“The occasion of violence, not to mention the turn toward violence, resides in the power exerted over one will by another will. It is difficult to imagine situations of interaction in which one individual does not exert a power over another by the very fact of acting. Let us underscore the expression ‘power-over.’ Given the extreme ambiguity of the term ‘power,’ it is important to distinguish the expression ‘power-over’ from two other uses of the term ‘power’…. We termed power-to-do, or power to act, the capacity possessed by an agent to constitute himself or herself as the author of action, with all the related difficulties and aporias. We also termed power-in-common the capacity of the members of a historical community to exercise in an indivisible manner their desire to live together, and we have been careful to distinguish this power-in-common from the relation of domination in which political violence resides, the violence of those who govern as well as that of the governed. The power-over, grafted onto the initial dissymmetry between what one does and what is done to another — in other words, what the other suffers — can be held to be the occasion par excellence of the evil of violence. The descending slope is easy to mark off, from influence, the gentle form of holding power-over, all the way to torture, the extreme form of abuse. Even in the domain if physical violence, considered the abusive use of force against others, the figures of evil are innumerable, from the simple use of threats, passing through all the degrees of constraint, and ending in murder. In all these diverse forms, violence is equivalent to the diminishment or the destruction of the power-to-do of others. But there is something even worse: in torture, what the tormentor seeks to reach and sometimes — alas! — succeeds in destroying is the victim’s self esteem, esteem which our passage by way of the norm has elevated to the level of self-respect. What is called humiliation — a horrible caricature of humility — is nothing else than the destruction of self-respect, beyond the destruction of the power-to-act. Here we seem to have reached the depths of evil. But violence can also be concealed in language as an act of discourse, hence an action; this anticipates the analysis that we shall undertake of promising: it is not by chance that Kant counts false promises among the major examples of maxims unamenable both to the rule of universalization and to the respect of the difference between persons as ends in themselves and things that are means to an end. The betrayal of friendship, the inverse figure of faithfulness, without being equivalent to the horror of torture, tells us a lot about the malice of the human heart” (Ricoeur 1994:220-221).
Ricoeur, Paul
1994[1990] Oneself as Another. Kathleen Blamey, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
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