Violence and Orders: Introduction

he moment a person enters the world, they find themselves surrounded by precedented orders; concrete forms of political borders and categories such as citizenship, kinship, gender and so forth, as well as the prejudices and grammar that underlie them. These constitute an integral part of human affairs including how we understand ourselves and how we navigate each day. There is no social order that is not reliant on prejudices which include certain people and exclude others. Dragged through time, these and the according orders are naturalized, turned into truths that are thought to be self-evident. The task for critical theory is therefore not necessarily to eliminate orders per se, but to consider that they are political. Hannah Arendt reminds us that “the danger of prejudice lies in the very fact that it is always anchored in the past – so uncommonly well-anchored that it not only anticipates and blocks judgement, but also makes both judgement and a genuine experience of the present impossible.”1 The power formations behind judgements originally had their own experimental basis, which might well be inapplicable or unjust for the present. This inaugural issue has taken as its task to lay bare the violence that springs from this ordering.