A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy after Narco-Culture
Carlos Alberto Sanchez’s A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy after Narco Culture carries out a phenomenological investigation of narco violence “outside the purview of [conventional] philosophy” that differentiates brutality from cruelty as it exposes the limits of violence itself. What is “the something more” of violence? What is “the unspeakable” and “the unimaginable” excess of violence? Sanchez explains:
Prying our concepts apart allows us to see that violence, when it is “irrepressible” (or “unthinkable” or “unspeakable”), is no longer violence but brutality; that brutality, as more than violence, is other than cruelty; and that, phenomenologically, brutality gives itself as that which oversaturates our concept of violence. (90)
For Sanchez, the specificity of “the historical event and social fact of narco-culture” demands a reflection on what philosophy means in its aftermath. The reviewers in this symposium ponder the implications of rethinking brutality in other contexts and aftermaths, which raise philosophical, theoretical, methodological, and anthropological questions: Is there a dialectical relation between ultra-objective and ultra-subjective violence within contemporary narco-history? What are the limits of derealization and dehumanization as frames for the conceptualization of brutality? What does positionality have to do with “speechlessness”? Is narco brutality a “difficulty of reality” specifically for secular liberals? How does the image of brutal death expose the insufficiency of the spectacle? How can technologically advanced states arrive at brutality through disciplinary power without necessarily using excessive force? How does brutality—as it both creatively and destructively constitutes modern culture itself—inaugurate a relationship between singularity and generalizability?
We thank the reviewers for their generous engagement and for expanding the conversation on violence. We specifically thank Nicola Hederich at Galerie Peter Kilchmann for securing permission for us to publish the image Muro Baleado by the Mexican conceptual artist Teresa Margolles with description notes from the artist herself.
