Borders of Transgression: Violence of Norms and Violence of Violations

This article develops a systematic philosophical account of violence by shifting the analysis from normative and empirical definitions to the ontological conditions that make violence possible. The analysis proceeds through three levels: terminological, denotative, and essential. First, the semantic history of the concept reveals an intrinsic indeterminacy linking violence with force, power, and authority across linguistic traditions. Second, the denotative scope of violence expands from criminal acts to systemic and structural phenomena, making a stable definition impossible. These difficulties indicate that violence cannot be understood as a property of particular actions. The article, therefore, proposes a shift to the generic level of the intentional application of force. Force is interpreted as a practice that produces and transforms social space through the establishment of hierarchies between agent and object. Violence emerges not as an autonomous phenomenon but as an evaluative designation applied when the application of force truncates another’s space by incorporating it into the space of the acting subject. Violence is thus understood as a structural feature of world-formation rather than an anomaly within it. The ethical and political problem is not the elimination of violence but the determination of its direction and measure.