Book Review / Compte Rendu

Abstract

Pawlett, William, Violence, Society and Radical Theory: Bataille, Baudrillard and Contemporary Society. Surrey and Burlington, Ashgate, 2013. 163 pp., $100.00 hardcover (9781409455424) T his is a short book, but it can be read as two distinct works, one of which is significantly more useful than the other. The first two chap-ters explore the conceptualization of violence in the writings of Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard and demonstrate the relationship of their ideas to the work of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. Readers with an interest in 20 th century French social thought and particularly in the history of the influence of Durkheimian concepts will enjoy this part of the book. Though he has apparently read Bataille and Baudrillard only in translations, the author is a more than adequate guide through the basic contours of their often highly obscure musings on transgression, excess, and symbolic exchange. In the remainder of the book, an effort is made to use the ideas of Bataille and Baudrillard to examine various forms of extreme violence, but the results are not compelling. The author's vision of the cause of the forms of violence discussed in the book is overly simplistic: they are essentially an effect of capitalist social order, which denies legitim-ate and ritualized expressions of transgression and symbolic exchange and thereby provokes murders, terrorism, and other spectacular forms of violence. We are repeatedly told that existing sociological and psycho-logical theories of violence are " woefully inadequate " (94), yet little ef-fort is made to show precisely how this is so or why the ideas of Bataille and Baudrillard are superior. The skimpy literature review inexplicably includes novels and personal memoirs (49). It is claimed that violence is on the increase in the modern West (x), but this is asserted without argument and no mention is made of the great amount of empirical evi-dence to the contrary. Steven Pinker (2012) has recently made a strong historical case that rates of violence are declining, and large bodies of supporting national and international data on this are readily available. The author sees it as unhelpful in understanding serial killers to focus on their psychopathology in sexual identity and expression (85), yet the very cases he has picked to illustrate the point betray the weakness of his position. Aileen Wuornos and Rosemary West were victims of