The Second Skin: A Critique of Violence

The explosions of violence around the world in the last half-century call for several and ongoing reassessments of the character and psychology of violence. Of particular interest today are the growing accounts of sacralised violence, the performative nature of violence and the misunderstanding that sanctioned violence provides us with immunity from the perils of the violence we create and project upon each other. The search for scapegoats in our modern times points to the mysterious nature of intersecting desires and rivalries which ironically protect the performers of violence from the insidiousness of their own actions. By appropriating the lens that Girard s theory of scapegoating enables, author Jane Fernandez-Goldborough traces the screens behind which violence is performed in the selected works of K.S. Maniam, so as to provide a literary expose on the secret rivalries that sustain the human predilection for violence.