In this paper, I explore the bodily constitution of violence from a phenomenological perspective, contrasting the directly lived experience of violence with imagistic violence. The analysis involves examining one’s own embodiment from the first-person perspective in two distinct situations: as the agent of violence, anchored in one’s own “I can”, and as a passive victim, marked by vulnerability and helplessness. Each situation reveals specific particularities of the other’s adversity. The final section transitions to the imagistic experience of violence, discussing how (...) bodily markers are modified in this context. Using Kubrick’s iconic film A Clockwork Orange as an example, I illustrate the shift in bodily structures and the implications of imagistic violence. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyse Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memories from a phenomenological perspective. Prosthetic memory, while sharing similarities with both personal and collective memory, is neither exclusively personal nor strictly collective, emerging as a product of new media in mass communication. According to Landsberg, prosthetic memories have four main characteristics: the recaller experiences them as firsthand accounts despite not personally living through the events, these memories often revolve around traumatic events, have a commodified form, and are ethically useful. (...) Using Husserl’s theories on memory consciousness and image consciousness, and contemporary phenomenological research on violence, I provide a phenomenological account for the first three characteristics of prosthetic memory. The key factors contributing to their quasi-personal and quasi-collective nature lie, on the one hand, in the presence of imagistic violence and, on the other hand, in their mass-mediated image character. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of imagistic violence by focusing—by means of a phenomenology open to dialogue with neighboring disciplines, from historiography to semiotics—on the particular case of photographs depicting atrocities, examples of photojournalism or images captured at crime scenes by forensic agents and presented as evidence during trials. To this end, I will implement a three-step analysis. First, I will seek to clarify the meanings associated with photography presented as evidence by adopting Husserl’s (...) phenomenological framework and by following a historiographical and juridical approach while verifying the grounds for the opposition that appears to be emerging between a paradigm of resemblance and a model of indirect, conjectural knowledge. Second, I will focus on how photography’s capacity to sustain a maximum degree of the reproduction of the real is problematized when the pictorial object is a violent scene that suspends, contradicts, and dismantles the order of the viewer’s experience. Finally, I will conclude by offering a hypothesis on the act of “seeing-with-other” and its phenomenological implications for the case of imagistic violence as evidence. Specifically, I will argue that we are more likely to understand imagistic violence at the level of a collective seeing than through a solitary gaze. (shrink)