Violence

SUMMARY Violence, whether actual physical violence or the violence of oppression, is an inarticulate language rooted in an obscure matrix of hate, dread and despair. It connotes qualitatively discrete categories of pain-psychological, emotional, spiritual-that are beyond words, mocking our concept of human understanding. Facts are detached from reality. Reality is estranged from meaning. An academic approach to the subject of human violence that addresses those who commit such acts as well as those who fall victim, must engage something in and of the human experience of the irrational, but explicated from the inside of that experience. This is, admittedly, a quixotic proposition. Yet in the absence of such a perspective, any discussion of human violence is rendered, well, academic.