Most people understand violence as the bloodied face of a boxer, or the sting of a hand slapped across their face. K disagreed. By the time something is hit, the violence is already tired. It began earlier. So quietly the person doing it rarely notices.
The earlier moment was the building of an identity. The boxer steps into the ring as an opponent of another boxer because each has agreed to be a fragment — a name on a card, a fighter representing a gym in a city, shorts colored like their flag. The slap in a kitchen runs on the same architecture. Two people. Two roles. One defending a role against the other. The body just performs what the fragment already decided.
K refused to grade violences. The patriot's violence and the terrorist's are the same mechanism in different uniforms. The slap and the war are the same mechanism at different scales. Treating violence as a problem of acts is treating the symptom. The disease keeps making symptoms.
Look at the moment before the punch. Before the slap there was a person who'd decided who they were and what threatened that. Before the war there was a country that had decided what it was and what was foreign to it. Before any act of harm there was the work of becoming a fragment that could be threatened.