This book traces the theory of violence from nineteenth-century symmetrical warfare through today's warfare of electronics and unbalanced numbers. Surveying such luminaries as Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Paul Virilio, and Jacques Derrida, Avelar also offers a discussion of theories of torture and confession, the work of Roman Polanski and Borges, and a meditation on the rise of the novel in Colombia.

Introduction: 20th Century Thinking on Violence * Specters of Walter Benjamin: Mourning, Labor, and Violence in Jacques Derrida * Torture, Confession, and the History of Truth: From Plato to Pinochet * Ethics Across Neocolonial Borders: Jorge Luis Borges and the International Division of Intellectual Labor * Transculturation and Civil War: The Origins of the Novel in Colombia * Afterword: On Violence, Law, and Justice