War and Violence

Translated from French by Cédrine Michel
Edited by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz
Copy editing: Stefan Nowotny

It is not sufficient to speak of violence alone: sexual violence, racial violence, the violence of exploitation. In capitalism – Maurizio Lazzarato writes – production, whether material or immaterial, affective or desiring, always presupposes the extra-economic, extra-affective, extra-cognitive production of social classes. For production, there must be class; and to produce class, there must be a war of subjugation. For a long time, war no longer seemed to be part of political debates – it seemed merely a phenomenon from the past or the fate of distant countries on the planet. In his essay War and Violence post-operaist philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato talks about the permanent continuity of warlike violence, its relation to the beginning of capitalist cycles of accumulation, and the production of subjectivity.

The present text is a translation of Maurizio Lazzarato’s lecture Guerre et Violence, which was comissioned as part of the lecture and discussion series On Violence (2022), a collaboration between Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (ADKDW) and Hebbel-am-Ufer Theater, Berlin (HAU). On Violence was curated by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz and Margarita Tsomou.

This publication is funded by the Akademie der Künste der Welt/Köln (Academy of the Arts of the World/Cologne) as part of the Decolonial Studies Program (2022-2023)