Vulnerable Embodiments: A Phenomenological Approach to

the Many Faces of Violence

Michael Staudigl
Abstract
The lack concerning an integrative conception of violence in social theory is
striking and calls for new approaches. In this article, I use phenomenology to
consider the many faces of violence, i.e., physical, psychic, structural,
cultural, and political as parts of a unified phenomenon. As I argue, Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenological account of embodied rationality provides an
appropriate basis for this undertaking. Finally, I will discuss how this
approach contributes to a comprehensive theory of violence.

Key Words: Edmund Husserl, embodiment, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

phenomenology, sense-making, sociology, violence.

*****

1. Do We Need an Integrative Conception of Violence?

Leading paradigms of social research have recently been criticised
for promoting one-sided explications of violence. As regards sociology, the
main objection holds that it concentrates exclusively on empirical research
concerning the reasons of violent actions and its subjective motives, on
explaining the perpetrator's deviant point of view, and finally on applying an
optimistic principle concerning the possible limitability and governability of
violence. Critics hold that this kind of research did ‘business as usual’ but did
not reflect upon the ambiguity that is constitutive of this over-determined
phenomenon.1 Thus viewed, the symbolic, cultural or historic determinations
are easily played off against the contingency, autochthonous expressivity,
and apparent senselessness of violence. Given this reductionism, the intrinsic
ambiguities of violence have, by and large, not yet been adequately
considered in the sociological context.2
A group of so-called ‘renovators’ sought to overcome this reductive
view on violence. To assess its multi-layered dynamics and innermost
intentions as well as its potential excessiveness they proposed to change
analytic focus: As to their understanding, the major aim of a ‘sociology of
violence’ should consist in the elaboration of ‘thick descriptions’3 concerning
the acts, effects, and consequences of violence. In focussing on the victims’
experiences and their inability to understand the violence done to them, they,
too, finally fell prey to a one-sided conception. Driven by the desire to
carefully describe actual violence, they concentrated on the phenomena of
visible violence and their effects on the physical integrity of its victims.
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However, they neglected the various forms of invisible, i.e., indirect or
‘structural violence’ and its impact on social relations. In setting aside the
violence of social exclusion, their conception entailed a restriction to physical
or direct violence.4 Given the exclusive focus on both the victims and the
materiality of violence, these approaches, in the last analysis, also fail to
provide us with an integrative understanding of the phenomenon at stake.5
The question whether such an integrative conception is desirable
remains contested. Given a vast, indeed inflationary number of definitions
and endless quarrels concerning the nature of violence, one might be tempted
to think that the attempt to elaborate such a conception is futile. Indeed,
various theorists claim that we should avoid too loose a conception of
violence.6 They argue that such a conception, which comprises forms of
‘structural’ and ‘cultural violence,’ facilitates the ideological
instrumentalisation of social phenomena. Thus viewed, the ideological
quarrel about ‘what counts as violence’ might cause further actual violence. I
believe, on the contrary, that it is of utmost importance to acknowledge,
analyse and counter the manifold violences that are inherent in historical,
cultural, linguistic and symbolic orders. In my understanding, the multi-
faceted exclusion of its (possible) victims engenders a variety of in-group,
externally directed as well as self-related violences and, thus, affects the
involved social textures in the most fundamental way. Therefore, I insist on
the necessity to elaborate an integrative conception of violence that will, in
the long run, help us to better understand the invisible forms of violence that
cause visible violence.
Even if a comprehensive sociological ‘theory of violence’ that is able
to cover the whole spectrum of violence has not yet been developed, attempts
have recently been made, especially in the ambit of the aforementioned
‘renovators.’7 In this context, we can observe an important opening of
traditional sociological methods. If we reflect upon this shift of interest,
however, we have to acknowledge a severe problem. Recent research, in
focussing on the vulnerability of the body,8 the various modalities of suffered
violence,9 and the meaning of so-called ‘senseless’ or ‘random’ acts of
violence, lacks an appropriate language. In other words, being confronted
with phenomena that escape its traditional methods, sociological research
tends to transgress its limits.10 It is, thus, not by chance that we observe a
strong drive towards integrating other disciplines in this context to provide
sociological research on violence with both the descriptive potential and the
methodological rigour it lacks. Interestingly, phenomenology has been
mentioned exceptionally often such a candidate.11
In what follows, I will outline a genuinely phenomenological
approach to the many faces of violence. In the first part, I will briefly
comment upon two misunderstandings concerning phenomenology, which
have impeded its reception in the social sciences (2). Following Husserl and
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MerleauPonty, I will then explain how phenomenology addresses the body
and thus enables us to consider the manifold vulnerabilities of the subject’s
embodiment (3). In a third step I will turn to the inter-subjective constitution
of our life-world and distinguish the levels of vulnerability as correlated to
various forms of violence (4). Finally, I will present some general
conclusions and show how this approach provides the basis for elaborating a
comprehensive theory of violence (5).

2. Two Misunderstandings in the Reception of Phenomenology

The reception of phenomenology in the social sciences is afflicted
by serious problems. These arise since the interdisciplinary appropriation of
phenomenology rests upon unclear assumptions concerning its aims and
methods. Since the clarification of these misunderstandings is important for
developing a socio-phenomenological approach to violence, I will discuss
two of them.
The first problem consists in the fact that phenomenology is too
easily reduced to offer an all-encompassing and purified idea of description.12
The phenomenological method, however, must neither be understood as a
better, because more neutral way of describing empirical facts, nor as a
rationalistic project of reconstructing our world from a foundational, i.e.,
transcendental viewpoint. As Merleau-Ponty criticises, both perspectives
remain unmindful of our pre-reflective intentional anchoring in the world.13
In other words, both dissolve the subject’s primordial experiential
interlacement with the world since they accord an epistemological primacy
either to the object or to the subject. The aim of radical phenomenological
reflection, on the contrary, consists in deconstructing these categories and the
epistemological shortcomings derived from it (i.e., rationalism and
empiricism). Its aim is to recover our most primordial intentional openness to
the world.
Intentionality, thus viewed, must not be misunderstood as a merely
mental capacity of cognitive representation. According to Husserl, it
comprises two interrelated, yet irreducible characteristics. On one hand, it
stands for the directedness of consciousness towards an object. On the other,
it designates this dynamism in terms of being consciousness of something as
something.14 This implies that consciousness develops within an unfolding
correlative horizon of its object’s horizontal co-determinations. Hence, we
should see intentionality as a correlation between noetic (subject-relative)
modes of appearance and noematic (objectively intended) modes of
givenness. In this context, Husserl speaks about a ‘universal a priori of
correlation’ that structures the experiential life of the subject.15 Intentionality,
in its many modes, perceptual, objectifying, emotional, axiological, etc. -
correlates the manifold (bodily, aesthetic, intellectual, and logical) layers of
our world-experiencing life to the multifarious senses our life-world entails.
194 Vulnerable Embodiments
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Thus viewed, the sense structures the world affords us turn out to be neither
subjective constructions nor objective givens. Rather phenomenology shows
that the structures in which we live are generated by our various intentional
activities. It teaches us how to unveil the pre-given sense-structures we live
in as correlates of our concrete, i.e. embodied, capacities of sense-making.
Thus, it enables us to unpack and reconstruct these capacities as being
correlated to a pre-given field of perception, action, and communication that
we have to appropriate in order to live our life. Our sense-making activities
consequently imply socially-derived patterns of interpretation that enable us
to make our way in the world, i.e. to consider the world in terms of projects
we are able to realise. Since the body functions at the core of all these
projects, all our intentional sense-making activities presuppose an embodied
subject.16
This anti-Cartesian view enables us to cope with another basic
misunderstanding which holds that phenomenology presupposes a pure,
disembodied, solipsistic, and constituting ego as its starting point. From this
viewpoint, the other person is seen as an ‘alter ego’ and is said to function as
a ‘partner’ in the ‘transcendental constitution of the objective world.’ Thus
viewed, she, however, never appears in her personhood, i.e., as a stranger or a
home comer, a friend or an enemy, a god or a monster. This indifference
concerning the concrete other, which is never fully perceptually accessible, is
a critical point in Husserl and classic phenomenology. Thus, one will not be
surprised by the fact that violence as a purely social phenomenon (‘a totally
social fact’ in Mauss’ words), which radically transcends the solitary ego’s
point of view, has hardly ever been thematised in phenomenology. However,
as we have shown, phenomenology knows no disembodied pure ego and,
consequently, no solipsistic subject. On the contrary, it shows that the consti-
tution of subjectivity is correlated to the historic unfolding of a field of
bodily, dialogical, and interactional experience. Experience, in other words,
cannot be reconstructed as the active synthesis of the intentional acts of pure
consciousness. It rather presupposes a passive ‘operative intentionality’ that
‘produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and our life.’17
This unified field of lived, i.e. embodied experience is shaped by historical,
cultural, and political patterns of perception and understanding. It designates
the place where we encounter others whose actions exceed our interpretations
and, thus, are never simple ‘analogues of ourselves.’ However, this field of
our primordial sociability is by no way a pre-established ‘harmony.’18 It is
also the field of possible violence. As I will show in the next section,
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers a viable setting to reassess this field
in terms of our bodily involvement in it.
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3. Outline of a Phenomenology of Embodiment
The reassessment of the body as a philosophical problem sui generis
is a major achievement of phenomenology. Whereas the body has been
denounced to be a marginal condition or even a confinement for the subject’s
individuation in the metaphysical tradition, phenomenology retrieved it as a
constitutive condition of our experience and subjectivity. Becoming aware of
the fact that only an embodied subject is able to perceive transcendent
objects, Husserl reflected upon it as early as he conceived of phenomenology
as a philosophy that seeks to solve the question of transcendence. From his
point of view, the synthetic character of intentional experience is not only
based on the consciousness of ‘internal time.’19 On a more foundational level,
it is also dependent upon the primordial experience of the so-called
subjective ‘I-can’.20 The ‘I-can’ is irreducibly tied to an embodied subject,
which moves and perceives in the world. Most of the time it does so without
a lucid awareness of its embodiment as a stable, active pattern of its
existence. In Husserl’s view, the ‘I-can’ is the texture of bodily life itself. He
sees it as a pre-reflective knowledge of the subject’s ability to move and
perceive herself and, consequently, to perceive and move objects in the
world. Since our existential projects of action correlate to this capacity to
move, perceive and gear into the world, we can also put this relationship in
other words: the senses we have of the world presuppose our bodily activities
that disclose them.
To be embodied is to be endowed with a practical kinaesthetic
horizon of manifold possibilities of moving, perceiving, and acting. As
embodied, the subject conceives of herself as a ‘zero-point’21 of orientation.
All that is given in perception unfolds relative to it. To inhabit this ‘zero
point’ designates an essential condition of selfhood. It assures that the self
coincides with itself,22 whilst being able to transcend itself and develop its
identity in time. Husserl’s essential insight accordingly consists in
differentiating between a primordially ‘lived body’ (Leib) and an ‘objective
body’ (Körper). He sees them as two different ways we conceive of
ourselves. This distinction, however, attests to a difficulty for which Husserl
was unable to account: Undoubtedly, the body is not only a perceivable
thing; rather Husserl himself acknowledges it to be an ‘imperfectly
constituted thing.’23 Yet this insight did not lead him to realise that the body
partakes in the constitution of the same objective world to which it
undoubtedly belongs. In this context, the idea of a ‘pure constituting ego’
should have become problematic. As his late writings show, Husserl indeed
felt increasingly uneasy with this position. However, he ultimately never
broke with it.
In reassessing Husserl’s analyses, Merleau-Ponty elaborated a
radicalised phenomenology. His major aim was to recover the basic relations
that anchor our lived body in our life-world. In his understanding, these
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relations do not consist in the objectifying character of intentionality. They
are rather woven on the more foundational level of our perceptual and
affective communication with ourselves, the world, and others. Thus,
Merleau-Ponty not only shares Husserl’s criticism of the objective sciences,
which reduce the lived body to its objective, i.e. scientifically measurable,
properties. But he also criticises Husserl for his rationalist account of the
‘lived body.’ From his viewpoint, Husserl’s phenomenological reduction
leads back to the arcanum of a transcendental subject. Such a subject
constitutes the world in absolute lucidity, but bears hardly any trace of being
constituted by it. Rather it dissolves both the essential opacity and intrinsic
rationality of our embodied being. Hence, in opposition to both the idealist
consequences of rationalism and the naturalist tendencies of empiricism,
Merleau-Ponty seeks to recover a ‘third dimension’ between (body-)subject
and object (world). He thereby attempts to correct one-sidedly rationalistic as
well as empiricistic accounts of the human condition, which both mistake the
role of the ‘lived body.’ Yet, this ‘third dimension’ is not objectively given. It
needs to be recovered in our body’s pre-reflective openness to our pre-
objective life-world. It consists in the ‘inextricable involvement’24 of our
embodied existence in the sensible world. Thus, it refers to the origin of our
personal intentions in the irreducible anonymity of a general life that is both
natural and cultural. This ‘involvement’ makes the body that ‘strange object
which uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world.’25
This is the context for Merleau-Ponty’s revision of classical theories
of perception. He refuses to understand perception simply as the passive
reception of sensory stimulation that requires the implementation of some a
priori faculties of knowledge. Instead, he finds it realised through the
‘intermediary of the body,’26 which inaugurates us into the world. Thus, it is
a pre-reflective but creative communication of the body subject with the
primordial pre-linguistic generality of the life-world. In other words, it func-
tions as a sort of ‘inspired exegesis’27 which is dependent upon the body’s
‘embodied knowledge’. Thus viewed, we must interpret neither perception
nor knowledge (which presupposes ‘perceptual faith’) in terms of the cogito,
the ‘I-think that,’28 which traditionally defined the autonomy of the subject.
Instead, Merleau-Ponty proposes to rethink the perceptual life of embodied
subjectivity in terms of the pre-reflective intentionality of the ‘I can’:

The true cogito is not the intimate communing of thought

with the thought of that thought [sc. universal thought;
M.S.]; they meet only on passing through the world. The
consciousness of the world is not based on self-
consciousness: they are strictly contemporary. There is a
world for me because I am not unaware of myself; and I am
not concealed from myself because I have a world.29
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The pre-reflective or ‘tacit cogito,’ which makes up the inner
structure of objectifying intentionality, relates us not only to ourselves and
the pre-objective world but also designates the primordial form of our
relations with others, culture, and history. Indeed, we need the others and the
‘symbolic institutions’30 that animate our traditions to assess our selves in our
expression. Only they allow us to coincide with ourselves in difference, i.e. in
reflecting ourselves in the other:

To be a consciousness or rather to be an experience is to

hold inner communication with the world, the body and
other people, to be with them instead of being beside
them.31

Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, my body is ‘the fabric into which all

objects are woven,’ i.e. ‘the general instrument of my ‘comprehension.’32 He
understands it as the pre-reflective ‘schema of my world’33 and perception as
the deciphering of objects as ‘polarities of bodily action:’34

Bodily existence which runs through me, yet does so

independently of me, is only the barest raw material of a
genuine presence in the world. Yet at least it provides the
possibility of such presence and establishes our first
consonance with the world. [...] In this way the body
expresses total existence, not because it is an external
accompaniment to that existence, but because existence
realizes itself in the body.35

This ‘first consonance with the world’ takes place in perception; it

designates a primordially ‘unbroken pre-objective harmony of body and
world’36. Such ‘harmony between what we aim at and what is given’,37 is
epitomised in Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the ‘corporeal schema.’ It
shows that all learning is incorporation - that our body is at once a ‘habitual
body’, i.e. an actualisable sediment of past activities and experiences by
which we manage to cope with any arising situation. In this implicit logic of
our behavioural patterning, wherein embodiment and pre-given situation
intertwine constitutively, Merleau-Ponty finds the clue to rethink human
existence in terms of an ‘embodied reason.’38 In other words, all of the ways
we make sense of a world hinge upon the body:

The thickness of the body, far from rivalling that of the

world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go unto
the heart of things, by making myself a world and by
making them flesh.39
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Yet, the body is not only a ‘mirror of our being.’40 As Merleau-Ponty
says,quoting Bergson, it virtually ‘extends unto the stars.’41 This prolongation
renders us vulnerable in a manifold ways, not only in the physical limits of
our ‘objective body.’ Given that the body is our ‘general medium for having
a world’, i.e. the functioning organ of the ‘I can,’ its vulnerability extends, as
I will show in the next chapter, into the ‘realm of the potential.’42

4. Embodiment, Vulnerability, and Violence

As I have argued, Merleau-Ponty aims at recovering the subject’s
pre-objective bodily anchoring in the life-world. He expresses this
‘inextricable involvement’ of the embodied subject and the ‘flesh of the
world’ in terms of a ‘‘living cohesion’ in which I belong to myself while
belonging to the world.’43 In his understanding, this pre-objective dimension
of embodiment silently underpins all the intellectual activities of the
subject.44 The pre-objective world that is the universal correlate to our
phenomenal or ‘lived body’ is, however, not a silent world. On the contrary,
the subject needs to responsively engage in gestures of expression, especially
language, in order to articulate her selfhood as part of an intersubjective
world. Since language is understood as a situational, responsive and
interactional ‘embodiment of thought,’ consciousness has to be seen as a
sedimented ‘project of the world’ that predelineates our general style of
being. The cogito, in other words, is a ‘cultural being.’45 If we bear in mind
that consciousness ‘is given to itself neither all at once nor at the expense of
others but in a field of presence and coexistence that situates consciousness
and truth as a sedimentation and as a search’,46 we thus find ourselves in a
position to rethink the various forms of violence as parts of a unified
phenomenon.
The fact that the ‘lived body’ is essential for our ways of making
sense of the world provides the premise for this undertaking. Given that we
do not simply have a (objective) body, but are a (lived) body, we are
vulnerable and open to violence. Violence, however, not only exploits our
physical vulnerability, but also in a constitutive way is destructive of sense.
Sense is the correlate of our being-in-the-world. Thus violence attacks not
only our bodily capacities of sense-making, but also the sedimented clusters
of sense a pre-given world avails us. In other words, violence attacks both
our bodily and interpretative integrity. If we understand selfhood as a
temporal process of bodily sense-making, the senses the world affords us
relate us to the lived intelligibility of the world, i.e. the field of possibilities
that prescribes ‘objects as polarities of bodily action.’47 Violence attacks this
self-referential integrity of the embodied self on various levels. Following
Merleau-Ponty, I contend that not only individual, but also social, cultural,
and political projects of action relate constitutively to our embodiment. To be
more precise, their very intelligibility is dependent upon the inter-subjective
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habitualisation, symbolic institution, and creative reactivation of our
embodiments. In what follows, I distinguish between the various bodies we
inhabit, the specific vulnerability these embodiments entail, as well as
correlated forms of violence.
If we reflect upon our body within the ‘natural attitude’ of
everydayness, we first have to mention the ‘objective body,’ i.e., the body as
it is viewed by the objective sciences. This is the biological body of our
physical functioning that is foundational for our ‘I can.’48 We know it as the
sensing body and the body that moves. On this basic level of our incarnation,
the ‘I can’ relates both to the necessity of fulfilling one’s needs as well as to
our capacities to use our body instrumentally. The body in this twofold sense
is the target of ‘physical violence’ in the traditional sense. Violence thus
understood as an ‘intended bodily violation’49 is, however, not simply
equivalent to the destruction of an instrument. Since it affects the intrinsic
unity of the I-can, it touches upon our non-substitutable ownness or
individuality. Injuring and mutilating the victim’s body consequently not
only affects the scope of her ‘I can.’ It is not simply an instrumental
infringement of some capacity of action; it also affects the ways she
understands the world and herself.
Such physical or direct violence appears in different forms and
attacks different layers of the embodied subject’s material and spatial
inhabitation in the world.50 According to their nearness to the ‘intimate
personality’ of the organic body, these forms can be classified: They range
from the use of physical coercion, which possibly involves an intentional
violation of the self’s capacity of action or disrespects its bodily integrity, to
injury - the reduction of the body to an object-like condition in specific
practices of torture or internment, mutilation, and ultimately murder.
1. The next level of embodiment concerns the ‘phenomenal’ or
‘lived body.’ Following Merleau-Ponty, we showed that our active,
intentional being-to-the-world is founded upon this dimension of pre-
objective embodiment. Thus viewed, all our higher intentional projects like
thought and judgment are dependent upon the ‘operative intentionalities’ of
our phenomenal body. On the level of what Husserl called ‘passive synthesis’
they constitute the ‘living references’ of our existence that open the
anonymous ways our body inhabits its world. Also following Merleau-Ponty,
we have subsequently described the ‘phenomenal body’ as the ‘general
medium for having a world.’ Body and world thus attest to a primordial
‘reversibility’: In other words, the lived body is conatural to and in
‘communion’ with the world and others. This correlation unfolds as a
temporal process; its ‘structures of practical relevance necessarily sediment
into the body’s habits and cultural gestures’,51 thereby determining our sense
of selfhood. Given this correlation, we will never coincide with our body,
which always remains at least partly a ‘foreign body’. We will never manage
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to adopt a wholly ‘extraterritorial stance’ toward the universe into which our
body inaugurates us. Hence, we must not describe conduct, expression, and
language in terms of closed systems of ideal signification. We have to see
them rather as instances of the ‘operative rationality’ that unfolds in our
‘lived body’s’ pre-reflective communication with the world.
2. This insight allows us to see how linguistic, psychic, and symbolic
violence works - as not only destructive of sense, but also of our pre-
objective patterns of embodiment. By assaulting the typical ways we exercise
our ‘I-can,’ such violence affects the higher, more transparent and intelligible
ways we inhabit the world, i.e. our ‘habitual body’ and its ideal substitutes.
Whereas ‘physical violence’ attacks the self’s bodily integrity, psychic,
linguistic and symbolic violence are destructive of the sense structures we
live in. Given, however, that the body plays a foundational role in the
generation of these structures, their destruction entails a destruction of the
constitutive role of the body and, hence, affects the ways we understand
ourselves as embodied beings.
3. Culturally viewed, our ways of sense-making are founded upon
our socially-learned bodily disclosures of the world. A yet higher level of
embodiment concerns what I call the ‘generative body’. Given its
communicative patterning, the ‘lived body’ is also a generative body.52 The
generative patterns of our embodiment develop with the self’s bodily
prolongation in the ‘life-world’. I propose to call this level our incorporation.
Incorporating the world on the basis of our inter-corporeal openness to
others, we adopt socially-preconceived ways of accessing and understanding
it and elaborate our own position in their appropriation and ‘coherent
deformation.’ The lived body is open to ‘several ways of the body to be a
body,’ hence to the ‘natural and social situation’53 it has to deal with. Thus, in
becoming ‘a part of the world which incorporates itself in it,’54 our body is
constituted as a social and cultural body. Given this symbolic over
determination, the self’s embodiment becomes a normatively set task to
achieve. In other words, it needs to be adjusted to socially preconceived
patterns of identification, interpretation and action. In such processes of
symbolic institution, the lived body’s self-understanding is constitutively
overlaid by collective styles of embodiment. Embodiment, understood as a
social structure, is open to violence in manifold ways. Yet violence, in this
context, not only designates a destruction of subjective sense-structures. It
rather destroys the collectively embodied ‘I can’ that occasions these
structures. Its forms vary widely, from racist and sexist stereotyping that
restricts open access to public options of action, to ‘structural violence’
unleashed by inequities that narrow the human potential of action, to the
oppressive influence of culturally-enforced norms exerted by what Foucault
called ‘technology of subtle, efficient, and economical forms of violence.
Inasmuch as all the afore-mentioned forms of violence institute collective
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power-relations, they serve a specific ‘politics of the body.’55 In other words,
they constitute a ‘political body’ or, to use Hobbes term, a ‘body-politique’.56
Political violence, in this context, designates the destruction of ‘political
space’. This is the space where we can collectively disclose our views on the
world and negotiate their commonality. Politics, thus understood as the ‘art
of compromise’ does not entail a definitive signification of political space.57
Political violence, contrariwise, attempts to fully determine political space. It
attacks the capacity of the individual’s ‘I can’ to recreate the common world
she inhabits. In frustrating the individual’s ways of embodying herself in a
living tradition of signification, it closes this world. In other words, violence
demotes, as can be seen exemplarily in totalitarian systems, interaction
between individuals to a purely formal process that dissolves as the ‘People-
as-One.’58 Through propaganda, coordination and censorship, it destroys the
functioning body of language, which is the prerequisite for all political
interaction. It has to do so, since real interaction would enable the serialized
individuals to create a truly common and open world.59
In such a situation of excessive power, all attempts at changing it are
denominated as illegitimate. The symbolic function of violence is of
paramount importance in this context. Its logic consists in legitimising its
own violence by rationalizing it, namely by (re)producing that ‘evil other’
who can legitimately be subjected to it, i.e. the ‘malfeasant criminal,’ the
contagious ‘underman,’ the ‘parasite in the people’s body’ (Volkskörper)
etc.60 In this context we must emphasize that the body functions, at least in
modernity, as a mighty image of society. The concept of ‘body-politics,’ thus
viewed, is not at all an innocent metaphor.61 On the contrary, political
violence is closely related to bodily images of totality, integrity, and
autonomy. It results from our attempts to uphold the political ‘ideal of
uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership.’ This, however, leads, as
Hannah Arendt observed, to the fatal ‘conflation of freedom and
sovereignty’62 that haunts political thought. Exploiting our primordial desire
to overcome our fragmented condition,63 body images that promise an
integration into an unscathed communal whole easily unleash a vicious logic
of confrontation. Indeed, our tradition of political thinking is beset with the
patriarchal image of a masterful and invulnerable body. Thus viewed,
constructions of otherness function as the screen whereon we project our
fears of disintegration. This illuminates why strategies of domination,
assimilation, incorporation, and, in the last analysis, extinction offer
attractive patterns to our ways of encountering otherness.64

5. Conclusions
My attempt to elaborate a phenomenological investigation into the
many faces of violence responds to an open challenge: the fact that recent
research on violence lacks both a proper experiential basis as well as a stable
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methodological framework. Such research is still hampered by the lack of an
integrative conception of violence. As I have argued, we need such a
reconception to account for physical, psychic, cultural, and political violence
as parts of a unified phenomenon. Otherwise, we would exclude a large scope
of violences that, in return, infuse our violent self-determinations.
In approaching this integrative conception of violence, I proposed to
focus on how violence destroys the ways we make sense of the world, others,
and ourselves. This approach involves two interrelated hypotheses that un-
derscore the twofold, both bodily and interpretative nature of selfhood.
Whereas the first hypothesis claims that any violence violates the subject’s
self-referential integrity, the second holds that violence is destructive of
sense. Following Merleau-Ponty, I have showed that the ways we make sense
and consequently enact, recover, and transform the senses of our world,
presuppose our embodiment, i.e. our bodily action and inter-corporeal
behaviour. Violence, thus, is not only directed against our body’s physical
integrity. It also attacks its pervasive role in the generation of sense. This role
varies: it may concern different layers in the generation of sense - the
preobjective functioning of the body that introduces us in a perceptual world;
its sedimentation and its habitual understanding that allow for the subjective
temporality of our embodied being; its ‘symbolic institution’ that makes us a
part of the traditions from which we descend. Given its destructive influence
on the various ways we inhabit our world, incorporate our traditions, and find
ourselves embodied, all violence, generally speaking, in some way
disembodies its victim.
This analysis led us to acknowledge a constitutive correlation
between the habitual sense structures that predelineate our world and the
ways we incorporate the generatively derived rationalities of our various life
worlds. Given this correlation, violence affects several levels of our existence
at once: it not simply violates the self’s bodily or interpretive integrity, but in
attacking one part of this correlation, it also affects the other. Thus, in
attacking our embodied being-toward-the-world, it affects the ways we
habitually make sense of ourselves in a pre-given world. In other words,
violence not only violates our bodily integrity and destroys the generatively
incorporated ways we inhabit our world; it also changes, undermines and
potentially destroys the ways we make sense of ourselves. Our ways of
sense-making and identifying ourselves suffer not only a loss of efficacy, but
of coherency, stability, and meaningfulness. To state it differently, being
confronted with violence, we are thrown back on our intimate selves and
experience a sort of entrapment by the immanence of our bodies and minds.
In this situation, the excessive affective quality of violence (the experience of
ineffable pain) couples with a collapse of our capacities of sense-making (the
experience of senselessness) resulting in a traumatic experience. Given the
separation this entails, we thus lose the capacity to transcend our given life
 Michael Staudigl 203
______________________________________________________________
world and recreate ourselves.
Being caught in such a petrified life-world engenders feelings of
entrapment and suffocation. Violence, as is well known, serves as a possible
strategy of escape in such a situation. Such violence, especially if it appears
illegitimate, however, produces further violence. Indeed, such outbreaks of
violence against oppressive social conditions are often ideologically triggered
in order to legitimate their violent suppression and elimination.65 The
question remains how to escape this vicious circle of violence and ‘counter-
violence.’ A first, yet indispensable step would consist in recognising the
polymorphic nature of both our embodiment and the violences directed
against it. This would sensitise us to the manifold vulnerability that
engenders violence-affined schemas of interpretation and reaction.
Deconstructing the cultural and political ideologies of their distribution
requires that we recognize our fears of disintegration and vulnerability as
well as the phantasms of integrity we substitute for them. A
phenomenological approach to the many faces of our vulnerable
embodiments will help to uncover both these phantasms and the violent
interactional consequences they engender.

Notes
* This article is part of my research project The Many Faces of Violence, un-
derwritten by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Vienna. I would like to
thank James Mensch for revealing discussions on the topic. The influence of
his work is present throughout this article. See esp. Embodiments: From the
Body to the Body Politic, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2008
(forthcoming).
1
See B Nedelmann, ‘Gewaltsoziologie am Scheideweg: Die
Auseinandersetzung in der gegenwärtigen und Wege der künftigen
Gewaltforschung’, Soziologie der Gewalt, Opladen & Wiesbaden,
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997, pp. 59-85.
2
T von Trotha, ‘Zur Soziologie der Gewalt’, Soziologie der Gewalt,
Opladen and Wiesbaden, Westdeutscher Verlag, pp. 9-56, esp. 16ff.
3
See W Sofsky, Traktat über die Gewalt, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1996, Passim;
see also T von Trotha, ‚Zur Soziologie der Gewalt’, pp. 20ff.
4
See N Luhmann, Die Soziologie und der Mensch, Opladen, Westdeutscher
Verlag, p.134, C Schroer, ‘Gewalt ohne Gesicht. Zur Notwendigkeit einer
umfassenden Gewaltanalyse’, Gewalt, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 151-
173.
5
See P Imbusch, ‘The Concept of Violence’, International Handbook of
Violence Research, Kluwer, Dordrecht et al., 2003, pp. 13-40.
204 Vulnerable Embodiments
______________________________________________________________

6
G Nummer-Winkler, Überlegungen zum Gewaltbegriff’, Gewalt,
Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 21-61.
7
A paradigmatic attempt is outlined by C Schroer, ‘Gewalt ohne Gesicht.’
8
H Popitz, Phänomene der Macht, Tübingen, Mohr, 1992, pp. 48ff.
9
Cf. Sofsky, Traktat über die Gewalt, pp. 65ff.
10
In fact a ‘sociology of the body,’ which would be a precondition for a
genuine ‘sociology of violence’, does not yet exist. See B Nedelmann,
‘Gewaltsoziologie am Scheideweg’, p. 74; T von Trotha, ‘Zur Soziologie der
Gewalt’, p. 27-28.
11
T von Trotha, ‘Zur Soziologie der Gewalt’, p. 20; R Hitzler, ‘Gewalt als
Intention und Widerfahrnis’, Grenzenlose Konstruktivität, Opladen, Leske &
Budrich, 2003, p. 101.
12
See T Trotha, ‘Zur Soziologie der Gewalt’, pp. 13-14.
13
On this see M Reuter, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Pre-Reflective
Intentionality’, Synthese, Vol. 118, 1999, pp. 69-88.
14
A presentation of these determinations of intentionality is given by L Ten-
gelyi, Erfahrung und Ausdruck, Dordrecht et al. Springer, 2007, pp. 109ff.
15
E Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, Evanston, Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1970, p. 159f.
16
See also ML Johnson, ‘Embodied Mind: Phenomenological Approaches to
Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Anthropology’, Perspectives on
Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, Routledge, New York
& London, 1999, pp. 81-102.
17
M Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, London,
2002, p. xx, see also ibid., p. 486 and 498.
18
E Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem
Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929-1935, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1971, p. 156.
19
See E Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy-First Book: General Introduction to a Pure
Phenomenology, Dordrecht et al., Kluwer, 1982, pp. 192ff.
20
E Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy-Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology
of Constitution, Dordrecht et al., Kluwer, 1989, p. 59f.
21
Ibid., p. 166.
22
E Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, p. 496 and 507.
23
E Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy-Second Book, p. 167.
24
M Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern Univ. Press,
Evanston, 1968, p. 84.
 Michael Staudigl 205
______________________________________________________________

25
M Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 275. This holds also
true for language and expression, which Merleau-Ponty sees as a higher type
of embodiment motivated by our encounters with others. They produce a
‘surplus of our existence over our material being’ and, thus, open us into an
‘interworld’ where we learn to reassess ourselves according to a ‘‘Logos’ of
the cultural world’ (Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Evanston, Northwestern Univ.
Press, 1964, p. 96f.).
26
M Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 160.
27
M Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 133.
28
M Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 159.
29
Ibid., p. 347.
30
To Merleau-Ponty, institutions are ‘those events in experience which en-
dow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other
experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or a history
– or again those events which sediment in me a meaning, not just as a sur-
vival or residue, but as the invitation to sequel, the necessity of a future.’
(‘Institution in personal and public history’, In Praise of Philosophy and
Other Essays, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 108f.)
31
M Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology ofPerception, p. 111.
32
Ibid., p. 273.
33
J O’Neill, The Communicative Body: Studies in Communicative
Philosophy, Politics, and Sociology, Evanston, Northwestern Univ. Press,
1989, p. 38.
34
J O’Neill, The Communicative Body, p. 37.
35
M Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 192.
36
B Behnke, ‘Embodiment Work for the Victims of Violation’, Essays in
Celebration of the Founding of Phenomenological Organisations,
<http://www.o-p-o.net/essays/BehnkeArticle.pdf>, (2008-02-21), p. 8.
37
M Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 167.
38
M Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 197: ‘living reason.’
39
M Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 135.
40
M Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 198.
41
See M Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 57.
42
M Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 169 and 125.
43
J O’Neill, The Communicative Body, p. 40.
44
On the fact that the ‘lived body’ is mostly passed over in silence in our av-
erage ways of experiencing, but becomes a problem and thematic only in ex-
periences of crisis, like e.g. sickness, ageing, or violation, see D Leder, The
Absent Body, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1990.
45
M Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 429.
46
J O’Neill, The Communicative Body, p. 74.
47
Ibid., p. 37.
206 Vulnerable Embodiments
______________________________________________________________

48
The importance of thinking intentionality in terms of need, hunger, and
thus from an embodied, instinctually driven being’s viewpoint, has early been
called for by G Anders, ‘On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Phi-
losophy’, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Vol 8, 1948, p. 339f.
49
H Popitz, Phänomene der Macht, p. 48.
50
On these distinctions see B Waldenfels, ‘Limits of Legitimation and the
Question of Violence’, Justice, Law, and Violence, Philadelphia, Temple
Univ. Press, 1991, p. 106f.
51
J O’Neill, The Communicative Body, p. 21.
52
On ‘generativity’ see AJ Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phe-
nomenology after Husserl, Evanston, Northwestern Univ. Press, 1995.
53
M Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology ofPerception, p. 124 and 456.
54
See T Fuchs, Leib, Raum, Person, Stuttgart, Klett, 2000, p. 331.
55
M Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, Paris, Gallimard,
1975, p. 104f.
56
T Hobbes, Leviathan, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991, p. 9.
57
See E Laclau, ‘Why do Empty Signifiers Matter in Politics?’,
Emancipations, London, Verso, 1996, pp. 36-46.
58
See esp. C Lefort, ‘The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism’, The Po-
litical Forms of Modern Society. Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism,
Cambridge, MIT-Press, 1986, pp. 292-306.
59
On this conception of the common world as a ‘web of relationships of ac-
tions’ see H Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago 1958, pp. 181ff.
60
See C Lefort, ‘The Image of the Body’, p. 298, and B Waldenfels, ‘Limits
of Legitimation and the Question of Violence,’ p. 108.
61
D Bergoffen, ‘The Body Politic: Democratic Metaphors, Totalitarian Prac-
tices, Erotic Rebellions’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol 16, 1990, pp.
109-126.
62
H Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 234.
63
On this psychoanalytic hypothesis see J Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as For-
mative of the Function of the I’, Ecrits, New York, Norton & Company,
2006, pp. 75-81.
64
See A David, Racisme et antisémitisme. Essai de philosophie sur l’envers
de concepts, Paris, Ellipses, 2001; S Kaltenecker, ‘Weil aber die vergessenste
Fremde unser Körper ist. Über Männer-KörperRepräsentationen und
Faschismus’, The Body of Gender. Körper, Geschlechter, Identitäten,
Vienna, Passagen, 1995, pp. 91- 109.
65
See the provocative attempt of J Gilligan who seeks to show that the
American prison system (as American society in general, which resembles
the social structure of the prison) produces rising rates of violence in order to
present the status quo as the ‘savior of everybody’. J Gilligan, Violence:
Reflections on a National Epidemic, Vintage, New York, 1997, p. 187.
 Michael Staudigl 207
______________________________________________________________

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