State Violence, Divine Abuse
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Vincent Lloyd
Abstract
It is tempting to attribute state violence to the imposition of a normative order, and it is tempting to construct an opposition between sanctifying that order and messianic interruptions of that order. This framework supposes that God, and the surrounding language of the sacred, follows the logic of rule, imposing a set of expectations on what is to be done enforced by threat of punishment. But what if we centre the story of Job in our account of the divine and with it an image of God as abuser rather than ruler, that is, God as only imposing the phantom of norms, norms that shift or evaporate as soon as they are imposed, never fulfilling a promise of reward or threat of punishment as expected? I explore this possibility through brief encounters with two texts on the racial violence of the state, one by Aimé Césaire and the other by the contemporary Black American writer Kiese Laymon.
© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous
- Possession
- Editorial
- Introduction: Nomos, Theos and Cultures of Violence
- Focus
- State Violence, Divine Abuse
- Inoperativity and Destituent Power in Benjamin, Agamben and Spinoza
- On the (Im)possible Relation Between the Universal and the Relative: The Aporia of Community
- Violent México: The War on Drugs, the Persistence of Oligarchies, and Gender Issues
- Want to Build a Death Camp? Call in the Lawyers: Obtaining Legal Title to the Land for the Killing Camp at Auschwitz
- “I Want to Judge! I Have to Judge!”: Judg-mentaility and the Theopolitics of the Apocalypse
- Research
- “She Would Get all of Them. Every Last One”: Carrie and the Jouissance of Revenge
- Book Review
- Matteo Nicolini: Legal Geography, Comparative Law and the Production of Space
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous
- Possession
- Editorial
- Introduction: Nomos, Theos and Cultures of Violence
- Focus
- State Violence, Divine Abuse
- Inoperativity and Destituent Power in Benjamin, Agamben and Spinoza
- On the (Im)possible Relation Between the Universal and the Relative: The Aporia of Community
- Violent México: The War on Drugs, the Persistence of Oligarchies, and Gender Issues
- Want to Build a Death Camp? Call in the Lawyers: Obtaining Legal Title to the Land for the Killing Camp at Auschwitz
- “I Want to Judge! I Have to Judge!”: Judg-mentaility and the Theopolitics of the Apocalypse
- Research
- “She Would Get all of Them. Every Last One”: Carrie and the Jouissance of Revenge
- Book Review
- Matteo Nicolini: Legal Geography, Comparative Law and the Production of Space
