Violent Attachments

• Date: 01 February 2020
• Author: Hagar Kotef
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719861714
• Published date: 01 February 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719861714

Political Theory

2020, Vol. 48(1) 4 –29

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591719861714

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Article

Violent Attachments

Hagar Kotef1

Abstract

Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive

of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is

necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism,

I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as

taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that

are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. This analysis refuses

the assumption that violence is in conflict with (liberal) identity, and that,

therefore, the endurance of violence of liberal states/societies is dependent

upon mechanisms of active blindness (or denial, deferral, and other forms of

dissociation). I argue that this assumption, which is shared by many critiques

of violence, fails to perceive that people can desire the violent arrangements

supporting their communities. They therefore fail to address political settings

wherein violence is an affirmative element of political identities.

Keywords

violence, denial, settler colonialism, Israel/Palestine, visibility, subject

formation

A standard critique of empire holds that imperial rule nourishes and feeds off

the cultivation of ignorance, that empire is in the business of limiting, distorting,

and obscuring knowledge and that with more of it, empires would be more

vulnerable to critique; . . . that knowledge pierces what obscures the workings

of power, weakens its hold, and, with sustained exposure, could be made to

1Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London, UK

Corresponding Author:

Hagar Kotef, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London,

Thornhaugh St, Russell Sq, London WC1H 0XG, UK.

Email: hk11@soas.ac.uk

861714PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719861714Political TheoryKotef

research-article2019

Kotef 5

crash. . . . I argue that these accounts . . . may be for us to question, if not refute.

—Ann Stoler

This essay asks about the shape a critique of violence should take, about its

scope and conditions of possibility, when violence is both visible and

embraced rather than denied. It seeks to unpack a “structure of feeling,” in

Raymond Williams’s words,1 in which violence becomes an explicit part of

collective identities. The theoretical–political question driving this analysis

can be put in these terms: how should violence that is woven into what gives

meaning to our lives be theorized—but also resisted? The concrete geopoliti-

cal setting that informs both my query and my analysis is Israel/Palestine, but

the argument potentially stretches beyond this context, albeit with necessary

adaptations. To allow this potentiality to echo, I move, at times, between vari-

ous threads and fields, between different kinds of “selves” (individuals,

groups, states), and between different modes of violence, which I will often

refer to here as modes of generating injury.

At its core, the essay questions one main mode of critique of violence,

which works along the lines Ann Stoler questions in the epigraph: the assump-

tion that, at least in the case of democratic/liberal contexts, violence is sus-

tainable only as long as it remains hidden or somehow unacknowledged. It is

the assumption, to repeat Stoler’s words, that “knowledge pierces what

obscures the workings of power, [thereby] weakens its hold.” Accordingly,

the work of critique within this framework is to render violence visible; to

expose the degree to which it dominates political arrangements. If only peo-

ple would see, this violence would end or be fractured. This account—still

with Stoler—“may be for us to question, if not refute.”2

I follow here Yves Winter in proposing that we should consider an alterna-

tive framework: not one in which “invisibility . . . allows violence to be

repeated and reproduced,” but one that sees “repetition and reproduction [of

violence]” as the source of what Winter calls violence’s invisibility, but what

I contend is its normalization (a significant distinction, as the visual field is not

re-called-on in order to mark a presumed absence of that which is there).3 The

argument will progress in four parts.

I begin with a brief illustration of two ways of situating the self vis-à-vis its

own violence. My illustration is located in Israel/Palestine, yet it is but one

example of other political formations in which the existence of some—their

lives, their bodies, their security, and their prosperity—is conditioned on

inflicting violence or insecurity on others. This is therefore as much a question

of capitalism as it is a question of national identities or white supremacy. For

me, however, it is primarily a question of settler colonialism, where the very