Pacifism's precarity.

摘要

In this dissertation I do not aim to resolve the problem of pacifism, but examine the concept of pacifism by exploring the generative praxis inherent in it. In other words, I will consider pacifism neither as passive, nor moral, nor even neutral. I am interested in pacifism only insofar as it develops productive practices that function because they paradoxically affirm their own precariousness. The historical dimension of this dissertation concentrates primarily on the American pacifist movement of the Catholic Worker, engendered by Dorothy Day in New York City, 1933. However, to create this peculiar trajectory of thought, I connect the Catholic Worker movement to the literature of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and to the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Approaching pacifism through the comparative studies of activism, literature, and philosophy affords the possibility to rethink pacifist practices as dynamically problematic, i.e. struggling to think and act outside the boundaries of rational, lawful, common sense. As Dorothy Day wrote, Catholic Workers try to do "[...] what no law enforcement can do, what no common sense can achieve.";Such a problematic direction for thought was a necessity for Ingeborg Bachmann, who wrote during post-World War II. Her work explores and reveals a brutality that was not yet sensible within the so-called "peacetime." Bachmann argued that the brutality of the war had remained by mutating into socially acceptable, common practices. Within this negative experience of peace, I develop a method for rethinking the efforts of pacifism through the work of Gilles Deleuze. His philosophy of concept creation enables me to determine the problem of pacifism by concentrating immanently on the particular dynamic of precarity that resonates between the various daily practices of the Catholic Worker - voluntary poverty, open hospitality, community living, and political activism.;With a problematic stage set by Bachmann, an experimental manner of thinking by Deleuze, and the provocative lifestyle of the Catholic Workers, the practices of pacifism's precarity take on complexity by creating a network of social relations that is not dependent on the State and is antagonistic to any social form that functions off of brutality.