Definitions of Violence(s) For Our Time

Subjective Violence: the most visible violence performed by clearly identifiable agents.

Objective Violence: violence inherent in the “normal” state of things. It is “invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”

There are two types of Objective Violence:
Symbolic Violence: violence embodied in language and its forms, which Heideggar called “our house of being.”
Systemic Violence: violence as a consequence of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.

Physical or interpersonal violence is defined here as the violation of the self by an Other. This violence, what Bourgois calls intimate dimensions of violence, is “directly” (my quotations) physical, emotional, and/or psychological.

Everyday Violence: “Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formulations.”

Structural Violence: “Such suffering is structured by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire—whether through routine, ritual, or, as is more commonly the case, these hard surfaces [of suffering itself]—to constrain agency.”

Symbolic violence: “Symbolic violence, to put it tersely and simply as possible, is the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity.”

Ethical Violence: the linguistic-ontological-social demand “that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require others to do the same.” This ethical violence is symptomatic in the requirement for narratives of the self to be given in tight form, in a straight line, with coherence and cohesion and conclusion.

To be sure, you will come across a few more type of violence: psychological, political, cartographic, spatial, disciplinary, etc. We will not define them here, but if you find a violence hobbyhorse, we can always add the term to our constellation of concepts.