Jainism supplied me with a rigorous clarifying yardstick for non-violence, extending its care to the eggs of fleas that might lurk in a droplet of water falling from a leaf or blade during monsoon season.
In October 2018, I spoke about the totalising of the visual and its integral violence at a symposium entitled ‘The Violence of Images’, hosted by Camera Austria in Graz, to advocate for the non-violent image as a site and practice of resistance. Azoulay’s six-hundred-page-long Potential History offers a liveable commonworld through exacting reparations and ends with a very short but insistent affirmation: ‘The potential is there’. There are many nuanced differences across such a crudely mapped zone but the quality that all three share is a burning desire to change, to radically redistribute the world as it is, or appears to be. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism is almost double the size of my copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism and about half the size, in turn, of Karl Marx’s first volume of Capital.
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