Kulturkritikk av volden? Begivenhet, tilblivelse og det reelle

This article discusses the topic of violence within the framework of cultural criticism. More specifically, it asks whether a scrutiny of the concept of the event (événement) in Gilles Deleuze’s and Alain Badiou’s different conceptions could provide new insights into today’s paradigm of cultural criticism and its access to violence as phenomenon. For both thinkers, the event causes a rupture in the existing order of discourse and could thus shed light upon the limits of cultural criticism as well as on the elusive “essence” of violence. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s conceptual framework, the last part of the article expands the discussion to include the critical field of New Historicism, which arguably shares a “programmatic inclusiveness” with both Cultural Studies and cultural criticism. As part of this expansion, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning brings about a discussion of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, a discussion that serves to illustrate the contrasts between the real violence of Badiou and the baroque fold of Deleuze, i.e. the vacuity (vide) of Badiou’s event versus the affirmative plenitude of Deleuze’s philosophy. Holbein’s painting thus serves to highlights the “parallax view” that might be the vantage point to access violence as the repressed other of today’s cultural criticism.