The tactics emphasized by Kennel, but also Anishinaabe scholars, such as Aaron Mills3 and Gerald Vizenor,4 interestingly converge around a nonviolent ethic of relational transformation. Rather than seeking the total negation of violence, and therefore the possession of purity, they instead align behind an ethic of invitation. This, of course, contrasts with the ostensibly necessary violence employed by anti-colonial movements across other contexts. Kennel does not rule out acts of what he calls “anti-violence,” including those of self-defense, but he does implore us to find a pathway forward whereby we avoid “exertions of coercive force in how one speaks, thinks, and knows” (Kennel 2023, 112–13). I am very much in agreement with Kennel here. And yet I cannot help but dwell on the fact that the threats facing us are urgent. Nonviolence, as a result, can feel difficult to sustain. How, then, do we make a case for nonviolence that appeals to this sense of urgency, and therefore to someone like Fanon, or to someone staring down the barrel of a gun as their land is expropriated, for whom violent transformation might look regrettably necessary? What is it about violence, moreover, that makes it such an intoxicating alternative? And how can advocates of nonviolence sustain the commitment from others but also their own energy when it fails to bring about transformation?

I do, after all, think that there is a convincing philosophical but also empirical case to make for the efficacy of nonviolence,5 but I wonder how this case can be translated into a set of practices at ground level that can invite those tempted by violence away from negation, while at the same time acknowledging its magnetic pull. It is likely important, consequently, to understand how nonviolence is framed by its critics. Is it seen as weak? As cowardly? As not reckoning with the so-called realities of the world? How can a bridge be built that leads away from these sentiments? This could be an interesting and especially useful way forward for the study of nonviolence, especially through the empirical study and philosophical reflection on how de-escalation works. I think here of a story told by Gerald Vizenor in his most recent book, Native Provenance, about a group of activists who entered a community years ago, wielding guns. We do not learn what the activists were facing, but we can imagine the conditions: dispossession, poverty, child removal, and contaminated land. They must have, understandably, been angry and filled with rage. However, as Vizenor recalls, after entering the community the activists were made to sit in a local classroom, legs crammed into pupils’ desks, where they listened to teachings. The activists, ultimately, dropped their weapons. A force stronger than violence prevailed.

This leads me to my final observation. As an anthropologist working within institutional spaces positively transformed but also profoundly limited by liberal universalism, a universalism that, once naturalized, carries incredible force, it is with curiosity and interest that I ask whether behind Kennel’s conceptualization of violence and human flourishing and that of Mills in his dissertation on constitutional orders, All That Has Been Given for Living Well Together: One Vision of Anishinaabe Constitutionalism, are projects that, in their own particular ways, make universal claims: Christian for Kennel and rooted for Mills. Both, in turn, seem interested in how they can bring their own concepts of human flourishing to the world, while at the same time looking to expand and enrich their own concepts following engagement with lifeworlds other than their own (albeit perhaps only those through which their own foundations are affirmed). Ultimately, then, I wonder whether they depend on some sort of foundational justification and agreement for their critique and pathway forward. After all, a feature ultimately common to the works of Kennel and Mills is their claim to know the world is in some way suffused by order and purpose.

This, in turn, is where I and these scholars must respectfully depart, if indeed I have understood them correctly. Because for Kennel and Mills it is the Creator, rather than us as humans, whose authority is ultimately sought and entrusted, albeit perhaps never truly known. I am interested in whether, and if so how, this trust helps sustain their mutual embrace of nonviolence, assuring justice may be deferred but will ultimately be done. I am also interested in what forms of relationality are made (im)possible because of this trust, and how this shapes their enactment of politics in this life. What is also common to the works of Kennel and Mills, however, is how these foundations are defended (a feature I have also found in the projects of many of my interlocutors). And it is here that scholars and practitioners looking to work critically and respectfully across difference may find value. Indeed, although they make clear what kind of world they want to live in, their arguments are not forced on the reader. Rather, they put forward unimposing but strong defenses of their own concepts of violence. And in developing virtues like humility, generosity, and openness, but defending and perhaps even doubting what one holds to be sacred and true, I wonder if Mills and Kennel provide us with one of the most compelling reasons to engage with their scholarship: an experience of how the exchange and contestation of ideas might take place in a renewed, expanded, and less violent public sphere.

I learned a lot from Max Kennel’s reflection on violence and his tour de force on the work of Jacques Derrida, Mennonite philosophical theologians, and Grace Jantzen. Ontologies of Violence’s engagement with these texts is careful and caring—it shows how critique can entail a generous way of cohabiting a space of problematization. This is significant because if critique means collective growth instead of narcissistic self-curation, it must resist being hijacked by academic attachments to competition, negation, and displacement. This book, in my view, embodies pacifist scholarly praxis.

Kennel’s approach to violence as a diagnostic concept is both generative and effective. Put simply, one can really know someone’s values through what they name as violent. I agree that violence is “exacerbated by defensive, reactive, and retaliatory responses” (Kennel 2023, 4). Furthermore, I cannot agree more with that “[. . .] part of the difficulty in naming violence comes from the desire to keep violence safely separated from language, thinking, knowing, and being” (Kennel 2023, 6). In fact, violence can be registered only when these sites are involved. The violence of interpretation is unavoidable to make sense of violence as violence. In phenomenological terms, the relationality of things and people in the world troubles stark distinctions between the physical and the symbolic, and this observation does fully apply to the problématique of violence.

I felt at home in Ontologies of Violence’s pages. This probably reveals alignment in terms of value-laden boundaries. My work on [the politics of political science] uncovers how academia and knowledge production are part and parcel of our violent world (Ravecca 2019). Many, if not most, political scientists seem committed to not seeing this. The convenient self-exclusion from what counts as political manufactures the impossibility of reading the—sometimes violent—political effects of the discipline’s conceptions and approaches to politics. Given that power dynamics shape political analysis and that politics has an epistemic dimension, critical engagement with academic analyses is, in my view, essential for making sense of power and politics. Without disciplinary and personal self-reflection, any attempt to unpack politics will remain severely incomplete. Similarly, Kennel’s study effectively shows that unpacking violence demands looking “inward.” Violence cannot be grasped without considering the production and reproduction of the self.1 Ontologies of Violence is a great companion for those trying to grasp “violence”—including their own—in its full complexity.

Violent Normalcies

For sure, “charges of violence are often accompanied by polemical terms like fanaticism, extremism, terrorism, or radicalism, each of which rely upon problematic distinctions between legitimate state violence and illegitimate insurgent violence, or idealized relations between a stable center and radical fringe” (Kennel 2023, 14). The questions of who controls and assigns these categorizations and with what effects need to be relentlessly asked.

Some of my recent work focuses on [the far-right] (Ravecca et al. 2023). Like many others, I worry about the violence its global rise brings into the world. However, I am uncomfortable with how it frequently becomes a scapegoat for the injustices shaping our contemporaneity. In Javier Milei, Jair Bolsonaro, or Donald Trump—following Ontologies of Violence’s terminology—differences become displacement, but is this the case only for them? The (self) curation of a nonviolent and innocent liberal center (what Kennel calls the stable center) erases the intimate, historically rooted connections between reactionary politics and mainstream social and political formations. Thus, the defense of privilege and inequality by established actors in academia and politics merges with shallow moralism and the construction of the far-right as their monstrous other.

Conversations on the far-right are commonly engulfed by an elitist anxiety that denies the power of democracy and quietly naturalizes the status quo (i.e., neoliberal capitalism). Anti-populism media and scholarly narratives are revealing in this regard: The rabble should behave and choose the correct elite to rule them, not those backward strongmen that sweet liberals dislike so much . . . The fact that extremism is commonly associated with sexism and racism (which are clearly present in “normal” society as well, anyway) but is never applied to classism says it all. Advocacy for economic inequality does not make you an extremist in the eyes of far-right studies. It is in this landscape of deception that the beautiful notion of “radical”—of going to the roots of the matter and of doing deep examinations that resist the fear of what can be found—has become associated with terror and violence. This authoritarian move against social transformation is mainstream.

This is to say that oppression can come from unexpected places and manifest in surprising ways. Unless [attachments to innocence] are shaken, (our) violence remains unreadable (Ravecca and Dauphinee 2022).

Choose Your Violence . . . Well

Can we change anything significant in the world without crossing anyone’s value-laden boundaries? And is it possible to theorize violence without centering a constellation of themes that include power, oppression, liberation, and the historical circumstances of neoliberal capitalism? I wonder to what extent the diagnostic approach to violence remains attached to a proceduralist logic. Kennel’s (leftist) political views are clear from the outset, yet they remain in the background of this theoretical journey.

I am resistant to the expression “the helpless.” Still, Adriana Cavarero’s observation about the ferocious forms of violence against them is powerful and appears twice: in the book’s Introduction and on page 203 (“Violent Intersections”). These two points delineate a normative arc and reveal value-laden boundaries. While opening the conversation to different experiences and notions of violence is important and probably even vital, it also risks falling into sameness (or into a landscape of equal differences) where, in fact, there are enormous asymmetries of power. In other words, if we, by theoretical design, weave conversations on violence into queries around inequality, domination, oppression, and the like, then diagnostics become insufficient. I hope Kennel dives deeper into the tensions between pluralization and political action in future projects. As a friendly provocation, I will say that Ontologies of Violence stays within the territory of violent abstraction.

Political struggle and world-changing interventions require choosing a specific political economy of violence and persuading others that this is the way to go. For this reason, I am unsure that we need “coalitional forms of antiviolence” (Kennel 2023, 199). I worry that this aspiration unintentionally reinserts the types of liberal frameworks that have neutralized and co-opted (identity) politics by conflating transformative interventions with what opponents dismissively call “political correctness.” Can critique without displacement unleash transformative politics, or is it a dangerous leash? The expression “intersecting identities without violent displacement” (Kennel 2023, 211) is compelling, and yet again, we need to consider what these intersections need to displace to remain emancipatory. Clearly, the left needs to articulate broad coalitions, abandon essentializing and ontologizing forms of identity politics, and avoid absorbing otherness into sameness. Nevertheless, any form of constructive politics (Táíwò 2022) will be experienced as violent by some. In fact, probably by many. I want to challenge the (violent?) illusion that we can extricate violence from politics. The left needs to engage in a deep and open conversation on violence. This means avoiding an in-advance and tout court rejection.

These points of tension do not diminish my appreciation for the deconstruction-inspired move of understanding violence as a diagnostic concept. Ontologies of Violence is an invitation to keep the space open and avoid dogmatism. This is very much needed because harm, abuse, and oppression can be done while invoking any ideology, category, author, or theory. I like to say that we lack the vocabulary to listen to the victims of the present moment. To a significant extent, we do not know what we are doing. In Kennel’s terms, we cannot be certain of what value-laden boundaries we are crossing. Someone else needs to explain that to us. For this reason, I have been invested in the [narrative voice] as a form of (democratic) encounter where others can teach us about our own violences (Ravecca and Dauphinee 2018). This encounter might allow us to liberate ourselves from the fixation on specific categories of liberation. This relates to the crucial point about the need to avoid the temptation to conceive of religion and secularity in competitive terms (Kennel 2023, 182). After all, and I speak as a secular person here, even considering just vulgar numbers, it is clear that, regardless of how we conceive it, emancipation cannot happen without religious people.

I ultimately agree with Kennel that “what matters more than coming to rest on a singular definition of violence is how the normative orders that underpin the diverse uses of the term ‘violence’ come into contact with one another, and what matters even more than that is how we imagine the relationship between competing accounts and definitions of violence” (Kennel 2023, 22). As previously said, this pluralization per se does not respond to the specific needs of the oppressed, and yet only these moments of pluralization help us listen otherwise and read silences. The future stays open as long as we allow the other to remain as a question.

The Reification of the West / Activist Impossibility / Academia beyond Violence

The book is generous in meaningful and inspiring visions that linger with the reader. “Reciprocities that dignify differences” (Kennel 2023, 100) and “a new imaginary of beauty which makes it possible to choose life” (Jantzen, quoted in Kennel 2023, 169) are two of them. These aspirations, however, can reinscribe what they resist in subtle ways. For example, the feminist and life-choosing vindication of Sappho might reenact the ahistorical and arbitrary construct of “the West.” This gesture reifies an imaginary geography that neglects the porosity between identities and experiences (Buck-Morss 2009) and that itself constitutes an act of displacement.

The overlap between reproach and reification of the West shows how the same fragment (of experience, of text) can oppress and liberate simultaneously. Both activism and knowledge warrant a “[. . .] a messianic and apocalyptic critique of possessive desire that refuses to secure knowledge of and exert control over a codified relationship between origins, essences, and ends [. . .]” (Kennel 2023, 134, on P. Travis Kroeker). But, if our beings and vocabularies are shaped by the displacement of others—in other words, if we have become destruction—is there a different place to return to? Is it possible to avoid ways of approaching dialogue that desire to control its outcome? Is it possible to avoid controlling ways of conceptualizing peace? How can we transform desire? Ontologies of Violence asks us, its readers, questions that matter.

Finally, if peace begins at home (Jantzen, quoted in Kennel 2023, 186), academic attachments to competition, negation, and displacement must be addressed in our conversation on violence. Academia and academics love the violence of inequality. While we deconstruct violence out there (and out there can include “mainstream academia,” “my department,” “positivism,” “neoliberalism,” etc.), critical spaces have their own marks of prestige and hierarchy. At some level, it is obvious that intellectual merit, including that one produced in the name of critique, is not completely different from, for example, economic wealth. In both cases, merit and privilege mesh in uncontrollable ways. The monuments of critique have barbarism, perhaps genocide, within. Critical theory is both a commodity and a violent illusion. Fortunately, that is not the full story: there are efforts, such as Ontologies of Violence, to bring theory to life.

References

Buck-Morss, S. 2009. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Kennel, M. 2023. Ontologies of Violence: Deconstruction, Pacifism, and Displacement. Leiden: Brill.

Táíwò, O. 2022. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Ravecca, P. 2019. The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences. London: Routledge.

Ravecca, P., M. Schenck, B. Fonseca, and D. Forteza. 2023. “What Are They Doing Right? Tweeting Right-Wing Intersectionality in Latin America.” Globalizations 20, no. 1: 38–59.

Ravecca, P., and E. Dauphinee. 2022. “What Is Left for Critique? On the Perils of Innocence in Neoliberal Times.” Las Torres de Lucca: International Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no. 1: 37–49.

Ravecca, P., and E. Dauphinee. 2018. “Narrative and the Possibilities for Scholarship.” International Political Sociology 12, no. 2: 125–38.

In what ways is a “society of enmity” still a society of normativity? Do theoretical tools developed to analyze the conceits and failures of political liberalism still apply in a time of widespread “exit from democracy”? Without pretenses of tolerance, inclusion, and d

In what ways is a “society of enmity” still a society of normativity? Do theoretical tools developed to analyze the conceits and failures of political liberalism still apply in a time of widespread “exit from democracy”? Without pretenses of tolerance, inclusion, and desire for diversity, social and political violence does not wear the liberal mask of universality. It does not offer the usual benevolent alibis in any recognizable form; it brags about rather than hides desires to dominate and harm.

Maxwell Kennel’s Ontologies of Violence: Deconstruction, Pacifism, and Displacement argues that it is precisely hostilities toward difference that animate political enmity. He focuses on applications of the term “violence” to examine convergences and disjunctures among thinkers who variously formulate visions for peace, justice, and pacifism: “The boundaries that implicitly define uses of the term ‘violence’ can tell us much about those who lay charges of violence, reject charges of violence, or critique charges of violence, serving as a kind of litmus test for deeper-held values that define personhood, agency, power, and the sanctity or dignity of life (human and otherwise)” (Kennel, 22). Questions of which actions, performed by whom, register as violence—the distortions they affix and the vulnerabilities they create—surface unstated assumptions and goals. Rather than assume shared understanding, Kennel argues that we should ask, “What are the boundaries that are violated when violence is done? What normative presuppositions undergird those boundaries? What priorities and values are protected by specific uses of the term?” (136)

Kennel is particularly interested in the ways that Radical Orthodox, Radical Reformation, and Mennonite theologians engage with deconstructive theory. He forges connecting threads that “challenge the notion that the world is essentially a violent place in which things will necessarily exist at the expense of other things and boundaries will inevitably be violated by antagonistic displacements” (13). He seeks strategies to reroute zero-sum oppositions into visions of a world that would allow heterogeneous forms of being, religious and otherwise, to thrive. One crucial strategy is to strive for humility about our capacity to discern with certainty whether violence is present or absent. Through detailed readings of Jacques Derrida, Kennel references the combination of force and undecidability that resides in law and language. He reads Mennonite theologians resonantly claim that there is difficulty in saying “with certainty what peace” means, and danger in thinking “that achieving a pure peace without any violence [is] possible” (138). Certainty easily inclines us to violence, giving us preauthorization for what it will take to institute already known ends (123).

Debates over what constitutes violence are necessarily accompanied by debates over what violence might be justified. Built into the philosophical fables of political liberalism is a certain peace with violence, rooted in the very places that we tend to associate with violence’s prohibition and limitation. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, for instance, is subsumed into liberal explanations for the social contract that consolidates power and force. The State of Nature’s amorality carries danger, “But whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good: And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, evill; And of his contempt, Vile, and Inconsiderable. For these words of Good, evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them.” At the same time, Hobbes fixed both goodness and justice under the prerogative of the sovereign. “To the care of the Soveraign, belongeth the making of Good Lawes. But what is a good Law? By a Good Law, I mean not a Just Law: for no Law can be Unjust.” The Laws of Nature would lead humanity to seek peace, accept reciprocal constraints on rights for the sake of mutual protection, and observe justice by keeping covenants. Yet Hobbes does not think that nature is what occurs automatically; he posits that only by “terrour” can people be made to obey the Laws of Nature: “And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” Hobbes’s account of the relationship between law, goodness, and justice is rather deconstructive. That is, he recognizes the lack of intrinsic justification behind political authority, the dependency of Law on force, and the passage of all social contract through a linguistic field in which meaning is not absolute.

I recall Hobbes, not because his decidedly illiberal thought is the vehicle for the undoing of liberalism, but because he is acutely concerned with the threat of “war” lurking at the edges of sociality. If this threat resurfaces in the contemporary society of enmity, we should also acknowledge what the fantasy of a world made safe by a liberal social contract entails in practice. Its features as delineated by generations of postcolonial, decolonial, queer, and Black radical thinkers include: 1) massive state violence enforcing imperial and racial hierarchies, across “foreign” and “domestic” geographies, often in the name of safety; 2) nonrecognition of the ways that state violence, including war, permissively models and contributes to interpersonal and group violence; 3) state-enforced modes of normativity that both reflect and constitute who is a sanctioned object of violence or whose violation will not register as violent. Liberalism structures and manages violence by means of containment, assimilation, and abjection.

I see Kennel reaching for a mode of thought that does not imagine domination—or, as Hobbes would have it, terror—as the only possible protection against war. I see him wrestling with the desire to make normative theological and ethical claims while trying not to repeat the violence of prescriptive normativity. In refusing the false comfort that one can be decisively nonviolent, he opens avenues for self-critique that accounts for more than ideal principles. In analyzing Grace Jantzen’s opposition to the Hobbesian narrative and her determination “that violence cannot and should not be solved by means of violence,” Kennel joins her search for another kind of exit—from competitive sociality that tries to overcome vulnerability (155).

I started at the end when I asked to what extent the society of enmity revolves around normativity. Kennel’s conclusion races through decolonial and intersectional frameworks at a dizzying pace that raises a plethora of complex issues. I was struck by its fleeting juxtaposition of Achille Mbembe and Judith Butler (207), which led me to consider how normativity features in what Mbembe calls the “exit from democracy.” I almost wanted the book to begin again from this point, since Butler has long been preoccupied with understanding how people who are by some criteria recognized as people fall outside the scope of those considered human, worthy of life, and grievable in their death. The themes they take up in The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020), cited in Kennel, revive questions about vulnerability, personhood, interdependence, responsibility, and even the definition of violence that they began asking in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Giving an Account of Oneself (2003), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), and Undoing Gender (2004). A thorough historiography of Butler’s work is unnecessary, but their trajectory for thinking violence and nonviolence repeatedly emphasizes the psychic operations that entrench social hierarchies and make ordinary people their agents—the desires, fears, losses, and illusions that naturalize exclusion and harm. These psychic dimensions of power and attachment are critical for understanding how a wide political spectrum of subjects can overlook or underestimate the violence purveyed by racial colonial hierarchies and their normative modes of gender and sexuality.

In Necropolitics, Mbembe resonantly identifies a shift within democratic cultures that is surfacing previously suppressed desires and affects. The genre of modern democracy that seems to be unraveling in Global North contexts, Mbembe points out, co-emerged with modern forms of colonialism and slavery. “The history of modern democracy is, at bottom, a history with two faces, and even two bodies—the solar body, on the one hand, and the nocturnal body, on the other. The major emblems of this nocturnal body are the colonial empire and the pro-slavery state—and more precisely the plantation and the penal colony” (Mbembe, 22). What are sometimes taught as the contradictions between democracy and enslavement, egalitarian ideals and drastically unequal realities, disguise inherent entanglements. In ways that apply spatially as well as conceptually for settler colonial nation-states, Mbembe claims, “The colony is not external to democracy and is not necessarily located outside its walls. Democracy bears the colony within it, just as colonialism bears democracy, often in the guise of a mask” (Mbembe, 27). To be an enfranchised member of the colonial state is to participate in violence. It is also, likely, to be in some degree of denial about the historicity and entanglement of one’s immediate surroundings.

I want to return to what I see as Kennel’s reflections on the difficulty and necessity of relinquishing domination. Developing “an ontology in which things do not exist at the expense of other things” (170) may be a dispositional precondition for this project. It is certainly at odds with racial colonial capitalism, which makes competition a seemingly necessary feature of survival. The process of unwinding the desire, affect, and fear that cling to racial and colonial power might be thought of as a nocturnal nonviolence that refuses selective identification with the solar body. Beyond simplistic and racializing associations with darkness, the nocturnal might signal the need to attend to that which is done unconsciously, out of sight, or in one’s sleep. It is not an achievement of nonviolence, but a method for reworking attachments to both hierarchy and enmity. At the same time, it cannot “shy away from conflict by means of mediating gestures.” My lingering questions for Kennel concern the practices that he asserts must exceed ontologies and epistemologies (212): What kinds of active confrontation might be necessary for challenging enmity? Is the “sustained process of disinvestment” that he believes “must be undertaken by those who have perpetrated and continue to benefit from the perpetration of all forms of violence” (209) a mode of confrontation with(in) oneself? How might the messy layers of such confrontations reveal and transform one’s understanding of violence?

esire for diversity, social and political violence does not wear the liberal mask of universality. It does not offer the usual benevolent alibis in any recognizable form; it brags about rather than hides desires to dominate and harm.

Maxwell Kennel’s Ontologies of Violence: Deconstruction, Pacifism, and Displacement argues that it is precisely hostilities toward difference that animate political enmity. He focuses on applications of the term “violence” to examine convergences and disjunctures among thinkers who variously formulate visions for peace, justice, and pacifism: “The boundaries that implicitly define uses of the term ‘violence’ can tell us much about those who lay charges of violence, reject charges of violence, or critique charges of violence, serving as a kind of litmus test for deeper-held values that define personhood, agency, power, and the sanctity or dignity of life (human and otherwise)” (Kennel, 22). Questions of which actions, performed by whom, register as violence—the distortions they affix and the vulnerabilities they create—surface unstated assumptions and goals. Rather than assume shared understanding, Kennel argues that we should ask, “What are the boundaries that are violated when violence is done? What normative presuppositions undergird those boundaries? What priorities and values are protected by specific uses of the term?” (136)

Kennel is particularly interested in the ways that Radical Orthodox, Radical Reformation, and Mennonite theologians engage with deconstructive theory. He forges connecting threads that “challenge the notion that the world is essentially a violent place in which things will necessarily exist at the expense of other things and boundaries will inevitably be violated by antagonistic displacements” (13). He seeks strategies to reroute zero-sum oppositions into visions of a world that would allow heterogeneous forms of being, religious and otherwise, to thrive. One crucial strategy is to strive for humility about our capacity to discern with certainty whether violence is present or absent. Through detailed readings of Jacques Derrida, Kennel references the combination of force and undecidability that resides in law and language. He reads Mennonite theologians resonantly claim that there is difficulty in saying “with certainty what peace” means, and danger in thinking “that achieving a pure peace without any violence [is] possible” (138). Certainty easily inclines us to violence, giving us preauthorization for what it will take to institute already known ends (123).

Debates over what constitutes violence are necessarily accompanied by debates over what violence might be justified. Built into the philosophical fables of political liberalism is a certain peace with violence, rooted in the very places that we tend to associate with violence’s prohibition and limitation. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, for instance, is subsumed into liberal explanations for the social contract that consolidates power and force. The State of Nature’s amorality carries danger, “But whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good: And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, evill; And of his contempt, Vile, and Inconsiderable. For these words of Good, evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them.” At the same time, Hobbes fixed both goodness and justice under the prerogative of the sovereign. “To the care of the Soveraign, belongeth the making of Good Lawes. But what is a good Law? By a Good Law, I mean not a Just Law: for no Law can be Unjust.” The Laws of Nature would lead humanity to seek peace, accept reciprocal constraints on rights for the sake of mutual protection, and observe justice by keeping covenants. Yet Hobbes does not think that nature is what occurs automatically; he posits that only by “terrour” can people be made to obey the Laws of Nature: “And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” Hobbes’s account of the relationship between law, goodness, and justice is rather deconstructive. That is, he recognizes the lack of intrinsic justification behind political authority, the dependency of Law on force, and the passage of all social contract through a linguistic field in which meaning is not absolute.

I recall Hobbes, not because his decidedly illiberal thought is the vehicle for the undoing of liberalism, but because he is acutely concerned with the threat of “war” lurking at the edges of sociality. If this threat resurfaces in the contemporary society of enmity, we should also acknowledge what the fantasy of a world made safe by a liberal social contract entails in practice. Its features as delineated by generations of postcolonial, decolonial, queer, and Black radical thinkers include: 1) massive state violence enforcing imperial and racial hierarchies, across “foreign” and “domestic” geographies, often in the name of safety; 2) nonrecognition of the ways that state violence, including war, permissively models and contributes to interpersonal and group violence; 3) state-enforced modes of normativity that both reflect and constitute who is a sanctioned object of violence or whose violation will not register as violent. Liberalism structures and manages violence by means of containment, assimilation, and abjection.

I see Kennel reaching for a mode of thought that does not imagine domination—or, as Hobbes would have it, terror—as the only possible protection against war. I see him wrestling with the desire to make normative theological and ethical claims while trying not to repeat the violence of prescriptive normativity. In refusing the false comfort that one can be decisively nonviolent, he opens avenues for self-critique that accounts for more than ideal principles. In analyzing Grace Jantzen’s opposition to the Hobbesian narrative and her determination “that violence cannot and should not be solved by means of violence,” Kennel joins her search for another kind of exit—from competitive sociality that tries to overcome vulnerability (155).

I started at the end when I asked to what extent the society of enmity revolves around normativity. Kennel’s conclusion races through decolonial and intersectional frameworks at a dizzying pace that raises a plethora of complex issues. I was struck by its fleeting juxtaposition of Achille Mbembe and Judith Butler (207), which led me to consider how normativity features in what Mbembe calls the “exit from democracy.” I almost wanted the book to begin again from this point, since Butler has long been preoccupied with understanding how people who are by some criteria recognized as people fall outside the scope of those considered human, worthy of life, and grievable in their death. The themes they take up in The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020), cited in Kennel, revive questions about vulnerability, personhood, interdependence, responsibility, and even the definition of violence that they began asking in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Giving an Account of Oneself (2003), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), and Undoing Gender (2004). A thorough historiography of Butler’s work is unnecessary, but their trajectory for thinking violence and nonviolence repeatedly emphasizes the psychic operations that entrench social hierarchies and make ordinary people their agents—the desires, fears, losses, and illusions that naturalize exclusion and harm. These psychic dimensions of power and attachment are critical for understanding how a wide political spectrum of subjects can overlook or underestimate the violence purveyed by racial colonial hierarchies and their normative modes of gender and sexuality.

In Necropolitics, Mbembe resonantly identifies a shift within democratic cultures that is surfacing previously suppressed desires and affects. The genre of modern democracy that seems to be unraveling in Global North contexts, Mbembe points out, co-emerged with modern forms of colonialism and slavery. “The history of modern democracy is, at bottom, a history with two faces, and even two bodies—the solar body, on the one hand, and the nocturnal body, on the other. The major emblems of this nocturnal body are the colonial empire and the pro-slavery state—and more precisely the plantation and the penal colony” (Mbembe, 22). What are sometimes taught as the contradictions between democracy and enslavement, egalitarian ideals and drastically unequal realities, disguise inherent entanglements. In ways that apply spatially as well as conceptually for settler colonial nation-states, Mbembe claims, “The colony is not external to democracy and is not necessarily located outside its walls. Democracy bears the colony within it, just as colonialism bears democracy, often in the guise of a mask” (Mbembe, 27). To be an enfranchised member of the colonial state is to participate in violence. It is also, likely, to be in some degree of denial about the historicity and entanglement of one’s immediate surroundings.

I want to return to what I see as Kennel’s reflections on the difficulty and necessity of relinquishing domination. Developing “an ontology in which things do not exist at the expense of other things” (170) may be a dispositional precondition for this project. It is certainly at odds with racial colonial capitalism, which makes competition a seemingly necessary feature of survival. The process of unwinding the desire, affect, and fear that cling to racial and colonial power might be thought of as a nocturnal nonviolence that refuses selective identification with the solar body. Beyond simplistic and racializing associations with darkness, the nocturnal might signal the need to attend to that which is done unconsciously, out of sight, or in one’s sleep. It is not an achievement of nonviolence, but a method for reworking attachments to both hierarchy and enmity. At the same time, it cannot “shy away from conflict by means of mediating gestures.” My lingering questions for Kennel concern the practices that he asserts must exceed ontologies and epistemologies (212): What kinds of active confrontation might be necessary for challenging enmity? Is the “sustained process of disinvestment” that he believes “must be undertaken by those who have perpetrated and continue to benefit from the perpetration of all forms of violence” (209) a mode of confrontation with(in) oneself? How might the messy layers of such confrontations reveal and transform one’s understanding of violence?