Brad Evans (author)

Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist and writer, whose work specialises on the problem of violence. The author of fifteen books & edited volumes, along with over fifty academic and media articles, he holds a Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath, United Kingdom.[1]

Brad Evans
Born	(1974-03-02) March 2, 1974 Rhondda, Wales, UK
Occupation	Political philosopher, writer, critical theorist
Spouse(s)	Chantal Meza
Website	www.brad-evans.co.uk

Evans work has centred on the political, philosophical and educational challenges posed by the problem of violence (in its many different forms), insisting upon the pedagogical need for a more "poetic" conversation between critical theorists, artists, writers and cultural produces.

In 2011, Evans founded the Histories of Violence project that has grown to have a global user base spanning 148 different countries. His co-directed movie "Ten Years of Terror" (with Simon Critchley) screened in the Solomon K. Guggenheim, New York during September 2011.

Having previously held positions at the University of Leeds and the University of Bristol, Evans has also been a visiting fellow at the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, New York (2013–14) and distinguished society fellow at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (2017).

Biography

Evans grew up in the Rhondda mining valley communities of South Wales. His father became seriously ill before Evans's birth and the family was dependent on state welfare,[2] and lived for a number of years on the notorious Penrhys social housing estate, a place of violent crime, drug abuse, theft, arson and widespread social depravation.[3] They later moved to the village of Ton-Pentre where he lived until the age of eighteen. Evans said later that his youth had a formative impact on his understanding of structural and everyday violence, along with the importance of a critical education.[4] Whilst inspired as a child by an illustrated copy his parents bought of Hans Christian Anderson fables, Evans suggested that his interest in reading only developed when we was around sixteen years old.[5] This changed after reading Stephen King's Salems Lot: "Growing up in the isolating former mining valleys of South Wales, it was a book that resonated on so many levels. Indeed, having already been scared witless by the movie that was the first horror film I watched – especially the scene of the floating child at the window, it was also the book, which taught me that words on pages are simply a point of entry into the more enriching and sometimes more terrifying life of the mind".[5]

Having attended Treorchy Comprehensive School, Evans initially pursued a career in fashion and design before going on to study at the University of Leeds, where he subsequently completed two master's degree programs in the fields of development economics and international relations. His PhD, titled "War for the Politics of Life", dealt with forms of resistance to liberal regimes of power, during which he spent visiting the Zapatista communities of Chiapas, Mexico.[6] This experience led him to theorise about the ethics of (non)violence, arguing that violence itself is not the result of "differences" but rather it is the result of forced homogenisation.[7] Such understanding on the nature of the human condition has led him to argue that Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is the best book of political theory ever written: "Lewis Carroll is such a captivating thinker, who manages to break down the false and unhelpful binaries that set apart poetic vs. technical modes of thinking. Not only is Wonderland such a timeless book, I mean is there a better character to capture the politics of Trump than the Queen of Hearts – she utters therefore its true – but the way the book deals with questions of power, arbitrary violence and the transformation in subjectivities is truly exceptional. Moreover, Carroll allows us to rethink the very terms of resistance and revolution, for what are Alice’s greatest weapons, after-all, if not the power of her imagination? If we lack resistance to the present, it’s precisely because we don’t have an alternative vision of the world".[5]

Overview of major works

Liberal Terror

Evans' first book, Liberal Terror deals with the changing nature of security, war and violence in the latter part of the 20th Century. Focusing on the impact the complexity sciences have had on social and political understanding, the book addresses the shift away from the foundational logic of states to the age of radical interconnectivity, which collapse previous fixed arrangements in politics between the logics of what is inside and what is outside, friends and enemies, times of war and times of peace, along with disrupting ideas concerning the past, present and future. Addressing what is identified in security practice as the onset of a "catastrophic topography of endangerment", which has brought together all manner of threats "from terror to weather and everything in-between", Evans suggest we are living in a time of "terror normality". Central to the books thesis is the idea that liberal democracies have normalised insecurity in such a way that catastrophe is now presented as inevitable. Hence, countering arguments that focused after the September 11 attacks on the state of the exception (notably inspired by the ideas of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben), Evans looks instead at the philosophy of events as a form of catastrophic rupture, which although bringing about the conditions of the new, offer a continuum where violence in response appears to be "business as usual". Connecting the global with the local, the book also considers the changing nature of political subjectivity as brought about through information and communications revolutions, leading to what Evans terms "the catastrophic individual" who is now capable of producing the image of a global security crises. In this Age of Catastrophe, Evans claims, our attention is therefore increasingly focused on spectacular media events and the promise of violence to come. The book was the focus for the inaugural episode of the comedian Russell Brand's podcast series Under the Skin.[8]

Resilient Life

In Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (co-authored with Julian Reid), Evans provides the first substantive political and philosophical critique of the doctrine of resilience. Addressing the ways in which ideas concerning political subjectivity in the age of catastrophe promote insecurity by design, Evans & Reid provocatively suggest that resilience is ultimately a form of political nihilism, which forces people to accept a world that is catastrophically fated and whose ideas of disaster are inescapable. In order to counter this, they argue, there is a need to develop a more poetic understanding of politics that takes more seriously Nietzsche's claim "to live is to forever be in danger". According to Evans and Reid, this search for a new concept of the political has a number of important implications for critical thinkers:

"[E]very intellectual project of a political kind should follow a number of basic principles1) Be deeply suspicious of anything that masks itself in universal regalia. Bring into question that which is not being questioned in the normal state of affairs. (2) Move beyond any self-righteous and self-absolving assessments of the operations of power. Look to deal with power at the level of its effects and the ways in which it positively manipulates subjects to wilfully abandon their own political freedoms. (3) Foreground the affirmative qualities of subjectivities. Not only is this integral in the fight against fascism in all its forms. It opens a challenge to the narcissism of those who would have us surrender to the mercies of the world. (4) Speak with confidence about the ability to transform the world, not for the better, but for the sake of it. Without an open commitment to the people to come, the struggle is already lost. (5) Use provocation as a political tool. Not to evidence extremist views. But to illustrate how normalizing power truly fears anything that appears remotely exceptional. The poetic most certainly included. (6) Trust in the irreducible qualities of human existence. The feelings we have, the atmospheres we breathe, the aesthetics we enfold, the fables we scribe, the playful personas we construct, they are all integral to the formation of a new image of thought. (7) Have faith in people. Just as they will resist what they find oppressive and intolerable, so they will also find their own dignified solutions to problems in spite of our best efforts. (8) Do not shy away from conflict. Without conflict there is no resistance to power. And without resistance to power there is no creation of alternative existences. (9) Reveal fully your political orientations. Do not abstract them from the work. Such a deception is of the order for those embarrassed by the mediocrity of their power. (10) Speak with the courage to truth that narrates a tale to affect a number of meaningful registers. No book should be read if it doesn't intellectually challenge and emotionally move us".[9]

Disposable Futures

The book Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle was co-authored with the public intellectual and educator Henry A. Giroux. In the book, they examine what they understand to be the production of "disposable lives" by addressing the connections between the spectacle and human disposability. Central to this work is the changing relationships between perpetrators, victims and witnesses of violence at a systemic level, in particular how modern societies curate what is seen and what is unseen, what is represented and what is ignored, and whose lives ultimately matter and whose can be disposed of without ethical consideration. To counter this, they argue, we need a new political imagination that moves beyond what they term "the dystopian realism" of the times. As they wrote in a published extract: "Never have we required with more urgency a new political imaginary that can take us out of the poverty of contemporary forms of catastrophe reasoning, which prove to be politically catastrophic and lead to civil and social death. Power has always feared those who have dared to think differently. It has always sought to pathologize and medicalize those who dared to imagine the alternatives instead of conforming. This is not incidental, for it is precisely in the realm of the imagination that we can rethink the world anew".[10]

Conversations on violence

During 2016–2017, Evans led a series of conversation on violence for the opinions section of the New York Times engaging in conversation with a number of renowned thinkers including Simon Critchley, Bracha Ettinger, Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Bernstein and Simona Forti.[11] Evans has continued this series in the Los Angeles Review of Books, with conversations featuring Oliver Stone, Russell Brand, John Akomfrah, Elaine Scarry, Malcolm London and Marina Abramovic.[12]

Selected works

Books

• Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity (New York, Columbia University Press: 2021)
• The Atrocity Exhibition: Life in an Age of Total Violence (Los Angeles, LA Review of Books Press: 2019)
• Violence: Humans in Dark Times (San Francisco, City Lights: 2018) (Co-written with Natasha Lennard)
• Histories of Violence: An Introduction to Post War Critical Thought (London, Zed Books: 2017) (Co-edited with Terrell Carver)
• Portraits of Violence: An Illustrated History of Radical Thinking (London, New Internationalist: 2016)
• Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco, City Lights: 2015) (Co-written with Henry A. Giroux)
• Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (Cambridge, Polity Press: 2014) (Co-written with Julian Reid)
• Liberal Terror (Cambridge, Polity Press: 2013)
• Deleuze & Fascism: Security, War & Aesthetics (London, Routledge: 2013) (Co-edited with Julian Reid)

Edited books/volumes

• The Event of Life: Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the death of Gilles Deleuze (LA Review of Books, Nov: 2015) (Co-edited with Arne Boever)
• Hiroshima & Nagasaki: 70th Anniversary of the Bombings (Thesis Eleven Vol. 129 (1) 2015) (Co-edited with Keith Tester)
• Against the Day: Liberal War (The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 110 (3) 2011)
• Post-Intervention Societies” (Journal of Intervention & State Building, Vol. 5 (4) 2010) (Co-edited with Colleen Bell)
• Special Symposium on Deleuze & War (Theory & Event, Vol. 13 (3) 2010)

References

1. "Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies". www.bath.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
2. "Under the Skin: Episode Featuring Brad Evans". ART19. Archived from the original on 2019-01-28. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
3. Houghton, Tom (2017-12-10). "The notorious Penrhys estate: What happens when planners get it wrong". walesonline. Retrieved 2019-01-27.
4. "Under the Skin: Featuring Henry A. Giroux & Brad Evans".
5. "Brad Evans: A World Without Books Is A World Foreclosed". The Reading Lists. 2017-06-01. Retrieved 2019-03-27.
6. Evans, Brad (2008). "The Zapatista Insurgency: Bringing the Political Back into Conflict Analysis". New Political Science. 30 (4): 497–520. doi:10.1080/07393140802486245. ISSN 0739-3148.
7. Evans, Brad (2010). "Life Resistance: Towards a Different Concept of the Political". Deleuze Studies. 4 (supplement): 142–162. doi:10.3366/dls.2010.0210. ISSN 1750-2241.
8. "Under The Skin with Russell Brand". ART19. Archived from the original on 2019-03-26. Retrieved 2019-03-27.
9. Evans, Brad; Reid, Julian (2014). Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Polity. pp. x, xi.
10. Evans, Brad. "Henry Giroux and Brad Evans | Disposable Futures". Truthout. Retrieved 2019-03-22.
11. "Violence". The New York Times. 2017-02-23. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-03-08.
12. "Histories of Violence". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2019-03-08.