Lecture: The Generativity of Violence: Affect, Embodiment, and Political Agency. Dr. Salih Can Açiksöz

The Generativity of Violence: Affect, Embodiment, and Political Agency.

The destructive face of violence often occludes its generativity. This talk draws from two ethnographic research projects conducted in Turkey over the last decade— one with disabled military veterans who fought against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party guerrillas and one with medics who delivered healthcare to protesters during the 2013 Gezi Uprising — to illustrate how violence produces new forms of embodiment, community, and political agency. Putting the ideas of the classical theorists of violence, such as Girard and Fanon, in a critical dialogue with the insights of affect theory and critical phenomenology, the talk reflects on how anthropologists working in settings of political violence can ethnographically theorize the generativity of violence.