Is aggression inevitable?

“There is no such thing as a raw, natural, aggressive urge that underlies human violence. While we inherit defense mechanisms, they work only when triggered culturally.” So opens John Protevi’s Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology, which takes as its biocultural basis that social practices shape our bodies and minds, and analyzes human aggression throughout history: early nomadic foragers, organized sports, berserkers and blackout rages, maroons escaping slavery, the January 6th invasion of the US Capitol, and responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Protevi entwines the philosophical with the anthropological and considers why humans’ capacity for cooperation and sharing is persistently overlooked by stories of aggression and warfare.

This book is an important contribution to the studies of Deleuze and Guattari, and here, Andrew Culp (Dark Deleuze) and Protevi (“joyous Deleuze”) dig into myriad shades of human expression from philosophical and cultural perspectives.

John Protevi is professor of French studies and philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology; Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic; Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences; and Edges of the State.

Andrew Culp is director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at California Institute of the Arts and author of Dark Deleuze and A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal. 

Episode references:

Francisco Varela

Evan Thompson

Esequiel Di Paolo

Hanne De Jaegher

Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson / The Embodied Mind

Wilhelm Reich

Baruch Spinoza

Sigmund Freud 

Gustave Le Bon

Jeremy Gilbert / Common Ground

Rodrigo Nunes / Neither Vertical nor Horizontal

Manuel DeLanda / War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Manuel DeLanda / A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

Deleuze and Guattari / Anti-Oedipus

Bataille

Nietzsche

Marx

Freud

Deleuze and Guattari / A Thousand Plateaus

Claude Lévi-Strauss / Wild Thought

Lisa Adkins / The Time of Money

Arline T. Geronimus / Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

Andrew Culp / Dark Deleuze

Deleuze and Guattari / What Is Philosophy?

Suzanne de Brunhoff / Marx on Money

Quentin Badaire

Quentin Badaire’s book review of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

Lewis Henry Morgan

Hobbes

Locke

Daniel Luban / Hobbesian Slavery (essay in Political Theory)

Rousseau

Case studies discussed in this episode:

Berserkers

Esprit de Corps

Robert Bales

Shenetta White-Ballard

Praise for the book:
"A brilliant and novel political anthropology that updates our most entrenched philosophical biases and looks to a politics of joy beyond the relations of command."
—Davide Panagia

Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology by John Protevi is available from University of Minnesota Press.