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The Laws of LoveIntimate Violence

The Laws of Love: Intimate Violence [Intimacy and violence are curiously closely connected. In medieval French, just to get etymological with you for a moment, “violence” and “viol” or rape were treated as synonyms. In fact violence is composed of “viol,” rape, and the Latin suffix entia, meaning thing, and can be translated loosely as the act of rape, and by extension any physical or later verbal intrusion by force. It would seem from these roots that there is something inherently sexual in violence, in potential at least, and this must have to do with the sudden shift from speech to force, from conversation to the body, from words to things. The classical lawyers captured this unintentionally well in defining violence as a failure of words, or more precisely as something that cannot be spoken—nulla esse dicere, nothing to be said, meaning that the recourse to brute force both exceeds words and defies verbal description. Coquillart in the New Laws incorporates this point by describing the fall from words to blows as a descent into mere noise (bruit). Noise is the mode of transition from language to force; it is the phonic expression of an absence of speech, the articulation of inarticulacy. By this definition, violence is the failure of communication, the moment when words run out and, to borrow a phrase, the body speaks.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

The Laws of LoveIntimate Violence

Part of the Language, Discourse, Society Book Series
Goodrich, Peter
The Laws of Love — Sep 30, 2015
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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007
ISBN
978-1-349-28311-8
Pages
153 –168
DOI
10.1057/9780230626539_10
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Intimacy and violence are curiously closely connected. In medieval French, just to get etymological with you for a moment, “violence” and “viol” or rape were treated as synonyms. In fact violence is composed of “viol,” rape, and the Latin suffix entia, meaning thing, and can be translated loosely as the act of rape, and by extension any physical or later verbal intrusion by force. It would seem from these roots that there is something inherently sexual in violence, in potential at least, and this must have to do with the sudden shift from speech to force, from conversation to the body, from words to things. The classical lawyers captured this unintentionally well in defining violence as a failure of words, or more precisely as something that cannot be spoken—nulla esse dicere, nothing to be said, meaning that the recourse to brute force both exceeds words and defies verbal description. Coquillart in the New Laws incorporates this point by describing the fall from words to blows as a descent into mere noise (bruit). Noise is the mode of transition from language to force; it is the phonic expression of an absence of speech, the articulation of inarticulacy. By this definition, violence is the failure of communication, the moment when words run out and, to borrow a phrase, the body speaks.]

Published: Sep 30, 2015

Keywords: Corporal Punishment; Violent Spouse; Love Affair; Original Edition; Night Watch

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