Love & Arms: Violence and Justification after Levinas by Helen Douglas (Trivium Publications)
How should we respond to violence and injustice?
A famous anti-war slogan of the late 1960s stated that “fighting for peace is like fucking for chastity”.
Yet, according to an aphorism attributed in some form or other to Edmund Burke: “All it takes for evil to triumph is for decent people to do nothing.”
If these two assertions are at all plausible, then we face the choice between incoherence or inconsistency on the one hand and inefficiency on the other. Neither is attractive for those who are committed to resistance but who are unsure about the direction their commitment should take.
This characterises the paradox of just violence, which is at the heart of Helen Douglas’s book.
How does one resist aggression without becoming a functional cog in the perpetual cycle of violence, aggression and injustice, a vicious circle that involves not only negation of the aggressor’s humanity (“he’s not human”; “he’s a monster”), but also, importantly, the diminution of the activist’s human dignity?
Making ethical sense of things
Douglas, a Canadian with a personal history of involvement in the South African anti-apartheid struggle, draws chiefly on the thoughts and writings of the Lithuania-born French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in her attempt to make ethical sense of the dilemma. The problem is that any justification of a violent act tends to lose sight of what makes violence and injustice, especially violent injustice, ethically wrong in the first place. Or does it?
The ethical problem of violence turns on the issue of justification. When, if ever, is violence justified? If it is, then what form should violence take? Is only retributive violence justified? Or is preventive violence permissible, too? Not according to the argument advanced in the first chapter, where the paradox of just violence receives an initial exploration: “In violently resisting unjust violence, one finds oneself ethically obligated to do the wrong thing.”
Douglas examines justification of such resistance to aggression in terms of fairness and proportional retaliation (which explains why preventive violence cannot be condoned), social approval and conventional endorsement, and immediate retribution, as in self-defence.
Levinas occupies pride of place in chapter two, which is, in some sense, the most difficult chapter to wade through in this book. When Douglas expresses an awareness of “Levinas’s excesses”, she is not referring to the philosopher’s verbal intemperance, it would appear. The writer herself is prone to indulging in a fair amount of fancy etymological footwork and portentous capitalising of key nouns. Chronicling the phenomenality of contact, the chapter provides careful analysis of “proximity”, “Self” and “Other” and paves the way towards what turns out to be an important distinction: between having a face and being faceless.
The development of the notion of “having a face”, in the sense of “showing” a face, is significant in terms of being able to make sense of proximity, of ethical obligation and responsibility, and especially of justice.
Different kinds of violence
With the desired groundwork done in chapter two, Douglas finds herself in a position to respond to the “question of how the struggle against violence — which is not necessarily a refusal of violence — could avoid instituting further violence”.
Levinas’s challenge implies that there must be a way to distinguish between different kinds of violence, namely “between the ‘bad violence’ of aggression and the ‘just violence’ of resistance to aggression”. Both Douglas and Levinas appear to find the Burkean dictum compelling. As Douglas puts it, “Bad guys fight to win”, and a commitment to non-violence easily translates into mere non-resistance, which involves a failure to honour one’s obligations to those at the receiving end of “bad violence” or aggression and, which, indeed, makes them conspire in the injustice done to those “in proximity”.
What is a human rights activist permitted to do in terms of resisting — for example — patriarchal laws and customs involving violence such as clitoridectomy, virginity testing, honour killings and the like? What is an appropriate response to an organisation or institution perpetrating economic injustice against its employees? If I act or resist on behalf of someone else, am I not encroaching on a person’s agency, diminishing that person even further? What is the status of the violence committed by someone who performs a requested abortion following rape? What about the violent actions of animal liberationists?
The answers to these questions are contained in this book, but they are not given explicitly. Although some may see this as a virtue of Douglas’s short but dense treatise, others may regard it as the book’s greatest shortcoming.
No quick answers
Take, for example, the statement: “Justice is only an issue in the complexities of the interhuman.” Is the emphasis here on “complexities” or on “interhuman”? If the interhuman was a less complex realm, would justice cease to be an issue? Or do considerations of justice simply fail to obtain in human-nonhuman relationships? Or does Douglas mean something else entirely? If so, what?
Those who seek an entry point to the work of Levinas will be richly rewarded. (The book’s appendix contains an excerpt from Levinas’s Otherwise than Being.) Those who seek quick and clear answers to certain questions about matters of life and death will have to invest a considerable amount of patient detective work.
Nonetheless, Love & Arms exhibits a combination of analytical rigour, compassion and frequently poetic commitment — a rare achievement.