SCLG2623 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Hutu, Essay, Commodification
29 Oct 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Massacre of the other has become increasingly common in contemporary civil wars. The homogenisation of space through murder and displacement is a strategy of power which offers security by contracting the social world around sameness. The lecture argues that the logic of massacre is simultaneously a ritual act of destruction and creation (girard). Difference is often emphasised through acts of defilement and disfigurement which inscribe the body of the other as abject (kristeva , bataille). The lecture argues that ethnic violence shapes space, sociality and identity. It argues that narratives of ethnic hatred are largely contingent on violence rather than being the primary cause of it. The durability of order and identity forged through violence is sustained by the cyclical character of violence - eg. feldman"s analysis of the production of corpses". It argues that the politics of terror is necessarily reiterative because it rests on the affective response of fear.
