Description
In this paper, I investigate how the body and embodiment are significant in the production of ‘atrocity’ violence. While invoked in both academic and public political discourses to convey moral outrage at – and hence delegitimise – certain forms of violence, atrocity remains a nebulous concept. Broadly speaking, it is understood either through legalistic and policy-oriented factors such as scale, time, and distribution of violence, or more anthropologically through reference to the infliction of unnecessary cruelty and/or pain. Both approaches counter-intuitively minimise the embodied experience of violence and produce objectified ‘victims’, to be measured against quantitative factors (in the first approach) or the rationality/necessity of violence of the perpetrator (in the second). Drawing on testimonies from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established following the 1991-2002 Sierra Leonean civil war, I combine psychoanalytic and post-colonial approaches to consider firstly how the body in its vulnerability to pain, wounding, and death is politically affective, and secondly how ‘atrocity’ arises from this affective horror being linked with ideas of rationality. I argue that existing accounts of violence and atrocity neglect these embodied experiences of both the violated subject and the subject confronted with this violation, which thus impoverishes understandings of how violence becomes politically salient. My research contributes to recent post-structuralist investigations of the embodied and bodily production of politics, and broader ongoing critical debates around the sanitisation and racialisation of political violence.
KEYWORDS: atrocity violence; embodiment; bodies; psychoanalysis; post-colonialism
