Critique of Violence

Beatrice Hanssen was trained in Comparative Literature at Johns Hopkins University and is Associat Professor of German at Harvard University. She is the author of Walter Benhamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (1998) and an editor of The Turn to Ethics (Routledge, 2000).

"Critique of Violence" is a highly original and lucid investigation of the heated controversy between poststructuralism and critical theory. Leading theorist Beatrice Hanssen uses Walter Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence" as a guide to analyze the contentious debate, shifting the emphasis from struggle to dialogue between the two parties. Regarding the questions of critique and violence as the major meeting points between both traditions, Hanssen positions herself"between" the two in an effort to investigate what critical theory and poststructuralism have to offer each other. In the course of doing so, she assembles imaginative new readings of Benjamin, Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault, and incisively explores the politics of recognition, the violence of language, and the future of feminist theory. This groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students of continental philosophy, political theory, social studies, and comparative literature.

Introduction; Chapter 1 On the Politics of Pure Means; Chapter 2 Between Kant and Nietzsche; Chapter 3 Power/Force/War; Chapter 4 The Violence of Language; Chapter 5 Violence and Interpretation; Chapter 6 Ethics of the Other; Chapter 7 Limits of Feminist Representation; Chapter 8 Whatever Happened to Feminist Theory?;