Refusals of Tolerance: Hunger, Mercy, and the Ethics of Immediacy in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The discourse on tolerance has become axiomatic for political and cultural life in the era of (post-)liberal modernity. In the event of any form of violence, the discourse is invoked as a ‘solution’ to ‘intolerance’. But what if we considered the tolerance discourse itself as an axiom of violence? Its discursive labour creates configurations of power relations that transform the existing human affairs and relations into fixed conditions and categories of difference. Instead of taking tolerance as an analytical proxy, this paper ethnographically elucidates how the tolerance discourse is refused and resisted with the social grammars, practices and ethical vernaculars of care, mercy and solidarity. By focusing on the spaces of public kitchens in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina and the ethics of immediacy they engender, I explore the actually existing forms of living with difference beyond the threshold of tolerance discourses.