The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (New Directions in Latino American Cultures)

This book traces the theory of violence from nineteenth-century symmetrical warfare through today's warfare of electronics and unbalanced numbers. Surveying such luminaries as Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Paul Virilio, and Jacques Derrida, Avelar also offers a discussion of theories of torture and confession, the work of Roman Polanski and Borges, and a meditation on the rise of the novel in Colombia.

This book traces the theory of violence from nineteenth-century symmetrical warfare through today's warfare of electronics and unbalanced numbers. Surveying such luminaries as Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Paul Virilio, and Jacques Derrida, Avelar also offers a discussion of theories of torture and confession, the work of Roman Polanski and Borges, and a meditation on the rise of the novel in Colombia.

Between the initial version of this chapter, composed in 2000 and published as an article in Chile in 2001, and the significantly rewritten version that appears in this book, much has changed in the discussion of the theme of torture, as the "war on terrorism" has revived debates that one thought were definitively buried in Western democracies.