Moral Bubbles: Legitimizing and Dissimulating Violence

Violence, Language, and “Writing”

Among the philosophers, Derrida is the only one to clearly analyze and explore the link between violence and writing, offering reflections of great value on the subject. The result echoes, from a strict philosophical perspective, the link between morality, violence, and language I described in the previous sections. The structure of the trace of writing (or difference) reflects violence in the sense that the common and obvious violence is just the vestige of a more fundamental and constitutive “archeviolence”. The structure of violence is itself – to use Derrida’s intense philosophical expressions – “marked” by the very structure of the “trace” of “writing” as the “production” of “presence”. This primal acknowledgement of violence in writing is what allows a distinction between philosophy and violence, so that the former may recognize the latter. However, a second violence is perpetrated: a compensatory violence is also at stake in writing, which plays the role of systematically erasing the traces of the primordial violence of the “trace”, as a kind of – supposed – counter-violence whose violence consists in the denial of violence (Grosz, 1999). It is “the violence that describes and designates itself as the moral counter of violence. This is the violence that we sometimes name the law, right or reason” (1999, p. 10). The familiar and obvious violence, the horrifying violence – so to say, “empirical” violence – we are everyday quite used to, rests upon, participates in, and is considerably made possible by the first two prior senses of violence described above.