Organised by Susanne Strätling, project Circulations of Theory: Topics, Processes, and Histories of a Globalised Form of Writing, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies", and Vasyl Cherepanyn (Visual Culture Research Center, Ukraine/EXC 2020 Early Career Fellow April–May 2025) in cooperation with the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education).

Although violence is a key societal phenomenon and one of the fundamental concepts of politics, the social stereotypes and existential fears that dominate discourses on violence have created an artificial zone of reflexive disability and analytical silence around it. On the one hand, violence is being traditionally inscribed in the historical context of the 20th century with its totalitarianisms, genocides, and mass terror and is clearly defined in negative terms. Hence the idea of non-violent development and the achievement of a state of society in which manifestations and methods of violence would morph into increasingly civilised forms, which seemed to have become generally accepted in the last few decades being particularly inspired by a range of the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 that were dubbed 'non-violent'. This approach, which seeks to reduce or avoid violence in society, to make it controllable and transparent, has utterly failed in the last years. In the context of brutal full-scale wars and genocidal attempts in Eastern Europe, violence in its most savage and archaic forms once again merged with the very fabric of society, penetrating all spheres of life and leading to the degradation of social cohesion and solidarity.

On the other hand, theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of violence attempt to disentangle themselves from the brutal experience of cruelty. This is especially evident from the prominent perspective of cultural semiotics that transforms violent acts such as warfare into symbolic 'exchange processes' on the borders of semiospheres. Without any doubt, an attack by force of arms that brings death and destruction is also carried out on the level of signs. The military insignia V and Z in Russia's current war of aggression against Ukraine are perhaps the most obvious indication of this. But this theoretical logic of symbolic mergers suppresses and eschews the fact that violence demands real victims, that the price for 'intense symbolic interactivity' is paid with lives.

Violence is inextricably linked to the existence of the collective or individual body; its nature is always manifested in the direct impact on the body, in the area of fragile tactility. The symposium explores this complex interrelationship between the need for theorisation as a means for reflection on current and past events and its limits in the face of practices of violence. Against the backdrop of raging wars and a fascist turn in global politics, the event tackles the multifaceted realities of violence and its societal impacts by addressing the extreme violent ideologies and their political applications, war traumata and the mass psychophysical devastation, the destruction of nature particularly due to military hostilities, the current visual violence and the variety of forms of its representation in arts and media. The structure of the symposium will reflect these entanglements and interrelationships and combines a theoretical discursive part and an artistic experience part.

Programme

Keynote: Michał Herer (University of Warsaw)

Michał Herer and Vasyl Cherepanyn (Visual Culture Research Center, Ukraine/EXC 2020 Early Career Fellow April–May 2025) in Conversation

Panel Discussion with Stanislav Aseyev und Yana Kononova

Moderated by Kateryna Mishchenko

Panel Discussion with Lesya Kulchynska, Mykola Ridnyi and Till Gathmann (typographer, artist and writer/former EXC 2020 Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence, November–December 2022)

Moderated by Susanne Strätling (Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020)