Is Violence Critique?

Abstract

The offence and violence surrounding episodes like the Salman Rushdie Affair and the Danish cartoon controversies have furnished Western critique of Islam. While important work has challenged this criticism of Islam by interrogating the secular foundations of critique, the relationship between violence and critique remains troubling. Through reflecting on an excerpt from an attempted murder trial following an attack in purported retaliation for offending Islam in an English prison, this article considers an expanded notion of violence that recognizes the structural conditions behind violence and the political stakes that prioritize the psychological and ideological drivers that service criticism of Islam. This article builds on scholarship that explored the State and the violent actions of non-State actors and the critical studies of hate crimes, Islamist extremism, and radicalization to reflect on the role of critique in the aftermath of violence and to ask: “Is violence critique?” It argues for an approach to violence-as-critique by recognizing how emotion and violence are not merely resident inside the fanatical body that protrudes outwards but are instead part of the wider, circulating, and unstable affective economies of structural violence where violences can be mutually reinforcing.