Portraits of Violence
An Illustrated History of Radical Thinking
First published in 2016 by
New Internationalist Publications Ltd
The Old Music Hall
106-108 Cowley Road
Oxford OX4 1JE, UK
© Brad Evans and Sean Michael Wilson
The right of Brad Evans and Sean Michael Wilson to be identified as the authors of
this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical,
electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.
Artwork by Robert Brown, Inko, Chris Mackenzie, Michiru Morikawa, Yen Quach and
Carl Thompson.
Printed by PBtisk s.t.o., Czech Republic, who hold environmental accreditation
ISO 14001.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-78026-318-2
(ebook ISBN 978-1-78026-319-9)
Contents
All chapters written by Brad Evans and Sean Michael Wilson
Chapter 1 Brad Evans: Thinking Against Violence 13
Illustrated by Inko
Chapter 2 Hannah Arendt: The Banality of Evil 25
Illustrated by Chris Mackenzie
Chapter 3 Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth 37
Illustrated by Carl Thompson
Chapter 4 Paulo Freire: The Pedagogy of the Oppressed 49
Illustrated by Inko
Chapter 5 Michel Foucault: Society Must Be Defended 61
Illustrated by Robert Brown
Chapter 6 Edward Said: Orientalism 73
Illustrated by Carl Thompson
Chapter 7 Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others 85
Illustrated by Inko
Chapter 8 Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent 97
Illustrated by Carl Thompson
Chapter 9 Judith Butler: Precarious Lives 109
Illustrated by Michiru Morikawa
Chapter 10 Giorgio Agamben: Sovereign Power/Bare Life 121
Illustrated by Yen Quach
Biographical notes for the writers and the artists 133
How do we educate
about violence?
Henry A Giroux
There has never been a more urgent time to develop the necessary
pedagogical tools to critique forms of violence in the contemporary period.
Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one
of the defining features of political and cultural life. Ignorance has become
a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past,
and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are
translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment.
As James Baldwin rightly warned, ‘Ignorance, allied with power, is the most
ferocious enemy justice can have.’
What I have called in my work the violence of organized forgetting signals
how contemporary politics are those in which emotion triumphs over reason,
and spectacle over truth, thereby erasing history by producing an endless
flow of fragmented and disingenuous knowledge. The lessons here are clear.
Without a critical formative culture, and the public spheres that nourish it,
a type of symbolic violence, engineered by the active disavowal of thought,
emerges in which it becomes difficult for people to think critically and act
with responsibility and informed judgment.
What I have stressed is that the culture of ignorance functions to depoliticize
people by immersing them in a culture of immediacy, thrill and pleasure,
a withdrawal into private obsessions, conspicuous consumption and the
spectacle of keeping up with popular celebrities.