Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy 9780231527187

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Violence and Politics: Questions
1. From Extreme Violence to the Problem of Civility
2. Hegel, Hobbes, and the “Conversion of Violence”
3. “Inconvertible” Violence? An Essay in Topography
4. Strategies of Civility
Après-Coup: The Limits of Political Anthropology
Appendix
Notes
Index

Citation preview

VIOLENCE AND CIVILITY

THE WELLEK LIBRARY LECTURES

The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory are given annually at the University of California, Irvine, under the auspices of the Critical Theory Institute. The following lectures were given in 1996.

THE CRITICAL THEORY INSTITUTE GA B R I E L E SCHWAB, D I R E C T O R

VIOLENCE AND CIVILITY On the Limits of Political Philosophy

ÉTIENNE BALIBAR TRANSLATED BY G. M. GOSHGARIAN

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

C O LU M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S PUBLISHERS SINCE N E W YO R K

1893

CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

Copyright © 2015 Étienne Balibar All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Balibar, Étienne, 1942– [Violence et civilité. English] Violence and civility : on the limits of political philosophy / Étienne Balibar ; trans. by G. M. Goshgarian. pages cm. — (Wellek Library lectures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-15398-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-52718-7 (ebook) 1. Political violence—Philosophy. 2. War (Philosophy) 3. Philosophy, Marxist. 4. Political science—Philosophy. I. Goshgarian, G. M., translator. II. Title. JC328.6.B3513 2015 303.601—dc23 2014029659

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

P R E FA C E

vii

Introduction: Violence and Politics: Questions 1 1. From Extreme Violence to the Problem of Civility 19 2. Hegel, Hobbes, and the “Conversion of Violence” 25 3. “Inconvertible” Violence? An Essay in Topography 63 4. Strategies of Civility 93 Après-Coup: The Limits of Political Anthropology 127

APPENDIX NOTES INDEX

151 157 205

P R E FA C E In Memory of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

IN MAY OF 1996, AT THE INVITATION OF THE CRITICAL Theory Institute of the University of California, Irvine (whose director at the time was John Carlos Rowe), I gave their annual series of three public lectures: the prestigious Wellek Library Lectures. The title had been announced as “On Politics and History: The Issue of Extreme Violence and the Problem of Civility.” This was a great honor and an extraordinary experience for me, given the quality and responsiveness of the audience. It had always been the tradition of the Welleks that the full text of the lectures, sometimes in a revised and expanded version, be quickly available as a volume published by Columbia University Press. So, over a long period of time, with her characteristic combination of authority and graciousness, Jennifer Crewe, the editor of the series, kept asking when I would deliver the final version, which they were ready to print immediately. It never came, in spite of her insistence; the warm encouragement that I received from my friends and colleagues at UCI, where I had been coopted in the meantime; and my own increasing feeling of guilt. I will not bother the reader with explanations or justifications: suffice it to say that—apart from obvious problems of style and correctness due to my very

viii

P R E FA C E

imperfect acquaintance with written English, that any good assistant could have helped me to deal with (and one, who was very competent, was offered by the Critical Theory Institute: Erin Ferris), I was blocked by the fact that I perceived the lectures as lacking a clear conclusion, which I spent years looking for in various directions, none of which proved satisfactory. But there was also the fact that, during those years, I had embarked on other investigations and discussions. They focused mainly on two related issues: (1) In which form, after the crisis of the “welfare state” in developed capitalist countries (which, for various reasons, I prefer to label the “national-social state”), could a renewed notion of the citizen be vindicated and problematized? (2) How to trace a genealogy of the two antithetic movements that (such is my hypothesis) keep inhabiting the contradictions of the “political” in the wake of the great “civic-bourgeois” revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a becoming citizen of the subject (qua counterpart of the sovereign) and a becoming subject (in the moral, juridical, social sense) of the citizen?1 I can see now (greatly helped by many discussions, public and private, in academic or militant circles) that the question of “anti-violence” as a condition of possibility for the “survival” or the “rebirth” of active politics in moments of existential crisis; the question of continuities and transformations in the ideal of the citizen, incorporating the revolutionary principles of political universality (for which, inspired by a long tradition, I coined the portmanteau name equaliberty); and finally the question of how subjectivities oscillate between the poles of what contemporary philosophers (notably Foucault) call subjection and subjectivation when the “normal” status for political and social participation is the “free and equal citizen” (called a bourgeois by Marx), are all components of a single problematic. I don’t say that they form parts of a system of political philosophy, because it is my conviction (long acquired and confirmed) that “philosophy” (qua theoretical practice, as my master Althusser called it) and “systematicity” (as distinct from conceptual rigor) are in fact conflictual terms (which is why I believe that all the great philosophical “systems” become interesting wherever they exceed and deconstruct their own systematicity), and because the concept of politics that is “looked for” in all these essays could not be isolated in a purely philosophical realm or genre, but calls for alternative combinations of the philosoph-

P R E FA C E

ix

ical discourse with its others: history, philology, anthropology, economy, legal theory. . . . Instead of assembling the parts of a system, what I was doing in those years was identifying in an experimental manner (very often also prompted by pressing contemporary issues: neo-racism, transnational citizenship, “minority” rights, alter-globalization, “internal exclusion,” “new wars,” etc.) genealogical lines along which the inherent complexity and instability of “politics” can be described, as a tension of insurrection and constitution, and a permanent displacement of its typical “fi gures” and “places.” But these different genealogical lines intersect continuously. And what matters above all for a combination of theoretical elaboration and practical (or militant) involvement is a permanent alertness to the “unpredictable” or “uncontrollable” conjunctures in which (at a very local or quasi-global scale: the household, the factory, or the school are no less important than the world-system) politics can slip into anti-politics—its own impossibility which (borrowing from—among others—Roberto Esposito, while “secularizing” his definition), I called generically the unpolitical.2 This could not but take me back to the issue that I had tried to deal with in my Wellek Lectures: “extreme violence (or cruelty) and civility (or antiviolence),” which is just a way of articulating in other terms the fragile nexus of politics and the unpolitical, or asserting that “politics” must always become conceptualized (according to the shifting conditions of history: since global “governance” in the era of neo-liberalism is not fascism . . .) from the point of view of the unpolitical, i.e., taking into account the fact that its conditions of possibility (Law, the State, the economy, the collective ideologies) are also, in a volatile manner, conditions of impossibility (this time a formula of Derridian descent). I would be led, in a sense, to relativize the formal thesis that I had proposed in my lectures from 1996: that “civility” or anti-violence (with its multiple “strategies”) forms as such a “politics of politics” (or a meta-politics in charge of “creating” the conditions for the institution of the political, including this very special form of institution which is a revolution), because (as I had also argued in another essay) the politics of politics is to be identified not so much with one modality (or one concept) of historical action as with a varying combination of several modalities: “emancipation,” “transformation,” and “civility.”3 But for the very same reason, I would be liberated from the obsession of reaching a “conclusion” for my quest of the strategies of civility

x

P R E FA C E

(or a conclusion that would not be the continuous elaboration of the problem itself). I would become more clearly aware of the fact that our quest, both theoretical and practical, is a quest for unprecedented forms of civility, combined with inventions of (postnational, postcolonial, postcapitalist, postdisciplinary, postpatriarchic) citizenship, which also by defi nition means experimenting with other modes of subjectivation. In 2010 I handed over to Jennifer Crewe a thick volume in French, which by then had the title Violence et Civilité. Wellek Library Lectures et autres essais de philosophie politique, which had just been published by Editions Galilée in Paris, and I asked her (and Columbia University Press) if they would still be interested, after so much time, to have it translated into English to appear in their series.4 Needless to say, I saw no reason why she (and the Press) would feel any obligation to do it, but to my great satisfaction and pleasure they agreed to consider the proposal, they received some favorable reviews, and we started working on it. It is from this French volume that the current book derives, in a perfect translation by Michael Goshgarian (among other achievements the editor and translator of several important posthumous works by Louis Althusser). In order to bring it closer to what had been the initial project, we agreed that this American edition should leave aside an entire section in which I had gathered essays of “political philosophy” (on war and politics; the issue of violence in Marxism, Lenin, and Gandhi; and the relationship of Carl Schmitt to Hobbes), of which many in fact are already available in English. They were complementary to the main text, no doubt, expanding its implications in the form of various critical readings and discussions, but also exceeding the format that we wanted to keep. With the agreement of Editions Galilée, we decided to limit ourselves to the text deriving from the Wellek Lectures and their immediate environment.5 I am immensely grateful to the Press, and to Jennifer personally, for enthusiastically receiving my proposal and working efficiently and intelligently to devise the best solutions and format for an American edition. I may say that I have the feeling that the book is now coming home, something important for me and for those who initially ordered it—but it is coming home as the enfant prodigue in the parable, having benefited from the delay and above all the tribulations involved in translating it into another language.

P R E FA C E

xi

As the reader will discover, the book is composed of three parts. The core development is a translation of the three chapters (“Hegel, Hobbes, and the ‘Conversion of Violence,’ ” “‘Inconvertible’ Violence? An Essay in Topography,” and “Strategies of Civility”) in which I have adapted, rectified, expanded, and to some extent updated the 1996 Lectures, of which I retain, however, the matter and the essential line of argument.6 Before these core chapters, in the guise of an Overture, I have included the essay from which the whole argument in fact arises: “Violence and Politics: Some Questions.” This was my contribution to a conference organized around Jacques Derrida at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1992 on “The Crossing of Borders.”7 In particular, I sketched there the distinction of two modalities of cruelty: “ultra-subjective violence” and “ultra-objective violence,” which then became one of the guiding threads of the Wellek Lectures, and I asked a question that keeps haunting me, about the possibility for violence crossing a certain threshold to actually annihilate possibilities of resistance. And in the guise of a Coda (which aims to be a re-formulation of the question rather than a “conclusion”), I have included the essay “On the Limits of Political Anthropology” (in other terms the unpolitical ), originally a contribution to a conference on “The Question of the Human Between Ethics and Anthropology,” organized in 2003 by my friend Alfredo GomezMuller at the Institut Catholique in Paris. It gave me the long-awaited occasion to return to my initial question, develop its ethical dimensions, and articulate it with a problematic of the “tragic” element from which—in the spirit of Machiavelli, Max Weber, but also such Marxists as Rosa Luxemburg and Gramsci—I believe a politics of emancipation and social transformation cannot be isolated.8 I conceive of this composition in three steps as a reflexive argument that constructs itself over time. And since it is meant to communicate the idea of a simple beginning (for others or perhaps myself to build upon), I see no reason to erase indications of origin and iteration—much the contrary. It is not for me, of course, to say if this is a good book. By definition, I always fear the opposite could be the case. . . . But I must try to capture in a few sentences what I think now was the guiding thread of my project. As I have indicated, I became convinced in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s that a critical attitude with respect to the concept of politics must in fact articulate

xii

P R E FA C E

at least three different concepts (or “ideas,” some would prefer to say), which I called “emancipation,” “transformation,” and “civility,” in a manner that is partly conventional but that also encapsulates some philosophical legacies. My idea is not that one should try and derive them logically from a single one, or from some superior essence of the political. On the contrary, one should always “problematize” how they become articulated in different conjunctures and political practices: this is the only “metapolitics” thinkable, and it is bound to remain “aleatory” (as Althusser would say), or historically singular.9 We, as individual and collective subjects, are the agents and actors of these various configurations. But even if they are made of our own “deeds,” we are not the masters (much less the creators) of the conditions in which violence (which is inherent in politics, whether in the “frozen” forms of institutions, powers, law, and government, or in the “fluid” forms of revolutions and deterritorializations) becomes extreme violence. Extreme violence in particular (I discuss in the text the phenomenological criteria and modalities of this “excessive” development) is one to which no symmetric counter-power or counter-violence can be opposed that does not disseminate and worsen it (think of the case of the “War on Terror”), pushing therefore politics toward its own selfdestruction. For that reason “politics” is never granted, it is never founded on and by means of ideals, principles, institutions, or laws, but it is “fragile,” or “vulnerable.” In other terms, as it proceeds toward certain goals by mobilizing material or social instruments and human or moral forces, it must also, through different strategies of civility, re-create itself, or its own structural conditions of possibility that involve primarily a demarcation between “violence” and “cruelty.” Quite often we, the political actors (who can no longer remain “passive” figurants), become aware that this vital condition cannot be dispensed with when we have already reached the shores of destruction, or anti-politics (e.g., fascism), or we have become subjugated by and enrolled in extreme violence. This is another side of the tragic element, and a good reason there is no a priori strategy of civility. But (as philosophers, or theorists) we can try and schematize the paradoxical trajectories along which modalities of extreme violence and strategies of civility meet, and clash. This is what I have attempted, in an allegoric manner, through the designing of a “topography” inspired by Lacan’s use of the “Möbius strip,” which can be read also as a sort of inverted picture of the

P R E FA C E

xiii

structures and superstructures where classical and post-classical Marxists tried to locate the antagonism of conservative and revolutionary politics. In a previous publication I called it “the other scene” of politics. It is disturbing for a conventional form of rationality, but conceptually decisive, that the other scene is always the same scene, in one of its unpredictable metamorphoses.10 This topography, however, has another function, which is more analytical. It must “schematize” the idea that modalities of extreme violence or cruelty are intrinsically heterogeneous or can never become reduced to a single, simple causality, and the idea that they continuously overlap and reinforce each other, so that in the end generalized “economies of destruction” may arise and gain momentum.11 Disjunction and fusion must be represented as complementary characters of extreme violence. Therefore we must propose differential phenomenologies of what I tentatively called “ultra-subjective” and “ultra-objective” violence, which coincide at the limit, or become indiscernible when the impossible is a reality and crystallizes in antinomian figures (such as “creative destruction” becoming the economic form of utility, and what—building on the analyses of Hannah Arendt—Bertrand Ogilvie has called provocatively “the production of disposable humans”).12 And although we must insist on the theoretical notion that extreme violence (as I said in my concluding essay) figures an anthropological limit of politics, whereby the question is posed of the penetration of the inhuman into the human, we must remain all the more consistently on the terrain of history, material structures, and lived experiences, and therefore avoid every speculative idea of an anthropological “foundation,” even a negative one, which by definition would be unique. Limit and foundation here are antithetic categories. In ethical terms, this makes it impossible to discuss the anthropological limit constituted by phenomena of extreme violence within a problematic of evil. As we know, there are religious, mythical, or transcendent figures of evil, but there are also mundane figures, which identify it with a social “system” (capitalism, or totalitarianism, or utilitarianism, as the single root of evil), or with the almighty “subjects” who are supposed to run the system. But if extreme violence in history were a figure of evil, its antithesis (called civility or otherwise) would be a figure of the good. This is what, in my stubborn “structuralism,” I try systematically to avoid. I defend that delirant assertions of “collective

xiv

P R E FA C E

identity,” leading to extermination processes in the form of genocides or “ethnic cleansing,” as well as the disturbing but very banal phenomena of institutional cruelty, where the State (and the legal apparatus itself ) seem to exact “vengeance” from the “public enemy” (a criminal, a terrorist, a deviant personality subjected to what the U.S. Constitution calls “unusual punishment”). Generally speaking, what I called ultra-subjective violence cannot be causally or phenomenologically confused with manifestations of ultra-objective violence, such as physical and moral destruction of the individual’s autonomy generated by overwork, extreme poverty, and precariousness inherent in the logic of the capitalist system, especially when it finds itself released from the constraints imposed by social policies, moral outrage, or the class struggles themselves. Nevertheless, “elimination” processes mark a point of encounter, and combinations of the different modalities of extreme violence within a single “economy” are plain, whose possibility we must represent in the discourse, as we run against it in the experience. This is not the logic of the single cause; it is the logic of the combined effects, which is much more real and important for politics. It is this complexity that I try to describe, and for which I seek names. And, as I describe and name it, I find myself disturbingly uncertain about the possibility of politically “escaping from it,” as Hobbes would write about his “state of nature” (which, as we see now, is essentially a historical state). What seems to be the case is rather a situation of no escape. This observation generates “pessimism of the intelligence,” according to the famous Gramscian formula, but also seems to threaten the “optimism of the will.” However, what it means philosophically is essentially that we must renounce eschatological perspectives, even in their secularized forms— which, as we know, were always insistent in the revolutionary discourse about politics, especially in its communist variants, seldom liberated from the myth of the “end of history.” To renounce the idea that extreme violence (and violence itself ) could be eliminated from politics and history, while maintaining that anti-violence is called for most urgently where it is most difficult to invent, thus acknowledging the intrinsic “fragility” of politics, is not tantamount to assuming that nothing changes or can change in history, except for the worse. On the contrary, it goes along with the idea that changes are actually taking place, as they did take place in the past, including emancipations from various forms of domination, and transfor-

P R E FA C E

xv

mations of the structures of power and exploitation. But as we observe these changes and try to “accelerate” their rhythms, we must name the risk that is immanent in political action, and we must intellectually explain its necessity. Outside of that risk and that necessity, there is only conformism or barbarity—or both. We must become “outraged” (as Stéphane Hessel famously exclaimed: Indignez-vous! ) and stand up against violent powers, structures, and ideologies. We must issue a call to arms (of which there are many kinds) when necessary in the name of equality and freedom. But we must arouse ourselves against the possibility that politics of emancipation and transformation that combat barbarity produce other forms of barbarity. In other words, we must take risks and know which risks we take. This is the nexus that—with the limited instruments of philosophy—I wanted to elucidate philosophically while I was writing these essays, and composing them into a book. I thank in particular Jennifer Crewe and her collaborators at Columbia University Press; Michael Goshgarian; Michel and Joanna Delorme, along with Cécile Bourguignon and Agnès Rauby at Editions Galilée. I also want to thank John Carlos Rowe, Alex Gelley, Gabrielle Schwab, and all other members of the Irvine Critical Theory Institute who invited me in the first place; Ellen Burt, David Carroll, Suzanne Gearhart, Rei Terada, and other longtime colleagues and friends at University of California Irvine; Bertrand Ogilvie and other colleagues and students at Université de Paris 10— Nanterre, with whom I discussed and criticized many of the arguments gathered in this book; Alfredo Gomez-Muller, with whom I maintain a durable exchange of ideas on ethics and politics; Warren Montag; James Swenson; and Debra Keates, who also helped with the project.

VIOLENCE AND CIVILITY

INTRODUCTION VIOLENCE AND POLITICS: QUESTIONS Non-violence is, in one sense, the worst kind of violence. —Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics”

IN ONE SENSE, NONVIOLENCE IS INDEED THE WORST FORM of violence.1 But in one sense only, and the whole question lies there, at least under certain circumstances that force us to think about it. That is what I wanted to do, by way of a contribution to this conference, in the form of an attempt to account for the political ambiguousness of the figures of violence and, symmetrically, the ambiguousness of politics when it is confronted with violence. I might as well admit right away, therefore, that the whole of this contribution will be placed under the sign of an aporia from which I do not think I can extricate myself. My justification is that I do not believe I am alone, and that I am doing my best to respond in this way to emergencies whose injunction we all feel. About violence in its “individual” and “collective” forms (one of the insistent questions before us is precisely whether that distinction can be maintained), its “old” (perhaps even archaic) or “new” (not just modern but also “postmodern”) forms, we should surely be able to say something other than that it is unbearable and we are against it—or again, in Thomas Hobbes’s famous formula about the “state of nature,” taken up by Immanuel Kant, that “we must leave it.” But it must be frankly admitted

2

INTRODUCTION

that we do not know, or no longer believe we know, how to “leave it.” And we sometimes find ourselves suspecting that, by a new ruse of history less favorable than the old one, this inability of ours is becoming a condition and form of the reproduction and extension of violence. War or racism, aggression or repression, domination or insecurity, sudden explosion or latent threat, violence and all the different kinds of violence may today be, at least in part, precisely the consequence of this nonknowledge. Such is the first aporia or quandary. It is quite sufficient to destabilize our understanding of politics and our confidence in its powers, for the presumption that violence can be eliminated is a constitutive element of our idea of politics. Or, if you prefer, it is constitutive of our idea that politics can be instituted. This can be put still another way: on the horizon of politics, as a condition of possibility and a telos of all its practices, is the political [du politique ]. In the absence of a pure and simple elimination of violence, we sometime fall back on the idea of a limitation of its field and effects, notably in the twofold form of its confinement to the sphere of the a-social and illegal, which we suppose to be extrapolitical (Michel Foucault challenges this way of representing things), and also in the form of an interruption of the endless spiral of acts of violence (the figures of the talion and vendetta). The idea of a political limitation of violence, however, already contains the essence of the idea that it can be eliminated, since it contains the idea that violence is restricted, known, and under control. Politics, insofar as it thus presupposes and presumes the political (the autonomous order of the political), is, to begin with, the negation or sublation of violence. If, however, violence cannot be sublated, or, still worse, if the means and forms of sublating it appear not contingently but essentially as the means and forms of pursuing it—if there exists, consequently, an intrinsic perversity of the political—then politics becomes desperate and a cause for despair. And we know, or think we do, where despairing of politics can lead. Closely bound up with this first quandary is a second. Politics would not present itself as a sublation if violence as we usually conceive it were not at once collectivizing and distributive—if we did not proceed, in other words, by first lumping together all forms of violence, however heterogeneous, in a single category in order to then redistribute them in accordance with hierarchies and distinctions whose effect is to exacerbate or minimize them, identify them as tolerable or intolerable, and so on.2 Thus, the “rape of

INTRODUCTION

3

conscience by political propaganda” (or religious propaganda, and so on) is under certain circumstances not violence unless certain limits are crossed. Thus war is the worst form of violence, yet it must be accepted under certain conditions (because peace is not the supreme value, or at least not an unconditional value). Thus simple acknowledgment of the reality of this or that act of “private” violence is or is not a political issue—and so on. The political would not be the empire of the nomos if the field of violence were not the empire of evil, both conceivable as such and rationally restricted. 3 Yet this unifying-distributive figure of violence, which is on the order of an anticipation of its negation, breaks down as soon as we are confronted with the equivocality, dissemination, and ambiguousness of the forms of violence. Equivocality because we cannot divide violence up between the “public” and “private” spheres without leaving a remainder. If violence consists in crossing limits, if the general formula for violence is “the boundaries— or barriers, protections, prohibitions, limits of the ‘self,’ and so on—have been violated,” then we cannot assign violence to a definite sphere with any precision. Yet identity, both individual and collective, depends on the existence of such spheres. Equivocality, again, because we cannot clearly assign individuals and groups, once and for all, to the categories of those who suffer and those who perpetrate violence. To all appearances, it is mainly those who suffer it who are also likely to perpetrate it: here, too, “boundaries”— if only intellectual and moral boundaries—are crossed once we can no longer content ourselves with calling this an “unfortunate consequence,” due to the pressure of circumstances or human frailty. As for the fact that those who perpetrate violence sooner or later end up suffering it, it is less often the case; but it makes it easier to see the effect of “immanent justice.” Dissemination of violence because, like the “weapons of mass destruction” the official monopoly on which engenders irresistible calls for their universal redistribution, owing to errors of calculation or apparently chance accidents (this is, indeed, one of the clearest links between violence and institution), the simple act of drawing a borderline to control or reduce violence seems to have the immediate effect of perpetuating if not exacerbating it. Ambiguousness, finally, not so much because of the often-posed question of the “complicity” between victim and perpetrator, or the originary uncertainty of the interrelationship between activity and passivity, but

4

INTRODUCTION

because we are unable to assign all the phenomena of “nonviolence” and “violence” once and for all to the poles of positivity and negativity.4 This is so, notably, because we cannot assign unequivocal ethical value to the notions of identity and alterity, as Derrida reminds us in his commentary on Levinas.5 It will be objected that these have always been the characteristics of violence and, in that sense, that it gets us no further to recall them here. But it might also be supposed not that they are new but that there are conjunctures in which they abruptly become more palpable because they are no longer held in reserve or relegated to some margin of philosophy but are rather, in some sort, exhibited at every turn of daily life and “normality.” Thus it would seem—I shall come back to this in my conclusion—that the picture of the conditions of violence yields to that of a condition of violence that, to repeat, “we do not know how to leave” (not even by way of— or, doubtless, especially not by way of—asceticism or the contemplation of “this world” or “this history”). Taking one more step, I would like to recall that politics has never ceased to go round in the circle of the “double” negation of violence, which, precisely, refers to the duality of the (determinate) conditions of this or that act of violence and the condition of (universal) violence. This negation is “double” not in the sense of a “negation of the negation” but in the sense of the two forms of practical negation that would seem to be elicited by the reality of violence and its inherent power of dissemination. They may be called “nonviolence” and “counterviolence.” It would not be hard to show that each of these “strategies” or “logics” (in the sense in which we are today told about the “logic of war”)—one striving to create the external and internal conditions for making violence impossible, the other striving to free us from violence by turning it against those who perpetrate it—is permanently sustained by the shortcomings or failures of the other (“peaceful struggle” and “armed struggle,” or, still more profoundly, struggle and contract, consensus, or friendship). It would also not be hard to show that this circle pertains to both the revolutionary perspective and the perspective of a state-centered politics (notably that of the institution or functioning of a “constitutional state of law”), or, if one prefers, that it pertains to the insurgent and constitutional perspective alike, which, at least in the modern period, imagine the political in the same way, so that each constantly finds

INTRODUCTION

5

itself playing the role of the other negation for the other, the “bad negation” (in the sense in which there is a “bad infinity”). It is well known how the state of law, for its part, resolves the tension between its objective, which is to create as broad a sphere as possible in which violence is “outlawed,” and the need originally and periodically to employ the counterviolence of overpowering repression in order to attain this objective. It proceeds by delegation, concentrating all the means of violence, which become “legitimate” as a result, in the hands of an at least presumptively rational and impartial central authority. It proceeds, in other words, by mobilizing an antinomic logic that calls for the identification of opposites—peace and war, law and transgression—on condition that this identification be made at a unique, transcendent point. No one has said this better than Hobbes, and no one has understood better than Max Weber how unmistakably it comes down to making politics the metaphysical stage on which is constantly performed, against a backdrop of indecision, the tragedy of the interrelationship between human practice and “evil”: malice and malediction. The same tension, however, marks the revolutionary conception of politics as well, generating antinomies of the same order (at least on a first approximation). For revolutionary politics is commanded, above all, by the twofold thesis that has it, first, that it is necessary to found politics anew in order to deliver it from the reign of violence (the violence of economic alienation and that of the state regarded as an instrument of the ruling classes or as Leviathan); and, second, that this goal can be reached only by eliminating, by means of counterviolence (whether it is brief and tumultuous or, on the contrary, “quiet,” controlled, and deferred), the forces, groups, and apparatuses that perpetrate violence against the people. The eschatological dimension is no less conspicuous here than in the discourse of the state of law. Or is it merely its echo? We need to pause here to consider, however briefly, the relations between the idea of revolution and the ideas of resistance and insurgency. This will also provide an occasion to say a word about the way this aporia has been centrally perceived in the Marxist tradition and Marx himself, but finally put aside. The notion of resistance is crucial to all conceptions of revolution in the modern period (that is, ever since “revolution” has ceased to mean simply

6

INTRODUCTION

bringing down a government or periodically replacing one constitution with another) because it evokes the irreducible experience in which a specific form of violence is revealed as such (whether exploitation, inequality, discrimination, or all three at once) and, inseparably, thereby reveals the universal “right” that that violence denies. Without the resistance of the oppressed to oppression—all for one and one for all or, better, everyone for everyone else, transindividually—in other words, without the fact that the effort to put an end to a situation of oppression has always already commenced with oppression itself, there would not only be no revolutionary politics.6 There would also be no “politics of the rights of man,” in the sense in which such a notion is reducible to neither moral invocation nor the legal proclamation of “man” and his “rights” but combines—since the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, if not before—an ethics of the “universal right to politics” with the endeavor collectively to forge the conditions of individual freedom. Nevertheless, although the notion of resistance is crucial, it is not sufficient. Alongside it we must put that of insurgency, even of permanent insurgency, in the broadest possible sense. The politics of the rights of man is the work of those who, in all possible forms, rise up against inequality and oppression; but it also posits, in practice, that there can be no equality without freedom and the other way around. It follows that no one can be emancipated by others but, as well, that no one can emancipate herself without others (I have proposed to call this the proposition of equaliberty). For precisely this reason, the condition for maintaining the “rights of man” at the political level is, in every historical conjuncture, that they be reconquered or extended beyond every instituted “limitation.”7 Here, however, the question arises as to how closely the idea of the revolutionary program is tied to a specific denegation of the self-destructive effects of “revolutionary violence” in the guise of “counterviolence” directed in spontaneous or organized fashion against the violence of the established order.8 Denegation here means either that revolutionary violence, as an expression of the insurgent resistance and (re)conquest of the right to politics by “those at the bottom,” would be by nature exempt from ambivalence or that it contains within itself (precisely because it does not aspire, at least as such, to consolidating a form of domination or even simply an established order) the means of its self-control, its self-moderation. In the one case, as

INTRODUCTION

7

in the other, violence would not be a “Gift,”* a poison circulating between the camps that each gives to the other, but an attribute of just one of them that can be provisionally turned against it, pending its eventual neutralization or exhaustion. It is, however, hard to miss the inadequacy of that presentation of things today. When we compare it to that of state-centered politics, we see, to be sure, that revolutionary politics sheds the hypocrisy that consists in holding up the established order (notably the legally instituted order simply because the legal form is that of a consensus or a rationality) as the very reality of nonviolence when it is quite often only the common framework for a host of general or particular, open or veiled forms of violence. We also see, however, that revolutionary politics deprives itself, in advance, of a realistic possibility authorized by the idea of a “monopoly on the legitimate use of force” [violence]: that of considering the state (that “bludgeon,” as Lenin puts it) and power in general as instruments dangerous for the very people who wield and institute them precisely because they are nothing other, at the limit, than crystallized or stabilized violence and, in the final analysis, the relative stabilization, by groups and individuals in a given society, of their own violence—in the form of a distantiation and unequal distribution, a more or less permanent appropriation of the means of violence by some of them.* What is Marx’s position on this issue? It seems to me to be highly paradoxical in that there are, in Marx, elements that reinforce the denegation just discussed or even make it absolute, and others that open up the possibility of theoretically overcoming the cycle of nonviolence and counterviolence—in other words, of concretizing still another type of “negation” (which I shall call in a moment antiviolence). Moreover, all these contradictory elements are directly bound up with what is and will remain the strong point in the Marxian theoretization of politics, namely, the radical short circuit that it operates between politics and what is at least apparently politics’ “other”: the economy. To put it differently, they are directly bound up with a radical refusal to confer any “autonomy” whatsoever on

*Translator’s note: “Gift,” which means “poison” in German, has the same etymology as the English word “gift,” a fact that Jacques Derrida exploits in his Given Time I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 12–13; Donner le Temps (Paris: Galilée, 1991), 25.

8

INTRODUCTION

politics vis-à-vis its economic conditions and effects: not, of course—at least not in Marx himself—in order to “depoliticize politics,” that is, to make it something merely technical or naturalize it in the element of the economy, but quite the opposite: in order to materialize it, to invest it with the real materiality and “power” of economic antagonisms while fully politicizing the play of “economic contradictions.”9 In other words, the difficulty I want to discuss here is lodged not in the theory’s margins or contingent applications but at the very center of its conception of historicity. It may be summed up by way of two possible interpretations of a pair of famous formulas in Capital, one of which describes violence [Gewalt ] as the “midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.”10 The other postulates (about state intervention in the regulation of the working-day and, more generally, the limitation of exploitation) that “between equal rights, force (or violence: Gewalt) decides.”11 That (revolutionary) violence is the means necessary for, and the path leading to, the destruction of an “old society,” the task of those whom society oppresses and exploits, is not just a tautological way of expressing the idea of overthrow or the logic of the “seizure of power” (which Foucault would typically have associated with what he calls the “repressive hypothesis”). It is also the result of an analysis of the conditions of violence (the economic violence of exploitation and the extra-economic violence based on exploitation and, reciprocally, required to reproduce it) that does not content itself either with “isolating” those conditions in linear fashion as causes or with ascribing them to an eternal curse but, rather, inscribes them in a structure.12 However, because the economic and political structure in question is that of the mode of production itself—in other words, because it refers us to the way all social practices depend on the “human” activity par excellence, labor (by which, according to The German Ideology, “men produce the conditions of their own existence” and thus “begin to define themselves”)—the result of carrying out such a structural analysis against the backdrop of an anthropology is always double. In Marx, more than in any other revolutionary theorist, there emerges a problematic that is no longer that of the “all or nothing” (that is, of nonviolence or counterviolence) but, tendentially at least, one of antiviolence. Let us say that this problematic rises a step higher—but no more—in order to identify and anticipate in a

INTRODUCTION

9

historical structure of “production” of social relations the determinate conditions of the historical repetition of violence. At the same time, however, the anthropological thesis of essence (the alienation of essence) inexorably drives Marxism toward new absolutes, especially a new indeterminacy of history and nature—perhaps nothing but the two metaphysical names for the idea of structure between which the “materialist theory of history” never ceases to waver. The result is, in some sort, a “transcendental deduction” of revolutionary politics as the violent abolition of violence as such.13 We might say that the denegation of the self-destructive effects of revolutionary violence and their transposition into the terms of an antinomic eschatology are, paradoxically, all the more insistent the more determinate the conditions of oppressive violence are and the more sharply they are distinguished from the fantasy of the oppressors’ malign will or innate iniquity. Similar conclusions may be drawn from Marx’s other formula, the one that sums up the way “violence” and “law” are intertwined in the conditions of exploitation. Their close association, dating from the beginnings of “primitive accumulation” and the process of expropriating the producers (in “mud and blood,” in Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase), has been perpetuated throughout the political history of capital and its sway over social relations in the guise of the “industrial reserve army” (mass unemployment) and the “despotism of the factory system,” the two poles, as it were—the Charybdis and Scylla—of the proletarian condition. Marx never thought that capitalist domination was a functional process; more exactly, he shows throughout his work that capitalism simultaneously develops economic functionality and the excess of repression over the functional demands of the economy as one of the very conditions of its form: an excess of superexploitation over exploitation, without which there would be no exploitation; an excess of the class struggle (beginning with the dominant class’s preventive or repressive struggle14) over the state itself, without which there would be no state; an excess of “physical” violence over law, without which there would be no law; but also an excess of law, which codifies and legitimizes violence over “naked” violence.15 One possible consequence of such an analysis is that the “revolutionary class struggle” may appear as a liberation of/from violence (in every sense), considered as the latent “truth” of the forms of law themselves. At the limit, we again have the antinomic

10

INTRODUCTION

representation of a passage to extremes in which the supersession or sublation of violence as such would be the more imminent the more thinly veiled the form in which violence appears. An analysis of this kind can, however, also lead to the idea that all politics, revolutionary politics included, is a combination or endless “negotiation” of strategies of force and law: law versus law, violence versus violence, law versus violence, and violence versus law (an idea that, be it noted in passing, is rather Leninist because it is rather Machiavellian). From that standpoint, the necessary resort to counterviolence and even its effectiveness depend on its capacity to incorporate a moment (moral and intellectual but, above all, political) of antiviolence.16 That Marx’s thought never really got beyond this oscillation, the consequence of a double movement of a “critique of politics” and a “critique of the economy” (or of the theorization of a generalized economy that links property and labor to the state and class struggle) comprising the most profound aspect of his conception of historicity, and that, as a result, Marxists after Marx have been paralyzed by it (very few have proved capable of simply continuing to treat the multiplicity of the forms of revolutionary politics as an open question; as everyone knows, they have tended once again to promote this or that “strategy” as absolute depending on circumstances and organizational logics)—all this makes it necessary, today more than ever, to think politics (or the “question of politics”) in Marx’s categories but also against them. The generalized economy is at least one of the names under which the constitutive impurity of politics has found recognition, that heteronomy of the political that rules out straightforward “sublation” of oppression or inequality by the state, law, the will and the rights of man. It is also one of the names under which the utopia of the end of history, as the end of the cycle of violence and counterviolence, has once again been conceived as the foundation or ultimate reference point for a “true” politics. This aporia is the more interesting in that it may be compared and contrasted with other in some respects antithetical ways of thinking the heteronomy of politics in which we have to do with not a generalized economy but symbolic violence or a generalized ideology. Think of Spinoza, for example: his analysis of the problem of the freedom of expression and religious conflicts in the Tractatus theologico-politicus follows a trajectory that, quite like Marx’s, ultimately anchors emancipation in resistance. I

INTRODUCTION

11

once tried to show that the politics of emancipation in Spinoza, as a politics of the “internal transformation of religion,” is based on the idea that there exists an “incompressible minimum” (the term is Gilles Deleuze’s) for the expression of theological-political opinions.17 This is because a “private opinion”—in the sense of a “private language”—is a contradiction in terms: thought’s condition of possibility is always its communication, and no man has it in his power (because “man thinks”) not to talk with others or, above all, not to tell them what he thinks. A man is the less capable of holding his tongue the more powerful the prohibition imposed on him. It follows that no act of repression or censorship (even, indeed especially, if it scrupulously respects people’s right to their “private opinions,” as in Hobbes) can ever “settle” the question of the existence of ideological conflict in a human society. It further follows that, from the movement of the communication of thoughts (the transformation of thoughts into “common notions”) that has already begun with the formation and formulation of any particular thought, there proceeds without pause or interruption (thanks to an irrepressible conatus) an “antiviolent” movement of trans-individual political negation and affirmation. Individual resistance to censorship is thus, by definition, collective and accordingly contributes to a new foundation of politics. This by no means implies, however, that all collective opinions are good or democratic in and of themselves, and it must for that very reason be admitted that the question of the institution of social peace or of a space for the “unrestricted exchange” of opinions and beliefs is bound to remain indefinitely open, at least to the extent that it targets a community’s stability and legitimacy. The antinomy designated by the famous slogan “no freedom for the enemies of freedom!” remains insurmountable.18 Thus, exactly like Marx, albeit on a completely different terrain, and at antipodes from Hobbes, Spinoza shows that the “state of nature” lives on in the “state of society,” or, rather, that there is no state of nature strictly speaking, and that the history of society or the field of politics is that of an excess or irreducible remainder of violence (if only latent violence) over the institutional, legal, or strategic forms for reducing and eliminating it. Simply, the “natural-historical” melange or structure involved here is one of not production and exploitation but belief and communication: it is what might be called the field of the imaginarization of the symbolic in which violence arises because the communitarian scheme still figures as the

12

INTRODUCTION

condition and form of communication and of the political itself, projecting itself onto the figure of the normality and abnormality of bodies, behaviors, values, “cultures” and “affiliations” marked with the signs of identity and difference. Derrida’s “shibboleth” is, in my opinion, an admirable statement and analysis of this imaginarization of the symbolic.19 In a word, there is a remarkable parallelism between the structure analyzed by Marx, which forms the background for his thesis that violence plays an irreducible role in emancipation, and the one analyzed by Spinoza, which forms the background for his thesis that violence makes its return in the institution of collectivity. Paradoxically, these two theses are at the same time utterly incompatible. It would be easy to conclude that Marx is basically unaware of the “other scene” of politics, the scene of communitarian affiliation, and therefore unaware of symbolic violence as well (although he names it or has bequeathed us with the word ideology, one of the aptest names for it); and to conclude that Spinoza, for his part, basically ignores the irreducible nature of economic antagonism (doubtless because, at the economic level, where conatus can perhaps be conceived of as a “productive force,” Spinoza is basically an optimist and a utilitarian). It is even tempting to conclude that each of them ignores the “absent cause” whose effects he perceives in the guise of an excess of violence over political rationality (whether it is a question of the rationality of production or of communication). Hence, the condition (the “reason for the effects,” in Pascalian terms) that continues to escape each of them is in a certain way the one that the other designates for him: the economy as the condition of ideology; ideology as the condition of the economy. In fact, if the economy has clearly been (and still is) the other of politics (and, consequently, the very locus of its reality, its “causes” and “effects”), ideology never stops manifesting itself as the other of this other and, therefore, the very reality (or “matter”) of this reality. The opposite, however, is no less true. The specific “locus” of the emergence of violence in its intersection with history, where politics finds itself both summoned to “intervene” and at a loss “to settle the question once and for all,” thus appears to be nothing more nor less than the point at which the economy encounters and “shifts into” ideology, and vice versa. However, this locus is only a line of flight, although it incessantly assumes concrete form, in the suffering and protest of bodies, for example.20 I shall here risk the remark that the one (purely nega-

INTRODUCTION

13

tive) thing that strikes me as intelligible in the atrocious Yugoslavian tragedy is that the confrontation between ethnic-religious “communities,” however ancient or recent their enmity, would never have eluded their own political capacities to the point it has (and, therefore, eluded all hope of a real solution: for how can anyone imagine that an external authority will find a solution?—it is then that we would truly witness the “end of politics”) if it were not completely overdetermined by the iron constraint of an international economy marked by domination and exclusion. At the same time, however, the competition between social systems, economic policies, and productive forces on the European or world market would never have so utterly eluded all calculation based on self-interest or all institutional mediation if it had not been overdetermined by the iron constraint of identification with an imaginary community, whether sociopolitical or nationalsocial, ethnic-national, or ethnic-religious. But “at the extremes” (the extremes about which one almost never knows that they have been reached until it is too late to steer clear of them), there exists no common discourse, to the best of our knowledge, that might simultaneously address these two constraints, although they are inseparable. Nevertheless, because I have repeatedly suggested the term antiviolence as a hypothetical designation for a “different” kind of political “negation” of violence, I wish to say a few words in concluding about what characterizes, in my view, the form in which we are called on to continue working on this aporia today. It seems to me that we are paradoxically obliged to think the ever greater objectivity and, simultaneously, ever greater subjectivity of violence. Or, if you like, the forms and effects of the violence confronting us today, which call the very possibility of politics into question, appear, in comparison with classic, normalized descriptions, to be simultaneously “ultraobjective” and “ultrasubjective.” Ultraobjective forms of violence: this means forms in which violence is even more closely intertwined with naturalness and universality. I have in mind, to begin with, the effects that certain epidemics, floods, earthquakes, or phenomena of desertification have today, and the way they are presented to us. Nothing is less purely natural than these supposedly “natural” disasters; rather, nothing is less natural than their differential effect on the regions of the world and their populations, some of which are considered masterworks in danger while others are portrayed as supernumerary and

14

INTRODUCTION

blamed for the “demographic time-bomb” threatening the planet. From here to the supposition that there exists an “instituted” correspondence between the unequal distribution of the means of fighting AIDS, on the one hand, and a need to “control” the global population on the other, it is but a short step, which it would be madness to take, but frankly naive to dismiss out of hand, just as it is impossible not to posit a relation between that “excess world population” and the way third-world children and adults are used, with or without their “consent,” as factories to provide organs needed for transplants in the developed world’s hospitals. It is, to be sure, also clear that the use of such regulative “strategies,” even if it is only “passive,” is a double-edged sword, but that it tendentially effaces the boundary between social and physical-biological processes.21 In other words, a form of mass violence that is patently not without social (notably, economic) causes irremediably lacks a social subject. So much for naturalness. I have in mind, secondly, the way the phenomena of nationalism and racism are disseminated in what is known as the “world economy”—which is, no less, the “world ideology.” Modern racism has always been nationalism’s “internal supplement,” that is, not merely exacerbated xenophobia but in a sense the very opposite: the rejection and discrimination directed against the “complementary enemy” arise from internal exclusions and borders, or produce them as required for the constitution of a fictive ethnicity.22 But what happens when—as a result of the abolition of external borders or, rather, their internalization and instrumentalization by economic, military, humanitarian, and communicational policies [ politiques ] whose field of maneuver is immediately a planetary geopolitical space—nothing but internal borders survive, tendentially, whether or not they are underscored by a line of “sovereignty”? What happens now that the drawing or redrawing of such borders, or the way they are monitored as well as their selective permeability to populations in different categories, rich and poor, from the north and the south, the east and the west, and so on—in short, to different “superior” and “inferior” species of human beings, armed or not, “televisualized” or not—has become both the testing ground for a “new world order” and a point of fi xation for institutional forms of violence and their more or less spontaneous individual or collective by-products? All indications are that the traditional relationship between racism and nationalism has a tendency to re-

INTRODUCTION

15

verse itself here. In other words, nationalism (an “anachronistic” nationalism that it is tempting to call “postnational nationalism” because it comes after all possibility of creating or re-creating autonomous nation-states has disappeared) is increasingly becoming a function of racism.23 There results, evidently, a very profound aporia as far as the political utilization of the notion of humanism is concerned. For if antiracist politics has necessarily inscribed itself, and conceived of itself, in a humanist perspective, it is because it has opposed the assumption that humanity is one to the supposedly natural divisions of humanity. But now that this oneness of humanity exists in practical, not ideal, fashion as a world population in immediate communication with the totality of itself, and now that this oneness is linked, precisely, to a multiplication of internal borders and a universalization of “thresholds of tolerance,” it is no longer possible in any simple way to imagine and symbolize universal fraternity as the ideal unity of the human species. Precisely when no one really believes any longer in the existence of distinct humanities, there are no longer any limits on the process of differentiation. The triumph of humanitarianism and the violence specific to it are humanism’s tomb. So much for universalism. The closer we come to a description of contemporary forms of institutional violence, however, the more conspicuously the ultraobjective forms of violence are reversed in the current conjuncture, becoming forms of its ultrasubjectivity. I would like to suggest the following paradox, which formally echoes certain diagnoses of “postmodern individualism,” although I wish to avoid both the characteristically cynical presentation of them as well as their naive enthusiasm. It is doubtless a commonplace today that the “return” of communitarian ideologies based on exclusive belonging and particularism—or, on the contrary, on cosmic aspirations to a “world citizenship” understood as a return to nature after the misdeeds of civilization—is a phenomenon, itself violent, of reaction to or compensation for the real or symbolic collapse of institutional frameworks. Rather than rejecting this idea, would it not be preferable to enrich it with a new element? Is there any reason to wonder at the general retreat of the political, the widespread feeling that it is useless and helpless, when violence no longer appears to be either the antithesis of the institution or the symptom

16

INTRODUCTION

of its capture and the perversion of its function by a “caste” or a “ruling class” but rather, in some sort, the general condition of the functioning of institutions, the “universal naturalness” of institutions? When it appears as both the principle of their proliferation and a daily reminder of their elusive “thinghood,” from which flows, constantly, the ambivalence of the protection and security that those institutions guarantee?24 Such a situation is doubtless at the root of the revival of “Hobbesian” portrayals of politics and history as the “war of all against all,” in opposition to the optimistic visions stemming from the Enlightenment (the Marxist vision included). Yet such a situation has nothing of a “state of nature” about it, for it is not founded on the division between nature and culture, violence and the institution but, quite the contrary, on their fusion and abiding equivocality. That is why it carries to an extreme the effects of ambivalence and the double bind that always characterize individuals’ “subjective” relationship to violence. It contains both an imperious invitation to individuals to recognize in the depths of their being, beyond any determinate condition or structure, a “radical evil” or originary source of violence; yet it contains at the same time a condition that rules out the possibility of developing any properly subjective (or intersubjective) dialectic of emancipation as a transition from passivity to activity, oppression to freedom, or isolation to the collective. Ultimately, the common premise of Spinoza’s “incompressible minimum,” the revolutionary “politics of the rights of man,” Marxian struggle and emancipation, and so on, was always the idea of a minimal human nature in which the trans-individual relation (whether it was called utility, sympathy, fraternity, communism, communication, or something else) was originally tied to an affirmation of the subject. It was on this basis that a political practice tending toward the conservation, reform, or new foundation of the institution could unfold. But with the generalization of a situation of indistinction (or “nonseparation”) between the production of institution and the production of violence, a representation of that sort obviously becomes more and more fantastic. This perhaps means, quite simply, that it is no longer possible to conceive of any political practice that does not aim simultaneously to drive back, everywhere, in each of its forms, the subjective-objective violence that ceaselessly suppresses the possibility of politics. Politics, accordingly, can no longer be thought as either a simple sublation of violence (as a going

INTRODUCTION

17

beyond it toward nonviolence) or as a simple transformation of its determinate conditions (which can require the application of counterviolence). It is no longer a means or an instrument employed to accomplish something else, but it is also no longer an end in itself. It is, rather, the uncertain stakes of a confrontation with the element of irreducible alterity that it carries within itself. This infinite circularity is what I have here called, at least hypothetically, “antiviolence.”

ONE FROM EXTREME VIOLENCE TO THE PROBLEM OF CIVILITY

T H E P R O B L E M I W O U L D L I K E T O B R O A C H I N T H E S E L E C TURES is the interrelation between the question of violence and the concept of politics. The first question is how to pose it. For reasons I hope to bring out, it has in the past few years appeared to me more clearly than before that this problem commands an essential segment of our thinking about the past and future of politics—all the analyses and projects that aspire not just to understand but also to reinvent it. “Quite some discovery!” you will reply. The issue of violence is everywhere. It is in discourses and the images and scenes that present and represent politics. It is also, patently, the object of constant manipulation, serving propaganda purposes and blackmail of all sorts. We might therefore be tempted purely and simply to ignore it for fear of being trapped in a mechanism of conditioned reflexes and false problems. Rightly or wrongly, I do not take that position. I think that public opinion here reflects a real question, in however distorted a fashion: that of the different conceptions of politics, among which violence (as it is perceived, utilized, and confronted) operates as a distinguishing criterion.1 To be sure, this point of heresy is also, par excellence, the ambivalent point at which politics

20

FROM EXTREME VIOLENCE TO THE PROBLEM OF CIVILITY

wavers between proclaiming its autonomy or its inadequacy, which can inspire it to go looking for a supplement of significance (and, occasionally, transcendence) in philosophy, morality, or religion. Any discussion of the relationship between violence and politics is based on examples, value judgments, and ideals that inform the very choice of words used to define violence. Mine will be no exception to the rule. To designate violence of the type I shall be describing as extreme, the kind I would like, above all, to discuss here, I shall use the term cruelty. I do not claim any originality there either. The subject is banal; it assails us at every turn in our “global village.” Or, rather, it is a subject whose banality is once again forcing itself on our perception of the world around us as the most widely shared thing there is, on which no region and no civilization has the monopoly and to which none is immune. What I wish to submit to discussion is the question of the extent to which the banalization and universal extension of cruelty call not only for commitment and action or defensive reaction (that much would seem to go without saying), but also for a conceptual response, a recasting of the very concept of politics that would pinpoint its specificity insofar as politics takes place in the element of violence and as a function of its effects. More precisely, I would like to pose the following problem: if we must admit that there exists an “extreme” violence whose forms are not just a counterpart to the functioning of institutions, a violence that politics cannot “manage” even when it takes the forms of the so-called state of exception, although such forms exceed the limits of politics defined as community building, regulating social conflict, defending the public interest, taking and exercising power, governing the multitude, transforming social relations, adapting to change, or in other ways as well—if such “extreme” violence, located beyond exception, does indeed exist, how does recognizing that affect our understanding of politics and its constitutive antinomies? What discourse or scheme of intelligibility offers us the means with which we can treat conjointly, as two aspects of a single problem, a reflection on the circumstances that motivate the transition from normality to exception and thence to the extreme form of violence (cruelty), and a reflection on politics’ multiple forms, its intrinsic heterogeneity or dislocation? I am well aware of the uncertainties and the imprecision of this first formulation—to begin with, the circle it is caught in. Can it not be said that

FROM EXTREME VIOLENCE TO THE PROBLEM OF CIVILITY

21

any identification of some form of violence as “extreme,” and capable of affecting or disrupting the political (social, historical, institutional) field by dint of the extremities to which it eventually leads, never does more than reflect a certain definition of politics, which is a matter of convention? The thresholds and boundaries that we say were crossed (or that, we warn, are in danger of being crossed) are never more than implications of the concept of politics that we began by posing. Granted. Yet the fact of classifying, in one way or another, the forms of violence and the response to it might also constitute a fully meaningful criterion for identifying what opposes different conceptions of politics, or for locating, theoretically, the “heretical points” around which the definition of politics revolves. We might also say, of course, that presenting certain forms of violence as “extreme” (meaning that we put them at the limit of the intelligible and the bearable) points to anthropological postulates or premises that call for explanation. I would not even hesitate to concede that such a presentation depends on metaphysical theses underlying our comprehension (or pre-comprehension) of what constitutes the “limit” of the human, whether in our relationship with social institutions or our representation of the course of history. Far from contesting that, I shall, rather, make it one of the subjects and stakes of these lectures: for it is precisely the point at which it becomes necessary to take stock of the presuppositions and philosophical choices that are always implicit in our representation of politics and its articulation with history, considered as a continuous or discontinuous series of events, a determinate or indeterminate production of situations. Thus, the reflections I propose to develop here also seem to me to constitute a privileged way of understanding something that does not do away with metaphysical questions but, rather, intensifies them, putting a sharper edge on them when they are recast as questions about the historicity of politics and the “politicity” (or non-politicity) of the history that we experience and conceive of as the horizon of our existence. If the word extreme has a meaning on which we can play, it consists precisely in paving the way for a determinate approach to these basic philosophical questions. I have spoken of politics as a “reaction” or “response” to extreme violence. I have suggested that this response poses the hardest problem, the one that enables us to make the finest discriminations when we try to conceive of it not as extrinsic (and thus, in particular, as a “defensive reaction,”

22

FROM EXTREME VIOLENCE TO THE PROBLEM OF CIVILITY

whether verbal or institutional) but as intrinsic or internal to the element of extreme violence. In what sense would politics be an effective response to the “extreme” if it remained external to it, if, that is, it took up in advance a position short of extremity? On the other hand, would it be a response— regulatory, transformative, or emancipatory—if it merely reproduced or prolonged extremity? That is the question I shall keep in mind in the course of these lectures, although I have no guarantee that it can be resolved. In exploring it, I shall use as guideposts two names that are themselves programmatic. The first is purely formal: it is that of a politics conceived as “antiviolence.” The word might simply designate a tautology, if (as I have also suggested elsewhere) we failed to pay careful attention to the fact that there are different types of negation, and that speaking of antiviolence does not produce the same effects as does speaking of nonviolence or counter violence. Indeed, I would suggest that those are the three poles of a distinction that is crucial here. The other name I shall be using is that of a politics of civility. It is also very general, of course, but it brings a whole ideological tradition with it as well as historical and rhetorical contexts, and thus the risk of dictating an answer to the question posed, and a terribly restrictive answer at that, one that orients the “response to violence” in just one direction and confines the concept of politics, in advance, to a system of arbitrary constraints or rules. The interiority or immanence we called for a moment ago would, in this case, lapse back into externality. I choose to use the term civility nonetheless—at least provisionally, for I by no means exclude the possibility that I will eventually have to supplement or replace it with other terms—for its differential value (in an earlier essay, I tentatively proposed that we distinguish between the politics of emancipation, transformation, and civility) as well as the possibilities of variation that it contains, and even for its history, divided between the poles of the institution and the constitution of subjects (or education).2 Let me very rapidly clarify this point. I am envisaging, in sum, a twofold question. First, under what conditions can we think a politics that is neither an abstraction from violence (“nonviolence”) nor an inversion of it (“counterviolence”—especially in its repressive forms, state forms, but also in its revolutionary forms, which assume that they must reduplicate it if they are to “monopolize” it) but an internal response to, or displacement of, it? Second, how well does the word

FROM EXTREME VIOLENCE TO THE PROBLEM OF CIVILITY

23

civility designate the political action that specifically pursues such “antiviolence?” In considering this twofold question, I deliberately refer to the metamorphoses that have marked the use of the category of civility as it shifted from one context to another, and thus to the term’s characteristic malleability.3 This is what distinguishes it, for example (in French), from civilization and, in another perspective, from politesse. The etymology and history of the first uses of civilité in French (or of civility in English or civiltà in Italian) go back to the Latin civilitas, considered to be, in its turn, an equivalent of the Greek politeia and used by Renaissance writers both in the sense of political community and in that of constitution or governmental regime. This sense, attested in philosophers and lexicographers (notably Nicole Oresme, in France), evolved in the Classical Age toward the seemingly more restricted sense of “proper behavior” or “good manners”—that is, courtesy, but considered from the standpoint of its function in organizing society and its hierarchies or of the “commerce” between the component parts of society. Thus it answers—as virtue or power—to a certain classical notion of civil society. Let us note on this score that, in the Hegelian conception, which we shall later be discussing at length, the concept that is best translated as “civility” in this sense is not bürgerlich Gesellschaft, which is a strictly classificatory, legal term, but Sittlichkeit, a profoundly political concept that encompasses the “state” and “nonstate” spheres of collective action.4 Let us further note that at least one of the aspects that Foucault eventually called “governmentality” (as “control of the way individuals govern themselves,” or an action upon an action that makes it possible to think the modalities of subjection and subjectification in a new way, as a relation internal to the play of power), is precisely a search for the various historical modalities or strategies of civility.5 Thus we are led to raise a third question within the two that precede it. In what sense is the civility that responds to contemporary extreme violence from inside extreme violence a political form that recurs as an old, periodically reactivated tradition? In what sense is it a form yet to come, an invention that it is incumbent on us to produce? Or is it precisely that aspect of politics that can recur only in the modality of invention because the extreme violence to which it responds is itself always new and unpredictable? I say antiviolence because the prefi x “anti-,” as in antithesis, antipathy, or antinomy, designates the most general modality of the act of “facing up

24

FROM EXTREME VIOLENCE TO THE PROBLEM OF CIVILITY

to”—from within the polity or community as well—or of measuring oneself against that which is, doubtless, enormous or incommensurable. (Hölderlin, as is well known, called Antigone the antitheos.) That is why I counterpose it both to the act of turning away, counting oneself out, or even protecting oneself (designated by the term nonviolence insofar as it seeks to avoid or defer extremities) and also to the act of returning violence or paying it back in kind with counter violence, which thus presents itself as second and as such a legitimate reaction to a “first violence,” generally presented as illegitimate. I shall not, however, decide in advance whether these logically constructed hypothetical distinctions are in fact tenable, whether the politics of civility itself contains moments of nonviolence or counterviolence, or whether it tends to surpass, abolish, transfigure, or institutionally regulate violence—no more than I shall decide in advance whether the extreme violence against which a politics of civility seeks to measure itself following diverse strategies, differs radically from that politics, or, rather, appears to it as its own immanent violence, which it reflects and works on. All these possibilities must, for reasons of principle, remain open. I plan to conduct this exploration in three rounds of interpretations and discussions. I shall first consider, taking Hegel as my starting point, the conversion of violence into institution, law or power/authority [ pouvoir], and the possibility that there exists an inconvertible form of violence aptly designated, precisely, as “cruelty.” Second, I shall discuss the intrinsic heterogeneity masked by this notion, and shall go on to suggest a topography of it, to essentially heuristic ends. Finally, I shall come back to civility in order to sketch a confrontation between the various political strategies that we can classify under that rubric, relating them to institutional or noninstitutional subjects. It will then appear, doubtless, that the problems we have thus posed were not susceptible of “resolution” in the proper sense of the word. Let us hope that we will, at least, have formulated them a little better.

TWO HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE “CONVERSION OF VIOLENCE”

BEFORE WE ENTER INTO OUR READING OF THE HEGELIAN text that will here serve as our guiding thread, it seems to me worthwhile to take due note of the “Hobbesian turn” that, at least since the early 1980s, seems to have inflected the discourse of political philosophy, sometimes by way of references to other authors (Kant, Freud, Carl Schmitt). It would appear that we no longer represent the space of politics as, in Max Weber’s famous phrase, a “war of gods”—that is, a space of conflict between values and ideologies claiming to embody the universal or, in a post-Marxian conception, a space of projects and processes of social transformation—but have instead lapsed back into imagining politics as an attempt (that may ultimately be doomed to failure) to master the condition of “primary” violence in which human groups live and act. This shift (a “neoclassical” turn, according to some who point to the influence of authors as different as Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss) is plainly of anthropological inspiration, with the difference that it appeals less to an originary “human nature” (and the various ways of conceiving of it) than to the idea of an origin now lost for good, a “posthistorical” human nature as it has been transformed or as it subsists, in now unrecognizable form, after one whole cycle of “culture”

26

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

and “progress.”1 The mushrooming of ethnoreligious conflicts and their apparently inexorable transformation into the national or transnational identity wars that have broken out in both the core and the periphery of what had been the Westernized world, the atomization and incompatibility of social movements that until recently seemed to be component parts of a single, overarching movement for the emancipation of the exploited and dominated, undoubtedly help sustain this way of looking at things. It overlaps with the idea that, on the now globalized political stage, the passions and interests making themselves felt across institutional and territorial borders alike embody a pure will to power. This is nicely summed up by the title of Benjamin Barber’s Jihad Versus McWorld, its contents aside—although they are not without interest either.2 We must nonetheless note a fundamental departure from the idea of a “war of all against all,” which, for the author of De Cive and Leviathan, calls for the constraint of a sovereign about whom Hobbes says that “there is no power on earth to be compared to him”: a sovereign power that fills men with the same terror as the war of all against all. To begin with, Hobbes’s state of nature is a world where equality reigns. More precisely, the struggle that rages throughout that world constantly reestablishes the equality of one and all in the extreme form of equality in the face of death (and the risk of death). The contemporary world, in contrast, is characterized by the fact that standing “structural” inequalities, constantly reproduced and exacerbated by violence, are transformed into absolute inequalities in the face of death itself (the universal horizon of the human condition, according to one whole segment of our moral, religious, and philosophical tradition). 3 Our world is one marked by an explosion as well as the radical inequality of the forms and experiences of death itself. Second, even if the war of “all against all” that Hobbes describes (more exactly, he inventories the always threatening symptoms of its latent reality) unfolds in a space with indeterminate boundaries, the form in which the sovereign or “mortal god” (a national commonwealth that combines internal peace with external war) emerges in response to the danger of mutual destruction necessarily implies that, for Hobbes, nationality constitutes a sort of protocommunity or predisposition to community that forms the condition for politics. (This is not the least of the contradictions of Hobbes’s radical “individualism.”) Today’s world, in contrast, while it does not really show signs that the national

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

27

form is withering away, nevertheless appears to be characterized by a relativization of the pretensions of national sovereignty as a mechanism for limiting or utilizing violence. A considerable number of the conflicts assailing us are raging on this side of the institution of national sovereignty, or beyond its limits, with the result that they look precisely like the symptoms of a new anarchy.4 These differences may lead us to suspect that the insistent invocation of Hobbes in the contemporary discourse on the foundations of politics evinces not a simple, self-evident truth but rather a hesitation between two paths: not just the one leading to a perpetuation or aggravation of structural inequalities with no prospect for immediately surmounting them now capable of commanding a consensus (that is what the idea of “post-history” implies), but also the (more or less utopian) path of a global “new order,” a postnational order that would take the form of an imperial authority or a system of universal legal rules (a new “cosmopolitical law”). Yet the reference to Hobbes is not arbitrary; rather, it gives philosophical expression to the fact that the complexity of the conflicts and struggles in the world we live in today now exceeds the possibilities of depicting it in terms of an antagonism that simply opposes a “negative” to a “positive,” whether it is a question of the nature of the conflicting forces, their political expression, or interpretation of their ideological motivations. By the same token, it appears that violence is not the “last resort” of social and political antagonisms, their ultima ratio, but a condition or permanent horizon of their political evolution in a wide variety of degrees and forms that cross the frontiers of “public” and “private” and pass constantly into one another. Once again, therefore, the intrinsic complexity or order of multiplicity that characterizes confl ict has exceeded the logical figure of contradiction or appears as an excess over the contradictory figures that in turn present themselves as attempts to “simplify complexity.”5 In this sense, politics in its present state is neither Hegelian nor Marxist; it may even have ceased to be Clausewitzian or Machiavellian. What seems to be at work in this practical refutation of the grand schemes of the intelligibility of politics, however, goes still further. It is something that can be formulated philosophically as a “supersession of historicity” or, at any event, a supersession of narrative scenarios thanks to which historicity (beyond the opposition of modern doctrines or the secularizing trend

28

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

that has given rise to the modern philosophies of history) establishes the horizon of politics. We shall perhaps have to go so far as to question all “historicizing” definitions of politics, every claim that the conditions of politics are essentially historical, products, or manifestations of history as process, evolution, or an unfolding chain of situations and events that in turn invest the idea of collective action with meaning—their stage, with its various conscious or unconscious “agencies” and objective and subjective “forces,” whose end result, fi ltered through the trials and tribulations of politics, would be precisely history. To put it plainly, what must perhaps be challenged is a certain model of intelligibility and, at the same time, of intervention in prevailing conditions or transformation of them. It is, of course, debatable whether there exists anything on the order of “history” in the singular (which is, as such, a metaphysical idea even when it is formulated as a tendential realization).6 Most assuredly, however, the question confronting us in the last analysis is that of the divorce of historicity from what I will hazard calling, by analogy, politicity. At any rate, their unity cannot be postulated a priori, neither as an origin nor as a future end or orientation [sens]. What name, then, should we give to the shifting grounds of politics (including politics as action or a “capacity for action”), to the field in which its conflicts develop? That is the unspoken question informing the return to Hobbes. This is so even if Hobbes’s reliance on the idea of nature is quite likely to strike us as a mere allegory whose philosophical function comes down to the opposition, lacking all determinate content, between “the state of nature” and “the civil state,” or to the demand that antagonisms be pacified through the institution of a sovereign power (it is impossible not to notice that this is also a figure of simple contradiction). It is a way of ruling out in advance any representation of the articulation between history and politics based on superseding or dialecticizing this antithesis. The most powerful such representation and the most influential even today, both directly and by way of its reformulations and inversions, is the Hegelian dialectic. A “globalized world” in which the condition for politics is the cyclical repetition of ideological antagonisms or conflicts of interest as well as the incessant metamorphosis of forms of violence—their anarchy—is, as such, radically anti-Hegelian. Yet a doubt looms up here. Have we not been a little too hasty? Hobbesian discourse is, to be sure, frequently opposed to Hegelian discourse to-

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

29

day, for understandable reasons. But this influential opposition simplifies a great many things in both Hegel and Hobbes. The relationship established in Hobbes (and a fortiori in what we may call a “generalized Hobbesianism”) between the concept of politics and the phenomenon (or problem) of extreme violence is in fact striking by virtue of its ambiguity: we might even ask whether it is an acknowledgment of the constitutive function of violence or, rather, a denegation of it. Many contemporary readings of Hobbes tend to gloss over this ambiguity (which explains why Hobbes has inspired both a “legal positivism” and a “critique of law” in the name of politics). As for Hegel, not only must it be granted that he ignores nothing of this function, and that violence forms, for him, politics’ horizon (albeit in historical and anthropological modes that evolve constantly from one work to the next); it must also be added that his analysis forms the heart of what we are calling a historicization of politics. In Hegel, indeed, the historicization of politics is realized above all by way of the historicization of violence. Reciprocally, violence appears as the factor determinant of historicization inasmuch as Hegel conceives of it as the ultimate figure of the “power of the negative.” That, moreover, is why Hegel is recurrently perceived as a philosophical figure halfway between Hobbes and Marx. There is still some Hobbes in Hegel (especially in the treatment, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, of the “master/slave dialectic” as a “struggle unto death for recognition”). And there is already some Marx in Hegel (the Marx for whom “history progresses by its bad side,” as Marx says in The Poverty of Philosophy).7 All this is problematic. It might even take us to the heart of our problem. Althusser liked to say that there could be no such thing as a “Hegelian politics.” From the first, this thesis took its place, for Althusser, in the framework of a Machiavellian conception of politics as the reign of uncertainty, of the conflict between action and chance, that excludes necessity or, better, excludes predetermination of the kind that forms Hegelian teleology’s “spiritual” horizon. Let us, however, point out that the price that Althusser (and, a fortiori, other Marxists) pay for a nonteleological conception of politics is an at least apparent neutralization of the problematic relation between violence and politics, which is absent (or not present to the same degree) in Hegel. This neutralization appears, if not in Althusser’s depiction of exploitation and its conditions of “reproduction,” guaranteed by the state, then at least in his definition of the class struggle and, consequently, politics.

30

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

To return to the letter of the Hegelian formulations and attempt to read them as the site of an intellectual experiment is thus to reopen a debate that traverses the whole of the modern conception of politics. It brings into play an articulation of three terms (violence, politics, history) that doubtless never finds anything more than provisional solutions there. But let us not abandon our rereading of Hobbes just yet. His way of accounting for the articulation of politics and violence is profoundly ambivalent, I said, because it seeks to repress the effects (and the very reality) of violence from the space of politics (in the sense of repression into the unconscious as well as police repression). This puts Hobbes in a philosophical tradition that goes all the way back to Platonism, one that contemporary interpretations have yet to free themselves of. It is in this sense that Hobbes defines the institution of politics as the constitution of a “state of law” (or a state ruled by the sovereignty of the law). 8 The fundamental opposition between the state of nature and the civil state puts war on one side of the divide and law on the other, with the result that the moment originary violence is repressed by the institution, politics “quits the field” of violence. It may well be, however, that it thereby “quits” its native element, to be transposed into a legal framework from which real conflict has been banished, and in which there are only rules to enforce. The analysis of political action coincides with the creation of the “mortal God”—with, possibly, its continuous creation—and the perfecting of its representative mechanism. Its particular interest is the distribution of power between the public and private spheres, the levels of “direct power” (the sovereign) and potestats indirecta—the “indirect power” we call “ideological.” Hence, it does not propose to confront violence on its own grounds, or, rather, it relegates the interpretation of violence to the domain of anthropology. The question becomes that of man constantly oscillating, with his “two natures,” between reason and passion, between two ways of trying to ensure his self-preservation: increasing his own power at others’ expense and seeking a consensus or “social pact” for which Hobbes proposes a naturalist explanation—not, like his predecessors, a religious or moral one. Yet Hobbes’s discourse has in this respect an esoteric face that complicates his theory if it does not, indeed, contradict its objectives. Were this not the case, there would be no understanding the omnipresence of coercion or fear in his representation of law and the state. The anthropological con-

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

31

flict between war and peace, violence and nonviolence, which is, in the last instance, metaphysical in nature, as it is throughout the “pessimistic” Augustinian and Pauline tradition as well, continues to haunt the political scene from which the institution of law and the state have excluded it. It does so in various forms: individual passions but above all the passions of the multitude, especially its religious passions (or differences of opinion exacerbated by religious belief ).9 Thus we have to do with something like a return of the repressed, which is simultaneously political theory’s limit and its constant obsession. It follows that we have to complicate our representation of Hobbesian politics by introducing a dimension of uncertainty or wager. It is a question of maintaining civil peace or preserving the social order, while constantly seeing to it (uneasily, it might be said) that the gaps or margins of representation, the areas of confl ict reserved for competition between individuals and associations of individuals (“systems”), are not filled with ideological controversies and, in their wake, the incendiary power of the passions, something that would in its turn open the floodgates for a return of repressed “natural” violence. If this is indeed the deepest structure of the Hobbesian conception of politics, it can readily be understood why it only apparently brackets out history (Hobbes himself, who translated and commented on Thucydides, took as passionate an interest in history as in the deductive disciplines of law and mathematics). As appears in Behemoth, which he wrote as a pendant to Leviathan at the end of his life in order to draw the lessons of the revolutions and counterrevolutions he had lived through, this cyclical history that haunts the region in the border zone between politics and anthropology, fulfilling the ambivalent function of separation but also articulation or interpenetration, constitutes the underside [envers] of politics and law—their “negative,” as it were, in an almost photographic sense.10 We can better understand, in view of what was just said, what produces the contemporary readings that make Hobbes the forefather of definitions of state power as a “monopoly on the legitimate use of force” [violence] and, above all, of analyses of its fundamentally antinomic nature, even when they run the risk of exceeding his intentions.11 We may be sure that Hobbes himself would never have consciously endorsed an ambivalent interpretation of the repression of violence by a sovereign power that his theory basically presents as a legal apparatus, a rational application of natural law principles.

32

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

Yet it cannot be denied that that very theory links the coercive form of law and the state to the fact that “natural” (and, in that sense, unlimited) violence lurks behind every contradiction that might emerge in civil society. Thus, we are not forcing Hobbes’s argument but merely bringing out what is latent in it when we ask how a political-legal apparatus can be sustained by nothing more than the consensus, contract, and representation that confer legitimacy upon it. Must it not also meet the return of repressed violence with violence?12 Such state violence must be defined as counterviolence from the outset . It must even, in order to attain its objective of maintaining peace and security, be organized as preventive counterviolence. Preventive counterviolence is the other face of the neutralization of violence. It forms the antinomic core of the “monopoly on the legitimate use of force,” the theory and procedures of which run through the history of the modern state. Hobbes’s philosophy anticipates this theory and at the same time spells out its presuppositions. In theory, if not in fact, this monopoly rules out all possibility of using force to resolve public or private conflicts internal to the society that calls itself “civil society”; but it does so by concentrating the means for the exercise of force in the sovereign’s hands, or by putting all of them in the hands of the political institution.13 The result is that this institution, which indefinitely reproduces the ambiguity of its origins, never ceases to concentrate the uncertainty or duality of justice and violence, of war and peace, in its very core. In the final analysis, state power can keep the peace in the social body only if it is virtually at war with it.14 The state is the bosom enemy of the society it protects. We should perhaps grant that an antinomy of this type—lodged at the very heart of the sovereign function that, in state-organized civil societies, “interpellates individuals as subjects” (potentially violent, deviant, or rebellious individuals) in order to protect them against their own passions—constitutes one of the ways extreme violence has emerged in the history of modernity. An altogether different kind of antinomic thinking is at work in the way Hegel attempts to theorize the historical process leading to the constitution of the Rechtsstaat or state of law.15 Hegel’s approach is not based on the return of the repressed and its prevention but on the speculative or dialectical identity between destruction and construction, or violence and the institution, in limits and under conditions that I would now like to examine.

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

33

I shall be referring to two complementary texts, each of which, from this standpoint, presupposes the other: on the one hand, Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (especially the introduction, established on the basis of auditors’ notes and published under the title Reason in History); on the other, his 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, which is unquestionably one of the outstanding works in the philosopher’s œuvre and one of his most enduringly influential texts. Hegel’s thesis is not that the construction of the state of law suppresses violence or represses it to the unconscious level of politics and social life. His thesis is that the state tends to bring about the conversion of violence and attains its internal goal by effecting this conversion in history.16 This idea is perhaps no less ambivalent than Hobbes’s, but it has radically different implications. Before beginning to criticize or deconstruct it, we have to acknowledge its profundity and try to explain what makes it an indispensable point of reference for our discussion— today more than ever. At the close of these lectures, I hope to formulate the problem of civility in such a way as to bring out alternatives: alternatives, to begin with, to the Hegelian conception (and all its derivatives)—that is, proposed ways of going beyond the dilemmas of nonviolence and counterviolence other than with the means Hegel uses to articulate the apparent contraries represented by the state and universalism, law and education. But nothing of the sort can be attempted if we do not first take the full measure of the way Hegel himself treats the question of civility under the term Sittlichkeit, awkwardly translated as “objective morality” or “ethical life” and better rendered, in my opinion, at least in French, by an expression à la Montesquieu such as “the spirit of customs.” We shall see that, for Hegel, the problem of civility is that of the “substance” of the state and of the “end” to which its constitution tends precisely insofar as it is based, not on an illusory abolition or mechanical repression of violence that merely paves the way for its return but on conversion. Thus we have to do, at one and the same time, with the ethical principle of politics, the teleology immanent in it, and the reason there can be no politics without a state, outside its existence and activity as the “self-realization” of the rationality embodied in the state [rationalité étatique]. What are we to understand by “conversion”? It is a sublimation or spiritualization, but it is also, and above all, a transformation of violence into (historically) productive force, an abolition of violence as a destructive force,

34

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

and a recreation of it as the internal energy or power of institutions. The dissociation that English, like French and other Romance languages, makes between two “senses” of the German word Gewalt is helpful here; more exactly, it is the play between languages that is helpful.17 Gewalt, by means of the conversion it effects, transforms itself into another Gewalt: violence becomes power and authority. This doubtless constitutes a typical case of “dialectical sublation” [Aufhebung ] or negation of the negation; the position we will be illustrating here, however, consists in putting the matter the other way around. It is not so much the speculative principle of Aufhebung that explains what we are to understand by a conversion of violence; rather, this “conversion” explains the operation of the negation of the negation in general—above all if we can show that it is immediately implied by the way Hegel consistently conceives of the temporal nature of every logical process. To assert, however, that politics is a conversion of violence is to say that politics is history, or that it finds its means and realizes its ends only in and through history. In other words, it is a way of saying that violence must prove convertible: it must be proven that it can be converted by politics, and that history is the process of this conversion. We should perhaps advance a still more radical thesis: history is the “absolute” process in which it turns out “in the end” that all seemingly irreducible, inconvertible violence, or all violence initially represented as inconvertible, will necessarily be converted into its opposite if only the level of “representation” or “imagination” [Vorstellung ] is overcome, opening the way for a real [wirkliche] efficacy or effectivity that is nothing other than the presence of the absolute in time, as its dialectical concept seeks to grasp it. But more is involved here, and that is why I speak of profundity and grandeur. Hegel does not content himself with positing that violence as such is convertible and that history can be conceived of as the movement of a progressive conversion of violence from which it results, but only after the event [après coup], that it was convertible because it has been converted. If we left it at that, we would simply have a story—a speculative story, to be sure, but also a moral, right-thinking story. In fact, Hegel is interested in finding a mode of exposition [Darstellung ] in which the historical process [Prozess, Vorgang , Fortgang ] resembles an experiment and a trial: a “process” in the legal or metalegal sense the word has in German [Urteil, Prozess, Gericht ]. In this “process” in the double sense, the convertibility or nonconvertibility of

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

35

violence is interrogated and tried. Better, violence has to show itself to be the inconvertible that will ultimately be converted, with the result that its ultimate conversion effectively demonstrates something from the standpoint of rationality. I am not unaware that, when matters are presented this way, the risk is that they will seem to appear less as the operation of a rational necessity, or its self-confirmation thanks to the coincidence of “time” and “logic,” than as sleight of hand (which will come as no surprise to the detractors of the dialectic): it will be objected that such a conception of the historical process never does more than “reveal” at the end what it had always already presupposed, just as soteriological theologies never do more than discover under the name of “redemption” what they have already inscribed in advance in their dogma of original sin. I nevertheless take this risk because I want to show, at the very least, that this result—however “predetermined” or “prefabricated”—is obtained by properly conceptual means, and that, in this sense, Hegelian discourse is not just another name for revelation. While everywhere bordering on political theology, and even borrowing some of its conceptual schemes, it is, nonetheless, a secular discourse. It sets out to show, on a plane of immanence and by way of a reflection on the conflicts of “the here below” [Diesseits], that politics in the strong sense is no more nor less than history, and that history, correspondingly, has no content other than to realize or accomplish a political end— on condition, doubtless, that we extend the sense of the term beyond the limits of the pedestrian or bureaucratic operations of politics (which might be called the “police,” in the “administrative” sense the word earlier had in French).18 To designate such a conception of the unity of politics and history, we may already borrow Gramsci’s term, hegemony. My ultimate goal is of course not to confirm the Hegelian conception or proclaim that there is no going beyond it. Hypothetically, it is rather the opposite: namely, to ask whether there do not exist in history or, rather, in the historical present, the absolute horizon for all politics (insofar as politics is activity, or the excess of activity over passivity), inconvertible modalities of violence, or, if one prefers, an inconvertible remainder the mere presence of which suffices to invalidate the “hegemonic” scheme of politics, requiring that we pose the question of civility in completely different terms: in terms that go beyond Sittlichkeit. But if a question of this sort is to be endowed with a meaning involving something more than a clash of

36

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

opinions, we have to show that Hegel’s demonstration is insufficient even as we acknowledge that it presents itself neither as the simple recitation of an article of faith (“all historical violence will be politically converted into power”) nor as an injunction (“we must work tirelessly toward the conversion of violence”) but precisely as a putting-to-the-test or, as one says today, a “problematizing” of this thesis, which offers Hegel an occasion to bring the whole of his dialectic into play. In thus once again assessing, as faithfully as possible, the Hegelian demonstration that “politics = conversion (effected in and by time) of (initially inconvertible) violence = history,” and in measuring ourselves against it, we assume a double challenge that it is by no means certain we can meet: to show that there exists, beyond the alternative of nonviolence or counterviolence (hence, of their symmetry), another way of thinking politics (or formulating the concept of politics): namely, as a politics of civility or “antiviolence” different from that constituted by the transformation of violence into power (and thus into institution, law, or a political and social order) through a dialectical conversion. Let us now examine the details of Hegel’s argument a little more closely. To begin with, let us try to justify the use of the term conversion, which I have not invented but which stems from a generalization. I borrow the requisite elements from Hegel’s discussion of “reason in history.”19 At the end of his theoretical elaboration of “the realization of spirit in history,” where Hegel explains how “world spirit” [Weltgeist ] passes from one temporal figure to another (or from one Zeitgeist to another), he tells us that such a transition from one institutional realization of freedom to the next always necessitates violation of the existing state’s moral principles and laws. It takes the typical form of the sudden apparition and intervention of a “great man” whose prototype is Cesar. Let us recall that, in the Hegelian conception, the great man must be an individual, because he must act in accordance with a particular will even while embodying an “unconscious consciousness” or instinctual sense of the need for revolutionary change that the majority of people lack because they remain prisoners of existing institutions and their “spirit” (social rules, moral values, positive law, modes of thought). The great man is the man who accomplishes the movement of history by assimilating it to his personal interests and will to power (by making it coincide with them). Somewhat earlier, in a famous passage on

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

37

the “cunning (or ruse) of reason,” Hegel compares Cesar to a common-law criminal, an arsonist who sets a whole city on fire in order to become “the master of the state” at the risk of his and others’ lives, thereby spawning an empire or resurrecting the city in the universal form of a cosmopolis. Thus he makes himself the instrument of spirit, whose immanent objective is the progress of civilization: Caesar, in danger [of losing] the position to which he had ascended . . . opposed his rivals with the intention of preserving himself, his position, his honour, and his security. He was in danger [of succumbing] to those who [were] on the point of becoming his enemies, but who at the same time had the formal constitution of the state (and hence the authority of outward legality) [die Macht des rechtlichen Scheins] on the side of their own personal ends. But since their power gave them sovereignty over the provinces of the Roman Empire, his victory over them simultaneously enabled him to conquer the whole empire itself. He thereby became the sole ruler of the state [der individuelle Gewalthaber im Staate], although he left the form of the constitution intact. But the means by which he achieved his own (originally negative) end, i.e., the undivided sovereignty of Rome, was at the same time an inherently necessary determination in the history of Rome and of the world. Thus not just his own personal advantage was involved, for his work was the product of an impulse which accomplished the end for which his age was ready. Such are the great men of history: the substance of their own particular ends is the will of the world spirit. Their true power resides in this inner content, which is present in the universal unconscious instinct of mankind [in dem allgemeinen bewusstlosen Instinkte der Menschen]. All men are driven on by an inward compulsion, and they are incapable of resisting the individual who has taken it upon himself to execute one of the ends of history in the course of furthering his own personal interests. On the contrary, the nations flock to his standard, for he reveals to them and carries out what is already their own immanent impulse [er zeigt ihnen und führt das aus, was ihr eigener immanenter Trieb ist ].20

The language of “crime” and the implicit discussion of the difference between a “private” and a “public” crime, one of which calls for external legal sanction while the other calls for immanent historical sanction, obviously

38

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

constitute very valuable indications of the species of logic at work in the conversion of violence into power. In the next section (“the course of world history”), Hegel explains that the transformation of the world implies violent destruction of the previous figure of it, inherited from the past, and thus the accumulation of ruins: this leads him to draw a line of demarcation between two kinds of men or two moral types. On the one hand are those “who on moral grounds, and consequently with noble intention, have resisted [widerstanden] that which the advance of the Spiritual Idea makes necessary”; on the other are “those whose crimes have been turned [verkehrt, which can also be translated as “converted”] into the means— under the direction of a superior principle—of realizing the purposes of that principle.” Hegel concedes that the former are superior to the latter from the standpoint of moral value [im moralischen Werte]. However, he adds, In revolutions [Umwälzungen; Umwälzung is a common German word for “revolution”] of this kind, both parties alike stand within the same circle of corruptible existence [innerhalb des selben Kreises des Verderbens], so that it is merely a formal kind of justice, abandoned by the living spirit and by God, which those who have the existing law on their side defend. The deeds [die Taten, which can just as well mean “the misdeeds”] of the great men who are the individuals of world history thus appear justified not only in their inner significance (of which the individuals in question are unconscious), but also in a secular sense. . . . The litany of private virtues—modesty, humility, charity, liberality, etc.—must not be raised against them. World history might well disregard completely the sphere to which morality and the . . . dichotomy between morality and politics belong—and not merely by refraining from judgements (for the principles of world history and the necessary relationship of men’s actions to these principles themselves constitute the judgement [das Urteil ]), but because individuals as such do not enter into its calculations.21

It can readily be seen that the notion of conversion is wholly commanded by a teleology: the model of purposeful action is transposed to a “higher order of history,” and a will that is the secular equivalent of providence is attributed to world spirit. Better, this notion confers the name “spirit” on the idea that a universal intention is at work in the vicissitudes of history.

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

39

More interesting, however, is the internal relationship between this image of a realization of the immanent ends of history (the progress of civilization, the realization of the idea of freedom) that proceeds by way of violence, and the idea of an overcoming of differences that flows from the same logic. Hegel offers several illustrations of this: (1) the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness [Bewusstlosigkeit ] in the “historical” or “public” individual who, like Cesar or Napoleon, unites opposites in his person without mediation (individual interest and activity of universal import); (2) the difference between morality and immorality, justice and injustice, internal to individual action, and, consequently, its antinomic nature, which comes into view as soon as it is considered with an eye to its place in world history, as “political” in the strong sense; and, finally, (3) the difference between two types or two classes of men, some of whom are active while others are passive, or, again, some of whom are effectively subjects in history, whereas others (even if they see themselves as moral subjects because they are the victims of a kind of illusion of practical reason) are reduced to the state of objects of historical change. These differences, destined to be dialectically sublated, are all basically aspects of one and the same contradiction. Insofar as they are negated as such, they exhibit the implications of a conversion of violence: what is unconscious becomes conscious (and the other way around); morality becomes immorality (and the other way around); subjectivity becomes objectivity (and the other way around). This last figure is especially important for our purposes, for it opens up the possibility of making variations on the Hegelian scheme that share its speculative conception of the relations between politics and history. In Hegel’s argument, it is the “great man” or “great individual” (the politician whose activity leaves a trace in history or even “makes history”) who unites consciousness and unconsciousness, morality and crime in his person, setting himself apart from the multitude at the risk of being violently reintegrated into it by being punished for his audacity. In the post-Hegelian socialist tradition, however (notably in Engels’s unfinished manuscript on the role of force in history22) this scheme is inverted: here it is the masses—or, more exactly, the exploited classes who are transformed by their consciousness or instinct into a popular movement—who constitute the historical subject and take on the role of making the political transition from one period to another by “converting” crime into morality (or the other way around).

40

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

Does this idea also appear in Marx, for example, in the famous passages in Capital (on the subject of the state) evoking the role of violence as a “midwife” that delivers society of the transformations with which it is “pregnant,” or in the passages (on the communist revolution) describing the negation of the negation as a violent process in which “the expropriators are expropriated”?23 The answer is perhaps not as simple as one might imagine. That, however, leads me to a second remark. To pinpoint the ways in which the conversion of violence is accomplished in Hegel’s teleology of universal history is to begin to see the points that call for criticism. The idea of conversion acquires its strong sense only if it designates reciprocity or a permanent swapping of places between the multiplicity of figures of order and disorder. This then makes it possible to think the constant production (or reproduction) of order out of disorder but also the latent presence of disorder at the heart of every form of organization that seems stable because it embodies a certain idea of order. This takes on its full significance as soon as we consider its temporal dimension: like the “conflagration” that destroys the house in Hegel’s metaphor, any disorder that cannot immediately be set to rights, that produces a catastrophic situation, will in time be brought under control at the price of a social restructuring that precipitates the emergence of elements of a new order.24 But every social order that seems inalterable (and conceives of itself as eternal or “absolute”) must ultimately crumble and fall into ruins. We need to reexamine the way Marx transforms this idea and the principle of reciprocity that it implies, for his treatment of it is especially ambiguous, as will appear. That is why there is nothing really surprising about the fact that the question of Marx’s relationship to Hegel with regard to the course of history has provided matter for endless debate. Should we say that Marx rejects the conversion scheme in its entirety, along with the representation of history as the process of humanity’s reconciliation [Versöhnung ] with itself by way of the political institution? Or should we say, rather, that he simply stands that scheme on its head in order to transform what had been a justification of the state of law—which, presenting itself as the incarnation of rationality and the universal, becomes “hegemonic” in the modern period—into a justification of communist revolution, whose rationality and universal significance lie precisely in the fact that they bring about the transition from class antagonism to a classless society, another figure of Abso-

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

41

lute Spirit and the historical conversion of violence into authority (or immanent power)? The mere fact that there is no simple answer to this question suffices to show that the teleology of conversion serves state-centered and revolutionary discourses alike. It is precisely on this point that much of contemporary thought has broken with Hegelianism and, more profoundly, the dialectic. This break itself, however, is by no means unambiguous: at least to a certain extent, it opens up divergent possibilities. Let us take Walter Benjamin’s and Georges Bataille’s formulations as our examples. Both call the conversion scheme into question and, more profoundly, the convertibility of violence into history, for reasons at once logical and ethical. Moreover—this point is of course crucial for our purposes—both do so by invoking forms or extremes of violence that exceed the Hegelian or quasi-Hegelian dialectic’s powers of conversion and, consequently, the representation of time as capable of bringing about the reconciliation of opposites by way of their “supersession” or the negation of the negation. In both the criticism of Hegel has a source in a Nietzschean sense of the tragic but also rediscovers and autonomizes the antinomic element in Hegelian discourse: the moment of uncertainty in negation that “hesitates,” as it were, in a disorganized present between destruction and construction, damnation and redemption. Benjamin and Bataille seek to push this uncertainty to the point at which it shatters every representation of becoming as progress. Such is the function of the messianic event in Benjamin: it attests the irreducible nature of the violence that history’s victims and vanquished have suffered, a violence that can never enter into a balance sheet or the ledgers of the end of time.25 Such is the function of sovereign expenditure in Bataille: it proclaims difference as such and recreates the sacred, inseparable from its dark underside: excrement or the abject as pure, nonnecessary, nonproductive (“unemployed”) negativity, which proves that there is beauty (or meaning, or civilization) in history only at the price of destruction without compensation—at the price of the “heterogeneous,” which is, in Bataille, the name of inconvertible violence par excellence.26 Let us accordingly note, in returning to Hegel, that what is thus called into question in Benjamin in particular is not just the idea of dialectical progress common to Hegel and Marx, or to Hegel and the “Hegelian” Marx, but also, more rigorously, the idea of transition or passage: the transition

42

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

[Übergang ] that is conversion and the conversion that is transition. Among the rare texts in which Hegel sets out explicitly to “define” the dialectic is the following from, precisely, Reason in History: Each [stage of the process] contains within itself a further process whereby it achieves specific form [ein Prozess ihres Gestaltens], and what constitutes the dialectic of transitions [die Dialektik ihres Überganges] between them [; but this] must be left to the later part of the investigation. We must merely note for the present that the spirit begins in a state of infinite potentiality—but no more than potentiality—which contains its absolute substance as something as yet implicit, as the object and goal which it only attains as the end result in which it at last achieves its realisation. In actual existence, progress thus appears as an advance from the imperfect to the more perfect [der Fortgang als von dem Unvollkommenen zum Vollkommeneren fortschreitend ], although the former should not be understood in an abstract sense as merely imperfect, but as something which at the same time contains its own opposite, i.e. what is commonly called perfection, as a germ or impulse [als Keim, als Trieb ]: just as potentiality— at least in terms of reflection—points forward to something which will eventually attain reality, or—to take a more specific example—just as the Aristotelian dynamis is also potentia, i.e., power and strength [Kraft und Macht]. Thus the imperfect, in so far as it contains its own opposite within itself, is a contradiction; and although it certainly exists, it must just as surely be overcome and resolved [aufgehoben und gelöst ]. It is the drive and inherent impulse of spiritual life to break through the shell of natural and sensory existence, of all that is alien to it [die Rinde der Natürlichkeit, Sinnlichkeit, der Fremdheit seiner selbst zu durchbrechen], and to arrive at the light of consciousness, i.e., at its own true nature.27

Hegel here states the idea that History is not continuous progress but progress that overcomes the appearances of regression and destruction; in the course of it, the accumulation of violence, suffering, and evil is productively converted in the service of the forces of emancipation, culture, civilization, and order—everything, in short, that may be called Spirit, with its own peculiar “objectivity.” The idea is that Reason is powerful enough to affirm itself on its own, not by isolating itself from its opposite but by “laboring”

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

43

the forms of unreason, injustice, and violence. Its effectiveness has its source precisely in this labor. How can we help but evoke, here, the phrase that Marx (in The Poverty of Philosophy) directs at utopians and liberals: “History progresses by its bad side?” Hegel adds that history as Weltgeschichte, universal or world history (today we would be tempted to say “the history of globalization,” at once globalized and globalizing), is a succession of stages (or periods) in which each one corresponds to the realization of a certain “principle,” that is, a certain figure of the contradiction between the infinity of freedom and its finite institution. Hegel never intended, however, to present such a succession as a straightforwardly ascending or asymptotic trajectory. What matters for him is the transition as such, or the differential of the process, change within change, or the break that occurs in the course of the change that each particular period already constitutes. Appealing again to Marx’s mechanical metaphor, which is inherently antinomic, we shall say that Hegel is interested in the acceleration of history. But this “acceleration” can come about, in his view, thanks only to a supplement of rationality that is precisely the conversion of violence, the identity realized at last between the atrocious reality of unreason and the sublime power of reason. Are atrocity and unreason one and the same thing? That is the whole question. Before addressing it, I would like to bring out another dimension of Hegel’s thesis, one that is in fact essential to it. It emerges in the course of the argument of Reason in History by way of Hegel’s insistence on the necessity of the process, forming something like a “conversion within conversion” itself, or a second level of reflection. It is a question of the idea of history as the elimination of chance (or the becoming-necessary of necessity itself ). What is most profound about this philosophy, as is always the case with any philosophy, is revealed in its doctrine of modalities. The idea that history is intelligible only to the extent that its necessity has been demonstrated, which implies the elimination of contingency or its reduction to the state of mere appearance, is ultimately the essence of the concept of reason in Hegel’s eyes. From the very outset of his course, he engages in a critical discussion of this point with the philosophical tradition. The philosophy of universal history is opposed, in his conception of it, to every empiricist or positivist presentation of the succession of events, of the appearance and disappearance of institutions and ideas as so many “facts” whose

44

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

causes have then to be sought in chance or the caprice of individual decision. That is why it has to present itself as a universal teleology (and a teleology of the universal), a process whose meaning is contained in the relationship of its origin to its end. But Hegel’s conception of history is no less adamantly opposed to the ancient or modern, pagan or Christian representations of teleology in which an “end” is imposed on history from outside it, in the transcendence of a Destiny or Providence. Teleology is not rational unless it expresses the necessity of an immanent process in which ends are contemporaneous with their means, that is, unless they are produced at the heart of the same “present” that engenders the means of their realization (men, forces, wills, institutions). Let us translate this into the language of the elimination of contingency: the manifestation, in universal history, of its final goal does not coincide with the march of reason unless chance “destroys itself ”—unless what is involved is, again, a self-elimination.28 Thus, Hegel’s idea is by no means that, in history, “everything is determined,” produced in accordance with a sufficient cause or reason with the result that there are no accidents, chance encounters, or surprise effects. Precisely the opposite is true: the historical process is initially replete with contingent events that do not answer to a necessity but gradually come to correspond to one, and ultimately culminate in the total elimination of fortuna represented by the constitutional state, which is capable of regulating all its citizens’ acts in accordance with a rational norm. This is the only way to understand in a way that is not itself irrational (say, providential) what Hegel means when he says that the elimination of chance proves the power of reason. (“The sole aim of philosophical enquiry is to eliminate the contingent. Contingency is the same as external necessity, that is, a necessity which originates in causes which are themselves no more than external circumstances”).29 This can be stated better with the help of a double negative: philosophy proves that reason is not helpless [impuissant ], that its realization in history is the unfolding of its “infinite power” [ puissance]. It is in this sense that Hegel can say that the exposition of the realization of reason in history is a “theodicy,” and that history itself, as objective or substantial process, is the absolute: Deus sive Historia, just as another philosopher writes Deus sive Natura with a view to producing the same semantic reversibility. I mean that this metaphysical thesis, on which everything else depends, is itself rationally intelligible only because it presupposes (by

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

45

“negating” both of them together) the speculative equivalence of violence and contingency as manifestations of “the irrational.” And, in fact, this equivalence alone ensures that the gradual elimination of violence by the constitution of a state of law and the Sittlichkeit or objective morality corresponding to it at the level of individual or collective behavior will lead to the self-elimination of chance. But it is likewise by virtue of this equivalence alone that we can read, in the becoming-necessary of human actions, a becoming-necessary of freedom itself—a grand rationalist idea of politics that is passed down from Spinoza to Hegel and from Hegel to Marx, all their differences notwithstanding—and thus, ultimately, a veritable conversion, not just an external repression or negation: a history of violence that “negates” itself rather than yielding to constraint (for example, that of an “artificial” or transcendent legal order).30 I find confirmation of this reading in all the passages in which Hegel explains that there is no historical violence external to the subject, that is, the community or state that suffers violence: But since the nation is a universal, a collective, a further determinant comes into play. As a collective, the national spirit exists for itself; this also means that the universal aspect of its existence may assume a role of opposition. Its negative side manifests itself; thought rises above the nation’s immediate functions. And thus its natural death also appears as a kind of suicide. Thus we see on the one hand how the national spirit brings about its own downfall [Untergang ]. . . . The negative side manifests itself as an internal degeneration, as a tendency towards particularism. It is usually associated with some external force which deprives the nation of its sovereignty, so that it ceases to exist as such. But this external force belongs only to the phenomenal world; no destructive force can prevail against the national spirit or within it unless it is already internally lifeless or dead.31

It would doubtless not be impossible to detect, as well, a restriction in this passage. We shall come back to this when we examine other forms of violence: violence that is “external”—because it is either of foreign provenance or extrinsic to the driving forces of history—is, as such, not “convertible.” Let us, however, begin by noting the unsettling way in

46

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

which Hegel shifts from speculative formulations to metaphorical play. Dialectical negation or Aufhebung , as Hegel describes it, “both conserves and transfigures” [zugleich Erhalten und Verklären].32 As for the “negative,” destined to be negated in its turn, it is identified as the particular comprising the “internal degeneration” [Verderben von innen] of the universal. Thus we arrive at a description of the historical process as “death and resurrection” [Tod und Wiederbelebung ]: not a resurrection of the same, as in the plant world, but a resurrection that is also a differentiation or an epigenesis, a production of new figures. It is this idea of the dialectical productivity of death which leads Hegel to characterize, from the first, the ruin of civilizations or the “natural death” of historical peoples as suicide, or, better, selfmurder [Tötung seiner selbst]. This is ultimately the sole form of violence that is convertible: the violence that the historical subject does to itself, as opposed to “external” or “foreign” forms of violence, which are identified as epiphenomenal. The idea of sacrifice is but a short step away. It appears when we short-circuit this indication with two other remarks: one on the relations between civilization and barbarity and another on the relations between the “stage” of history and the stage in the proper sense, the stage of theater. What is striking about Hegel’s approach to civilization and to the opposition (a classic and, of course, typically Eurocentric opposition) between civilization and barbarity is his insistence on the idea that civilization is itself violent insofar as it is an “exit” from nature and a struggle against barbarism that, in its turn, employs barbaric means: It is . . . important that we should not confuse the principles which govern relations between states with the principle which governs their position within the history of the world. . . . Such relationships can be defined in treaties, in which case legal considerations are at least supposed [sollen] to decide the issue. But in world history [better, “universal history,” Weltgeschichte], a higher right comes into play. In fact, this is even recognised in reality in those situations where civilised nations come into contact with barbarian hordes. And in wars of religion, one of the parties involved will invariably claim to be defending a sacred principle in relation to which the rights of other nations are secondary and of lesser validity. This was true of the Mohammedans in former times, and in theory even today. The Christians likewise, in making war on

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

47

heathen nations with a view to converting them [heidnische Völker bekriegten, um sie zu bekehren], have claimed that their religion invests them with superior rights.33

A formulation of this sort has obvious ideological functions (notably that of justifying European colonization as a necessary moment of “universal history”); but it also—and inseparably—fulfi lls another purpose. When Hegel affirms Spirit’s “higher right” to mobilize violence in the pursuit of its ends, it is no longer a matter of the great man or the forces he “individualizes” but, rather, of the “more advanced peoples” “converting” other, “less advanced” peoples and thus bringing them into the civilized realm. (We might call this world spirit’s compelle eos intrare.) From the speculative standpoint, however, it is more than ever a question of a logic of self-elimination. What Spirit violently eliminates (ostensibly) is its own barbarian roots, its own primordial violence, equated with nature and at once contingent and unfree. History is a violent conversion of violence conceived as a process of incessant denaturation. We might therefore assume that when Hegel refers in this connection to the idea of sacrifice and raises a question fraught with anxiety—“But even as we look upon history as an altar [Schlachtbank] on which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals are slaughtered, our thoughts inevitably impel us to ask: to whom, or to what ultimate end have these monstrous sacrifices been made?”—it is only a question of sacrificing nature to culture. 34 The idea involved is, however, more complex, because the notion of sacrifice [Opfer] appears as the last of a series of institutional symbols by means of which the Philosophy of History seeks to zero in on the function that the conversion of violence performs in order to lift the concept of politics to the level of universal history. We have, first, the theater: “in the theatre . . . the theatre of world history—spirit attains its most concrete reality.” This theatrical stage is that of the great dramas of freedom and necessity on which the destiny of the peoples is first played out as epic before culminating in tragedy (if not comedy), and on which the great men (their “greatness” is owing to this) make their entrance as heroes and criminals. All the world’s a stage. But this first allegory immediately brings a second in its wake, that of the court, which is in its turn expanded to take in the whole world: Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht.35

48

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

We know that the sentences that this court hands down are not pronounced and carried out by professional judges and executioners but by the peoples themselves, who are aware of the offense they have committed in failing to recognize the higher necessity of Spirit. We must accordingly imagine history as a process that makes the world a theater, and then a court, a “bar” to which violence is called in order to be judged and, in the end, punished. Does this combination of dramatic and legal metaphors not hold the key to the enigmatic idea of a “historical conversion of violence”? No doubt, with the proviso that, in order to resolve the tension haunting this combination, particularly because the two “scenes” it evokes confer sharply disparate figures on the “subject,” Hegel has to subsume them under a third scene. When he does, we shift to yet another dimension: that of sacrifice and the place where it occurs (altar or butcher’s shop). There is clearly a dimension that can be called transgressive here, but we must immediately grant that Hegel allows it no freedom or indeterminacy. The result—historical transformation itself—is dictated by Spirit. Rather than understanding the encounter of history and politics as the performance of a sacrificial rite, therefore, we must ultimately regard it as a sacrifice of sacrifice, a demonstration of the inevitability of violence and also a sublime elimination of violence, which renounces itself. That self-sacrifice of violence constitutes the essence of (the) institution.36 The state of law that is born of this movement of history is, as the accomplished form of politics, “happy” because it no longer needs heroes or saints locked in combat with other people’s violence or their own—just institutional judges who relegate it to the private sphere and soldiers who exercise it outside that sphere “in proper form.”37 Obviously Christian in all its references, this model of the sacrifice of sacrifice that incorporates the contradictory allegories of theater and court helps us grasp how Hegel could simultaneously do justice to the antinomy of power, encompassing the sovereign order and the outbreak of disorder, and also, ultimately, relativize it, uniting in one and the same discourse political prescription and a speculation on the course of history. Let us now try to contrast Hegel less with the inverse model than with a reflection on what makes it extremely hard to delineate on the basis of any “model” at all (hence, any teleology at all) the relationship between violence and politics in history. Hegel’s immense importance undoubtedly stems from the fact that he does not simply offer us an image of violence

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

49

that is the opposite, by anticipation, of the order or strategy supposed to control and suppress it. His concern is to understand the conditions under which it is possible to achieve such control or suppression by means of a politics. He concludes that this possibility exists only insofar as it simultaneously represents a necessity determined from within as the necessity of violence itself—which is, in a certain sense, “the same thing.” This, however, does not prevent him from constantly engaging in two quite dubious and, what is more, inseparable operations on which the very possibility of internalizing violence depends. One consists in restricting the “historically” significant instances of violence to certain specific forms that are in fact always already “political”; a second consists in idealizing the effects of political violence, less by downplaying the ravages and suffering they cause than by imposing meaning on them. Where historical transformation (“changing the world,” as Marx puts it in a famous affirmation) is at stake, the result can only be progressive. That is perhaps the simplest formulation of the idea of conversion: the consequences of the most massive acts of destruction are ruins and mourning, but they cannot not be constructive (or reconstructive), even as they destroy. It is this historical optimism or faith in the meaning of history that we have lost with respect to not only the present but also, retrospectively, the past (as we continue to take the measure of the historical censorship that made it possible to maintain that illusory optimism and faith, especially as regards the ways the world was Europeanized). I shall therefore not go into another round of textual interpretation in order to determine how to displace or overturn the opposition between controvertible and inconvertible forms of violence, using the results to construct a new model of the relations between politics and history in which this dilemma would play some other role. This is not for lack of theorists of violence: the names Marx, Weber, and Foucault spring to mind, and we shall, in fact, come back to all three later. But an element of decision is very obviously involved here, side by side with the argument and commingled with it. That is why it seems to me preferable to begin by indicating in the simplest possible terms the cases of violence that, in the present, do indeed seem “inconvertible,” thereby compelling us, in my opinion, to turn back to the question of civility and pose it in a framework that has nothing to do with the conceptualization of a Sittlichkeit.

50

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

I shall set out (as I have already done elsewhere) from a statement of Foucault’s in one of his last interviews: “I am attempting . . . apart from any totalization . . . to open up problems that approach politics from behind” [qui prennent la politique à revers]. What are these problems? Foucault names a few: “the problem of the relation between sanity and insanity; the question of illness, of crime, or of sexuality,” matters that he says have to be posed as contemporary but also historical problems, as “moral, epistemological, and political problems.”38 This directs our attention to the idea of politics’ “others.” It would seem to follow, in line with a certain materialist tradition that focuses on the transformation of social structures, that it is a question of the conflictual realities hidden beneath the surface of official politics (that is, of political representation) and destined to resurface in it, undoing its seeming consistency and bringing it face to face with its truth. But we might just as well assume that it is a question of “problems that cannot be solved” by politics, problems that bring it up against its limits—still more precisely, that bring it up against the perverse effects or contradictions engendered by the practice of politics itself. It is this second possibility that I would like to begin to explore here (before confronting it, perhaps, with the first). We do not have to cast such problems in the form of catastrophes affecting masses of people, even if that is how they usually come to our attention, whether in the suddenness of the instant or over the long term. Sometimes we attribute them to an encounter with events or phenomena for which politics as such was not prepared—which lay outside its discourse or its field of vision and with which it is unable to cope; sometimes we have the feeling that they develop along “lines of flight” (to use Deleuze’s metaphor again) where, in some sense, the actions of politics itself or their consequences escape its control. It seems to me that this holds for everything that can be called inconvertible violence, even more so, perhaps, when we refuse to adopt, imaginarily or speculatively, the standpoint of “ultimate goals” or even “a long-term perspective.” It is perhaps possible, after all, to affirm that in the long run societies—or humanity, as such—have always “converted” every form of violence into power or institutions, and thus overcome it as such. That, however, gets us nowhere when the problem arising in the present is that of the kind of violence that eludes both control from above as well as the transformation from below of its causes or the structures that produce

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

51

it (whether economic, ideological, or of some other kind), thus revealing the helplessness of political rationality. We might even hazard the suggestion here that if, in the course of history, forms of extreme violence have sometimes been “productively” combined with a politics of emancipation, liberation, resistance to domination, democratization, and the institution of law, this has never happened in accordance with the logic of such politics alone. Rather, another politics, irreducible to any of these received political concepts, has always had to intervene in addition, or to provide politics with its underside, as it were: precisely the politics that I am hypothetically calling civility. In 1995 psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama published reflections on the phenomena of “ethnic cleansing” in the wars in Yugoslavia. (It is hard to describe them as either “civil” or “foreign” wars; that is part of the problem they pose for contemporary politics.) They went “beyond a new limit-point,” according to Benslama, “in the destruction of the human.” “The foreigner in question” here, he wrote, does not institute, cannot be distinguished, does not allow herself to be dialecticized or overcome, does not afford us a glimpse of holiness or healing; she is not absolute and does not absolutize. . . . Her foreignness does not stem from the fact that she is an alien or comes from elsewhere. Rather, it is a question of someone (from a group, a set of individuals) very close, very familiar, very much commingled with oneself, as if she were an inextricable part of one’s self. All the havoc wrought by the troubles of identity proceeds, precisely, from this condition in which foreignness has surged up from the substance of communitarian identity amid the greatest possible intermixing of images, emotions, languages, and symbolic references. Hence, when the imperious need to re-appropriate what is proper to the self spreads—and that is the watchword of all purification—the rage for purification and the thirst for vengeance display a singularly embittered determination, not to defeat or expel the enemy, but to mutilate and exterminate her, as if the aim were to extirpate a foreign body and the foreign from the body clinging to one’s image of one’s own body. . . . This is the opening of a gap in the us that can no longer be fi lled or eliminated. . . . It is the uneasiness bred by the disidentification of a self that is unrepresentable for itself and lives in

52

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

fear of being annihilated by something foreign come from its own depths. The effects of such a situation can be contained politically, and only politics is capable of containing them. If, however, the political institution were to crumble or collapse . . . we would witness a return of the anguished fear of annihilation or an unleashing of the purifying forces that proceed by way of mutilation or self-mutilation, so closely are self and other intermingled.39

These practices that target the foreign(er) in one’s own body, her integrity, her physical dignity, constitute not simple annihilation of the enemy but self-annihilation because the foreignness in question here is that which comes the closest to the self—which is, at the limit, inseparable from the individual and collective self, the representation of one’s identity. Hence, the only way to extirpate it is to endeavor to destroy, in an intensifying spiral of mutilation, not a group or a presence but the humanity in man, the very fact of inclusion in the human race. This is an obviously impossible, desperate task that extends the limits of the atrocious ever further (but we could also say again, down paths already taken once or several times in a relatively recent past). Benslama’s remarkable analysis, with others as well, helps make it clear why I call the extreme, inconvertible forms of violence cruelty: because they can never be dissociated from fantasy. I would, however, like to take one more step in order to suggest that we have to do, in fact, with two forms or manifestations of cruelty as a doggedly pursued, because impossible, elimination of the humanity and the human in man. Even if in practice they cannot be absolutely separated, it is important to distinguish them analytically. I call them ultraobjective and ultrasubjective cruelty, since the first kind of cruelty calls for treating masses of human beings as things or useless remnants, while the second requires that individuals and groups be represented as incarnations of evil, diabolical powers that threaten the subject from within and have to be eliminated at all costs, up to and including self-destruction.40 Let us simply note in passing that the term racism, to the extent that this category possesses a genuine historical and anthropological unity, masks both these phenomena simultaneously. That is not the least of the reasons for examining it today. For the racism that, in its diverse (old and new) forms,

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

53

periodically issues in mass murder (and it is not likely that we seen the last of it, all the lessons of history notwithstanding) but is also meted out daily in the guise of individual and social exclusions comprising so many forms of “social death” oscillates constantly between these two scenarios of elimination.41 It is something like the metonymic name of this problematic unity. It calls the very possibility of politics into question not only by virtue of its longevity and its capacity for renewal and displacement (displacement of the target onto many different “others,” even onto the “self ” and the “other”; displacement of discourses and logics42) but also by virtue of the ambivalent political effects it spawns, ranging from the politics of a defense of the rights of man to the mimetic transmission of schemes of persecution and dehumanization down through history.43 This gift/Gift, to borrow a page from Derrida, if it cannot be assimilated to “radical evil” without careful definition, nonetheless stands as the condition for the radical heteronomy of politics, a condition that simultaneously makes the demand for politics imperative and deprives it of its usual benchmarks. It is this intrinsic ambiguity that I am trying to grasp “disjunctively” (not conjunctively or synthetically) under the name of cruelty. Cruelty is not just one form of “extreme” violence. It is violence that can oscillate in unmediated fashion between ultra-naturalistic, anonymous forms, apparently arising from the very force of “things,” violence whose sources and objects alike are depersonalized, and other forms in which intentionality reaches convulsive levels or even turns against its own agents or “subjects”—forms whose suicidal dimension displays a strange kinship with criminal compulsion. That is why I think it is important, after citing Benslama’s account of extreme violence, to juxtapose to it another that apparently tends in the opposite direction: an essay by Bertrand Ogilvie published in the same review not long after Benslama’s. Ogilvie’s account links extreme violence to a certain conception of the “disposable human being,” identified as the limit of political representation (in both senses): Notwithstanding a widespread notion that we are seeing a sharp quantitative increase in violence in modern societies, I would like to examine the hypothesis that we have to do, rather, with a new configuration of violence, a modern, undisguised violence that is structural or reveals a structure. . . . What we call “violence” may be . . . something other than

54

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

what the West has, since ancient times, designated as war, despotism, tyranny, and force. . . . Involved here is, perhaps, a profound displacement in the thing itself as well as the system of representations that seeks to account for it. That is the hypothesis that I would like to develop here by trying to bring out the idea of what I call violence without address. 44

Ogilvie, in his turn, makes the detour of a rereading of Hegel: specifically, of the analysis, in a pivotal passage of the 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (§244), of “the creation of a rabble” [Pöbel ], a class outside the system of the corporations making up “society”—that is, a nonrepresented class that discovers by way of the experience of dire poverty that “wealth and, consequently, social life itself are not made for it” (what Marx would later reformulate under the term proletariat, or a class whose existence is characterized by absolute dispossession and insecurity). This situation of exclusion leads by its very nature to violence, “from the moment that a threshold that is inseparably real and imaginary is crossed, excluding [the individual] from that which defines him, in his own view, as someone who has a place, and leaving him to confront social existence as something alien, in which his participation has become problematic.” 45 This gives rise to the political problem lucidly identified by Hegel (who is, in this regard, at a far remove from any “humanist” rhetoric): The logic of civil society inevitably produces a growing class of individuals who are not simply just threatened by poverty, but are simply “superfluous.” This is the height of the unrepresentable, and perfectly reciprocal: society is no longer representable for this class, which can no longer see the source of its existence in it; and this class is no longer representable for society, which literally does not know what to do with it. It must, accordingly, disappear.46

This contradiction, Ogilvie goes on, was nevertheless veiled, in a certain sense, by the effects of a political struggle that mitigated its effects (in the form of what I call the construction of the social-national state, an institutional response to the organized revolts and demands of the workers’ movement47) or tried to do away with them by making communist revolutions:

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

55

For two centuries, however, owing to a particularly perverse effect, this symbolic gap was occulted as the result of the counterposed valorization of progressive or revolutionary violence, “the midwife of history.” It tended to transform the deadly contradiction between the universal and the particular specific to the system of big industry into a personalized battle strategy and personalized confrontations (the rich and the poor, the dominant and the dominated) that were thus perfectly representable in the theater of the self.48

Thus, an excess of violence emerges beyond this whole cycle of violence and counterviolence (in the form of a “civil war” at once real and symbolic). It is both passively suffered and actively exercised or “turned back against” its source. In this violence, the effects of economic rationality and the collapse of social meaning are superposed: Today it is quite as if the political and economic, or even administrative powers-that-be considered themselves free at last to devote themselves to the peaceful management of things (since “human resources” are, like things, exposed to the risk of “relocation,” to wear and tear—that is, employment—to internationalization or globalization of all the mainsprings of the economy, to the control of the “flows” of production and consumption, and so on. The only hitch is that this unprecedented violence provokes, in one and the same movement, its counterpart, another mute, random form of violence, which makes no demands and is addressed to no one . . . but is a sort of immune response to the first. It is called, today, “violence”—urban violence, the violence of the banlieues, ethnic violence, and so on; but despite all these adjectives, which seek to localize it . . . we must not forget that it is, first and foremost, an immediate, implicit, unconscious rejection of the direct or indirect effects of the violence of the world order . . . basically the extremely convoluted result of a social and political history, a provisional culminating point and, therefore, something new.49 For what might seem to be recurrences of a savage, antediluvian form of violence are in fact new forms of it, results directly related to the symbolic disinvestment of industrial societies in which the idea is

56

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

gaining ground that it has at last become possible to treat people, “human resources,” like things. Characteristic of these new forms is precisely that they are symptomatic of the fact that subjects no longer stand over against the order of things, but are identified with it.50

It is the remnant (or, depending on the direction from which one makes the count, the excess) generated by this anonymous management that Ogilvie identifies as the “modern production of the disposable human being,” the unintended but not illogical result of a seemingly uncoordinated set of processes, some of which have their source in “society” and others in “nature” (or “life”): We can say that the contemporary logic of the market . . . is a logic of indirect, delegated extermination . . . in Latin America, the massive populations that have no place in the national and international plans for production and exchange are known by the suggestive name of población chatarra: rubbish, waste, excremental population.51

Ogilvie occasionally seems to hesitate between the idea that this “production of the disposable human being” represents a continuation of what Hegel designates as the Pöbel (the rabble), relegated by poverty to the margins of representation, and the idea that it is a question of radically new figures produced by globalized capitalism’s “law of population” (which others, hijacking an expression of Foucault’s, call its “biopolitics”). However, the great majority of the examples he cites in support of the idea that there is an “indirect, delegated extermination” that consists in abandoning “to their fate” (a composite of so-called natural disasters, epidemics, genocides, and reciprocal genocides or, more commonly, periodic purges, at the blurred frontiers of crime and the repression of crime, such as the murders of children in the Brazilian favelas) populations that have become superfluous on the world market (albeit not without the proliferation, in the margins, of a handful of humanitarian relief operations or, at the opposite pole, a few commercial enterprises in the exploitation of human material that seek to turn a profit on exclusion: the trade in human organs, child trafficking, and so on), suggest that he thinks these are new phenomena.

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

57

With this “fantastic pressure of a-subjectivity,” we are plainly at antipodes from power relations of the kind that Foucault attempted to theorize by insisting on their dynamic, potentially reversible character.52 We are also in a space where—perhaps temporarily, but the whole problem lies precisely in this temporal indeterminacy, in the persistence, with no foreseeable end, of this situation that is at once massive and critical as well as more or less easily confined to certain regions of the planet—the demand for the right to politics has become ludicrous. This is not because the universality of the human condition is not at issue here, or because it is a question of nothing more than the expression of a dominating rationality. It is because it is virtually impossible for the victims to imagine or present themselves in person as political subjects capable of emancipating humanity by emancipating themselves. That is why masses of individuals can, in contradictory fashion, embody the human in its most vulnerable, bare state while also effectively occupying the place reserved for those whom a National Socialism bent on extermination called “subhumans” [Untermenschen]. Is this because certain historical conditions for emancipation have not yet been achieved? Or is it, rather, because they no longer obtain, having been “destroyed” at the same time as the social conditions of existence of precisely those people they most nearly concern? More generally, what shall we say of the relationship between such practices of elimination and the idea of structural violence? Let us provisionally leave these questions in abeyance in order to complete our idea that there is competition between “ultraobjective” and “ultrasubjective” forms of extreme violence. It may be that the idea of a form of ultrasubjective cruelty has only subjective significance in its turn, and that it only exists in the imagination. This hardly means that there is no need to define it. Quite the opposite is true. At stake here is precisely the idea that, at the heart of subjectivity (and, consequently, of intersubjectivity as well), we may find ourselves facing a limitpoint at which intentionality becomes so equivocal that it is impossible to decide whether we have to do with a will, even perverse or malign, or with the emergence in the “self” of the pulsional object that Lacan calls, after Freud, “the Thing” [das Ding ]: the unrepresentable that, in the subject, is “more real” than the reality of objects themselves (that is to say, less accessible, more intractable).53 To form some idea of it, we would do well to begin by

58

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

evoking examples from cinema or literature, since what is at stake is, first and foremost, a fantasy structure. It is the diabolical seed which, in Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby, at once comic and blasphemous, is embodied in the heroine’s baby, the malign, malignant flesh of her innocent, delicate flesh. Or, again, it is the moment when Miss Rosa Coldfield, in Faulkner’s novel Absalom! Absalom!, “understands,” with the help of mythology, what is incomprehensible or superhuman in the character of her brother-in-law Sutpen: That this Faustus, this demon, this Beelzebub fled hiding from some momentary flashy glare of his Creditor’s outraged face exasperated beyond all endurance, hiding, scuttling into respectability like a jackal into a rockpile so she thought at first until she realized that he was not hiding, did not want to hide, was merely engaged in one final frenzy of evil and harm-doing before the Creditor overtook him this next time for good and all;—this Faustus who appeared suddenly one Sunday with two pistols and twenty subsidiary demons and skuldugged a hundred miles of land out of a poor ignorant Indian.54

These allusions, however, must still be transposed from the individual to the collective level. Once they are, they leave the psychological realm behind for good. The kinds of violence we shall be discussing in terms of ultrasubjectivity do not simply have to do with communitarian hatred. Nor do they have to do with revolt, even when it takes the form of Ogilvie’s violence “without address” and therefore also without hope of changing the world as it is: a despair that leads to “blind” destruction, terrorism, or ideological fanaticism, even if these things are easily demonized by their adversaries. Involved here, rather, is above all the kind of violence in which the fantasy of bestiality plays a role, whether for the perpetrators or their victims: the Jewish genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and a few others, the extermination of Native Americans after the conquista and the fantasies of enjoyment [ jouissance] often attendant on it.55 Similar practices marked the entire history of slavery in the Americas and elsewhere. We cannot discern any difference in nature between these forms of cruelty and those, equally ritualized, cultivated by the Nazis and, in particular, the SS. The “ferocious” beast, man’s double, is a good representative here of the ultrasubjective “Thing.”

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

59

In the essay by Fethi Benslama I quoted earlier, Benslama talks about the “disembodiment,” “de-propriation,” and “disaffiliation” of individuals in order to characterize a will to power that tends not only to drive individuals and groups from their native or institutional communities, their “nation” or “polis,” but from humankind, membership in which precedes, and is the condition for, any sort of community at all. This explains why ultrasubjective violence props itself up on the most elementary characteristics of inferhuman relations: sexuality, of course, but more generally all the fundamental anthropological differences that constitute and at the same time divide humanity (sex and sexuality, age and authority, language and genealogy, and so on). Benslama adduces countless examples of the anguishing affinity between enjoyment and brutality with which we have become all too familiar, although it is by no means certain that we have really grasped their import or understood what their recurrence at the heart of “civilization” signifies (as in the case of the wars in Yugoslavia): schoolteachers slitting their own pupils’ throats, torturers forcing their prisoners to emasculate each other or raping the enemy’s women to make them give birth to their own enemies, against the backdrop of a generalized destruction of symbols and monuments inherited from a multicultural past.56 It is as if it were a matter of eradicating the symbolic as such, in the etymological sense of the word: that which “binds” by way of an articulation of the differences constitutive of the human. Such are the symptoms that lead Benslama to ask, in psychoanalytic terms—taking up a suggestion of Derrida’s57—whether we should not go beyond the Freudian model of a death drive located “beyond the pleasure principle” in order to think a cruelty or capacity for destruction located “beyond the death drive” itself. This formulation becomes inevitable as soon as we are no longer concerned with ordinary fascism or its ordinary forms— extraordinarily widespread in the twentieth century, it must be said, both at the state and micropolitical levels—but rather with their limit.58 The violence we are discussing here is thus not the authoritarian, murderous, oppressive violence of domination, which accompanies the construction and destruction of states or wars between different social systems (although colonial and anticolonial wars often straddle this limit). Rather, to borrow a phrase from another psychoanalyst, André Green, the author of what he calls a “psychoanalysis of limit cases,” it is the violence that stems from the

60

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

idealization of hatred, or from its “sublimation”—a process of a psychotic cast that, at the level of collective behavior, is integrally bound up with the fluctuating representation of the enemy, who is both potential victim and mimetic persecutor, or the fetishized Other (this also holds for imaginary constructs of the “races,” whether superior or inferior).59 Today it must frankly be stated that, after the collapse of Nazism, we were much too quick to affirm that such excesses could occur only once in human history, or at least that once they had attained their spasmodic climax, they could never be repeated because of the horror they inspired (when it is no doubt the case that the distance between such horror and fascination is infinitesimal). It will be understood why I speak of ultrasubjective violence. Although acts of cruelty like those that accomplish processes of “ethnic cleansing” are organized and decided upon and thus have, in a certain sense, individual perpetrators, culprits who display the usual combination of stupidity and cowardice but also passions and ideals, and although we can formally even attribute to them the goal of domination or omnipotence, the will underlying them is nevertheless not on the order of a political project but on that of the “Thing.” It is well known that Lacan’s criterion for diagnosing the presence of the “Thing” is precisely the fact that the “real” with which it confronts us is based not on empirical perception but on its hallucinatory inversion, the lack or “hole” that ruptures or interrupts the symbolic order of discourse, history, or action by always “coming back to the same place.” That place is here identified with that of cruelty, murder, or torture.60 The subject is neither master nor possessor of this “Thing”; rather, he is quite likely its instrument. In most of the cases I have mentioned, however, the “Thing” is no different from a collective fetish; in other words, it is an identity (national, religious, or racial) that is at once completely idealized and absolutely reified. Thus it is the subject’s “own identity” that becomes, for him and for everything that falls under his dominion, a tyrannical force; or, if one may hazard a tautology of this kind, it is an identity identical to itself that, the subject is convinced, exists in him in exclusive fashion, or that he “possesses” while simultaneously representing the human as such through it (or the superior variant of the human, meaning, most of the time, virility). Hence, its presence rules out all otherness, commanding its own realization—at the price, when circumstances dictate, of the subject’s self-obliteration—by way of elimination of every trace of otherness and

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

61

thus all “internal multiplicity,” all différance in the self (the “us”) and its others without which no self could exist. An identity of that sort as well, and, of course, the subject subjected to it, are in precisely the sort of position in which one’s own death is preferable to any mixing, intercourse, or hybridization, the threat of which is perceived at the fantasy level as worse than death. This by no means prevents the first death that it seeks, by way of a perpetual flight to the front, from being that of countless “others” stripped of their reality as a result of their confrontation with the hallucinatory real of the Thing—who nevertheless do not cease to come back to the impossible place that the Thing delineates.61 This leads to the question that I would now like to explore. Even if, by definition, there is no unique form of either ultraobjective or ultrasubjective violence (one of which proceeds by way of an inversion of the utility principle and the transformation of human beings into not useful commodities but disposable waste, while the other proceeds by installing in place of the subjects’ will the fetishized figure of an “us” reduced to absolute homogeneity) and, a fortiori, no unique form of their overdetermination, can we put forward something like a topography or diagram that would allow us to interpret our encounters with such violence? That will be the subject of my next lecture.

THREE “INCONVERTIBLE” VIOLENCE? A N E SS AY I N T O P O G R A P H Y

L E T U S R E V I E W O U R T R A J E C T O RY S O FA R . W E S E T O U T F RO M a question about the relationship between various representations of the role of violence in history and various conceptions of politics. We posed it against the backdrop of the problems involved in associating politics (as practice) with history (as process) by way of a conception of progress implying that violence is “convertible.” Today, what seems self-evident (problematically, like everything that is “self-evident”) is not progress but the cyclical return of a global confrontation between “anarchic,” more or less “intended” violence and counterviolence, state violence in particular. To be sure, the notion of “progress,” itself divided among several different models, is just one possible way of articulating politics and history transcendentally (at the level of their conditions of possibility). But it is privileged because it expresses, for us, the essence of the viewpoint of modernity, shaped on the basis of Enlightenment philosophy and the “bourgeois” revolutions of the late Classical Age. In a series of texts, Immanuel Wallerstein has developed a hypothesis on this point that simplifies things but is also very illuminating. For Wallerstein, “ideology” is, as such, a typically modern species of discourse. It

64 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

emerged in reaction to two “revolutionary” events of the late eighteenth century. One was the Industrial Revolution, which originated in England. The other was the democratic political revolution, which originated in the United States and France and appeared in three competing, virtually contemporaneous variants (the very names that are still used to designate them were invented or gained currency in the first decades of the nineteenth century): “conservatism,” “liberalism,” and “socialism.” All three are characterized by the fact that they take the idea of irreversible historical change for granted, as opposed to that of stability (or a cyclical instability that periodically returns to stability) that was dominant in a prerevolutionary world now relegated to a political and social “Ancien Régime.” They have, however, three divergent strategies for responding to historical change. Progress, in this sense, appears as the norm: it is the “worldview” forming the common basis for all three ideologies. Yet it inspires three distinct attitudes. Some (the conservatives) seek to resist progress by limiting it or containing its effects as far as possible in order to maintain the traditional “order” of societies (especially its hierarchies and moral values). Others (the socialists) seek to hasten progress in voluntaristic fashion or to extend it beyond its initial objectives (particularly as regards equality); they inscribe a second revolution in the first, as it were. As for liberalism, which is in the pivotal position, it is precisely the discourse that affirms the normality of progress as such, and simply proposes to accompany it (that is, to free it of all “artificial” obstacles) by incessantly reforming the old to the profit of the new.1 It follows that, although the three modern ideologies are expressions of distinct forces and, more profoundly, structural differences in a single “world system” that their conflict makes it possible to regulate, all three (including Marxism, a radical variant within the socialist tradition) are ultimately reducible to liberalism, which presents progress in “pure” form as the principle informing the articulation of history and politics. Or, if you like, just as “democracy,” in a certain tradition of political philosophy espoused by the early Marx, is the “truth of all constitutions,” so liberalism is the “truth” of all ideologies. Liberalism thus appears twice in the table: as one ideology among others and as the expression of their common stock (their “problematic,” as Althusser would have put it). Without necessarily subscribing to all the presuppositions of this analysis (especially as far as the functionality of the system of ideologies with respect to the capitalist world system is concerned),

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

65

we can take advantage of it to corroborate a negative thesis, at least: it is precisely the common stock of the ideologies of modernity, embodied in an image of progress to which liberalism gives “dominant” expression, that has been called into question by some of the “self-evident” truths of contemporary globalization (specifically, by the novelties globalization is producing and, at the same time, by the contradictions or the very old forms of violence that it is making more conspicuous, as a new regime of the communication and circulation of images.) When I gave the hypothetical name “civility” to the whole set of political strategies (and conditions of possibility of politics) that respond to the fact that violence, in various forms, always exceeds normality, I obviously had no assurance that I would be able to make civility correspond to anything more than a question, destined, perhaps, to go unanswered. That is why I had to make the detour that consisted in elaborating certain conceptions of the relationship between politics and violence, referring to Hobbes and Hegel not just as two discourses characteristic of the moment of modernity immediately preceding and following the great revolutionary break that transformed the way history was imagined but as two problematics whose internal tensions are prolonged, or lead to new questions, in our contemporary world. However cavalier our path through Hobbes may have been, it suggests the possibility of carrying out a symptomatic reading of his “imperfect” way of treating his own dualism between nature and political artificiality: constantly encroaching on each other, the two regions (or two “states”) sketchily delineate a site, neither completely natural nor purely juridical, in which the violence of the passions and wills to power returns as that which juridical rationality can never abolish for good.2 This border zone, with its uncertain contours and status, is the one in which historicity properly speaking is produced in the cyclical form of revolutions and counterrevolutions and, more generally, ideological disorders (especially religious disorders, in Hobbes’s view) and restorations of political order (which is the firmer the more solidly it is rooted in a mechanism of representation of the multitude and of juridical sovereignty). Thus, we may call it the frontier of the political, or the point at which a politics confronted with its own conditions of possibility turns back on itself. The sovereign function of the state as arbiter of all these differences and conflicts of interest in civil society, in which the Weberian notion of a “legitimate monopoly on the use of force”

66 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

is already prefigured, now inevitably wears the aspect of preventive counterviolence that has to be brought to bear by various means on the natural “tendencies” of society itself, or of what is “repressed” and threatening in it. This antinomic aspect of the conception of power of course explains the return to Hobbes and the topicality of his thought in the contemporary conjuncture, although the historical conditions for his construction of the “representative” state seem completely outdated. 3 But it is also because Hobbes brings the articulation between power and violence back before, so to speak, the grand narrative of progress to which Hegel gave one of its fullest expressions that he seems to echo what we are today experiencing as “the decay of the idea of progress.” 4 However, the interest of a rereading of Hegel, as I have tried to show, goes far beyond his sophisticated presentation of a “progressive” conception of history (one that puts him squarely in the liberal tradition, in that part of it that makes the state of law the mediator of the complementarity between the various social “functions”). For the dialectical presentation of the idea of progress or, better, the dialectical demonstration of its necessity, assumes that progress exists only as the immanent negation of its opposites. The law of progress dominates history only if history is a process of the conversion of violence that brings about its transformation (or “sublimation”) into institutional power, thereby endowing law and the state with a spiritual content and a legitimacy that goes beyond mere domination. That is why I insisted so heavily on the fact that there is no dissociating the grandeur of the Hegelian edifice (and, beyond Hegel, of the dialectical idea that he bequeathed his successors, to whom it was left to reformulate it in applying it to new objects) from an acknowledgment of the violence of the conditions of politics and its “continuation” in the institution. The problem for Hegel is not to abolish or repress violence (or this is only secondarily his problem, when it is a question of the most “anarchic” forms that, in his view, are not “political”). It is to constitute the power of the state as the immanent “end” of historical progress by way of conversion of the forms of violence that initially seemed inconvertible. That is why all interpretations of Hegelian philosophy turn on confronting the conceptual and symbolic arsenal that it uses to think this conversion (the negation of the negation, the temporality of the “supersession” of figures through their violent self-dissolution, the allegories of stage, court,

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

67

and sacrifice) with the restriction that it imposes a priori on the recognition of forms of historical violence so as to be able to maintain their teleological significance. This restriction is more interesting in that it is not veiled but (as we recalled in citing Bertrand Ogilvie’s commentary) emerges by way of an analysis of contemporaneous conflicts located to either side of a line of demarcation—which is itself political—running between what is “politics” and what is not, since it represents only a “remainder” of empiricity and contingency.5 Hegel never flinches before the articulation of historical violence, individual or collective, with the political, however bloody that violence may be, as long as it serves a purpose and constitutes the means of instituting an order of producing a constitution for the peoples who, historically, show an interest in forming a state. Thus, he takes into account only that violence of which it may be said that it will (or of which he decrees that it will) ultimately bring a people’s constitution and state into universal history in the allegorical forms of drama, trial, and consecration. It is here that we can, questioning the philosopher’s claim to read the meaning that is woven “behind history’s back,” advance the opposite thesis: it is precisely the fact of conferring “universal meaning” on violence (the meaning that consists, in the final analysis, in indicating the “differential” of historical time itself ) that makes it possible to posit the convertibility of political violence in advance—at the risk of denying, marginalizing, or treating as mere “empirical” residues all forms of violence (however massive, enduring, and unbearable they may be) that remain irreducible to such universalization. Let us therefore attend carefully to the following: the Hegelian scheme can be read at two different levels. We can content ourselves with the names he gives to his theoretical objects (which also have, of course, immediate political significance): “peoples” and “the state” for whose benefit the dialectical conversion of violence must be carried out. But we can also (for we have the advantage that comes with arriving after an entire cycle of “reversals” or transpositions of the dialectic) imagine possible substitutions: in particular, in a Marxist perspective, the one that would replace people with proletariat and state with revolution. Such a substitution makes it possible to integrate into the dialectical process (or even to situate at its very core) something that Hegel excludes from it or only lodges in its uncertain margins. At the same stroke, it makes it possible to lift certain restrictions that

68 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

he imposes on the definition of “historical” violence by virtue of his postulate of convertibility.6 Yet, ultimately, it changes nothing about the nature of the division. Some of the acts of violence perpetrated or suffered by those whom Hegel banishes from the dialectical process will now be not just recognized but elevated to the rank of the “motor of history” (the class struggle). Yet this recognition (let us beware of underestimating its political significance) entails designating other margins, tracing another formally analogous division that excludes from the meaning of history acts of violence that have no revolutionary effect (or, perhaps—but a symptomatic embarrassment already begins to make itself felt here—that play the role of obstacles to the revolution, or that of “counterrevolutionary” phenomena).7 What can serve as our guiding thread here (and prefigures a crucial aspect of any discussion of the strategies of “civility”) is the structural function with which Hegel invests, not just transitions between the unconscious and the conscious, morality and crime—implied, as we have seen, by the process of conversion—but also transitions from the “private” to the “public” sphere. This dispositive, too, is susceptible of variation, yet it immediately suggests that, in Hegelian perspective, the forms of typically inconvertible violence are those that remain confined to the private sphere without possibility of translation or representation in the public domain as well as those that explode in the public arena with no possibility of being rooted in private life.8 This is no doubt related to the fact that the figure of power for the sake of which violence is converted is in fact the national state or, at least, the postrevolutionary state in the process of transforming the nation into an agent of universal history. At the same time that the conversion of violence eliminates contingency, it also integrates the individual into world history, but by way of his affiliation with the nation and the “civility” it requires of him. The subsumption of private by public life is the scheme that governs such affiliation. It might therefore be the case that the phenomena of “inconvertible” violence connected with globalization, or whose conditions are generalized by globalization (whether genocides and ethnocides or the production of economically dispensable human beings), owe their “unpolitical” or “antipolitical” character to a short circuit between the extremes. On the one hand, they call the primacy of the nation into question, that is, the form of collective “subjectivity” by means of which the nation interpellates individuals in order to inscribe them in the process of historical universality

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

69

(patriotism, civic duty). On the other, they reveal a whole set of kindred behaviors and conditions of existence that are not, properly speaking, public or private but are inscribed in a gray zone in which recognition of individuality loses sight of its rules and norms. Peoples, subjects, citizens, territories, civil status: without purely and simply disappearing, these categories of “normal” politics—at least in a certain historical period and a certain part of the world—find themselves strangely incapable of configuring “the whole.” Let us keep this idea of a short circuit between extremes in mind. We shall put it back to work when we take things up again at the point to which our sketch of a phenomenology of cruelty has brought us. My hypothesis about the tendential duality of the forms of cruelty is plainly of no interest unless, besides making it possible to describe a large number of disparate empirical situations, it provides the elements of an articulation. That is what we shall now put to the test. To justify the expression “ultraobjective violence,” I evoked situations of mass impoverishment in which whole populations slide from “make live” to “let die” because they have become “superfluous” or “excessive,” so that their presence no longer has a place—even from the standpoint of the reproduction of capitalist conditions, and thus of its functionalities—in the framework of what Marx calls “the industrial reserve army.” 9 For Marx, this “army” is linked to the concept of a “relative surplus population” created and maintained by phases of accumulation alternately characterized by “repulsion and attraction of workpeople.”10 Involved in the case before us, in contrast, is an “absolute surplus population” that is eliminated by a variety of means—ecological, biological, terrorist/counterterrorist, and genocidal—whose common denominator is that they reduce human beings to the condition of things, beginning by suppressing their individuality and treating them as quantities of residual “pieces.”11 To justify the corresponding expression, “ultrasubjective violence,” I insisted on another aspect of genocidal processes (recently exemplified again by the Yugoslavian wars with the systematization of “ethnic cleansing”), where what counts is not so much the mass dimension of the process (although that is latent in the fact that the search for the absolute enemy can never impose limits on itself ), as the fantasy representation of the Other as a mortal threat operating from inside the community: as if an inassimilable Foreigner had penetrated the Self (or the Same)

70 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

and had to be violently rooted out of it to “cleanse” it of something contaminating it, at the risk of precipitating its own destruction (death being preferable to adulteration).12 I underscored the fact that this “acting out”— we now know that it is recurrent in history, with no end in sight, and can be justified by various communitarian discourses (national or ethnic and therefore, of course, “racial” but also religious or sociopolitical)—always entails idealizing hatred or investing it with a “mythical” dimension. It is quite striking that the practices of murder and torture in which the body of the enemy is pursued beyond death itself (“mere death”) are often associated with a fantasy of animality that not only blurs the limits of the human but also makes it hard to know whether the projection of animality bears first and foremost on victim or perpetrator (hunted or hunter) or on both at once.13 One of our main reasons for using the word cruelty is not just that it connotes extremity (for, from this point of view, every language offers a wide array of possible terms, none of which is, rigorously speaking, ever adequate or resistant to blunting by emotional declamation). It is also the fact that we need a term in which the ambivalence of the relationship between the two forms, their superposition and “logical” heterogeneity, immediately makes itself heard. This ambivalence always haunts the idea of cruelty, since we can never say whether cruelty is “all too human” or “inhuman,” personal or impersonal, endowed with a “face” or not.14 If we must, as I firmly believe, maintain that the forms of ultraobjective and ultrasubjective violence cannot be conflated either conceptually or practically, and that neither, in that sense, is the reason for or ultimate cause of the other, “determinant in the last instance,” it must nevertheless be admitted that a whole range of phenomena in our historical experience, particularly racism whenever it coincides with an outbreak of inconvertible violence, superpose the two forms or circulate between them. However, what doubtless contributes more than anything else to breeding such ambivalence is the fact that the very distinction between “subject” and “object” vacillates in the limit experience of cruelty. The excess of intentionality that appears when genocidal programs of murder and torture are put into practice, all the more when it is systematized and ritualized, reflects the subjection of the subject not just to an “ego ideal” but also to an impersonal instance that terrorizes it, replacing its decision-making ability with an internal Thing’s. The imagery accompanying the processes

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

71

by which the surplus populations of the planet are eliminated, the representation of human beings as accumulations of waste or junk, is always haunted, in its turn, by fantasies of hostile or victimized subjectivity. The importance of metaphors of animality in the discourse of cruelty is doubtless owing to the fact that they represent at the imaginary level (for the “civilized” peoples, at any rate) a combination or an in-between of objectivity and subjectivity; the whole question is to what extent those victimized by it can themselves remain immune to it. Recall that the influence of neoDarwinism has never quite disappeared from the Eurocentric representation of nonwhite “others,” especially Africans, only recently still classified as inferior races. It resurfaced in violent fashion with the AIDS epidemic, identified as a process of natural selection or assumed to derive from genetic proximity and sexual contact between African populations and communities of anthropoid apes. This by no means prevented the television networks covering the “humanitarian catastrophes” at the same moment— dramatically illustrating the ambivalence I just referred to—from selecting, out of the mass of victims of the contemporary processes of elimination, faces or bodies offered up as sublime images of the human, supposed to elicit the most immediate, most unconditional kind of fraternity (but also, it must be said, the kind that offers the most brutal confirmation that its object has been stripped of the last vestige of political subjectivity and reduced to the state of an object incapable of initiative).15 How can such considerations, which are perhaps not immune to the risk of a speculative travesty of banality, help us reformulate the question of the concept of politics? As is suggested by reflection on the historically determined configurations of racism in both its institutional and popular (or “populist”) dimensions, what analysis must foreground is lines of flight, processes of dissemination that exceed all linear causality, investing even the abnormal and unimaginable with the character of necessity. Combinations of ultraobjective and ultrasubjective violence constantly emerge in the space and time of our private and public experiences. It is there that we are led to “respond” to them in a context that is, in the general sense of the word, social, constituted by relations of utility and power and by laws and rights affirmed or denied. Yet the fact remains that they are in part unimaginable or exhibit a state of affairs that defies conceptualization, displaying, in some sense, the limits of theory. This is so, it seems, because all these

72 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

phenomena are immediately characterized by the unity of opposites, the passage of opposed forms into one another, when, for example, we see institutionalized racism becoming “popular” or “spontaneous” racism at the price of a constant oscillation in the way the target population is depicted, an alternation between the themes of subhumanity and malevolent superhumanity. I once attempted (in my contributions to a book I coauthored with Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities) to theorize this as a series of transitions from one extreme to the other.16 It would be worthwhile to pursue these analyses by revisiting the great theological antitheses that were renewed and “secularized” by the nineteenth-century biological and anthropological evolutionary theory that translated them in terms of “selection” and “election.” They provide good illustrations, in the order of scientific discourse, of the oscillation between ultrasubjectivity and ultraobjectivity.17 I cannot interpret these indications otherwise than by suggesting, contradictorily, that the “objective” and “subjective” aspects fuse even while remaining causally independent, as if simultaneously producing their effects on two stages that are at once distinct and inseparable, of which one is something like the other’s underside [l’envers]. We should, accordingly, broach them by simultaneously speaking two languages whose mutual translatability is never anything more than a hypothesis subject to the hazards of the conjuncture—by using a “double-language,” as Gaston Bachelard puts it in a very different context. But we can also try to locate them in the “topography” of a diagram that allows us to present in schematic fashion something that is not altogether conceptualizable, although it conditions the possibility of a concept. I have two indicative diagrams in mind. I borrow the first from Lacan. More exactly, I turn to my own ends the use he makes of it, especially in his 1962–63 seminar on anxiety,18 where it is a matter of enabling [his auditors] intuitively to grasp the distinction between the objet a and the object constructed on the basis of the speculary relation, the ordinary object. . . . What makes a speculary image different from what it represents? The fact that right becomes left and vice versa. . . . With respect to what it redoubles, the speculary image is precisely the passage from the left-hand glove to the right-hand glove. . . . An ant pro-

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

73

ceeding [down a Möbius strip] moves from one apparent side of it to the other without having to make his way over the edge. In other words, the Möbius strip is a surface with just one face, and a surface with just one face cannot be turned inside out. . . . That is what I call not having a speculary image.19

DI AG R A M 1 .

Lacan’s original Mobius strip.

Let me explain the terms used here. What Lacan calls, by convention, the “objet petit a” is the object of desire. Psychoanalysis calls the subject’s relation to it an “object relation,” thus distinguishing it from the object of “ordinary” perception, the one that gives rise to the philosophical problem of “objectivity.” As for the speculary relation, it is the one the subject maintains with her own mirror image. (The prototype of this relation is the experience of what is known as the “mirror-stage,” which Lacan regards as the key moment in the formation of personal identity: the moment when a baby held in the arms of an adult (under “normal” circumstances, its mother) looks back at him or her with “jubilation” because it has perceived an image of them together in a mirror).20 It is then a question of a relation of recognition that, according to Lacan, forms the condition of possibility for the subject’s orientation in “reality” or perceptual space, which is consequently woven of the imaginary (but commanded or normalized by the subject’s dependence on a symbolic Other possessed of speech, that is, the first person to “name” and “interpellate” the subject.21 The proof a contrario is provided by the psychotic phenomena of “depersonalization,” where the subject’s failure to recognize her image goes hand in hand with the emergence of terrifying “doubles,” “things” realer than reality itself. The feeling of anxiety (or disintegration of the ego) attaches itself to their insistent presence:

74 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

The speculary image becomes the strange, invasive image of the double. That is what gradually happens near the end of Maupassant’s life, when he starts by no longer seeing himself in the mirror, or when he perceives something in a room, a phantom turning its back to him, which, he immediately understands, is not unrelated to him: when the phantom turns around, he sees that it is him. That is what is involved in the entry of the a into the world of the real, where it can only return to haunt the subject.22

Returning to the problem raised earlier, I would like to suggest that the Möbius strip provides a way of illustrating the idea that the manifestations or phenomena of “ultrasubjective” violence (commanded by an obsession with identity or introducing this obsession “into the real”) can at any moment turn into those of “ultraobjective” violence (resulting from the reduction of human beings to the status of useless and, therefore, superfluous or redundant objects), and the other way around, although the “ultrasubjective” and “ultraobjective” nevertheless remain fundamentally heterogeneous. “Inconvertible,” each in its own register, the excesses of sovereignty and those of commodification (or the reversals of the constitution of communities and those of commerce and the generalization of commodity exchange) are perhaps still more inconvertible in that each constantly overdetermines the other. This gives us the following diagram: However, in this kind of schematic presentation, which illustrates the fact the we can never determine with certainty the moment of passage from

DI AG R A M 2 .

Ultrasubjective and ultraobjective violence as reverse sides of a Mobius strip.

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

75

one stage [scène] to the other (from the real to the imaginary, or from the economic to the ideological, and so on), we cannot yet see with sufficient clarity the problem that must be formulated at the same time: that of the interruption in the ongoing chain of metamorphoses of violence, or the “empty place” that this interruption can come to occupy (in constituting it). It might be called the “moment of politics” in the field of cruelty.23 That is why I turn to a third diagram, derived this time from one devised by JeanPierre Faye; I have simplified it and adapted it to my own ends. Like Faye, I call it the “horseshoe”:24

DI AG R A M 3 .

Politics as interruption in the continuity of

ultrasubjective and ultraobjective violence.

To think antiviolence as political innovation is thus to attempt to take up a position at a point in the analysis in which ultrasubjectivity comes infinitely close to ultraobjectivity, yet where the heterogeneity that allows us to dissociate them comes into view. I now propose to look for this point by elaborating, for each of the forms of cruelty, an ideal—and, of course, hypothetical—genesis reflecting one of the tendencies in the discourse of contemporary political philosophy. To that end, I propose two formulas: the repressive hypothesis and the colonial hypothesis. Foucault uses the term repressive hypothesis in his short, programmatic 1976 book, La volonté de savoir.25 Following a path charted in his previous book

76 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

(Discipline and Punish26), he strives to take his distance from the Marxist tradition (at least in its most common version, that of the Communist Parties as well as the far left) and, simultaneously, Freudian orthodoxy (including, in this respect, popularizations of Lacanian psychoanalysis) on the crucial question of the relationship between the subject and the law. By “repressive hypothesis,” he means an explanation of the nature of a power presented as both “total” and essentially “negative”: the idea that the essence of power is in the last instance sovereignty, and that its basic mechanism is the repression of all that is spontaneous or free in individual or collective acts (and desires). Under such conditions, it is inevitable that the central power represented by the state with its repressive (or even “castrating”) functions should figure as the paradigm of power in general. Foucault’s critique focuses on this point. Contesting the idea that this image of state power represents the typical form of power in general, he undertakes a series of empirical analyses intended to show that state power in fact masks a multiplicity of power relationships, an administration and a capacity for “governing” civil society that would be unintelligible if it were, in essence, purely repressive. According to Foucault, it is a matter, rather, of differentiated forces that operate by disciplining individual freedoms so as to render them productive (or by converting their resistance into utility). All this, which seems to me to be a rectification of unquestionable importance, quite rules out making “repression” the unitary essence of political power.27 But that does not mean that there is no repression. Better— this is what interests me here—it does not mean that the state does not represent itself as a repressive power and act in accordance with this ideological representation as a “sovereign,” “absolute” power—as do other powers fashioned in its image, although their practical sovereignty is still more limited or hypothetical than the state’s (whether it is a matter of traditional powers, “patriarchal powers,” or bureaucratic powers in the administrative and economic spheres). Thus we can grant that the repressive hypothesis is false, regarded as a general theory of the dispositives of power, even while recognizing its terrible efficacy as a fiction, a fiction whose effects are produced in the real, where power projects itself as both an objective mechanism and a “subject” that interpellates other subjects. Once we take power’s fictional dimension into account and inflect the notion of “repression” accordingly, that notion is not just useful critically and polemically; it also

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

77

designates specific processes of subjectification whose supports and institutional conditions remain to be determined. At the heart of the problem is something that Foucault, even as he tried to relativize and decenter it, continued to situate on the horizon of his interest in the forms of illegality and the play of power that combine organization of the “defense of society” with the right to administer death:28 “sovereignty” as an “excessive” (hence perverse) figure of the power of law or of the power legitimized by law. The antinomic nature of sovereignty is the guiding thread in a philosophical tradition embracing Hobbes, Weber, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Derrida, but also Freud and Lacan.29 This tradition can orient itself toward either constituting a transcendental dialectic in the field of politics or analyzing the most mundane practices of the cruelty of power. It is always a question of understanding why it is impossible for a power that claims to be sovereign to unite in itself the opposites of sovereign justice and extreme violence, or the double monopoly on justice and violence, without being able to keep this “contradiction” from spilling over into all the concrete manifestations of its authority. The “symbolic,” too, is in this regard a material figure of everyday practice. That, conversely, is why a political power (including democratic or “popular” political power) that does not periodically engage in warfare finds it very hard to maintain the fiction of its sovereign authority or its preeminent, sacred nature. Sovereign power has to show itself as such, in rituals that variously combine justice, spectacle, and cruelty.30 That is why the issue of capital punishment (or of its abolition and, therefore, of the substitutes for it) and its correlatives (“pardon”) plays a decisive role in every institution of political power. That is also why the sovereign’s violence is the object of a demand on the part of his “subjects” (in both senses of the word) that cannot remain “symbolic” but must occasionally be materialized in the form of a “preferential repression” brought to bear on individuals or groups identified as domestic enemies of the community and law.31 It is, consequently, materialized at the point where the mechanisms of recognition are marked by a double inadequacy [défaillance]: the one having to do with the representation of the community incarnated by the sovereign or whoever holds collective power; and the one having to do with the community’s coincidence with its own ideal, the identity or “sameness” of its members. 32 In both cases, this inadequacy (or failing) must constantly be compensated by a supplement of the Gewalt

78 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

of law over the “ordinary” exercise of it; this leads to a flight to the front that has no assignable end: from the “legitimate monopoly of force” [violence] to preventive counterviolence, and from preventive counterviolence to institutional cruelty.33 Is this inadequacy necessary? I think that we can say so, without prescribing in advance either the circumstances or the modalities of its manifestation. In principle, law and power correspond term for term in conformity with a scheme of reciprocity: a “constituent power,” that of the people or its general will, imposes its own universal rules on itself by which it institutes law or the framework in which the legal constraint binding on all citizens is established along with their right to monitor the way it is applied. On the other side of the balance, a “constituted power” organizes legislative activity; enforces the law; represses, if necessary, violations by “delinquent” individuals or groups; and negotiates the definition of the common interest with “parties” of citizens. In practice, however, as soon as the suspicion arises that the common interest is a fiction or simply cannot be the object of a consensus (even at the end of a democratic procedure) so that it is therefore not enough to affirm the common interest for it to be recognized as such, the government [le pouvoir] finds itself faced with the obligation to govern individuals with an eye to their own good (or happiness, or freedom) against their own perception of that good. The scheme of the reciprocity of power and the law breaks down or must be reestablished by a supplement of law, a supplement of power, or both. In a famous passage of The Social Contract (book 1, chapter 7), Rousseau makes it perfectly clear that this obligation to “force citizens to be free” is inherent in the institution of sovereignty. The formula is the more striking in that Rousseau has a radical conception of sovereignty as popular sovereignty, coming from below and drawing all its legitimacy from its own “subjects.” Derrida makes this double supplement (to which he opposes the “justice” that is always yet to come) the mainspring of his essay “Force of Law,” interpreting texts by Pascal, Kafka, and Benjamin in the light of contemporary interrogations of the limits of sovereignty.34 I believe it can be affirmed that its necessity is not diminished but reinforced whenever sovereignty is purely imaginary, as in all “communities” (national or revolutionary, for example) that tend not to reproduce themselves under the dominion of an existing legality but to constitute themselves by “freeing”

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

79

themselves from foreign dominion and, therefore, appropriating its “traits”—unless the contamination is countered from within by powerful capacities for (moral and political) self-restraint that are obviously not available in unlimited quantities, What, however, is a “supplement of law”? To begin with, it seems to me that it is an absolutization or idealization of its name, which makes it a “master name” or “name of the truth.”35 Such names are often presented in the form of tautological statements, the “performative” violence of which, as a violent reduction of differences and resistances, is beyond question. 36 “God is God,” but also “war is war” and, of course, “the law is the law” [Gesetz ist Gesetz; la loi, c’est la loi ], which is in our day perhaps the most potent and ambiguous (protective and destructive) of these tautologies that proffer the positivity of the absolute and absolutize the positive, making every lawbreaker a potential public enemy. (Godard, however, has managed to inject the “Hegelian” irony of the community back into them: “a woman is a woman.”) The public enemy is someone whose violation of the law and, thus, existence or “stubbornness” (whose stubborn existence or sometimes, quite simply, stubborn will to exist) potentially threaten the community embodied by the government [pouvoir] with corruption and collapse: he is the “gangrenous limb that must be cut off ” to save the body, a theme sounded by politicians and theologians alike.37 But the opposite is no doubt more determinant: if there were no public enemies or “gangrenous limbs” to cut off, there would be no way of verifying law’s transcendent nature, and the “void” of the tautology would have no concrete effect. 38 The internal enemy is necessary; he has to exist in fantastic or “spectral” form before taking on flesh in experience and being identified with this or that group or individual, an identification that depends on circumstances, “dominant” traditions and interests, and power relations as well as the “fears” and “conflicts” sustaining them.39 This abruptly brings us to the other extreme: the supplement of not law but power. Let us repeat that the idea of preventive counterviolence itself contains a progression ad infinitum insofar as there are in every society acts of violence and violations of the law that must be neutralized or deterred (as Hobbes says, their perpetrators or potential perpetrators must be subject to “terror”). The excess of power in this sense includes a dimension of subjectification that is quite strange, in that it seems to affect not just individuals but

80 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

also institutions (especially states). In what does the “enjoyment” not only of an individual subject but of an institution or of law itself consist, and, in consequence, that of the subject who embodies the law or wields institutional power? We might call him, in this sense, an ultrasubject.40 The excess of power—visible in punishment, or in the punishment that prevents repetition of crime—always occurs within “power relations” or relations “between subjects,” oscillating between the two poles of recognition, or even of obedience, since it is a matter of proceeding in such a way as to create absolute passivity or impotence (elimination of recidivism) on the one hand, and, on the other, an omnipotence whose legitimacy no longer brooks any challenge. This fantastic scene, with its altogether “real” effects, is ordinarily staged by the state but always in an obligatory relationship with the “broad mass”: the masses are not simply the target of the terror effect; they also delegate the function of excess in the exercise of power, or the power to “glue” law and the community back together. Ordinarily the excess of violence is exercised by way of the institution; this means that it is neutralized or relegated to the wings of the repressive apparatuses, targeting “dangerous individuals” who have been separated from the broad mass in advance (so that one no longer even sees them, or else sees them as absolutely “different”).41 “Totalitarian” episodes are customarily interpreted (especially in the history of the fascist regimes) as moments in which the pursuit of violence imagined as a collective “revenge” taken on defenseless public enemies (religious, ethnic, or “racial” minorities, for example, as well as stigmatized professions) passes back into the masses’ hands. There are, however, other possibilities, many of them pertinent to our immediate present; they take the form, notably, of a demand for preferential violence (against foreigners, nomads, and so on) that allows modern states to compensate for the gradual crumbling of their sovereignty.42 Sovereignty, which defines itself as an internal excess over legal power, appears to be inseparable from cruelty because it must always remedy its own defect, whether on the side of the law itself or on that of the people. Let us now explore the other term of the alternative, what I have called the colonial hypothesis, as an ideal genesis of ultraobjective violence. To be honest, I shall be using this term in atypical fashion: not, to be sure, in the absence of all reference to the history of the imperialist domination of non-

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

81

European peoples, yet fi rst and foremost as informed by the project of rereading, after the experience of that real history, a number of classic analyses of exploitation in Marx and his successors. For, in any case, a concept of violence—the more so when the focus is on the excesses and extreme forms of violence—results from an intellectual construct. It is never free of presuppositions. Thus, the concept developed here depends on a critical reprise of earlier constructs whose implications I am endeavoring to assess while asking which of the realities observable today fall under their jurisdiction and which fail to. The descriptions and interpretations of the violence entailed by the appearance and evolution of the capitalist mode of exploitation and accumulation interest us here all the more in that they quite deliberately take to its furthest limits a reflection on the fragility of the boundary between, on the one hand, forms of violence that can be regarded as “normal” in a given society (meaning that they are confined within certain limits, or “normalized” by the history of resistances and struggles, the equilibrium effect produced by violence and counterviolence) and, on the other hand, those that exceed all possibility of regulation and, for that very reason, call the depiction of a “logical” course of historical development into question. Within the limits of the present discussion, I shall try to show that this depiction is problematic while also showing what makes it germane to a genealogy of cruelty. My analysis will essentially be based on the first volume of Capital, not merely because I regard Capital—despite or perhaps precisely because it remains unfinished—as the main exposition of “dialectical materialism” bequeathed us by Marx but also because a rereading of this book in the perspective adopted here can bring out an authentic phenomenology of violence that runs through it from one end to the other. The stakes of this phenomenology can be stated in a sentence: to think conjointly two phenomena that Marx attempts to bring together in one and the same contradictory unity: capitalism’s destructive face, the explosion of violence that accompanies both its emergence as a new mode of production and also its historical expansion across the globe, and the aspect of it that seems progressive and constructive, the development of the socialization of labor. More profoundly, Marx attempts to think in close conjunction the double movement, within capitalist violence, of the self-reproduction and self-destruction of its conditions.43

82 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

There can be no doubt that this phenomenology takes a good part of its inspiration from the Hegelian model of “reason in history.” It does so, however, in a mode that is critical and conflictual from the outset. I believe we can affirm that Marx has constantly in mind the Hegelian idea of the conversion of violence as a means of realizing “world spirit”—realizing, that is, the meaning of history, especially when, in the last section of volume 1, about “the so-called primitive accumulation” (die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation44), he weaves together, meshing them in a single process, the themes of violence as an effect, on the one hand, of the requirements of capital accumulation, and, on the other, of the state intervention that expropriates small landowners and accelerates the concentration of the means of production. This is also the moment in which he concretely illustrates the idea that there is a complementary relation, or a relation of dependence, between the development of the mode of production and that of the political superstructure. In these passages Marx’s rhetoric is itself violent in the extreme. It attacks the edifying “anecdote” that serves classical economists’ effort to justify on the basis of the capitalist’s “frugality” or ability to save the origin of the difference between his wealth and the proletarian’s dire poverty. But Marx’s rhetoric also constitutes a way of demonstrating that the violence perpetrated for centuries against the poorer social classes, especially the peasantry (in order to ruin it economically and transform it into a mass of “free” [vogelfrei ] individuals seeking waged work and, later, into the “reserve army” required by industry), had nothing to do with pursuit of the “spiritual” ends of humanity in the Hegelian sense, that is, with the transition from one institutional form of freedom to another, higher one.45 The interpretation made in Capital, coming after that offered by the Hegelian philosophy of history, thus appears as an immense demonstration of the fact that the bulk of violence at work in history was ignored or even denied by Hegel as well as all other representatives of the ideology of progress, their dialectical ambitions notwithstanding. That is why this violence has to be considered “inconvertible” in the Hegelian sense of the word. All of which of course immediately throws up another question—and might be said to leave it glaringly unanswered: is what is involved here not, in the final analysis, an attempt to produce a new model of “conversion” operating on a still vaster scale? Is the act of taking more extensive forms of social violence into account, forms more resistant to the “civilizing of manners,” and throwing them into the historical

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

83

cauldron not bound to show ultimately, the need for an order, except that what is at stake is not the liberal (constitutional) state but a classless society or “communism”? Taking a closer look at the way Marx himself stages the alternative between exception and norm, between regulation and deregulation, may show us how to go about unraveling this theoretical tangle. At the core of the problem, we fi nd the question of structural violence. It is true that, before Marx, there existed theories of domination, and even theories affirming that, as a constant phenomenon in history, material interest (whether economic or of some other kind) drives the dominant to perpetrate violence against the dominated (particularly the violence perpetrated by the rich against the poor). There was, however, no theory of structural violence before Marx because there was no theory of domination as an element in a structure capable of being “reproduced” as a result of the play of its own contradictions or the conflict immanent in it, not the action of arbitrary forces or an external ill will. After Marx, things doubtless took a very different turn: theories of “structural” violence were put forward on all sides. They put the accent on structures of domination other than capital (or based themselves on an analysis of forms of anthropological difference other than the “division of labor” in order to interpret the essence of domination); some of these structures were as determinant in the long term and as universal in their scope as the exploitation of labor power. The reasons for Marxism’s influence and enduring “modernity” but, at the same time, for the most eloquent objections to it, or refutations of it, are rooted in this bid to reply to it. I am thinking in particular of the analysis of the forms of sexual domination ranged by contemporary feminists under the rubric “patriarchy,” and of the forms of cultural domination that can be ranged, in general, under the rubric “symbolic violence.” 46 I do not see in what sense this magnification of the problem, even if it breeds theoretical conflict (and conflicting claims to theoretical legitimacy), detracts from the interest of a discussion of the way Marx conceptualized “structural” violence; it seems to me to enhance it. Simply, it encourages us to take into account, before making any generalizations, Marxist theory’s “finitude.” 47 Let us first set out a few general points. Marx introduces the principle governing all forms of capitalist violence when he defines, in general, that which precipitates the transition from an abstract model of the “market,” founded on simple exchange relations between individual, private owners

84 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

of commodities, to a more concrete model, that of the “capitalist” relations in which money is exchanged for human labor power. All forms of capitalist violence are direct or indirect consequences of the structure that makes labor power a commodity and, consequently, a “thing,” thus conferring on the worker himself the contradictory status of a “subject” that is its own “object” (before becoming that of others), the “owner,” as a legal person, of his body, its physical and intellectual capacities, which can be transferred [aliéné ] to capital. The ideal description of the market derives from a representation of legal ownership that implies a rigorous distinction between persons and things, and even makes it absolute. The situation is reversed, however, once exchange becomes nothing more than a moment in the capitalist process: person and thing then cease to be mutually exclusive categories since persons can be used as things—that is, as commodities that can be consumed as need dictates—and can be physically and intellectually transformed to adapt them to the technological mutations affecting the other “things” with which they enter into combination in the productive process. Marx suggests that this reversal itself includes an element of extreme violence and produces a “fantastic” effect: capital (whether represented as a sum of money or an accumulation of means of production: raw material, machines, factories, and so on) appears as the true “subject” in which the will and capacities of social individuals have been concentrated. In short, capital produces the new Leviathan, simultaneously “automaton” and “autocrat.” 48 But Marx goes still further, for he never believed that the reversal of the anthropological relationship between subject and object resulting from the transformation of labor power into a commodity and from its exploitation could come about automatically, simply by dint of its “form.” On the contrary, what interests him is the resistance that it inevitably engenders, requiring, in its turn, that capital establish repressive or disciplinary means destined to curb or crush resistance. Thus, the class struggle begins as soon as labor power is caught up in the process of its transformation into a commodity, and capital (or the public and private institutions that create the conditions for its uninterrupted operation) undertakes to “manage” the material resource that labor power, considered globally, represents for it. Which of these forms of violence that are inherent in the process of exploitation or spawned by the class struggle can be considered “progressive” from the standpoint of a social history of capitalism? A fortiori, which

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

85

can be considered progressive from the standpoint of a history in which the development of capitalism figures as a protracted transition that creates the conditions of possibility for a “communist” mode of production? These are crucial but thorny questions.49 Second, a class struggle takes place in the labor process itself. Marx made a thoroughgoing study of it based on the main source at his disposal: the factory reports issued from 1850 on by the English parliamentary commissions of inquiry and the “factory inspectors.” This class struggle itself has no other stakes than the boundary between exploitation and superexploitation.50 This boundary, however, which makes it possible to talk about “normal” conditions of exploitation of labor, is in a certain sense impossible to pinpoint: it shifts constantly as an effect of the balance of power between workers (isolated at first, then grouped in trade unions and parties, and developing various forms of solidarity or “class consciousness”), capitalists (who themselves organize as a class by creating their own “unions” or national “committees”), and, finally, the state as a political regulatory agency preoccupied by the need to maintain the conditions for ongoing accumulation. In reality, it is only after the event that we can talk about a difference between exploitation and superexploitation, which is also the difference between more or less limited violence and extreme violence. There exists no “objective” definition of levels of violence. It is especially noteworthy that Marx’s analysis attaches considerable importance to forms in which the functioning of the enterprise combines with that of the family and its historical transformations. Their point of intersection is child labor. The extreme violence involved in putting children to work and in the conditions of their exploitation during the Industrial Revolution (which has its equivalent today, as everyone knows, in most of the world) certainly represents one of the most characteristic forms of capitalist cruelty, not only because we find here every possible type of slavery, ruination of people’s health, and torture or maniacal authoritarianism but also because it sharpens the contradiction between the two aspects of labor power, simultaneously person and thing. The martyred child, rejected after it reaches a certain age because it is no longer of any use to the “factory system,” is ultimately neither one nor the other.51 And it is generally the worker herself who, driven by need, has to adopt the comportment of a slave trader for capital’s benefit, peddling her progeny to procure the wherewithal to

86 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

survive. If we jump from this to the effects of the organized class struggle, which—combined with other forces for the “protection of the social body”— eventually put certain limits on destruction, we can see that it is not so much a question, historically, of radically abolishing this cruelty (even if, in theory, national and international legal norms ban it) as of relegating it to a more or less extensive “periphery.” Thus, there clearly is local conversion of violence into socially more “advanced” forms of exploitation—more civilized and possibly more “productive.” But this comes at the price of its displacement or delocalization. Moreover, it is in this connection that Marx undertakes an analysis of the class struggle as an evolving balance of power [rapport de forces]; we can identify this, retrospectively, as the most “Foucaldian” aspect of his work.52 “Power” does not, in fact, figure in Marx as a univocal term designating an agency that would, from without, impose constraints on the social process; it appears, rather, as the relation itself, that is, the complex, unstable result of the conflict that unfolds in time between discipline and resistance, techniques for exploiting human labor power (what Marx calls “methods for extracting surplus labor”) that are already, in a sense, “techniques of government,” and individual or collective struggles that embody a kind of freedom from the moment of their most elementary manifestations (rather than simply paving the way for an ultimate act of “emancipation”). Note that Marx repeats, in this context, a formula describing the combination of antagonism and legal regulation that takes advantage of the great politicophilosophical “pun” on “violence” and “power” contained in the German word Gewalt: “zwischen gleichen Rechten entscheidet die Gewalt.”53 In the field of law, which is based on the actors’ formal equality, what is decisive in the last instance is the dialectic of violence and power. We can now formulate what we have called “the colonial hypothesis.” Let us recall that the whole of the last section of Capital is given over to the interrelation between the ideas of reproduction and accumulation. What Marx terms “reproduction” is quite simply the structure effect: the continuity of relations of domination through the development of their own contradictions. That is why the concept of reproduction has to include, in its complete form, two moments, each of which envelops the other: (1) the economic process, which ensures that the structure trans-

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

87

forms its internal contradictions into an unlimited capacity to extend the field and scale of exploitation, accumulation on an extended scale as the condition for the permanence of the mode of production; and (2) the political process through which the class struggle is regulated, that is, its organization in the form of trade unions, parties, and political movements, on condition that the state continue to control them or maintain its “hegemony” over them by means of a certain combination of force and negotiation, or violence and consensus.54 In Capital, however, this definition of reproduction is followed by a section containing the famous critical description of “primitive accumulation” as the unleashing by the state and the capitalists themselves of the violence that culminates in the destruction of traditional “social ties,” hence, of the corresponding “communities” and “modes of production” that stand in the way of the concentration of money-capital and the reduction of individuals to the status of mere wage workers. Here it is no longer a matter of reproducing a structure or regulating its reproduction but of clearing a space for its constitution. If we reread the discussion of the “bloody legislation” of seventeenth-century England and the practice of enclosure, we will see that it includes a treatment of colonization while, more generally, sketching a comparison between the methods of exterminating populations that allowed colonization to extend the domination of capital into areas “peripheral” to its original domain and the sometimes equally violent methods employed to impose it in the “core” of the world economy.55 Here, it will be granted, we see nothing of a shifting and, at the limit, reversible “power relation” that is organized in the long term into a mechanism for regulating confl ict. Rather, we have what Rosa Luxemburg, setting out from this description and generalizing it, would later analyze as capitalism’s need permanently to re-create itself, or to reconstitute the conditions for accumulation “in mud and blood.”56 It is worth recalling the way Marx organizes the themes he broaches in the final section of Capital, volume 1 (while bearing in mind that Capital is an unfi nished and probably unfi nishable book), for it raises the difficult problem of how to interpret the relationship between the depiction of the course of history and the distribution of the various modalities of violence. These themes are organized as follows:

88 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

1. “Simple reproduction” (that is, the abstract concept of structure) (chapter 23); 2. “Reproduction on an extended scale” or “accumulation” (the object of which is basically the correspondence between the cycles of capital and the cycles of employment, leading to what Marx calls the “law of population” of the capitalist mode of production, and to the inversion that, in the long term, transforms the “law of appropriation” of commodities by people into the “law of appropriation” of people by the production of commodities) (chapters 23 and 25); 3. “Primitive accumulation,” the discussion of which is broken down into 3.1. A critique of the economists’ theory of the origins of capital— and capitalism—in individual work and saving, and an account of the genesis of the capitalist mode of production (through the violence of the “absolutist” state) (chapter 26, paragraphs 1–6); 3.2. “The historical tendency of capitalist accumulation” (by a “natural law,” capitalist accumulation leads to the “negation of negation”—that is, to the emergence of a classless society when the “expropriators are expropriated” as a result of the revolutionary use of violence, “the midwife of history”) (chapters 31 and 32, paragraph 7); and 4. “The modern theory of colonization” (exemplified by Ireland) (chapter 33).

To be sure, volume 1 is by definition just the beginning of a much bigger project. Marx must have believed that it would shortly be followed by the next volumes; it was therefore not his intention to provide the “true conclusion” of the whole work at this point. The fact remains that—either in order to give readers, especially socialist militants, an idea of what the work as a whole would demonstrate or in order to resolve for himself a political uncertainty resulting from the analyses of capital as the extraction and accumulation of surplus value [Mehrwert ]—Marx unmistakably offers a lesson about the “end” of the process here: the revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism is the necessary consequence (the historical tendency) of the development of the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Yet this “concluding word” is followed by a supplement that treats an apparently secondary question (colonization).57 Why this incongruous postscript?

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

89

One explanation might refer to what Leo Strauss later called the art of writing in conditions of “persecution.” There is no lack of justification for it here. Wanting to state his revolutionary conclusions in the first volume, Marx would have had to hide them amid scholarly discussions of a more academic cast in order to pull the wool over the censors’ eyes. It is well known that censors usually contented themselves with examining specimens, opening books at the first and last pages to determine their nature (in this case, an economic-historical work, nothing at all like a “party” manifesto). Without necessarily rejecting this explanation, we can advance another, more intrinsic hypothesis based on the symptoms of crisis that can be glimpsed in this text. In fact, the process of writing volume 1 did not issue in the determination of a single, linear “tendency” of capitalist development but in at least three possible developmental paths. History seems to have been left hanging in suspense between them (as if waiting for a “decision”): • Reproduction, as a process combining socialization and structural violence, leads to a “dynamic equilibrium,” a regulatory scheme in which the class struggle itself becomes a condition for accumulation (this conversion of conflict into a mechanism for stabilizing structures and maintaining power is in many respects comparable to the political scheme that Machiavelli sketches in the Discorsi (book 1, chapters 1–4, which Marx probably did not know firsthand);58 • Reproduction culminates in the “expropriation of the expropriators,” the violent transformation of the structure, because at a certain point the “objective” as well as the “subjective” conditions for revolution (in Lenin’s terms) are realized. It seems reasonable to suppose that what leads to the crystallization of the “subjective conditions” is the very excesses of exploitation; in other words, violence that cannot be converted into regulatory power or the “government” of class struggle, and that what engenders the “objective” conditions, albeit in contradictory form, is the development of “socialization” thanks to the concentration of capital and labor; or • Reproduction periodically revives the violent forms of “primitive accumulation,” opposed term for term to institutional regulation;

90 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

but the form that “primitive accumulation” typically takes in the history of modern capitalism is colonization, either “external” or “internal.” Having thus discerned three different—and politically contradictory— latent conclusions in Marx’s text, let us go on to describe the different political “strategies” that flow from them and correspond to them term for term.59 These are, to be sure, only virtually present in Marx himself. But they are concretely posed by Marx’s writing in Capital; they constitute its materiality, indicating its “experimental” nature, later effaced by dogmatism (or by rival forms of dogmatism, each in its own way). It is incumbent on us today to discover this experimental nature again. 1. The “social-democratic” interpretation is based on singling out and absolutizing those of Marx’s formulas that delineate the possibility of regulating the class struggle in the framework of capitalism (to the detriment of the “revolutionary conclusions” taken from the manifesto and repeated at the end of Capital ). As interpreted by Social Democrats, these formulas raise the possibility of civilizing capitalism. Violence is converted into the precondition not of a status quo but of a “reform” process in which technological progress, social movements, and state legislation combine and reinforce one another. (Marx himself seems to have sketched this possibility with his analysis of the class struggles for a “normal working-day” and the factory legislation). 2. The “revolutionary” interpretation—which Marx seems to privilege—is based on the possibility of arranging the three phases of the history of capitalism in teleological succession. By way of the extreme violence of “primitive” accumulation, we fi rst move from precapitalist, more or less communitarian modes of production and social organization, based on servants’ and peasants’ “personal dependency” on their masters, to the generalization of the wage relation. From there we move from capitalist accumulation reproduction to the “expropriation of the expropriators” 60 (the Marxist equivalent of Hegelian Aufhebung ) by way of revolutionary violence, which acts as the “midwife” of history and the new society “gestating within the

“ INCONVERTIBLE”

VIOLENCE?

91

womb” of the old. Thus, initially violence is basically destructive. Later, however, it is relegated to the margins of the process of exploitation, flagging its constantly resurgent “excesses” before presenting itself as an antinomic combination of destruction and construction in line with a demiurgical tradition of representing change in history. 3. Finally, the third interpretation is the one Luxemburg advances in The Accumulation of Capital, setting out from a “left-wing” criticism of the evolutionist, Eurocentric conceptions of the history of capitalism common to various orthodox currents.61 Her central thesis is that “primitive accumulation,” far from being confined to capitalism’s “origins,” should be considered an interminable process, coextensive with capitalist expansion on a “world” scale. For this expansion (in the absence of which, according to Luxemburg, capital cannot overcome the contradictions internal to its “reproduction” 62) dictates the destruction of preexisting modes of production and the attendant forms of historical community. Thus, the origins never cease to recur at the heart of the structure, and the unleashing of ultraobjective violence—far from constituting a peripheral and, at the limit, contingent excess that holds back accumulation and technological progress rather than facilitating them—forms their necessary counterpart. Capitalism constructs only by destroying (always destroying more, perhaps, than it constructs).63

There we have “the colonial hypothesis” in the proper sense. We can, however, extend it in the form of a generalized colonial hypothesis by suggesting that, once capitalism has finished conquering, dividing up, and colonizing the world in the geographic sense (thus becoming “planetary”), it begins to recolonize it or to colonize its own “core.” At that point, colonization takes the form both of internal colonization, bound up with the emergence of “dual societies” in which inequalities are transformed into exclusions, and of processes of “desocialization” of forms of cooperation or solidarity that it has itself brought into being, or that have developed in reaction to it.64 This process thus seems to be a process without end—at any rate, without any end predetermined by the “level of development” of its productive forces.65 Capitalism as a system or social formation with a

92 “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

history going back several centuries doubtless has developed a specific “civilization” whose more or less inegalitarian, more or less emancipatory modalities depended, in every one of its occurrences, on a relationship that can be termed agonistic: tending, that is, to produce institutions out of conflict itself. The moment also comes, however, when its inherent logic of exploitation as superexploitation and production as “creative” destruction plunges the human lives from which it draws its productivity into a state of subhumanity.66

FOUR STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

T H E R E A R E S E V E R A L WAYS O F U S I N G T H E R E A D I N G S T H AT I proposed at the end of my last lecture. Are we still, will we always be, “reading Capital ”? No doubt; and we are beginning to understand that, as with every truly great theoretical oeuvre (Hegel’s, for example), our task is by its nature endless because the meaning we are looking for can only be found at the point where questions formulated on the basis of current events (or even current emergencies) encounter contradictions that, in latent fashion, haunt the writing of the text that we have to set back in motion. The goal we are pursuing here, however, is not (if it ever was) purely epistemological. We are trying to shed light on the thorny question of the various conceptions of politics, their irreducible plurality, and the choices they dictate. Such a plurality is well and truly to be found in Marx, at the level of the bifurcations of his analyses of capitalism. We can rather clearly see how he himself made up his mind—at a certain point—to interpret it, sometimes, as the case demanded, at the price of repressing certain insights (history rapidly took it upon itself to challenge this repression). If we take Capital as our reference text, we can see that this plurality is associated, precisely,

94

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

with the difference between the various historical strategies compatible with the concept of “class struggle.” Implicitly in Marx’s early texts,1 explicitly in the Manifesto, there is a politics of the end of politics (and therefore also the end of history), for which the leap into the future first takes the form of a return to “initial” or “primitive” violence, where the idea of an emancipation that, inverting oppression, transforms it into liberation constitutes a sort of upwelling of the realm of light at the heart of the realm of shadows. This apocalyptic scheme recurs constantly in the messianic currents of twentieth-century Marxism.2 At the opposite extreme, Social Democracy’s reformist theorists (less the representatives of “orthodoxy,” it must be said, than the heretics or “revisionists” who took the pains to deconstruct the apparent systematicity of historical materialism) developed a concept of politics as civilization, if not “civility.”3 This concept is the object of a denegation in Marx himself, although it must be said that that denegation is by no means uniform, as Marx’s altercations with Marxism go to show. The revolutionary formula that he nevertheless tends to privilege is the one that inscribes the possibility of abolishing exploitation (the emancipation that, he said in his 1864 “Provisional Rules of the Working Men’s International Association,” would be “conquered by the working classes themselves”) in a transformation of the structure of domination; the material bases for it have been prepared by the whole history of capitalism. Yet it can only be realized violently. Once again at issue, then, is a concept of the conversion of violence into not power or the institution of a state but revolution. Although all these strategies imply, in one way or another, an intrinsic relation between politics and violence—more precisely, between politics and the historical conditions for the abrupt transformation of capitalism’s structural violence into forms of extreme violence—none takes into account (at least explicitly, at the conceptual level) the articulation of the ultraobjective and ultrasubjective forms that they nevertheless occasionally encounter in their object (this is a fortiori the case, naturally enough, when Marx reflects, as a committed witness, on “catastrophic” episodes of contemporary history, particularly those that associate revolution with civil war). For this reason, I would like, in my third and last lecture, to try to formulate more precisely, with regard to the historical functions of violence, this notion of a multiplicity of strategies or conceptions of politics—but, above all, to displace it. To that end, I shall deliberately take up a position in Marx “beyond Marx.” 4

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

95

I begin by returning to the topography of the heterogeneous sketched in the second of these exposes. In suggesting that the Möbius strip as utilized by Lacan can provide a first, schematic illustration of the “nonrelation” relating the heterogeneous forms of cruelty to each other (see Diagram 1, p. 73), I was trying to suggest a way of visualizing the fact, without explaining it, that these forms flow continuously into one another, remaining, in contradictory fashion, utterly different (like the two sides of a Möbius strip as seen from a “local” standpoint) and indiscernible (hence, “identical” from a structural standpoint, like one and the same point on a Möbius strip when it is considered in global fashion). Obviously, this is a way of imposing on the imagination in order to represent the unrepresentable: the moment when, impossibly, the subjective and the objective coincide. The same thing can be put in Marxist terms: the ideological, a socially organized form of the imaginary, and the economic, source of both production and destruction, contribute to producing the same “real” effects, with the proviso that the point is precisely to invalidate any mechanical addition or dialectical synthesis of these two “factors” or “discourses” with causal pretensions. From a different point of view, the Möbius strip is a metaphor for the political closure that results from the continuous passage from one form of violence to another: for instance, when cruelty manifests itself as, alternately, impoverishment; the physiological misery of populations; a lifting of the cultural and religious forms of repression that counter idealization of hatred of the other (one’s neighbor, more often than not) by confining it to the unconscious; and, ultimately, extermination.5 Or, to take another example, when, on a daily basis, exploitation and racism take turns battering a target ranged under the general rubric “immigrant populations.” In such paradigmatic situations, which, albeit “extreme,” are more or less closely approximated by other situations in history, it would appear that what gives way is the possibility for collective subjects of imagining their historical objectives as anything other than annihilation of the other, and of constructing institutional strategies, forms of solidarity, and ways of representing time with an eye to changing individuals’ conditions of existence. What therefore also gives way is the corresponding possibility for those individuals to take their place— out of conviction or because of their social condition—in the framework of an organized struggle that distinguishes at every moment between

96

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

immediate and final objectives, principal and secondary contradictions, adversaries and potential allies. All that survives, it seems, are the dizzying absolutes of identity and a hostile environment, objects of anxiety or threat—or, to use Lacan’s terminology again, the “void” or “gap,” at once internal and external, in which the subject/object distinction collapses and, with it, the topography or cartography of action. In contrast, the “horseshoe” diagram is less puzzling (see Diagram 3, p. 75). It can be seen as a dismantling of the Möbius strip that brings us back into the field of the representable: we can make the diagram figure the strategies we use to identify extreme violence as an effect of preexisting structures whose effectivity it takes to the limit, in the realm of either the ideological imaginary (especially the imaginary of sovereignty) or that of the economy, insofar as the economy tends, on Marx’s analysis, to reproduce the human/inhuman conditions of exploitation. But this comes at the price of an abstraction or metaphysical insularization of the two “stages” [scènes] of imaginary and economic reality; it breeds the illusion that each obeys its own pure logic (the fantastical ambivalence of the similar and the foreign, or the radical utilitarianism of exchange value), even if, in the end, the double face of cruelty always surges up again, when, for example, the violence of power [le pouvoir] or domination carried to an extreme seems to contradict its own logic, transforming production into destruction, utility into uselessness, and subjection into extermination of the subject.6 There is a way of utilizing this diagram differently—negatively, we might say. I alluded to it when I suggested that we think politics’ condition of possibility by setting out from its very impossibility: less as an “exit from the state of nature” (in line with the ideal procedure common to Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant, and always latent in Hegel’s and Marx’s conversion schemes) than as a disjunction of the forms of ultraobjective and ultrasubjective violence. Obviously, such a formula is very hard to distinguish from a moral injunction or precept. Yet it should not be reduced to that, for the disjunction that we are talking about here is not so much a preexisting condition as a result immanent in the invention of politics as collective action. It is only if, where, and when the “extremes” do not coincide but are separated by a distance that prevents individuals and groups (or “societies”) from being caught in the trap represented by the ideological deliriums of identity or economic and ecological disasters that a space for politics emerges—or, bet-

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

97

ter, has already emerged in whatever institutional form, democratic or despotic, progressive or conservative, revolutionary or hegemonic. It will be recalled that the Aristotelian definition of politics as the common praxis of citizens (to which it is difficult not to return from time to time, as an instrument for measuring conceptual deviations7), the public space in which political activity unfolds, is also defi ned ethically by way of a reference to “virtues” (or capacities) such as intelligence (or prudence: phronesis) and sociability (or friendship: philia). It presupposes that one rise above the realm of “necessity” (ta anagkaia), that is, the production and reproduction of life and the means of subsistence. Here I am attempting to think the opposite: the idea that the space and time of politics emerge not from an abstraction from or transcendence of necessity, much less out of an abstraction from or transcendence of the forms of the production of life, which, as modernity has taught us to see, are the permanent object of politics (and political economy), but rather out of a precarious disjunction of the counterposed ways in which human life can be destroyed and politics can abolish its own conditions of possibility.8 It seems to me that it is this circularity of political practice, the first object of which is to sublate its own impossibility (concretely, to forestall its own destruction), that makes politics a “work of art,” as Hegel says of the Greek city-state.9 What must be put at the center of the concept of politics, in other words, is not the idea that politics falls under the ideal. It is not even that politics is “rare,” as certain contemporary philosophers would have it.10 The notion of politics as an ideal situated beyond the realm of necessity, like that of politics as a rare event, is connected with eschatological visions of the time and place of politics, even if those visions are cast in secularized form. The idea of the precariousness of politics can be associated, it seems to me, with a modality of contingency that in some sort inscribes risk and discontinuity in everyday life (or, better, in the everyday reality of conflict). The form in which we ordinarily acknowledge the necessity of maintaining the space or site of politics even while creating it is, obviously, the institution. I am not here using the term in the purely legal and administrative sense, nor in the phenomenological sense (as in Cornelius Castoriadis), but rather in an anthropological sense—in the sense in which certain contemporary authors in France and the United States are working toward an anthropology of citizenship.11 The notion of institution is ambiguous or,

98

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

rather, applies to a whole range of historical transformations and competing forms. State institutions, even taking the term in the broad sense—corresponding to the emergence of the “citizen” as a political figure, a legacy of the antique “polis” and its principle of membership and participation in affairs of common interest (the Greeks’ politeia and the Romans’ civitas or ius civitatis) that was reconstituted on very different bases by the unequally democratized modern nation-states in the general framework of an international legal system—obviously represent just one aspect of what we call institutions, the one that restricts the definition of the institution to the “public” sphere. Following a tradition that runs from Aristotle to Montesquieu and from Hegel to Gramsci and Althusser, I here set out from the idea that the decisive moment of (the) institution (in the twofold sense of the act of instituting and the result of that act) is not the emergence of the public sphere as an instance separate from society, but the articulation of public and private, their always relative, shifting disjunction being nothing more, in this regard, than the condition of individual and collective transition from one sphere to the other. (The classic example is education, the most massive, most universalizing segment of which is not accidentally referred to in French as the task of instituteurs [elementary schoolteachers]). Yet the fact remains that, in this articulation, political philosophy’s traditional conception of things privileges the action of the state or government [le pouvoir]. This suggests that the space of politics, as the precarious gap between the heterogeneous forms of extreme violence that threaten it with collapse from within, results from an initiative “from above,” thus presupposing the existence of a center of reference or the framework of a totality, even when it is granted (as in contractualist theories) that the institution is the everyday result of political activity as well as its preexisting condition of possibility. It might seem that the emergence of democratic institutions (which represent, in a certain way, the historical truth of contractualism) does not fundamentally alter this situation precisely insofar as, by a historical efficacious fiction (even if only in the guise of a symbolic narrative that reinforces the legitimacy of the state and the practice of obedience), they concentrate the power of the people (what the classics call the “multitude”) in the form of a general will that is, supposedly, constantly formed and reformed at the center of the political space, over and above its divisions or conflicts of interest. In reality, however, the emergence of such institutions implies a pro-

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

99

found transformation of the problem, for the state has never been democratized without demands, resistance, or an upsurge of forces “from below,” designated by the political tradition precisely in a manner at once extensive and specific, with the name demos, the egalitarian component of the “constituent” people.12 That is why we can grant both that the institution of the state is political in the active sense, or that, especially in its democratic (or, better, democratized13) forms, it helps open up a space for politics while also granting that it does not do so without finding itself caught up in a conflict between the tendency (on the part of a class, a caste, a bureaucracy, or an apparatus) to monopolize power, and the tendency to citizenship as the concrete conquest of freedom and equality.14 But this conflict can (and even must, in situations of dictatorship, exclusion, colonization, and so on) itself take violent forms or “go to extremes.” The contribution of the institution to establishing a space for politics in which the forms of (self-)destructive extreme violence are—if only temporarily—ruled out is thus itself conditional. It depends on historical (“objective,” “subjective”) conditions that subject its efficacy to a second degree of “politicity” at once immanent and heterogeneous: the degree, precisely, that I am hypothetically calling “civility.” Let me make two further remarks here. First, if we go back to the question of the relationship between history and politics, discussed—by way of a commentary on Hegel—in our first lecture, we may say that the opening up of a space for politics is also the opening up of the site of historicity. For it points back, independently of all global or synthetic representations of historical becoming (whether of cycles, progress, bifurcation or dissemination, or even the indeterminacy of the “direction” of social, cultural, and institutional transformations), to the subjective/objective unity of acts and events that change the conditions of human practice and, consequently, pose the problem of their duration, the consequences they will have, and the traces they will leave—or not. In the absence of one or another form of politics, then, there would be no history in the strong sense. Yet it soon appears that such a formulation is ambiguous. It leaves us, in some sense, straddling an intellectual borderline. We can take it to mean that historicity (as a negation of immobility or repetition— supposing that immobility in the strict sense is ever possible—but also of absolute contingency, without direction or memory) has institution for its framework, or, at least, the possibility of institution and institutional

100

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

transformations. Thus it would seem to presuppose that cruelty has been overcome, even if it is still situated within cruelty’s horizon and under its latent threat, making it fragile or contingent. Extreme violence as such is not, apparently, in history, is not a moment of the historical process; rather, it would seem to mark its limit and finitude. We can, however, also take our formulation to mean that historicity is what produces the material conditions (especially the institutional conditions) of action, the event, duration, or the trace: in that sense, it points, not to a history that unfolds within limits but precisely at the limits—that is to say, a history that consists in establishing, displacing, recreating, negotiating, and imposing the limit itself. Historicity is not a becoming that proceeds from a preexisting guarantee of the limits of action or passion (in the sense in which Auguste Comte says that “progress is the development of order”). Rather, it is what emerges when such limits remain uncertain or are questioned—which also means endangered. From this standpoint the identity of historicity (or the opening up of a possibility of history) with the opening up of the political space takes on a much stronger sense. In fact, politics as such is from the outset at work in this opening up. It cannot exist as a practice or a set of individual and collective acts that inscribe themselves in an institutional framework or contest that institutional framework, unless it is simultaneously invention, recreation, or preservation of the very limits of the institution which stand between it and its collapse—for which the institution itself creates the conditions. This idea underlies what the republican tradition—exemplified in modern times by Machiavelli or Montesquieu but also by Spinoza—calls “virtue”; but it doubtless also underlies what, inverting the Hegelian dialectic in a revolutionary perspective, Marx calls “making history” under determinate material and ideological conditions.15 In any case, virtù or praxis leads us to the representation of a “subject” or “political actor” who finds herself in a position to inflect history, found an institution, or leave a trace in history, precisely to the extent to which she confronts the unavoidable reality of violence in order to “decide” (even if unconsciously or involuntarily) how it enters into her own constitution and what limits it assigns her existence (that is, her capacity to act and suffer, resist and communicate, revolt and defend herself ). The relationship of the forms of history to those of politics is thus condemned to remain circular, under the threat and

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

101

warning of extreme violence, within the horizon of encounters with cruelty and in a permanent negotiation of the ways of “utilizing” and “moderating” it, but with no guarantee of continuity. That is why I said earlier that politics is not “rare” (no more so than history) but is by nature precarious. It will thus be readily understood why we cannot content ourselves with the idea that the space of politics is opened up by the existence and play of institutions, even if we define that term in a broader anthropological sense not limited to state institutions whose avowed objective is to establish a horizon of security for human activities, particularly “political behaviors,” on condition that they respect more or less democratic institutional rules.16 That is my second remark. Precisely because we do not believe in the possibility of politics without institutions (the possibility of absolutely spontaneous or radically “constituent” politics), we necessarily fi nd ourselves from time to time at the limit, where the stakes are not the continuation of politics in the framework of, or by means of, existing institutions (including institutions of protest or the revolutionary institutions known as “movements” or mass “parties”), but clearly the spacing or delimitation of violence, the distribution of violence and counterviolence between various agents and instances, the forms and sites of the emergence of a civility that distances the diverse modalities of violence from one another and wards off their “extremity.” No existing institution can do this (at least not by itself.) These problems, which are preliminary to institution while remaining its permanent condition of possibility, force themselves on our attention whenever we seek to found politics again under new historical conditions. It seems that precisely this holds today for a series of limit problems, the more or less convincing list of which—confused, perhaps, on a number of points—has become symptomatic of the “challenges of globalization” (or of “local” problems that activate “global” problems not controlled by any institution or counterinstitution, even international). These limit problems illustrate, to various degrees, the combination of ultraobjective and ultrasubjective manifestations of extreme violence: ecological catastrophes as well as genocides but also “new” ethnoreligious wars, imperialist interventions with or without “humanitarian” cover, epidemics with a differential impact on the rates of reproduction of the world’s populations, and mass migrations by victims of global poverty. The relation of these phenomena to the formation of multicultural and postcolonial societies, the transformation

102

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

of the means of communication into “universal” systems for distributing images and interconnecting computers, the emergence of capitalist companies more powerful than most states, the autonomization of fi nancial markets with respect to the productive economy, and so on, all this remains enigmatic and, at the same time, practically undeniable.17 It is thus a question for us here and now, not merely a speculative question. It may well be that none of these problems, or the structural changes that they reflect, is new. It seems, however, that we have crossed one or more thresholds that are unbalancing the relationship between the modalities of extreme violence as it is developing in this situation, and the power of institutions (or citizens themselves by means of these institutions) to control and reduce such violence. I am surely not the only one to think that the project for a “New World Order” invented after the Cold War (and already somewhat passé) represents only a pale approximation of what is called for—if it is not, in fact, just the opposite.18 I have another reason as well for thinking that a model for the institutional construction of the space for politics would not suffice, at least not in its dominant legal and state form. Those who have never had organizational ties with the “socialist project” that, under the aegis of Marxism, had undertaken to change the world (that is, the capitalist world), those who have never shared its hopes, inherited its watchwords, or suffered because of its decline, are likely to find this reason a little too personal. I shall nevertheless hazard stating it. It comes down to this: because we failed to accomplish—to use Régis Debray’s phrase—a “revolution in the revolution,” which is to say a transformation of the revolutionary movement from within, now that there no longer is a revolutionary movement (at least for the time being), we must nevertheless arrive at an understanding of what made the revolution fail, not only because of its enemies’ might or the unfavorable conditions in which it was attempted but also because of its own internal weakness and blindness (which, be it noted in passing, are doubtless one and the same thing: for if the essence of reform is to negotiate a shift in the balance of power in a given situation, the essence of revolution resides, precisely, in the capacity to confront superior enemy forces and invent the means of countering their superior numbers). Probably one of the fundamental causes (but also puzzles, for there is nothing rational about this “causality”) of the socialist revolutions’ utter inability to “change the world” lay precisely

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

103

in their utter incapacity to control, theoretically or practically, the backlash to and perverse effects of the situations of violence in which they occurred: the acts of counterrevolutionary violence infl icted on revolutionary movements but also the acts of violence that they perpetrated, particularly when they were legitimate and institutionalized in their turn in the framework of revolutionary states, and when that violence encompassed even the liquidation of “internal enemies”—a truly suicidal process with along string of traumatic effects, which were most often denied as such. Having thus raised the problem, I hasten to rectify my precaution of a moment ago. Why, in fact, should we suppose that the day of revolutions is over? As long as we do not attach the word “revolution” to a unique model, predetermined forms of political organization, ideological mobilization, tactics for the seizure of power or counter-power, and so on, but only (only!) to the idea of a collective political movement intent on transforming structures of domination that will not disappear spontaneously, or, again, to a movement intent on changing change, I see no reason to exclude this historical perspective. Not only do I not think the structures of social domination— whether economic, cultural, or sexual—will dissolve on their own; I also do not think their consequences can always be prevented from getting worse without violence, or without the becoming-violent of a social force that is the object of a form of repression that is itself violent. That is precisely why I consider it so important, and so relevant to the present, to understand—retrospectively, and therefore prospectively—how to “civilize” a revolutionary movement from within, how to introduce the antiviolence that I call civility into the very heart of the violence of a social transformation. It is here that we encounter Rosa Luxemburg again. For that was precisely the question that she posed with her comments on the Russian Revolution, made as the events were unfolding, when, addressing the Bolsheviks, she protested that instituting the dictatorship of the proletariat to the detriment of any element of representative democracy “must inevitably cause a brutalization [Verwilderung ] of public life.”19 Against the backdrop of passionate debates about “bourgeois” and “proletarian” forms of democracy, this warning (we must never forget that it went hand in hand with an unambiguous declaration of solidarity with the revolution, expressed from within the movement) was widely interpreted (to begin with, by the Bolsheviks and Lenin) as a straightforward defense of the parliamentary

104

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

system, constitutional order, and state of law, and thus as a rejection of the revolutionary logic that led to a participatory democracy of the “soviet” type, and as proof of “political vacillation” in the face of the class adversary. Nevertheless, I think today (I have not always been of this opinion) that we can read Luxemburg’s warning differently, putting the accent on not this or that institutional or legal form but the revolution’s need (even in the midst of the revolutionary process) for a representative moment. That is to say, its need for a moment that allows a collective movement, especially a “mass” movement, to take a distance from itself, or to produce a Verfremdungseffekt, in an almost Brechtian sense, vis-à-vis its collective identity and its way of imagining its ends and means (its forces): an effect of critical perception resulting from a “staging” or spatialization [mise en scène ou en espace]. In other words, what was at issue then (and doubtless, mutatis mutandis, still is), was the idea that the revolution, present and to come—because of its failure to see itself and describe itself for what it was—risked being overwhelmed by the very barbarity that it was trying to expunge from history. Or, to tie together the “three concepts of politics” to which I have already had occasion to refer: unless a politics of civility is introduced into the heart of the politics of transformation, indications are that the latter will not by itself create the conditions for emancipation (but only those of another form of servitude). Most assuredly, the late Luxemburg (whether or not she had a presentiment of the fate awaiting her) is no longer quite the same “prophetic” or “messianic” Rosa whom we have seen hailing the “catastrophe” of global capitalism through the interlinking of war and revolution. But neither is the late Luxemburg antithetical to that earlier Luxemburg; she is not, in any event, any less revolutionary. She is, in my view, defined by her recognition of the antinomic nature of violence, not only the violence exercised by the state but also that employed by the revolution. A few years later, in the striking but obscure formulations of his “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin would restate this question with respect to the difference between “mythic” and “divine” violence.20 The perception of this antinomy is quite as clearly present in Hegel and passes from Hegel to Marx and Lenin (thus it does not exclude an appeal to the scheme of “conversion”). In Luxemburg, however, we find the sketch—even if it is only allusive—of another attitude.

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

105

It is no longer a matter of discerning, in the antinomy of political violence, the logical or speculative form (the unity of opposites) that makes it possible to identify history with a dialectic of radical transformation (since “history progresses by its bad side”) but of introducing another dialectic (that of violence and antiviolence) into the practice of transformation itself on the basis of an understanding that political violence can never be completely controlled. One cannot simply use it as a means in the service of certain ends (or else it is a question of a “pure means,” as Benjamin says) without oneself feeling the ambivalent effects of its use, “deliberate” or not. It would be possible to show here that this insight is not peculiar to Rosa Luxemburg but attests her kinship with other political thinkers who, despite their many differences from her and the fact that they were in the opposite camp, were neither positivists nor mystics. Max Weber is an example. On the other hand, Luxemburg’s insight put her at opposite poles from Lenin’s position as stated in the texts in which, in the midst of the revolutionary process, he postulated that the essence of violence (especially violence that mobilizes the state and is conflated with its function) consists in crushing resistance with the help of an “apparatus” or a “machine.” That is why the state apparatus, which is merely an instrument, can be just as easily employed by the dominant who use it to crush the resistance of the dominated to exploitation, as by the dominated when they wrest the “bludgeon” from the hands of the dominant class and use it in their turn to crush the latter’s resistance to the transformation of society and the abolition of the conditions of exploitation.21 Not only is the assumption here that violence is, as such, politically neutral, that is, comparable to a thing that one or another subject can seize and use to her own ends with altering its identity; more profoundly, the assumption is that the mobilization and voluntary use of violence (or renewed recourse to it on a voluntary basis after a utilization dictated by circumstances) will not call the limits of objectivity and subjectivity into question. In other words, the “subjective” pole will not be invaded by uncontrollable “objective” forces, just as the “objective” pole (the objectives and practical results of political action) will not be invaded and denatured by ultrasubjective imaginary representations of destruction, self-destruction, conspiracy, and so on. We know, however, that that is exactly what did happen in the course of the revolution and, above all, the phase of the construction

106

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

of the state (and police) institutions that sought to defend the revolution’s achievements, especially under the influence of a “mimetic rivalry” with fascism (but perhaps even earlier). I shall make one last remark on this point. The critique of revolutionary violence that we find in Rosa Luxemburg remains sketchy, yet it is sufficiently well developed to allow us to sharply distinguish it from a “reformist” critique. But it is not the only possible critique. One can also begin by questioning the classic (that is, metaphysical) idea of an instrumental relation between “means” and “ends,” and go to the other extreme, making nonviolence the basis for a politics of emancipation and social transformation, thus completely inverting the model of revolutionary violence implied by the Marxist tradition. Gandhi’s name comes naturally to mind, and Gandhi is doubtless, with Lenin, precisely, one of the greatest twentiethcentury strategists and organizers of a revolutionary movement. In my view, the interest of Gandhi stems especially from the fact that, even if satyagraha (imperfectly rendered as “the force of the truth”) necessarily includes a dimension of discipline, control, and purification of the “self,” hence of an asceticism that is at once individual and collective (or collectivizable), it is not exactly a mystic practice.22 It is a politics in which nonviolence is theorized, organized, and differentiated as a function of circumstances, and its goal is to reverse a certain power constellation. This is not the place to undertake an examination of the principles and history of Gandhian politics. We must nevertheless ask (the question shall here remain open) whether nonviolence is not marked by antinomies just as profound as those associated with violence (one thinks in particular of Derrida’s phrase to the effect that the violence of nonviolence is a terrible violence).23 With that, I enter the last stretch. Everyone knows that it is the toughest. I now come to the question of the different strategies of civility. I shall not broach it from the standpoint of programs or slogans (I am not out to write a manifesto) but from that of the philosophical distinctions that such an idea requires us to introduce. What interests me, ultimately, is the intrinsic pluralism of the notion of civility as such, once one sets out to think it as a “politics” at the heart of politics itself. I shall consider three approaches that are, ideally, distinct. Each is an intellectual construction; thus, the point is not that they belong to actually

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

107

separated worlds. In reality, the simple fact that it is not only not possible to determine, outside a particular conjuncture, which of them is “true,” but even which of them corresponds to a “correct [ juste] line,” means that we take the measure of the inadequacy of theory in the very moment in which we try to adjust [ajuster] it. History shows that no situation of extreme violence is characterized by the presence of a single danger, a single adversary, or a single aspect of the adversary: this was true even in the conditions of the struggle against fascism, and is a fortiori true in the context of the neofascist (or, as is sometimes said, “populist”) developments to which nationalism today lends itself, especially in Europe. The multiplicity of the conceivable strategies of civility by itself constitutes a way of reflecting on the complexity of the problem posed by “opening up (or reopening) the space for politics.” Yet, if it seems to me worthwhile to construct ideal types, particularly by referring to the work of the philosophers, it is also in order to try to understand what takes place “between” the strategic perspectives, at the points of their mutual interference or disjunction.24 This is the very object of a philosophy of practice. The fact is that Hegel and Foucault here interest us less as the authors of a systematization of this or that conception of civility taken by itself than as writers whose work is engaged in a movement of overcoming or adjusting theory. The first of the approaches I have singled out is based on a return to Hegel (as in the first of these lectures) or, more exactly, on an examination of the problem that his doctrine of Sittlichkeit (“custom,” “ethical life,” or “objective morality,” depending on the translation) leaves unsolved. I call it hegemonic strategy, projecting back onto Hegel’s texts about Sittlichkeit questions that come to us from Gramsci, so as to make it possible to discuss conjointly problems bearing on citizenship, education, universality, and normality.25 The second approach—which I will discuss more rapidly because of everything I have just said about the Marxist tradition and the alternatives it includes—could be called majoritarian strategy. The most interesting procedure here, it seems to me, consists in proceeding from the elements of civility found in Marx and, more importantly, certain internal critiques of the Marxist tradition back to the twofold, qualitative and quantitative dimension with which the notion of “majority” is endowed in our political tradition: the mass or multitude of the people, and the citizen’s capacity to emancipate himself by his own efforts, to be her own master and teacher. What I call

108

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

majoritarian strategy is not, however, merely the idea of collective emancipation or mass emancipation / emancipation by the mass. It is the solution sought in a “civic” framework (or the framework of an institution of citizenship) to the aporias of an emancipation that concerns the multitude as such. Third and last, I would like to consider a form of civility seemingly at antipodes from both majoritarian hegemonies and majoritarian strategies of emancipation; it consists in the “becoming-minoritarian of minorities.” Obviously, the expression “become minoritarian” comes straight from Deleuze. It plays, notably, an important role in A Thousand Plateaus, a book he coauthored with Guattari that seeks, in particular, to renew our thinking— in contemporary conditions—about resistance to fascism by attempting to grasp the abiding mechanisms of its dominion.26 I will later be quoting a passage by Deleuze (and Guattari) that is valuable in its own right but even more interesting, in my view, when read as an attempt to displace certain problems raised by Foucault in connection with “power.” Let us begin by recalling a few characteristic moments of Hegel’s political construction, which presents itself as an elaboration of the idea of the “constitution” (Verfassung ). The decisive text is part 3 of the 1821 Philosophy of Right (“Die Sittlichkeit”), itself subdivided into three sections (the family; civil society, which combines an examination of civil law [droit privé ] with a study of economic processes based on the division of labor; and the state in the proper sense, considered as a system of public power). The doctrine of social “estates” [Stände]—including the theory of the “universal class,” which Hegel identifies with the bureaucracy—continues to fuel debate between advocates of a liberal and advocates of a corporatist reading of Hegel. This doctrine forms the transitional element between civil society and the state: it shows that social groups whose substance derives from the division of labor exist historically (or take institutional form) only insofar as their members’ functions are recognized by the state and incorporated into its constitution. This doctrine is rounded out, from this standpoint (whence the commentators’ hesitation between the two readings) by the crucial doctrine of public opinion (the sticking point for Marx in his critical rereading of 184327), which institutes the reciprocal relationship between state and society, without which there could be no “recognition.” Let us further recall that the conception of Sittlichkeit presented amid a wealth of “empirical-speculative” detail in The Philosophy of Right (inspiring Marx’s

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

109

ironical comments on the way Hegel thought he could deduce the real from the articulations of the concept) represents a very important transformation of Hegel’s earlier conceptions, especially that of chapter 6 of The Phenomenology of Spirit, just one section of which (on “the spirit” of ancient institutions as contrasted with modern “culture”) is also entitled Sittlichkeit; here the state is almost entirely bracketed out.28 In contrast, there is, from the present point of view, a close correspondence between The Philosophy of Right and The Philosophy of History [as Weltgeschichte or “universal history”], which are exactly contemporaneous. Each of these two themes (constitutional law and the history that culminates in the emergence of the modern state) presupposes the other and can seem either to result from its internal dialectic or to privilege one of the two aspects of the dialectical identification of the rational (the legal constitution in the broad sense, or, if one likes, the “state of law”) and the real (the forward march of “world spirit”) that is proclaimed in a famous phrase in the preface to The Philosophy of Right. From our standpoint, this comes down to saying that the problematic of the conversion of violence and what we have seen to be the basic principle of the philosophy of history, the idea that historical violence is in the last instance convertible, is unreservedly embraced in The Philosophy of Right. It also means, however, that it falls to The Philosophy of Right to explain what the idea of conversion of violence means practically by showing how a state of law works or, better, how the mechanisms of civil society can be wholly steeped in the spirit of a legal constitution. From this point of view (even if nothing is simple, including the aspect of the fluctuations in Hegel’s formulations and their cat-and-mouse game with Restoration censorship), Hegel’s construction, which had quite precise political aims (and adversaries), clearly leans toward what might be called “historical liberalism” (as distinct from “theoretical liberalism”). This self-evident fact is always worth pointing out against those who believe Hegel to be a forerunner of totalitarianism or an enemy of the “open society.” That there are basic organicist or “holistic” aspects in his thought is undeniable: they flow above all from the fact that his “state of law” is from the outset (“constitutionally”) a national state conceived as organizing a community of citizens, and that it stands as a critique, from this viewpoint, of abstract representations of the individual as an “atom” inserted into the political space with no preliminary social ties or “relations.” Hegel is nevertheless not a nationalist in the

110

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

narrow sense; indeed, he is very far from being a nationalist (subsequent nationalist recuperation of his work notwithstanding). His presentation of the nation-state as the rational state and his conception of patriotism as the citizens’ Gesinnung (conviction or impassioned devotion) toward the constitution are much more closely akin to what has been called “constitutional patriotism” (Verfassungspatriotismus29) in twentieth-century Germany than to the “ethnic” or “ethnocentric” nationalism that preceded it (whether “cultural” or “racial”). The most delicate point has to do with the possibility that the individual can be separated, as a “citizen,” from the genealogical and cultural “affi liations” that make him a mere spokesperson for the values of his group. On this point, it must be made clear that the Hegelian critique of contractualist ideologies targets not this separation itself but the idea that it is originary. Hegel’s construction of the philosophy of history, whose profoundly Eurocentric teleology (which makes the state on the Western model the “end” of all history) seems so dubious to us today, sought precisely to demonstrate that that separation must not be put at the origin but at the culminating point of a history that “frees” the individual from traditional affiliations and grants him access to universality. From this point of view, Hegel is, with all the necessary fi ne distinctions, not on Edmund Burke’s, Heinrich von Treitschke’s, or Maurice Barrès’s side, but on John Stuart Mill’s and John Dewey’s in the Anglo-American tradition, and on François Guizot’s, Alexis de Tocqueville’s, and Émile Durkheim’s in the French tradition.30 We may now turn to what the nub of the idea of Sittlichkeit represents for strategies of civility. Involved here is a regulated, controlled construction of “pluralism” as a politically structured relationship between state and society: the articulation of the two terms is premised on a diversification of communitarian affiliations, voluntary or involuntary (traditional), and, consequently, of the identities bound up with them. Every identity is of course relational: it does not stem from an immediate “self-identity,” but from an identification that leads the singular individual to imagine a “common trait” or “common substance” that he shares with other singular individuals.31 But there are always several types and several hierarchical levels of relations and identifications. They can be arranged on the steps of a scale or vertically, with some embedded in others. Hegel seeks to put such a program, at once speculative and political, to work in order to illustrate the

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

111

dialectic of the particular and the universal, and to show at the same time that it is realized in history to the extent that the individual frees himself of his immediate ties or acquires relative autonomy from his community of origin and, consequently, proceeds to take his distance from his immediate identity, generally hereditary, in order to accede to the demand for inclusion emanating from the state itself, which is located above communities (or constructs a “second community” that imposes its hegemony on them). The state effectively requires that its subjects become “citizens,” defined by the universalist relationship that they maintain with law and the public sphere. To that end, primary communities, the “natural” or supposedly “natural” ties deriving from one’s birth or cultural heritage, find themselves subordinated to the legal ties constitutive of the higher political community. This requires that natural ties be, as it were, virtually destroyed or deconstructed through education and professional life, and reconstituted as organs or functions of the state. Hegel, however—this is of fundamental importance—never believed that the primary communities thus virtually destroyed and reconstructed, particularly the fi rst of them, the family, had to become, as such, organs of the state and its politics, as was the case in the fascist regimes and is more generally the tendency of what Foucault calls the “biopolitics” of modern states. 32 He believed, on the contrary, that this integration (hence, this dialectic of the decomposition/recomposition of the communitarian tie) is effected by way of social mediations, by the emergence of secondary communities that are neither “natural” nor “political” but precisely social, offering a kind of affiliation or belonging halfway between constraint and freedom. We might call it “contingent” in the sense that it depends on interests, individuals’ particular goals, and circumstances. The upshot is that the complete hierarchical system of social identities, which reflects that of individuals’ particular affiliations, presents itself as a superposition of three or even four distinct levels. At the lowest level we find the primary community—that is, the family and, more generally, kinship ties in the broad sense, which may perhaps be extended to include the ties of ethnic identity, conceived as an imaginary blood relation. At the second level, we find the organizations and corporations of civil society, or the secondary communities that allow the individual to choose his profession or, to use an older expression, his “estate,” religious affiliation, cultural or

112

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

“group” activities, not arbitrarily but in the context of the constraints imposed by the division of labor. To these various affiliations, there correspond as many identities, and thus, for the individual, the possibility of playing on the multiplicity of his affiliations—on condition that the state recognize them. Or, still better, on condition that the recognition that these affiliations secure for individual and collective identities be located within the bounds of his affiliation with the highest community, which is, again, the state: thus, the state constitutes the third “communitarian” level, to which individuals relate as citizens. For Hegel, this means that identification is realized at this highest level in an essentially contradictory form in that it combines a final, undifferentiated affiliation, egalitarian or universalist, with an original, diversified affiliation that endows the state with a multiplicity of conditions and social competencies so that it can recognize them as its own functions. The Hegelian political subject is thus citizen and burgher [bourgeois] at the same time, a “man without qualities” and a “man with qualities,” these qualities being at once subjective and objective, that is, dispositions (habitus) and properties (proprietas).33 The state thus conceived, however, has two faces; we should perhaps go so far as to say that it divides into two, that it contains two communities in one. On the one hand, insofar as it turns toward society and, via society, toward the family in order to “recognize” them in its capacity as representative of the universal, it acts as the emancipatory force that tears individuals more or less violently from their primary, immediate identity and thrusts them into the world of multiple personalities, that of a pluralism rendered “coherent” by the fact that the individuals never cease to identify abstractly with their common citizenship (indeed, to identify with the very abstraction of that citizenship). On the other hand, however, as Hegel constantly insists, the state is not an absolute; it operates in history as the concrete incarnation of the universal and thus continues to be essentially an instance that transforms individuals by inducing them to turn their gaze toward humanity or the progress of humanity as such—no doubt less toward a supplementary “universal community” (which Hegel does not believe in, in which he sees a cosmopolitical utopia) than toward participation in Spirit beyond community, which represents an essentially intermixable task. 34 What is not only interesting here but also quite topical (to be honest, highly relevant to what is going on in the world today) is likewise what is

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

113

most open to question. A detailed discussion of the way in which violence is converted at the practical level, following a strategy of a hegemonic type, would again show, it seems to me, that Hegel combines an astonishing underestimation of the acuity of the contradictions he analyzes with an equally astonishing knack for pinpointing them. Thus, he consistently underestimates the level of symbolic and even physical violence (brought out by analyses such as those by Norbert Elias, Bourdieu, and Foucault) characteristic of the educative process, which wrests the individual from the immediacy of the family tie (itself quite violent, if Freud is to be believed); yet he talks about “tearing apart” the natural unity of family relations.35 It might be supposed that he also underestimates the level of violence involved in forging, by way of the division of labor, a “civil society” that is a “society of individuals” (Norbert Elias);36 yet he offers an extraordinary description of the polarization of class relations latent in the free market, which provided Marx with his point of departure. It may also be said that, like all Verfassungspatriotismus theorists, he underestimates the imperative that the “community of citizens”—which is also a national community— reconcile universalism and particularism by constructing itself as a community based on origins, values, and culture, the effect of which is less to neutralize nationalism’s potential for violence that to focus it on or displace it onto certain points.37 But none of this prevents the idea that forms the kernel of the problematic of Sittlichkeit, the idea of a dialectic of the deconstruction and reconstruction of affiliations, from providing a very profound definition of a certain modality of political subjectification. From this standpoint the individual’s life and liberty do indeed consist in permanently “playing on” the social possibilities of identification and disidentification, since neither of these two poles can be abstractly opposed to the other. This further implies that emergence of self-consciousness is invested with an immediately transindividual character, making the constitution of the “self” a function of its relation to the other.38 We must, however, immediately rectify what we have just said, or, rather, complicate it. This Hegelian politics of civility, inseparable from an ethics, includes a restrictive or even repressive condition, normality. That is why I have evoked hegemony: for there can be no normality without a process of normalization, both individual and collective, of customs or the personality.39 The condition for Hegelian “civility” is normality; Hegel chose to

114

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

use the word Sittlichkeit precisely to express their unity. Normality in turn extends to all spheres of social life (property, family, education, physical and mental health, patriotism) that embody its forms and are converted into processes of normalization. Above all, however, it generalizes the normalizing distinction between public and private, which Hegel, even more emphatically than his predecessors, makes into a determinant structure of social life. Like the articulation of polis and oikos in Aristotle, it defines the complementary “sites” of the individual’s socialization, with the difference that, rather than being situated for good and all in one sphere or the other, socialization now passes incessantly back and forth from one sphere to another, as identifications and disidentifications dictate. The family, which is not only the private institution par excellence but also the institution of the “private” as such, nevertheless remains the basis for this process. But the heart of this “private” sphere (which fulfills an eminently “public” function) is, as everyone knows, the distribution of sexual roles in conformity with a certain ancestral rule that has hardly been modified by the institutions of bourgeois marriage. The family does not figure as a “natural” anchor for subjectivity unless it institutes this difference and elevates its play or recognition to the level of the concept: the result is that there is privacy wherever the difference between the sexes is presupposed in accordance with this rule (and this figure) or remains visible (in contrast, there is “public” activity or the “state” in the normative sense wherever this difference is tendentially neutralized). This leads us to suggest that the core of the strategy of civility in Hegel is not just normality and normalization in general, but sexual normality: exhibition of the social and, consequently, political function effected above all by way of a figuration and regular distribution of masculine and feminine roles and functions (professional, educative, reproductive, disciplinary) and, more profoundly, by way of a normalization of sexualities in such a way that they hew to the dualist, inegalitarian model that is supposed to constitute the natural condition for the formation of families, the articulation of pleasure and procreation, and so on.40 At this point, however, we may legitimately ask: does the strategy of civility we are trying to define under the rubric “hegemony” fully coincide with the normative concept of Hegelian Sittlichkeit? Or should it lead us, rather, to take a new approach to the problem of identification and its social function (the play of “civil” institutions, affiliations, and identities) even

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

115

while radically questioning the articulation of civility and normality by attempting to deconstruct the principle grounding their association? Would it then be possible to reopen, without annulling it, the question raised by Hegel by asking, in particular, how civility is rooted in the family and the family values that make it possible to dissociate the question of sexual “genders” and the question of the universal? It is here that the fluctuations in Hegel take on extraordinary interest, particularly the disparity between the formulations of The Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology. In the latter work (written earlier), the question of the relationship between genealogy, kinship relations, and the public sphere, which is certainly informed by the controversies of the Revolutionary and Romantic periods about love and woman’s place in society (“eternal irony of the community”) but mythically projected back into antiquity, is discussed—at least briefly—not in terms of the hierarchy and complementarity between the particular and the universal but in terms of the conflict between heterogeneous universalities. What Hegel’s interpretation of Sophocles’s Antigone in fact shows is that the confl ict that tears the “tragic” family par excellence apart (the “Oedipal” family) counterposes two expressions of the universal, each of which is as absolute as the other (one is to the other as Law is to Justice). But it also shows that this confl ict is projected onto the difference between the sexes, such that each of the two sexes separated by their “quarrel” [différend ] represents the universal for the other, albeit in a way that remains inaccessible to that other.41 This comes down to saying that the Hegel of the Phenomenology, for whatever reason, took a very different view of if not civilization then its discontents than the later Hegel (and perhaps the earlier Hegel as well, since the Phenomenology remains an unclassifiable book in which Hegel’s thought on a number of issues is projected beyond itself ). Here, consequently, it becomes possible to articulate Hegel’s discussion of Sittlichkeit with Freud’s discussion of Kultur, and to articulate the “universalisms” corresponding to each. The reader will perhaps allow me to leave the possibility open or bequeath it to someone else. To conclude, let me now consider together, in their relation rather than their autonomy, the strategies I have called majoritarian and minoritarian. Why this bifurcation? The stake here no longer has to do with the constitution of a public authority or the institution of a stable relationship between society and the state (even in pluralistic or liberal form). Rather, it

116

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

involves the way one takes a distance from the state and the imperatives of its constitution. This is obviously a cautious formulation; it can apply to antistate projects or simply to nonstate projects and can span the gamut from the idea of a withering away of the state as imagined by a certain socialist and communist tradition (which includes Marx) to that of control over the state by other autonomous political subjects who interfere with and, in a relative sense, neutralize it or resist it either because it appears to be primarily invested with a function of domination (which cannot be reversed at will) or because it is one of the major sources of the development of violence in society and its transition to ultraviolence thanks precisely to the “monopoly on legitimate force [violence]” that it claims for itself and, consequently, its antinomic relation with violence: it can overcome its helplessness in the face of violence only by multiplying and reproducing it. Marx, it must be said, is not a bad guide here. Let us recall his critique of the “draft program” of the 1875 founding congress of the German SocialDemocratic Party in Gotha: in question in this draft program, as we can see in retrospect, was a rigorous blueprint for what would emerge as the national welfare state in the course of the twentieth century. The Gotha Program insisted, notably, on the importance of the state’s role in labor legislation and public education. How did Marx react to this discourse? “Doubtless, but who will educate the educators?” 42 “The state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.” 43 What majoritarian and minoritarian strategies have in common is the conviction that the political space cannot be opened up from above (or from the center, by arraying social forces and social relations around a unique “subject”). As both see it, that can only be the objective, and even a result (attained several times in history, intentionally or not, under the name “democracy” or under some other) of the action of individuals and forces “emancipating themselves” independently of institutional structures. These forces are doubtless those of “one and all,” or of “anyone,” but envisioned from a different angle or caught up in relations of a different kind. The disagreement bears precisely on the nature of the external relations established with the institution and more profoundly on the very conception of agency and subjectivity. I say “majoritarian strategy” because it seems to me that, since the Roman and medieval uses of the term maioritas, the two senses of “the greatest number” and “autonomy of decision” (linked to age and social status)

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

117

have always marked the idea of emancipation of the masses from the domination imposed on them by an oppressive minority, representing at the same time for the individuals comprising the majority a means of “emerging from their immaturity” [minorité ] or dependency, which robs them of the free exercise of their will or even of their own body.44 As Kant puts it, superbly, in “Was ist Aufklärung?,” this emancipation, like the subjection it abolishes, is their own responsibility.45 That is why the modern political theories that make the “rights of man” and “rights of the citizen” two faces of the same emancipatory movement have always insisted on the fact that the mass of society must free itself of its “voluntary servitude,” or overcome the barbarity that resides at the heart of domination, before—or, at least, at the same time as—it frees itself from the domination or power of its oppressors.46 Thus, the basis for the strategy of civility as a “majoritarian” politics in this sense is not simply a popular insurgency with universalist aspirations (which finds an exemplary illustration in the discourse of the Insurgents and Insurgentes of the American revolutions, North and South) but also the idea that emerges at a deeper level of reflection on the problems and aporias of programs of liberation. Here we may once again invoke Gramsci, for the Italian philosopher seems always to have tried to anticipate the “becomingmajoritarian” of the dominated, which, from the revolutionary moment on, does not consist simply in exercising counterviolence (the overthrow of the power of “constraint”) but represents the invention of a new “civilization” or “civility” (the two words are not distinguished in Italian: civiltà). Some of the most interesting contemporary post-Marxist projects, which are attempting to renew the Gramscian concept of hegemony in the sense of radical democracy, seek precisely to apply a Gramscian model to the reconstruction of pluralism “from the bottom up,” not as a state function or state institution by means of which it can normalize social conflicts in hierarchical fashion but in the form of an implicit or explicit “contract” concluded between the emancipatory movements themselves, in their irreducible diversity.47 This comes down to accomplishing a reversal that can transform the conflict between the various emancipatory movements, which are not just heterogeneous but incompatible (since each gives rise to the definition of a different universalist objective and “universal class” of revolutionary subjects: the proletariat, women, colonized or neocolonized peoples, and so on), into a “people” capable of yoking the emancipation of each of its

118

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

component parts to the service of their common liberation. As everyone knows, the logic as well as the politics of such a reversal, the need for which, but also the improbability of which, contemporary left movements constantly feel, is the vexed question besetting “majoritarian” strategies.48 I believe in the need for majoritarian emancipatory movements and am persuaded that they constitute, by themselves, forces of civility; in other words, that they are helping to open up (or constitute) the space of political freedom in which they can themselves act in pursuit of their objectives.49 But I quite as firmly believe that we must carefully examine the objection to them raised by Foucault and, albeit differently, Deleuze. The critique of majoritarian strategies running through Foucault’s work is not aimed at the idea of emancipation per se. (Witness his attachment to Kant’s “Was ist Aufklärung?,” even if his interpretation of it bears essentially on a different point: not the “emergence from immaturity,” and still less the teleology of progress bound up with it, but rather the contemporary relevance, as he repeatedly says, of the problem it poses.) Nor is Foucault’s criticism directed against the objective of “transformation” (of power relations or the institutional structures that crystallize them). It is a different matter with Deleuze, perhaps, when he invents (in collaboration with Guattari) the expression “becoming-minoritarian,” and sets it in relation with a liberation of desire, as a transindividual process or “machine,” from the mimetic grip of state and “mass” violence. Foucault and Deleuze have both adopted the idea (which obviously is no invention of their own) that the revolutionary movements that confront and seek to destroy the violence of the “state apparatuses” and state power have historically mimetically reproduced it. Such a confrontation changes nothing about the subjection of individuals—or, rather, about the desire that traverses them and circulates among them—to the “machines” that produce them. It may even be that, as the desire for liberation grows more intense, subjection becomes still harder to overcome, thus rendering impracticable the idea that the apparatuses of domination should not be attacked with their own instruments and technologies of power, their own forms of organization and discipline. Consequently, to cite Carl von Clausewitz, who gives condensed expression to this logic of symmetry, the conflict “goes to extremes.” At the extremes, however, there is no escape hatch, no “line of flight.” Allow me to quote at some length from A Thousand Plateaus:

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

119

Why are there so many becomings of man, but no becoming-man? First because man is majoritarian par excellence, whereas becomings are minoritarian; all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian. When we say majority, we are referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination of a state or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian: white-man, adultmale, etc. Majority implies a state of domination, not the reverse. . . . In this sense women, children, but also animals, plants, and molecules, are minoritarian. It is perhaps the special situation of women in relation to the man-standard that accounts for the fact that becomings, being minoritarian, always pass through a becoming-woman. It is important not to confuse “minoritarian,” as a becoming or process, with a “minority,” as an aggregate or a state. Jews, Gypsies, etc., may constitute minorities under certain conditions, but that in itself does not make them becomings. One reterritorializes, or allows oneself to be reterritorialized, on a minority as a state; but in a becoming, one is deterritorialized. Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become-black. Even women must become-woman. Even Jews must become-Jewish (it certainly takes more than a state). But if this is the case, then becoming-Jewish necessarily affects the non-Jew as much as the Jew . . . etc. Becoming-woman necessarily affects men as much as women. In a way, the subject in a becoming is always “man,” but only when he enters a becoming-minoritarian that rends him from his major identity.50

Deleuze and Guattari then explain that, if every “minority” has to become what it nominally already is, it is in order to be able to “serve as the active medium of becoming, but under such conditions that it ceases [itself ] to be a definable aggregate in relation to the majority.” Processes of becoming-minoritarian thus imply, inseparably and, always, in fundamentally asymmetrical fashion (one is tempted to say “in transitive fashion”), “two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another by which a term (the medium or agent) rises up from the minority.”51 A woman has to become-woman, but in a becoming-woman of all man. A Jew becomes Jewish, but in a becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. A

120

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

becoming-minoritarian exists only by virtue of a deterritorialized medium and subject that are like its elements. There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority. We can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things. You don’t deviate from the majority unless there is a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off. . . . Anything at all can do the job, but it always turns out to be a political affair. Becoming-minoritarian is a political affair and necessitates a labor of power [ puissance], an active micropolitics. This is the opposite of macropolitics, and even of History, in which it is a question of knowing how to win or obtain a majority. As Faulkner said, to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice but to become-black.52 But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran’s fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole. . . . There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to act upon the “masses”. . . . What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. American fi lm has often depicted these molecular focal points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle,—fascisms spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they “want” to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels. . . . Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It’s

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

121

too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.53

There is, in these texts, no lack of formulations and ideas calling for clarification and discussion. I would like to draw attention, in particular, to the fact that the terminology of becoming-minoritarian and the accompanying illustrations (becoming-woman but, above all, becoming-Jewish or becoming-Negro, the reference being to “minorities” that are, or have been, subjected to extreme violence) invert, term for term, the scheme of the emancipation of humanity through emancipation of a “universal class.” Like every inversion, however, this one, too, preserves an element of its point of its departure. The idea is still that of a process that simultaneously affects both poles of an asymmetrical relation of domination. In that sense, it not only has subjective import for each of the two sides; it can also seem like an emancipation to one side and the other. This is the very opposite of the scheme of a “struggle to death” that goes to extremes and is bound to culminate in the elimination of one of the two struggling groups (the metaphor of generalized warfare to be found, after Clausewitz, in Georges Sorel, The Communist Manifesto, and elsewhere).54 The difference, however, is that there is no longer any question of the exteriority or exclusivity of the “becomings” (logically, at least, this should be beyond question): historical situations can impose priorities, but, in and of itself, becoming-minoritarian is not “becoming-woman” rather than “becoming-Jewish,” or “becoming-Jewish” rather than “becoming-black” (or “Negro,” in the old terminology inherited from Faulkner; it is hardly our task here to try to eliminate the ambivalence for the sake of some sort of political correctness). It can be said, it seems to me, that all theses becomings go around in circles, endlessly, or flow into one another without being conflated in one and the same process, because the essential idea is that of the fluidity of identities, “minority” identity included (even if the archetype of the crystallization of an identity is the formation of a majority). In that sense, there does not exist any such thing as a minority in an absolute sense, or a “minority in itself.” All becoming is a becoming-other, or, better, a becoming-the-other: not only the different, but the other-than-oneself. That is also why Deleuze, alluding explicitly to a Hegelian or Hegelian-Marxist concept of historicity,

122

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

opposes “becoming” and “history” (but it may perhaps be suggested as well that this is a way of drawing distinctions within the concept of history).55 To be sure, there is a close relation between the notion of “becomingminoritarian” and that of the mass or multitude: this is the point at which the confrontation between majoritarian and minoritarian strategies is at its most direct. As Deleuze sees it, the multitude is composed of minorities; more exactly, since, as social groups, minorities are static and fulfill an institutional function of “territorialization” (either in a directly geographical sense, or in the sense of the administrative classifications—sexual, racial, or nosologic classifications, for example—applied to, and internalized by, them), processes of becoming-minoritarian enable radical disidentification to prevail over the identification and self-recognition in the form of a fi xed identity that is also, always, a normative model. Let us not discuss, for their own sake, the examples chosen by Deleuze and Guattari. Basically, they have allegorical value, referring in each case to a context that is at once aesthetic and political: the black, the Jew, the woman (let us note, however, the absence of the Worker, a figure who seems irredeemably “majoritarian” to Deleuze and Guattari).56 It may be doubted whether any example at all would have filled the purpose: if Deleuze had been asked, he would probably have answered that it is once again a question of a circle. What the names “black,” “Jew,” and “woman” indicate is not an identity or a group but the sign of a becoming-in-progress or of a difference to produce (or in the process of being produced) in a conjuncture. It is one facet of the “people who are missing,” destined to be forever missing. This is also what is elsewhere called a “line of flight.”57 The fact that Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) thinking on this point is, from beginning to end, placed in the perspective of an antifascist politics (and a politics of struggle against the return of fascism; signs that such a return is imminent are not far to seek in the contemporary situation) by itself suffices, obviously, to show that what is in question is a new way of thinking strategically about the question of civility. That is what makes a comparative discussion pertinent. No doubt Deleuze rejected altogether the notions of dialectic and dialectical movement. Yet I shall take the liberty of assuming that we have to do here with a dialecticization of the very idea of minority, which we may perfectly well regard as open to criticism but cannot dismiss out of hand in a world characterized precisely by the proliferation

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

123

of “minority statuses” (pending, perhaps, the great homogeneization, the transitional means of whose realization “minority status” will, in that case, turn out to have been). The concept of minority calls for dialecticization quite as much as that of majority. The question is how deeply the transformation or transmutation of individuality has to be implanted for the becomingfascist of the masses to remain, indefi nitely, a virtuality—that is to say in Deleuzian terms, for it to forestall the emergence of a desire that would be a desire for its own repression or abolition as desire.58 It will then appear that, between an antifascism based on the becoming-majoritarian of “molar” (or popular) multitudes and an antifascism rooted in the becomingminoritarian of individual or, rather, “molecular,” desire—in other words, between the masses’ identification with majorities by way of emancipatory ideals and the “deterritorialization” of desire by way of the multiplicity of processes of becoming-minoritarian, or the circularity that reunites them in a kind of practical “disjunctive synthesis,” there is, philosophically speaking, something like a Kantian antinomy. Each of the two positions can justify itself by way of a critique of the other’s shortcomings. Each endeavors to demonstrate the other’s insufficiency as a means of containing or neutralizing extreme violence, or even its latent tendency to reproduce extreme violence. From the standpoint of a micropolitics of desire, the organization of mass movements (or “popular” movements) that strive to seize power in order to reform or control the state or, better, transform it from within in a revolutionary way is always inseparable from a hegemonic project: the formulation of a “total,” if not totalitarian, ideology, a representation of society as a “whole” divided into antagonistic parts (classes, camps). For this very reason, it is never immune to an idealization of hatred. However, from a social or socialist macropolitical standpoint (which can include a macroeconomy, Marxist or not) that aspires to “civilize domination” or develop a social, (radically) democratic “citizenship,” the Deleuzian “machinic assemblages of desire” that make possible the deterritorialization of collective formations as well as their constant metamorphosis are in great danger of seeming to confer a new name on acceptance of the very same processes of naturalizing the social bond, objectifying the individual and especially her body, “fluidifying” identities and sweeping away the fixed signposts of belonging (and genealogy), that are already being produced today by the globalized

124

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

processes of consumption, communication, and the conditioning of needs. This encounter may well be involuntary, but it is not a chance encounter. At the very least, it must be granted that the dissolution of the subject is a double-edged sword. Deleuze and Guattari are well aware of the danger; that is doubtless why they so often evoke the need to be careful with deterritorialization, in the sense of the ancient phronesis and the “principle of caution,” as a crucial aspect of politics.59 We might say that the majoritarian viewpoint constantly detects a danger of ultraobjective violence in the “micropolitics of desire,” whereas the minoritarian viewpoint constantly sees a danger of ultrasubjective violence (a recurrent fantasy of sovereignty) in the “macropolitics of emancipation,” producing what could be called the antinomy of antistate civility. The most interesting way of proceeding here—but it would call for a whole new expose—would be to relaunch the discussion of the relationship between these Deleuzian formulations and Foucault’s work, the source, naturally, of the opposition between “micropolitics” and “macropolitics” (Discipline and Punish). Foucault’s and Deleuze’s trajectories crossed at a certain moment, which was also the moment when Deleuze started to interpret Foucault beyond Foucault while incorporating into his own discourse ideas, expressions, and words supposed to constitute as many ways of resolving what seemed to him to be Foucault’s aporias (in the sense not of insurmountable obstacles but of openings for thought).60 The most obvious of these aporias has to do with the Foucauldian idea of an aesthetics of existence or care of the self—that is, of asceticism as the way in which the individual or subject acquires the capacity to create himself [se former lui-même] or give form to his own life by inventing a “style.” 61 Without going into a discussion of Foucault’s examples of such processes of aestheticization of the self (not just Greek antiquity but also Baudelairian modernity and, thus, a certain dandyism), let us note that the aim is obviously to meet the challenge contained in the description of “governmentality” as a set of power mechanisms for producing individuality (or “individualizing individuals”) by means of epistemic no less than disciplinary procedures.62 The aesthetics of the self is a counterpart of the power relations outside which it would be impossible to understand why all power still harbors the possibility of resistance and even the possibility of subversion, or, at any rate, displacement— on the condition, doubtless, that we leave aside the extreme situations in

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

125

which the subject confronts entrenched structures of domination that exclude play or, still worse, forms of the play of power that seek not to make individuals’ lives productive but, on the contrary, to destroy and eliminate them. The idea of an aesthetics of the self is thus crucial to understanding what a Foucaldian strategy of civility might look like. But it remains tied precisely to the representation of a “self,” and thus of an identity (however transgressive, pragmatic, or performative), and that is certainly no accident.63 The very idea of a creation or “production” of the self (by a technology or an art) entails antinomies no less forbidding than those besetting the revolutionary idea of “changing the world.” 64 The fact that Foucault once again resorts to the terminology of conversion on this occasion must be seen as an index of these problems, if nothing else: Question: Can this care of the self, which possesses a positive ethical meaning, be understood as a sort of conversion of power? Michel Foucault: A conversion, yes. In fact, it is a way of limiting and controlling power. For if it is true that slavery is the great risk that Greek freedom resists, there is also another danger that initially appears to be the opposite of slavery: the abuse of power. In the abuse of power, one exceeds the legitimate exercise of one’s power and imposes one’s fantasies, appetites, and desires on others. Here we have the image of the tyrant, or simply of the rich and powerful man who uses his wealth and power to abuse others. . . . And it is the power over oneself that thus regulates one’s power over others.65

To what extent are these formulas (which, in any case, would have been impossible without the recurrence of modern formulations such as “power is checked by power”) applicable, in Foucault’s view, beyond the Greek context? And where would he draw the borderline between what is convertible in power relations and what is not? I think I can say that both Deleuze and Foucault cultivate the project of purging the concept of politics of everything involving the antinomic nature of power and, consequently, the foundation of “ultrasubjective” violence that has been handed down by the tradition of sovereignty. But I also think that Deleuze sets out to displace Foucault’s strategy at a level deep enough to yield a radically different “ontology.” The idea of a becomingminoritarian does not reflect the activity of creation or identification of

126

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

the “self ” but, rather, a movement of disidentification that we must perhaps call “active-passive.” 66 Dissolving the fi xity and unity of the “self,” it allows it not only to change places but to trade places with others in the transindividual space of “desire.” This practical philosophy of passivity (or the fiction of passivity) begins to emerge very early in Deleuze’s work, particularly by way of his aesthetic, moral, and political predilection for a problematic of “perversion” to the detriment of a problematic of “transgression.” 67 What Foucault and Deleuze nevertheless have in common, within this very tension between their strategies of civility, is an avowed Nietzschean reference to play, whether it is the play of identities or of the proliferation of masks—and, therefore, a radical opposition to normality and normalization which, by definition, exclude play of any sort. That is why, jointly or separately, they erect the most radical alternative to Hegelianism and the Hegelian heritage (in Marx and Marxism as well, supposing that we can reduce them to that). This does not mean that they drop the problem of civility. Quite the contrary: they allow us better to assess the extent to which, and the reasons for which, the central question is still that of the concept of identification and its other face, disidentification, torn between the diverse modalities of the tragic: as sacrifice (or sacrifice of sacrifice), as heroism without “hope,” or as the game of metamorphosis in search of its rules.

APRÈS-COUP THE LIMITS OF POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

O U R C O N F E R E N C E ’ S T I T L E A N D T H E M E H A V E S P U R R E D M E TO read you a paper that extends work I have already done on the relationship between politics, understood as “civility,” and violence.1 That will help us, I hope, come closer to an encounter that we are all inclined to make but do not want to base on misunderstandings. I shall organize what I wish to suggest around three points, trying to make it clear how they are linked without conferring on them the strict systematicity that a demonstration would require. This does not only have to do with circumstantial factors or the limited time at my disposal; it is more than ever a question, at least as far as I am concerned, of an ongoing search for the problematic unity of subjects that are not, in any case, susceptible of any definite “resolution.” My three points bear on (1) the phenomenology of extreme violence, which, beginning with the contemporary manifestations of it in which we ourselves are caught up or of which we are the “spectators,” requires that we rethink the conditions of possibility for political “action,” thus confronting us anew with interrogations that have defined political anthropology from its inception; (2) an enunciation of the categories of the “negative” that would here seem to govern the articulation

128

APRÈS-COUP

of ethics, anthropology, and politics—evil, violence, death, and the need to criticize or even deconstruct them; and (3) the dilemmas (after many others, I shall take the liberty of calling them tragic) with which we are confronted by the need for a politics that can transform the existing state of affairs, characterized by structural and conjunctural violence, to the extent that politics can renounce neither liberating insurgency (which may itself require violence ) nor (internal and external) resistance to the nihilism of violence: in other words, the demand for civility.

I We have to begin by elucidating the meaning of the term extreme violence and, to that end, try to grasp some of its typical aspects or essential traits in the mode of comprehension. This comes down to saying that we have to propose a phenomenology of extreme violence, however schematic.2 It is, however, a matter of describing not simply how such violence is experienced but also, more generally, how it is distributed between the poles of the individual and the collective or the objective and the subjective. This, of course, also governs lived experiences about which we can perhaps agree to say that they are, in different modalities, limit experiences, or that they take human beings to the limits of their capacity for interpretation, learning, reaction, and transformation. They do so because they effectively call into question personal and social identity, the individual’s physical and psychological integrity, and the mutual bond between subjects and their historical and geographical environment.3 We have discussed, at this conference itself, the way individuality is bound up with a system of habitations and workplaces and is constructed in space, just as it is bound up with communities that are either close or “imagined,” so that it is constructed in a time that always exceeds individuality (notably because it includes the succession of the generations), but on which individual subjects must nevertheless maintain a hold.4 A description of this kind can be related to the idea of a state of exception as brilliantly developed by Agamben, for example, on the basis of a generalization of the paradigm of the concentration camps and the death camps. In some way the camps produced, Agamben says, what it is usually the function of institutions of social, political, and cultural life to hide and hold at

APRÈS-COUP

129

a distance: the absolute fragility and vulnerability of “bare life” or, if one prefers, of the dimension of animal existence at the heart of the human world itself—and thus the destruction of the social bond by society itself.5 There is no denying the power of this conceptualization and the fundamental problems that it allows us to pose. I think, however, that we would also do well to set out from a more widely diversified and, in a sense, less allegorical phenomenology capable of revealing one of the typical traits of what is often meant by “extreme violence” today as well as some of the reasons for which it is hard to elaborate, without further ado, a straightforward interpretation of it: I mean its fundamentally heterogeneous nature. We have to try to identify, through this heterogeneity, a set of features attesting the persistence of one and the same ethical and anthropological question. I shall come back to this in my conclusion. “Extreme” violence is by definition an unsettling, even paradoxical notion. It points to a threshold or identifiable limit that should be located in things themselves, while simultaneously eluding absolute criteria and quantitative estimates. There is extreme violence in mass phenomena spanning exterminations and genocides, enslavement, the displacement of populations, and the mass impoverishment that breeds vulnerability to “natural disasters,” famines, and epidemics (in connection with which we speak, precisely, of thresholds of survival). But there is also extreme violence in the infliction of purely individual physical or moral suffering or the violation of bodily integrity or self-respect—that is, the individual’s capacity to defend his own life and ensure its “dignity.” In a sense, the reference to the singular individual can no more be avoided than the reference to generic or social situations because the life that is the support for the experience of the characteristically human activities of language, work, sexuality, reproduction, and education—like the life that is the support for the rights known as the rights “of man” or “of the citizen”—is, in the final analysis, individual or, rather, individualizable life (this is not synonymous with isolatable life, and may even rule it out). However, this phenomenology also includes other elements of complexity. There is extreme violence in the brutality and suddenness of traumatic events or “catastrophes” that bring death, displacement, or subjection to the power of a master. But there is also extreme violence in the indefinite repetition of certain forms of habitual domination that are, at the limit,

130

APRÈS-COUP

invisible or unidentifiable as violence because they would appear to be part of the very foundations of society and culture: here, of course, one thinks especially of the subordination of women or their domestic slavery. There is extreme violence, again, in certain forms of exclusion bound up with the way the normality of customs is instituted or the utility of human beings is measured: the exclusion of the insane, criminals, and sexual deviants, the savagery of which is still very much a contemporary reality that appears for all to see when certain “scandals” break but generally remains hidden, the more so because no one wants to see it. Michel Foucault’s work, in particular, reconstructs the genealogy of this savagery, which is coextensive with the history of modernity.6 From this extreme diversity, which we must avoid oversimplifying while nevertheless attempting to grasp the moments of convergence in it, I propose to extract a certain number of traits here. I do so with an eye to the way they affect our definition of the problem of political action, conceived, in its turn, as a fundamental mode, both material and symbolic, of instituting the reciprocal relationship between individuals and their communities—in other words, of collectivizing individuals and individualizing the members of historical collectives. To specify qualitatively what we call “extreme” on the scale of violence is not to produce typologies or categorizations in the legal sense of the word, even if jurisprudence and, in particular, the evolution of its definitions (for example, when it criminalizes rape or genocide) provide very valuable pointers. It is, however, to problematize the very notion of a threshold—to begin with, because violence as such cannot be the object of blanket condemnation. Such condemnation is pointless: it comes down to immediately covering up, by denial or with the veil of morality, the fundamental anthropological fact that violence in its various forms (I am even tempted to say the social invention of the various forms of violence, the “creativity” specific to it) is part of human experience and, by the same token, part of history, of which it is one of the “motors.” The fact remains that—in this history of which violence forms an integral part, and which inextricably associates violence and politics, violence and aesthetics, and violence and moral experience—we feel a need to specify the thresholds with which we associate the idea of the intolerable. We bring them into relation with a legal limit and the very possibility of politics. We regard them, conse-

APRÈS-COUP

131

quently, as manifestations of that part of inhumanity without which the very idea of humanity and the humane would be meaningless. I believe that this limit is tendentially reached when, in particular, three types of reversal of the “transindividual” conditions of individual and social existence are produced, suddenly or stealthily, perceptibly or not. They involve the “resistance” of human beings to death and enslavement, the complementarity of life and death (or the place of death in life), and the end to which force and constraint are employed. No one has illustrated better than Simone Weil, in her commentary on Homer’s Iliad, the significance of violence when it takes the form of an annihilation of all possibility of resistance. She brings out three characteristics that, as they are intertwined in the poet’s discourse, found a tragic vision of the world: the reduction of the defeated to the state of a helpless “thing” at the moment of violent death; the illusion of omnipotence that shifts constantly from one camp to the other in war and occasionally deprives the one who acts of an occasion to escape his destiny; and the moral rectitude thanks to which someone experiences the enemy’s suffering as if it were his own. It is the first aspect which directly interests us here, although we should bear the others in mind as well: Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it. Exercised to the extreme, it makes the human being a thing quite literally, that is, a dead body. . . . The hero is a thing dragged in the dust behind a chariot. . . . The force that kills is summary and crude. How much more varied in operation, how much more stunning in effect is that other sort of force, that which does not kill, or rather does not kill just yet. It will kill for a certainty, or it will kill perhaps, or it may merely hang over the being it can kill at any instant; in all cases, it changes the human being into stone. From the power to change a human being into a thing by making him die there comes another power, in its way more monstrous, that of making a still living human being into a thing. He is living, he has a soul; he is nonetheless a thing. Strange being—a thing with a soul; strange situation for the soul! Who can say how it must each moment conform itself, twist and contort itself? It was not created to inhabit a thing; when it compels itself to do so, it endures violence through and through. A man disarmed and exposed, toward whom a weapon points, becomes a corpse

132

APRÈS-COUP

before being touched. . . . At least some suppliants, once granted their wish, become again men like others. But there are still more miserable beings who, without dying, have become things for life. In their days there is no play, no space, no opening for anything that comes from within. These are not men living harder lives than others, or socially inferior to others; they are an alternative human species, a hybrid of man and corpse. That a human being should be a thing is a logical contradiction; but when the impossible has become a reality, the contradiction lacerates the soul. This thing aspires at all times to be a man or a woman, and never attains the goal. This is a death that extends throughout a life, a life that death has frozen long before putting an end to it.7

To say that the extremity of violence annihilates every possibility of resistance in whatever form is to say that it does not contribute to any dialectic, not even the one Hegel has in mind when, in a famous passage on the “independence and dependence of self-consciousness” (better known as “the master–slave dialectic”), he describes the possibility of an “exchange” between submission and life and identifies it as the origin of cultural development.8 Also founding this impossibility, however, is the obliteration of a certain complementarity of life and death, which founds, in its turn, the orderly succession of generations and the formation of communities. (Here, of course, we find something closely akin to what Agamben calls the production of “bare life.”) It looms up whenever life seems worse than death. Traditionally, the fact that life is worse than death, or harder to bear than death itself, is associated with the experience of torture, that is, a threshold in the intensity and “refinement” of suffering that makes the victim plead for death as a “deliverance.” It is also associated, however, with an intensity or a prolongation of violence that makes it seem interminable, as if violence were a destiny or an end in itself. Achille Mbembe has put this at the center of his “phenomenology of violence” within the limits of the colony and what succeeded it (not independence or freedom but the “postcolony”). His striking formula for it is the multiplication of death: not just in the sense in which colonization, for as long as it lasts (something extreme violence alone makes possible), involves untold “direct” and “indirect” murders that “survive” it in the postcolonial world to which it has bequeathed its “techniques” of power but also in the sense in which every single death is, as it

APRÈS-COUP

133

were, multiplied, deferred, and extended to infinity. This is how colonization produces the “living dead” (an idea that we find again at the heart of Hannah Arendt’s thought), those whose flesh (as Weil also says) has become “meat.” The colony is a place and a time of half-death—or, if one prefers, half-life. It is a place where life and death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them, or to say what is on the side of the shadow or its obverse: “Is that man still alive, or dead?” What death does one die “after the colony?” “There are so many deaths. One no longer knows which one to die”. . . . Every recipe is tried out on [the tortured prisoner’s] body [to make him “confess” that he has taken part in the plot against the government]. . . . There are some, placed in a sort of non-place, who do not know whether they are alive or whether they are condemned. “We never knew whether we were condemned to death or not.” Then there is death by stages. Fifteen stages, for example, “a death multiplied by fifteen” . . . finally equal to a single death. . . . Even more, there is that other form of dying, which can be read in the landscape, in the shadow of abandoned work sites, rubbish bins, and street corners. 9

This multiplication of death is brought into relation, on the one hand, with the abolition or annihilation of the existence of the dominated by colonization, which denies “natives” any culture or social existence of their own or even any individuality (all “Arabs,” “Negroes,” or “coolies” look alike), and, on the other hand, with the obsession with animality that makes the native “prey” (not without engendering the permanent, haunting fear, described by Frantz Fanon and already evoked in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that the hunted might become the hunter—which implies that terror must be exercised without pause). It is precisely in connection with the impossibility of resistance and reduction to helplessness that Derrida hazards a provocative comparison between genocide and cruelty to animals (which is not so much a historical fact as it is a fantasy that obsesses both the perpetrators and the victims themselves).10 However, let us not forget that the possibility of perceiving life as harder to bear than death is also, in a sense, part of “normality.” To be more exact, it marks the presence, at the limit, of the pathological—especially illness

134

APRÈS-COUP

or infirmity—at the very heart of the norm. This gives rise to the most contradictory moral experiences and ethical choices (the Stoical choice of suicide over degradation; the Christian acceptance of suffering, a form of identification with the Savior’s passion), and brings us to another way of obliterating the complementarity between life and death necessary to life itself: when individuals find themselves radically dispossessed of their own death—which in any case “does not really belong” to them although they never stop constructing, with the help of narratives, rituals, and the imagination, fictions that give them semi-ownership of it. This dispossession is the product of widely differing modalities of the interruption of culture: from radical solitude or death in isolation, without assistance or witnesses, to industrialized, anonymous death, administered en masse. This leads us to a third phenomenological modality of extreme violence. Arendt puts a great deal of emphasis on it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where it serves as the counterpoint to her description of the totalitarian “terror” that begins by “preparing” the bodies of victims marked out for extermination en masse by a triple annihilation of their existence as human beings: as legal persons, moral persons, and distinct individuals.11 These painstaking preparatory measures for elimination, which call for an entire legal apparatus, technical rationality, and organization, have no social utility if their utility is not purely antisocial, is not a radical inutility. Violence appears, at least as far as one of its aspects is concerned, as something that exceeds the purposes guaranteeing it a permanent place in the economy of power and production. Arendt, in her analysis of the significance of the camps, endeavors to show that, despite appearances or precisely because of the industrial forms and the simulacrum of bureaucratic rationality that characterized them, the camps fulfilled no economic function (not even in the context of the war economy). Rather, in the Nazi and the Soviet case alike, the squandering of resources was one of their essential dimensions. And this counter-purposefulness, very far from diminishing with the increasingly urgent demands of self-preservation, was, quite the contrary, capable of wholly neutralizing them. Thus, the closer the Nazis came to defeat, the more resources and force they devoted to the work of the “Final Solution”—their work as such—at the cost of national defense. Such “madness” must be considered in connection with the fact that the camps and, more generally, the terror had no other function than to reproduce, attest,

APRÈS-COUP

135

and justify their creators’ imaginary omnipotence. Terror became, consequently, its last refuge. This characterization is debatable.12 It is not free of ethical ambiguity (as would appear if we compared and contrasted it with the notion of “expenditure” in Georges Bataille). It applies, however, to the whole spectrum of the forms of violence that we regard as extreme, whatever the nature of the utility and, more generally, the purpose we have in mind. This holds even when it is a question of breaking the will of a slave or obtaining information by means of torture, isolation, and the denial of rights and contact with the outside world, as we see today in Guantánamo, for example; or when the aim is to secure military advantages through terror, as we see in the case of the state terror and the suicide bombings that “respond” to it in the Middle East and elsewhere. Indeed, the question here is whether recourse to violence is ever entirely functional, whether it can ever really exist without the excesses specific to it, that is, without a “going to extremes” that exceeds the intentions and escapes the control of those exercising violence. However that may be, I believe that we can put forward the criterion, at least as a problem, of a distinction between extreme violence, with the means it employs and the effects it produces, and Zweckrationalität, the rationality of the relationship between means and ends. Furthermore, we may—hypothetically again—posit a connection between the fantasy of omnipotence that both sustains extreme violence and is reproduced by it, and the reduction of its victims to a state of helplessness that is its immanent “objective.” The modalities of the multiplication of death or the excess over death to which I alluded earlier are located within the “circle” thus constituted. It has, however, another dimension as well (perhaps the properly “tragic” dimension, a point to which I shall return): that of the victims’ contamination by the violence they undergo. In the contemporary period, this question has been raised in connection with the Nazi camps in particular, causing embarrassment and sparking polemics. It could hardly be otherwise in a “gray zone” (to use Primo Levi’s word) in which the need to tell the truth constantly involves the risk of shamefully effacing the distinction between perpetrator and victim (or, a fortiori, inverting their places or moral worth, as in certain exploitations inspired by the aesthetics of transgression that effectively fulfill, after the fact, one of the objectives of terror).13 We have

136

APRÈS-COUP

to reread, in this light, all the debates about the “passivity” of the victims of genocides (the Jewish genocide included) that haunt survivors and their descendants. The criterion of the impossibility of resistance, and thus of the “response” (or “adequate” response, which is to say, ultimately, the political response) to violence, encompasses a whole range of distinct modalities: they include silence, which is perhaps a basic modality here, but also the counterviolence, called “suicidal,” that is located at the limit of powerlessness and the illusion of omnipotence and in fact reproduces it.14 It may even be mutual helplessness, a seemingly paradoxical notion that might usefully be considered in connection with a forgotten sentence in the Communist Manifesto evoking “the common ruin of the contending classes” in certain historical conjunctures and, consequently, the abolition of politics itself.15 In a sense, however, the impossibility of resistance peaks when the perpetrators or, more generally, the “masters” use the threat of death or torture to make their victims, or some of them, instruments (sometimes even zealous instruments) of the annihilation, subjection, or humiliation of their own friends and family. We shall here refer to both Primo Levi’s description of the functioning of the Auschwitz Sonderkommandos and a passage from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in which Lanzmann tries (displaying a much discussed form of the “sadism of the truth”) to make the old barber from Tel Aviv, Abraham Bomba, relive the moment in which he had to prepare women from his own village for the gas chamber.16 Conceiving and organizing [the Sonderkommandos] was National Socialism’s most demonic crime. Behind the pragmatic aspect (to economize on able men, to impose on others the most atrocious tasks) other more subtle aspects can be perceived. This institution represented an attempt to shift onto others—specifically, the victims—the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence. It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow. . . . The existence of [the Sonderkommandos] had a meaning, a message: “We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.”17

APRÈS-COUP

137

Levi goes on to report an anecdote, the veracity of which has been attested, about a soccer game in the camp between a team of SS men and another made up of members of the Sonderkommando (who were themselves slated to be eliminated when the time came for their periodic replacement). It illustrates the “monstrous bond of involuntary complicity” between them. Levi offers a symbolic interpretation: Nothing of this kind ever took place, nor would it have been conceivable, with other categories of prisoners; but with them, with the “crematorium ravens,” the SS could enter the field on an equal footing, or almost. Behind this armistice one could hear satanic laughter, it is consummated, we have succeeded, you no longer are the other race, the anti-race, the prime enemy of the millennial Reich; you are no longer the people who reject idols. We have embraced you, corrupted you, dragged you to the bottom with us—you are like us, you proud people: dirtied with your own blood, as we are. You too, like us and like Cain, have killed the brother. Come, we can play together.18

In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman puts this essential aspect of an extreme violence that has attained its limit in the perspective of a rationality that makes extermination the fulfillment of modernity: SS administration transformed everything which had come into its orbit—including its victims—into an integral part of the chain of command, an area subject to the strictly disciplinary rules and freed from moral judgement. The genocide was a composite process: as Hilberg observed, it included things done by the Germans, and things done—on German orders, yet often with dedication verging on self-abandonment— by their Jewish victims. This is the technical superiority of a purposefully designed, rationally organized mass murder over riotous outbursts of orgy killing. Co-operation of the victims with the perpetrators of a pogrom is inconceivable. The victims’ co-operation with the bureaucrats of the SS was part of the design: indeed, it was a crucial condition of its success. . . . Hence not only the external articulations of the ghetto setting, on which the victims had no control, were manipulated so as to transform the ghetto as a whole into an extension of the murdering

138

APRÈS-COUP

machine; also the rational faculties of the “functionaries” of that extension were deployed for the elicitation of behaviour motivated by loyalty and co-operation with bureaucratically defined ends.19

Despite such experiences, it might be asked whether these limits that, albeit complementary, represent different “paths” to the goal of turning the human against itself are ever really attained. This is a crucial question for the very possibility of politics. In a world and a history irremediably marked by the existence of relations of domination and violence, the possibility of politics is fundamentally bound up with practices of resistance not just negatively, as contestation of the established order, demands for justice, and so on, but also positively, as a “place” in which active subjectivities and collective solidarities are forged. Yet the essential characteristic of extreme violence is precisely that it tends to obliterate this possibility, that is, to reduce individuals and groups to utter helplessness, of which the diverse forms of suicidal violence and counterviolence are also variants. This question was the abiding preoccupation of certain philosophers, especially Spinoza, who, although he develops an account of such helplessness in terms of the effects that absolute monarchy has on individuals’ capacity to maintain their instinct for self-preservation, nevertheless denies that it is possible in absolute terms. Spinoza’s phenomenology of violence, highlighted in particular by Deleuze, is based on the idea that individuality (for as long as it subsists) comprises an incompressible minimum that extreme violence cannot obliterate or turn against the individual’s effort to live and think, in the conscious or, above all, unconscious form of a willed or “voluntary” servitude that is also a will to sacrifice.20 This idea, let us note, is altogether different from the Hegelian idea (ultimately of Christian origin) that extreme violence can be “converted” into ethical, legal, and political progress by the “power of the negative.” It is all the more interesting in that it is based on the thesis that individuality itself is transindividual; that is, on the claim that what grounds both individuals’ capacity to resist violence and, quite simply, their “being” is the whole set of relations that they maintain at all times with other individuals who “are a part of themselves” as they “are part” of the being of others.21 With the capacity to resist that marks the power to live comes the capacity to speak, to demand “rights,” to fight for one’s selfinterest or the emancipation of humanity. Endlessly deferred, it is also always

APRÈS-COUP

139

the “ideal” target of the system of cruelty; this clearly shows that it poses a fundamental anthropological and political problem. It is the problem, I am tempted to say, on which the very possibility of an “anthropology of politics” depends.

II One whole segment of contemporary philosophy has responded to this problem by reactivating the question of evil at the juncture between ethics and politics. In Spinoza (who, precisely, uses the traditional term ethics to designate the theoretical field in which the possibility of politics can be “deduced” from the general conditions of individuality considered as a set of relationships and conflicts, of relations of activity and passivity), the idea of an incompressible minimum and, accordingly, of the individual’s capacity to resist violence (especially the idea that people cannot be prevented from thinking) is closely bound up with two theses that we shall have to question, meaning both that we cannot take them for granted and that we must discuss their presuppositions. One affirms, against the dominant current of contractualism (particularly against Hobbes), that there is no nature that can be opposed to the history of institutions and to politics, and, more generally, that there is nothing before politics and thus no “foundation” for the differences between various forms of society and regimes other than the different economies of forces operating in them. The other thesis has it that the notion of evil is an imaginary notion and that it simply reflects the way that individuals who are “conscious of their desires and ignorant of the causes that determine them” (Spinoza, Ethics, appendix to part 1) imagine the forces that stand in the way of their interests and self-preservation and, in that sense, “destroy” them. In the fi nal analysis, they mean death, which is “evil” par excellence because it corresponds to the ultimate isolation of the individual from his fellows: we can cause the death of others or die at their hands, but we always die alone, if not “for ourselves.” This thesis, even if we do not maintain it in this form, has the immense advantage of posing the ethical problem in the vicinity of the limits revealed by the phenomenology of extreme violence. The critique of the reference to “evil,” however, can be conducted in a number of very different ways. It has been vigorously pursued by Alain

140

APRÈS-COUP

Badiou in a short book, Ethics, that alludes to Spinoza while affirming its own Platonic orientation.22 With Emmanuel Levinas as his point of reference but with an eye to the broader current of the philosophical defense of the “rights of man” [les droits de l’homme] and the “rights of the living” that sets out from a denunciation of Evil as that which politics and, more generally, human action should shun and make impossible,23 Badiou takes it upon himself to show, in a way that is partly axiomatic and partly demonstrative, that ethics and politics (and therefore their articulation) should not be founded negatively, on the primacy of a reference to Evil, but positively, on a reference to the Good, which, in line with a tradition extending from Plato to St. Thomas (even if, technically speaking, Badiou proposes a definition of it that is different and even antithetical to the traditional one), he identifies with Truth.24 Badiou elaborates his critique along two axes that inevitably call certain Spinozist theses to mind. One is the idea that the ethical (and, consequently, political) position founded on the primacy of the idea of Evil (or “radical” Evil) is inseparable from an obsession with death and, accordingly, a “nihilistic” submission to the death drive even as it combats its manifestations.25 The other is the idea that Evil is an abstract generality founded on the power (and, in certain cases, the manipulation) of analogies that make it possible to forge “enemies” of humanity by way of assimilation to archetypal figures of the inhuman (thus the use of Hitler’s name and the reference to the Holocaust in order to identify new incarnations of Evil, Islam in particular).26 The weakness of a discourse of this sort, at least in my view, is that, after proceeding to make a term-by-term inversion within the metaphysical couple of Good and Evil (proclaiming the superiority of the ethics of the Good over the ethics of Evil, whereas Spinoza, it will be remembered, considers them to be rigorously inseparable, not to say synonymous), or even an inversion of the inversion (if it is granted that the various ethics of radical Evil, both before and after Kant, are governed by the destruction of the Idea of the Sovereign Good, and that the task is not to reestablish the latter but to bring out the true principle of universality informing it: the immortality of truths), it proves to be literally obsessed by the threat posed by the different forms of Evil. It has deduced their existence as the negative of the Good: above all, the “simulacrum,” formally indiscernible from the truth whose evental character it mimics, while also mimicking its power to de-

APRÈS-COUP

141

stroy the established order as a source of subjective fidelity (the example par excellence of this “disaster” being, once again, Nazism, as “counterrevolutionary revolution”) but also as illusion’s general condition of possibility, the reign of opinion itself founded on negative generalities such as “egoism,” the “power of money” (or of the market), “communitarianism,” and so on. The idea of an ethics of the Good thus proves to be indiscernible from the idea that, a few “rare” exceptions aside (the rarity of founding events, the rarity of fidelity without betrayal, and so on), human beings live in the world of Evil, or at least of perversion and ignorance of the Good. Thus we find ourselves back at our starting point, the indistinction of the figures of the negative. But it is precisely this that we must leave behind, it seems to me, if we are to confront the question raised by Spinoza and, in the opposite sense, the contemporary phenomenology of extreme violence: that of the limits of the collective capacity for politics (or, if you like, that of the “unpolitical” limits on politics).27 Most contemporary thinking about extreme violence has not, in fact, been organized around an undifferentiated or metaphysical notion of “absolute” evil (even if it has had occasion to rethink its significance, particularly in the wake of Kantian and post-Kantian theorizations of the perversion of freedom or the Nietzschean theorization of nihilism). Rather, it has been organized in response a specifically modern problem, that of the interrelations between the “destruction of the political” and the “destruction of the human” as correlative aspects of the same essential productivity. Should we speak of a “destruction of the political” or of a “capture of the political”? In examining this question, our reasoning should follow, I have suggested in chapter 1 of this volume, two axes of a “structure” founded on a cross between two modalities of the destruction of action: the modality that I call “ultraobjective,” which reduces human beings to the status of things that can be eliminated or instrumentalized at will in a world of commodities, and the modality I call “ultrasubjective,” which makes individuals and communities overcome by the delirium of sovereign power the agents of a plan to liquidate the forces of “evil.” In question here is less, as I see it, a structure of “causes” with an explanatory function than a structure of observable effects whose cause (or, at any rate, whose ultimate or main cause) is “absent.” Hence, this structure serves less to classify and rationally explain the historically observable forms of extreme violence by reducing their

142

APRÈS-COUP

essential heterogeneity than to interpret their overdetermination by approaching from several angles at once, at the boundary between discourse and metaphor, the critical points of our experience at which measure is transformed into excess, homogeneity into heterogeneity (Bataille28), and relation (including the balance of forces or “power relation”) into nonrelation as a result of the disappearance or the absolutization of the figure of the adversary as such.29 The attempt to take extreme violence and one of its specific effects into account—the destruction of the conditions of possibility of politics, beginning with the very possibility of struggle or agon—raises anthropological questions of the most difficult kind. This attempt is, it seems to me, closely bound up with the possibility of dissociating, at least to a certain extent, a notion of history and historicity from the “eschatological” or apocalyptic notion of the “ends of man.” For what is at issue here is the coexistence—at the limit of the indiscernible—of the production of the human by man (that is, by society and culture) and the destruction of man by man in the very forms and institutions of humanization. This question may be approached by way of certain related themes have taken on great significance in contemporary philosophy. The theme of radical evil is certainly one of them. It is well known that Arendt consistently links it, in her post-Kantian terms, to the annihilation of “spontaneity,” meaning both the capacity to judge and the capacity to resist. She also treats it, however, as an effect of all the transgressions that, taken together, tend to blur the distinctions between subject and object or perpetrator and victim—in a word, between activity and passivity—thereby instituting what Levi calls, as was just noted, the “gray zone.” I, for my part, interpret this as less a confusion between the roles of perpetrator and victim than, at a deeper level, the emergence of a question (an undecidable question, in fact) about the place of the inhuman in the human (or “the human race”). Which of the two, perpetrator or victim, (ab)user or (ab)used, becomes the equivalent of an animal or a machine, a Stück? Another theme inseparable from the idea of destructive production is based—for Adorno, for example, and the Frankfurt School in general—on an inversion of the economists’ conception of industrial rationality (which makes a place for the idea of “productive destruction”) and a generalization of it to the whole of history. This brings us back to Arendt’s reflections on the

APRÈS-COUP

143

idea of the inutility of the camps and, more generally, the institutions of totalitarianism; it is, in sum, the other face of the idea of radical evil, which she extends far beyond its Kantian sense, fraught with theological presuppositions, of a “perversion of the will,” making it a “diabolical” inversion of the very idea of law. This is a move that Kant, for his part, carefully rules out: it is ultimately the same problem as that of the “banality of evil,” considered as detached obedience to a law of the destruction of the human conditions of life. The latter accordingly presents itself as a “categorical imperative” mandating collective dehumanization; its source is anonymous in its turn.30 Above all, however, such reflections on the limit of the anthropological invite comparison with what Jacques Derrida proposes to call, in a series of texts, “the beyond of the death drive.” This means, if I understand him rightly, the dissociation of the tension or “unity of opposites” that constitute the death drive in Freud, where it figures as the power to destroy or denature life while simultaneously “protecting” the individual against his or her instrumentalization by the process that perpetuates the life of the species. The result, for Derrida, is that only a drive for mastery or possession (Bemächtigungstrieb ) subsists, which he associates with the principle of sovereignty. This no longer has anything to do with the psychological analogy of ill-will or human “evil”; the hypothesis is, rather, that the constitutive association of death with life is turned back against life itself, inverting the function of defense of the “ego” or of individuality and turning it into a process of unlimited appropriation (including—perhaps most importantly—self-appropriation).31 I say that we are beyond psychologism here, but we naturally find ourselves on a very uncomfortable tightrope, as in Freud himself, between psychology and metaphysics or between two ways, empirical or speculative, of invoking the idea of human nature. The idea of the “death drive” and its beyond or limit can be reduced neither to Hobbes’ “war of all against all” nor to Darwin’s “natural selection” and its applications in the political realm. Thus we are brought back to the question of the anthropological status of extreme violence in a way that highlights the aporetic variant of it. A phenomenology of the modalities of human existence that bring extreme violence into play seeks out limit experiences or, rather, investigates their conditions of possibility and impossibility. It also tends, however, to efface conventional distinctions, both normal and normative, between nature and history or nature and politics, as well as the border between humanity and inhumanity.

144

APRÈS-COUP

III How, then, shall we reformulate the objectives of politics in order to take into account its constitutive limit, which is internal to it, not simply imposed by circumstances? In my opinion, we can do so only if we acknowledge at the philosophical level its irreducible complexity, which rules out relating it to just one category even if the different concepts of politics that we conjointly evoke are necessarily akin. But kinship necessarily implies tension. Here, in particular, I come back to the tension between the etymologically kindred notions of citizenship and civility, which I have had occasion to discuss earlier in this volume and elsewhere. 32 Must we go so far as to say that we have to do here with “opposites,” each of which in some way presupposes the other, in a continuous historical process? Modern citizenship of which we are the products and, to the extent that we can be, the actors, is a universal right, even when it is instituted only within borders. That is why it must take the paradoxical form of a “community without community,” a community with no substantial bond or natural or supernatural “origin.” It can only be the immanent, collective construction of reciprocal rights, simultaneously invalidating forms of domination and of discrimination.33 I associate the idea of civility, in contrast, with the movement of identification and disidentification (or, if one prefers, of a distantiation internal to those identifications without which there can be no human solidarity) and, consequently, of retreat even from the power of the collective. My hypothesis is, consequently, that there must be a moment of civility in politics, over and above citizenship, in order to introduce the demand for antiviolence or resistance to violence into it—especially resistance to the reactive violence that violence itself elicits when it is generalized. The negative universality of the community of citizens—not so much in its extensive (that is, territorial and therefore national) dimension as in its intensive, egalitarian, and democratic dimension—can result from the objective institution of public order only within very narrow social limits and under conditions that are always provisional. Its historical dynamic stems from a strictly subjective process: what Lefort calls “democratic invention” and Rancière calls a demand “for a share by those who have no share” [la part des sans part]. I have called it “the emancipatory insurgency” that simul-

APRÈS-COUP

145

taneously perpetuates and eclipses the constitution. But this insurgency, in its turn, only makes sense in relation to a positive law or communal order that it “critically” recognizes. How, then, shall we associate the two subjective movements that are at once closely akin and irreducible to one another, never absolutely identical, yet both required by the circumstances in which we confront extreme violence? One leads us to demand justice or “reparations” for the wrongs infl icted by domination and exploitation: to demand rights (especially equal rights) in the form of a constitutive insurgency that founds the universal community. The other makes it possible to take a distance from the very interests and substantialist images of the political community, a movement the peculiar universality of which is not communitarian and intensive but extensive and “diasporic.”34 That is perhaps the riddle, or, in any case, the practical aporia of politics. Yet this aporia is also the opening in which, after the forms of “terror” or “cruelty” have been swept aside, politics can be reconstituted or reinvented in aleatory fashion at the heart of every “contemporary moment” that calls for politics—and, by the same token, gives it its chance. We can also discern this paradoxical, pragmatic, or—to the extent that it seeks to bring about a process of the self-transformation of subjectivity (and of political subjectivity, the very representation of action)—“performative” combination in a celebrated text to which many have referred: Arendt’s discussion of the problem of the politics of the rights of man. Her basic idea (developed at the end of the second part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, in the chapter entitled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”) might be called her metapolitical “theorem.” It is a critical transformation of the demand for emancipation contained in the proposition of equaliberty or the idea of a “politics of the rights of man.” For Arendt, as is well known, the crisis of the nation-state, together with the mass phenomena of denationalization and the accompanying deportations of entire populations (for whom she has coined an expression, “stateless” people, that today serves as a model for many similar or derivative expressions), has revealed that the “rights of man,” in the moral and philosophical sense (frequently associated with a cosmopolitical horizon), do not constitute the ground and guarantee for the rights of the citizen or for the state based on the rule of law. It is the other way around: where institutionally defined citizen’s rights are abolished (as well as for those who are stripped

146

APRÈS-COUP

of them politically), the fundamental “rights of man” no longer exist. The “right to have rights” on which all the others are premised is rooted neither in nature nor in revelation; nor, it goes without saying, is it reducible to the positive, constituted modality of the exercise of power (which further implies that it cannot be purely and simply “granted” by a sovereign, even if the sovereign is the “representative of the people”). It constitutes itself, rather, at the point where individual resistance to oppression, subjection, and death intersects with the collective affirmation that human existence has a “public” dimension: the point where the institution is born. In other words, the universal declarations of rights that make liberty and equality strictly inseparable—reciprocal rights uncompromised by the “lexicographical orderings” (Rawls) that tend to impose despotic or oligarchic powers on them—effectively proclaim the reality of the “political form,” the community of citizens, to be the only concrete realization of the “human,” proclaiming it in the mode of the injunction or the task to be accomplished but also as the first performative modality of its existence. Arendt’s “republicanism”—which, it is often said, is inspired by ancient Greek models and accordingly haunted by nostalgia for the “city-state,” the small community of equals who are also peers (homoioi )—thus turns out to be, in fact, capable of posing a problem that is, in the age of globalization, wholly open to the actuality of the universal: the problem of the ways of instituting the right to have rights or citizenship in a world in which the political community no longer has natural or traditional bases but can arise only from a collective decision and practice.35 It seems to me that this comes down to recognizing that citizen’s rights are not grounded in an already existing humanity or human nature but form a “constituent” dyad with civility, the other face of community: less the “negative” face as opposed to the positive than the “critical” and even self-critical face of political action. This can be reformulated in speculative terms. The only way to prevent the democratic foundation of politics—what was classically declared to be “natural” equality and freedom, with or without reference to a revelation— from being immediately contradicted or negated in its practical institution is to abolish the foundation itself; that is, to conceive of politics (and the proposition of equaliberty) as an absolute “fiction,” or an institution with no foundation that is necessarily and irremediably contingent. 36 The sole “foundation” is a negative one, terror or extreme violence (or a combina-

APRÈS-COUP

147

tion of the forms of extreme violence, which is, precisely, terror). The alternative, it is the aleatory, purely practical possibility of avoiding terror, of deferring it more or less completely and for a relatively protracted period. From the anthropological viewpoint, this is undoubtedly a “pessimistic” proposition that one might accordingly suppose to be still “Hobbesian” if it were not that the terror involved here has nothing of a “prepolitical” state of nature about it. That terror would seem to be, rather, ultrapolitical, constantly surging up out of the way politics is “continued” by “other means,” or carries its own means to an extreme. Consequently, it cannot be avoided by instituting the political in the form of a juridical absolute or a monopoly on “legitimate” violence, the sovereign imperium that always pretends to “save” man from his evil nature, but only in the form of a collective antiviolence. It is in this sense that I am trying to conceive of a way of instituting a citizenship that would be constantly measured by the standard of civility, a citizenship for which the institution of civility would constitute something like the internal condition. A citizenship permanently “in the making” though the detour of the unpolitical other scene. It is therefore impossible not to evoke here, even if only very briefly, the classic debate on the essentially tragic dimension of politics. Doubtless that adjective is not unambiguous even if, in our contemporary culture, it draws on sources that are in part always the same for everyone: the Greek tradition, a reading of Nietzsche. This holds for an author such as Albert Camus, who has once again become a standard reference in our culture, thanks to the decline of moralities of “commitment” à la Jean-Paul Sartre and religious or secular forms of messianism.37 In The Rebel (1951), Camus describes the revolution as an eclipsing of revolt by nihilism, a delirium of destruction inspired by the illusion that history has meaning and direction [sens]. He defi nes political morality as a “thought that recognizes limits” and a “thought at the meridian” that marries a sense of moderation to the way conflicts are conducted (the model here, in his view, was the revolutionary syndicalism inspired by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon). Camus sought to apply this philosophy during the war in Algeria, notably by issuing, in 1956, two years after the outbreak of the war of liberation, a “Call for a Civilian Truce in Algeria.” It stipulated that the “two peoples” for which Algeria had become a native land would agree to limit the methods employed in their confrontation to the forms recognized by the laws of war, thus avoiding the

148

APRÈS-COUP

“fatality” of the tragedy.38 To these unrealistic formulations (unrealistic because, to begin with, they presupposed what it would have been necessary to prove, the symmetrical position of the combatants in a colonial war), however noble and courageous they may have been, we must, I think, prefer Max Weber’s earlier formulations in “Politics as Vocation”: Whoever makes a pact with the use of force, for whatever ends (and every politician does so), is at the mercy of its particular consequences. The man who fights for his faith, whether religious or revolutionary, is particularly exposed to this risk. . . . Anyone who wishes to engage in politics at all, and particularly anyone who wishes to practice it as a profession, must become conscious of these ethical paradoxes and of his own responsibility for what may become of him under the pressure they exert. For, I repeat, he is entering into relations with the satanic powers that lurk in every act of violence. . . . The only man who has a “vocation” for politics is one who is certain that his spirit will not be broken if the world, when looked at from his point of view, proves too stupid or base to accept what he wishes to offer it, and who, when faced with all that obduracy, can still say “Nevertheless!” despite everything. 39

The question that confronts politics today, however, is no longer quite the same as Weber’s, which is still marked by the Machiavelian, Hegelian, and Nietzschean idea that “great men make history.” The question today would seem to be, rather: How can the balance between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility be democratically shared? Which are the forms of collective power (even insurrection) that make it possible for classes, peoples, multitudes to reflect on the consequences and aftereffects of their own “social movements” when they confront a violent social order or a legal state of injustice? After “Arendt’s Theorem,” this could be called “Luxemburg’s aporia.” I would bring different hypotheses into relation with this reference to tragedy. First—negatively—the idea that a politics of civility is no more to be identified with nonviolence than with the counterviolence that prevents or resists violence. This no doubt explains why such a politics cannot be elaborated in either an exclusively epic or an exclusively messianic mode. This means, further, that that politics cannot coincide (or, at any rate, can-

APRÈS-COUP

149

not merely or completely coincide) with the imperative of peace. Alongside it, it must make room for not only social justice but also the political confrontation (agon) or conflict without which justice has no value as emancipation and will quite simply remain beyond reach. But the characteristic feature of extreme violence is not, perhaps, that it destroys peace or makes it impossible but rather that it obliterates conflict itself by imposing on it a disproportionality of forces that robs it of all history and all uncertainty. For that reason I began my phenomenological sketch of extreme violence and its thresholds with the annihilation of the capacity to resist, and I pursued it with the problematic emergence of a “gray zone” of mutual contamination of the oppressor’s and the oppressed’s antithetic positions. My second hypothesis is the idea that the debate with “violence” in its different forms (objective as well as subjective) is essentially interminable. That is why, ultimately, “there is no nonviolence.” A relationship of forces [rapport de forces] that can develop, at the limit, into the nonrelationship of the contending forces, into their incommensurability, and thus obliterate or annul what Foucault calls the agon—that is, the permanent possibility of a reversal inscribed in all forms of resistance to domination of whatever kind, and the heterotopia of the spaces of freedom eluding every social or territorial normality—is latent in the evolution of every conflict in which fundamental social forces and, therefore, antagonistic principles of social organization are invested. But, however powerful and even “majoritarian” it can become (this is the dream of every emancipatory movement, popular insurgency, self-asserting demonstration of the nameless and the powerless), it is bound to face the return of repressed violence from both without and within. The “end of tragedy” has been a subject of discussion for many years now (if not, indeed, for centuries, given that this discussion is coextensive with the very idea of modernity). The debate has turned on its irreversibility and on how it should be interpreted in light of the relationship between aesthetic and political categories. Hegel asserted (in the Philosopy of Right ) that “our time no longer needs heroes”; Bertolt Brecht echoed him (in The Life of Galileo): “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” It may indeed be true that we can no longer “write ‘tragedies’.” It should, however, be possible to renew the writing of the tragic in the form of documentary journalism, or fi lm, or political discourse, if only it is carefully borne in mind that the

150

APRÈS-COUP

“tragic individuals” of our own epoch (whom I shall emphatically not call heroes, even if their courage is past doubting) are the militants of the impossible who—for example, in Palestine, where they come from both sides of a “wall” under construction—are trying to block with their bodies and their words the irreversible separation of communities without forgetting on which side power lies, and on which side, weakness: who the oppressors are who are the oppressed. The “tragic dimension” of politics is the element, pointed out by Max Weber, of the disproportionality of power inherent in it. But it is also the risk of the perversion of the acts of resistance, revolts, and revolutions provoked by oppression or terror that transform them into destructive or selfdestructive forms of counterviolence. This brings to mind Kant’s “people comprised of devils,” for whom, according to the author of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, a republican constitution should also be viable. He identified this people, perhaps, with the revolutionary masses, that is, with the subject of freedom in history. The tragic dimension of politics can, however, become a politics of the tragic when it acts on the ethical decision that the risk that the revolt may be perverted is never sufficient reason not to revolt. That, perhaps, is the application “from below” of Weber’s phrase, at the very end of “Politics as Vocation,” which has it that the proper task of the political is to achieve the “impossible” in the diabolical element of power. I would be tempted to add that the most diabolical thing about power is its helplessness, or the illusion of omnipotence inherent in it. But that may be exactly what Weber meant.

A PPEN DI X

I. Lacan (see pp. 72 ff.) The purpose of these remarks is not to produce a “psychoanalytic interpretation” of extreme violence but a topological structure that allows us to imagine the paradoxical unity of its manifestations. Lacan uses two related properties of the Möbius strip, as appears when we put them back in context: first, the fact that it has just one “surface” (and therefore also just one “edge”) so that one passes continually from its outside to its inside, endlessly “traveling” in place (like insects in the grip of an illusion or fantasy—which we doubtless all are); second, the fact that the strip’s one edge circumscribes (“for us,” theoretical—or political—observers, a void or a hole that is neither “inside” the strip nor “outside” it, but located in a radical elsewhere (in which we can put everything that proves irreducible to our way of representing it, whether it is a lack that it is impossible to fill or an object that is “excessive”). On the Möbius strip’s continuous surface, the “antithetical” predicates of perception and hallucination constantly flow into one another (recognition of the self and its objects is transformed into miscognition). On the edge, which Lacan calls “the place of anxiety,” an alternative appears. What fi les by here are either the countless partial objects of desire (more generally, of emotional fi xation: love

152

APPENDIX

and hate) that, in their inadequacy, “supplement,” for the subject, the lost object (supplement, that is, the impossibility of returning to the source of desire, the relationship of dependency on the Other or the symbolic order, the inaccessible “cause” of subjectification) and for that very reason have the power to “captivate” her. But there can also loom up, on this edge, in obsessive or even “depersonalizing” fashion (that is, in the destructive way that breeds madness), the uncanny [unheimliche] hallucinatory things, the ego’s (or self’s) “doubles” that threaten to annihilate the ego. These things occupy the empty place of the object of absolute, originary, or total desire (an object that obviously does not exist, a simple “remainder” of subjection to the symbolic order or the signifiers of language).1 That is why Lacan repeatedly says that “anxiety does not deceive.”2 The “empty” or nonassignable place (a place that can be localized only as a paradoxical, external/ internal edge) must be conceived of as the place of an oscillation between the objectification of desire (or its incarnation in “objects” of love and hate, partial sources of pleasure and unpleasure) and its reification (or “fetishization”) in the form of an unrecognizable, inhuman double of the subject, or in that of something it is “impossible to make disappear.”3 This oscillation is fundamentally unpredictable, for we have no criteria or absolute guarantees of the difference between reason and madness, although there can be no conflating them. It further implies that we have to do, simultaneously, with a continuous “transition” and an irreducible “gap”: this finds its topological illustration in the fact that the “insect” moving from one place on the Möbius strip to another cannot “penetrate the surface” in order to get to the other side (at the same point, which is its underside): it has access to the other side only by way of the edge, or the inaccessible “hole” in which the subject annihilates herself in her objects at the fantasy level, thus sliding into “ultra-subjectivity.”

II. Faye (see pp. 75 ff.) Jean-Pierre Faye, in his 1972 Langages totalitaires: Critique de la raison narrative, critique de l’économie narrative, sets out to describe the “topography” of the discourses of the German “conservative revolution” that took place in the Weimar Republic between the failure of the Kapp Putsch and Hitler’s triumph in the 1933 elections, in order to explain how their semantic oscillation between left and right and the dynamics of their transformative effects on the ideological field could pave the way, through a transformation of political language itself, for the hegemony of “national socialism.” The ambiguous meaning of the word Volk (people) and its derivatives (völkisch, which means “popular” or “populist,” but also “national,”

APPENDIX

153

and eventually became the equivalent of “racial”) and the symmetry of certain syntagmatic segments in the discourses of the different “extremist” groups ultimately abolished [aufheben] the left/right opposition, authorizing the transfer of the idea of revolution from the Communists to the Nazis. Faye did not invent the “horseshoe” form but borrowed it from a narrative, constructed after the event, of the speculations that were bandied about in circles of nationalist writers, such as the one that crystallized around Ernst Jünger: “The horseshoe of the parties is the force field in which definitions of the credible and justifiable—the acceptable—would be transformed.” 4 It allows us to situate the “radical” formulations agitating the mass movements in both camps: “national Communists” and “national Bolsheviks” on the one hand, and “national revolutionaries” and “conservative revolutionaries” on the other. Their immediate proximity explains how individuals who would play a more or less ephemeral role in the construction of National Socialism and, in the long run, lay the groundwork for their own elimination by the “silent guest” on this stage could change sides. Straddling the void, Hitler introduced his own signifier, anti-Semitism, into this discursive space, rallying the masses disoriented by the crisis around it: However, an implicit paradox lurks in the opposition between these two faces and the successive and complementary discoveries of them. . . . There was a curious crisscrossing in the genesis of Hitler’s ideology: national was associated with revolutionary, while social was associated with conservatism. We may say, if we are not intimidated by a double anachronism, that the young Hitler felt himself to be a national revolutionary before discovering that he was a social conservative. He saw himself as a political revolutionary—but it was a question, as with Thomas Mann’s Naphta, of a Revolutionär der Erhaltung [revolutionary intent on conservation]. Hitler was “national,” but discovered that he was “social.” One would expect nationalism to declare itself to be conservative, and the discovery of the social to experience itself as revolutionary. And such formulas do fulfill that expectation. In the course of the narrative, however, the opposite happens. This is what Mann, precisely, called Verschränktheit, or crisscrossing. . . . A certain logic in this crisscrossing dictates that Hitler should implicitly have regarded himself as a national revolutionary and a social conservative before expressly announcing that he was a national conservative and a social revolutionary: that is, ultimately, someone national-and-social who declared himself to be “the most conservative revolutionary in the world.” In Hitler, the point where these oppositions crossed, where the confusion reached its apogee, was, precisely, anti-Semitism.5

154

APPENDIX

III. Habermas (see p. 92 and note 66) In Habermas, the term internal colonization refers to a description of the retroactive effect [effet en retour] that bureaucratic rationality (in Max Weber’s and Georg Lukács’s sense: a combination of economic utilitarianism and legal formalism) has on the “lifeworld” constituted by the traditional meanings—religious or not— that organize daily life and determine the communitarian values from which daily life was divorced in the course of capitalism’s development. Marx’s specific contribution here, according to Habermas, resides in the possibility that “the theory of value” or of commodification opens up when it is applied to labor power itself (and thus, in a certain way, to “life”): that of understanding how this rationalization culminates less in a “mystification” of consciousness than in its fragmentation. Habermas believes that this fragmentation, which makes the individual in late capitalism someone who is, as it were, “uprooted” in his own lifeworld, is comparable to the psychosociological effects historically observable in the colonial world: Something of this sort does in fact happen; the differentiation of science, morality, and art, which is characteristic of occidental rationalism, results not only in a growing autonomy for sectors dealt with by specialists but also in the splitting off of these sectors from a stream of tradition continuing on in everyday practice in a quasi-natural fashion. This split has been repeatedly experienced as a problem. The attempts at an Aufhebung of philosophy and art were rebellions against structures that subordinated everyday consciousness to the standards of exclusive expert cultures developing according to their own logics but cut it off from any influx from them. Everyday consciousness sees itself thrown back on traditions whose claims to validity have already been suspended; where it does escape the spell of traditionalism, it is hopelessly splintered. In place of “false consciousness” we today have a fragmented consciousness that blocks enlightenment by the mechanisms of reification. It is only with this that the conditions for a colonization of the lifeworld are met. When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it. The diffused perspectives of the local culture cannot be sufficiently coordinated to permit the play of the metropolis and the world market to be grasped from the periphery. Thus the theory of late capitalist reification, reformulated in terms of system and lifeworld, has to be supplemented by an analysis of cultural modernity,

APPENDIX

155

which replaces the now superseded theory of consciousness. Rather than serving a critique of ideology, this analysis would have to explain the cultural impoverishment and fragmentation of everyday consciousness. Rather than hunting after the scattered traces of revolutionary consciousness, it would have to examine the conditions for recoupling a rationalized culture with an everyday communication dependent on vital traditions.6

Thus it is a question of people’s experience of the world at a deeper level than that of consciousness itself. I suggest using the term internal colonization to designate a secondary phenomenon that arises both when the utilitarian rationalization of individuals’ activity has, tendentially, already come about, with the result that all individual and collective existence is irreversibly caught up in the space of the market but also when the forms of socialization specific to classic capitalist society (whether what is involved is new traditions “invented” by the working classes on the basis of experiences of resistance and struggle, or modes of education and consumption imposed on all the “subaltern” classes by the ruling bourgeoisie) begin to fall apart under the impact of a new “grand transformation” targeting proletarian culture itself.7 Thus it is truly a question, in this sense, of “late capitalism,” as revealed by the effects of “neo-liberal” globalization. This seems to me to be the thrust, in particular, of Robert Castel’s analyses of the transition from the “wage-earning condition” to that of generalized precariousness and the effects of “negative individualism” or “disaffi liation” that go hand in hand with them. 8 It is in this sense that I depicted not long ago the condition of superfluous individuals “internally excluded” from a universal market that, as such, has no outside.9

NOTES

Preface 1.

2.

3.

Partial results of these two parallel inquiries are now collected in two volumes: La Proposition de l ’égaliberté. Essais politiques 1989–2009 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010) [English translation: Equaliberty. Political Essays, translated by James Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)], and Citoyen Sujet et autres essais d ’anthropologie philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011) (English translation forthcoming from Fordham University Press). See my essay “What Is Political Philosophy? Notes for a Topography,” in Equaliberty (op. cit.), 135–144. Several of Esposito’s books [including Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) and Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Boston: Polity Press, 2011)] are now translated into English. See my essay “Trois concepts de la politique” [in La Crainte des masses. Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1997) [translated as “Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation, Transformation, Civility,” in Politics and the Other Scene (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 1–39].

158

P R E FA C E

4 . Étienne Balibar: Violence et civilité. Wellek Library Lectures et autres essais de philosophie politique (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 420 pages. 5. The essays included in the French edition (forming Part II of the volume) and left aside in the American edition are the following: “Guerre et politique: variations clausewitziennes” (English version: “Politics as War, War as Politics. Post-Clausewitzian Variations,” http://www.ciepfc.fr/spip.php?article37); “Gewalt. Violence et pouvoir dans l’histoire de la théorie marxiste.” [English translation: “Reflections on Gewalt,” Historical Materialism, 17 (2008), 99–125]; “Lénine et Gandhi: une rencontre manquée” [English translation: “Lenin and Gandhi: A Missed Encounter?” with a new Afterword, Radical Philosophy, 172 (Mar/Apr 2012), 9–17]; “Le Hobbes de Schmitt, le Schmitt de Hobbes” (no English translation). 6. What I have not updated are references to contemporary events where cruelty is displayed, because this would be endless. The Lectures were conceived and delivered at the time of the “Wars of Yugoslavia” and shortly after another episode of mass starvation in the African Sahel, due to seemingly “natural” climate and ecological accidents, while the doctrine and practice of “humanitarian interventions” was taking shape, together with its very selective implementations. 7. See Le Passage des frontières, Autour de l ’œuvre de Jacques Derrida, ed. MarieLouise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1994), pp. 203–210. 8. See Alfredo Gomez-Muller (dir.), La Question de l ’humain entre l ’éthique et l ’anthropologie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). This essay also appeared earlier (in a translation by Stephanie Bundy) in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 20 (2,3), (2009), 9–35. 9. On Althusser’s “late” philosophy of aleatory materialism or “materialism of the encounter,” see in particular Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries. Philosophy ’s Perpetual War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 10. See Politics and the Other Scene, op. cit. 11. See my essay “Outline of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” in We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, translated by James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 115–132. 12. As I indicated in the texxt, there are undoubtedly affinities here with what Giorgio Agamben calls the figure of the homo sacer, on which he built a whole genealogy of the unpolitical, which would deserve a more explicit comparison. See Bertrand Ogilvie, L’Homme jetable, Essai sur l’exterminisme et la violence extrême (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2012).

INTRODUCTION

159

Introduction: Violence and Politics: Questions 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

This chapter is an expanded version of “Violence(s), non-violence(s), contre-violence(s), anti-violence(s),” a paper I delivered at the conference “Le passage des frontières: Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida,” held in Cerisy-la-Salle in July 1992. The original version is available in the published proceedings of the conference, Le Passage des frontières (Paris: Galilée, 1994). It would perhaps be preferable to say “by lumping ‘all sorts of things’ together under the generic term ‘violence.’” This scheme of unification/distribution is of course not peculiar to the political; it has its pertinence in theology and other fields as well. What distinguishes the political, however, is the postulate that the empire of evil is “of this world,” immanent if not material, and the assumption that “spiritual” (or “symbolic”) violence is a form of nonviolence: it does not become (more or less serious) violence unless it resorts to means of coercion. This gives rise to the whole dialectic of coercion and seduction and to one of the always available ways of “criticizing politics,” demonstrating that nonviolence or symbolic violence are also clearly forms of violence. This idea itself rather clearly constitutes a form of violence for as long as it is confi ned to psychology. To get beyond the psychological realm we must no doubt pose, like Freud, the problem of the death drive, or else reflect, like Spinoza, on the element of “passivity” constitutive of the “active position” itself in the field of violence. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79–153. See also Catherine Malabou’s commentary in “Economie de la violence, violence de l’économie (Derrida et Marx),” Revue philosophique, no. 2, 1990. In still other words, if it were not for the fact that there is an inherent limit to the situation of “voluntary servitude,” precisely the point at which violence is felt to be intolerable and incompatible with “human” existence, which it threatens with death, misery, or abjection. Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). My aim here is not to discuss this or that historical example, not even the tragic examples that weigh down, in the most immediate way, on our attempt to think politics and violence together. I shall simply say that it seems to me

160

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14 .

15.

16.

INTRODUCTION

equally impossible to pretend that the horror of the historical oppression exercised in the name of the revolution results simply from the perversity or utopian naiveté of this idea, on the one hand, and, on the other, to aver that this naiveté has nothing at all to do with revolutionaries’ inability to come to terms with the failure of their undertaking. This is undeniably Marx’s way of repeating the revolutionary thesis of the “universal right to politics” that I have linked to the “proposition of equaliberty,” as is shown, in particular, by formulas he devised in connection with the foundation of the First International (“the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”). See Jacques Freymond, ed., La Première Internationale: Recueil de documents (Geneva: Droz, 1962), 1:3–9. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works [hereafter, MECW ] 35:739. Ibid., 243. “Isolating” those conditions in linear fashion as causes is what might be called Thomas More’s schema. Let us recall how Utopia elaborates, with impeccable logic, the chain of “causes” and “effects” that leads from private property to, ultimately, grinding poverty, crime, and war. This gives rise to the project of going all the way back to the first cause in order to do away with the whole chain: tollata causa, tollitur effectus. The term “dictatorship of the proletariat” (itself almost an antinomy) long symbolized this doubling of the revolutionary perspective in connection with the problem of violence. Louis Althusser always insisted on the fact that, in the history of capitalism, the “class struggle of the dominant” precedes and forestalls the resistance and “class struggle of the dominated.” This is plainly a figure of excess at the heart of the structure. I take some of my inspiration here from Malabou’s excellent formulations in “Economie de la violence, violence de l’économie.” See also Étienne Balibar, “Pouvoir,” in Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, ed. Georges Labica and Gérard Bensussan (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1982) and Balibar, “L’idée d’une politique de classe chez Marx,” in Marx en perspective, ed. B. Chavance (Paris: Ecole de hautes études en sciences sociales, 1985). Why not turn, the reader will ask, to Gandhi’s teachings? It seems to me that, despite the great interest of his idea of “nonviolence,” which is not reducible to morality but is a plainly political idea—the idea of a determinate, organized “nonviolence” collectively mobilized on the basis of a strategy in order to tip

INTRODUCTION

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

161

the balance of forces against institutional violence (or reversing the balance of apparently existing forces) and secure determinate objectives—Gandhi is not enough to settle the question we are examining here. This is not only because of the uncertain effects that Gandhian politics seem to produce: the terrifying revenge in the form of collective violence to which it historically gave rise. For it is no clearer than in the Leninist case what this revenge owed to historical conditions and what resulted from its own internal contradictions. It is also because this “nonviolence” serves a determinate end, for which it is the means: nationalism, albeit a nationalism inseparable from a powerful demand for equality and freedom. Finally, the ethics associated with this politics and presented as its condition is an ethics of interiority; but do we know exactly what interiority is in Indian civilization? See Étienne Balibar, “Lenin and Gandhi: A Missed Encounter?,” Radical Philosophy 172 (March–April 2012): 9–17. Étienne Balibar, “Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx, trans. James Swenson (London: Routledge, 1994), 3–37. The phrase is attributed to Saint-Just. Although it does not figure verbatim in any of his speeches justifying the Terror, it is faithful to their spirit (especially to that of his speech of 13 Ventôse of the Year II). I cannot help detecting similarities between this imaginarization and the analysis of rassemblements proposed by Jean-Claude Milner (For the Love of Language, trans. Ann Banfield [London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1990]), although I am not unaware that they have little affinity for one another. Obviously, the physical nature of violence, that is, its essential relationship to the body (we must doubtless go so far as to say that “moral” violence is itself always physical), is no more a matter of the “economy” than of “ideology.” It is in this paradoxical modality of simultaneous negation that it belongs to both. Precisely: everyone knows that this use is essentially a matter of “passivity.” Such passivity is the analog, on a planetary scale, of “non-assistance to a person in danger,” and no “right of humanitarian intervention” even scratches the surface of this massive phenomenon. On a global scale, however, nonassistance ceases to be a “crime.” [Translator’s note: Non-assistance to a person in danger is an offense punishable by law in France and other countries]. The phrase “complementary enemy” was coined by Germaine Tillion during the war in Algeria. See her France and Algeria: Complementary Enemies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961). See also Étienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Étienne Balibar and

162

INTRODUCTION

Immanuel Wallerstein, trans. Chris Turner, 37–67 (London: Verso, 1991). The expression “internal border” is crucial in Fichte: see Étienne Balibar, “Fichte and the Internal Border: On Addresses to the German Nation” [1990], in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx, trans. James Swenson (London: Routledge, 1994), 61–84. 23. Some argue that nationalism is merely one of the forms—never the only one, and never pure—of the exacerbation of “communitarian” confl icts and forms of violence. In the modern period, however, this is simply a way of designating global racism, for every real or virtual “community” is always already inscribed in a structure of differentiation and hierarchization. 24 . An example is provided by the functioning of the state apparatuses that produce what might be called “security amid insecurity,” or the generalization of policies—apparently illustrated by the 1991 Gulf War—of provoking armed violence with a view to beefing up the “new world order” (“state terrorism” is elicited at the material and ideological levels so that “counterterrorism” on a global scale, a substitute for the impossible organization of collective security, will seem indispensable).

1. From Extreme Violence to the Problem of Civility 1. This is not the same thing, it seems to me, as positing a priori that “violence” and “politics” (Eric Weil) or “violence” and “power” (Hannah Arendt) are antithetical or incompatible concepts. 2. Étienne Balibar, “Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation, Transformation, Civility,” trans. Chris Turner, in Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 1–39. 3. It is not possible to give a full genealogy of the notion of civility here, covering all the bifurcations and transformations of the word in the European languages. Moreover, as far as I know, the kind of critical work that has been done on the word civilization (to some extent a derivative and successor of civilitas) is not available for “civility.” See, however, François Bourricaud’s article Civilité in the Encyclopaedia Universalis, 2nd ed. (1984); Edward C. Banfield, ed., Civility and Citizenship in Liberal Democratic Societies (New York: Paragon House, 1992); Claudine Haroche, “La civilité et la politesse, des objets négligés de la sociologie politique,” in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 94 (1993): 97–120; and Philippe Raynaud, “Les philosophes et la civilité,” in L’Homme des Lumières de Paris à Pétersbourg , ed. Philippe Roger (Naples: Biblioteca Europea, Vivarium, 1995).

1.

FROM EXTREME VIOLENCE TO THE PROBLEM OF CIVILITY

163

The Latin civilitas (derived from civis, which, according to Benveniste, should be translated as “fellow townsman” rather than “citizen” (“Deux modèles linguistiques de la cité,” Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 2 [Paris: Gallimard, 1974]), originally had an objective meaning (the fact of belonging to the civitas) that gradually became subjective (the citizen’s “virtues”). During the first urban Renaissance (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), the Middle Ages used the word as the equivalent of politeia to designate the “civil regime” as opposed to the regime of ecclesiastical authority on the one hand and military imperium on the other. In the Classical Age (in the debates between philosophers of the Enlightenment à la française and representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment), the term played a crucial role in the definition and critique of the relations between the idea of progress and the autonomization, vis-à-vis the royal authority, of the society known, precisely, as “civil.” The uses of the term tended, however, to be distributed between the poles of “private life” (politeness, friendship) and the “public sphere” and government (police, civic-mindedness). The notion of mores (in Montesquieu and beyond) maintained the connections between the various poles before being itself tendentially distributed between the reign of civilization or culture (as opposed to “barbarity”) and sociability (as opposed to confl ict or war). In the interval between them lies the preclassical moment in which we find the usages most directly germane to the problematic I am trying to put in place here: Erasmus’s use of the term (civilitas puerilis), the cornerstone of Norbert Elias’s celebrated genealogy of the “civilization of manners” or the constitution of procedures for normalizing the individual’s comportment in society (Elias, “The Development of the Concept of Civilité,” in Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Ephraim Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [1969]), 42–47; and Machiavelli’s usage (vivere civile), characterized by the fact (decisive in our perspective) that civilità names (as a problem rather than a solution) a feature of government that covers the moments of both peace and conflict as long as the common good is preserved (which is thus situated in an intermediate zone between concord and civil war; see Marie Gaille-Nikodimov, Conflit civil et liberté: La politique machiavélienne entre histoire et médecine [Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004]). I take advantage of this note to point out the interest of John Keane’s Reflections on Violence (London: Verso, 1996), which appeared too late for me to be able to take it into account in these lectures. Explicitly adopting the perspective of a “rediscovery of civil society,” Keane sets out to conceptualize a politics of civility antithetical to the major forms of incivility manifest in the emergence of an uncivil society, against the

164 1 .

4. 5.

FROM EXTREME VIOLENCE TO THE PROBLEM OF CIVILITY

backdrop of new uncivil wars: a politics “aimed at publicizing and reducing the incidence of such disparate phenomena as murder and rape, genocide and nuclear war, the violence of disciplinary institutions, cruelty to animals, child abuse and capital punishment” (22). Finally, Étienne Tassin, in Un monde commun: Pour une cosmo-politique des conflits (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003), uses “civility” as the noun implied by the idea of a “global civil society.” See Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Pierre Macherey, Hegel et la société (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984). See the following works by Michel Foucault: The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2010); “Subjectivity and Truth,” trans. Robert Hurley, in Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 87–92 (New York: New Press, 1997); “Intellectuals and Power,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, 205–17 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); Preface to The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. William Smock, in The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and N. Rose, 58–63 (New York: New Press, 2003); “The Ethics of a Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in The Essential Foucault, 25–42; and “Technologies of the Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Essential Foucault, 145–69.

2. Hegel, Hobbes, and the “Conversion of Violence” 1.

2. 3.

The term “post-history” (dopostoria) was popularized by Pier Paolo Pasolini. But it in fact comes from Marx, who uses the expression Nachgeschichte in an astounding passage in “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” (1844), where it is the pendant to “pre-history” [Vorgeschichte]. In the twentieth century, the term was put back in circulation, first by Walter Benjamin, in his Origin of the German Tragic Drama [Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928], then by Arnold Gehlen in particular. See Gehlen, Post-Historie, in Zur geisteswissenschaftlichen Bedeutung Arnold Gehlens, ed. H. Klages and H. Quaritsch (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994 [1962]), 885–95. Benjamin Barber, Jihad Versus McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996). Thus we are witnessing an inversion of the phenomenon of unequal immortality that long characterized human societies, as Zygmunt Bauman rightly points out. Bauman, Mortality, Immortality & Other Life Strategies (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).

2.

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

165

4. These lines were written well before the beginning of the cycle of wars unleashed by the September 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. At the time, it might have seemed that they were invalidated by the resurgence of a particularly imperious assertion of sovereignty. Today we see that that is not at all the case, albeit in conditions that call for detailed analysis rather than mere affirmation. 5. Giacomo Marramao, Dopo il Leviatano: Individuo e comunità (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), 272ff. 6. Let us recall that Sartre made this debate the subject of his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). There he tends to substitute a problematic of totalization for that of the totality characteristic of the Hegelian dialectic (according to Sartre) in order to safeguard the unambiguousness of the concept of history, which is the condition for its intelligibility. 7. See Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995), 97–100. 8. Chapters 26–28 of Leviathan, however, lay out a theory of the universality of law (grounded, let us recall, not in “truth” but in the legislator’s “authority”), which it is the responsibility of the courts to impose on individuals, on condition that the law be made known in advance. See Michel Troper, Pour une théorie juridique de l’État (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994), and Michel Troper, “Le concept d’État de droit,” Droits, no. 15 (1992). For a comparison with legal positivism (Hans Kelsen) on this point, see Franck Lessay, Souveraineté et légitimité chez Hobbes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988), 178ff.; and Norberto Bobbio, Democracy and Dictatorship: The Nature and Limits of State Power, trans. Peter Kennealy (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 91. 9. This explains Hobbes’s steadfast opposition to the concept of “conscience.” See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 25–27. 10. See Alexandre Passerin d’Entrèves, The Notion of the State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 104ff. 11. Bobbio, Democracy and Dictatorship, 61. 12. See Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 20ff. Thus, the watchword of chapter 1 of De Cive—“we must leave the state of nature” (exeundum est e statu naturae)—immediately calls forth the disillusioned conclusion that we in fact never “leave” it. 13. The two poles of this line of reasoning are authorization (thanks to which individuals renounce the right to take justice into their own hands and accept

166 2.

14 .

15.

16.

17.

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

punishment or, rather, consider themselves the “authors” of their own punishment; this is the “terror” discussed in chapter 17 of Leviathan, whose limit is constituted by the fact that individuals cannot renounce the right to selfpreservation—leading to the excess of coercion) and withdrawal, “in the last instance,” of communities’ capacity to resolve their internal conflicts and judge their own members (this is the theory of the “systems subject” in chapter 22). The consequence (chapter 18) is that subjects may never accuse the sovereign who protects them of injustice (and that it is subversive to do so). This extreme but rigorous interpretation is developed by Frieder Otto Wolf, Die neue Wissenschaft des Thomas Hobbes: Zu den Grundlagen der politischen Philosophie der Neuzeit (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromann, 1969). The same idea may be found in Esposito, Communitas. On the origins and meaning of the idea of the Rechtsstaat (usually rendered in English as “state based on the rule of law” or “state of law”), which I am retrospectively applying to Hegel (who doubtless helped inspire it), see Philippe Raynaud, “État de droit, État légal,” in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Le Seuil / Le Robert), 2004. Jean-François Kervégan, in his contribution to the 1994 Colloque de Cerisy, “Violence et politique,” examines with precision and profundity the question of Hegel’s relation to the problem that violence poses for politics, basing what he says on the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology. Kervégan’s approach differs from mine here in that it privileges the idea of mediation, effecting the transition from the “prepolitical” of violence to the “political” of a state power incorporating the institutions of civil society. See Kervégan, “Politique, violence, philosophie,” Lignes, no. 25, special issue: “Violence et politique” (May 1995): 57ff. The question of the “double meaning” (for a francophone or anglophone) of Gewalt in German and the attendant dialectical effects (the tension between the two senses of power/authority and violence/force and the transition from one to the other) has inspired well-known commentaries, among them Raymond Aron, “Macht, Power, Puissance: Prose démocratique ou poésie démoniaque” [1964], in Les sociétés modernes (Paris: Presses universitaires françaises, 2006), and Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (London: Routledge, 1992). It underlies the interpretation of Frederick Engels’s unfinished pamphlet “The Role of Force in History,” MECW, 26:453–510 (Die Rolle der Gewalt in der Geschichte, in Marx Engels Werke [Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962 (1895)], 21:405–65). The existence of the doublet Gewalt/Gewaltsamkeit makes it possible, when

2.

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

167

the need arises, to make the relationship between the two meanings explicit in German or to mark an internal distantiation. See, in connection with Kant and Hegel, Kervégan, “Politique, violence, philosophie”; and, for Kant and Weber, Catherine Colliot-Thélène, “Violence et contrainte,” Lignes, no. 25, special issue: “Violence et politique” (May 1995): 264ff. Jean-Pierre Faye, for his part, makes an extremely valuable remark on this subject in his Dictionnaire politique portatif en cinq mots: Démagogie, terreur, tolérance, répression, violence (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 206–7: How are we to translate Gewalt, which means both violence and power— in the sense that the theory of the distinction or separation of powers, from Locke to Montesquieu, assigns the latter word? How are we to translate this term when German thought, from Hegel to Marx, stages a fundamental debate on the issue it encapsulates? Aristotle simply named the “component parts” of power, cratos; here we find them translated into German as forms of violence—as Gewalt. Thus German sidesteps the great English problem delineated in Part II [chapter 17] of [Hobbes’s] Leviathan, in which power rises above the war of all against all. On the one hand, we have “power,” on the other, “war”; or, on the one hand, “terror,” and on the other, “cruelty.” Shall we say that power is here counterposed to violence and war? But is the sword that power wields not also violence? . . . But the German language has answered from the outset that violence is internal to this force that is deployed as state power. 18. Hegel, in particular, elaborates a critique of the “police state” in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See J.-F. Kervégan, Hegel, Carl Schmitt: Le politique entre spéculation et positivité (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), 233ff. 19. That is, Hegel’s introduction to his course on the philosophy of history. The text of this introduction, corresponding to lecture courses Hegel gave in 1822, 1828, and 1830, was edited by Lasson (and later revised and augmented by Hoffmeister) on the basis of Hegel’s manuscripts and students’ lecture notes. It has been published as Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, vol. 1 of Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1955). For an English version of the introduction, see Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

168 2.

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

20. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 76. It is obviously hard to read this passage without supposing that Hegel, in the time and place in which he was writing, was thinking at least as much or more of Napoleon than Cesar, without being able to say so explicitly because of the political conditions of the Restoration: another “ruse” of reason. 21. Ibid., 141. [Translator’s note: I have modified Nisbet’s translation of the last sentence to bring it into line with the French translation cited here.] The German word verkehrt (from the verb verkehren, from which the noun Verkehrung derives) means “conversion” in the sense of “inversion.” To convey the religious and ethical-political sense (the “conversion” of saints, unbelievers, and so on), German usually uses bekehren, Bekehrung. The root of both words is kehren, Kehre: to “turn” or “turn back”; “turning point” or “reversal.” 22. Engels, Die Rolle der Gewalt [The Role of Force in History]. On the history of the composition of this text, see Étienne Balibar, “Reflections on Gewalt,” Historical Materialism 17, no. 1 (2009): 99–125. 23. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, MECW, 35:739, 750. 24 . On the “conflagration” that destroys the house, see Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 75. 25. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003 [1940]), 389–480. 26. Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Theory and History of Literature, 14 vol. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985 [1934]), 137–60; Bataille, “Lettre à X” [Alexandre Kojève], in Le Collège de Sociologie (1937–1939), ed. Denis Hollier (Paris: Gallimard, 1979); Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 3, Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 27. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 131. 28. Vittorio Morfino’s short book, Sulla violenza: Una lettura di Hegel (Como-Pavia: Ibis, 2000), which appeared after these lectures were written, defends a thesis that is in many respects similar to mine. In particular, Morfino offers very interesting analyses of the relationship between the question of violence in Hegel’s work and the repetition/transformation of an Aristotelian scheme of causality (of which “teleology” is a part) that detaches causality from its two “extremes” (chance and destiny) in order to reduce and integrate them after the event. 29. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 28.

2.

HEGEL, HOBBES, AND THE

“ CONVERSION

OF VIOLENCE”

169

30. Let us note that, in Hegel, there is a problem not just of the conversion of violence but also of the conversion of love, which forms precisely the object of a theory of marriage as the “ethical” transformation of feeling into an “objective”—that is, social—bond. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §161ff., pp. 200ff. Here, too, it is explicitly a matter of going beyond contingency and “nature,” by way of a “second nature” that emerges even before the moment of education [Bildung ]. However, the analogy is imperfect: analogous to the conversion of love is a conversion not of hate but of violence [Gewalt]. This justifies the supposition that the violence involved here is a “violence without hate”; that, precisely, makes it convertible. 31. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 60. Marx would quite literally plagiarize this passage, without mentioning Hegel, in the first part of The German Ideology, in connection with the “external” and “internal” causes of the decline of civilizations. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, 5:32–34. 32. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 61. 33. Ibid., 123–24. Hegel thus subscribes in advance to a thesis that was to be formulated in the twentieth century, with radically different intentions, by Schmitt, Arendt, and Aimé Césaire. The protection of a regime of civilization (including the civilization of war or its self-limitation) in an extended “European legal space” has as its counterpart (and, doubtless, condition) an unleashing of savagery (that is, total war, ethnocidal or genocidal) against the “savage peoples” outside Europe. See Nestor Capdevila, “Impérialisme, empire et destruction,” in La Controverse entre Las Casas et Sepulveda, by Bartolomé de las Casas (Paris: Vrin, 2007). 34. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 69 (Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 80). The more common translation of the word Schlachtbank that Hegel uses here is “killing floor” or “slaughterhouse.” 35. “World history [is] the world’s court of judgement” (Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §340, 371). See also Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §548, p. 277 (“universal world history . . . the judgment of the world”). The phrase in fact comes from a poem of Friedrich Schiller’s, “Resignation” (1786). 36. In an admirable essay that puts the conception of sacrifice in Bataille and Martin Heidegger to the test of a reflection on the Nazi death camps (which ultimately, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s view, radically invalidate that conception), Nancy begins by recalling that the Hegelian conception of process belongs to the Western tradition inaugurated by St. Paul. Nancy, “L’insacrifiable”

170 2 .

H E G E L , H O B B E S, A N D T H E “ C O N V E R S I O N O F V I O L E N C E ”

(1989), in Une pensée finie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 65–106. Nancy, too, interprets it as a “sacrifice of sacrifice” that, he says, dialectically unveils the truth. He cites §546 of Hegel’s Encyclopedia (Philosophy of Mind, 276): Country and fatherland then appear as the power by which the particular independence of individuals and their absorption in the external existence of possession and in natural life is convicted of its own nullity—as the power which procures the maintenance of the general substance by the patriotic sacrifice on the part of these individuals of this natural and particular existence—so making nugatory the nugatoriness that confronts it. Since, however, this sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the community represented by the state (and instituted in it) coincides with the accomplishment of patriotic duty, Nancy concludes that the sacrifice of sacrifice is also, simultaneously, the indefinite conservation of the model of sacrifice: The same Hegel who renounces religious sacrifice reclaims, for the state, the full value of sacrifice in war. (And what shall we say of Marx’s proletariat, which, for its part, “has a universal character by its universal suffering”?) In sublating sacrifice, the West engenders a fascination by and for the cruel moment of its economy. It does so, perhaps, in the same measure as suffering in the world of modern war and technology is intensified and exhibited—at least up to a certain point. . . . Western spiritualization/dialecticization has invented the secret of an infinite efficacy of transgression and its cruelty. After Hegel and Nietzsche came the eye trained on this secret . . . Bataille’s, for example (79–80). 37. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §93, Addendum, 120: “Within the state, heroes are no longer possible.” The dialogue that Brecht invents in Galileo is in this sense perfectly Hegelian: “Andrea (in the door): ‘Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.’ Galileo: No, Andrea. ‘Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.’” Bertolt Brecht, Galileo: A Play, ed. Eric Bentley, trans. Charles Laughton (New York: Grove Press, 1966), scene 12, p. 115. On the transcendence of the “heroism of freedom” in Hegel’s mature work, see Kervégan, Hegel, Carl Schmitt, 174ff. 38. Michel Foucault, “Politics and Ethics: An Interview” (with M. Jay, L. Löwenthal, P. Rabinow, and R. Rorty, April 1983), trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 373–80 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).

2.

H E G E L , H O B B E S, A N D T H E “ C O N V E R S I O N O F V I O L E N C E ”

171

39. Fethi Benslama, “La dépropriation,” Lignes, no. 24 (February 1995): 36, 39–40. 40. The adjective “ultrasubjective” is taken from Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), 248: “This place that we are trying to zero in on and define, this place that has never been identified heretofore in all of what we might call its ultrasubjective effects, this central place of the pure function of desire, if I may put it that way, this place is the one in which I have been showing you how the object a is formed—a, the object of objects. For this object, our vocabulary has suggested the term objectality as opposed to objectivity.” I have coined the corresponding adjective “ultraobjective.” 41. On “social death,” see Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 42. See the typologies suggested in Pierre André-Taguieff, La Force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: La Découverte, 1988); and in Étienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 37–68. 43. Robert Ian Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998 [1987]). 44. Bertrand Ogilvie, “Violence et représentation: La production de l’homme jetable,” in L’homme jetable, Essai sur l ’exterminisme et la violence extrême (Paris: Amsterdam, 2012 [1995]). Ogilvie does not cite Hannah Arendt’s remarks about “the totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous” (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1966], chap. 12, sec. 3, 437–45), but it is quite possible that he has them in mind and is trying to invert the vehicle of Arendt’s metaphor (“the attempt . . . reflects the experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth”) in an effort to identify the equivalent, at the level of the objective processes of overpopulation in a world ruled by the market, of the cruelty of totalitarian violence. 45. Ogilvie, “Violence et représentation,” 126. 46. Ibid., 127. 47. Étienne Balibar, “Exclusion ou lutte des classes,” in Les Frontières de la démocratie (Paris: La Découverte, 1992), 191ff. (and, more recently, Balibar, “Uprisings in the Banlieues,”in Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 231–258. 48. Ogilvie, “Violence et représentation,” 129. 49. Ibid., 130. 50. Ibid., 136.

172 2 .

H E G E L , H O B B E S, A N D T H E “ C O N V E R S I O N O F V I O L E N C E ”

51. Ibid., 128. Zygmunt Bauman has recently taken this question up again on a grand scale in the framework of his phenomenology of “liquid society.” See Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). 52. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” trans. Leslie Sawyer, in The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and N. Rose, 126–44 (New York: New Press, 2003). 53. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Slavoj Žižek’s illuminating commentary in Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), chap. 4, 89ff. 54. William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! in Faulkner, Novels, 1936–1940, eds. Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk (New York: Library of America, 1990), 148. 55. Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio reports that the conquistadors raised “noble breeds” [races] of dogs that had great names and pedigrees resembling their own, so that they sometimes identified with them. They trained them to hunt Indians, who were considered a kind of game (Ferlosio, “Lâchez les chiens: Prélude au 500ème anniversaire de la découverte des Amériques,” trans. J. Lacor, Les Temps modernes, no. 509, December 1988). 56. Louise L. Lambrichs, “Un aspect particulier du nettoyage ethnique,” Le Monde, May 30, 1996. 57. “Whether the word cruelty is assigned to its Latin inheritance, that is, to a very necessary history of spilled blood . . . of some crime of blood, the ties of blood, or whether it is affiliated to other languages and other semantics (Grausamkeit, for example, is Freud’s word) unrelated to the flow of blood, this time in order to name the desire to make or to make oneself suffer just to suffer; even to torture or kill; to kill oneself or torture oneself to torture or kill, just to take a psychic pleasure in evil for evil’s sake, or even just to find bliss in radical evil, in all these cases cruelty would be difficult to determine or delimit . . . no other discourse—be it theological, metaphysical, genetic, physicalist, cognitivist, and so forth—could open itself up to this hypothesis. They would all be designed to reduce it, exclude it, deprive it of sense. The only discourse that can today claim the thing of psychical suffering as its own affair would indeed be what has been called, for about a century, psychoanalysis. . . . This question [that must therefore be put to psychoanalysis] will not be: Is there some death drive [Todestrieb] that is, and Freud regularly associates them, a cruel drive of destruction or annihilation? Or again: Is there also a cruelty inherent in the drive for power or for sovereign mastery [Bemächtigungstrieb ] beyond or on this side of . . . the pleasure or reality principles? My question will be, rather and

3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

58.

59.

60.

61.

VIOLENCE?

173

later: Is there, for thought, for psychoanalytic thought to come, another beyond . . . a beyond that would stand beyond these possibles that are still both the pleasure and reality principles and the death or sovereign mastery drives, which seem to be at work wherever cruelty is on the horizon? In another words . . . can one think this apparently impossible [thing] . . . namely, a beyond the death drive or the drive for sovereign mastery, thus the beyond of a cruelty, a beyond that would have nothing to do with either drives or principles?” Jacques Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches,” in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 238–41. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari speak of “micro-fascism” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 356–57. I shall come back to this. André Green, La Folie privée: Psychanalyse des cas limites (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 287ff. (“Idéalisation de l’amour—Idéalisation de la haine” [Idealization of love—Idealization of hate]). “The real is that which always comes back to the same place—to the place where the subject is insofar as he thinks, where the res cogitans does not meet it.” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 49. I can still remember a conversation that Michael Löwy and I had in 1992 in Pontevedra, during the Semana Galega de Filosofia (which focused, that year, on the theme “Filosofía e Nacion”), with a philosopher from Zagreb whose name was, I believe, Franjo Zenko. After Professor Zenko explained to us that the essence of “Croatian philosophy” lay in the resistance to Serbian imperialism, we asked him how a Serb differed from a Croat. “Each one knows what he is,” he answered. “But,” we objected, “what do you do with the [many] children of “mixed” marriages (between Serbs and Croats)?” “They will have to choose.” “But,” we persisted, “if they can’t or don’t want to?” “Then they are nothing at all.” We would have liked to remind him of a few historical cases in which those who “were nothing at all” had the bad taste to exist nonetheless, and of what happened to them. But what good would it have done?

3. “Inconvertible” Violence? An Essay in Topography 1. Immanuel Wallerstein, “Trois idéologies ou une seule? La problématique de la modernité,” Genèses, no. 9 (October 1992): 7–24. See also Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1995); and Wallerstein, The Modern WorldSystem IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914 (Berkeley: University of

174 3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

VIOLENCE?

California Press, 2011), chap. 1. It is interesting to compare and contrast this typology with the one suggested by Reinhart Koselleck in his now classic Future Pasts: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1979]). This theme, first discussed in the preface to De Cive, recurs in more demonstrative form in Leviathan, especially chapter 29: “Of Those Things That Weaken, or Tend to the DISSOLUTION of a Commonwealth.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1973), 170. See Lucien Jaume, Hobbes et l’Etat représentatif moderne (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986). Hobbes is of course not alone. The relevant comparison here would be with Friedrich Nietzsche and, above all, Sigmund Freud. See Georges Canguilhem, “La décadence de l’idée de progrès” [The decline of the idea of progress], in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 92, no. 4 (1987): 437–54. This “decline” is also, inevitably, a questioning of the “secularization” that Weber calls “the disenchantment of the world.” See Giacomo Marramao, Potere e secolarizzazione: Le categorie del tempo (Turino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2005), esp. chap. 2 (“Tempo e rivoluzione”) and chap. 6 (“Tempo della norma e tempo dell’eccezione”). It is quite striking that, for Hegel, the individuals whose existence is at the mercy of life’s “hazards”—that is, its radical uncertainty and insecurity— should simultaneously be charged with representing the part of irreducible contingency in social and political theory. See Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 117. Here one thinks, of course, of the systematic omission, in the Manifesto’s historical schema, of forms of violence associated with male domination of women (whereas the two forms of domination related to property and sexuality are evoked side by side in the “Romantic” tradition of utopian socialism). Including such violence would have called into question (to ignore all other reasons for its omission for now) the linearity of the scheme of the evolution of modes of production toward “simplif[ying] the class antagonisms.” It is also very interesting to note that, almost as soon as Marx moves from the notion that Hegel uses to designate those excluded from bourgeois society, the Pöbel [rabble] who are victims of impoverishment and a potential threat to the social order, to the socialist writers’ “proletariat,” he starts to make negative references to the Lumpenproletariat, presented as the counter-

3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14 .

15. 16.

VIOLENCE?

175

revolutionary element “in the midst of the people.” This has been pointed out by Jacques Rancière, in particular (The Philosopher and his Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004]), who makes it the mainspring of his deconstruction of Marxian “theory” as a restoration of the “philosopher-king’s” privileges. These two antithetical possibilities, which also give expression, in their way, to Hegel’s teleological presupposition, find illustrations in two key moments of the Phenomenology of Mind that are obscurely interconnected and find extensions throughout Hegel’s work: the moment of Antigone’s sacrifice (which illustrates—starting from the quarrel of the sexes—the violence perpetrated and suffered by an individuality that asserts “private” right in absolute fashion against public authority), and the moment of the revolutionary “Terror” (which illustrates—starting from an ultra-Rousseauist reading of Jacobinism— the self-destructive violence of a political delirium in which the individual of civil society completely effaces himself in favor of the citizen). On “let die,” see Michel Foucault, “Make Live and Let Die” (1976), in ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1995). Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, MECW, 35:450, 623–25. It is well known that the Nazis described the individuals brought together in the extermination camps as “pieces” (Stücke), a term perfectly applicable to the way in which globalized capitalism goes about eliminating its superfluous population. See Liisa Malkki’s book on the East African refugee camps, Purity and Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). This holds for the cruelty of the Spanish conquistadors, the French African army, the SS, the perpetrators of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, and so on. The complex phenomenology of the face of cruelty, which can be “distorted by hatred” or, conversely, neutralized by “impassibility,” still needs to be worked out. Gilles Deleuze discusses these shifts between extremes in Sacher-Masoch: An Interpretation, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: G. Braziller, 1971); and Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1999), chap. 7, “Year Zero: Faciality,” 167–91. See Rony Brauman, L’Action humanitaire (Paris: Flammarion, 1995); and Pierre de Senarclens, L’Humanité en catastrophe (Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, 1999). Étienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-racism?” “Racism and Nationalism,” and “‘Class Racism,’” in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class:

176 3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

VIOLENCE?

Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995), 17–28; 37– 68; and 204–16. See Étienne Balibar, “Election/Sélection,” in Cahier de L’Herne Derrida, no. 83, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, 226–31 (Paris: L’Herne, 2004). Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004). I have here emended my original 1996 text, based on old course notes of my own, in the light of this publication. Ibid., 113. On the critical function of the “mirror stage” in Lacan’s thought, see Bertrand Ogilvie, Lacan: Le sujet (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987). On the origins of this problematic, see Emile Jalley, L’Enfant au miroir—Freud, Wallon, Lacan (Paris: EPEL, 1998). Lacan’s analysis is here influenced by Kant: in the works preparatory to The Critique of Pure Reason (especially the “Inaugural Dissertation of 1770”), Kant identified the “paradox of symmetrical objects”—that is, the noncoincidence of a geometrical object and its mirror image as a result of its transposition—as one “criterion” for sense perception’s autonomy from the “pure concept.” Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, 116. Further: “Freud tells us that anxiety is a phenomenon of the edge, a signal produced at the limit of the ego when the ego is threatened by something that should not appear. That is a, the abhorred remainder of the Other. . . . We very clearly find this again in the best known of the phenomena that accompany anxiety, the so-called phenomena of depersonalization. They are, precisely, the phenomena that are the most contrary to the structure of the ego as such [that is to say, in Hegelian terms, recognition, and in Freudian terms, identification]. In what does the danger [of such fantasy-objects] for the ego consist? It is these objects’ very structure that makes them inapt for egoization. That is what I have tried to make you see with the help of . . . topological . . . metaphors, insofar as they introduce the possibility of a non-specularizable form into the structure of some of these objects. . . . If what is seen in the mirror causes anxiety, it is because it cannot be offered up for recognition by the Other . . . because the subject is too fully a captive of the image . . . because the purely dual relation dispossesses her of her relation to the big Other. . . . Specularization behaves strangely here . . . outside symmetry. It is Maupassant’s “Horla,” the outside-space, insofar as space is the dimension of the superposable” (ibid., 140–42). See the appendix, part I, p. 152. Louis Althusser says, in the posthumously published Machiavelli and Us, that political practice resides, to begin with, in the capacity to “create a void” in an

3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

24 . 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

VIOLENCE?

177

overdetermined historical space (one that is also overinvested by preexisting forms) in order to carve out a place for itself. Political practice thus entails, at the level of “causality,” an essential circularity. Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, ed. François Matheron, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 1999 [1972]). Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires: Critique de la raison/l’économie narrative (Paris: Hermann, 1972). See the appendix, part II, p. 153. La Volonté de savoir was to be the first volume in a multivolume work entitled History of Sexuality. As is well known, after an interruption lasting several years, the work ultimately moved in a very different direction. The English translation of La Volonté de savoir was published as The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1978). See “Part Two: The Repressive Hypothesis—I: The Incitement to Discourse,” 19–35. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Its importance is considerably enhanced by analyses of the “disciplines,” processes of “normalization,” and the forms of “governmentality” that Foucault explored in courses held at the Collège de France in the years following the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. They were initially made available in the form of course summaries and then transformed into essays and lectures. A complete edition of them is under way. I have no doubt that Foucault’s intention was in part to “respond” to Louis Althusser’s conceptualization of the “ideological state apparatuses.” See Foucault’s “The Subject and Power” (1982), trans. Leslie Sawyer, in The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: The New Press, 2003), 126–44. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.” We must obviously add Agamben’s name to this list. I come back to this later. Foucault opens Discipline and Punish with a description of such a ritual. He refers explicitly to Ernst Kantorowicz’s analyses of the mystique of royal authority, but he is surely also thinking of Georges Bataille’s discussion of the element of transgression inherent to sovereignty, for which he had written a preface a few years earlier. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression” (1963), trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in The Essential Foucault Selections from the Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and N. Rose (New York: New Press, 2003), 452–57. The quartering of Damien is the counterpart of the Chinese torture of the “one hundred pieces” that Bataille comments on in The Tears of Eros. One of the aims of the still extremely relevant

178 3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

31.

32.

33.

34 .

VIOLENCE?

work of the Groupe Information Prisons in which Foucault participated along with Deleuze and others was to show how cruelty is disseminated throughout the apparatus of “punishment.” It is striking that the countries that have abolished capital punishment (as France did in 1981) found themselves caught, thereafter, in the trap of outbidding themselves in stiffening the penalties supposed to “replace” it for “monstrous” or “irredeemable” criminals. See Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons: Archives d’une lutte, 1970–1972, eds. Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, with an afterword by Daniel Defert (Paris: IMEC, 2003). On the institutional and historical “play on words” entailed by the West’s use of the category of the subject (subjectus/subjectum), see Étienne Balibar, “Citoyen sujet: Réponse à la question de Jean-Luc Nancy: Qui vient après le sujet ?” in Citoyen Sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011), 35–66 (English translation forthcoming from Fordham University Press). If we interpret the Freudian schema of identification proposed in the 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (summed up in a “graph” in chapter 8) as the account of an ideal genesis of sovereignty, the similarity with Hobbes’s account, in Leviathan, of the schema of the “representation” of the people in the person of the sovereign is overwhelming. But Freud’s analysis brings out a condition masked in Hobbes by the “volunatrist” connotations of the notion of contract ( pactum): the need to proceed to a “desexualization” of the libido—or to inhibit it with respect to its objectives—in order to institute the double, horizontal and vertical, relationship between subjects and sovereign. See Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955). Cruelty reinforces the legitimacy of state violence only insofar as it appears to be both the effect of an incarnation of law and an excess of violence that makes up for its inadequacy. Machiavelli, in particular, has an intuitive understanding of the “monstrosity” resulting from this contradictory relationship between the “personal” and “impersonal” nature of absolute power; he makes it a characteristic of the “political” as such. See the celebrated episode of Cesare Borgia’s public quartering of his minister in The Prince, chap. 7. “Democratic” societies carry this flight to the front into the register of mass extermination. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (London: Rout-

3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

179

ledge, 1992). For a very interesting commentary on this text, see Adolfo Barbera del Rosal, “Détours, Derrida et le positivisme juridique,” in Le Passage des frontières (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 385ff. 35. Étienne Balibar, Lieux et noms de la vérité (La Tour-d’Aigues: L’Aube, 1994), chap. 2. 36. See Stanislas Breton, “Dieu est dieu: Essai sur la violence des propositions tautologiques,” in Philosophie buissonnière (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1989). 37. “If something in the body is of the sort to cause harm to the rest, we allow it to be cauterized or cut so that part may perish rather than the whole body. Likewise in the body politic: let whatever is noxious be amputated so that the whole may be saved. A harsh saying! This one is far harsher: ‘Let the criminals, the wicked, the traitors be saved; let the innocent, the respectable, the decent, the entire Republic be wiped out!” Cicero, Philippics, in Philippics 7–14, ed. and trans. D. R. Schackleton Bailey, trans. rev. by John T. Ramsey and Gesine Manuwald (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2009), 49. It is a perverse and cruel beast, sin; it works its malice, not on the body, its slave, but even on the glory of God: “Because of you, says the Lord, my name is blasphemed among the nations” (Isaiah, 52:5). That is why the Prophet banishes the sinner from the concert of creatures, like a bad citizen is exiled from his homeland. A skilled musician removes from his lute a string that makes inharmonic sounds, so that it does not destroy the effect of the instrument; a doctor versed in his art does not hesitate to cut off a gangrenous limb, lest the evil is communicated to the healthy part of the body: the Prophet does the same, and makes dissent and decay disappear from the universe. ( John Chrysostom, “First Sermon after his Ordination,” trans. Roger Pearse, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/chrysostom_fi rst_sermon.htm. I thank Cinzia Arruzza for her help in locating this translation [EB]). 38. The same tautology informed the mechanism by which the Revolutionary Terror eliminated enemies of the people: “Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution?” Maximilien Robespierre asked. Speech of November 5, 1792, “Answer to Louvet’s Accusation,” in Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, ed. Jean Ducange, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2007), 43. 39. Chapter 22 of Leviathan (“Of Systemes Subject, Politicall, and Private”) contains an extraordinary classification of “corporations” or “concourses” of citizens (“Systemes”) according to whether, in the public or private sphere,

180 3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

40.

41.

42.

43.

VIOLENCE?

they can be brought under the authority of law (the pertinent criterion here is recognition of the sovereign’s power to judge in the last instance). This classification can also be read as a deduction of sovereignty’s remainders, which violence or the “ordinary” exercise of power are insufficient to control. The two typical “cases” that Hobbes adduces are “the Corporations of men, that by Authority from any forraign Person, unite themselves in anothers Dominion, for the easier propagation of Doctrines, and for making a Party” (Hobbes has, specifically, the Catholic Church in mind), and “the Corporations of Beggars, Theeves and Gipsies, the better to order their trade of begging, and stealing,” but also temporary “concourse[s] of People (if the number be considerable).” Hobbes, Leviathan, 124, 118. Suffice it to consider the way the most “democratic” states treat public enemies who “have terrorized” and become the occasion for exercising “counterterror”: the IRA, the Baader-Meinhof Gang or Action directe. Members of these organizations were subjected to isolation and refined physical and psychological tortures that led to madness and suicide. For a Lacanian analysis in terms of the “superego by default” of this “law that enjoys itself,” see Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 54ff. Michel Foucault, “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th Century Legal Psychiatry,” trans. Carol Brown, in Essential Foucault, 208–28. See also Étienne Balibar, “Crime privé, folie publique,” in Le Citoyen fou, ed. Nathalie Robatel (Paris: PUF, 1991). We must likewise ask the corresponding question about the “real identity” of the individual/citizen/subject who stands opposite the “born criminal” and is defined by their relationship, and also how the “born criminal” evolves historically once the idea of defending society is made official. See Étienne Balibar, “De la préférence nationale à l’invention de la politique” [1996], in Droit de cité: Culture et politique en démocratie (La Tour-d’Aigues: L’Aube, 1998). Readers may compare this reading, if they wish, with one I made a long time ago in the context of a seminar organized by Louis Althusser: “The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” in Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, 199–308 (London: New Left Books, 1970 [1965]). While carefully distinguishing real history from the internal dynamic of social relations, I examined “reproduction” (both simple and on an extended scale) as a structure so as to deduce from it a “problematic” of the “transition” between modes of production, of which the “transition to socialism” (and, via

3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

44 . 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

VIOLENCE?

181

socialism, to communism) might have (or should have) been regarded as a special case. Today I would argue not that the idea of transition is meaningless but that any transition takes place in the unforeseeable conditions of an overdetermination by a (heterogeneous) variety of modalities of extreme violence, such that its result and even its possibility can never be stated in advance by theoretical anticipation. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 35:704. Ibid., 704ff. More recent discussions of these processes may be found in Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed., ed. Bettina Bien Graves, trans. Leland P. Yeager (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006 [1944]); Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1964 [1945]); Isaac Joshua, La Face cachée du Moyen Age (Montreuil: La Brèche, 1988); and Heide Gerstenberger, Impersonal Power: History and Origins of the Bourgeois State, trans. David Fernbach (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009 [1990]). See also Gerstenberger, “La violence dans l’histoire de l’Etat, ou la puissance de définir,” Lignes, no. 25, special issue: “Violence et politique” (May 1995): 23ff; and Robert Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: The Transformation of the Social Question, trans. Richard Boyd (New Brunswick, NJ: 2003 [1995]). On patriarchy, I shall cite only Christine Delphy and Carole Pateman; on symbolic violence, Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall, without here anticipating the detailed discussions called for. Louis Althusser, “Le Marxisme comme théorie ‘finie’” [1978], in Solitude de Machiavel et autres textes, ed. Yves Sintomer (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), 281–96. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 35:374ff., 421–22. This problem (which expands by degrees until it takes in the whole question of the relationship between “socialization,” “class struggle,” and “communism”) was common, in the 1960s, to Althusserianism (especially Robert Linhart, Lénine, les paysans, Taylor (Paris: Seuil, 1976), the U.S. Monthly Review school (particularly Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998 [1974]), and, of course, Italian operaismo as theorized by Mario Tronti in Operai e capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966). It is, consequently, the problem from which their divergences stem. See Marx, Capital, vol. 1, esp. chap. 10 (“The Working Day”), 35:239–307 and chap. 15 (“Machinery and Modern Industry”), 35:374–508. Michel Henry points out that the factory reports were as important to the conception and

182 3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

51.

52.

53. 54 .

55.

56. 57.

VIOLENCE?

composition of Marx’s book as Ricardian political economy, whose underside they might be said to reveal; he devotes an important chapter of Marx II: Une philosophie de l’économie (Paris: Gallimard, 1972) to them. My disagreement with him bears on the fact that, in the extracts from the factory inspectors’ reports depicting the workers’ suffering, Henry believes he can hear the “undisguised voice” of living labor, whereas I detect in them a writing effect that sets one text in the framework of another. This does not, in my view, diminish the violence involved in any way. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 35:236–37, 283ff., and passim. There is, from this standpoint, a striking complementarity between Marx’s and Dickens’s descriptions. The International Labour Organization regularly publishes reports on the current state of the exploitation of child labor in the world. A general ban on child labor has still not been achieved. Foucault himself acknowledged this. See esp. his reference to “Capital Volume Two” in “The Meshes of Power,” trans. Gerald Moore, in Space, Knowledge, Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. J. Crampton and S. Elden, 153–62 (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2007). This slip of Foucault’s pen has unfortunately been perpetuated by many of his commentators. What he in fact meant was the second volume of the edition of Marx in general use in France at the time (Le Capital en huit volumes [Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1960]), and thus, most likely, the chapter of volume 1 on manufacture (“Division of Labour and Manufacture,” Capital, vol. 1, chap. 14), which is also one of his essential sources in Discipline and Punish. This mistake has been corrected and explained by Rudy M. Leonelli in “Fonti marxiane in Foucault,” Altreragioni, no. 9, 1999. “Between equal rights force decides”: Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 35:243. At this point it is tempting to bring Gramsci’s analyses in terms of the “war of position” into harmony with Althusser’s in terms of “ideological state apparatuses,” extrapolating from his unfinished manuscript “On the Reproduction of the Relations of Production,” in On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideolog y and Ideological State Apparatuses [1969], trans. G. M. Goshgarian, 1–217 (London: Verso, 2014). The now general currency of this terminology (core/periphery) was established by the series of volumes published from 1974 on in Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press). Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (London: Routledge, 2003 [1912]), 328–47, 348–74. The problem posed by the organization of the last section of volume 1 becomes still more complicated when we take into account, in light of the post-

3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

63.

64 .

VIOLENCE?

183

humously published preparatory manuscripts, the fact that the discussion of the “historical tendency of the capitalist mode of production” represents all that remains, in the final version of Capital, of a whole section that Marx cut when he produced his final draft. See Karl Marx, “Draft Chapter 6 of Capital”: “Results of the Direct Production Process,” MECW, 34:355–466 (also available in an appendix to the Penguin edition of Capital, vol. 1). Althusser, in his 1977 lecture “Machiavelli’s Solitude” (in Machiavelli and Us, 115–30), takes the opposite path: he compares the Machiavellian theory of the Prince and the political use of violence that it advocates to the “primitive political accumulation” characteristic of the transition to the modern state (“absolute monarchy”). There is even a fourth, if we count the complete theory of “real subsumption” sketched in Capital ’s unpublished chapter. On the idea that alternate strategies follow from Marx’s analyses, the standard work, inspired by the confl icts of the 1960s in the communist movement, is still Stanley Moore, Three Tactics: The Background in Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1963). Let us note the messianic overtones of this famous phrase, which Marx wrote in an odd species of Gallic German (Die Expropriateurs werden expropriiert). It no doubt echoes slogans that the French Revolution directed against the “accapareurs” [the expropriators (of the Revolution)] but is ultimately patterned on a passage in Isaiah: “For the Lord will have mercy on Jacob, and will yet choose Israel, and set them in their own land: and the strangers shall be joined with them, and they shall cleave to the house of Jacob. . . . and they shall take them captives, whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors” (Isaiah 14:1–4; see also Isaiah 27:7–9). Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, chap. 26–29, pp. 328–98. This thesis, typical of Luxemburg’s “economic Romanticism,” was copiously “refuted” by both Leninist and social-democratic Marxist orthodoxy before being confirmed, to all appearances, by the history of twentieth-century capitalism and generalized by theorists of the school of the “development of underdevelopment”: André Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Giovanni Arrighi. “Capitalist production . . . develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth: the soil and the labourer” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 35:507–8). See Michael Harrington, “The Two Nations,” in The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1971), 167ff.

184 3. “ I N C O N V E R T I B L E ”

VIOLENCE?

65. Rosa Luxemburg did not herself come to a conclusion of this kind because, for reasons easy to understand in light of the conditions then prevailing, she privileged the notion of an “external colonization,” an effect of the expansion of the industrialized European states throughout the rest of the world. But, for Luxemburg, because “the world is round,” as the French saying goes—that is, because it is finite—this process necessarily had an absolute limit. The 1914 “catastrophe,” the outbreak of the First World War among the imperialist powers, convinced her that this limit had already been reached, and saw her lapsing back into the apocalyptic scenario of a “generalized war” that was driving the corrupt world of injustice and domination toward selfdestruction but also opening up the messianic possibility of emancipation, if only the revolutionary forces proved capable of seizing this chance. See, in particular, her 1916 “Junius pamphlet,” in which one finds the famous alternative that she claims to have borrowed from Engels: “socialism or barbarism” (“Die Krise in der Sozialdemokratie” [1916], in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 [August 1914–January 1919] [Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974], 49–164). 66. Jürgen Habermas employs the term “internal colonization” in an important section of his 1981 Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1985), vol. 2 (Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy [Cambridge: Polity, 1987]). I borrow the term from Habermas, of course, while displacing it. See the appendix, part III, p. xxx.

4. Strategies of Civility 1. Especially the 1844 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,” where Marx first treats the proletariat in an intensely messianic perspective: “When all inner requisites are fulfi lled, the day of German resurrection will be proclaimed by the ringing call of the Gallic cock” (MECW, 3:187). See Étienne Balibar, “Le moment messianique de Marx,” in Citoyen Sujet et autres essais d ’anthropologie philosophique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011), 243–64 (English translation forthcoming from Fordham University Press). 2. See Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity, trans. Hope Heaney (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 3 . Eduard Bernstein’s 1899 book, which opened the “revisionist” controversy in Marxism (The Preconditions of Socialism, ed. Henry Tudor. Cambridge Texts

4.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

185

in the History of Political Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993]), systematically exploits the “wordplay” allowed by the two senses of the word Bürger in German (“bourgeois” and “citizen”). In this way, it suggests that we inscribe civility at the point of equilibrium between a theory of the autonomy of civil society and a theory of citizenship, together with the corresponding practices. Even if I do not do so in the same way as Antonio Negri, in an exciting but also difficult book, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (London: Autonomedia/Pluto Press, 1989 [1979]). A “neighbor” is someone located just beyond a certain “border”—unless this border is drawn precisely in order to transform the neighbor into an enemy and, to begin with, an irreducible “other.” See Ulrich Bielefeld, “Das Konzept des Fremden und die Wirklichkeit des Imaginären,” in Das Eigene und das Fremde: Neuer Rassismus in der Alten Welt?, ed. Bielefeld (Hamburg: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 1991). One is tempted to stand Spinoza’s dictum on its head: “Nothing is more useless to man than another man.” As Hegel and Arendt explicitly do, and as Marx does as well, implicitly. The difference between what I am suggesting here and the “biopolitical” concept that Giorgio Agamben introduces in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Median Crossing Aesthetics [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998]), a concept that merits extended discussion, seems to me on a first analysis to bear on at least three points: (1) I agree with Agamben’s thesis that we have to set out from the forms of the collapse of politics in order to think its conditions of possibility (which are inseparable from conditions of its impossibility), but I do not believe that they can be reduced to a single model (whether it is the model of the “camp” or some other). I believe that these conditions are heterogeneous and that they produce their effects only in contingent situations that do not arise from an ontology but from the conjunctural variations of a structure. (2) That is why it seems essential to me to divorce the “concept of history” (or, more profoundly, the scheme of historicity) from teleological formulations of it. But in many respects the negative conception of historicity that Agamben elaborates on the basis of a detailed reading of Benjamin’s “theses” is still located within the horizon of teleology; it treats sovereignty and its power over “naked life” as the metaphysical destiny of Western politics (that is why, notably, it is important for Agamben to detect a fi rst figure of “sovereign” power and

186 4 .

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

“internal exclusion” of zoe through the institution of bios politikos and citizenship). (3) The “messianic” conception of political community that is brought out a contrario (in conformity with the theses of Agamben’s previous book, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993]) is radically anti-institutional. Not only do I agree that the institution does not by itself comprise a guarantee against extreme violence; I also think that it contains the permanent possibility of extreme violence. Yet I do not believe that we can get beyond the horizon of the institution. This points, in my view, a tragic rather than a messianic perspective. It is that tragic perspective that I am submitting to discussion under the rubric “strategies of civility.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 239. I am thinking, in particular, of Alain Badiou, who sounds this theme every time he discusses democracy and communism (see Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker [London: Verso, 2005], especially the discussion of Jacques Rancière’s work). Catherine Neveu and James Holston in particular. See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). This is the viewpoint that Jacques Rancière rightly develops in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (trans. Julie Rose [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004]), after introducing it in a series of essays that have now been gathered under the title On the Shores of Politics (trans. Liz Heron [London: Verso, 2007 (1990; 2nd French ed., 2008)]). Miguel Abensour, setting out from a “Machiavellian” reading of the early Marx (“A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”), develops what seems to me to be a convergent viewpoint on “true democracy” as the insurrectionary emergence of “legislative power” or the “total demos ” (see “Marx et le moment machiavélien: ‘Vrai démocratie’ et modernité,” in Phénoménologie et politique: Mélanges offerts à Jacques Taminiaux [Brussels: Ousia, 1989], 17–114; revised edition translated as Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, trans. Max Blechman and Martin Breaugh [Cambridge: Polity, 2011]). For, following a path that I have suggested is Spinoza’s—in a way that lends, by the same stroke, constructive meaning to the fact that his Tractatus politicus remains “unfinished”—but is also the path taken by the Marx of “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (MECW, 3:3–129), I believe that there exist processes of more or less advanced democratization that stand in a dialectical relationship with citizenship, not an autonomous

4.

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

187

political regime that should be located at the same level as the others. In that sense, conversely, there is some “democracy” in every regime, albeit only in the form of internal conflict (Étienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Chris Turner [London: Verso, 1998]). This view should be contrasted with the one Max Weber develops in The City (2nd ed., trans. Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth [New York: Free Press, 1958]), in which he makes democracy, in contrast with all forms of “legitimate domination,” a historical instance of “illegitimate domination.” 14 . This is what I call “the proposition of equaliberty.” Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 15. Marx’s phrase, which has given rise to countless commentaries and extrapolations, occurs at the beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852], MECW, 11:103 (MEW, vol. 8 [Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1960], 115). It reads, in full, “men make their own history [machen ihre eigene Geschichte], but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” [unter unmittelbar vorgefundenen, gegebenen und überlieferten Umständen]. When we read this phrase out of context, we are tempted to make an “ontological” interpretation of it that simply extends the synthesis of transformative action and material conditions affirmed in the Theses on Feuerbach. The context, however, shows that the “circumstances transmitted from the past” that Marx has in mind essentially belong to the imaginary order (the “time-honored disguise”—Verkleidung—that people don for their entry onto the revolutionary stage). It is thus a question of one of the most relevant indices in Marx of what Althusser was to call the “overdetermination” constitutive of the “concept of history.” 16. The question of war as institution (which should not be confused with what is called, in French, the “military institution”) was powerfully posed by Roman civilization: the symbolic figure here was the Temple of Janus, the door to which was opened or closed, depending on the period, to mark the transition from peacetime to war and, consequently, the fact that both belonged to the same legal space. See Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, trans. Philip Krapp (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970), 1:327. In the twentieth century, the succession of “world” wars and the transformations in international law inspired two major, roughly contemporaneous studies: Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965 [1942]), which uses a comparative typology to zero in on the displacements of the

188 4 .

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

transitional moment between the two “states”; and Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europäum (The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum), trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006 [1950]), which describes the rise of a “bracketing of war” [Hegung des Krieges] in the European area, and its disappearance with the outbreak of war in the peripheral areas opened up to colonization. In the “Treatise on Nomadology” that Deleuze and Felix Guattari have incorporated into A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi [London: Athlone Press, 1999], 351–423), they counterpose war to the state on principled grounds, taking their inspiration from Pierre Clastres (the state apparatus, they say, appropriates war only after the fact) and, consequently, treat war as an autonomous model of the political institution, opposed to the model of sovereignty. Alain Joxe develops the diametrically opposed point of view throughout his oeuvre, which presents itself as a genealogy of “the empire of disorder” created by the superposition of commercial globalization on the American imperium’s claim to sovereignty. Joxe, Voyage aux sources de la guerre (Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1991). Étienne Balibar, “Outline of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” in Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson, 115–32 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). The New World Order was proposed, if not defined, by President George W. Bush in a congressional address seeking to interpret the historical change that had come about with the collapse of the USSR and its satellite regimes in Eastern Europe. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?, ed. Bertram D. Wolfe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 72. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913– 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, 236–53 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996). Vladimir Lenin, “The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University, July 11, 1919,” in Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960– 1980), 29:470–88. To the best of my knowledge, Lenin never directly responded to Rosa Luxemburg’s criticisms. On the contrary, he invoked her remarks in his polemic with Kautsky, the representative, in the Marxist tradition, of the “renunciation” of proletarian positions in favor of a “liberal”

4.

22.

23.

24 .

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

189

conception of democracy (“The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky [1918],” in Collected Works, 28:227–325). Lenin’s references to Luxemburg thereafter bore exclusively on the significance of the German Freikorps’ murder of her, covered by the Ebert-Noske Socialist government. On this whole discussion, see the thorough analysis in Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 268–302. See my essay “Lenin and Gandhi,” in Violence et civilité (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 305–21, and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), chap. 4: “The Moment of Manoeuvre: Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society.” Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). I have said elsewhere (in connection with Fichte) that the philosopher’s task consists in expressing alternatives or contradictions that he does not invent but that have not found radical philosophical expression elsewhere. Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (London: Routledge, 1994), 63. Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s Gramsci and the State (trans. David Fernbach [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980]) is still essential reading here. For a discussion focusing on Gramsci’s very unorthodox “Hegelianism” in relation to the history of Italian philosophy and its “reception” of Hegel by LabriolaCroce-Gentile, see André Tosel, Marx en Italiques (Mauvezin: Éditions TER, 1991). See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Theory and History of Literature series (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). In “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.” On the difference between the two texts, see J.-F. Kervégan, “La vie éthique perdue dans ses extrêmes: Scission et réconciliation dans la théorie hégélienne de la Sittlichkeit,” in L’Effectif et le rationnel: Hegel et l’esprit objectif (Paris: Vrin, 2007 [1995]), 213. “Patriotism based on the constitution” would be a better translation of Verfassungspatriotismus (the constitution designates not the legal framework for patriotism but the object with which the individual must henceforth identify, instead of the historical nation). Introduced in 1979 by the liberal theorist Dolf Sternberger (“Verfassungspatriotismus,” in the volume of the same name,

190 4 .

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

in Schriften, vol. 10 [Frankfurt, Insel Verlag, 1990], 13), it was taken up by Habermas in 1983 in the context of a debate with the “extraparliamentary,” antiwar far left. Habermas later used it in the framework of the Historikerstreit over the significance of Nazism in European history, closely associating it with a defense of the Arendtian notion of “civil disobedience” and the “cosmopolitical” perspective opened up (in his view) by the construction of Europe. See the texts brought together in Jürgen Habermas, Ecrits politiques: Culture, droit, histoire, trans. Charles Bouchindhomme and Rainer Rochlitz (Paris: Le Cerf, 1990), and in Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, ed. and trans. Ciaran P. Cronin and Pablo de De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 105–54. 30. See C. Colliot-Thélène, Le Désenchantement de l’Etat de Hegel à Max Weber (Paris: Minuit, 1992). On this point, we must give up received ideas about the opposition between liberalism and étatisme. Hegel has a close affinity with contemporaneous theorists of “political rationality” such as Guizot (see Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot [Paris: Gallimard, 1985]). See also Domenico Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns, trans. Marella Morris and Jon Morris (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 117–28. 31. See Georges Devereux, “Ethnic Identity: Its Logical Foundations and Its Dysfunctions,” in Ethnopsychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and Anthropology as Complementary Frames of Reference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 136–76; Étienne Balibar, “Ambiguous Identities,” in Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 56–74; and Balibar, “Culture and Identity (Working Notes),” in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (London: Routledge, 1995). 32. Foucault uses the term “biopolitics” in a precise way in connection with the medical and demographic policies of the nineteenth-century and twentiethcentury bourgeois states. See esp. Michel Foucault, “The Birth of Social Medicine” (1974), in The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and N. Rose, 319–37 (New York: New Press, 2003); Foucault, “The Meshes of Power” (1976), trans. Gerald Moore, in Space, Knowledge, Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. J. Crampton and S. Elden, 153–62 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 2007); Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2009); and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2010).

4.

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

191

33. On the “institution of the individual” as burgher and citizen in Hegel, JeanFrançois Kervégan calls it a “weak institutionalism”—that is, one compatible with liberalism, a question closely related to that of “pluralism.” See Kérvégan, L’Effectif et le rationnel, 371; and his earlier Hegel, Carl Schmitt: Le politique entre spéculation et positivité (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), 183. 34 . This is indicated by the fact that Hegel inscribes cosmopolitical perspectives in the insurmountable context of war at the end of Elements of the Philosophy of Right (ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991]). 35. See the section of Elements of the Philosophy of Right titled “The Upbringing of Children and the Dissolution of the Family” (§173–80), 210–8. In “L’Etat et la concentration du capital symbolique” (in L’Etat, la finance et le social, ed. B. Théret [Paris: La Découverte, 1995]), Pierre Bourdieu cites, in this regard, a terrible passage from Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters, the most recent echo of a long, cruel history: School is the state school, where young people are turned into state persons and thus into nothing other than henchmen of the state. Walking to school I was walking into the state and, since the state destroys people, into the institution for the destruction of people. . . . The state forced me, like everyone else, into itself and made me compliant towards it, the state, and turned me into a state person, regulated and registered and trained and finished and perverted and dejected, like everyone else. When we see people we only see state people, the state servants, as we quite rightly say, who serve the state all their lives and thus serve unnature all their lives. (Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy, trans. Edward Osers [London: Quartet Books, 1989], 27) See also Étienne Balibar, “La violence des intellectuels,” Lignes, no. 25, Special issue: Violence et politique: 9–22. 36. Norbert Elias, Society of Individuals, ed. M. Schröter, trans. Ephraim Jephcott (New York: Continuum, 2001). 37. Benedict Anderson calls this an “imagined community.” I have used a similar term, “fictive ethnicity.” Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); and Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995). 38. As is well known, that is precisely the aim of Hegel’s problematic of “recognition,” recurrently formulated throughout his work. Axel Honneth has provided

192 4 .

39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

a brilliant reminder of the importance of this guiding thread for the interpretation of Hegel’s oeuvre and an understanding of the way it articulates phenomenology and the socio-political theory of “law”: Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). This explains Hegel’s affinity with Durkheim on this point. This point has already been subjected to systematic deconstruction in Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. Richard Rand, and John P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). See the essays collected in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Patricia Jagentowicz Mills (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). On the “quarrel” between the sexes, see Monique David-Ménard, Geneviève Fraisse, and Michel Tort, L’Exercice du savoir et la différence des sexes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991). On Antigone, see Françoise Duroux, Antigone encore: Les femmes et la loi (Paris: Editions Côté-femmes, 1993); and Suzanne Gearhart, The Interrupted Dialectic: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and their Tragic Other (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” MECW, 5:4. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program” [1875], MECW, 24:97. It would be worthwhile to examine the late medieval origins of the term maioritas at the moment when the political gained its autonomy from theology: the maior pars of Marsilius of Padua. See André Tosel, “Nature de la politique chez Marsile de Padoue,” in Réseaux, Revue interdisciplinaire de philosophie morale et politique, nos. 24–25 (1974), special issue: L’idée de nature. From this point of view, a red thread runs from the famous passage in Kant’s 1784 “Was ist Aufklärung?” (which defines Enlightenment, and therefore also the politics of the Enlightenment, as “man’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity”) to Marx’s formulations in “Provisional Rules of the Working Men’s International Association” [1864], MECW, 20:14: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.” This idea is clearly present in Marx, in the general form of the principle of struggle against “the ruling ideology,” and also in the form of analyses of particular situations. Thus, after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, Marx declared that “the working class must first transform itself if it is to become capable of reversing the domination of the ruling class.” See Étienne Balibar, Cinq études du matérialisme historique (Paris: Maspero, 1974), 26. I have in mind, obviously, the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, as it is systematized by way of a critical revision of the Marxist heritage in

4.

48.

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54 .

55.

56.

57.

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

193

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). This is the problem addressed from a theoretical standpoint by, in particular, the later work of Ernesto Laclau. See especially the essays collected in Emancipations (London: Verso, 1996). One way they can do so is by making the detour of what Gramsci called, after Renan, “intellectual and moral reform.” In the Quaderni del carcere, Gramsci elaborates, as two aspects of such a “reform,” the category of “hegemony” by interpreting the Marxist (and Leninist) conception of the “practical truth” of the ideologies, and, reciprocally, the development of a universalist culture of the dominated classes and their organic intellectuals. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols. Gramsci Institute critical ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 292. In Deleuze, these formulations are bound up with a radical critique of the categories of the action, the will (general and particular), and the possible, which command the paradigm of “majoritarian” politics. See François Zourabichvili. “Deleuze et le possible (de l’involuntarisme en politique),” in Gille Deleuze: Une vie philosophique, ed. Eric Alliez, 335–57 (Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo / Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1998). Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 292. Ibid., 214–15 (translation slightly modified). Deleuze began to study this problem in Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983 [1962]), criticizing the Hegelian conception of the “struggle between master and slave.” See especially Antonio Negri’s interview with Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” trans. Martin Joughin, Future Antérieur (Spring 1990); and Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 162. The groundwork for this thesis was laid in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1967]). This whole discussion is haunted by the question of the way National Socialism exploited the figure of the worker (der Arbeiter, the Proletarian); the precondition was violent elimination of the traditional working-class organizations. One could draw a parallel here with the work of Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Chris Turner and Erica Carter, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 and 1989 [1977–1978]). Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 202ff.; and, above all, Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam

194 4 .

58. 59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

STRATEGIES OF CIVILITY

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 124ff. On “the people who are missing,” see Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galatea (New York: Continuum, 2005 [1985]), 217. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 214–15. See ibid., 150ff. (“Not wisdom, caution. In doses. As a rule immanent to experimentation: injections of caution.”) Deleuze and Guattari go on to suggest that we read Spinoza’s Ethics as “the great book of the BwO” [body without organs] (ibid., 153). “In Foucault’s opinion the Greeks did a lot less, or a lot more, depending on your choice. They folded force, discovered it was something that could be folded, and only by strategy, because they invented a relation between forces based on the rivalry between free men (the government of others through selfgovernment, and so on). But as a force among forces man does not fold the forces that compose him without the outside folding itself, and creating a Self within man. . . . (Perhaps there is still a Greek somewhere in Foucault, revealed by a certain faith which he places in a ‘problematization’ of pleasures.)” Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota), 113–15. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” 1983 interview with Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow in The Essential Foucault, 103– 25; “An Aesthetics of Existence,” 1984 interview with A. Fontana, trans. Alan Sheridan, in Foucault, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 (London: Routledge, 1988), 47–53; “Technologies of the Self,” in The Essential Foucault, 145–69; and History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1988), chap. 2, “The Care of Self,” 37–96. This theme is also discussed, notably, in the lecture “What Is Enlightenment?” with respect to Baudelaire, in terms of the “ascetic elaboration of the self” (trans. Catherine Porter, in The Essential Foucault, 43–57). Michel Foucault, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Hugh Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, 145–62 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). Foucault’s discussion of the disciplines begins with the 1976 Discipline and Punish. In 1981–1982, Foucault devoted a whole course to “the hermeneutic of the subject”: The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

APRÈS-COUP

195

64 . See the parallel that I sketch in “Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation, Transformation, Civility,” trans. Chris Turner, in Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002), 1–39. 65. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” trans. P. Aranov and D. McGrawth, 1984 interview with H. Becker, R. Fornet-Betancourt, and A. Gomez-Muller, in The Essential Foucault, 31. 66. This is its relation to Spinozist ontology (if the term is appropriate). 67. “Masochism” versus “sadism.” The opposition already makes itself felt in Gilles Deleuze, Sacher-Masoch: An Interpretation, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: G. Braziller, 1971).

Après-Coup: The Limits of Political Anthropology 1. Paper read at the conference “L’humain comme exigence: situations et universalité” [The human as demand: Situations and universality] organized by the Laboratoire de philosophie pratique et d’anthropologie philosophique, Institut catholique de Paris, Faculté de philosophie, December 4 and 5, 2003. The present version was revised for publication in La Question de l ’humain entre l’éthique et l ’anthropologie, ed. Étienne Balibar and Alfredo Gomez-Müller (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). 2. Achille Mbembe also uses the term “phenomenology of violence” in “Out of the World,” chap. 5 in On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). I shall be borrowing several elements from Mbembe’s book. Mbembe refers above all to phenomenology in the Hegelian sense, which confronts consciousness with its own limits in order to bring out its historicity. Phenomenology can of course also be understood either as an “existential” analysis of being-in-the-world—as in Heidegger and, to a certain extent in his wake, Arendt—or as the unfolding of the “plane of immanence” of events that manifest the potentialities of life, as in Deleuze, who takes up certain suggestions in Henri Bergson and Jean-Paul Sartre. Phenomenological comprehension in both these modes does not necessarily exclude a project of explication, even a “causal” one, but helps defer it while also suspending its reductionist postulates. Compare Omar Carlier’s work, in a seemingly less phenomenological and more anthropological register, on the reproduction of extreme violence in the period running from the colonization to the decolonization of Algeria: Carlier, “Violence(s),” in La Guerre d’Algérie, 1954–2004, la fin de l’amnésie, ed. M. Harbi and B. Stora (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004), 347–79.

196

APRÈS-COUP

3. In this regard it is impossible to overemphasize the importance of the analysis in which Hannah Arendt showed for the first time that the Nazi genocide (especially the destruction of European Jewry in the death camps) depended on three successively realized conditions that make all the difference between persecution and extermination: elimination of the juridical person, destruction of the moral person, and suppression of the individuality of existence. Arendt, “Totalitarianism in Power,” chap. 12 in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 389–459 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), at 447, 451, 455. Alessandro Dal Lago persuasively extends Arendt’s argument in his analysis of the condition of migrants: Non-Persons: The Exclusion of Migrants in a Global Society, trans. Marie Orton (Vimodrone: IPOC di Pietro Condemi, 2009). 4 . Fred Poché, “De l’espace comme exigence sociale,” in La Question de l’humain entre l’éthique et l’anthropologie (Paris: Harmattan, 2004), 27ff. 5. See Giorgio Agamben’s work on this theme, beginning with Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 6. See esp. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004). 7. Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force: A Critical Edition (bilingual ed.), ed. and trans. James P. Holoka (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 45–45, 48–49. See also Étienne Balibar, “Simone Weil et le tragique de la force: A propos de ‘L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,’” Cahiers Simone Weil, 33, no. 2 (June 2010): 215–36. 8. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 111–19. 9. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 197–99. 10. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 11. Arendt, “Totalitarianism in Power.” 12. Especially in the light of a theory about the reestablishment of slavery by the totalitarian regimes, which, however, fails to explain the relentlessness with which the Nazis pursued the “Final Solution” at the expense of their own war effort. 13. Primo Levi, “La zona grigia,” chap. 2 in I sommersi e i salvati (Turino: Einaudi, 1986); “The Gray Zone,” chap. 2 in The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 36–69. 14 . On silence, see Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530–1570 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971);

APRÈS-COUP

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

197

and Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Manifesto of the Communist Party, MECW 6:482. Abraham Bomba, before fainting, even evokes “a colleague” who had to cut his own wife’s and daughter’s hair. It is possible that this “colleague” was in fact Bomba himself. Lanzmann’s fi lm has been published as a book: Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film, trans. A. Whitelow and W. Byron (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 101–8. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 53–54. Ibid., 55. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 22–23. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 202–3, 221–24. I discuss this problem in “Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson, 3–38 (London: Routledge, 1994). This thesis brings us back to the problem explicitly posed by the great witnesses to the world of the camps, for whom the ultimate limit in the destruction of humanity and the reduction of the individual to the status of a “thing” is reached when the capacity to communicate and share collapses. (They go on, however, to show that this limit is almost endlessly deferred so that the experience of the “living dead” is in fact an experience of the capacity for resistance of the human in man.) We weren’t yet used to death—not, at least, to the death found here; whereas his particular language, his dreads—and also his calm—were saturated with it. We still believed that some recourse was possible; that one didn’t just die, “like that”; that, when it finally did come to a question of dying, rights could be made to prevail; above all, that one couldn’t watch a friend die without “doing something.” (Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler [Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1992], 16) The column keeps on. My legs keep going, one after the other. I don’t know what they are still able to do, these legs. I don’t as yet feel collapse coming from there. If they do fail, perhaps I can hang on a guy’s arm; but if I don’t recover strength he won’t be able to keep me

198

APRÈS-COUP

going for long. “I can’t go on anymore,” I’ll say to him. He’ll force me, will himself make a terrific effort, for me, he’ll do whatever you can for somebody who can’t remain in charge of himself. “I can’t go on anymore,” I’ll repeat, twice, three times. I’ll have a different face, the face you get when you don’t want to anymore. He won’t be able to do any more for me, and I’ll fall. (ibid., 214) A father called an old fool in front of his son. A hungry old man who’d steal in front of his son, so the son could eat. Father and son covered with lice, the two of them no longer looking their true age, coming to look alike. Both hungry together, offering their bread to each other, with loving eyes. And both of them here on the floor of the box-car. Were both of them to die, who could bear be it but the weight of their deaths? . . . The SS believe that in the portion of mankind that they have chosen love must rot, because it cannot be anything but an aping of the love between real men, because it cannot really exist. But the extraordinary stupidity of this myth is obvious here, on the floor of this railroad car. For us, the old Spaniard may have become transparent; but not for the boy. . . . For the son, the father’s language and transparency remain as immeasurably profound as they were when the father was still fully sovereign. (ibid., 262) Seryozha Klivansy died. He and I had been freshmen together at the university, and we met twenty years later in a cell for transit prisoners in Butyr Prison. . . . He loved poetry and recited verse by heart while in prison. He stopped doing that in camp. . . . He would have shared his last morsel, or, rather, he was still at that stage. . . . That is, he never reached the point where no one had a last morsel and no one shared anything with anyone. (Varlam Shalamov, “An Epitaph,” in Kolyma Tales: Combined Two-Volume Edition, trans. John Glad [Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1994], 303–4) Suddenly, we felt that the bread ration was not enough, that an insatiable desire to eat was tormenting us. . . . It was impossible to buy anything, impossible to ask a comrade for the smallest crust of bread. . . . Abruptly, no one shared anything with anyone any more; each of us nibbled away on the sly, hastily, furtively, perpetually rummaging through his pockets in search of crumbs. Hunting for crumbs became the instinctive occupation of any camp inmate whenever he had a free moment. But free moments were becoming increasingly

APRÈS-COUP

199

harder to find.” (Varlam Shalamov, Récits de Kolyma, trans. O. Simon and K. Kérel [Paris: Denoël, 1969], 89) 22. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001). 23. “‘Human rights’ are rights to non-Evil: rights not to be offended or mistreated with respect to one’s life (the horrors of murder and execution), one’s body (the horrors of torture, cruelty and famine), or one’s cultural identity (the horrors of the humiliation of women, of minorities, etc.). The power of this doctrine rests, at first glance, in its self-evidence. Indeed, we know from experience that suffering is highly visible. The eighteenth-century theoreticians had already made pity—identification with the suffering of a living being—the mainspring of the relation with the other. That political leaders are discredited chiefly by their corruption, indifference or cruelty was a fact already noted by the Greek theorists of tyranny. That it is easier to establish consensus regarding what is evil rather than regarding what is good is a fact already established by the experience of the Church: it was always easier for church leaders to indicate what was forbidden—indeed, to content themselves with such abstinences—than to try to figure out what should be done. It is certainly true, moreover, that every politics worthy of the name finds its point of departure in the way people represent their lives and rights [Badiou calls this “opinion”]. It might seem, then, that we have here a body of self-evident principles capable of cementing a global consensus, and of imposing themselves strongly. Yet we must insist that it is not so: that this ‘ethics’ is inconsistent, and that the—perfectly obvious—reality of the situation is characterized in fact by the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, the disappearance or extreme fragility of emancipatory politics, the multiplication of ‘ethnic’ confl icts, and the universality of unbridled competition” (ibid., 9–10). 24 . For Badiou, who characterizes his own philosophy as a “Platonism of the multiple,” the classic conversion of Truth and the Good—raked over the coals by the critical philosophies, followed by the “philosophies of suspicion” and the post-Heideggerian philosophies of deconstruction that claim to be non-philosophies—has to be rethought by setting out from the substitution of the idea of the multiple for that of the one. Thus, this conversion is associated not with the idea of eternity or transcendence but with the ideas of the event (the fundamental characteristic of which is its “rarity”) and immanence. It remains associated, however, with a critique of the world of “life”

200

APRÈS-COUP

and with the belief (or faith, fidelity) in immortality attained through faith in, or fidelity to, a “truth” that manifests itself by means of its power to break (its power of “forcing”) with established knowledge and the institutional order that such knowledge grounds (on condition, however, that we avoid the “betrayals” that bend truths to the service of order, and the “simulacra” that create events by setting out from particularity rather than the universal: for example, the National-Socialist “revolution.” All this grounds the “militant” character of the ethical faith founded on the definition of the Good as Truth). 25. See Badiou, Ethics, 34ff. (“Ethics as the ‘Western’ Mastery of Death”). It should be noted that, in Badiou’s perspective, obsession with death is basically no different from obsession with life; they are two faces of one and the same representation, which he calls “wanting-to-be-an-animal” (12). Thus, the death in question here is not really analyzed with respect to its differential modalities, whose phenomenology ought to be constructed. Death is, rather, synonymous with “mortality” in general. 26. See ibid., 63 (“On the Existence of Evil”). Badiou calls into question, simultaneously, the discourse about the “uniqueness of the Holocaust” and the discourse about its indefinite repetition, two sides of the same negative opinion, which, he argues, only seem to be incompatible: “In fact, this paradox is simply that of radical Evil itself (and, in truth, of every elevation to the transcendent level [‘mise en transcendance ’] of a reality or concept). The measure must itself be unmeasurable, yet it must constantly be measured. The extermination is indeed both that which measures all the Evil our time is capable of, being itself beyond measure, and that to which we must compare everything (thus measuring it unceasingly) that we say is to be judged in terms of the manifest certainty of Evil. As the supreme negative example, this crime is inimitable, but every crime is an imitation of it.” The question of the use of prototypes, or, better, names of Absolute Evil (and even of the name “evil”) in constructing figures of the enemy around which a community or social order rallies (that social order can itself be extremely violent and disordered) is, without a doubt, a fundamental anthropological question that can also be studied at a concrete, localized level. For example, on the criminalization and demonization of the poor in Brazil’s megalopolises (São Paulo), where the extreme violence of public and private police forces constitutes a response to mass illegal activity, see Teresa Caldeira,

APRÈS-COUP

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

201

City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). The term unpolitical, derived in part from the title of Thomas Mann’s wellknown Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918), translated into English by Walter D. Morris under the title Reflections of a Non-Political Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1987), has been put to work, notably, in a series of books by Robert Esposito, beginning with Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitcs (Commonalities), trans. Rhiannon Noel Welch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), and, especially, Nove pensieri sulla politica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993) (chapter 8 of which is devoted in its entirety to the question of “evil” as a political category, defined with reference to the phenomenon of the effacement of the enemy’s traces). Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr., 137–60 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985 [1933–34]). Carl von Clausewitz, as is well known, holds that the military objective in warfare is the annihilation of the adversary’s defensive capability or capacity to resist. Clausewitz nevertheless carefully distinguishes this military objective from a political objective and, accordingly, maintains a distinction between the destruction of men’s means and that of their naked existence—their elimination or transformation into “superfluous” objects. On the complementarity and inconsistency of Arendt’s two formulations, which have inspired untold commentaries, see Adi Ophir, “Between Eichmann and Kant: Thinking on Evil after Arendt,” History and Memory 8, no. 2 (1996). See also Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (New York: Zone Books, 2005). See Jacques Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the State of Its Soul,” in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 238–80; and Fethi Benslama, “La dépropriation,” Lignes, no. 24 (February 1995). Étienne Balibar, “Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation, Transformation, Civility,” in Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 1–39. I have proposed a portmanteau word for it that condenses the history of the democratic tradition, “equaliberty.” See Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); and Balibar, “‘Rights of Man’ and ‘Rights of the Citizen’: The Modern Dialectic of Equality and Freedom,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and

202

34 .

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

APRÈS-COUP

Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (London: Routledge, 1994), 39–59. We might also call it “heterotopia,” borrowing that notion from Foucault while extending its meaning somewhat: Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, trans. Robert Hurley, ed J. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998 [1984]), 175–85. Foucault first uses this term in the opening pages of The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1970 [1966]). Hannah Arendt, part 2, “Imperialism,” chap. 9, “The Decline of the NationState and the End of the Rights of Man,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), 267–302. Among the commentaries, see esp. Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp, Les Sans-Etat dans la philosophie d’Hannah Arendt: Les humains superflus, le droit d’avoir des droits et la citoyenneté (Lausanne: Payot, 2000). Étienne Balibar, “Hannah Arendt, the Right to Have Rights, and Civil Disobedience,” in Equaliberty, 165–86. Camus’s relationship to the Greeks is mediated not only by Nietzsche but also by Simone Weil. An interesting analysis of his conception of the interrelations between morality and politics may be found in David Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. A. Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991); and Camus, “Appeal for a Civilian Truce in Algeria,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 131–41. Max Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 89–90, 93.

Appendix 1. I shall go no further into Lacan’s construction here. In the course of his seminar on anxiety, he identifies this “remainder” with the non-symbolizable part of the body, the “negative” of the organ that has always already been symbolized in the social organization of human sexuality or of the difference of the sexes (the phallus), associating it with a radical kind of “lack” that is said to be neither abolition nor denegation, “a lack that the symbol does not supplement” because this lack is the very consequence of the sym-

APPENDIX

2. 3. 4. 5.

203

bol’s existence or of its grip on the subject (Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse [Paris: Le Seuil, 2004], 158ff.). Elsewhere in his work, Lacan tries to “locate,” in the same place, not only anxiety but also enjoyment [ jouissance]—for example, mystical enjoyment—as a “real” (non-)relation to the object of desire itself. This is strikingly analogous to the way Bataille describes the “inner experience” that for him is always bound up with eroticism, cruelty, or, more probably, the “excess” common to both. We could approach, along these lines, the question of the “convertible” or “inconvertible” violence as we have delineated it by setting out from a reading of Hegel: for Lacan explicitly identifies his account of the difference between the “object petit a” and the world of subjective experience, a difference revealed by anxiety and hallucination, as a demonstration of the “limits” of the Hegelian dialectic of recognition (ibid., 380–83). It might be suggested that the Hegelian conception of the historic “conversion” of violence into legitimate authority is closely related to his conception of the “struggle for recognition” as a “dialectical resolution” of the confl ict between subjects’ autonomy and the fact that all belong to the social order. We would, however, have to ask again whether Hegel himself was altogether unaware of this “limit,” which would bring us back to his analyses of Antigone’s rebellion (the “irony of the community”) and of the Terror in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and to the subterranean link between them. I shall try to do this elsewhere. Ibid., 360. Like the spot of blood that Lady Macbeth rages against, in vain (ibid., 162). Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires: Critique de la raison/l’économie narrative (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 405. Ibid., 512–13. On p. 407, Faye, too, offers a diagram. Charting the German parties to the right and left of the “Zentrum,” it allows him to array the discursive “constellations” around each of the two extremes (the Communist Party, or KPD, and the Nazi Party, the NPD) in such a way as to show how these constellations sometimes account for the discursive distance between them, and, at other times, explain their discursive proximity. With this idea of the “horseshoe” as my starting point, I have constructed a different diagram because my aim is not to show how antithetical terms “uttered in quasi-simultaneous fashion—that is, non-dialectically”—can add their political value together rather than canceling each other out (ibid., 413) but, on the contrary, to make visible or figuratively to represent the possibility of a political practice based on separating the modalities of violence, thereby thwarting their mutual conversion.

204

6.

7.

8.

9.

APPENDIX

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 355–56. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed., ed. Bettina Bien Graves, trans. Leland P. Yeager (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006 [1944]). Robert Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question, trans. Richard Boyd (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003 [1995]). Étienne Balibar, “Exclusion ou lutte des classes?,” in Les Frontières de la démocratie (Paris: La Découverte, 1992), 191.

INDEX

Absalom! Absalom!, 58 “absolute evil,” 141 Accumulation of Capital, 91 Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), 14, 71 Adorno, Theodor, 142 African American, 121, 122 Agamben, Giorgio, 128–129, 132, 184n AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), 14, 71 alterity, 4 Althusser, Louis, 29, 64 ambiguousness of violence, 3–4 anarchy, 63 anti-Semitism, 153 Antigone, 115 antiviolence, 13, 17; etymology, 22, 23–24; political innovation, 75 anxiety, 72–74, 175n Arendt, Hannah, 25, 134, 143, 145–146 Aristotle, 97, 98, 114

“armed struggle,” 4 Aufhebung , 34, 46, 90 Auschwitz, 136 “autocrat,” 84 “automaton,” 84 “autonomy of decision,” 116 autonomy of politics, 7–8 Bachelard, Gaston, 72 “bad infinity,” 5 “bad negation,” 5 Badiou, Alain, 140 barbarism, 46–47 Barber, Benjamin, 26 “bare life,” 129, 132 Barrès, Maurice, 110 Bataille, George, 41, 135 Bauman, Zygmunt, 137–138 Behemoth, 31 Bemächtigungstrieb, 143 Benjamin, Walter, 41, 77, 104–105

206

Benslama, Fethi, 51–52, 53, 59 Bewusstlosigkeit, 39 “biopolitics,” 56, 111, 184n “bloody legislation,” 87 Bomba, Abraham, 136 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 39 Bourdieu, Pierre, 113 Brecht, Bertolt, 149 bürgerlich Gesellschaft, 23 Burke, Edmund, 110 Camus, Albert, 147 “capacity for action,” 28 Capital, 8, 39–40, 81, 82; plurality of politics, 93–94; “primitive accumulation,” 87; themes, 87–88 capital punishment, 77 capitalism, 81, 84–85, 91–92 Castel, Robert, 155 catastrophe, 50–51, 129 Cesar, Julius, 36–37 child labor, 85 Christianity, 48 citizen as political figure, 98 citizenship, 15, 144 city-state, 146 civil law, 108 “civil state,” 28 civil war, 51–52, 55 civility, etymology, 22–24, 161–162n; as politics, 65; problem, 19–24; strategies, 106–107 “civilizing of manners,” 82 “class consciousness,” 85 class struggle, 84–85, 86 Clausewitz, Carl von, 27, 118, 121 collective violence, 1 colonial hypothesis, 81–91 colonization, 132–133; “internal colonization,” 154 communism, 85

INDEX

The Communist Manifesto, 121 “community without community,” 144 Comte, Auguste, 100 Conrad, Joseph, 133 consciousness, 39 conservatism, 64 “constituent power,” 78 constitution, 108 “constitutional patriotism,” 110 “constitutional state of law,” 4 contingency, 44 conversion of violence, death and resurrection, 46; definition, 33–34; historical, 48; justification, 36–37 counterviolence, antiviolence distinction, 24; law, 5; preventive, 32; revolution as, 6 crime, public versus private, 37–38 “critique of law,” 29 “Critique of Violence,” 104 cruelty, 20, 24, 171n; definition, 53; duality, 69; Möbius strip, 95–96; ultraobjective, 52; ultrasubjective, 52 Darstellung , 34 Darwin, Charles, 143 De Cive, 26 death, life harder than, 132–134; multiplication of, 133, 135 “death drive,” 143 Debray, Régis, 102 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789, 6 défaillance, 77 “defense of society,” 77 defensive reaction, 21–22 Deleuze, Gilles, 50, 108, 118, 119, 122, 124, 138 democracy, 64; institutions, 98–99; Social Democracy, 94 “depersonalization,” 73

INDEX

depoliticization, 8 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 53, 59, 77, 143; “Force of Law,” 78; shibboleth, 12 desire, 125 Deus sive Historia, 44 Deus sive Natura, 44 developing nation, 14 Dewey, John, 110 “dialectical materialism,” 81 “dialectical sublation,” 34 Diesseits, 35 dignity, 129 das Ding , 57, 60–61 direct power, 30 Discipline and Punish, 75, 124 “disposable human being,” 53, 56 disposition, 112 dissemination of violence, 3 “divine” violence, 104 double negation of violence, 4–5 “draft program,” 116 droit privé, 108 Durkheim, Émile, 110 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 33, 54 Elias, Norbert, 113 emancipation, 12, 117–118 “emancipatory insurgency,” 144 “end of tragedy,” 149 equivocality of violence, 3 estate, 108 “ethical life,” 33 Ethics, 140 ethics, 139 ethnic cleansing, 51, 60, 69 ethnic minority, 121 Evil, 5, 139–140; “absolute,” 141; radical, 16, 53, 140 exploitation of labor, 85 “extreme” violence, 19–24, 127, 128

207

family, 114 Fanon, Frantz, 133 fascism, 121 Faulkner, William, 58 Faye, Jean-Pierre, 75, 152–153 force, legitimate use of, 7, 31, 65–66, 78, 116 “Force of Law,” 78 fortuna, 44 Foucault, Michel, 2, 8, 50, 113, 118; “biopolitics,” 56, 111; care of self, 125; “extreme” violence, 130; “governmentality,” 23; “repressive hypothesis,” 75–77 “fragmented consciousness,” 154 freedom of expression, 10–11 Freud, Sigmund, 57, 59, 76, 77, 113, 143 Gandhi, Mahatma, 106, 159n gender, 115 genocide, 58, 70 Gesinnung , 110 Gewalt, 8, 34, 77, 86, 165–166n globalization, 28, 43, 68, 101 God, ;mortal, 26, 30; “war of gods,” 26 Good, 140–141 “governmentality,” 23 Gramsci, 35 “gray zone,” 135, 142, 149 “great individual,” 39 Green, André, 59 Guattari, Pierre-Félix, 108, 118, 119, 122, 124 Guizot, François, 110 Habermas, Jürgen, 154–155 habitus, 112 Heart of Darkness, 133 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 149. See also The Phenomenology of Spirit; The

208

Hegel (continued ) Philosophy of Right; Sittlichkeit; Aufhebung , 90; historical violence, 67–68; progress, 65–66; “reason in history” model, 82; “universal class,” 108 hegemony, 35, 40, 87, 114, 117 “historical conversion of violence,” 48 “historical liberalism,” 109 historical violence, 67–68 historicity, 27, 99–101 historicization of politics, 29, 35, 99 history, “materialist theory of history,” 9; “motor of history,” 68; “universal history,” 109 Hitler, Adolf, 140, 153 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 26, 65, 77, 143; state of nature, 1; “war of all against all,” 15 Holocaust, 58, 140 Homer, 131–132 “horseshoe” diagram, 75, 96, 153 human nature, 25 “human resource,” 55 humanism, 15 ideal, politics as, 97 identity, 4 ideology, 63–64 Iliad, 131–132 “immanent justice,” 3 immigrant, 95 impuissant, 44 “incompressible minimum,” 11, 16 “inconvertible” violence, 48, 63–92 indirect power, 30 individual violence, 1 individualism, 15, 26 “industrial reserve army,” 9, 69 Industrial Revolution, 64, 85 institution, 97–99, 101–102, 186–187n institutionalized racism, 72

INDEX

intelligence, 97 “internal colonization,” 154–155 “internal multiplicity,” 60 “internal transformation of religion,” 11 Islam, 140 Jew, 58, 121, 122 Jihad Versus McWorld, 26 jouissance, 58 justice, immanent, 3 Kant, Immanuel, 117, 118, 140, 150 labor power, 84 labor union, 85 Lacan, Jacques, 57, 60, 72–73, 77, 151–152 Langages totalitaires: Critique de la raison narrative, critique de l ’économie narrative, 152 Lanzmann, Claude, 136 law, “constitutional state of law,” 4; counterviolence, 5; “critique of law,” 29; “state of law,” 30; “supplement of law,” 79 “law of population,” 56 Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 33 “legal positivism,” 29 legitimacy of violence, 5, 7, 116 Lenin, Vladimir, 7, 105 Levi, Primo, 135, 137, 142 Leviathan, 26, 31 Levinas, Emmanuel, 4, 140 liberalism, 64 The Life of Galileo, 149 “lines of fl ight,” 50 “logic of war,” 4 Luxemburg, Rosa, 9, 87, 91, 103–105, 106 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 27, 100 macropolitics, 124

INDEX

majoritarian, 115, 116–117, 118 Manifesto, 94 Marx, Karl, 5, 8–9, 10. See also Capital; “draft program,” 116; emancipation and violence, 12; “industrial reserve army,” 9, 69; Manifesto, 94; The Poverty of Philosophy, 29, 43; proletariat class, 54; “Provisional Rules of the Working Men’s International Association,” 94; “reproduction,” 86–87 Marxism, 5, 64, 94, 102, 106; revolution, 7–8 “master-slave dialectic,” 132 “materialist theory of history,” 9 Mbembe, Achille, 132, 194n Mehrwert, 88 micropolitics, 123–124 Mill, John Stuart, 110 “mimetic rivalry,” 106 minoritarian, 115, 122 minority, ethnic, 121 “mirror stage,” 73 Möbius strip, 73–75, 73d, 74d, 95–96, 151–152 Modernity and the Holocaust, 137–138 “moment of politics,” 75 Montesquieu, 33, 98, 100 morality, 38; “objective morality,” 33 “mortal God,” 26, 30 “motor of history,” 68 multiplication of death, 133, 135 “mythic” violence, 104 “naked” violence, 9 nationalism, 14–15, 109–110 natural selection, 143 “natural” violence, 31, 32 nature of man, 30 nature, state of, 11–12, 28 Nazism, 58, 60, 134, 135

209

necessity, 97 negation of violence, ; antiviolence, 13; “bad,” 5; double, 4–5 neo-Darwinism, 71 “new order,” 27 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41, 126, 141, 147 nihilism, 141 nonseparation, 16 nonviolence, 149; antiviolence distinction, 24; worst form of violence, 1 “object relation,” 73 “objective morality,” 33 Ogilvie, Bertrand, 53–56, 58 Opfer, 47 oppression, 6 order, social, 40 Oresme, Nicole, 23 The Origins of Totalitarianism, 134, 145 “other,” 69, 71 pardon, legal, 77 passion, 30, 31 passivity, 126 “peaceful struggle,” 4 persecution, 89 “perversion of the will,” 143 phenomenology, 194n The Phenomenology of Spirit, 29, 109, 115 philia, 97 The Philosophy of History, 109 The Philosophy of Right, 108–109, 115, 149 phronesis, 97 phronesis, 124 Platonism, 30 play, 126 pluralism, 110 plurality of politics, 93–94 Pöbel, 54, 56 Polanski, Roman, 58 politesse, 23

210

politics, definition, 97; historicization, 29; as history, 35; as ideal, 97; as interruption, 75d; “moment of politics,” 75; plurality, 93–94; response to violence, 22; “state of law,” 30; “work of art,” 97 “Politics as Vocation,” 147–148, 150 population, law of, 56 “postmodern individualism,” 15 postmodern violence, 1 potestats indirecta, 30 pouvoir, 24 poverty, 82 The Poverty of Philosophy, 29, 43 power, balance, 86; distribution, 30; “seizure of power,” 8 “power of the negative,” 29 “power relations,” 80 preventive counterviolence, 32 “primary” violence, 25 “primitive accumulation,” 9, 87, 88, 90 private violence, 3, 68–69 “productive destruction,” 142 progress, decay of, 66 proletariat class, 54 propaganda, 2–3 properties, 112 proprietas, 112 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 147 “Provisional Rules of the Working Men’s International Association,” 94 Prozess, 34 psychoanalysis, 59 public enemy, 79 public violence, 3, 68–69 puissance, 44 Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 72 racism, cruelty, 52–53; institutionalized, 72; nationalism, 14–15 “radical evil,” 16, 53, 140

INDEX

Rancière, Jacques, 144 rapport de forces, 86, 149 rationalité étatique, 33 rationality, 33 reason, 30, 36 Reason in History, 33, 42, 43 “reason in history” model, 82 The Rebel, 147 Rechtsstaat, 32 religion, 10–11 Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 150 repression, 76–77 repressive hypothesis, 8, 75–81 “reproduction,” 86–87, 88, 89–90 resistance, 5–6 revolution, 5–7, 38, 103–104, 147 “revolutionary class struggle,” 9 right, universal, 6 “rights of man,” 140, 146 “rights of the living,” 140 Rosemary’s Baby ( film), 58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 78 sacrifice, 47–48, 168–169n Sartre, Jean-Paul, 147 satyagraha, 106 Schlachtbank, 47 Schmitt, Carl, 77 “seizure of power,” 8 self, 57, 69, 125 self-appropriation, 143 self-identity, 110 sexual role, 114 Shoah, 136 Sittlichkeit, 23, 33, 45, 107, 110 Sittlichkeit, 113–114 slavery, 58 sociability, 97 social class, 54; “universal class,” 108, 117, 121

INDEX

The Social Contract, 78 “social death,” 53 Social Democracy, 94 social order, 40 “social pact,” 30 socialism, 57, 64, 102, 136, 152, 153 society, state of, 11–12 Sonderkommandos, 136–137 Sophocles, 115 Sorel, Georges, 121 sovereignty, 77, 78 Spinoza, Baruch, 10–12, 100, 138; ethics, 140; “incompressible minimum,” 16 Spirit, 38, 42, 47, 48 “spirit of customs,” 33 Stände, 108 state, “castration” function, 76; rationality, 33 “state of law,” 109 “state of nature,” 11–12, 28 “state of society,” 11–12 Strauss, Leo, 25, 89 “structural” violence, 83 Stück, 142 “subhuman,” 57 suicide, 46 “supersession of historicity,” 27 “supplement of law,” 79 “symbolic” violence, 77, 83 system, 31 ta anagkaia, 97 talion, 2 terror, 134 “the Thing,” 57, 60–61 A Thousand Plateaus, 108, 118–119 “threshold of tolerance,” 15 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 110 Tod und Wiederbelebung , 46 tolerance, threshold, 15

211

torture, 132 totalitarianism, 80, 134 Tötung seiner selbst, 46 Tractatus theologico-politicus, 10–11 tragedy, 148–149 transgression, 126 “transindividual,” 131 transition, 41–42 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 110 “two natures” of man, 30 Übergang , 41–42 ultraobjective cruelty, 52 ultraobjective violence, 13–14, 70, 74d, 75d; colonial hypothesis, 81; justification, 69; Möbius strip, 74 ultrasubjective cruelty, 52 ultrasubjective violence, 13, 70, 74d, 75d, 125; Möbius strip, 74 Umwälzungen, 38 “unconscious consciousness,” 36 unconsciousness, 39 unemployment, mass, 9 unheimliche, 152 union, labor, 85 “universal class,” 108, 117, 121 “universal history,” 109 Untermenschen, 57 vendetta, 2 Verfassung , 108 Verfassungspatriotismus, 110, 113, 188n Verfremdungseffekt, 104 Versöhnung , 40 Verwilderung , 104 violence. See also “extreme” violence; “inconvertible” violence; conversion of violence; cruelty; ultraobjective violence; ultrasubjective violence; discussion methods, 19–20; “divine,”

212

violence (continued ) 104; external, 45; historical, 67–68; as “midwife,” 40; “mythic,” 104; natural, 31, 32; “primary,” 25; public versus private, 3, 68–69; “structural,” 83; symbolic, 77, 83 virtue, 97, 100 vogelfrei, 82 Volk, 152 völkisch, 152 La volonté de savoir, 75 Vorstellung , 34 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 63–64, 72 war, acceptance, 3; “all against all,” 26; civil, 51–52, 55; as institution, 186–187n; logic, 4

INDEX

war machine, 120 “war of gods,” 25 weapons of mass destruction, 3 Weber, Max, 5, 77, 105, 148; legitimacy of violence, 65–66; tragedy, 150; “war of gods,” 25 Weil, Simone, 131 Weltgeist, 36 Weltgeschichte, 43, 109 widerstanden, 38 wirkliche, 34 woman, 122, 130 “world citizenship,” 15 “world economy,” 15 “world spirit,” 36, 82, 109 Zweckrationalität, 135

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED WELLEK LIBRARY LECTURES

The Breaking of the Vessels (1983) Harold Bloom In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1984) Perry Anderson Forms of Attention (1985) Frank Kermode Memoires for Paul de Man (1986) Jacques Derrida The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (1987) J. Hillis Miller Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (1988) Jean-François Lyotard A Reopening of Closure: Organicism Against Itself (1989) Murray Krieger Musical Elaborations (1991) Edward W. Said Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1993) Hélène Cixous The Seeds of Time (1994) Fredric Jameson Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (1995) Evelyn Fox Keller

The Fateful Question of Culture (1997) Geoffrey H. Hartman The Range of Interpretation (2000) Wolfgang Iser History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (2000) Harry Harootunian Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000) Judith Butler The Vital Illusion (2000) Jean Baudrillard Death of a Discipline (2003) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) Paul Gilroy On Suicide Bombing (2007) Talal Asad Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (2009) David Harvey Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War (2009) Rosalyn Deutsche Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012) Ngugi wa Thiong’o