Radical Violence and the Ontological Fragility of the Political

This article argues that radical violence allows us to understand diffuse, opaque, and ontologically corrosive forms of violence that are not confined to event-centered, instrumental or legal-judicial conceptions of violence. Rather, radical violence is performed through a malign condition of structural, epistemic, bureaucratic and algorithmic forms of rule, and not in acts of coercive violence. Drawing on phenomenology, hermeneutics and post-foundationalism, the article shows how radical violence roots itself in the world-relation, resulting in disorientation, narrative rupture, unworlding and a state of almost permanent vulnerability. Radical violence also empties the grounds of worlding and relationality, even where institutions themselves are not destroyed. The book concludes with a theoretical account of the ontological fragility of the political, wherein political worlds are sustained through fragile practices of meaning, recognition, and judgment that render them at once possible and vulnerable to radical violence. It does not offer solutions, but rather expands the conceptual vocabulary through which contemporary harm is understood as a world-altering phenomenon.