Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volume 18, Issue 2, Spring 2014

Andrew T. LaZella
Pages 373-394

De Aventure
Matter, Causal Violence, and the Event Worthy of Its Name

That the category of violent causation has passed from the register of “useful” scientific categories is without question. And yet, in a time of ecological crisis, this conceptual atavism reflects not some idyllic pre-modern past, but the present ubiquity of causal violence. Tracing a course through medieval Aristotelianism will show not only that violence cannot be reduced to artificial production, but also that its operation remains phantasmatic insofar as it seeks to exclude the very condition upon which it is founded: possibility. And as the possibility to end all possibility, violence neutralizes “any event worthy of its name.”