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Welcome to the new books network. I'm Caleb Zackrin, Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Maxwell Cannell, Senior Research Associate at NOSM University. We're discussing ontologies of violence, deconstruction, pacifism, and displacement from Brill.
This book provides insight into how we understand the nature of violence. Maxwell, thank you for joining me today from the New Books Network. Thanks for having me, Kelv, I appreciate your time. Of course, yeah, thanks for being here.
And of course, I love doing books from Brill. They're always very interesting, so just wanted to give a brief shout out. But before jumping over the book, I was wondering if you could tell me a little about yourself and how you can write this book. Yeah, I'll second that about Brill.
It was kind of a dream to publish with them because they have their own kind of proprietary font. And so I was worried I was a little too drunk to them for reasons of form. But yeah, so I can't write the book by a wind about way that I'll share. So I'm currently a senior research associate at the Center for Social Accountability.
And that's at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, which has recently become its own kind of autonomous university. So at work, I work at an interdisciplinary team and we're focused on kind of medical education reform, helping doctors and healthcare professionals become more connected and accountable with the communities they serve. And so I'm currently very excited about preparing for a longer project on what it would mean to think about socially accountable research. So my scholarly work is connected to my work at the research center, but in some ways it's a little bit broader.
And so my first book with Paul Green McMillan, it was called Post-Secular History, and that was on the kind of political normative character of periodization, and how we divide time and history in religious ways, but also in secular ways. And then my next book after the one we're talking about is going to be on conspiratorial thinking and critical theory and political theology. And then in addition to that, I keep a foot in Mennonite studies with a project where I'm working on a book on Mennonites and Metaphysics, and I edit a book series in Anabaptist and Mennonite studies. So my work is kind of all over the place, but it's united by a single approach where I look critically at the normative and valuating character of keywords and key concepts like secularity, religion, violence, conspiracy.
And so overall, my work is in critical theory and religious studies, which are interdisciplinary enough for me to work freely. Now, the route to me writing this book was a long road. I'll say that it's based on my doctoral dissertation that I wrote under the direction of Travis Craker at McMaster University and defended in May 2021. And it was on ideas that I'd had for many years beforehand during my undergraduate master's degrees, but it wasn't until I met Travis and until I encountered the very pluralistic program at McMaster that I was able to pursue the project in a dedicated way.
So that's where I'm at in the route that took me here. So as far as the book is concerned, I was just wondering if for listeners just at the very most basic level, how do you understand the meaning of the term violence? Yeah, so the book itself, it's called Ontologies of Violence, Deconstruction, Pacifism and Displacement. And so deconstruction is a stand-in for the work of French philosopher Jacques Arida.
Pacifism is a word I'm using as a stand-in for Mennonite forms of pacifism that are philosophical, and then displacement is kind of my way of pointing to the work of Grace Janssen. But the term violence is the core of the book, right? I kind of wrote the book so you can read the introduction and conclusion and get the paradigm without necessarily having to do the three deep points. And then we dive into the into Derrida, Mennonites and Janssen.
So I think most people think of a violence as something we can identify with our senses. And I noticed that most writing on violence doesn't really define the term. It proceeds using examples like murder or war or assault. But the way I think of a violence is a little different.
It's through ontology, which is the study of the kind of metaphysical structures in the world. And it's epistemology, right? The study of how we know what we know. So for me violence is a category and a concept that's pretty far upstream from the examples we use to exemplify it.
And violence is something that's just inextricable from how we think and know and how we understand the world in our relation to it. That's why I knit the whole book around the idea that violence is best understood as a diagnostic concept that implies the violation of value-laden boundaries. Can you expand on that particular sentence that this idea of violence as being understood as a diagnostic concept that implies the violation of value-laden boundaries? Could you break down what a diagnostic concept is?
And then also, you know, this sort of notion of value-laden boundaries? Yeah, so the definition, I mean, I kind of wrote it in quite a compressed way that I've expanded a lot in the book, but it's, I mean, to kind of move through each term, violence is a direct reflection of our values. Like, without something to value, nothing can really be violated. And without symbolic boundaries that, like, encircle what we value, we wouldn't use the term violence to name a violation or a crossing.
So I noticed that it's like hard to find an example of violence where a line isn't being crossed or a boundary around something important isn't being like transgressed. And so these boundaries are how we keep our social bonds of trust and the things we think are important. It's how we keep things in place. And so I noticed that violence is a concept that it like brings with it the expectation that certain lines will not be crossed or should not.
And it's a negative concept that responds to states of affairs that we think should not be the case. And it's, and then on top of that, it's a diagnostic concept because it's a reflection of what we value. So if you call something violent, that tells me something about where you think the lines are. And so violence is a reflection of our values.
And that means debates about what counts as violence also reflect our conflicts of values. So not everyone agrees, for example, on whether words or language can be violent. So the fact that violence is a contested concept leads me to see it as a reflection of much deeper conflicts of values. And it's also an aid in interpretation in interpreting what people think is most important by listening for what's underneath their use of the term.
So as far as the case studies go, how did you settle on Grace Jansen, Jacques Derrida, and Mennonite Thought Tradition? So I was reading around in the history of Western religious and political thought, and I didn't find many like stable or central definitions of violence. And then when I did find them, like Hannah Arendt has a definition of violence that separates it from power. When I found definitions like that, I found they didn't like really reflect the breadth of how the term was being used, like in the public sphere.
And so I was interested in thinkers who understood violence as something that can in here and how we think and speak and know, and maybe even in the metaphysical structure of the world. Like do we live in an inherently violent world? So then when I encountered Jacques Derrida's early essay called Violence and Metaphysics, and then when I found that Mennonite theologians from my own tradition had responded to that, I was pretty thrilled because these are thinkers who are conceiving a violence is something upstream of its exemplary manifestations. And then my supervisor recommended that I read Grace Jansen, and she has this very neglected but very beautiful trilogy that she was assembling toward the end of her life.
And it's called Death and the Displacement of Beauty. And so in that book, she challenges how Derrida understands violence, and she sympathizes with Mennonite pacifism. So there's like this dialogue that was already sort of underway in a germinal form, and then I use the dissertation and then the book is an excuse to deepen it in further. Your book deals in the realm of political theology for listeners.
What is political theology in your view and what is the relationship between your book and the series study? That's a really good question because this term political theology is quite controversial and it's got a lot of angles to it. And the book does appear in a series on public and political theologies. And so it's another contested concept like violence.
It often reflects what its users think is important, but and its political theology is often used as a name for political forms of theology, most often Christian theology, where in theologians use political ideas to further their own names. But the kind of political theology I work with is more interdisciplinary and more critical, and it stands apart from theology proper because it looks analytically at how concepts that initially appear to be secular and modern, conceal theological and religious roots and histories, and they retain their structure even if they're empty of religious content. So for the example I give is one of the better ones I think is progress. We think of social or economic progress as a modern secular idea, but the idea itself is received from Jewish and Christian ideas of the end of time, the end of the world and the apocalypse.
And this is something that German thinkers like Karl Löveth and Hans Blumenberg wrote a lot about. So I just started reading a book called political theology today, 100 years after Karl Schmitt, Karl Schmitt, one of the very controversial and violent founding voices of the discourse. And this book shows how political theology has become kind of a field of research and a paradigm in the humanities and social sciences like in its own right. But they show it's one that can't really avoid being scandalous and controversial.
So Karl Schmitt famously was the crown juris of the Third Reich and his friend enemy distinction, animated his whole political thought, is something that's kind of been a cancer inside of political theology ever since. So part of my approach to political theology is trying to help it become less violent. And so I think about scandal and controversy and these kind of difficult terms like political theology, it's pretty germane to the book because over the course of writing the book I also found I was thinking more that way about Jacques Derrida. He was a very scandalous figure.
His definition of violence, I noticed a word at the end of my writing book and it shows up in the conclusion that his way of thinking of violence, it allowed him to overlook other forms of violence and avoid some things. Yeah, so I'll just add that about how Jacques Derrida conceived of violence. So that's a difficult question. It's a pretty highly debated question.
So whether Derrida even has like a formal definition of violence, he's just a highly interpretive figure, he would respond to those who he was reading and interpreting. So my focus on his essay violence and metaphysics where he's he's most concerned with the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levonot. And so in this essay Derrida says there's really no way to speak or to have language without some violence. And there's a phrase that I'm most interested in.
It's his claim that predication is the first violence or the original violence. And I mean, I think to a lot of people that sounds defeatist, right? Giving up on the idea that one could work against violence using language, but his claim is more of a caution to those who think you could like fully escape violence and achieve peace through the same means by which all violence is mediated in that language. So there's like one level of what guard us as violence is, but because I consider violence to be like a diagnostic interpretive concept, my first chapter reads his early work in detail and tries to show that, you know, every time he calls something violent, his real worry is about closure and totalization.
And so the value that's underneath his use of the term violence is this kind of openness. He values a radical form of openness that eventually I think really robs his definition of violence of its power because at a certain stage for Derrida, things become so radically open that having any coherent boundaries becomes a real problem for him. And I encountered this in a book by Vanessa Sringora called consent, or she just kind of offhand mentions that he signed a quite disturbing open letter in the 60s or 70s against the raising of Age of Consent Laws in France. So he was part of Derrida, was part of this French intelligency who thought that any curb on desire or anything that bounded anything off was a form of violence.
And I see that as a violent limitation of his thought, and I discuss that in the conclusion to the book. So I think there's always that possibility within the conversation of violence that the desire to protect against it can flip into its opposite. And this is the case for all the sources in the book. All of Ontario Safer.
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How do you see that coming through in Mennonite thought and also in addition to looking at how the power Mennonite thought in Paris, but there he does thought just giving an overview of what Mennonites think and believe. Yeah, so the Mennonite thing is interesting. It's a tradition I kind of grew up in and work a bit in and it's not only come from a radical left wing of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. The about this groups kind of where they wanted more severe quicker reforms than their Lutheran or reformed counterparts.
And so that radicalism comes down the line and gets received and contemporary men and I thinking in some interesting ways that I discuss in the second chapter of the book. But I noticed that like Mennonites don't talk enough about violence. They talk far more about peace and justice. And those are definitely the positive correlates of violence, but they don't really tell us much about what they are against or about what violence is and does.
So my second chapter I take out by interpret the work of two highly exceptional like philosophical theologians in the Mennonite tradition that's Chris Hughbner and people and both of them are trying to they're responding to data and to that kind of conversation about whether language can be violent. And they're trying to articulate a vision of peace that sees peace is something that's for human rights. It's precarious. You can't possess it as soon as you think you have it it's lost.
And then similarly with human right there's similarly with blown sorry pieces something impossible. You can't really go anywhere without doing some violence and so it's about anti violent minimization tactics. And so the presence of violence in the manite tradition is pretty deep. It's a pacifist tradition that's like known for its resistance to war.
It's a highly persecuted history back to the 1525 and onward. But the most famous manite theologian is named John Howard Yoder. And he was the one who kind of put men ideology on the map, especially in terms of his politics of Jesus. But you know underneath all of this was a long term highly disturbing program of sexual abuse, which he kind of like in the case of Heidegger right there was initially this thought that he made some mistakes but his theology is stable and usable.
But over time as you know more documentary evidence came out this this manite theologian. I mean it's clear he sexual violence is like in some respects built into his theology. And so there's been this interior like in house reckoning with John Howard Yoder's work that I'm not so interested in going deeply into in the book. I didn't want to make my book all about him.
But I think that there's something about the pacifist position that can actually be quite avoidant of the conflict of values that lead to lead to and define violence. So that's something I talk a bit about in the second chapter. But overall I'm interested in how these men andites respond to darida and say like look they're they're they're actually they see their in some respects is a bit of an enemy. But part of my work in the second chapter is showing how they their values actually do align.
So when Huber and Blum talk about violence they're also often using it in a similar way saying like if something's violent it offends against the openness of things violence closes things down rather than opens things up. So like a violent view of peace would be to say like I possess it and I know it's perfect definition. So that's that's kind of the minute conversation. The responses to darida are there's a few of them and I interpret them in close detail.
But that's something I'm trying to further in the book. And just to you know to fill out with your three case studies, Grace and Janssen if you could discuss her work I actually not heard of her before so it was interesting to learn about her. But I would love to hear about how her conception of violence compares with the men and I thought and and yeah so she's just fascinating and really wonderful to read and think about. I encountered her thought my supervisor recommended that I look into her and I hadn't heard of her either for most of my masters program.
And so she's kind of like a hidden key and all of this where you have darida is kind of got a huge thing going on and then the men and I respond to him. But Janssen is an interesting third party because she criticizes darida's ideas of a violence and language she says you know you can't equate the force of sentence with the force of a bomb we need to think more carefully about how we're using that word. But she also I think she grew up in a men and I don't know brethren contacts which she then left. I think because of her sexuality she was a lesbian who like then moved to the UK and did a second doctorate and became a Quaker.
So she's quite like has a really broad vision of things and she sympathizes still with in some of her late work with the men and I passivism but you know I think it has some has some clearer thinking about peace than many men nights do. And so her whole thesis in her final trilogy two of the volumes of which were posthumous is that we are both death obsessed and death avoidant and she's wanting to kind of reframe our thoughts about mortality the fact that we all die and refocus on Natality the fact that we are all born and Natality she draws that for me to run a cover where on Hannah rent as well. And this this reframe is interesting to me because she tries to do it in a way that doesn't displace one with the other he's trying to think about how we can be more life affirming without being death denying. And I think the word displacement is really key for that and I developed that in the book I think a little bit more than she does.
Because I'm trying to think about displacement as a violent structure of the world where you think differences lead inevitably to danger and if one thing is different than another then by necessity it will displace the other thing. So that's the real possibility that I see in her thinking she's able to criticize both paradise limitations and her feminist critique is such a necessary compliment to men and I think for obvious reasons. And as far as just a broader framework for thinking about violence just to bring it home. How you think that both scholars and other people should think about violence differently than some of the other ideas that you discussed so far.
Yeah, so I think like the introduction of the book and throw like I give this definition of violence is the violation of valuing boundaries. It's like a nice way of interpreting things. But I think the challenge for using this framework is to think about violence in a way that avoids two like twin problems. And the first is the tendency to just abandon the term violence to subjectivity to say like oh it just means whatever we want it to mean it's just a reflection of values if you value something different your definition of violence is different.
And then the second is the opposite is to like fix that term in place and declare you know a set of static values against which we would position violence and have like just one definition for all time. So I want to avoid those two things. Violence is like radically subjective as a word and you know the same kind of violent act done in one situation the same act can be done elsewhere with slight changes in context. It's not violent at all to those who are involved.
So we have to acknowledge that we all think differently about what violence is and that's because we all think differently. But this can't paralyze the defense of a set of social and symbolic boundaries and it shouldn't paralyze anti violent action that resists those especially those who repurpose the term in like a polemical and persuasive ways. So like calling something violent can become a political tactic that used to delegitimize others. And so I think we need to go beyond the definition that I provide and contest the idea that calling something violent is enough to critique it.
So when something when someone says something is violent I think the take home is the next question we should always ask is alright but what values does that reflect and what conflicts of values does that expose. And I'm definitely the media example that just to screen mind is like I'm an American so American football and you know a lot of people myself include think like yeah there's something kind of barbaric to it but at the same time in the context of American culture. It's hard to deny it's hard to deny its place and as a result I feel kind of comfortable with that but a certain with certain that you know maybe acts of control violence. So long as it's you know everyone's okay with it or consenting.
And that's that's a key part of it right like Janssen so funny she like for her you know football and she says this explicitly I want to book this very funny that the football is a is like a substitute for violence. And I remember like she she condemns it in that respect because she thinks it's a reflection of a violent culture but I hear the opposite argument from others that it's just like kind of an exhaust like it's a way to kind of get the violence out so it doesn't show up elsewhere. I'm not so sure but I don't know enough about sports or really say. Yeah I know these sports are definitely you know it's a in under discussed field of you know I was always wondering I feel like there's sports place such a vital role in things but yeah it's hard to really think about them in like these sort of theoretical philosophical approaches.
One of the ways I think of is like I've been using this word competition throughout the book right part of the problem I see with this violent ontology of displacement is where you set up two different things is in competition with each other where you think one has to win like like Natality or more tally like we would have to emphasize the fact that we all die at the expense of the fact that we're all born. But now I'm thinking a little bit more trying to think more carefully about this term competition and question whether there is some some healthy version of it where there might be enough enough boundaries around competition and consent by those involved that it could lead to something good. Yeah it's hard to squeeze everything in you know to one book I've seen too many books that try and go too far field. I'm already doing that I'm already doing too much this should have been great.
So you mentioned at the very beginning that you've another book in the works I was wondering if you just quickly talk about that and a little bit of the other things that you've been thinking about since this book came out. Yeah absolutely so my just just following the finishing the dissertation I went into a short postdoctoral fellowship at the Department for the study of religion at University of Toronto and so I spent two years on a project there called critique of conspiracism or I'm trying to think about the underlying structures of thought behind conspiratorial thinking what what makes conspiracy theories what they are and some reading books by Michael Butter and trying to enter that discourse so my next book is called critique of conspiracism it's under contract with a series of religious conspiracy theories. And so for the next year or so I'll be I'll be working on writing that one up and that one takes basically three approaches to the problem. The first is trying to think about conspiratorial thinking as a somewhat religious phenomena there's a whole conversation about that the second paradigm I'm looking at is critical theory and it's like current manifestations that follow from the Frankfurt school.
So I'm reading the works of Rahal Yegi reinforced Robin Sellecatus and Titus Stahl and trying to think about how to criticize conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking by showing how they don't solve the problems they purport dissolve and turn like rather than paternalistically impose a standard on to them from outside whether that's education or critical thinking I want to kind of show their interior contradictions and then the third paradigm I'm drawing on which I'm really excited about is something called internal family systems which is a quite a largely popularized therapy modality for the treatment of trauma complex trauma and so that's helping me kind of get outside of intellectualizing about conspiratorial thinking which is very often a kind of an affective motive speech. So that's the basic frame of the next book and more to come after that. Well look forward to seeing what you do you're definitely going down some really interesting I find it so hard personally to read soap to spend a lot of time reading about violence and these sorts of things. I'm wondering for you personally like is it do you find it difficult like you need to create periods of time where you can't be reading about this stuff or is there something about reading about it that makes you feel like a little bit more peaceful.
Yeah that's hard like I'm lucky I'm not like people in this course is like peace and conflict studies or conflict resolution where they're engaged in situations that are corporeal material physical violence or in front of them. I read thinkers who reflect on it quite abstractly and that abstraction has provided a layer of protection for me that many people who do more concrete work don't have so my partner is a therapist who works with complex trauma and PTSD that's a lot different right like that's that's much closer to the bone. My self care stuff is doesn't have to work against as much as it does for others who are more engaged. My hope is that the book can be a resource for theoretical thinking for those who do quite practical work in the field and help them kind of think about the violence in a fresh or a new way.
So that's that's the good end game I think that's you know always always a good a good hope for you know the action between theory and practice. You know it's obviously hard to score that circle sometimes you have to kind of operate in both worlds you know one at a time but yeah I definitely think that they think that they can see that connection. Thank you so much for being a guest on the new books never crazy book is ontology the violence deconstruction pacifism and displacement from Brill. Thank you.
Thank you so much.