With the vicious cycle of attacks and retaliations carving ever deeper wounds into the flesh of the global body politic, we have been re-reading an essay by Paul Ricoeur, Violence and Language, excerpted below with italics added to a crucial passage by DP.
Have we reached the stage where peace becomes impossible, where the “morality of responsibility” disappears entirely into the carnage, and where the “untimely gesture” of non-violence appears nonsensical? Has violence become the sole “prophetic” language, with humans at its disposition?
The images are borrowed from the work of Bruce Naumann, which hangs in the murky interspace between discourse and violence.
Desperado Philosophy 