Interpreting the Peruvian internal armed conflict from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy

Katherine Mansilla Torres^[2]

Abstract

The following text advances the distinction between two ways of understanding violence: on one hand, that which understands violence as destructive and that, therefore, it must be overcome; on the other, that which considers violence as a social relationships’ phenomenon, which would allow for a broader and more dynamic analysis of collective life. The text is divided in three sections. First, we identify the ways in which violence has been understood in Peru, specifically, in the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Second, we use the phenomenological ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to reconsider the relation established between violence, power and history. Third, we try to approach, from a Merleaupontian perspective, to a re-reading of the Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict, taking into consideration violence as a fundamental social phenomenon.^[3]

   

Key words: violence; contingency; Merleau-Ponty; conflict.

Resumen

Este texto propone distinguir dos vías reflexivas de la violencia: por un lado, aquella que entiende la violencia como destructiva y que, por ende, debe ser superada; por otro lado, la vía que piensa la violencia como un fenómeno de relación social, que facilitaría un análisis más amplio y dinámico de la vida colectiva. El texto se divide en tres partes. En primer lugar, identificamos los modos como se ha comprendido la violencia en el Perú, específicamente, en el informe final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación. En segundo lugar, nos apoyamos en ideas fenomenológicas de Maurice Merleau-Ponty para reconsiderar la relación que se establece entre violencia, poder e historia. En tercer lugar, intentamos aproximarnos, a partir de la propuesta merleaupontiana, a una relectura del conflicto armado interno peruano, considerando la violencia como un fenómeno social fundamental.

   

Palabras clave: violencia; contingencia: Merleau-Ponty; conflicto.

§ 1. Violence according to the final report of the truth and reconciliation commission

Almost fifteen years ago, Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR due to its initials in Spanish) presented its Final Report to the Peruvian State. This way, the CVR completed its mission, which was to shed light on the violence process and on the facts of the internal armed conflict that took place between 1980 and 2000, as well as to determine the corresponding responsibilities, within a framework of democratic institutions and the defense of Human Rights (CVR 2003).

The Final Report is shocking for several reasons: the number of fatalities (69 280 people), the cruelty exercised both by the terrorist groups (Peruvian Communist Party Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) and by some sectors of the Armed Forces, and the indifference of a large part of civil society, who had not stopped to think of the victims’ situation nor of the painful consequences of this historical period. Because of all of this, the Report is highly valuable: not only does it enable the opening of transitional justice processes on the basis of the recommendations it offers, but it also encourages academic inquiry and discussion concerning the relation between violence, history, and political power. However, considering that in the years since the Report was presented, many of the recommendations in it have not been adequately assumed by the Peruvian State, the political parties, and civil society, as one might have expected. Peru still faces the challenge of thoroughly understanding what happened during the armed conflict.

I believe that the temporal distance elapsed—eighteen years—since the delivery of the Report may be favorable for its reading and revision, since we can reconsider if applying such meanings makes sense today. Briefly, it is possible to identify three frequent uses of the word “violence” in the Final Report. (1) Violence as visible actions. The CVR categorizes violence on the grounds of concrete actions that violate human rights. One might say that an event is “violent” when it can be classified as a crime according to the legal framework. This enables the CVR to identify the agents involved (victims and aggressors), and to show cruelty and offense as punishable, tangible actions. The functionality of this first perspective allowed the CVR to promote the opening of judicial proceedings, and to offer the State some of the tools required for the just reparations for the victims. However, the identification of these visible actions is not enough to understand violence more generally. The partial analysis of identification must be accompanied by research on the socio-historical context. For this reason, the Report turns to the analysis of what I understand as structural violence.

(2) Structural violence. The CVR explains that the violent conduct of the agents involved in the conflict (the visible actions) must be seen under the light of the historical and social factors that enabled them: marginalization, poverty, discrimination, authoritarianism, amongst others. The CVR considers the group Shining Path to be the main responsible for the armed conflict (2003: VIII 16). However, with no intention of justifying the terror strategy applied, the CVR proposes a deeper analysis with the metaphor of a “spiral” (2003: I 30) that renews itself, grows, and expands due to unresolved historical violence that has remained unaddressed for many years. In this sense, what could be identified as “structural violence” works as the matrix that makes the violence of “visible actions” understandable. This also explains why, on occasions, the CVR describes the armed conflict as an “episode of extreme violence” (2003: I 29), that is, a moment when structural violence manifests itself and overflows. Structural violence is not an element that dissuades from identifying responsibilities; on the contrary, it tries to understand agency from a historical and systemic perspective.

(3) Violence as a rejectable tool. The dynamic that arises between the violence of visible actions (1) and structural violence (2) allows the CVR to conclude a third form of violence; namely, violence as an “intrusion in politics” (2003: I 19), which must therefore be rejected. The Report actually describes violence also as a resource, a tool used by the terrorist groups and some sectors of the Armed Forces to try to bring the conflict to an end. In this context, the CVR claims—following Hannah Arendt—that violence is contrary to politics, for the latter is “the dialogical process to build agreements” (2003: VIII 17).

We can see how the Final Report presents three forms of violence within a reasoning that makes it possible to conclude its rejection. Visible violence manifests structural violence, which—in turn—explains instrumental violence. The latter, placed at a deliberative and evaluative level, is recognized as destructive and, therefore, it must be either excluded, overcome or abandoned in the political arena. Thus, instrumental violence, according to the CVR, excludes every political position and, in spite of being deduced from the previous forms, its intrusion produces danger for political relations.

The analysis presented by the CVR is closely linked to previous reflections. For instance, as aforementioned, the notion that instrumental violence must be morally rejected corresponds to Hannah Arendt’s proposal (1970). Arendt distinguishes violence from power: violence is associated with domination, while power is the capacity to act under agreements. This means that power is legitimate because it takes place in plural and dialogical public life, contrary to violence, which is an instrument to attain and preserve power. Thus, Arendt believes that violence always seeks a justification, but it is never legitimate. She says “violence is mute” (1970: 47) and is excluded from power, which is dialogue and agreement in politics. Hence, what we find here is a response based on a moral distinction that sets violence and power apart, in order to finally eliminate violence from our political relations.

Regarding structural violence, the Report refers to Galtung’s (1998) violence triangle. Galtung proposes to identify the factors that enable visible violence by considering the existence of a non-visible violence, which can be subdivided into structural and symbolic (1998: 15). Galtung also differentiates between ex ante and ex post violence. The ex-ante corresponds to previous situations of conflict that were not attended, and the ex post, to the transformative possibilities aimed at avoiding violence, considering the features of a symbolic violence.

The interpretation of violence in the Report—and its references to Arendt and Galtung, to mention just a few authors—brings forth questions which must be addressed. It is obvious that the reasoning developed in the Report will lead to the conclusion that “it is necessary to overcome violence.” But, is this possible? I think it is important to consider the context in which the Report was written. This corresponds to two factors: the violent episode that had just ended (the armed conflict) against a non-violent process, namely, the democratic transition during 2001 that allowed the creation of the CVR. The democratic transition is not only considered “non-violent,” it is also repairing insofar as it represents possible political ideals, such as democracy, dialogue, justice, and pluralism (CVR 2003: I 31). This way, an evaluative political order, which is yet to be “made”—i.e., a “desirable” order for this new political era—, is legitimated. It is important to understand that the CVR’s Report was produced within the legal international framework of Human Rights, facing the reality of dictatorships in the Latin-American continent. I do not intend to criticize the Report, but to present some concerns regarding the idea of violence, which I believe still need to be discussed.

According to Staudigl (2014), to identify violence only from its destructive potential is inconvenient by three main reasons, First, violence seen only as negative establishes a subjective analysis in a single direction; i.e., aggressors and victims are identified, thinking that they are related to each other as the oppressing executioner of violence and victim whose agency is destroyed. Second, as Staudigl explains, the binary and dual logic (violence v. non-violence) also conditions a view of the legitimate and the illegitimate in social organizations, without taking into consideration the exercise of subtler forms of violence. Indeed, violence is associated with the lack of justice, democracy, and development, but all of these categories imply life options and choices that can affect others and continue exercising a type of violence that is not so easy to uncover. Hence, Staudigl proposes analyzing violence as a network of power relations. However, as Guthmann (1991) suggests, the alternative is not to make violence so broadly polysemic as to render it unintelligible.

Is it possible to think violence beyond its destructiveness? The phenomenological description found in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty might shed light on a way of understanding the Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict from a perspective that allows us to delve into the meaning and the use we are giving to the term “violence.”

§ 2. Violence in Merleau-Ponty’s political work

The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty helps to overcome the binary logic used to understand violence beyond its sedimented meanings. There are two reasons for this. First, the political work of Merleau-Ponty is a response to his own experiences during World War II, an experience that Merleau-Ponty tries not to forget. Second, Merleau-Ponty continues to reflect on violence and power in the context of the political antagonism of the Cold War and the threat of a third war. I will focus mainly on two of the author’s works: Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) and Humanisme et terreur (1947).

2.1. Violence and social anonymity

The French word “empiétement” is used to indicate that a person is transgressing or usurping the functions or properties that belong to someone else. Saint-Aubert, who has carefully studied the term empiétement in the work of Merleau-Ponty, proposes to understand it as an intentional transgression (2004: 18). Even though the author develops the term “empiétement” in his period of maturity, it is possible to refer to it in his earlier work (1945). Though the word does not appear in Phénoménologie de la perception, the term violence is indeed used there within his description of intersubjective relations. Let us offer two examples of this:

(i) Violence in sexual desire (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 194 [193]).^[4] Two subjects desire each other, but they also feel that they lose their autonomy in their relationship; that is, there is a sexual dependence mixed with the interest of possessing the other (objectivation) and, at the same time, with the desire of being recognized by the other as a subject. In this case, violence does not show up as the unilateral control of A over B, but as a transgressive movement of A to B, and of B to A, whose behaviors combine and organize their desire, their interest in autonomy, and the power each one has over the other’s body. Both subjects modify their behavior motivated by the behavior of their partner and by the situation experienced.

(ii) Violence of a revolutionary situation (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 416 [422]). The author describes a social conflictive situation that boosts blue-collar workers to put an end to the situation they experience as oppression, which is exercised by another human group more powerful (economically, politically). The revolutionary situation reveals the dependence of one class with respect to the other, but it also shows attitudes, behaviors and even ideals that were kept silent, and that force social agents to transform and re-institutionalize what was already established.

These examples are the seed of what he will later identify as “intentional transgression.” Both cases allow us to see that the empiétement can be positive (for instance, if it accelerates the dependence of one lover for the other, allowing them both to recognize the possibilities of their freedom) or negative (if the bourgeoisie oppresses workers and does not allow them to transform the actual conflictive situation into something that offers them the possibility of achieving their self-realization). The key of this thought is that intentional transgression is always transformative, and that violence is negative when it restrains or crystallizes the transformative flux, namely, when it becomes a sort of sclerosis where one of the parts involved prevents the transgressive movement of the other.

Merleau-Ponty describes how our own body lives between natural and social anonymity. Sensitivity offers the motive for the body to assume its task and to operate over an assumed meaning and to “give it a form” (mettre en forme) in different ways. But, just as the body lives in natural anonymity, it is also located within a cultural anonymity inherited from previous generations with the passing of time, including communication tools that one’s own body assumes as its own and actualizes. Thus, one’s own body develops on the basis of a natural and cultural anonymous background that, as the author states, “runs through me without my being the cause of it” (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 250 [251]). This anonymous background is thus a silent, unspoken, pre-reflective relationship that works as a condition of possibility for its bodily assumption (reprise).

Since pre-reflective life is a cultural and natural indistinctness, it entails intentional transgressive relations with the others. That is, it forces collective life to flow and to transform the modes of socio-natural relations in the social collective each one belongs to. Sometimes the intentional transgression of collective life crystallizes and becomes perverted; other times, it enables the transformation of relations within social anonymity.

2.2. Violence and power

Is there a single way of referring to violence? No, at least not in the work of Merleau-Ponty. Humanisme et terreur presents us with three forms of violence; I will deal with the third one separately.

(i) Violence from a political-ideological perspective. Merleau-Ponty analyzes the reproaches that liberals and communists throw against each other. They both blame each other for being “violent:” on the one hand, communists claim that liberals endorse the violence of capitalism (oppression of the proletarian, inequality, colonialism) (Merleau-Ponty 1947: ix-xi [xii-xv]); on the other hand, liberals denounce revolutionary violence for eliminating individual liberty and taking autonomy away from people. The ideological critiques and rivalry among them increase and their antagonistic positions consolidate. Merleau-Ponty claims that it is necessary to escape this one-sidedness (1947: xxv [xxix]) and, in order to do so, he takes Husserl’s phenomenological path of going back to the things themselves and pre-reflective life.

(ii) Violence in the pre-reflective dimension. Merleau-Ponty describes the pre-reflexive collective life as the “interlacing,” the “communication’s commerce” between individuals that are part of the interworld. This supposes the conflict and transgressions that belong to a specific social organization. As the author himself says: “Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence” (Merleau-Ponty 1947: 118 [109]). For Merleau-Ponty the point is not to analyze violence “in itself,” but the bond it expresses regarding the dimensions of social life. One of such dimensions is the relation with political power.

When we analyze violence and its relation to politics, we study “its sense or its future” (Merleau-Ponty 1947: 118 [109]), that is, how political oppositions and actions are placed in a dynamic of violence, for every action is favorable to some and, at the same time, unfavorable to others (Merleau-Ponty 1947: 118-119 [110]). This forces us to give up a perspective that traces a line between legitimacy and illegitimacy of violence and proposes that we recognize types of violence that could be generated by any political praxis. In other words, when we make political choices, we are choosing between different modes of violence to exercise the praxis politically.

Also, Merleau-Ponty considers the individuals as interlocutors of power, who have a conflictive relationship with each other. Power is frail and, nonetheless, it enables some control amongst the subjects implied, so that it is the tension itself, or conflict, that keeps power in a transformative movement. Therefore, political agents are forced to review where the violence of the political choices that are made end up and how this happens. Is there a way of rationalizing or describing the political attitudes confronting each other over a background of violent coexistence? Contingency turns out to be, in Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, a central element of reflection.

2.3. Violence and contingency

According to Merleau-Ponty, our own body does perceive time, but produces it through its movements. It is a temporal movement of “reprise” (picking up): picking up what has sedimented in past movements and transforming it to give meaning to future situations. Thus, producing new gestures or new words is to recognize that expressions are prone to perish, transform, and endure. Our living body gives meaning to a current situation but, once it is given, it becomes sedimented and demands a new meaning.

In the same way, neither history nor politics are to be understood as fixed and objective structures, but as changing, acting, and recreating in an incessant becoming, without any final synthesis. The collective life is made out of transitive syntheses, whereby political power is institutionalized. Now, when trying to establish a relation between transitive synthesis and social anonymity, one might observe that social life cannot be understood as a fixed and objective structure either, but as a changing structure that is created and recreated. In other words, the collective and anonymous life is made up of transitive syntheses whereby political powers are re-institutionalized. If we want to understand the historical social fabric, we have to identify how the passing of one historical moment into another is not a specific historical idea, neither a history with an irrevocable end, but a contingent history. Hence, there are no future guarantees in history, only the hope of possible realization. Therein lies the contingency of history.

Consequently, according to our author, the original violence is the one exercised by history (1947: 21 [19]), for it is contingent. History does not present itself in a straight line, it is rather an unstable landscape that modifies itself with every step. Conceiving history as contingent does not imply thinking it as chaotic or random, it rather means being aware that we are in a world, in a specific place and time, from where we organize our human, social and political relations.

What could it mean then to think about history from the perspective of its violent nature? If we consider that history is lived, it cannot be reviewed from the perspective of an observing subject who foresees its end, but from the perspective of a subject who interprets an open-ended history, who pays attention to current conditions, and demands the transformation of political praxis. In Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, history interprets events and sets forth possible paths, considering the risks each one entails, but also knowing that its analyses always imply something that cannot be foreseen (1947: 59-60 [55]). If there was a philosophy of history, we could contemplate the system of interconnections between different dimensions of human existence. Although Merleau-Ponty calls history “the first form of violence,” his proposal is not fatalistic. Risk and the future are elements that allow us to reflect on historical transformations in collective lives where politics is contingent; that is, on a field of possibilities.

In sum, according to Merleau-Ponty, violence cannot be rejected from a moral standpoint without acknowledging the dynamic of the social relations given in pre-reflective life or—in other words—without considering a description of what we are as a starting point. This forces us to think that undermining violence is to suppress a deeper and more detailed understanding of ourselves and of our history. On the contrary, by recognizing both our contingent historical nature and anonymous coexistence, it is possible to distinguish, in the work of Merleau-Ponty, a form of violence that he calls “terror,” which appears as rigidity, non-fluctuation, and paralysis in time. Terror reifies human relations and prevents the flow of communication and transformation. In that sense, if contingency is linked to the field of possibilities of political action, it entails a risk; that is, we accept that action is never definitive, that it always holds a halo of spontaneity and that our will is not capable of clearly “overseeing” everything. On the contrary, rejecting contingency would be a form of terror, for it freezes social relations or it claims to do so (Merleau-Ponty 1947: 97 ff. [98 ff.]). Thus, denying violence its place in the political sphere would bias a broader interpretation of the forms of power constantly being remade in the field of anonymity. The correct political path is rather to recover this anonymity; this involves, amongst other tasks, to re-institutionalize attitudes that have become sedimented in collective existence.

§ 3. Reflections from contingency concerning the armed conflict

Considering the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty, we find three possibilities. First, it enables us to go beyond the diagnostic of the Internal Armed Conflict that only highlights the deficiencies of our State, or that compares reality to ideal categories. For several years, research on the Internal Armed Conflict has led to a political proposal related to deliberative democracy, or to the moral rejection of violence. All of this research has been developed within a context in which it was considered necessary to decisively reject violence. However, now it is necessary to understand fundamental aspects implied in this violence that have only been condemned. We must come back to this idea and reach deeper, with a greater effort, into the forms of violence present in the aftermath of the internal armed conflict, the violence that existed before and that remains in the anonymity of our collective relations, the violence of which we form a part, even within the academia as we study violence.

Secondly, to think violence as a mode of social relation also allows us to use hermeneutical tools offered by Merleau-Ponty, such as historicity and contingency. From this perspective, for example, the point is not so much to analyze legitimate or illegitimate forms of violence, but which forms of violence have been accepted, and which have not. It also enables us to recognize breaking points in this acceptance that have transformed some forms of violence into historically regulated ones, or forms of consensual violence. In other words, besides considering the extreme or excessive violence that the Final Report identifies with the Armed Conflict, we could look into fluctuating or consolidated forms of violence that appeared in some regions and not in others. One of the lessons left by Merleau-Ponty is that we cannot refer to violence without taking into consideration the power relations whereby individuals co-constitute themselves.

Thirdly, Merleau-Ponty’s work offers ideas to link agency with the concept of intentional transgression in anonymity. In spite of terror and cruelty, violence shows the different responses of the subjects involved in a conflict situation. In the current scenario of our country, which carries shared wounds and fears as a way of communicating with each other, research concerning the Armed Conflict implies asking ourselves which positions we experience as resistance, and which are easier to understand when we analyze violence. We could also overcome the simple victim-aggressor distinction and explore our understanding of how we interact with each other, from and within the social anonymity to which we also belong. It is worth asking ourselves, from this perspective, how we keep building multiple forms of violence. What form does post-conflict violence have now? What has changed with time or how has it been transformed? What types of conflict are still present, and which seem to stiffen? The hardest phenomenological task here might well be to return to the pre-linguistic realm where we interact, to unveil the layer of anonymity where we relate. This phenomenological task might be the most “violent” one due to its harshness, for it exposes us all to our own pain, or to our own silent position in a land that insists, until this day, on rejecting violence without trying to understand it nor to understand itself in it. Merleau-Ponty’s proposal is a genetic perspective for the reflection on violence: to return to ourselves and ask ourselves in what way we are immersed in violence.

References

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Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR). 2003. Informe final. Lima: CVR. http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/.

De Saint-Aubert, Emmanuel. 2004. De lien des êtres aux éléments de l’être. Merleau-Ponty au tournant des années 1945-1951. Paris: VRIN.

Galtung, Johan. 1998. Tras la violencia, 3R: reconstrucción, reconciliación y resolución. Afrontando los efectos visibles e invisibles de la guerra y la violencia. Bilbao: Bakeaz.

Guthmann, Gerardo. 1991. Los saberes de la violencia y la violencia de los saberes. Montevideo: Nordam.

Mansilla, Katherine. 2020. Violencia y contingencia. Una lectura del Conflicto Armado Interno peruano desde la filosofía de Merleau-Ponty. In Chu, Mariana and Rosemary RP Lerner, Eds. La racionalidad ampliada. Nuevos horizontes de la fenomenología y la hermenéutica (pp. 235-262). Bogotá/Lima: Aula de Humanidades/Fondo Editorial de la PUCP.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1947. Humanisme et Terreur. Gallimard: Paris = 1969. Humanism and Terror. Trans. John O’Neill. Boston: Beacon Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la Perception. Gallimard: Paris = 2005. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge.

Staudigl, Michael. 2014. Introduction: Topics, Problems, and Potentials of Phenomenological Analysis of Violence. In Staudigl, Michael, Ed., Phenomenologies of Violence. Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology 9 (pp. 1–34). Leiden: Koninklijke Brill.

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