Speaker
Description
This work develops a Lacanian account of structural violence as the foundational operation through which political order is constituted. Rather than treating structural violence as an effect of inequality, symbolic domination or ideological mystification, it locates violence in the act of disavowal by which a political formation establishes itself as an order. Structural violence is defined as the cut, exclusion and torsion required for a configuration to appear coherent and self grounding. Drawing on Lacan’s four logical moments in L’Étourdit—the gap between saying and hearing, the logic of the Not All, topological torsion and the impossibility of a fully writable relation—the article conceptualises dis order as the gaps and impossibilities every order must repress, and this order as the contingent arrangement that emerges from that repression. Violence is thus not an event that breaks a prior harmony but the Real of the political: the structural operation that binds inside to outside, universality to exception and enunciation to what cannot be said.
| Institutional Affiliation | University of Manchester |
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