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On august 4th 2020, a warehouse in the port of Beirut exploded.
The incident generated a zone of destruction 9.6 kms wide, killed
almost 200 people and wounded thousands. Long before the
explosion, Lebanon’s economy was in a deep crisis, unemployment
and poverty were on the rise and people flooded the streets over
and over again.

As Reine Chahine, a photographer from Beirut who documented the
aftermath, showed me some of her pictures I couldn't avoid wondering
how the violence surrounding human beings shapes the way we
understand reality? Where does violence comes from? And has it
always been there?

Modern day republics have been constructed on the idea that by
creating a monopoly of the use of force in the form of a State
violence would cease to exist. But even if this would be true,
such logic ignores the diverse ways in which violence can
manifest itself. For instance, Slavoj Žižek describes systemic
violence as the violence inherent to a system, this includes
“not only physical violence, but also de more subtle ways of
coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation,
including the threat of violence.”

In other words, by intending to regulate human interactions and
creating institutions to enforce these regulations, the system
can become violent itself and somehow, get lost in the “that
just how the things are” explanation of the world, what Žižek
would call pure ideology. While it surrounds us, systemic
violence becomes normal in our daily lives, at work, at home,
in the media and in the public space. Eventually, this normalised
ideology of violence can be manifested in our own actions, in
the way we understand the meaning of justice, in the way we
treat each other, in the way we explain things happening around
us.

In 2002, the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, answered
to a question about the lack of evidence linking the government
of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to
terrorist groups by creating his own theory of knowledge. He
said that knowledge can be categorised in 3 aspects: (1) “known
knows” or things that we know we know, (2) “known unknowns” or
things that que know that we don’t know and (3) “unknown
unknowns” or things that the we don’t know that we ignore.

In his philosophical analysis of Violence, Žižek argues that
there is a 4th category of knowledge that Rumsfeld failed to
identify, perhaps the most important and interesting one: the
“unknown knows” or the things that we do not know that we know.3
This is what ideologies are made from, the unconscious and silent
prejudices that are so enshrined in our daily lives that we
prefer to ignore them even though we know that every decision
we take will probably be affected by such violence inherent to
the system.

The Lebanese civil war ended 31 years ago, back then the three
most powerful sects in the country signed an agreement in which
they distributed the government power among them, but even
though the civil war ended, violence did not cease to exist.4
While objective violence has continuously been perpetrated in
Lebanon and the Middle East in the form of domestic and foreign
armed attacks, on the other hand, systemic violence has allowed
the normalisation of a corrupt governmental structure which
neglects people’s rights to education, health and security among
many other rights. So, where does the violence comes from? Is
it an external force affecting our agency as free willing human
beings or is it within ourselves shaping how we understand
everything around us, or could it be little bit of both?

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