Abstract
Starting from a phenomenological reading of Jean Améry's At the Mind's Limits, a biographical account recalling the detention period and torture endured in Breendonk and Auschwitz under the Nazi regime, this article explores phenomenologically the relation between violence and trust. Trust is understood as a basic form of our "being-in-the-world" and, as such, it is constitutive for the intersubjective world, for the world lived as "for everyone." Following Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the article shows that this basic "trust in the world" is constituted by embodiment, in the intertwining of sensing and being sensed, in the reciprocal inherence of the within and the without, and by intersubjectivity: the trust in the world, which grounds any perceptual faith, is also anchored in and mediated by the trust in others, through which a common world is given.
The article investigates the way in which violence (and especially torture) radically undermines this basic trust in relation to the world, to the others, and finally to the self. Discussing also other violent examples (such as the annihilation of aboriginal cultures by the European colonists, or the destruction of the small Peruvian village Uchuraccay), the article shows that, in the experience of endured violence, the world as such becomes alien to the human subject and, in this estrangement, the human being no longer find one's place in the world, becoming ontologically homeless.