Cuts Without Knives: 9 When Cutting Becomes Violence

We have traced cuts through perception, language, mathematics, and logic. We have seen that distinctions do not presuppose difference, that multiplicity does not require parts, that the field is co-actualised with the cut. We have seen that the knife is absent and the cut illuminates.

Yet, in much of thought and practice, the knife returns. The knife is seductive because it promises clarity, control, separation. It enforces boundaries, fractures the field, isolates units. When we mistake the knife for the cut, violence becomes inevitable — not metaphorical, but ontological.

Consider the everyday forms of this violence:

• In social systems, insisting on fixed identities or rigid categories forces distinctions where none need exist. Individuals and groups are cut against one another, multiplicity is compressed, and relational potential is foreclosed.

• In knowledge, treating distinctions as pre-existing divides the field of inquiry, privileging some patterns over others, excluding alternative actualisations, and naturalising hierarchies of attention.

• In ethics, the knife demands that we isolate “good” from “bad,” “inside” from “outside,” “us” from “them,” even when such separations are unfounded, harming what is co-actualised and relationally entangled.

Violence arises wherever cuts are imagined as division rather than actualisation. The knife imposes, whereas the true cut illuminates without fracture. To act ethically, to act responsibly, is to recognise the relational field and actualise distinctions without creating unnecessary separations, without treating the field as something to be carved.

This insight does not moralise in the conventional sense. It does not demand that we be “gentle” or “good.” It simply demands ontological fidelity: to recognise that distinctions co-actualise pattern, and that any assumed pre-existing boundary imposes harm by falsifying the relational nature of possibility.

The lesson is simple, though counterintuitive:

• Cuts are necessary; the knife is optional.

• Distinctions are co-creative; division is destructive.

• Perspective actualises; separation destroys.

In the final post, Living Without Edges, we will explore what it means to fully inhabit a world in which cuts are relational, multiplicity is co-actualised, and boundaries are effects rather than givens. This is the culmination of the series, where theory becomes a lived orientation toward possibility itself.

For now, hold this vertigo: violence is not inevitable; it arises only when the knife masquerades as the cut. The world can be illuminated without fracture, if we choose to see relationally.