Trust and Violence

Preface ix Introduction: The Mystery 1 Chapter 1: Trust and Modernity 9 Two Scenes from Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull 10 Trust 12 Practices of Social Trust 17 Trust and Seriousness-- The Gretchenfrage 21 Trust and the Construction of the We 27 We Can't Not Trust 33 Reorientation 35 The Bearers of Premodern Social Trust 39 The Problem of Trust within Modernity 44 Trust in Modernity 52 Chapter 2: Power and Violence 54 Kratos and Bia 54 A Phenomenology of Physical Violence 55 Locative Violence 57 Raptive Violence 60 Autotelic Violence 62 Reduction to Body 66 Psychological Violence/Autotelic Bias 69 Fragmentation: Th e Destruction of the I 71 Complementary Opposites 74 Power-- Without Violence 76 Coercive Power 79 The Temporality of Power 80 Reward Power, Coercive Power, and Violence 80 Richard III: A Flawed Power Calculus 83 Consent as a Function of Temporality 86 Participatory Power, Trust, Legal Regulation 89 Monopoly 92 Delegation 93 Th e Dynamics of Demonopolization 95 Participatory Power and Violence 97 Modernity and Violence 99 Chapter 3: Delegitimation/Relegitimation 101 Marsyas 101 Max Stays Seated 102 Permitted, Prohibited, Mandated 103 Civilization and Barbarism 106 Th e I and the Idea of Humanity 110 Disgust 116 Shakespeare and the Dawning Awareness of Violence as Wrong 127 Curtailing Violence and Preserving Trust 145 Relegitimation (1): Th e Rhetoric of Nation and Civilizing Mission 153 Bounding the Nation 167 Th e Guillotine and the Puppy 169 Relegitimation (2): Th e Rhetoric of Eschatological Purge 175 Relegitimation (3): Th e Rhetoric of Genocide 180 Modernity and Its Discontents 184 Chapter 4: Trust in Violence 187 Violence-- Trust-- Power: Th e Devil and the Little Bishop 187 Auschwitz-- Gulag-- Hiroshima 191 Escalating the Instruments of Violence 196 Modernization and the Gang 205 Demodernization and the Gang 219 The Logic of Terror 231 Macbeth 239 Why the Jews? 242 When the Impossible Becomes Possible 246 Trust in Violence and the

Jan Philipp Reemtsma, geboren 1952 in Bonn, ist unter Geisteswissenschaftlern und Intellektuellen ein fester Begriff. Er lebt und lehrt in Hamburg, ist Professor für Neuere Deutsche Literatur an der Universität Hamburg und Vorstand des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung und der Arno-Schmidt-Stiftung. Er ist Mitherausgeber der Werke Arno Schmidts und Autor zahlreicher Bücher. 1997 erhielt er den Lessing-Preis der Freien Hansestadt Hamburg, im Jahr 2015 den Gutenberg-Preis der Stadt Leipzig.

"This is the most exciting work of philosophy that I have read in years. It is brilliant, deep, and destined to be a classic. Bringing together fifteen years of work on violence, modernity, good, and evil, this book should change the way we think about all these concepts."--Susan Neiman, Einstein Forum