Civility means being named, mutilation strips identity

Evidence

Civility, in this context, is precisely about “polite” speech (both the appeal of the civil and its cover). It is about decent speech or exchange, a speech not (too) impolitic but never political, the speech of decency between those with identity, those respectfully identified and addressed. Mutilating violation, counter-civility in the extreme, is exactly about the erasure of address, in both senses of the latter term. Or addressed violently, the mutilated cease to be and have address at all (“no longer to be found anywhere,” as Keane says presciently in a different context). They are a “statistic,” one anonymously among a number, numbered but unnamed (perhaps living in caves or holes in the ground, in some self-assumed acting out). Thus if civility is about naming, about being named, about being identified in being named and so about having identity (itself an altogether ambiguous condition), mutilation is about – is – the stripping of identity, its purging. Hence the deep relation between purges and mutilation, knotted together in silence, in the silencing that is the logic at the heart of both. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 240

Categorization

• CANDY: The sharpness of naming-as-identity versus mutilation-as-identity-stripping is a memorable, quotable formulation.
• SEED: Article angle: the bureaucratic production of namelessness — how ‘statistics’ and numbered detention erase the violence done to identified persons.
• XREF: connects to: Political civility depends on being named while mutilation reduces persons to unnamed numbers — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 240