The appeal to and exercise of violence in Dada during its initial and probably most ambivalent manifestation situate the formation somewhat awkwardly and contradictorily at times, for instance with regard to the strategic deployment of violent means in achieving transformative socio-political ends. Aggression, hostility, assault – the demarques of violence – rarely absent themselves beyond shallow recess. Their presence can of course be read as continuing the potentialities of antecedents, most notably Futurism's art of provocation and dinamismo universale, but there is an equally critical reading of the necessity in deployment of such methods that accords them centrality within the entire Dada project. The project, we were once told, would happily set out to destroy. But it would not, and perhaps the Dadaists ultimately believed that it could not, pass judgement upon others; prerequisite to judgement is an opinion, and an opinion, as Kierkegaard had long since suggested, presupposes ‘a security and well-being in existence akin to having a wife and children in this mortal life’. The doubly farcical and notorious mock trial of Maurice Barres, staged under the auspices of later Paris Dada, is demonstration enough of Dada's self-reflexive proximity to a reading of juridical authority, while the philosophical complexity of passing judgement was widely and well recognised into the early twentieth century. Passing judgement, with its attendant quality of ‘justice’, functions to mandate and maintain the interests of defined groups and defined ways of life by means of positive forms of law (of law that can be posited; indeed ‘all law … is dependent on a positing (Setzung)’).

The indiscriminate and all-inclusive aggression of Dada remains embodied for many in the confrontational poses struck at the Cabaret Voltaire and sporadically at the Dada soirées, and this chapter will begin by considering the quality of the ‘violence’ that initially manifested itself at those performances.