Violence and Meaning [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-27172-5, 978-3-030-27173-2

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Violence As Metaphor (Vasti Roodt)....Pages 3-26
Violence and Essentialism? (Lode Lauwaert)....Pages 27-37
Front Matter ....Pages 39-39
The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution and the Construction of Sense (Felix Ó Murchadha)....Pages 41-58
Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence: A Phenomenological Exploration (Michael Staudigl)....Pages 59-90
The Violence of the Singular (Arthur Cools)....Pages 91-109
Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion, and the Irreducibility of Violence (Jason W. Alvis)....Pages 111-133
Front Matter ....Pages 135-135
The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis and Mimesis (Nidesh Lawtoo)....Pages 137-165
The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking at Photographs of the First World War (Stéphane Symons, Tammy Castelein)....Pages 167-188
Front Matter ....Pages 189-189
Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach to the Violence in the Acts of Torture (Jeremy Heuslein)....Pages 191-215
Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt (Debra Bergoffen)....Pages 217-238
Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan on the Socio-symbolic Function of Violence (Gavin Rae)....Pages 239-265
Back Matter ....Pages 267-268

Citation preview

Violence and Meaning Edited by

l ode l au wa e rt l au r a k at h e r i n e sm i t h christi a n sterna d

Violence and Meaning

Lode Lauwaert  •  Laura Katherine Smith Christian Sternad Editors

Violence and Meaning

Editors Lode Lauwaert Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium

Laura Katherine Smith KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium

Christian Sternad Husserl Archives KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium

ISBN 978-3-030-27172-5    ISBN 978-3-030-27173-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Part I The Concept of Violence   1 1 Violence As Metaphor  3 Vasti Roodt 2 Violence and Essentialism? 27 Lode Lauwaert

Part II Transcendental Violence  39 3 The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution and the Construction of Sense 41 Felix Ó Murchadha 4 Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence: A Phenomenological Exploration 59 Michael Staudigl

v

vi Contents

5 The Violence of the Singular 91 Arthur Cools 6 Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion, and the Irreducibility of Violence111 Jason W. Alvis

Part III Immanent Violence 135 7 The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis and Mimesis137 Nidesh Lawtoo 8 The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking at Photographs of the First World War167 Stéphane Symons and Tammy Castelein

Part IV Individual Violence 189 9 Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach to the Violence in the Acts of Torture191 Jeremy Heuslein 10 Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt217 Debra Bergoffen 11 Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan on the Socio-symbolic Function of Violence239 Gavin Rae Index267

Notes on Contributors

Jason W. Alvis  is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Vienna, and the European Editor of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. His research examines continental phenomenology and theology. Debra  Bergoffen is Bishop Hamilton Lecturer in Philosophy at American University and Professor Emerita of Philosophy at George Mason University. Her research and teaching examine epistemological, ethical, and political issues from a continental, feminist perspective. Tammy Castelein  is an independent scholar and translator. She holds a PhD from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) for her work on the militarization of thinking after the First World War in Germany. Arthur Cools  is Professor of Contemporary Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Antwerp. He publishes in the field of critical theory, philosophy of culture, contemporary French phenomenology, and the interplay between philosophy and literature.

vii

viii 

Notes on Contributors

Jeremy Heuslein  is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. His work investigates torture from a phenomenological perspective. Lode Lauwaert  is a visiting professor at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven, Belgium. He teaches Philosophy of Technology and researches violence, war and technology. Nidesh  Lawtoo  is a principal investigator of the European Research Council Project Homo Mimeticus (HOM) at the Husserl Archives: Centre for Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy at KU Leuven. Lawtoo works on modernism, film, and theory, with special interest in interdisciplinary approaches to mimesis and the unconscious. Felix Ó Murchadha  is Senior Professor of Philosophy at NUI Galway. He has published three monographs and numerous articles on religion, politics, and phenomenology. Gavin  Rae  is Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Experienced Research Fellow at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. He specializes in post-Kantian philosophy with particular emphasis on socio-political philosophy, ethics, and theories of subjectivity. Vasti Roodt  is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her research focuses on moral contractualism and the justification of social policy. Laura Katherine Smith  is postdoctoral researcher in Cultural Studies at Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven, Belgium. Laura’s research focuses on twentieth century and contemporary art theory and visual culture. Michael Staudigl  teaches philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria, where he is also running two research grants. His research interests include phenomenology and questions of violence, most recently, religious violence.

  Notes on Contributors 

ix

Christian Sternad  is a postdoctoral research fellow at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a research associate at the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium. His research specializes in human mortality, the phenomenology of death and ageing, and social and political issues such as the engagement of philosophers in the First World War. Stéphane Symons  is an associate professor at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. His main research interests are twentieth-century German and French philosophy, aesthetics, and literature.

List of Figures

Photos 8.1–8.9 Fig. 9.1 One of Abu Zubayduh’s drawings, depicting the suspension of his temporal horizons

171–184 202

xi

Introduction: The Many Layers of Violence

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, marked a turning point not only in the scale and scope of violent actions but in the manner in which images of violence are communicated and absorbed. These terrorist attacks, as well as those that have followed throughout the world since, may give the impression that instances of violence are on the rise. This impression could be due in large part to the fact that the specific violence of terrorism is not isolated but threatens to echo beyond its particular location and event in its production of fear and its puncturing (or attempt thereof ) of the collective social fabric. Moreover, the impression that violence is on the rise can be reinforced if we look at the last 100 years. The two world wars, the genocide in Rwanda, the Vietnam War, the Spanish Civil War, and, for example, the violence in former Yugoslavia may suggest that violence has increased, rather than decreased, in the course of history. The conclusion could be that, contrary to what Leibniz thought, we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. However, according to some optimists including Steven Pinker, the impression that violence is on the rise is erroneous. Despite what seems to be a growing feeling of unease, many statistics show that violence is actually on the decline, Pinker argues.1 The world is improving not only because poverty and illness are decreasing, but also because there is a downward trend in the curve of violence. Moreover, one of the reasons why we have the impression that violence is on the rise, according to xiii

xiv 

Introduction: The Many Layers of Violence

Pinker, is actually the real decline in violence. If this relation at first sounds strange, we can understand the link by way of the concept of sensitivity. Precisely because violence is declining and the world is becoming safer, Pinker holds that humans become sensitive to the slightest act of violence. This increased sensitivity leads to the fact that people, more often than before, report violence, which results in the misconception that violence has not been decreasing but is, instead, increasing. Although this conclusion is supported by extensive data, doubts persist. Those who argue against optimists like Pinker claim that the perception of a decrease in violence is due to a focus exclusively on physical violence, and not, or much less so, on psychological violence. Moreover, instances of violence are now recorded more frequently than, say, 500 years ago, thus complicating the reliability of statements about its occurrence. In other words, both positive and negative answers to the question of whether violence is increasing across history are questionable. Less doubtful, however, is the answer to the question of whether scientific studies on the topic of violence have increased or decreased. Unlike the answer to the question of whether the phenomenon of violence is on the rise, there is no doubt as to whether there is an increase in the academic reflection on the topic of violence. Indeed, for at least three decades, violence has progressively become a much-discussed subject in the academic world. This is not only the case in disciplines such as history, sociology, and psychology but also in philosophy. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, and specifically since the pioneering work of, among others, Walter Benjamin and Georges Sorel, thinking about violence has a firm footing in philosophy. Therefore, one can say without exaggeration, that the philosophy of violence has become a much debated and discussed topic within contemporary philosophy. The growing contribution to the philosophy of violence applies to different areas across philosophy. Political philosophers like C.A.J. Coady, for example, focus on the relation between institutions, power, and violence, whereas in normative ethics, thinkers including Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan work within the ancient tradition of Just War Theory. They ask themselves under what conditions the use of force is justified, what limits can be placed on justified force, and how justice can be achieved after the end of a war. And with regard to the tradition of

  Introduction: The Many Layers of Violence 

xv

continental philosophy, it is clear that, for example, (post)structuralists in the tradition of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault reflect upon the relationship between power and violence, and phenomenologists focus on the experience of violence. However, when we look at the recent philosophical literature on violence, we see that many questions on this subject remain unanswered. One of the topics that philosophers have not yet considered is the relationship between the concept of violence on the one hand and the concept of meaning on the other.2 This gap is striking for at least three reasons. Firstly, throughout history philosophers have always reflected upon the relationship between meaning and other domains, such as religion, suffering, life, sport, and many others. Secondly, a common intuition follows that violence is often associated with a loss of meaning, and that, conversely, an abundance of meaning in life is a buffer against violence. Thirdly, since at least two decades, the popular notion of ‘senseless violence’ has emerged. This indicates the existence of a form of violence as a brutal force without any specific meaning, and yet also implies that there may be violence that has, is grounded in, or even generates meaning. This volume aims to provide a philosophical contribution to discuss the relationship between violence and meaning. In order to clarify this goal, it is necessary to make a number of distinctions that are crucial to the design of this volume, but which are nevertheless often overlooked in the scientific literature. In the first place, we have to draw attention to the difference between ‘meaning’ on a conceptual level on the one hand and ‘meaning’ on an existential level on the other. ‘Meaning’ on the first (conceptual) level refers to the content of a word. For example, ‘unmarried man’ is the meaning of the word ‘bachelor’, while ‘intentional damage’ could possibly be the signifié of the signifiant ‘violence’. ‘Meaning’ on the second (existential) level refers to the importance or weight of X (person, action, or event) for Y (person, group, society). On a larger scale, not only Y in the shape of an object or a person has meaning but also the world or even life as a whole harbours and generates meaning. It is precisely in this sense of the word meaning that themes of religion, having children, and sexuality can be approached, for example. The first two texts in this volume, written by Vasti Roodt and Lode Lauwaert, focus on the meaning of the concept of violence, while the

xvi 

Introduction: The Many Layers of Violence

other nine contributions reflect philosophically on the existential meaning of violence. If, however, we focus further on ‘meaning’ on an existential level, we can make at least four more distinctions there, since ‘existential meaning’ is a concept that is multiplicitous in scope. Firstly, one can investigate the way in which meaning arises and is constituted by violence. In other words, we can focus on the transition between the absence and presence of meaning, and the role of violence in bridging that border. A second possibility is to focus on meanings, rooted in given beliefs, that express themselves in and through violence. A third possibility is violence that is argued to have meaning because it serves as an instrument, while, fourthly, there exists violence that does not have any meaning because it is non-instrumental or not embedded in a greater whole. And, of course, one can also distinguish structures that create meaning, which is exactly the reason why these structures may be violent. From Chaps. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, this variety of relationships between violence and existential meaning are analysed and explored philosophically in terms of the many different forms of violence. More specifically, nine chapters are spread over three parts, each of them referring to one specific form of violence. Firstly, transcendent or religious violence is investigated in the contributions of Felix Ó Murchadha, Michael Staudigl, Arthur Cools, and Jason Alvis. These contributions explore violent actions that take place in the relationship between humanity on the one hand and the divine world on the other. A second type of violence is completely immanent, in the sense that it relates only to the secular world. In particular, this part focuses on secular violence that occurs at the level of a group, community, or society. This part’s contributions, from Nidesh Lawtoo, Stéphane Symons, and Tammy Castelein, explore aesthetic representations of violence. Thirdly, the last part reflects upon the relationship between violence and meaning on an individual level with contributions from Jeremy Heuslein on torture, Debra Bergoffen on the role of shame, and Gavin Rae on the formation of the individual. The design of the edited volume is twofold in the sense that it focuses on both the meaning of the concept of violence on the one hand and on the relation between existential meaning and violence on the other. Moreover, focusing on the latter makes clear that this volume is also both

  Introduction: The Many Layers of Violence 

xvii

multi-directional (since it focuses on the manifold of relations between violence and meaning) and multi-­layered (since it focuses on violence on three levels: transcendent, immanent, and individual). In organizing the volume in this manner, we hope to provide the reader with a philosophical and methodological apparatus to better understand the omnipresent display of violence. Instead of asking, whether violence is on the rise or not, we want to ask what violence itself even is, what it does to us and to our relationship to the world, and last but not least, whether violence has, destroys, or even is able to generate meaning. Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium Husserl Archives KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Lode Lauwaert Laura Katherine Smith Christian Sternad

Notes 1. See Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature. New York, NY: Viking. 2. However, one exception is the volume The Meanings of Violence, edited by Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala, published in 2018 by Routledge.

Part I The Concept of Violence

1 Violence As Metaphor Vasti Roodt

Introduction Describing an action, event or a state of affairs as a form of violence is often shorthand for condemning whatever falls under that description. To use the term in this way is to assume that violence is wrong by definition. Under the spell of this assumption, the meaning of violence has expanded to include a whole range of abstract categories: language and silence; knowledge, truth, reason and power; law-making and the destruction of law; science and symbols; family, class, race and gender; politics and economics; structures, institutions and nearly every other aspect of the social order. For some, this semantic extension merely reflects the “protean” transformations of violence (Bernstein 2013, p. 177). For others, it is way of focusing our attention on a persistent but unacknowledged feature of the world. Either way, “violence” is a term of “scandalization” (Winter 2012, p.  197). However, we must distinguish between the motivation for V. Roodt (*) Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_1

3

4 

V. Roodt

a­dopting an expanded definition of violence and its intelligibility. We may often be oblivious to the ways in which merely living our lives can implicate us in various wrongs, but, as we will see, calling these “violence” does not add anything to our understanding of the nature of the wrong or what we might do to address it. The central claim in this chapter is that the semantic extension of violence is a metaphorical extension on the basis of a presumed analogy between the concrete domain of forces impacting on objects and the abstract domains of language, law, epistemology and the like. The problem is that this analogy does not hold, which undermines the validity of the arguments that rely on this assumption. This leaves us unable to make sense of violence at all, and consequently also unable to combat it, whatever “it” might be. I therefore argue that we ought to resist the semantic extension of violence for epistemic and moral reasons. First, some clarifications. The aim here is not to distinguish between “real violence” and “pseudo-violence.” I therefore do not propose any ontology of violence. By implication, I also do not develop any theory about the causes of violence or the appropriate means for resisting or overcoming it. Finally, I do not mean to diminish our concern with violence as a moral problem. On the contrary, the issue is precisely that the indiscriminate application of the concept diminishes its moral force. The first section provides a general overview of the process whereby concepts are extended from the concrete to the abstract. Drawing on evidence from cognitive linguistics, I explain this semantic extension in terms of conceptual metaphor. The second section examines conceptual metaphor as a product of analogical reasoning, whereby we draw inferences about a less well-understood abstract domain in light of our knowledge about a familiar source domain. The crucial insight here is that, while reasoning by analogy is a normal feature of human cognition, this reasoning is not automatically valid. We can employ analogies consciously and deliberately to generate valid conclusions, but we are also prone to fallacious reasoning under the spell of unconscious, spontaneous and automatic patterns of association. In the third section, I show that extended definitions of violence can be understood as cognitive metaphors underpinned by analogical reasoning, while, in the fourth section, I explain why and how this reasoning goes wrong. The specific criticisms

1  Violence As Metaphor 

5

are that arguments that employ such extended definitions either are circular or generate conclusions that have no semantic content or contradict other beliefs to which the reasoner is committed. In the final section of the chapter, I consider how we might sensibly think about violence without falling prey to the fallacious reasoning as explained in the earlier parts of the chapter.

Conceptual Metaphor Earlier I referred to the semantic extension of violence as a metaphorical extension. This in itself is not a criticism. “Metaphor” here does not mean a linguistic add-on to the “real,” literal meaning of violence. The semantic extension of violence to various abstract concepts is a means of cognition and not merely decoration. To understand this point, we need to understand something about conceptual metaphor. What is a conceptual metaphor? It is a set of conceptual correspondences between two different conceptual domains. These correspondences are not linguistic expressions, but a way of thinking (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993; Gibbs 2011; Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011).1 We think metaphorically when we understand one conceptual domain—in whole or in part—in terms of another. A “domain” in this sense is the background knowledge structure against which a concept is understood in a given language (Evans and Green 2006, p.  230). The conceptual domain from which we draw lexical terms to reason about another domain is the source domain, while the domain we are trying to understand is the target domain. A conceptual metaphor, then, is a “cross-domain mapping” (Lakoff 1993, p. 203) between a source domain and a target domain. To think metaphorically is to map our knowledge about a source domain—the elements that constitute it, its salient features, and the relations between them—onto a target domain. While a conceptual metaphor is such a cross-­ domain mapping, a metaphorical expression is a particular linguistic realization of a cognitive metaphor (ibid.). Metaphorical expressions use words that are drawn from the terminology of the source domain to speak about the target domain. For example, we can think about the

6 

V. Roodt

target domain “life” in terms of the source domain “journey.” This cross-­ domain mapping can then be realized in a variety of metaphorical expressions involving obstacles overcome, forks in the road, dead-ends, new directions, starting over, reaching one’s goals, losing one’s way, and so forth. The cognitive metaphor is the cross-domain mapping that underlies these different linguistic expressions. We can further distinguish between basic or concrete domains and abstract domains. Concrete domains are still mental representations, but they are representations of embodied experiences: “our bodily movements through space, our manipulation of objects, and our perceptual interactions” (Johnson 1987, p. 29; see also Lakoff 1987, p. 267). These embodied experiences can be represented as images, while abstract domains do not have this kind of experiential grounding and cannot be represented as images (Lakoff and Turner 1989, p.  94; Clausner and Croft 1999, p. 14). We do not engage in such a cross-domain mappings every time we think about a concept. In many cases, what starts out as a conceptual metaphor—that is, a deliberate mapping—becomes conventionalized, so that we are no longer aware of it as a metaphor. The cross-domain mapping then simply becomes part of the lexical meaning of a word. This is the so-called career of metaphor hypothesis (Bowdle and Gentner 2005; Gentner and Bowdle 2008). Moreover, not all concepts are metaphorical. The sentence you have just read can be understood without any recourse to cognitive metaphor. Much of our everyday reasoning is conducted in terms of non-­ metaphorical concepts. However, when it comes to abstract—that is, non-imagistic—concepts, metaphor is the norm rather than the exception (Lakoff 1993, p. 205). Abstract reasoning nearly always involves a mapping of elements and relations from a concrete source domain onto the abstract target domain. In particular, our reasoning about abstract concepts frequently involves inferences about causes, forces, objects, and relations between objects that belong to the domain of spatial reasoning. Spatial concepts can be said to have “universal donor” status (Gentner et al. 2001, p. 242) in that they are the primary source domain for nearly all abstract target domains. In addition, a large part of our mental vocab-

1  Violence As Metaphor 

7

ulary (in English) consists of metaphorical extensions of terms that were first applied to visual perception and manual operation (Fischer 2014, p. 582). This kind of cross-domain mapping is also a key element in the process of language development: concepts that are first applied to concrete actions, movements, objects and the relations between them are gradually mapped onto abstract concepts and “inferential generalizations [drawn] across different conceptual domains” (Lakoff 1993, p. 209). That is not to say that this experiential base predicts metaphors; they merely motivate the mappings we come up with (ibid., 241). Moreover, many of these mappings are conventional, in so far as they draw on the background knowledge of a particular group of speakers who have to coordinate linguistic expression in order to convey semantic meaning. For the purposes of the argument I develop in this chapter, it is important to know that new mappings between concrete source domain and abstract target domains also play a role in the development of philosophical terminology (Fischer 2009, p. 80). When it comes to the terminology of violence, I suggest that the term is frequently used as a lexical expression of the metaphorical extension from the concrete source domain of physical forces working on bodies and objects to an increasing array of abstract target domains. My hypothesis, then, is that many contemporary theories of violence are attempts to map the physical acts of violation and the application of force onto new abstract target domains, and then to draw inferences about the latter based on our knowledge about the former. At this point, the reader might well ask: If this kind of cross-domain mapping is simply how human cognition and language development work, why criticize the semantic extension of the concept violence? My reasons will become clearer after we have a better understanding of another feature of cognitive metaphor, namely analogical reasoning. In the next section, I explain how analogical reasoning relates to cognitive metaphor how it can go wrong, which sets the scene for an in-depth analysis of philosophical reasoning about violence in the third and fourth sections.

8 

V. Roodt

Analogical Reasoning The ability to understand the unfamiliar in light of situations, experiences and mental representations with which we are already familiar is a key feature of human cognition (Gentner 1983; Holyoak and Thagard 1989; Holyoak 2012; Bartha 2013). In so far as conceptual metaphor involves a structural comparison between different mental representations and draws inferences about the target domain based on knowledge about the source domain, it involves a form of analogical reasoning. There is a kind of cognitive bootstrapping at work here, in which simple analogical reasoning gives rise to conceptual metaphors. This in turn enables us to engage in more complex, abstract reasoning. One analogy thus becomes the source for another and so on. It is by this process that whole sets of terms that are initially applied to the concrete and publicly visible are gradually applied to the less public and observable (Fischer 2009, p. 80). While it has long been held that analogical reasoning is something we do consciously and deliberately, more recent evidence from different branches of cognitive science shows that a great deal of analogical reasoning is spontaneous, unconscious and automatic (Fischer 2014, p. 580; see also Day and Gentner 2007; Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011). This doesn’t mean that we cannot logically and experimentally reconstruct the reasoning process after the fact; merely that it is not a matter of conscious deliberation before the fact. We are most likely to engage in such spontaneous analogical reasoning in the context of problem-solving. When we encounter an unfamiliar experience, phenomenon or knowledge terrain, we are predisposed to draw on our knowledge about similar situations in order to make inferences about the nature of the current problem and possible solutions. We are even more likely to do so when we are trying to solve a problem at a high level of abstraction, with little knowledge about the target domain and low confidence in what we do know (Fischer 2018, p. 212). It is this kind of unconscious, spontaneous analogical reasoning that is the most likely to lead us astray. For one thing, spontaneous associative processes that establish a structural analogy between two different ­conceptual domains can sometimes “duplicate the achievements of complex reasoning” (Fischer 2014, p. 7). Thus, what looks like the outcome

1  Violence As Metaphor 

9

of careful deliberation might be nothing more than the random result of associative process operating below the level of conscious awareness. To use a deliberate analogy, it is the equivalent of shooting into the air and hitting an arbitrary target as opposed to hitting the target deliberately. Even worse: the target might turn out to be a mirage. When we reason in the unconscious grip of a pattern of associations, we are prone to “illusions of sense” (Fischer 2015, p.  74). This is the illusion that we have acquired new knowledge, that we understand something we had not understood before, while in fact our conclusions have no semantic content. That is, we cannot explain what they mean except in the terminology we have used to reason about them in the first place. In both cases—accidentally leaping to a conclusion or succumbing to the illusion of sense—we have mistaken an associative pattern for an argument. These patterns are particularly seductive when they draw on a highly familiar source domain. Thus, (pseudo-)arguments that employ causal reasoning from the visual-spatial domain to reason about an abstract domain tend to strike us as highly plausible, and we are likely to accept such arguments without too much critical scrutiny (Thompson et al. 2011). Moreover, when reasoning under the spell of a structured pattern of associations, we find it easy to make inferential leaps from one cognitive domain to another. This feeling of cognitive ease is what cognitive scientists call “fluency” (Fischer 2014, p. 601; Gill et al. 1998; Kelley and Lindsay 1993). It is this very sense of fluency that is triggered by an unconscious, automatic and spontaneous pattern of associations that leaves us particularly prone to fallacious arguments. This does not mean that a sense of cognitive ease proves our arguments to be fallacious. It does, however, give us reason to subject them to critical scrutiny. In what follows, I try to do just this with philosophical arguments that rely on the metaphorical extension of the concept violence. It is striking that the circumstances that predispose us towards spontaneous analogical reasoning—problem-solving, high levels of abstraction and uncertainty—are precisely the conditions under which philosophers ply their trade.2 And indeed, I will show that philosophical arguments often rely on patterns of associations rather than careful reasoning from source domain to target domain, and that this results in inferential leaps not substantiated by the content of the arguments.

10 

V. Roodt

Reasoning About Violence: Violation and Force We have seen that conceptual metaphors involve analogical reasoning from one conceptual domain to another, and that we commonly understand abstract concepts in light of a concrete source domain. In this section, I show that extended definitions of violence draw on a concrete source domain of bodies, objects and force dynamics. These elements and the relations between them are then mapped onto the abstract domains of law, language, epistemology, social and political structures and the like, and inferences drawn about the latter in light of our knowledge about the former. I will focus on two specific elements in the cross-domain mapping underlying the semantic extension of violence, namely violation and force. This is not a reconstruction of the entire cross-domain mapping. However, I think that at least these two elements and the relations between them are being mapped, irrespective of the other, more complex mappings that might also be in play. Let us accept that the extension of the term “violence” to domains not commonly thought of as violent is meant to shock us into becoming aware of hidden wrongs. What, then, is the specific wrong that must be brought to consciousness? What particular feature of actions or events is the term “violence” pointing to? In many cases, the wrong of violence is conceived as violation. Consider: An act of violence occurs when the integrity or unity of a subject (person or animal) or object (property) is being intentionally or unintentionally violated, as a result of an action or an omission. The violation may occur at the physical or psychological level, through physical or psychological means. A violation of integrity will usually result in the subject being harmed or injured, or the object being destroyed or damaged. (Bufacchi 2007, p. 43–44)3

We saw earlier that many cognitive metaphors rely on image-schemas drawn from bodily experience, specifically, visual-spatial perception and the manipulation of physical objects. It is also remarkably common across linguistic communities to use our knowledge of physical entities to conceptualize analogous properties of persons. We generally experience such

1  Violence As Metaphor 

11

physical entities as “singular and integral” (Landau et al. 2010, p. 1055). Such entities can be torn apart, broken, pierced, fractured, invaded, have their interiors exposed, become unstable, or disintegrate altogether. In all of these cases, the object loses its integrity and is made less than what it was before. In so far as violence is understood as violation, it involves a conceptual analogy between breaching, invading, breaking apart the integrity of objects and breaching, invading, breaking apart some abstract whole. The elements of breaching, breaking and so on in the source domain are then mapped onto elements such as classification, categorization, taxonomy in the target domain. I suggest that it is only on the basis of this cross-­ domain mapping from the concrete experience of the breach of physical integrity to the abstract target domain of language that we can make sense of statements such as: “Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it” (Žižek 2008, p. 52 fn. 14), or language is “exactly like a knife” with “the usual abstract functions of syntactic languages, such as conceptualization” (Magnani 2011, p. 53). And it is only by mapping these same concrete elements onto elements in the abstract domains of epistemology and law that we can understand the claim that “truth itself … is violent in its own way. It cannot irrupt without tearing apart an established order” (Nancy 2005, pp. 17–18); or “[to] name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute” (Derrida 1976, p. 112). This is not the whole story, however. At the concrete level, the act of violation (breaching, breaking, invading or diminishing in some way) involves the application of physical force to a body or an object. We further experience that a stationary object only moves if force is applied, that the application requires contact, and that the application of force temporally precedes motion (Lakoff 1993, p. 228). Force dynamics is thus the second element of the concrete source domain that is mapped onto abstract notions of violence. Actions, omissions, laws and circumstances that confound our plans, hopes or interests, or compel us to do what we

12 

V. Roodt

otherwise would not do are understood analogously to having a body or object subjected to physical force: being invaded or broken apart, pulled, pushed, pressed down upon, diverted or impeded. It is only in light of what we know about the latter that we can make sense of claims that “violence is force gone wrong” (Bufacchi 2005, p. 195); that violence is “that which increases the distance between the potential and the actual, and that which impedes the decrease of this distance” (Galtung 1969, p. 168; my italics), or “the operation that consists of founding, inaugurating, justifying law, making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretive violence” (Derrida 1990, p. 941).4 The aforementioned examples, as well the myriad other theories about the violence of law, language, epistemology, reason, culture, structures and so on are all conceptual mappings from the concrete source domain of forces working on objects onto one or more elements of an abstract target domain. Most important in these mappings is not the individual elements—the specific properties of bodies or forces—but the relations between them. It is usually these relations, known as the generic-level structure, that are preserved in the cross-domain mapping; in particular, causal structure, aspectual structure and the persistence of entities (Lakoff 1993, p. 232). At the level of generic structure, we find an abstract concept occupying the role of an agent that violates the integrity of or otherwise impedes an object by means of force. The elements in italics, together with the relations between them, are then mapped onto the elements and relations of the abstract target domain, and inferences drawn about the latter based on our knowledge about the former. Note that what is being mapped is a causal structure involving an agent that causes a change in the state of an object. In the cross-domain mapping from source to target, the causal structure is maintained, while being mapped onto new elements within the target domain. The current state of the object can therefore be explained with reference to its causal relation to another element. I ­suggest that it is this structure that underlies the arguments that laws, language, epistemology, rationality and so forth causes the violation or oppression of persons. Thinkers who adopt an extended definition of violence are usually at pains to point out that the entire point of this extension is to bring to

1  Violence As Metaphor 

13

consciousness forms of violence that lack an identifiable agent. However, as we have seen, the analogical reasoning involved in such cross-domain mappings is often not a matter of conscious deliberation, but of a spontaneous pattern of associations. In my view, in much of the philosophical theorizing about violence, it is the causal pattern, agent—force—object and its attendant associations that is doing the work of persuading us of the reasoner’s conclusions, rather than the cogency of the argument. Thus, while theorists using expanded definitions of violence might claim that violence should not be understood as analogous to concrete acts of physical force perpetrated by an identifiable agent, their theories are only comprehensible in so far as we do, in fact, understand them on the basis of the agent-force-object structure derived from a concrete source domain. (I demonstrate this by way of an analysis of arguments by Derrida and Butler in the fourth section.) As we have seen, reasoning under the spell of a pattern can mimic the results of complex reasoning even where the conclusion is not, in fact, supported by the content of the argument. Associative patterns can also foster an illusion of sense and the feeling of fluency that make invalid arguments nevertheless seem persuasive. Of course, we have also seen that analogical reasoning and conceptual metaphors are essential features of human cognition. I am therefore not reproaching anyone for the fact that they make use of conceptual metaphor and analogy. My criticisms are aimed at specific arguments that render results that are nonsensical, tautological or self-contradictory.

How Reasoning About Violence Goes Wrong Vacuity and Circularity In the previous section, I showed that abstract notions such as linguistic violence, epistemic violence, symbolic violence and the like are the linguistic expressions of a conceptual metaphor, and that this metaphor entails an unwitting analogy between physical force applied to objects and language, laws, structures and so on that violate, exclude, hide, silence, divide or oppress. By now, the alert reader would have noticed

14 

V. Roodt

that there is no element in the concrete source domain that can be mapped onto the element of wrongness in the target domain. And yet, arguments that employ an expanded definition of violence do so on the assumption that violence does entail wrongness—that is, that violence is wrong by definition. What is going on here? I think that this discrepancy between our knowledge about the source domain and the inferences drawn in the target domain is because the reasoners rely on patterns of associations that result in invalid arguments. While arguments involving expanded definitions of violence operate on a presumed analogy between the source and the target domains, this analogy is never fully mapped out and, in most cases, denied outright. Hence reasoners overlook the fact that the presumed correlation does not hold: the elements of the source domain do not completely map onto the elements of the target domain, which means that the inferences about the latter are not supported by our existing knowledge about former. Specifically, the inference about the wrongness of violence cannot be derived from the source domain of forces working on objects. Arguments about violence that do infer wrongness from an unconscious analogy with the concrete domain are therefore invalid. One might try to counter the above criticism by denying that violence in the abstract domains of law, language, structures and so on is understood analogously to the concrete domain of physical forces and objects at all. Indeed, advocates of expanded definitions are at pains to distinguish their arguments from the so-called positivistic paradigm of violence involving “the sudden, forceful, and perhaps unexpected infliction of painful physical injury upon an unwilling victim” (Harris 1980, pp. 16–17; see also Winter 2012, pp. 197–198). Let us ask, then: what is the paradigm that advocates of expanded definitions have in mind? An example is instructive here. Consider Derrida’s taxonomy of a first or arch-violence of language that names, classifies and inscribes with difference, a second violence that is “moral” and “reparatory” and that seeks to conceals this originary violence, and tertiary, “empirical” violence (“evil, war, indiscretion, rape”) that is conditioned by the originary violence of naming and the secondary violence of its concealment (Derrida 1976, p. 112). A version of this argument returns in Judith Butler’s proposal that it is the “normative violence” of language that forcibly enacts

1  Violence As Metaphor 

15

classifications and thereby conditions the overt violence of physical force, while at the same time hiding this violence from us by rendering it normative (Butler 1997, 2004, 2009; see also Ashenden 2014, p.  430). According to both arguments, empirical or overt violence—understood as physical force—is caused (conditioned, made possible) by the abstract violence of writing and language. The latter is the originary violence, the former its effect. However, there is no way in which Derrida and Butler could conceive of writing or language as the paradigm of violence without relying on the concrete elements of forceful separation, cutting and rending apart of what had been whole. If we forgot everything we knew about physical forces acting on objects, how could we possibly make sense of the abstract violence of language and writing and effacement? It is only because Derrida and Butler assume that classification and categorization in language are like breaching the physical integrity of an object that they are able to conceive of the former as violent at all. The main reason for the confusion is that they take it for granted that violence is wrong in some unspecified way, and it is this assumption that motivates their extension of the concept to the abstract domain of language and writing. However, as we have seen, the wrongness of violence cannot be inferred from the concrete source domain on which they rely for their definition of violence in the abstract domain. Their arguments are thus motivated by a prior belief that has no logical connection to the content of their arguments. This demonstrates how reasoning under unconscious, spontaneous patterns of association motivated by prior belief can lead to an illusion of sense, but which on closer inspection turns out to be a mirage. What goes for the violence of language goes for other abstract definitions of violence as well. In the absence of the concrete source domain of forces impacting on objects, “structural violence,” “epistemic violence,” “symbolic violence” and all the rest would be nonsensical. Some philosophers are willing to accept this as the price for rejecting the so-called positivistic paradigm. Thus, we have claims that violence is something “ineffable,” something that is “uncontainable, unrepresentable, and ultimately uncontrollable” (Shkliarevsky 2015, p. 305), or that “[v]iolence alone—or at least violence in particular—somehow marks the aporia and

16 

V. Roodt

names the undecidable” (La Capra 1990, p.  1069). True, this strategy avoids the fallacious reasoning from concrete source domain to abstract target domain. However, as it renders a conception of violence without semantic content, it comes at the cost of not telling us anything about violence at all. Those who want to save the extended definition might argue that while the causal structure of the abstract concept is derived from the concrete source domain of objects and force dynamics, the wrongfulness of violence is not. In other words, they could argue that we ought to apply the concept violence to things we already consider to be wrong on other grounds. The idea here is that there are invisible or unspectacular wrongs that we are unable to recognize as such unless they are presented to us in the more dramatic guise of violence. The word violence would therefore be a mere rhetorical device to raise awareness about a particular moral concern and place it front and centre of our consciousness in a way that generic terms such as “wrong,” “harm,” “badness” or even “injustice” do not.5 I agree that there are many intimate and unspectacular wrongs that go unrecognized, and I think that many theories of violence employ the term as a way of mobilizing us to resist these wrongs. However, this doesn’t get us much further. For one thing, the claim that we are only able to recognize a particular type of wrong once we have described it as violence is self-defeating. To say this is already to acknowledge that we can recognize the very phenomenon that must be included in the definition of violence. For another, when we ask after the specific type of wrong that deserves to be called violence, the answer usually comes down to harm—to persons, animals, bodies, communities, nature and so on. However, as soon as this harm is specified, it turns out to mean the violation of integrity, or being subjected to force, oppression, exclusion and marginalization.6 It is therefore not a matter of using the term “violence” as a rhetorical device to call our attention to a specific type of wrong, but rather that the latter is inferred to be wrong on the basis of a normative definition of violence. The reasoning is circular. To be clear: I am not suggesting that philosophers are mistaken in claiming some things to be harmful when in actual fact they are not. The

1  Violence As Metaphor 

17

point is that calling these kinds of wrong violence does not add anything to our understanding of the actions, phenomena, events or states of affairs to which we are meant to be paying attention. This amounts to “persuasion-­by-naming” (Honderich 1976, pp.  30–31), as opposed to demonstrating their wrongfulness by argument. It is one thing to raise awareness and mobilize people for action; it is another thing to explain what it is that we must be made aware of, and yet another to justify such mobilization. If both explanation and justification come to naught, what could be the grounds for wielding the concept violence as a rhetorical weapon in the first place?

Contradiction So far, we have seen that arguments that rely on expanded definitions of violence either draw invalid inferences about an abstract target domain from an unacknowledged source domain, or they are circular. However, there is yet another way in which such arguments go wrong, in that they render conclusions that contradict other beliefs to which the reasoner is committed—specifically, the belief that we ought to make the world less violent. The source of the contradiction is once again the assumption that violence is a normative concept. Given this assumption, it is tempting to consider ascriptions of violence as a kind of moral currency, which is worth having more of. However, the semantic extension of the concept has the same impact on our moral reasoning as monetary inflation has on the economy. In the case of the latter, an increase in the money supply drives down its value. In the case of the former, the more phenomena are designated as forms of violence, the less valuable each individual application of the concept becomes. By “valuable” here I mean: rendering reliable knowledge about a specific moral wrong that is sufficiently informative for us to be able to decide how to respond to it. However, if violence is used to describe anything from positive acts of physical force to language, writing, speaking, law, culture, structures, institutions, symbols, classes, epistemology, beliefs, reason, images, contracts and more, it becomes harder to under-

18 

V. Roodt

stand what we mean by this term. We are motivated to expand the semantic range of the concept in this way because we assume that violence is an evaluative term, and we want to use this term to point to some aspect of reality that is not as it ought to be. However, this is only possible so far as we are able to think what violence is not. If there is no outside to violence, conceptually speaking, then it ceases to be a term of “scandalization” and becomes an empty label. The argument for expanding the meaning of violence to encompass a range of abstract domains therefore runs up against a reconciliation problem. On this argument’s own terms, it is impossible to reconcile the moral end that is being pursued—recognizing, resisting, overcoming a presumed wrong or harm—with the means for identifying and resisting these wrongs or harms. The argument is thus self-defeating. Proponents of an expanded definition of violence undermine their own moral opposition to violence in other ways as well. For one thing, the indiscriminate extension of violence to encompass more and more phenomena induces the false belief that all problems are variations of a single problem (Coady 1986, p. 12). But in that case, what could possibly count as criteria for progress? We cannot merely assert as a matter of faith that the world is as violent now as it has ever been and cite as proof our preferred definition of violence.7 There is an instructive analogy with slavery here. If we eliminated physical slavery, it would not mean that we have eliminated poverty, unequal power relations, unequal life chances and the many other wrongs that exist due to our social and political arrangements. But equally, it would be a mistake to think that the world is in no way better for having done away with physical slavery. The same goes for violence. To cite Coady once more: Suppose, what is hard enough, that we have vastly reduced wars, revolutions, assassinations, riots, military coups, police and criminal violence, is it really conceivable that, other things being equal, the lot of mankind could remain unimproved with respect to death, injury and suffering? (Coady 1986, p. 18)

I find the claim that the reduction of overt, physical violence would leave the world unchanged unconvincing. This is to dismiss human experience

1  Violence As Metaphor 

19

in its starkest aspects of life and death and physical injury in favour of an a priori theoretical framework that equates these experiences with every possible form of harm, whether severe or trivial. Such a framework is likely to blind us to the different types of wrong that would have to be addressed by different means, and does not offer us any criteria for judging their success or failure. Finally, wide definitions of violence may result in bad arguments in defence of physical violence (Govier 2008, p. 75). These are particularly prevalent when it comes to claims of “structural violence” and derivatives such as systemic violence, institutional violence and the like. These abstract conceptions of violence can be used as a way of rationalizing the killing and physical harm to persons on the grounds of defence, rather than regarding them as acts of aggression in their own right: the “victim of structural violence throws the first stone, not in a glasshouse but to get out of the iron cage” (Galtung 1990, p. 295). Let me add immediately that violent resistance against an oppressive regime might very well be justified, and in some cases even morally required. The point is not that violent resistance is wrong by definition—that would simply repeat the error of assuming that violence is a normative concept—but that such resistance requires moral justification, and justification is a feature of a normative argument, not definition.

What Is the Alternative? Having laid out the epistemic and moral grounds for rejecting the metaphorical extension of violence, it remains for me to propose an alternative. The criticisms of the expanded definition are a helpful guide to what should not be included in such an alternative. To begin with, reasoning about violence should not collapse into “persuasion-­by-naming.” Definitions are not arguments, and the aim of making sense of violence is not advanced by merely proposing one definition in the place of another.8 We have also seen that the proclivity to have the definitions stand in for reasoned argument is due to the assumption that violence is a normative concept—that is, that it is wrong by definition—but this assumption is false. I therefore propose that we start by

20 

V. Roodt

assuming that violence is not wrong by definition, and that it would have to be shown to be wrong—or right, as the case might be—by argument.9 In the second place, we would have to test both our definitions of violence against out other moral commitments. As we have seen, it is self-­ defeating to develop an argument about violence that contradicts the very reason for being concerned with violence in the first place. It does not follow that we are obliged to adopt a definition of violence that is in line with our existing moral beliefs. After all, it might turn out that these are mistaken. However, testing our background beliefs and our conception of violence against one another would give some initial indication of their viability. Given the criticisms of the semantic extension of violence, we can take it that a non-normative definition would be a narrow definition. I think we can do a lot worse than thinking of violence as “positive acts of interpersonal force usually involving infliction of physical injury” (Coady 1986, p. 4). This restricted meaning does not rely on faulty analogical reasoning from a concrete source domain to an abstract target domain. It is also compatible with our moral intuition that violence is prima facie wrong, without committing us to the belief that it is wrong by definition. Opting for such a restricted definition of violence does not prohibit us from speaking of violence in a metaphorical sense. It does commit us, I think, to making it explicit when we are doing so. Much of the faulty reasoning about violence is not due to our using metaphors and analogical reasoning as such, but to our doing so unwittingly and under the sway of associative patterns. This can be avoided, at least to a large extent, by being alert to the danger of “illusions of sense” and cognitive fluency that are due to the attractiveness of the pattern and not to the content of the argument. I further propose that, when it comes to the wrongs that inhere in our social, political and economic structures rather than in the actions of individual agents, we are better off understanding these in terms of injustice rather than violence. While we can coherently make an argument for when violence is not wrong—say, an act of resistance against oppression, or knocking someone out to save them from drowning (Degenaar 1990, p. 72)—we cannot coherently claim this with regard to injustice. While we might sometimes claim that it was necessary to commit one injustice in

1  Violence As Metaphor 

21

order to prevent a greater injustice, we nevertheless would not claim that the smaller injustice was not wrong. So: injustice is a normative concept, while violence is not. The criticism that a specific procedure, action or state of affairs is unjust is also a more decisive moral condemnation than the claim that it is violent (Coady 1986, p. 11). Of course, this does not mean that the normative concept of injustice can now stand in the place of reasoned argument. One would still have to show why a particular social or political institution is unjust, and this would, in turn, require a coherent conception of justice defended by adequate reasons. The point is simply that, in so far as we want to reason about large-scale, systemic wrongs that do not involve direct acts of interpersonal force, we are better off doing so within the conceptual framework of injustice rather than violence. In summary: I have argued in this chapter that the semantic extension of violence is a function of a conceptual metaphor, which entails a set of conceptual correspondences between a concrete source domain and an abstract target domain. Linguistic, symbolic, legal, institutional, epistemic violence and similar terms are different metaphorical expressions of the same conceptual mapping from violation and force to classification, conceptualization, taxonomy and division on the one hand, and oppression, coercion, impediment on the other. While this cognitive metaphor is a function of analogical reasoning, the presumed analogy does not hold. The crucial feature of expanded definitions of violence is that it is bad or wrong in some way, but this cannot be inferred from either the elements or the relations between the elements in the source domain. Thus, arguments that rely on such expanded definitions of violence make for conclusions that are vacuous, circular or contradictory. Despite these criticisms, my aim here has not been to dismiss violence as an object of moral concern. Instead, I have tried to show that flawed reasoning based on unconscious associative patterns clouds the object of such concern, and that the limitless extension of the concept violence diminishes the moral value of each instance of its application. The upshot of this is that we are less sensitive to the many different kinds of wrong in the world and the different strategies required to combat interpersonal harm and social and political injustice. For these reasons, we should resist the temptation to extend the concept violence beyond the concrete domain.

22 

V. Roodt

Notes 1. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) is not without its critics (e.g. Pinker 2007, Murphy 1996). As Gibbs (2009, 2011) shows, many of the criticism fall short of the mark in that they are based on isolated examples, target their criticisms at Lakoff and Johnsons’s early work, and ignore the overwhelming empirical evidence from the different cognitive sciences of the ways in which metaphor shapes language and thought. Nevertheless, my argument does not rest on the wholesale acceptance of CMT.  My claim here is simply that, when it comes to reasoning about violence, many philosophers (a) use the concept in a metaphorical sense and (b) this involves reasoning by analogy from our knowledge about concrete experience to a variety of abstract domains. 2. This does not only hold for philosophy, of course. Analogical reasoning plays an equally important role in everyday problem-solving, in scientific and legal reasoning and in artistic creation. 3. The paradigmatic argument that violence is violation is Newton Garver’s “What is violence?” (1977). 4. The conception of violence as force is a common feature in many, of not most, expanded definitions of violence. For paradigmatic examples, see Benjamin (1978), Fanon (1963) and Sorel (1999). 5. The same criticisms would hold for claims that the term “violence” points to injustice. Once we ask about the specific feature of the injustice that warrant it being called violence rather than injustice, the answer would again have to appeal to the definition of violence as violation, oppression, and so forth. I take up the question of injustice again in the fifth section. 6. A case in point is the definition of “epistemic violence” as “a refusal, intentional or unintentional, of an audience to communicatively reciprocate a linguistic exchange owing to pernicious ignorance. Pernicious ignorance should be understood to refer to any reliable ignorance that, in a given context, harms another person (or set of persons)” (Dotson 2011, p. 238). 7. This point is nicely illustrated in the disagreement between John Gray and Stephen Pinker about the latter’s claim in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) that violence has precipitously declined since the eighteenth century. What Pinker means is that death in war and internecine conflict has declined. Gray counters this by arguing that Pinker leaves out of account the long-term effects of harm and the threat of harm, and that when these are taken into account, “advanced societies have become terrains of vio-

1  Violence As Metaphor 

23

lent conflict. Rather than war declining, the difference between peace and war has been fatally blurred” (The Guardian, 13 March 2015). Gray thus opposes Pinker’s argument by redefining violence and then claiming that violence has not declined—based on this redefinition of the term. Pinker responds in turn that “Gray is not just wrong but howlingly, flat-earth, couldn’t-be-more-wrong wrong” (The Guardian, 20 March 2015). 8. Incidentally, this is why Arendt’s famed distinctions between power, force and violence is not a viable strategy. While she rightly criticizes the expansion of violence to cover both power to act in concert and unjustified coercion, she largely does so by way of definitions rather than argument. See On Violence (1970). 9. For further arguments against a normative conception of violence, see Audi (2009), Wyckoff (2013).

Bibliography Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Ashenden, S. (2014). On Violence in Habermas’s Philosophy of Language. European Journal of Political Theory, 13(4), 427–452. Audi, R. (2009). On the Meaning and Justification of Violence. In V. Bufacchi (Ed.), Violence: A Philosophical Anthology. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bartha, P. (2013). Analogy and Analogical Reasoning. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 ed.). Edward N. Zalta (Ed.). Retrieved from http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/reasoning-analogy/ Benjamin, W. (1978. Critique of Violence. In P. Demetz (Ed.), Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (E.  Jephcott, Trans.) (pp.  277–300). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Bernstein, R. (2013). Violence: Thinking without Banisters. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bowdle, B., & Gentner, D. (2005). The Career of Metaphor. Psychological Review, 112, 193–216. Bufacchi, V. (2005). Two Concepts of Violence. Political Studies Review, 3, 193–204. Bufacchi, V. (2007). Violence and Social Justice. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable Speech. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

24 

V. Roodt

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War. London: Verso. Clausner, T. C., & Croft, W. (1999). Domains and Image Schemas. Cognitive Linguistics, 10(1), 1–31. Coady, C.  A. J. (1986). The Idea of Violence. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 3(1), 3–19. Day, S., & Gentner, D. (2007). Non-Intentional Analogical Inference in Text-­ Comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 55(1), 39–49. Degenaar, J. (1990). The Concept of Violence. In N. Manganyi & A. du Toit (Eds.), Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa. London: Macmillan. Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G.  Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1990). Force of Law: “The Mystical Foundation of Authority”. Cardozo Law Review, 191, 920–1045. Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing. Hypatia, 26(2), 237–257. Evans, V., & Green, M. (2006). Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fanon, F. (1963). Concerning Violence. In The Wretched of the Earth (pp. 35–106). New York: Grove Press. Fischer, E. (2009). Pictures and Secondary Qualities. Synthese, 171(1), 77–110. Fischer, E. (2014). Philosophical Intuitions, Heuristics, and Metaphors. Synthese, 191(3), 569–606. Fischer, E. (2015). Mind the Metaphor! A Systematic Fallacy in Analogical Reasoning. Analysis, 75(1), 67–77. Fischer, E. (2018). Two Analogy Strategies: The Cases of Mind Metaphors and Introspection. Connection Science, 30(2), 211–243. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, Peace and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural Violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291–305. Garver, N. (1977). What Is Violence? In T. A. Mappes & J. S. Zembaty (Eds.), Social Ethics. Morality and Social Policy (pp.  268–282). New  York: McGraw-Hill. Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy. Cognitive Science, 7, 155–170. Gentner, D., & Bowdle, B. (2008). Metaphor as Structure-Mapping. In R.  Gibbs (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (pp. 109–128). New York: Cambridge University Press.

1  Violence As Metaphor 

25

Gentner, D., Bowdle, B., Wolff, P., & Boronat, C. (2001). Metaphor Is like Analogy. In D. Gentner, K. J. Holyoak, & B. N. Kokinov (Eds.), The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (pp.  199–253). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Gibbs, R.  W. (2009). Why Do Some People Dislike Conceptual Metaphor Theory? Cognitive Semiotics, 5(1–2), 14–36. Gibbs, R.  W. (2011). Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Discourse Processes, 48(8), 529–562. Gill, M.  J., Swann, W.  B., & Silvera, D.  H. (1998). On the Genesis of Confidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(5), 1101–1114. Govier, T. (2008). Violence, Nonviolence, and Definitions: A Dilemma for Peace Studies. Peace Research, 40(2), 61–83. Gray, J. (2015, March 13). Steven Pinker Is Wrong About Violence and War. The Guardian. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining Harris, J. (1980). Violence and Responsibility. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Holyoak, K. J. (2012). Analogy and Relational Reasoning. In R. J. Holyoak & R.  G. Morrison (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (pp. 234–259). New York: Oxford University Press. Holyoak, K.  J., & Thagard, P. (1989). Analogical Mapping by Constraint Satisfaction. Cognitive Science, 13, 295–355. Honderich, T. (1976). Three Essays on Political Violence. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Honderich, T. (1989). Violence for Equality. London: Routledge. Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kelley, C. M., & Lindsay, D. S. (1993). Remembering Mistaken for Knowing: Ease of Retrieval as a Basis for Confidence in Answers to General Knowledge Questions. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 1–24. La Capra, D. (1990). Violence, Justice and the Force of Law. Cardozo Law Review, 11, 1065–1069. Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. (1993). The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought (pp.  202–251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

26 

V. Roodt

Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. (1989). More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Landau, M.  J., Meier, B.  P., & Keefer, L.  A. (2010). A Metaphor-Enriched Social Cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 136(6), 1045–1067. Magnani, L. (2011). Understanding Violence: The Intertwining of Morality, and Violence: A Philosophical Stance. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Murphy, G. (1996). On Metaphoric Representation. Cognition, 60, 173–204. Nancy, J.-L. (2005). The Ground of the Image (J. Fort, Trans.). Chicago: Fordham University Press. Pinker, S. (2007). The Stuff of Thought. New York: Basic Books. Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes. London: Penguin. Pinker, S. (2015, March 20). Guess What? More People Are Living in Peace Now. Just Look at The Numbers. The Guardian. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/wars-john-gray-conflict-peace Shkliarevsky, G. (2015). Overcoming Modernity and Violence. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 11(1), 299–314. Sorel, G. (1999). Sorel: Reflections on Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLoS One, 6, e16782. Thompson, V.  A., Prowse Turner, J.  A., & Pennycook, G. (2011). Intuition, Reason, and Metacognition. Cognitive Psychology, 63, 107–140. Winter, Y. (2012). Violence and Visibility. New Political Science, 34(2), 195–202. Wyckoff, J. (2013). Is the Concept of Violence Normative? Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 3(265), 337–352. Žižek, S. (2008). Violence. New York: Picador.

2 Violence and Essentialism? Lode Lauwaert

Although thinkers throughout history have written quite a few pages about hatred, anger, aggression, resentment and so forth, the theme of violence has long been treated a little poorly. It is only since the second decade of the last century that intellectuals including, notably, Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, among others, have started to think and write about violence more thoroughly. In the course of the twentieth century, thinkers such as Georges Bataille and René Girard joined them, and today there are many academic disciplines in which violence is an important research topic. Sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, psychologists and so forth publish in journals devoted exclusively to this theme, and annually organize workshops and conferences worldwide on the theme of violence. This is a more extensive version of a Dutch article that has been published in Karakter. Tijdschrift voor wetenschap.

L. Lauwaert (*) Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_2

27

28 

L. Lauwaert

Examples of research questions asked by researchers in the recent and highly diversified domain of violence studies are the following: Has violence increased over the course of the history of mankind, or is it rather on the decline? And what about the individual course of life: do humans become more or rather less violent as we age, or does little or nothing change over the course of one’s life? Is the intuition that democratic and high-tech societies are less violent than, for example, totalitarian non-­ secular societies, correct? Is there a tendency to violence in so-called human nature, or should we acknowledge that violence is more related to nurture, or to both nature and culture? Is there more structural violence today than about 500 years ago, or can we assume that the form of violence has changed dramatically in recent centuries? And so on. One of the studies in the current research on violence is Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationship by Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, an erudite and often acclaimed study published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, for which Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Selves: Why Violence Has Declined, wrote a foreword. In it, the authors offer a highly original perspective, in the sense that they approach violence from the perspective of the perpetrator. More specifically, they zoom in on the perpetrator’s motives, and conclude that those who carry out violence often have morally desirable motives, despite the fact that the act of violence itself is largely undesirable. This decision not only nuances the image of the violent person, it is also relevant for policy makers, therapists, judges and others. When one takes a closer look at the study of Fiske and Shakti Rai, it is clear that they obtain the data on which their conclusion is based from different fields of science. They justify their thesis with help from empirical material from anthropology, cognitive and moral psychology, history and so on. In light of this great diversity of data and perspectives, it is striking, however, that the authors do not explain in detail how the concept of violence is generally understood. Don’t we expect a study on violence to lay out a general definition of violence in detail, and certainly a study based on data from various domains? At first sight, this expectation seems to be addressed at the beginning of the book, where one finds the paragraph entitled ‘What we mean by

2  Violence and Essentialism? 

29

“violence”’. But what do we read? In this paragraph, which is very short, Fiske and Shakti Rai in no way explain what we generally mean by ‘violence’. They only mention what they mean by ‘violence’. Although our intuition says that from a scientific point of view this is problematic, it remains to be seen whether this is really the case. In other words, can we criticize Fiske and Shakti Rai because they do not dwell extensively on what ‘violence’ in general means, and that they only clarify how they understand violence? Or should we adjust our expectations? Is it justified to expect an author to thoroughly explain what the definition of violence in the general sense is? To answer these questions, we must first consider what we usually require from a general definition. What do we hope for when we want to define a certain concept? What exactly is the purpose of a general definition, for example, of a commonly employed concept such as violence? To begin with, it is clear that when we strive to define a concept, we at least expect a common denominator to be found. By such a common denominator, we mean a property that is shared by all the particulars that fall under the concept. In other words: the desire to define what a concept means in general, at the very least implies the hope of finding a characteristic common to all the members belonging to the concept of which a definition is desired. However, often finding such a common denominator is not at all sufficient. Usually, we also expect a definition to offer a unique property, that is: a property that belongs exclusively to the concept which we wish to determine. In other words, we usually also strive to draw a clear boundary between two sets. A definition must therefore establish, that is at least the expectation, which property characterizes all violence and only violence. If we find such a property, then we know what the so-called essence of the concept is. Now that we have created clarity about what exactly we want from a definition, we must ask ourselves the following question: Does violence have an essence in the sense in which it has been explained above? Is there a quality that we find in everything we call ‘violence’ and that only characterizes ‘violence’?1 There are several reasons for assuming that we can answer this question in the affirmative. Firstly, there is more than one entity that we can understand in an essentialist sense. In the case of gold, for example, we know

30 

L. Lauwaert

that each gold atom has 79 protons and that only a gold atom has this amount of protons. In other words, if you count 79 protons then you can conclude that you are dealing with gold and gold atoms. The same also applies to entities from the non-natural world. All and only Mercedes cars, for example, have an emblem consisting of a circle with three stripes. Secondly: those who believe in the essence of violence will also find support in the both continental and analytic tradition of philosophy. For, example, well-known philosophers such as Georges Bataille and Hannah Arendt wrote about violence in an essentialist sense. But what are the arguments of these philosophers? Or is it just an assumption? If so, is this assumption justified? One reason to doubt that violence has an essence is that when we think of violence, we spontaneously think of many other phenomena: aggression, coercion, cruelty, sadism, masochism, brutality, roughness, wildness, hatred, anger, rage, ferocity, hostility, war, psychopathy, anger, evil and so forth. Certainly, ‘violence’ is clearly not synonymous with, say, ‘war’ nor with ‘fury’ and ‘brutality’. Moreover, violence evokes these associations because these other phenomena are de facto often accompanied by violence: some sadists use violence, just as it is not surprising that those who are hateful invoke violence. However, based on the extensive web of concepts to which ‘violence’ belongs, can we not expect that it cannot always be clearly separated from other concepts? Can we not expect, precisely because ‘violence’ is related to many other concepts, that there is an overlap between ‘violence’ on the one hand and, for example, ‘aggression’ on the other, in such a way that you cannot draw sharp boundaries between the two? This last expectation is reinforced by the following example: When Tom pulls a hair from the head of his friend Peter, the chance is rather small that this will be considered an act of violence by others (even if it is undesirable or, at least, a peculiar thing for Tom to have done). This is also true when Tom pulls two or three head-hairs. However, when he pulls a handful of hairs out of Peter’s head, there is no doubt that this is a form of violence. Removing a few hairs is not violent but removing a bunch of hairs is. Although it is clear in this context that something is violence and something else is not, it is by no means possible to infer from this that there is a clear and easily identifiable boundary between

2  Violence and Essentialism? 

31

what is and what is not violence. Does violence require you to pull out 15 hairs? Or are 13 or 14 hairs enough? Or should we do more to be a violent agent, and pull out about 40 or 41 hairs? These questions feed the suspicion that the concept of violence has no essence. Indeed, if you determine that a concept lies on a continuum, this does not seem to be consistent with the idea that there is a characteristic that draws a clear line between that concept and other concepts. However, a presumption is insufficient to reject an essentialist concept of violence. Let us therefore focus on the notion of violence, to see whether one should be more than only a little bit suspicious regarding the essence of violence.2 The first candidate who qualifies for the definition is obviously ‘physical or material damage’, that is, damage caused to (living) organisms or artifacts. Why is this an obvious candidate? When we recall cases that everyone thinks are a form of violence (the suicide attacks in Brussels, the reaction of the Chinese army to Tiananmen protest, etc.), it turns out that they are characterized by the fact that they include material or physical damage. All violence, so the provisional conclusion seems to be, implies damage in at least one of the two senses. Although this proposal seems plausible at first sight, that first description does imply, however, that anyone who intentionally causes psychological damage (without physical consequences) is not violent. The daily humiliation of a person, in such a way that the person suffers from anxiety disorders or feels the effects on their self-esteem, would not be an act of violence according to the definition we have identified until now. Of course, this goes directly against our intuition, which says that violence also exists on a mental level. In other words, the first description of violence is too limited, because violence can include physical and material as well as psychological damage. However, we can easily amend that shortcoming. Suffice it to say that all violence includes damage, leaving open what kind of damage is involved. If we assume that this is true, it remains to be seen whether it is clear what ‘damage’ means in the case of violence. Does it mean that functioning is made impossible? Or is that too strong an interpretation, and is it sufficient that functioning is merely hindered? However, both descriptions do not seem satisfactory. If I pull a handful of hairs from a person’s

32 

L. Lauwaert

head, we understand this as an act of (violence) that causes damage, despite the fact that this action does not necessarily have a negative effect on that person’s general functioning. The same goes for the damage to an artifact: one can damage a car by using a coin to scratch its door without that affecting the functioning of the car. But is it really convincing that damage is the essence of violence? We must answer that clearly in the negative. Damage is not a unique characteristic of violence. My bike can be damaged as a result of a collision that is not an act of violence at all. And is it necessary that there is damage in order to speak of violence? Does all violence include damage? This is very doubtful because we also see failed attempts to cause damage as acts of violence. Think of the research by military historian Samuel Marshall, which demonstrated that during the Second World War a large percentage of bullets did not reach their target. Although that research was strongly criticized, it reminds us that we also consider shooting that intends to hurt or kill someone, but which does not result in injury or death, as an act of violence. Or think of a fight between two persons. One runs to the other and hits him or her several times in the face with their fist. The attacks hit the other, but the victim has no bone in the nose and stands firmly in his or her shoes (e.g. since the victim is a trained boxer). Does the absence of damage mean that in that case we would not speak of violence? A second candidate for a definition of violence is ‘morally wrong’.3 The above (suicide attacks, the reaction to the Tiananmen protest, etc.) are examples of violence that undoubtedly breaks a moral boundary. Although it is of course true that many forms of violence are morally wrong, ‘morally wrong’ cannot be the essence of violence. This characteristic does not separate violence from what is not violence. Lying and deceiving, for example, are also morally reprehensible but are not acts of violence. Moreover, the thesis that all violence involves the transgression of a moral boundary has a number of fundamental problems. First of all, the consequence of this would be that the liberation by the Allies during the two world wars was either violence and morally wrong, or morally (in)correct but not violence. Both go against the established moral and political discourse, since we hold that the liberation was both violent and justified. Secondly, it would also mean that the centuries-old

2  Violence and Essentialism? 

33

tradition of the Just War Theory, which goes back to Augustine, is meaningless. The purpose of the Just War Theory is precisely to detect the conditions that justify a war (jus ad bellum) and that determine what is morally just warfare (jus in bello). The conditions that justify a war include that a matter being fought for must itself be just, that the fighting parties must have the right intentions, that there must be a reasonable chance of success and so on. The jus in bello includes the principle of discrimination and proportionality. Thirdly, the determination of violence as morally incorrect, a determination that some describe as ‘right-wing’ or ‘conservative’, clashes with our intuition. We consider it morally justified to arrest a person in a violent way if it turns out that he or she is about to cause much suffering or damage. The third candidate to be included in the definition of violence is ‘intention’. All violence, so the description would be, is characterized by the fact that it is intended. If you commit an act of violence, it would mean that it is also your goal to commit such an act. In this sense, violence would be like making a pizza or repairing a dishwasher, but would be radically different from the blowing of the wind or losing hair. Please note, if it is true that all violence is intended, it does not necessarily follow that a psychological disorder is at the basis of violence. An act of violence can be committed deliberately, simply because there are good compelling reasons for it. The legitimization of violence does not have to result in its pathologization. Is it true, however, that all violence is the expression of an intention? In the second half of the last century, peace scholar Johan Galtung coined the term ‘structural violence’, also known as ‘systemic violence’, two terms that are still used today by numerous thinkers, mainly left-­ wing inspired. Both refer to negative matters that are allegedly connected with capitalism, and that are, as it were, part of the system. More specifically, ‘structural violence’ refers to death, illness, poverty and so on. The reason why it is relevant to cite this form of violence is that so-called systemic violence is not necessarily intended. Of course, the structure of capitalism is at least partially intended, and presumably certain negative things related to capitalism are actually intended in this way. However, those who believe that poverty, illness and death are structural violence do not necessarily mean that they are intended. With ‘structural violence’

34 

L. Lauwaert

one can also refer to undesirable things that, although they are an effect of capitalism, are nonetheless unintended.4 The thesis I put forward on the basis of the analysis in the previous paragraphs is that violence has no essence. Just as visual illusions exist, so do conceptual illusions. It is a misconception to suppose that there is a common denominator between everything we call ‘violence’, and that there is a clear boundary between all violence and everything that is not violence. Anyone who regrets this should be aware of three things. One: violence is no exception. It is also extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find an essence of, for example, the concepts of religion, sport, art or philosophy. And what, for example, would be the essence of illness? In the latter case, suffering is an obvious candidate. Our intuition says that whoever is ill suffers in all cases, hence the expression ‘suffering from a disease’. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that the following two questions can be answered in the affirmative. Is every paraphilia accompanied by suffering? Is everyone who suffers ill? Two: the absence of an essence in no way implies that everything can be called ‘violence’. Although it is abundantly clear that for a number of decades the concept of violence—just like other ‘negative’ concepts such as ‘aggression’ and ‘illness’—has gained popularity as a subject of research, we can still say with great probability that many phenomena will never fall under the heading of violence.5 Three: despite the strong suspicion that violence has no essence, some phenomena are without any doubt a form of violence. Moreover, there are also prototypes of violence. These are forms of violence that possess all the characteristics that are shared by many but not all of the members of the set ‘violence’. A prototype of violence, for example, is suicide terrorism. Although it is (perhaps) true that not all violence is harmful, morally wrong or intended, suicide terrorism is a prototype of violence because it involves not only causing damage but also breaking a moral boundary and expressing the intention of an offender. The suicide bomber therefore formally corresponds to, say, Ann, a prototype of the Collins family. The reason is that Ann is both funny and social, two characteristics that are shared by most members of that Collins family, but not by all. Furthermore, the above also implies, and with this we are back to the recent study Virtuous Violence, that we cannot criticize the authors of that

2  Violence and Essentialism? 

35

study because they did not first explain in detail what we generally mean by violence. Indeed, if it is true that violence has no common denominator and clear boundary, then you cannot require Fiske and Shakti Rai to first offer a general definition of violence. However, what we do expect from scientific research on violence, an expectation that the authors of Virtuous Violence meet, is that they should make clear from the outset what they understand by violence. This also stems directly from what we have shown above. The observation that there is no general definition of violence means that the word ‘violence’, unlike the example of gold, can mean different things. A broad interpretation may mean that ‘violence’ refers to the negative consequences of capitalist society or to undesirable aggressive behavior during a public demonstration. ‘Violence’, in a narrow sense, can refer to the intentional infliction of material damage. It is precisely this semantic plurality that obliges researchers to make explicit what they do and do not mean by ‘violence’. Suppose you did not do so, there is a kind of danger that is not unique to research on violence but still does not threaten all forms of research. Indeed, the danger is that others (fellow researchers, journalists, etc.) may use your research to say something about sexual violence, for example, while your research actually addressed much broader concept of violence. Although the above makes clear that my analysis of the concept of violence has both philosophical and non-philosophical relevance, some may find the scope of such an analysis limited. It seems to have consequences only for other academics. At first sight, the relevance of that insight to the non-academic world seems minimal or even non-existent. Is this impression justified? Can the analysis of the concept of violence also be, say, morally relevant? Imagine a care institution where one can observe undesirable behavior.6 Although little or no damage is done, there is a patient who strikes, pulls and pushes. Healthcare provider A has a narrow view of violence, and therefore does not report on that incident in terms of violence. Caregiver B, on the other hand, believes that hitting, pulling and pushing are a clear case of violence, and notes this as such. Both reports are given to the team leader, who does not know that both reports concern the same person. Based on the report of caretaker B, the team leader decides

36 

L. Lauwaert

to punish the patient, while reading the other report is not followed by a sanction. This is, of course, morally problematic, because it is unfair. Some argue on the basis of the unequal treatment of the care receiver that it would be better to remove the word ‘violence’ from our vocabulary. Although such an intervention is the result of good intentions, it nevertheless seems unrealistic. ‘Violence’ is an old word so deeply rooted in our language that it will not soon disappear, perhaps not even if we collectively decide not to use it anymore. What is realistic, however, is that you explain well what you understand by violence when you write, or that you ask for an explanation if the concept has not been made explicit. In a sense, this is not only desirable, but even a duty. After all, the consequences of not making it explicit or not checking what is meant by ‘violence’ can also be felt at a level other than the scientific. As the example of the care institution suggests, it is possible that careless handling of words and concepts also has undesirable moral consequences.

Notes 1. Note that the purpose of the following paragraphs is explicitly not to define once and for all what the definition of violence should be, a definition against which the already-existing concept of violence can be measured and on the basis of which that concept can be judged on its value. When reading the following pages, one should rather keep the word ‘violence’ in mind, as it is used, for example, in the media, political discourse or everyday life. The aim is, in fact, to see whether there is a characteristic shared by everything we call ‘violence’ in these different contexts, and which only characterizes those things that we consider to be violence. 2. My analysis was inspired by Vittorio Bufacchi (2005), ‘Two Concepts of Violence’, Political Studies Review 2 (3), 193–204 and Allan Bäck (2004), ‘Thinking Clearly About Violence’, Philosophical Studies 117, 219–230. 3. For a more detailed analysis, see Jason Wyckoff (2013), ‘Is the Concept of Violence Normative?’, Revue internationale de philosophie 3 (265), 337–352. 4. See also Giuliano Pontara (1978), ‘The Concept of Violence’, Journal of Peace Research 1 (15), 19–32.

2  Violence and Essentialism? 

37

5. Nick Haslam (2016), ‘Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology’, Psychological Inquiry 27 (1), 1–17. 6. See also Malin Akerström (2002), ‘Slaps, Punched, Pinches  – But not Violence: Boundary-Work in Nursing Homes for the Elderly’, Symbolic Interactions 25 (4), 515–536.

Bibliography Akerström, M. (2002). Slaps, Punched, Pinches – But Not Violence: Boundary-­ Work in Nursing Homes for the Elderly. Symbolic Interaction, 25(4), 515–536. Alan Page Fiske en Tage Shakti Rai. (2015). Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bäck, A. (2004). Thinking Clearly About Violence. Philosophical Studies, 117, 219–230. Bufacchi, V. (2005). Two Concepts of Violence. Political Studies Review, 3(2), 193–204. Haslam, N. (2016). Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1–17. Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Selves: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking. Pontara, G. (1978). The Concept of Violence. Journal of Peace Research, 15(1), 19–32. Wyckoff, J. (2013). Is the Concept of Violence Normative? Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 3(265), 337–352.

Part II Transcendental Violence

3 The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution and the Construction of Sense Felix Ó Murchadha

Violence tends to the destruction of meaningful entities and of that in and through which such entities are meaningful. Not all violence is annihilating in its effects, but violence aims towards a nothingness in which is disclosed a certain fragility of meaning. The obliteration of the singular, the reduction of organic and structural unity to charred flesh and rubble, is not simply an event within a world, but an event that threatens worldly sense. The constitution of such worldly sense is dependent on time, on the interweaving of temporal tendencies, or orientations, in Husserlian terms: retention and protention. But this interweaving of temporal orientations requires a minimal order of continuity whereby retention, both near and far, and near and far protention allow for a sense of temporal stretch which has a unity and a sense. This is true even though every now may be new, temporal relations being of self-differentiation. Annihilating violence—whether of the individual raped and tortured or the community left bereft through war, colonization or natural

F. Ó Murchadha (*) NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_3

41

42 

F. Ó Murchadha

disaster—has a traumatizing effect that results in a disconnection from the past and derealization of that which profoundly modifies the retentional and protentional orientations. The vulnerability of temporal constitution, which violence discloses, reveals a fundamental absence at the core of time itself and a nothingness threatening the stability of normalized meaningful entities and spaces while disclosing a groundless space of the emergence of meaning.

Trauma, Accident, Catastrophe That which happens suddenly has a certain violence and this is true even when the event is subsequently welcomed and understood as beneficial. The sudden takes us unawares, is that which comes upon us, for which we were not prepared, happens secretly, stealthily. Yet, at a primitive level, there is a preparedness for the sudden, one which is inscribed in animality, namely the preparedness to either fight or flight. The crudity of such response, its generalizing gesture and its reduction of the meaning of the event to that which threatens survival, nonetheless places the sudden event within a meaningful context and one that can be passing and that can be incorporated into an underlying trajectory. Extreme situations of violence are ones in which even these primitive trajectories are either inoperative or exhausted. In such situations, the very struggle for survival itself is suspended and the self finds itself without resources, without the possibility of a response which can be adequate to the situation in which she finds herself. There is here an unknowing seeing, radically different from the seeing which marks the passage of time (Caruth 1996, p. 37). The sudden happening is an accident. This is not to say that this happening was not planned, perhaps meticulously so. But for the one to whom it occurs it is an event into which they fall (ad cadere). In falling into such a happening they find themselves where they had not planned to be and where, in the moment of the happening itself, they cannot find a reason or a cause. The reasons or causes of where someone is are inscribed as the past in their present. Being in this room, sitting before this computer screen, is what it is because of reasons and causes which, while not fully known to me and while involving a plurality of temporal trajectories

3  The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution… 

43

of generation, of technological invention, of construction, are nonetheless open for me, ideally articulable in an account which is transparent and complete (or in Leibnizian terms, sufficient). Furthermore, these temporal trajectories can have a predictable, if necessarily presently obscure, future: the paper I am writing may or may not end up being published, the computer may or may not continue to function for a few more years, the room I am in may or may not continue to be occupied by me and so forth. Then, suddenly, a gust of wind blows down a tree which crashes through the roof or a nearby gas cooker explodes or an earthquake shakes the building to its foundations. Suddenly, in a moment, the temporal trajectories are interrupted. While I can subsequently accept an explanation that makes the event intelligible in terms of the age of the tree and the strength of the wind or the frayed gas pipes or the movement of plates, such explanations do not so much negate the accidental nature of the event as universalize it: if this event has an explanation like any other then any event can be experienced as an accident. This falling into an event is neutral between the pleasant and the painful. To fall in love is also to fall, is also to be overtaken. Indeed, it may be that this very idea can be traced back to the kidnapping of wives for the sake of exogamy (as Barthes suggests, Barthes 2002, p.  188) or to the arrow of Eros. In either case, the violence of the happening is real: the violent is that which takes its ‘victim’ from elsewhere, overwhelms and reduces that person to the vulnerability of their porous being. It is that which is suffered. If the event is accidental, if it is that which befalls me, by that token it has already occurred. I am too late. Too late for what? Strictly speaking not too late to respond, because response already implies lateness: to respond there already must be that to which I respond. Referencing Barthes again, he speaks of the impossible reciprocity of love in which both parties would say at once ‘I love you’ (Barthes 2002, p. 151). But such simultaneity is precisely that which we cannot achieve. What we have instead is continuity. The one to whom I respond is the one to whom I am present because she is the same one who was there a moment ago. The situation to which I respond is one which I have encountered many times before, such that through habituation I have it so mapped out in advance that I hardly experience it. To experience it, is however, to

44 

F. Ó Murchadha

recognize the gap between two moments, the moment of the event and the moment of my response to the event. The unexpected by challenging my mapped out anticipations allows this gap, this interval, to emerge. The traumatic is locatable precisely in this interval, such that the moment of the emergence of the overwhelming threat remains incommensurate with my recognition of it (Caruth 1996, p. 64). But this, which trauma discloses, is inherent to the responsive structure of experience itself, where the knowing-seeing that marks the passage of time overlooks the very intervals which constitute time and the temporal structure of experience itself. The nature of experience is that it fails to experience, that it comes too late to be ready for that which has already occurred. In this sense the truest experience is the experience of that which remains absolutely other to it (see Levinas 1969, p. 25). When Blanchot says of disaster, it is ‘always already past’ (Blanchot 2015, p. 2), the disaster is disclosing something essential to the phenomenon itself. But if there is a violence in the unexpected, the annihilating tendency of that violence is that which threatens the possibility of experience, by destroying its conditions. What we have here is a fundamental ambivalence with regard to experience itself: experience responds to that which escapes from it and remains beyond the experiencing self, but such distance tends to negate that which can appear as formed within any particular locus of experience, thus tending towards the destruction of the conditions of experience. Experience is temporal, is at once the encounter with the new and the incorporation of the new into the old, the already having-been. The new is only in relation to what has been and that difference finds a unity in the manner of temporal gathering of past and into the newly opened future. In that sense the new builds upon the old, can synthesize like a melody with what went before. But the unexpectedly new cannot only break with the content of the past, but can also undermine the viewpoint from which those events were perceived and sensed. In doing this, the violently unexpected event tends towards the setting up of a barrier to the past, and does so by undermining its reality. The ­traumatic makes the past unreal, allows it to disappear (see Brison 2011, p. 53; Amery 2009, pp. 58–9). This indicates something essential: for the past to seem real, it must be commensurable with the present. If something occurs which radically changes the real, then there is no point of

3  The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution… 

45

coherence between past and present, making the remembered past seem more like an imagined world: the traumatized self may well admit that the past events really happened, but the world of those events, her familiarity with that world and her life within it, appears as a dream state, an imagined world, which cannot be imagined to be real. The irony is, however, that this splitting off from the past is itself a continual possibility of time itself, as the continual self-differentiation of past and present which is both the condition of experience and the abyss at its core.

Time, Habit and World Every trauma implies an injury and as such a vulnerability. The traumatic subject is as such essentially embodied (see Staudigl 2015, p. 75). The traumatic can only occur as a wounding of a habituated body. Someone who lived without habit, without any anchorage into the world, could experience pain and terror, but not trauma. Such a being would not relate to the past as that which is already incorporated into the present, but rather a mere passage neutral to the present. Trauma is above all an offence against the habitual. Habits are formed both actively and passively and also voluntarily and involuntarily. An athlete or musician must develop habits of movement, of touch, or posture which are actively and voluntarily aimed at, but which then become, as we say, second nature. Similarly in how we approach the world and others in the world, in aiming to act well or otherwise, certain characteristics—etymologically meaning marks on the soul or body—maintain a manner of being towards one another, incorporated into the self. Bodily gestures of one sort or another express the self even when they are not actively or voluntarily aimed at and which only becoming apparent to the gesturing self, when they are mirrored back to him. All of this has a certain temporal structure, which mirrors the ambiguous structure of habit. In each case, past practice is sedimented, whether actively or passively pursued, this amounts to an incorporation of a past, which itself has other possible futures, but which were curtailed, cut short such that the body, movement, character and thought were pruned,

46 

F. Ó Murchadha

trained to operate in a certain more confined, more directed manner. Such curtailment, while closing off possible futures at the same time, actualizes those futures that came to be and in doing so continue to make possible new futures, but also continue to limit and constrain the present in terms of a past that does not pass, but which remains settled in the present. Through habit, the present takes on a depth, which is the past incorporated in it. In that sense, Merleau-Ponty drawing on Hegel states that the past is never absolutely past (Merleau-Ponty 1965, p. 188). What allows for such a settling of the past in the present is the constancy, normality and consistency of the world. A habitual action, practice or thought pattern, intends its object not necessarily as the same object but as one which belongs in a world that stands (the common root of consistent and constant—‘sta-’) in place. Without such a standing world, habit would be unreasonable: in a world of radical difference, where each moment was new, body and thought would need to adapt ex nihilo. But this is not the case. Each now is new, has arisen out of change, but such change—even if thought of in terms of a Heraclitean flux—is change within a pattern and one of entities and situations that allow for recognition over time, indeed are identifiable only through a standing relation to themselves and to all around them. In this sense, habit implies harmony, not to be sure a preestablished harmony, but a harmony nonetheless in which nothing is that does not come to be within the horizon of an order which is reaffirmed in each moment, while being incomplete, unended, precisely temporal. Novelty is constitutive of temporality, but as already noted that novelty is itself dependent on a sedimented past: the new is so only in respect to what has been. The past depth in the present allows the new to stand in a certain relief. The new is, however, always in some sense unexpected. The relation to such novelty, to the unexpected, has a range of affective modalities and intensities. At one limit is boredom, where the novelty is so shallow that it is unapparent and this can apply, perhaps especially so, when each new moment is determinedly ‘novel’ and ‘new’. At the other affective end, as far as temporal constitution is concerned, are those affective modes of approaching the new, in which the new is disclosed in its essential unexpectedness—the expected being optimally the completely

3  The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution… 

47

seen (ex-spectare)—is encountered with various degrees of intensity: surprise, shock and horror. In surprise the self is overtaken by an event, such that—if only momentarily—the self finds itself unprepared for what has happened, responding too late beyond all expectation. Indeed, as Dastur puts it (Dastur 2000, p. 182),1 event in the strong sense of the word always happens by surprise. Expectation can be understood actively or passively; in either case the appearance of the situation in which we find ourselves is in some sense misleading. We may speak ultimately of being lulled into a false sense of security, a false sense namely that the consistency and constancy of our world has slipped into a pattern of predictability in which our habitual practices can become dominant. This can be seen in the difficulty we have in remembering the events of days on end that follow a similar habitual pattern, when the attention on particular actions in not necessary. The surprising event interrupts this constancy, becomes a disruptive moment, one in which we experience a feeling of disorientation, where precisely we do not know how best to react. But surprise has an adjectival sense: a surprise party, a surprise attack and a surprise appearance (of a musician on stage at a concert). In each case something happens suddenly, for which we are unprepared, but for which we have ways of engaging, ways of responding—ways of responding in a party, when under attack, as an audience member at a concert. Surprise is a moment of disorientation that allows us to reorient without too much delay. Indeed, we have habits of surprise, ways of taking on the surprising and incorporating it, because the surprising happens in the context of prior sense, a prior trajectory of events which is already in place. Shock is a more violent emotion, one which, unlike surprise, is almost always a matter of displeasure. Surprise is itself partly constitutive of shock—the shocking event is surprising—but while the surprising is indeed unexpected, the shocking is a violent disruption, which challenges an individual’s or a community’s preparedness in a radical way. While surprise remains within the parameters of the horizon of a world, in shock we feel our world challenged. Experience in the normal sense presupposes faith in the stability of the world and a corresponding presumption that experience will always have the same basic rhythm and hue, which Merleau-Ponty is expressing when he refers to ‘style’

48 

F. Ó Murchadha

(Merleau-­Ponty 1968, pp.  110–1; see also Dastur 2000, p.  185). The shocking event is one for which my past orientations give me no preparation because these past sedimented practices belong in a world from which the shocking event is precluded—and my trust or faith in that world precludes such possibilities from having any reality in the world of my possible experience. What is characteristic of shock is that it discloses the habitual in a kind of zombified manner: in shock I ‘go through the motions’ as we say, but do so without any clear sense of the present. The initial response to the death of a loved one is like this. The world in which that person was a constitutive part is no more, and this event of disruption within the world disrupts the world itself (Ratcliffe 2017, pp. 162–3). My habits both sustain me and betray me: they sustain me by allowing me to function despite my disorientation, but they betray me too because they imprison me in a past that maintains possibilities which are no longer those of my present. In that way the past of a lost limb or a lost relative can remain within the horizon of the present (see Merleau-Ponty 2013, p. 83). In both surprise and shock, the self or community is exposed in its vulnerability but is still able to help itself. The shocking event disrupts the world, undoes many of its possibilities, but not all of them. This means that the capacities inherent in that world and many of its habitual practices remain. Indeed, it is not by accident that in most cultures it is precisely at moments of shock that people respond in the most openly habitual manner: particular phrases are used, certain ritualized actions are engaged in, reaffirming the world in the face of its interruption. These liminal moments, though shocking, do not undermine the capacity for response of the experiencing self or community. When, however, an event or an entity evokes horror, the response is one of repulsion, helplessness, the inability to articulate in speech. The bodily shivering in horror responds not to that in relation to which the self can act or respond, but rather to that which has withdrawn from that self all capacity for response or reaction (Cavarero 2009, pp. 4–5). This is the traumatic in horror. The moment of horror is one in which the world no longer relates or corresponds to the self ’s capacities for action—either in actual or conceptual terms—and its sedimented past is left without any relevance to the present. In horror we are faced with that loss as that which negates all possible

3  The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution… 

49

responses and renders us helpless (Cavarero 2009, pp. 20–24). There is nothing to be done which is proper to the event; it robs the self of itself in the sense that it forecloses the world in terms of which that self can return to itself. Each of these affective responses exposes a fundamental vulnerability. Only a dependent being is vulnerable because only the capacity to be injured depends on the dependence of the self on its own exteriority. In cases of extreme violence, this exteriority is exposed so fundamentally as to render individuals or whole communities helpless (Cavarero 2009, pp. 20–24). Yet, here again, ambivalence arises at the heart of violence. Vulnerability, dependence, utter exteriority and helplessness characterize the human being in its birth and infancy. There is, for the human, a primordial helplessness. That helplessness is a setting of the future into the hands of another, the nurturing of capacity out of a relation to others. This is a primordial having of help, of care, through which a self becomes itself in its habits of response to care given to it. Such a vulnerable being can be in the world only through its trust in the world, a trust that grows with its habituation to the world: a trust firstly that the world appears as it is, secondly that the possibilities of being towards things in the world give way to the capacities of the self ’s embodied being in the world and thirdly that the patterns of behaving towards things set up in this way have consistency and constancy. That trust relates to the world as promising; promising a certain set of meanings, certain manners of practice and forms of action (see Ó Murchadha 2017, pp. 101–106). Such promise relates not only to people within the world but also to the things that make up the world. There is a certain way in which things have been and the promise is that they will remain in that way. Only in response to such promise is there habit. When this promise is radically broken, there is a disruption, a breakdown of world, which happens suddenly, that is, accidentally. The sudden event interrupts habitual trajectories, makes them inoperative, possibly making the temporal orientation impossible. The reincorporation of my past into that present can occur instantaneously in surprise, after an extended period in shock, and possibly never be fully realized in horror. In such cases, the very explanation of the causes or reasons make the event more, not less, difficult to integrate. What occurs here is not a loss of

50 

F. Ó Murchadha

past and future, but rather a modification of both. What is striking about this is that the loss of trust in the world manifests itself as attempting precisely to live through the loss of world, such a living through we know as trauma. In this, trauma shares with habit the characteristic of not letting the past pass, of sedimenting the past in the present, but this time in a manner in which such sedimented past does not allow new possibilities. The suffering of the sudden event, the attempted but failed living through that event, is a suffering of a past that remains present. Such a suffering bears the same structure as habit, which suffers a past that does not pass. The self suffers both in the sense that it is acted upon by a past in the present, but also in the sense that it is held to a past that has not passed but remains inscribed in the present, marked in the flesh of the present. There is here a certain constitutive violence, manifest in surprise, shock and horror. This violence undermines the world of those caught within it and does so through an inversion of the incremental mode of temporal experience, namely through the temporality of ruination. Already in the Physics, Aristotle tells us that time is the origin of decay (Aristotle 1984, 221b1) and in doing so ties time to ageing and, I would add, to ruination. Ruination is a natural occurrence which infects all human enterprises. We repair our buildings, bring our cars to the mechanic, work on our bodies to the point of plastic surgery in some cases, in order to offset the process of ruin which Simmel calls the ‘vengeance of nature’ (Simmel 1996, p. 287; see also Ó Murchadha 2002) but in Ravaisson’s terms could be called rather the vengeance of destiny (Ravaisson 2009, p.  31). The inorganic (the ‘empire of destiny’ as Ravaisson puts it) as such cannot suffer ruination. Ruin is possible only for something that has a singular nature, a unity which is either that of life or the result of living seeking after expression: making. What this suggests is that every living being, and that which such beings make as expressions of their being are vulnerable to both their own materiality and to forces outside of themselves. To be in the world as an embodied being is to incorporate oneself to the world, while all the time being ­vulnerable to loss, to dissolution, to collapse. Habit in not letting the past pass is in this sense defending the self against the ruination all around it. It is a working of the self on itself, whether actively or passively, to main-

3  The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution… 

51

tain a way of being in the world into the future. The violence in question, however, is not that of ruination itself, but rather the suffering of that ruination endured or witnessed in selves subject to ruin. The violence that threatens to unleash ruination is that which disrupts temporal continuity, forces an interruption of time, whereby the very condition that habit both assumes and aims to maintain are undermined. In this sudden happening, in this exaiphnes, is revealed an apeiron, a loss or breakdown of boundaries or borders, a loss of form, the release of brute materiality.

Apeiron The relation here of habit and form is crucial and has ontological significance. The habitual is that which allows the contingent, whether in physical motion, conceptual thought or mode of behaviour, to take on a concrete reality through repetition such that the taking on of a gesture towards things in the world becomes a mode of being of that self. It is this that gives form to the self in the manner of its expressing of itself in the world. But this taking on of form, this unifying of present and past in the concrete reality of the self, requires that past gestures now habitual are confirmed by things in the world as being relevant to them. When that confirmation is not forthcoming, the habitual gesture, far from affirming that trust in the promise of things, becomes empty, like a ghost of a lost world, seeming both unreal in the present and the provenance of a past without reality. The violence of suffering such a loss is traumatic in the sense of its dissolving effect, which incapacitates the synthesizing function of the self also at the level of habit: the traumatic event divides the present from the past, it does so as a lacuna, an interval that is precisely not remembered, but is re-enacted, repeated, but unlike habit such repetitions cannot synthesize or integrate into life because they do not reach confirmation in a world which allows that self to dwell, but rather the opposite. The helplessness of the traumatic, rupturing moment is precisely that which cannot be given form, rather that which threatens with formlessness, the loss of boundaries and limits and the disclosure of limitlessness, what Richir calls the ‘phenomenological apeiron’ (quoted in Tengelyi 2004, pp. 80–81).

52 

F. Ó Murchadha

While the violent events of trauma are disruptive of temporal continuity, they are so only through the collaboration, so to speak, of time. It is the temporal difference between the event and its recognition which is crucial, but such a difference depends both on the temporal constitution of the object and the recognition of a temporal delay. That recognition is itself unique: it is the recognition of having not perceived, the recognition that something has happened and that time has elapsed while the self has been closed off from the time of the event. This recognition is not simply of a past event, but of a past futural tendency. As Husserl saw, retention and protention are intertwined (Ineinander). Retentional consciousness is of that which itself contains a protention, an intentional directedness towards fulfilment (Husserl 2001, p.  25). Husserl speaks here of a forked branch—Doppelzweig—of retention and protention, where protention is retained and a retained consciousness is of a past protention on the way to fulfilment. The paradigm case here is clearly continuity and indeed Husserl states in a footnote that ‘a beginning as intrusion of a fully unexpected event? There is no such thing’ (Husserl 2001, p. 28).2 Yet, if the retained consciousness is that of a future directedness that future directedness is not simply a function of consciousness: as a perceiving conscious being I perceive what was as what it is going to become. The primal impression in Husserl’s terms is that continual inciting of temporal movement in the twin senses of retention and protention. But the latter are not simply functions of consciousness, but rather are perceivable in the phenomenon itself. I perceive a sound which, in fading away, also indicates a future sound. This protentional sense is one that is perceived in the object itself, in the virtual causal or motivational structure of the object as appearing. The now is the now of the phenomenon which appears to me as a secondary manifestation of itself. In appearing to me it expresses itself before me. It expresses itself as a particular futural tendency which comes to me from elsewhere. It is precisely this having-been futural tendency as expressive of a phenomenon that the violent, traumatic event brings to the surface and in doing so shows time in a primordial sense. In other words, the violent, traumatic event is not simply a disruption of time, not simply an event that can be recovered from and reintegrated into temporal continuity. Rather, it indicates fundamental aspects of temporal existence, namely

3  The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution… 

53

that the temporal is constituted through the new, that the temporal relation is one of belatedness and that the self as a temporal being is in a continual process of catching up with an future that has already been in the phenomenon to which it responds. Understood in this way, the temporal structure of consciousness or indeed the narrative structure of temporal constitution (see Ricoeur 1994, pp. 52–90) does not so much give a temporal unity to the world as it belatedly responds to protentional tendencies already manifest in those phenomena to which the self must belatedly respond. Violence, though destructive in its inner tendency, through that destruction discloses a temporal structuring of sense. For sense to appear is for it to appear as already having-been, but as such in relation to an already incorporated having-been. In other words, the appearing of sense refers in a doubled manner to the past: the past that has just been and to which we respond too late and the already incorporated past which is more present than the past moment which has just occurred. This past, which is not represented but lived, habituated (see Bergson 1991, pp. 80–1), is the past as present foreign to the unexpected past future. The unexpectedness of that new moment with its own protended future is hidden to various degrees in the normality of the everyday where it is more or less covered over by the incorporated past through the habituation of the body, that anonymous body that retains the past into the present (Merleau-Ponty 2013, p. 86) to which the perceiving self remains subject. That hiddenness of the newly encountered past is normally itself hidden. But the violent event through its disclosure of the traumatic interval between present and past and the failure to incorporate that interval into the already occurred past threatens to render the latter unreal and in so doing undermine the futures already contained within the incorporated past. In so doing, it breaks asunder the surface of past appearance and discloses therein the vulnerability of past form, of all form, showing therefore the apeiron. The setting of meaning is a setting of form and as such a production of boundaries, of limits, of surfaces between and amongst the phenomenal things and their eventual unities in a world of sense. That setting of boundaries is forever endangered, however, by the wiping out of form, the collapse into formlessness. In thinking this collapse, two texts and

54 

F. Ó Murchadha

two thinkers who may seem very far apart can perhaps help us, namely the Parmenides of Plato and the ‘On the Critique of Violence’ of Benjamin. Both of these texts are concerned with the manner in which meaning is formed and making intelligible that formation in the light of the potential fragility of all unity. The contexts of these discussions differ and cannot be brought together without some violence. Nevertheless, this violence is a kind of ‘tiger leap into the past’ (Benjamin 1968, p. 261) to rekindle a particular problematic of how meaning can be produced in the face of the traumatic. Through the mouth of Parmenides Plato is posing the hypothesis, if ‘the one’ is (Plato 1961a, 137c3). The question here is whether there is anything that is the same as itself, that is, has identity, and if so what the consequences are with respect to the same, the identical, the one. His discussion ends in aporia where the one is both one and many and neither one nor many, and furthermore the one comes into and goes out of being (Plato 1961a, 155e). The concern here is with transition, indeed transformation between oppositions—one and many, being and non-­ being, stationary and in motion. To explain how such transitions and transformations occur, Plato approaches the theme a third way, by recourse to the traumatic—the sudden instant (exaiphnes), this ‘queer thing’ as he puts it (Plato 1961a, 156d1), which allows for an identifiable thing to emerge or for a multitude of identifiable things to emerge. This time beyond chronology is between motion and rest, is that which interrupts the thing and changes its ontological nature. What makes the one susceptible to this transformation is the fragility of its own form, which Plato expresses as ‘apeiron’ without limits or boundaries. If identity is to be understood as without parts, as a oneness without any multiplicity, then it would be without beginning or end, without shape, not taking up space in the sense of delimiting its own identical space (Plato 1961a, 137d). Yet, it is oneness that gives limits, such that the many are limited only by partaking in the one, by being a multiplicity of identical things, a multiplicity of ones (Plato 1961a, 158e). As such the multitude is unlimited, such that whenever it seems to have a limit, to be one, ‘in an instant (exaiphnes), just as in a dream, instead of seeming to be one, it appears to be many’ (Plato 1961a, 164d). The setting of form, the limiting of something to this thing, encounters the trauma of the

3  The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution… 

55

sudden dissolution of meaning, the identity that disappears dreamlike when we try to touch it. The Parmenides ends with the statement ‘if one is not, nothing is’ (Plato 1961a, 166c1), which sets the stakes in ontological and semantic terms. If the identifiable is not, cannot be discerned, cannot be given a word or term and has no being of its own, then there is nothing. But the instant is such a nothing: it is neither being nor non-being, neither rest nor motion, yet we cannot speak of intelligibility and indeed the being of the one without reference to it. In negative terms, we can call this nothing apeiron, as that lack of boundaries which threatens both the one and the many, yet is that which in some sense is between them, is that limitless space and time in which and through which identities are formed and dissolve.3 It is precisely such an exaiphnes that in a very different register can be discerned in Benjamin’s ‘divine violence’ (Benjamin 1986, p. 297), that violence which destroys boundaries, destroys the limits set up as identities, as the multitude of ones. The now time (Jetztzeit), which is implicit here is a traumatic now, a now in which the ghosts of the suppressed past return and the force of legally established power, the force which sets up boundaries through a mythical appeal to destiny (Schicksal), is undone. In this sudden instant, the formless threatens all established forms, the meaning structure is broken up. Divine violence in Benjamin’s terms is the opposite of mythical violence, but this is not to be understood as a dialectical opposition. Rather, divine violence breaks the dialectic of law-making and lawpreserving violence rooted in the manifestation of force whereby mythical violence sets down lines to which those subjected to that legal force are already guilty through transgression (Benjamin 1986, pp. 295–6; see Derrida 1992, pp. 51–53). It is a divine violence manifesting just ends (Benjamin 1986, p. 294), which is beyond the rational and the mythical. As such, it manifests an interruptive moment, a moment that can escape history, escape the ruination of time. But above all, such divine violence demonstrates the contingency of that constancy and continuity that established passage of time, which is all the mythical sight sees. In other words, the divine violence arises out of that interval of time where both individuals and communities are left helpless and find themselves dependent. Again, there is an inherent ambiguity here

56 

F. Ó Murchadha

where helplessness is both in the face of a horrible violence and at the origin of any human expression and human life.

Conclusion Violence in its very destructiveness opens up that groundless space in which meaning first becomes possible. As Arendt makes clear, however, violence alone cannot be creative of sense (Arendt 1970, p. 51). What we find in violence is the apeiron, the contingency of boundaries and hence all identities, and in that contingency is the limitless domain of possible futures liberated in the traumatic moment from the habituated past. Such a ‘liberation’ may give space for no possible meaning, leave the self without selfhood, a being without world, at the very margins of human existence. Yet, the exaiphnes, the sudden, shocking perhaps horrific moment, that lacuna which remains inaccessible to the self who attempts to respond to it discloses that hinge of time, for the most part hidden, without which nothing new, no expression of sense is at all possible. Without it the human would be like Plato’s heavenly bodies ‘ever abiding and revolving after the same manner and on the same spot’ (Plato 1961b, 40b7). The violent disrupts such tranquillity in revealing the relation of dependence, vulnerability and helplessness of the human in relation to the world. In so doing, it demonstrates the contingent origins of sense for both the individual and the community in ‘thrownness’ (Heidegger). The ‘recovery’ from such violence is never a regaining of a past world, a past world which in the case of extreme violence—in the case of the annihilating force which threatens any worldly sense—has been shattered. The lacuna, the interval, is not without sense, however. It demonstrates a fundamental contingency of meaning rooted in the manner in which temporal constitution of sense always leaves a gap, an interval, that which in the rhythm of time remains unheard until it is violently brought to the fore in the unexpected. Falling into the unexpected, the catastrophic, the individual or the community finds itself responding to an a­ lready-­suddenly unleashed future and a temporal initiation before all deliberation and projection of meaning.

3  The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution… 

57

Notes 1. Dastur (2000) gives a powerful phenomenology of the surprising, but understands the surprising as a general term for what I am here distinguishing as the surprising, shocking and horrific. But the shocking and the horrific are themselves partly constituted by the surprising. 2. Husserl notes himself that continuity is a paradigm here. See Husserl (2001, p. 48). 3. The relation between this discussion and the later account of the chora in the Timaeus cannot be pursued here.

Bibliography Amery, J. (2009). At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. London: Allen Lane. Aristotle. (1984). The Physics. In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barthes, R. (2002). A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. London: Vintage Classics. Benjamin, W. (1968). Theses on the Philosophy of History. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 253–265). New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, W. (1986). The Critique of Violence. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (E.  Jephcott, Trans.) (pp.  277–300). New  York: Schocken Books. Bergson, H. (1991). Matter and Memory (N. M. Paul & W. S. Palmer, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. Blanchot, M. (2015). The Writing the Disaster (A.  Smock, Trans.). London: University of Nebraska Press. Brison, S. (2011). Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Cavarero, A. (2009). Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (W. McCuaig, Trans.) New York: Columbia University Press. Dastur, F. (2000). Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise. Hypatia, 15(4), 178–189.

58 

F. Ó Murchadha

Derrida, J. (1992). The Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundations of Authority”. In D. Connell, M. Rosenfeld, & D. Carlson (Eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (pp. 3–67). London: Routledge. Husserl, E. (2001). In R. Bernet & D. Lohmar (Eds.), Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A.  Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1965). The Structure of Behavior. London: Metheun. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the invisible (A.  Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013). The Phenomenology of Perception (D. Landes, Trans.). London: Routledge. Ó Murchadha, F. (2002). Being and Ruination. Simmel and Heidegger on the Phenomenology of Ruins. Philosophy Today, 46(SPEP Supplement), 10–18. Ó Murchadha, F. (2017). Speaking After the Phenomenon: The Promise of Things and the Future of Phenomenology. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 48(1), 99–115. Plato. (1961a). Parmenides. In E. Hamilton & H. Cairns (Eds.), The Complete Dialogues of Plato. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Plato. (1961b). Timaeus. In E.  Hamilton & H.  Cairns (Eds.), The Complete Dialogues of Plato. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ratcliffe, M. (2017). Grief and the Unity of Emotions. Mid-West Studies in Philosophy, XLI, 154–174. Ravaisson, F. (2009) Of Habit (C.  Carlisle & M.  Sinclaire, Trans.). London: Continuum. Ricoeur, P. (1994). Time and Narrative vol. 1 (K. McLaughlin, Trans.) Chicago: Chicago University Press. Simmel, G. (1996). “Die Ruine” in Philosophische Kultur. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Staudigl, M. (2015). Phänomenologie der Gewalt. Dordrecht: Springer. Tengelyi, L. (2004). The Wild Region in Life-History. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

4 Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence: A Phenomenological Exploration Michael Staudigl

This chapter proposes to discuss and to readjust the potentials of a revised phenomenological account to confront the meaning—or rather the various meanings—of “religious violence” today. Confronted with the deep influence of various reductionist accounts of religion dating back to Enlightenment rationalism, I argue that we truly are in need of such an account. Indeed, we need it order to gain a more comprehensive as well as sensitive outlook on the both intriguing and disconcerting realities that the “return of religion” and also “religious violence” confronts us with. However, to talk about such specific sensitivities that a distinctly phenomenological account of the “post-secular condition” or “religion today” might afford us calls for reassessing the role of the very phenomenological method that we wish to apply. It is, to be clear on that point, a kind of applied phenomenology that takes its historical motivation very seriously. As Heidegger had formulated this very convincingly in his early lectures on the “Phenomenology of religious life,” one of the key problems

M. Staudigl (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_4

59

60 

M. Staudigl

that any “phenomenology of religion” has to reflect upon is the basic fact that religion needs “to be explained from out of our own historical situation and facticity” (Heidegger 2004, p. 89). Put in other words, it is only against the background of our “lived pre-understanding of religion” and the always already-functioning “hermeneutic circles” that it entails that a phenomenological analysis may proceed. This insight involves, first and foremost, indeed far reaching implications for the eidetic status of the phenomenological enterprise we wish to undertake. As for the phenomena we are interested in, this insight implies that we need to consider at least two unprecedented qualities that our contemporary pre-understanding necessarily implies. On the one hand, this relates to the unsettling situation of globalization and its discontents. Given the proliferating fact of inter-religious encounters taking place all across (and “beyond”) the globe and the closely related challenge of “global religions” struggling for recognition, we must not anymore pretend that we may approach “religion” in the singular or in terms of some “singular eidetic structure.” The insight that any presupposed “idea of religion” would be able to cover this “continent” (Ricœur 2000, p.  130) has been unveiled either as an imperialist gesture or as selfrighteous scientific hubris. Ricœur accordingly rather came to compare the religious with a “detached archipelago, where one cannot locate anywhere the universality of the religious phenomenon.” In the contemporary context, this difficulty seems to be further aggravated since in the wake of the so-called return of religion it is, as Derrida has clearly demonstrated, absolutely not clear what it is that returns. As a consequence we need not only take care to avoid any “hyper-imperialist appropriation” (Derrida 2002, p.  66) of religion in the singular; we need not only expose ourselves to the indeed risky dialogue between the religions, as many have reminded us (Bernasconi 2009; Moyaert 2014). On the other hand, we moreover need to reflect the most disconcerting fact that faith and reason today appear to be inextricably intertwined. This is a fact that is epitomized most clearly in the joint uses of globalized tele-technology by the very practices of both reason and religion. Or as Derrida had put this: “No faith, therefore, nor future without everything technical, automatic, machine-like supposed by iterability.

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

61

In this sense, the technical is the possibility of faith, indeed its very chance that entails the greatest risk, even the menace of radical evil” (Derrida 2002, p. 83). For Derrida, in a nutshell, religion figures but the “ellipse” of “two distinct sources or foci,” namely “the experience of belief (trust, trustworthiness, confidence, faith, the credit accorded the good faith of the utterly other in the experience of witnessing)” and “the experience of sacredness, even of holiness, of the unscathed that is safe and sound (heilig, holy)” (Derrida 2002, p. 82). As to my hypothesis, we need to philosophically confront and explore this elliptical constitution of religion in order to get a better grip on the disconcerting forms of the very return of something unprecedented in the guise of “religion.” This confrontation definitely is a daring undertaking since it exposes the truly cardinal but generally disavowed dichotomies that are so dear to our traditional philosophical attempts at coming to terms with the very phenomenon of religion—and its assumed irrationality, opacity, and heterology. Confronting it indeed calls upon us to escape the undercurrents of our beloved modernist waters that have tacitly lured us to sharply oppose reason and faith in terms of rationality and irrationality. Finally it calls upon us, as I do hypothesize, to bear witness to the very fact that reason obliquely constitutes religion as its relevant other, thus at once camouflaging and disavowing it as its most “originary supplement.” If this, however, proves to be the case and reason in some sense is truly parasitic upon its very “other,” we need not only take care to avoid any “hyper-imperialist appropriation” of religion, be it in terms of its conceptual explication, discursive integration, or any other form of totalizing assimilation. Still more basically, we also need to avoid our contemporary forms of some hyper-rationalist expulsion of “religious truth.” This kind of expulsion in fact refers to the most basic problem that we see mirrored in the political “solution” that has been substituted for the philosophical problem of religion: relegating religion to the “private realm,” thus substituting the categories of discursivized reason to the existential problem of the “truth of religion,”1 indeed amounts to misconceive or rather “duck” the question of such truth. Most convincingly, this argument has been propelled by John Caputo’s radical hermeneutical account:

62 

M. Staudigl

Religious truth is not reducible to a set of propositional assertions which are to be scrutinized in terms of their capacity to pick out facts of the matter to which they refer—no more than is a work of art. Religious truth is not found in having certain information or beliefs that will gain one insight into a supersensible world or a ticket of admission to an afterlife. Religious truth is not a matter of information—as if it reveals certain facts of the matter otherwise unavailable to empirical inquiry or speculative “reason”—but a matter of transformation, with the result that religious truth takes place in and as the truth of a form of life. […] Religious truth is more a matter of doing than of knowing, as when Kierkegaard said that the name of God is the name of a deed. That means that religious truth flies beneath the radar of both the theism and the atheism of the Enlightenment. Its truth has to do with a more elemental experience that precedes this distinction, one that cannot be held captive either by confessional religion or reductionistic critiques of religion. (Caputo 2015, pp. 33–4)

The wager accordingly is to confront this very zone head on—a zone that opens up beyond our beloved modernist dichotomies of rationality and the irrational, beyond theism and atheism, beyond myth and Enlightenment. This refers to a zone that is mirrored quite explicitly in our contemporary social imaginaries and their discontents; it becomes palpable most clearly in how they propose to re-incorporate the “truth of religion”—what Habermas has called its “unexhausted force” (das Unabgegoltene) (Habermas 2010, p.  18)—in the context of an all too soberly “disenchanted” world. In the reflections to follow, I will embark firstly on a discussion of these novel social imaginaries and their ambivalent stance toward the very question of religion. In a second part, I will proceed to argue for a revised phenomenological account of religion and will attempt to delineate its major contours; this will, thirdly and finally, allow me to delineate the potential of this account for rethinking the vexed meanings of “religious violence” beyond the extremes of blank irrationality and functional instrumentality. Whereas this issue is all too big and cannot be treated here adequately, I wish to at least sketch the general framework in which a phenomenology of “religious violence” might systematically be developed.

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

63

 ontemporary Continental Philosophy C of Religion, Its Potentials, and Discontents In contemporary continental philosophy of religion Heidegger’s “destructive” dictum that we “can neither pray nor sacrifice to this God [sc. of philosophy],” that “before the causa sui, man can neither fall on his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god” (Heidegger 1969, p. 72), has finally received serious attention and has indeed been brought to bear on respective research regarding the changing faces of returning religion. Religion, in this perspective, is, albeit implicitly, recovered as a matter of our “being-in-the-world.” It is, to put it in other words, not anymore about doctrines, beliefs, or invisible ideas taken to be located in some “inner self,” but rather about practice or “deeds” (Kierkegaard). It is exactly in this inherently post-metaphysical context—and the implicit turn to practice that it entails—that Levinas, Ricœur, and Derrida’s (more or less explicit) reflections on religion come to reveal their full potential. In this regard we may, first of all, think about Paul Ricœur’s early reflections concerning the possibility of a so-called post-­ religious faith (Ricœur 1974). As to his understanding, this designates a kind of “faith” that has productively incorporated the atheist critique of religion in the philosophical form of a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” thus opening the movement from atheism to a novel kind of “post-­metaphysical faith.” Accordingly, Ricœur struggled hard to explore a kind of “faith” that escapes the illusory traps of accusation and escapism, that is, our deep-rooted “fear of punishment” as well as “desire for protection.” As to his conviction, it would be the wager of this kind of “faith” to open up “fallible man’s” existential capabilities onto an inherently creative “poetics of the possible god” (Kearney 2001, pp. 101–111). As for Ricœur, this undertaking is drafted in terms of a “poetics of the good” (Ricœur 2010, p. 37) but is also not at all conceived to be free from all ambiguity: quite the contrary, Ricœur rather emphasizes the ties that bind human imaginative creativity to the ineradicable potential of “radical evil.” On another note, Levinas’ “atheist” distancing from the lure of idolatrous fusion with totality comes to mind in this context, too. In his most

64 

M. Staudigl

powerful attempt to break philosophical thought and language free from the all-consuming reigns of ontology and totality, this step, too, embodies a move which paves the path for retrieving an inherently religious relationship with the “wholly other,” one that laterally erupts in the disruptive power of the ethical encounter. To be more precise, it is a move that, generally regarded, affords us the possibility to reclaim the significance of religious notions that have traditionally been sacrificed at the threshold of either categorical intelligibility (cf. Kosky 2001) or at the altar of practical reason. As for our context, Levinas’ related incorporation of the Christian figure of the kenosis might be mentioned as a prominent example for such a re-­appropriation that can help us to reassess the intrinsic significance of the religious for his comprehensive attempt at providing a novel foundation of the ethical, one that takes the traditional figure of the logon didonai to its truly hyperbolical, that is, practical end (van Riessen 2007). Finally, we may also mention Derrida’s elliptical phenomenological inquiry into the structure of a so-called “religion without religion,” a description that opens onto the idea of a structural “messianicity without messianism.” In renouncing the ideas of Being, sovereignty and unicity that have traditionally been affiliated with the name of (one) God, his reflection paves the path for imagining another “God to come,” a vulnerable, suffering and divisible “God” (Derrida 2005, p. 157). More closely regarded, he conceives of a “God” whose unconditional claims call for always differing articulation and response under inherently contingent conditions—but do not exclude their auto-immune foreclosure. As Naas among others has lucidly shown, this deconstructive gesture harbors a variety of implications for a deepened and critical understanding of our modern ideas of sovereignty, identity, and agency. These ideas not only revolve around the concept of unicity derived from this onto-theological tradition. That they are replete with practical significance and therefore are in deep need of being reconsidered (Naas 2006) becomes most clear in the context of the “return of the religious” since it is here that we may find the logic of unconditional sovereignty running havoc once it finds itself confronted by a plurality of other “unconditionals.” Despite their visible differences, these positions nonetheless embrace at least one joint insight that is of paramount interest for the topic at hand: it is the insight that a “double and supplementary gesture of

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

65

a­ bandonment and retrieval of God” (Kearney 2009, p. 167; cf. Kearney 2011) is necessary in order to finally leave the old God of metaphysical causality and theodicy behind. This ideal, as we know since Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, is but the conceptual idol of a God fixed onto our unavowed projections of omnipotence and omniscience. That, however, there exists a possibility to “return to God after God,” that is, after the demise or “death” of the metaphysical God of the onto-theological tradition—this “ana-theist wager” as Richard Kearney has felicitously termed it—calls on us to reflect the overall practical potential and implications of such a challenging “return.” According to Kearney, it indeed involves not so much a simple return to a yet unthought facet of some “ineffable other,” which has traditionally been shrouded either in its incessant withdrawal from the grips of autonomous reasoning or became dissolved in the mires of some overwhelming heteorology. The “return” this author has in mind rather signifies a truly liberating move, one that frees us from this bad alternative of autonomy and heteronomy, and from its petrifying political implementation in the exclusive terms of sovereignty and unfreedom. Following Kearney, we may conceive of it as a move that exposes us to the idea of (an) “enabling God,” whose powers are not only embodied in human narrative but practically extend to “creative imagination,” that is, human poiesis (Kearney 2016).2 Put differently, this move gains full significance only if considered in the context of the never-ending “struggle for concordance in discordance” (Ricœur 1992); only in light of this primordial human struggle we may come to understand the liberating potentials of what Ricœur terms a “poetic qualification of the naming of God” (1995, p. 235) and the different ways it feeds into a “rebirth of the capable self ” (2000, p. 146). As Ricœur also explicitly states, this poietic qualification and the motivational inspiration gained therefrom may extend both into an “ethics of conviction” or one of “responsibility” (1995, p. 235); in the last analysis, it may result both in a “political theology of domination” (2000, p. 146) or one of “liberation.” In light of the vexed realities that the “return of the religious” confronts us with today, this conception by its very definition remains inherently ambivalent. On the one hand, it refers to a “God” that is taken to be truly dependent upon humankind and the creative articulations of the “capable self ”; it is about a God who has to risk a possibilizing and, hence, liberat-

66 

M. Staudigl

ing dance with her. This dependency is something we may realize clearly, for example, in the “Song of Songs” and the exemplary way it depicts a theo-erotic dimension of mutual openness and indeed radical hospitality to the wholly other (Kearney 2001, pp. 53–8). On the other hand, however, this conception also needs to mediate the primordial violence that it nolens volens has to retain; such violence indeed is, as I argue, a constitutive part of the very experience of “transcendence,” the “sacred,” “revelation,” and so on. Put otherwise, it is constitutive of the ways such experience comes to the fore, which is evidenced in a most phenomenal way in the contemporary context and its “spectacles of violence” (de Vries 2013). And indeed one might rightly wonder whether “violence” isn’t in fact part and parcel of so many contemporary attempts at “recovering the sacred” in a time that is all too obviously marked by a “pervasive sense that something has been lost” (Taylor 2011, p. 115)? On a still more profound level, one may even proceed further and ask whether the related appeal to something “unconditional,” which is arguably part and parcel of the narrative semantics of the vast variety of religious systems of knowledge, isn’t in fact motivating violence (or at least testifies to some “violent potential”)? Yet raising this very suspicion does not amount to univocally blame all talk about religion being a potential vessel of peace as simply a self-righteous and inauthentic disavowal of a much more disconcerting truth of religion/s. Neither, however, does it entail the issuing of some charter for disengaged, secular reason to alone hold the potential to identify social pathology, irrationality, and opacity, which it all too quickly identifies as “markers of religious violence” (cf. Appleby 1999). It rather calls on us to more deeply confront the deep cutting intersections between “the religious” and “the secular,” faith and reason, (secular) reason and (religious) violence, and so on.

 emarks Concerning the Relationship R of Religion and Violence Bearing in mind these questions, I should note that any talk whatsoever about violence as being constitutive for religion is easily misleading and calls for further clarification. If we start from the widely shared premise

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

67

that such a correlation between violence and religion exists, we need to be careful in order not to misunderstand it in essentialist, substantialist, functionalist, or otherwise reductive terms. Violence in this case, like in fact in any other, is not one—like religion as such must not to be misunderstood reductively with reference to some assumedly generic type of foundational experience, practical form of expression, or motivating ontological assumption (cf. Tucket 2018). Violence, for instance, neither simply may be explained as “the heart and secret soul of the sacred,” as Girard (1979, p. 31) claimed in his functional account of religion, nor may we pin it down to necessarily revolve around some basic experience of the “numinous,” as Otto’s (1958) famous treatise most suggestively argued. The relationship between religion and violence rather is, albeit intrinsic in nature, only actualized under inherently contingent conditions. And furthermore it is articulated not in one way but rather in a variety of different yet interrelated experiential layers. As Srubar (2017) has demonstrated convincingly, “violence” firstly is—due to the inherently excessive affective status of the sacred, transcendent, and so on—an inherent part of religious experience (as, e.g., hierophanies or the very phenomenon of revelation clearly demonstrate). Due to its affective character, this primordial “violence” remains a structural part of our irreducibly embodied, that is, always (at least partly) a-semiotic ways of communicating with the “transcendent,” “sacred,” and so on, however differently they may be articulated in various religious traditions. Secondly, the socio-cultural grammar used to spell out this correlation on the level of concrete human life-worlds implies a practical translation of this “primordial violence” into lived topologies of the sacred and the profane. As functioning socio-­ topologies these revolve around an inherently violent economy of inclusion and exclusion, that is, a kind of social-technology. Thirdly, violence is also symbolically represented or rather incorporated in the narrative semantics of religious systems of knowledge: in representing a societal “struggle for concordance in discordance” (Ricœur) that mirrors the aforementioned topologies of inclusion and exclusion, these narratives hand down pre-­ fabricated legitimizations for actual violence as an appropriate means to “define one’s situation” in the light of pre-given religious scripts of perception, interpretation, and action.3

68 

M. Staudigl

Given this interrelated implication of various forms of violence and religious practices, we, on the one hand, need to accept that an intrinsic relationship exists between “religion” and “violence.” On the other hand, however, we also have to embrace the insight that this relation finds its concrete actualization and articulation only under inherently contingent conditions. It is my hypothesis that the novel and oftentimes indeed phenomenally violent form that the “quest for transcendence” takes today (de Vries 2013) is dependent upon a dangerous mix of such motivating conditions. This includes, first and foremost, the structural, but frequently disavowed and normatively embellished, violences that the “maelstrom of globalization” (Appadurai 2006, pp.  35–48) entails. Yet even if such motivating conditions apply, “religious violence”—or rather “religiously justified violence”—still is, as any violence in general, always only an option of action. It must not be reduced to some causal necessity mechanically driven by some assumedly unchangeable “human condition,” as if, for example, the uprooting impacts of globalization necessarily have to result in a fanatic response to recover some more concrete, that is, home-worldly form of trust and ethos (Held 2018, pp. 166–76). If we take this into account, it becomes clear that the overall argument must not be about some arcane logics of violence shrouded in the unfathomable mysteries of revelation, and so on. The task rather will be to confront the unprecedented constellation of human finitude, vulnerability and exposure today and to assess the ways it is related to the creative articulation of human capabilities in the light of empowering “tales of transcendence” (Giesen 2005). It is on these “tales” and their reactivation and performative re-creation in practices—or “liturgies” (Riesebrodt 2010, pp. 72–4, 84–7), as I prefer to call them—of self-transcendence that we need to focus in order to confront “religious” violence more adequately. Thus viewed, I argue that the following questions need to be answered if we want to shed some more light on the notoriously overdetermined question concerning the links between “religion” and “violence”: how is the relationship between “violence” and “religion” worked out in mankind’s attempts to poetically reconfigure and practically transform everydayness in light of revitalized tales of transcendence, that is, articulations that follow the so-called death of God and its deep repercussions in life-­ forms that are driven to understand themselves as both post-modern and

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

69

post-secular? How does the resurgent “quest for transcendence” enliven novel social imaginaries, esp. of the kind that entails violence as a viable medium of social action? How does this revitalized quest affect mankind’s never-ending “struggle for concordance in discordance” (Ricœur 1992), a struggle that has, at least in its modern political form, until quite recently been conceived in plainly secular terms of discursive reason, deliberation, and so on? And finally, but most importantly, does the creative potential of this quest remain within the limits of “a poetics of the human will”—that is, its possible poetical articulation—which, in confronting the abysmal character of his capabilities, sets out to explore and describe the fact of its creation and investment with similar, god-like powers? Or does it transform into “a poetics of the will”—that is, a poietical transformation of the world—that is driven by the attempt to overcome human finitude by becoming itself creator-like?4 Has, in the aftermath of the “Death of God,” to quote the rumination of Nietzsche’s madman here, this deed indeed become “too great for us”? Did the “holy games […] we ha[d] to invent for ourselves” not necessarily turn us into “gods” (Nietzsche 2008, p.  120)—a necessarily incomplete and “prosthetic” transformation that Freud, too, felt compelled to understand as a necessary consequence of modernity and its discontents? (Freud 1961, p. 39). As I have argued, these disconcerting questions, which put the “ana-­ theist wager” on existential trial, are by far not only of theoretical importance. It is about their practical implications, which abound, and therefore seem to require utmost attention. Without delving deeper into a vast discussion here, let it suffice to note that the ambiguity of the aforementioned potential becomes manifest in the many but finally pretty much uniform ways that the irreducibility of religious “truth claims” are dealt with today. As recent discussions concerning “post-secularism” have demonstrated, procedural, functional as well as discursive accounts of religion remain inadequate to incorporate the liberating claims of religious reasoning and “truth” into the normative fabrics of late modern societies. Quite the contrary, the mere attempt to do so quickly results in sacrificing them on the cognitivist altar of one self-same brand of reason, be it fashioned in teleological, discursive, dialectical, or transcendental-­ pragmatic terms. This general criticism and a variety of related proposals

70 

M. Staudigl

to substitute for this all too visible deficiency by contemporary discourses of “inter-religious hospitality” or “cosmopolitan justice” do not, however, suffice either. This lack becomes most evident if one takes into account the larger contemporary picture, as I will demonstrate in the next section.

 ontemporary Social Imaginaries and Their C Discontents Today, we are indeed confronted with a context whose implications flagrantly oppose the implicitly universalist and assumedly reconciliatory underpinnings that the aforementioned conceptions (discursive reason, deliberation, etc.) are said to not only entail but actively endorse. In the wake of contested sovereignties on the nation-state level and with the (structural) violences of globalization, neoliberalism and neocolonialist geo-politics becoming endemic constituents of a “modernity threatening to spin out of control” (Habermas 2010, p. 18), it becomes more and more problematic to analyze the “return of religion”—as if we would know what is returning or will return—with a view to its potentially universalizing “cognitive potential.” Whether such a potential is being ascribed to a teleological principle of progress, a principle of translation, or most recently a kind of procedural justice; whether it is designed to finally feed into the process of reason’s self-explication (Husserl), to enable its dialectical reconciliation with its other, or result into a higher form of legal inclusion—religion thus viewed is all too quickly perceived in an integrationist way. Yet exactly this kind of integrationist vision, which is endorsed in a tradition from Kant to Habermas and beyond, overshadows the motivating power of religion and thus has quite dangerous consequences. In the last analysis, it silently results in a self-righteousness of reason further acclaiming itself and its unity via its encounters with its assumed other—an other who either needs to incorporate reason’s standards into its own (religious) business or will unmask itself as a corrupted form of social practice. While this critical suspicion may be quite widely accepted in contemporary philosophy of religion and critical thought, the mere observation of this state of affairs does not suffice: the question

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

71

still remains how to confront “religion” beyond this apparently bad alternative of either integrating its assumedly infinite otherness into a unified vision of reason and its basic claim for autonomy, or projecting onto it the qualities of some ineffable irrationality, opaque alterity, or uncommunicable heterology. To my hypothesis, an answer to this truly vexed problem calls on us to consider that the “return of religion” does not refer to some clear-cut and self-same event. It is not something that simply interrupts our purportedly unified contemporary social imaginaries from out of nowhere. As I have attempted to outline in the very beginning, it rather takes place in a socio-cultural constellation of shifting images of transcendence. Such a constellation, as I argue, attests to a variety of fault lines that have undermined the functional coherence of social order, traditionally conceived, thus giving rise to new social imaginaries that somehow exploit this relationship to transcendence. As Stoker (2012) has demonstrated in systematic fashion, the experience of transcendence today does not only resonate across a variety of fields that unfold beyond the narrow domain of religion, including first and foremost culture, art and politics. It rather has changed most basically inasmuch as contemporary articulations of transcendence are actively called upon to practically translate a variety of existential truth claims that appear to be eclipsed more and more in the context of our contemporary individualist social ontologies and technologies. Consequently, this concerns first and foremost those claims that lead us, by opening up (again) a deeper and more interconnected level of co-existence, beyond the aforementioned traditional dichotomies of rationality/irrationality, theism/atheism, or myth and Enlightenment. As has been argued on various accounts, the prevalence of these hetero-­ normative dichotomies and narratives has played a most important role in shaping our modern rationalist frameworks and especially the idea of some “disengaged reason,” which have both in turn helped Western ­societies to keep apart our rigorously disenchanted life-worlds from some neatly demarcated spaces of the holy whereto “the varieties of religious experience” have been relegated. Today, however, these demarcations and separations become more and more porous. They give rise to what has frequently been termed “re-enchantment,” which is, according to Taylor, not simply the undoing of our secular “disenchantment”:

72 

M. Staudigl

So “re-enchantment” in this sense doesn’t undo the “disenchantment” which occurs in the modern period. It re-establishes the non-arbitrary, nonprojective character of certain demands on us, which are firmly anchored in our being-in-the-world. These demands do not just emanate from us, but at the same time, they are not inscribed in the universe (or the Universe and God) independently of us. They arise in our world. By contrast, the enchanted world was one inhabited by forces that were held to exist independently of us. (Taylor 2011, p. 117 f.)

In our contemporary situation, the semantics of “re-enchantment” is indeed gaining traction again. This concerns a variety of contexts, ranging from the return of tribalism and the rise of populism and the resurgence of religion and “political theologies” to tendencies like a “re-enchantment of science” and “craft” (Suddaby et al. 2017). For our context, it becomes especially relevant inasmuch as this development appears designed to breach novel affective pathways for effectively legitimizing yet unfought struggles for recognition (Rogozinski 2017). I have in mind struggles here that are taken to respond to a dangerous lessening of “an awareness of the violation of solidarity throughout the world” (Habermas 2010, p. 19). Such a violation, in fact, is frequently taken to result from the traditional, progressivist view of disenchanted rationality, which is being refurbished today in neo-institutional discourses. Given this, such a kind of violent response, as we may argue, can be motivated amidst an understanding of the “public square” that due to its normative rationalism is notoriously overburdened at smoothly integrating the variety of such “demands” or truth claims. Especially when confronted with “unconditional claims” concerning, for example, a “livable life” under conditions of scarcity, systemic vulnerability, social suffering, or multiple exclusion, that is, claims that can indeed be formulated more properly with a little help from the narrative semantics of religious systems of knowledge (Liebsch and Staudigl 2014), we begin to see clearly that our conceptions of “disengaged reason” indeed lack the capacity to account for what is still able to absolutely affect and consequently motivate social actors. Thus viewed, the symbolic relegation of religion to the confines of an assumed “other of reason” is a nearby and perhaps indeed systemic reaction to such an overburdening challenge; it is a challenge, albeit one

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

73

that easily disavows “pure reason’s” own participation in the (not only symbolic) production of its very “other”—upon which it is, as I do hypothesize, structurally parasitic.5 Not only the unprecedented alliance of contemporary religious practices with hyper-rationalist technologies but also the very tendency of “disengaged reason” to hypostatize itself in an auto-idolatrous fashion6 testifies to this yet largely unthought intertwining of religion and reason. This becomes most clear with regard to the “new wars of religion” that we witness today, as Derrida pointed out: But inversely, if what is thus happening to us, as we said, often (but not always) assumes the figures of evil and of the worst in the unprecedented forms of an atrocious “war of religions,” the latter in turn does not always speak its name. Because it is not certain that in addition to or in face of the most spectacular and most barbarous crimes of certain “fundamentalisms” (of the present or of the past), other over-armed forces are not also leading “wars of religion,” albeit unavowed. Wars or military “interventions”, led by the Judaeo-Christian West in the name of the best causes (of international law, democracy, the sovereignty of peoples, of nations or of states, even of humanitarian imperatives), are they not also, from a certain side, wars of religion? The hypothesis would not necessarily be defamatory, nor even very original, except in the eyes of those who hasten to believe that all these just causes are not only secular but pure of all religiosity. (Derrida 2002, p. 63)

But the point is not only, as I have said before, that various wars that are waged “in the name of reason” become religious since they render reason sacrosanct; the point is also that the “reasonable transformation” of war in terms of enhanced technologies in fact creates an atmosphere of being exposed to “superhuman powers” on the part of the victimized. This implication is explained convincingly by cultural anthropologist Neil Whitehead who explicitly underscores the magical undertones of the military industry in his reflections on the “intertwining of divine or sacred forms with the exercise of political power”: [T]he contemporary cannibal war-machine directly reflects the globalized, digitized and immaterial forms and relations of power, that are controlled by a de-territorialized pirate class of nomadic off-shore capital. […] [It] no

74 

M. Staudigl

longer needs the State […] War becomes an infinite possibility for the enactment of an Infinite Justice, in response to the infinite threats of terror and insurgency, criminality or civil disobedience […] In turn war itself ceases to be a clash of nation states and becomes the profligate consumption of high tech weaponry and resources in pursuit of these intangible and mystical goals, goals which nonetheless are highly profitable. […] Militaries world wide have quite literally adopted the notion of the ‘war-machine’ and are consciously employing the nomadic tactics of swarming and chaos creation which become a means to assert, through violence, sporadic forms of murderous and destructive control. This ordering and disordering of social life through violence also invokes, and is a mimesis of, sorcery and witchcraft. The occult and hidden nature of high-tech military weapons, such as drones, attack helicopters and black-ops, create a magical military violence. Sacred empowerment comes not just through human sacrifice but through the sorcery of military killing […] (Whitehead 2011, pp. 11–15, cf. 2013, pp. 19–21)

For Derrida, in absolute concordance with Whitehead’s interpretation, this ambiguous spectacle and indeed theater of “religious” violence, that is, the very fact that it most strikingly appears to belong to “two ages” (Derrida 2002, pp. 88–9) at once, embodies the disavowed intertwining of reason and religion in an exemplary fashion. Yet even if it is truly exemplary in this regard, “religious violence” is only a case in point. Recently, it has been observed on a manifold of occasions and in a variety of contexts that traditional religious semantics and pragmatics have structurally dispersed into a broad variety of our late modern social imaginaries (Höhn 2007). Not only religious fundamentalism in its subtle correlation with hyper-modern tele-technology but also phenomena like the return of religious communities (Braeckman 2009; Kippenberg 2013), the emergence of popular spiritual imaginaries (Knoblauch 2009), or the resurge of “political theologies” in the post-­ secular world (de Vries and Sullivan 2006) clearly testify to this development. What appears striking to me about this so-called post-secular constellation, however, is not simply the “return of the religious,” a contested concept still lingering ambiguously between “sociological fact” and “philosophical artifact.” Truly striking about our changing perceptions, assessments, and evaluations of religion rather is that its novel

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

75

articulations seem to revolve around a largely unthought transformation of traditional understandings of transcendence. Recently, this transformation has been described in terms of “transcending transcendence” or under the header of “shifting images of transcendence,” to mention just a few discussions here (Caputo and Scanlon 2007; Stoker and van der Merwe 2012). As I argue, however, at issue here is not only the scope of our experiences of transcendence, which has shifted and indeed opened up onto other cultural realities (especially art and politics) and their capacities of articulating experiences of transcendence. The true shift rather seems to concern the fact that novel social figurations of transcendence are taking precedence in this constellation. As we now come to understand most clearly, “transcendence” in this context neither seems to refer any more to the classical onto-theological figure of the absolute, ultimately transcendent, “wholly other” nor, however, can it be recast as a “transcendence within the confines of immanence alone” (be it the immanence of the logos, history, or inter-textuality). According to my hypothesis, this development calls on us to re-conceptualize transcendence in the context of our late modern, individualist, social ontologies and the social technologies they entail, in terms of self-transcendence. Self-­ transcendence here relates, as I will argue further on, both to individual practices of self-transcendence and the poietics or liturgies of making transcendence together.

 oward an Integrative Phenomenological T Account of Religion My overall hypothesis revolves around the old and indeed foundational (but generally overlooked) insight that self-transcendence may indeed be “more than casually linked to the transcendent” (Westphal 2007, p. 83). Put differently, if the experience of transcendence, the “wholly other,” and so on, by definition shakes our categories of understanding, we in fact need to transcend our socially derived categories of understanding and also ourselves in order be able to adequately respond to this disquieting call, for example, by translating and institutionalizing its transgressive

76 

M. Staudigl

potential in the framework of everyday existence. If, however, we “experience the transcendent as such, as truly other, only to the extent that we are able to transcend ourselves” (ibid.), this has strong consequences: it calls on us to raise the question how we may conceive of the relationship between transcendence and self-transcendence: is the experience of transcendence simply mediated (or otherwise occasioned) by practices of self-­ transcendence? Or could it perhaps be that “transcendence as such” is rather constituted by the experiential import of the practices of self-­ transcendence in which we partake? This kind of thinking in dichotomies, however, does not at all help us to confront the phenomenon per se. I rather argue that we should rethink the relationship between transcendence and self-transcendence in the late Merleau-Ponty’s terms of intertwining. In light of this paradigm,7 I contend that all this is about inherently affective experiences of transcendence and meaningful practices of self-transcendence co-constituting each other, finally to the effect that none of them may claim the precedence of being the foundational layer. Self-transcendence, thus viewed, rather needs to be conceived as a practice that allows one to creatively articulate experiences of transcendence without either sacrificing them to the totalizing effects of self-identification and representation; or relegating them to the unsayable realms of some ineffable alterity. Given this, I deem the very concept to be perfectly designed to develop a framework to describe the transformative experience of transcendence in terms of a “retrieval of selfhood through the odyssey of otherness.” Transcendence, to adopt Husserl’s epistemological wording for our context, does not simply fall into consciousness through some hole in its closed intentional structure. Or, as Kearney (2004, p. 18) has formulated the related methodological premise with utmost clarity: “Between the logos of the One and the anti-logos of the Other, falls the dia-logos of oneself-as-another.” Religious practice embodies this dialogical dynamism in a most exemplary fashion. The methodological precedence of an irreducible intertwining between self and other hosted at the very core of selfhood that can be deduced thereof, resonates in the ambiguous status of embodied selfhood and the “affective fragility” (Ricœur 1986, p. 81ff.) that it entails. It is exactly the articulation of this irreducible fragility in its basic ambiguity—that is, our

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

77

openness to what affectively befalls us and shakes our categories of understanding and meaningful response—that I deem to be of paramount importance for developing a truly integrative phenomenological account of religion (and religious violence): being open or rather being exposed, to use Mensch’s terms, to “impulses from below” (drives, affects) as well as “impulses from above” (reason) (Mensch 2017), a philosophy of transcendence that takes the abyssal problem of human freedom seriously needs to start over “from the lower to the above”; its focus hence has to be on the “response of subjectivity to an appeal or a grasp which surpasses it” (Ricœur 1966, pp. 468–9). Thus the phenomenon of religion, as to my hypothesis, unfolds nowhere but in-between this ineffable call and the creative response given to it. Regarded from this point of view, the intertwining of experiencing transcendence and responsive self-transcendence is the fundamental issue here. The question of course remains how this concept may be developed more concretely in phenomenological terms. In order to proceed further into this direction, it needs to be established what the expression “integrative account” shall mean. This can be done by pointing out the deficits that the two leading paradigms in continental philosophy of religion today, that is, phenomenology and hermeneutics, are haunted by. Put in a nutshell, I shall note that these accounts have focused either on the “counter-experience” of transcendence in terms of “otherness,” “saturated phenomena,” “excess,” “absolute affection,” and so on (Levinas, Marion, and Henry); or the emphasis has been cast on the hermeneutic potentials of some tradition’s concrete ­socio-­cultural responses to the “immemorial call” of such “absolute givenness,” “revelation,” and so on (Ricœur). Whereas various radical phenomenological accounts have insistently attempted to describe the inchoative phenomenality of “the transcendent” or “wholly other” in terms of their “unconditional givenness,” “self-affection,” and so on, hermeneutic positions revolve around the responsive dispositions, narrative articulations and generally speaking textual (and more recently pictorial) mediations of “the transcendent,” “revelation,” the mysterium tremendum, and so on. To my understanding, there is a joint problem haunting both accounts. It relates to the fact that phenomenology of religion thus conceived in the last analysis loses its genuine phenomenological status: in its focus on the excessive and superabundant qualities of transcendence it easily tends, on

78 

M. Staudigl

the one hand, to be turned into the deployment of a religious phenomenology that can only assure adequate access to its key topics on the basis of its disavowed religious character (this amounts to the well-known critique concerning a “theological turn”) (Janicaud 2000); with the hermeneutic focus on pre-given meaning structures (esp. texts as well as textualities), on the other hand, a reductive form of some merely descriptive phenomenology or “phenomenography” takes precedence, a kind of anthropological “thick description” that has become predominant in the vast majority of traditional accounts in religious studies.8 The restriction of focus hence concerns either the surreptitious assumption of some specific kind and quality of experience or the limited outlook focused onto an all too clearly demarcated practice of endless interpretation; it is either narrowed down on “counter-experiences” of radical transcendence or restricted to the interpretive patterns, that is, the narrative semantics of religious systems of knowledge that are taken to symbolically represent an always already lost experiential origin. While these accounts may offer valuable regional insights, the problem with their restricted setup is not only that both revolve around a “framework of high culture.”9 Furthermore both these accounts, as I would argue, apparently only promise concreteness but do indeed not deal with “lived religion.” As regards phenomenology, this is definitely a pity all the more since it in some sense affirms the frequently launched critique concerning its assumed pseudo-concreteness, a critique that it seems to be able to exorcise only by way of taking recourse to “incantations to the ­absolute,” or what others have more generally termed the “myth of the given.” As for hermeneutics, this reproach finds evidence in the fact that in its limited focus on texts, the related “textual gaze” (Stordalen 2012, p. 521) testifies strongly to a still widespread mentalistic bias that remains “preoccupied with immaterial ideas” (Meyer 2015, p.  335). This tendency, however, leads to the prioritizing of belief and meaning as correlates of some “inner self,” a move wherein we can easily glean the precedence of disengaged “secular reason.” This twofold criticism might appear exaggerated to some readers. I believe, however, that it is backed up by the very fact that there is no coherent examination—not to speak about a critical assessment—of religion in terms of a “total social phenomenon” to be found in contemporary

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

79

phenomenology. The focus in general rather rests quite one-sidedly on personal religious experience but structurally eclipses its larger social, cultural, as well as political dimensions, that is, the role of effective religion in contemporary societies. This eclipse, however, in the last analysis amounts to a serious deficit that appears all the more striking since phenomenology in fact offers a big variety of conceptual tools and methodical devices to confront phenomena like religious experience, its symbolic institutions, social practices, or violence head on. What it is lacking, though, definitely is an integrated framework that would allow us to address the factual interrelation of these phenomena, their unprecedented contemporary display, and overall disconcerting implications. The integrative account I am looking for needs to be able to avoid both these kinds of criticism and should offer a consistent framework to address the aforementioned questions and problems. In order to do so, such an account has to avoid two shortcomings: it can neither start from a “phenomenology of the invisible” and the immanent description of its experiential contours; nor can it remain preoccupied with a hermeneutic analysis of “textual worlds” and the original message that they are taken to translate. The fact that, on the one hand, Ricœur’s “hermeneutic phenomenology of religion” at some point demands that “the absolute” has to “declare itself here and now” (Ricœur 1980, p. 144) in order to interrupt the endless chain of interpretations and provide evidence for the genuine phenomenality of religion; and that, on the other hand, Marion’s “radical phenomenology” finally has to take recourse to the hermeneutic element in order to re-integrate the excessive nature of “saturated phenomena” into the intelligibility of everyday life (Marion 2013)—both these “turnings” clearly attest to the importance of the integrated account the contours of which I attempt to sketch here. In order to link this methodological discussion back to my more general reflections, I argue that an exploration of the concrete intertwining between experience (affective call) and interpretation (meaningful response) in terms of self-transcendence is helpful for further developing this integrative account. My related hypothesis is twofold: Firstly, I argue that the phenomenality of religion unfolds exactly in-between experiences of “transcendence” (“absolute affection,” “superabundant givenness,” “saturated phenomena,” etc.) and the autochthonous role of

80 

M. Staudigl

imaginative interpretation, which has always already helped to creatively respond to such limit-phenomena and to practically integrate their claims into the fabrics of everydayness. Secondly, I hypothesize that our embodiment figures the very medium for this interplay between call and response to take place and concretely articulate itself. As the phenomenology of embodiment tells us, however, the “lived body” figures not only as the affective medium for experiencing transcendence; due to its basic ambiguity, its both active and passive patterning, it also is the practical vehicle of self-transcendence that allows one to practically translate the affective intelligibility of one’s openness to a transcendent principle into the very pragmatics of everydayness. The “poietic imperative” derived from the shaking encounter with the transcendent, and so on (the “original violence” of revelation, etc.), however, involves not only to “see through” (Schutz 1962, p. 257; Augustine 1991, p. 184, book X, vi. (9); cf. Rom 1:20) a world basically ruled by our “pragmatic motives” in a different light (be it the Christian ideas of salvation, unconditional love, grace, and eschatological redemption, the Islamic Ar-Rahman resp. Ar-Rahim (a specific kind of mercy), or the Buddhist notion of dharma). In fact it also calls for, and this is the important point I want to raise, the dialectical translation and concrete institutionalization of the “transcendent call” into the fabrics of everydayness (Barber 2017).

The Opening of a Question: Religious Violence This translation, as to my hypothesis, is of key importance not only for understanding religious practice but, finally, “religious violence,” too. Following Srubar (2017), I argue that we need to understand religion in terms of a basically “a-semiotic communication with the sacred,” transcendent, and so on, that is, as something inherently embodied, and therefore never fully exposable to the principles of rationalist intelligibility and discursive integration.10 Consequently, I argue that we need to look at the ambiguous status of the singular, “lived body”: more precisely, in order to understand its truly foundational role in religious communication, we need to explore it as both being “beyond sense” and as yet appresenting a socially meaningful “symbolic order”; as being both

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

81

vulnerable and capable of transcending its vulnerability by its very mastery (Levinas 1991, p.  164). It is exactly this irreducibly amphibolic nature of our embodiment, the “intertwining of incommensurables” that it incorporates, which assures it the power to break with the given and unleash a truly poetic power to start all over. This “poetic license to start all over” (Kearney 2006, p. 13) and to refigure the ordinary, however, is not a monological act. As Riesebrodt (2010, 84ff.) terms it, we rather should conceive of it in terms of an “interventionist practice” that assures its referent, as Geertz (1973, p. 109) famously put it, a cultural “aura of factuality.” Thus understood in terms of the inter-corporal liturgies that revolve around the inherently dialogical ambiguity of the body, it points at a true poietics—in the classical Aristotelian sense—of making transcendence together. With this insight, however, we finally approach the critical point that we have been aiming at throughout this paper. The “poietic imperative” of making transcendence together in practices of self-transcendence not only assures the experience of transcendence its exceptional, tranformative and potentially liberating character. It also creates and furnishes it with the nimbus of being foundational, of offering unconditional sense amid a crisis of notoriously conditioned and therefore contestable meaning structures. This of course becomes especially clear in regard to the poietics of religious violence and the way it exploits unconditional claims for something deemed originary, foundational, absolute, or transcendent. Such claims, however, are birthed, as Ricœur has demonstrated convincingly, nowhere but in the original “disproportion” of our affective condition, that is, in our “affective fragility” (Ricœur 1986). As this author put it most poignantly: [D]welling in my finite capacity is something infinite, which I would call foundational. Schelling speaks of a Grund, a ground or foundation, which is at the same time an Abgrund, an abyss, therefore a groundless ground. Here the idea of a disproportion arises which is suffered and not simply acted upon, a disproportion between what I would call the excess of the foundation, the Grund/Abgrund, the groundless ground, and my finite capacity of reception, appropriation, and adaptation. (Ricœur 1999, p. 3; cf. 2010, p. 36)

82 

M. Staudigl

To better understand what is at stake in this situation of ambiguous fragility and frailty as well as the poietic empowerment that it entails, we might turn to Derrida’s claim that “religion is the response” (2002, p. 64). It is “the answer” inasmuch as it offers a general framework to respond to the “utterly other,” the irrespondable, the irresponsible, the loss of a common ground, or the eclipse of community, that is, most generally put, to a threatening lack of meaning that endangers the very fragile “struggle for concordance in discordance” around which every individual life as well as every coming community initially revolves. Viewed in this light, religion indeed is “the response,” the inherently meaningful response, inasmuch as it offers novel possibilities for transforming what shakes “us,” what befalls or absolutely affects “us” and thus endangers our socially derived meanings, by way of a self-transcending response. It is a transformation, for example, of the anxious longing for some unscathed (the whole, holy) belonging into the intersubjective performance of the credit (belief, faith, trust) that can only animate such a project. Religion, in this sense, can be understood as the taking of responsibility for that which escapes and overwhelms absolutely, or as Jan Patočka (1996, p. 102) put it: This bringing into relation to responsibility, that is, to the domain of human authenticity and truth, is probably the kernel of the history of all religions. Religion is not the sacred, nor does it arise directly from the experience of sacral orgies and rites; rather, it is where the sacred qua demonic is being explicitly overcome. Sacral experiences pass over [to] religious as soon as there is the attempt to introduce responsibility into the sacred or to regulate the sacred thereby. […] Religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all. Its history derives its sense entirely from the idea of a passage to responsibility.

Responsibility here clearly is to be understood as a responsibility for the other—not only, but, first and foremost, for the other in myself, and thus for “the menace of radical evil,” too. It concerns the irreducible “disproportion,” to use again Ricœur’s wording, that man’s “affective fragility”—its dialogically distorted being-oneself-only-as-another— necessarily entails. The “passage to responsibility” thus has to be understood, as Derrida propounds elsewhere, as a project that always has to

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

83

confront the risk of giving in to a “return of the orgiastic” (Derrida 1995, p.  135). Put otherwise, the primordial “moral creativity” of human freedom to poietically refigure the ordinary, as Wall (2005, pp. 52–53) remarks, is far from providing us with an unanimously good power that only needs to be set free. Exactly in its radicality rather nests, as Kant has convincingly demonstrated in his reflection on “radical evil” (Ricœur 2010, pp. 28–29), not only the irreducible possibility of violence but also the pseudo-­capacity for justifying it; not only sublime enthusiasm but also the motivation for fanaticism. As Ricœur demonstrates, this capacity is surreptitiously derived from the poietic potential of religion to truly transgress the ordinary and everydayness, yet not in terms of its “coherent deformation” within the “struggle for concordance in discordance” but in the attempt to appropriate or seize “the source of life itself ” (Ricœur 2010, p. 34), that is, to transform man’s irreducible disproportion into a “pretension to monopolize the source” (ibid., p. 35). Already a quick side glance to some instances of assumedly religious justifications of violence clearly testifies to this self-defeating, assumedly religious justification, which undercuts the very principle upon which it thrives: whether this concerns the horrorist spectacle of contemporary fundamentalist violence, most notably the literal deduction of a “theology of rape” issued by the IS; the eschatologically coded de-secularization of US foreign policy especially in regard to the conflict in the Near East, or the self-defeating logics of vulnerability being turned into the final weapon of suicidal “martyrdom”—in all these cases the original source is usurped; as Sartre brilliantly demonstrated, a full-fledged “theology of waste” needs to be constructed in order to justify mankind’s parasitic dependency upon a merely positively conceived idea of God, instead of accepting her insistent “weakness” (Caputo) as something we can substitute for: Everything positive being God, man by origin is negative (error, vices, crimes—all something negative). Therefore he is on God’s side not in creating the positive (which he cannot do since everything that can be already is), but in destroying the negative. By applying that negativity that is his own to destroy negativity. (Sartre 1992, p. 184)

84 

M. Staudigl

This insight, in the last analysis, calls on us to undercut a plethora of misleading discussions concerning whether or not violence is to be understood as a structural attribute of religion or rather revolves around a temporarily misdirected implementation of the narrative semantics of religious systems of knowledge. All we can do—but in fact this might already be a lot—is to describe the inherently contingent conditions under which the performative power of the “poietic imperative” appears as a viable way to transcend an ordinary world that appears replete with all too many disavowed violences. That “evil,” thus viewed, is indeed “radical but not original” (Ricœur 2010, p. 35), may help us to suspend our deep-rooted mental habit of always already affirming a certain “economy of violence” and embark instead on the wake of imagining otherwise. Acknowledgments  This chapter was developed with the generous support of two research grants from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): “The return of religion as challenge for thought” (FWF I 2785) & “Secularism and its Discontents. Toward a Phenomenology of Religious Violence” (P 29599). An earlier, much shorter version appeared in Bogoslovni vestnik 77 (2017) 3/4,517—531 under the title “Transcendence, Self-Transcendence, Making Transcendence Together: Toward a New Paradigm for Phenomenology of Religion.”

Notes 1. As for this argument, we may refer not only to deconstruction—Caputo being our spokesperson in this regard—but also to accounts that emphasize the anthropological-practical irreducibility of “religious truth claims,” see Rentsch (2001, pp. 113–126); Höhn (2007). 2. In the following, I will use the Greek term poiesis in order to clearly emphasize a “broad sense of ‘inventive’ making and creating,” esp. the (unconscious) “creation of everyday existence” (Kearney 2016, p. 366, 179), which is operative in Ricœur’s so-called poetics of the will (see also Wall 2005). 3. This argument is developed in detail by Kippenberg (2011) who attempts to decipher the logics of religious violence from the viewpoint of action theory and, most basically, the so-called Thomas-theorem.

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

85

4. The both basic and irreducible ambivalence that I am referring to here is stated most clearly in Wall’s (2005, p. 53) succinct assessment of Ricœur’s understanding of religion which, in the last analysis, cannot avoid this “tantalizing religious possibility” concerning its reserves of violence, even if he hardly ever reflects on it. 5. This insight, namely, that order is dependent upon the production of disorder, which it needs as its material and upon which it is hence parasitic, has been outlined forcefully by Bauman in his account of modernity and the violence that its very project entails (Bauman 1989). 6. That this hypostatization is frequently embellished in a semantics of universality is demonstrated by the author (Staudigl 2014) in a case study on the violent universalism of the Western concept of “world cultural heritage” and the way it was instrumentalized in the case concerning the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. 7. As a “paradigm,” this concept has been developed in a systematic manner most recently by James Mensch in his book, The Intertwining (Mensch 2018). 8. On this overall dilemma that seems to be constitutive for phenomenology of religion since its very inception, see also Waldenfels (2012, p. 353ff). 9. This reproach finds evidence in the major proponents of both a radicalized and a hermeneutic phenomenology of religion, that is, Marion and Ricœur, who both focus such phenomena at the expense of “lived religion.” 10. In Bloch’s terms, one could also describe this in terms of a “rebounding violence” that is part and parcel of the “conquering return” of the subject to this world from its “journey to the beyond” (Bloch 1992, p. 5): that is, to use Schutz’s expressions, from its journey from the “religious finite province of meaning” that has enabled one to “see through” the all too pragmatic limitations of everydayness.

Bibliography Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of Small Numbers. An Essay in the Geography of Anger. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Appleby, R.  S. (1999). The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

86 

M. Staudigl

Augustine. (1991). Confessions (H.  Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barber, M. D. (2017). Religion and Humor as Emancipating Provinces of Meaning. Cham et al.: Springer. Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bernasconi, R. (2009). Must We Avoid Speaking of Religion? The Truths of Religions. Research in Phenomenology, 39(2), 204–223. Bloch, M. (1992). Prey into Hunter. The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Braeckman, A. (2009). Habermas and Gauchet on Religion in Postsecular Society. A Critical Assessment. Continental Philosophy Review, 42(3), 279–296. Caputo, J.  D. (2015). Forget Rationality: Is There Religious Truth? In J. Bornemark & S. O. Wallenstein (Eds.), Madness, Religion, and the Limits of Reason (pp. 23–40). Stockholm: Elanders. Caputo, J. D., & Scanlon, M. J. (2007). Transcendence and Beyond. A Postmodern Inquiry. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. de Vries, H. (2013). Phenomenal Violence and the Philosophy of Religion. In M. Jerryson, M. Juergensmeyer, & M. Kitts (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (pp. 496–520). Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Vries, H., & Sullivan, L. (2006). Political Theologies. Public Religions in a Postsecular World. New York: Fordham University Press. Derrida, J. (1995). The Gift of Death. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (2002). Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone. In G. Anidjar (Ed.), Acts of Religion (pp. 42–101). London: Routledge. Derrida, J. (2005). Rogues. Two Essays on Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New  York: Basic Books. Giesen, B. (2005). Tales of Transcendence: Imagining the Sacred in Politics. In B.  Giesen & D. Šuber (Eds.), Religion and Politics. Cultural Perspectives (pp. 93–137). Leiden: Brill. Girard, R. (1979). Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Habermas, J. (2010). An Awareness of What Is Missing. In Habermas et  al. (Eds.), An Awareness of What Is Missing. Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age (pp. 15–23). Cambridge: Polity.

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

87

Heidegger, M. (1969). The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics. In Identity and Difference (pp. 42–74). New York et al.: Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (2004). The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Held, K. (2018). Der biblische Glaube. Phänomenologie seiner Herkunft und Zukunft. Frankfurt on the Main: Klostermann. Höhn, H.-J. (2007). Postsäkular. Gesellschaft im Umbruch—Religion im Wandel. Paderborn: Schöningh. Janicaud, D. (2000). The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology. In Dominique Janicaud et al. (Eds.), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’ (pp. 16–103). New York: Fordham University Press. Kearney, R. (2001). The God Who May Be. A Hermeneutics of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kearney, R. (2004). Strangers, Gods and Monsters. Interpreting Otherness. London/ New York: Routledge. Kearney, R. (2006). Epiphanies of the Everyday: Toward a Micro-Eschatology. In J.  P. Manoussakis (Ed.), After God. Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy (pp.  3–20). New  York: Fordham University Press. Kearney, R. (2009). Returning to God after God: Levinas, Derrida, Ricœur. Research in Phenomenology, 39, 167–183. Kearney, R. (2011). Anatheism. Returning to God After God. New York: Columbia University Press. Kearney, R. (2016). The Wake of Imagination. London/New York: Routledge. Kippenberg, H. (2011). Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kippenberg, H. (2013). ‘Phoenix from the Ashes’. Religious Communities Arising from Globalization. Journal of Religion in Europe, 6, 1–32. Knoblauch, H. (2009). Populäre Religion. Auf dem Weg in eine spirituelle Gesellschaft. Frankfurt on the Main: Campus. Kosky, J. (2001). Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levinas, E. (1991). Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. The Hague: Nijhoff. Liebsch, B., & Staudigl, M. (Eds.). (2014). Bedingungslos? Zum Gewaltpotential unbedingter Ansprüche im Kontext politischer Theorie. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Marion, J.-L. (2013). Givenness and Hermeneutics. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.

88 

M. Staudigl

Mensch, J. (2017). The Animal and the Divine. The Alterity that I am. Studia phaenomenologica, 17(2017), 177–200. Mensch, J. (2018). Selfhood and Appearing: The Intertwining. Leiden: Brill. Meyer, B. (2015). Picturing the Invisible. Visual Culture and the Study of Religion. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 27, 333–360. Moyaert, M. (2014). In response to the Religious Other: Ricœur and the Fragility of Interreligious Encounters. Lanham: Lexington Books. Naas, M. (2006). ‘One Nation … Indivisible’: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of God. Research in Phenomenology, 36(1), 15–44. Nietzsche, F. (2008). The Gay Science. Cambridge et  al.: Cambridge University Press. Otto, R. (1958). The Idea of the Holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patočka, J. (1996). Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. La Salle: Open Court. Rentsch, T. (2001). Worin besteht die Irreduzibilität religiöser Wahrheitsansprüche. In M.  Knapp & T.  Kobusch (Eds.), Religion – Metaphysik(kritik)  – Theologie im Kontext der Moderne/Postmoderne (pp. 113–126). Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. Ricœur, P. (1966). Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ricœur, P. (1974). Religion, Atheism, and Faith. In The Conflict of Interpretations (pp. 440–467). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ricœur, P. (1980). Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Ricœur, P. (1986). Fallible Man. New York: Fordham University Press. Ricœur, P. (1992). Life in Quest of Narrative. In D.  Wood (Ed.), On Paul Ricœur: Narrative and Interpretation (pp. 20–33). London: Routledge. Ricœur, P. (1995). Figuring the Sacred. Religion, Narrative and Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricœur, P. (1999). Religion and Symbolic Violence. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, 6, 1–11. Ricœur, P. (2000). Experience and Language in Religious Discourse. In D.  Janicaud et  al. (Eds.), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn (pp. 127–146). New York: Fordham University Press. Ricœur, P. (2010). Religious Belief: The Difficult Path of the Religious. In B. Treanor & H. Venema (Eds.), A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricœur. New York: Fordham University Press. Riesebrodt, M. (2010). The Promise of Salvation. A Theory of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4  Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence… 

89

Rogozinski, J. (2017). Djihadisme. Le retour du sacrifice. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1992). Notebooks for an Ethics (D. Pellauer, Trans). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Schutz, A. (1962). On Multiple Realities. In M.  Natanson (Ed.), Collected Papers. Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality (pp.  207–259). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Srubar, Ilja. (2017). Religion and Violence. Paradoxes of Religious Communication. Human Studies, 40(4), 501–518. Staudigl, M. (2014). Unbedingte Ansprüche im Widerstreit. Die Zerstörung der Buddhas von Bamyian als Fallbeispiel. In B.  Liebsch & M.  Staudigl (Eds.), Bedingungslos? Zum Gewaltpotential unbedingter Ansprüche im Kontext politischer Theorie (pp. 275–298). Baden-Baden: Nomos. Stoker, W. (2012). Culture and Transcendence. A Typology. In W.  Stoker & W. Van der Merwe (Eds.), Looking Beyond? Shifting Views of Transcendence in Philosophy, Theology, Art, and Politics (pp.  5–28). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Stoker, W., & van der Merwe, W. (Eds.). (2012). Looking Beyond? Shifting Views of Transcendence in Philosophy, Theology, Art, and Politics. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Stordalen, T. (2012). Locating the Textual Gaze: Then and Now. Material religion. The Journal of Objects, Arts, and Beliefs, 8(4), 521–524. Suddaby, R., Ganzin, M., & Minkus, A. (2017). Craft, Magic and the Re-Enchantment of the World. European Management Journal, 35/3(2017), 285–296. Taylor, C. (2011). Recovering the Sacred. Inquiry, 54(2), 113–125. Tucket, J. (2018). Prolegomena to a Philosophical Phenomenology of Religion. A Critique of Sociological Phenomenology. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 30, 97–136. van Riessen, R. (2007). Man as a Place of God. Levinas’ Hermeneutics of Kenosis. Dordrecht: Springer. Waldenfels, B. (2012). Hyperphänomene. Modi hyperbolischer Erfahrung. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Wall, J. (2005). Moral Creativity. Paul Ricœur and the Poetics of Possibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Westphal, M. (2007). A Phenomenological Account of Religious Experience. In M. Peterson (Ed.), Philosophy of Religion. Selected Readings. 79–87. New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press.

90 

M. Staudigl

Whitehead, N. L. (2011). Divine Hunger. The Cannibal War Machine. Published on the Internet: https://www.academia.edu/701130/Divine_Hunger_-_ The_Cannibal_War_Machine. Accessed 22 Oct, 2017. Whitehead, N.  L. (2013). Hambre divina: la máquina de guerra cannibal. Mundo Amazónico, 4, 7–30.

5 The Violence of the Singular Arthur Cools

The dominant model to understand the social meaning of violence in modern times relates the manifestations of violent acts to the power and the alienating effects of a general (political) entity, for instance, the state, capitalism, globalization. Whether as the destructive and/or submissive effects of power structures within society or as the revolt of the individual against these structures, the meaning of violence is, according to this model, political and has to be situated within the clash between a universal which is oppressive and a particular that is rejecting it, being oppressed by it. Hegel’s analysis of the terror regime after the French Revolution or Marx’s analysis of capitalist production can be mentioned here as exemplifications. The main theories of violence in the twentieth century did not break with this model as such, even though the experience of radical new, extreme and unchained manifestations of violence in the First and Second World War required a fundamental reflection on the origins and reasons of these manifestations, as for instance Arendt’s account of totalitarianism (Arendt 1966) and Sartre’s and Camus’ reflections on violence A. Cools (*) University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_5

91

92 

A. Cools

and counter-violence in the context of colonialism (cf. Welten 2006). Even today, the model seems to be able to explain the most important manifestations of violence in modern societies: war between nations, civil war (as in Syria), collective uprisings ending in random acts of vandalism involving cars and stores (as in Hamburg during the G7 meeting in 2017) or in the act of burning a national flag, the violent aggression of some individuals against policemen in urban contexts (as in Paris during the weekly actions of the gilets jaunes in 2018). It would be wrong, however, to say that this model claims to be able to explain all manifestations of violence. It would be wrong as well to state that its relevance is due to the absence or irrelevance of other theories of violence (cf. Jacques Derrida (1967), René Girard (1972), Emmanuel Levinas (1974) among others). Yet, the dominance of this model with regard to manifestations of violence in modern times is demonstrated by the fact that it is easily capable of inscribing and interpreting all kinds of violence within the oppositional structure of the general and the individual. However, it seems that precisely this logic of inscription is no longer taken for granted today. This change in the theory of violence is not limited to an academic endeavor, but is visible in the social context. Let me give one example. The newspapers’ commentaries on the riots involving young people who burned cars, plundered stores and threw stones at fire fighters and police officers in the streets of St.-Jans-­ Molenbeek (Brussels) on New Years’ Eve 2019 show an interesting conflict of interpretations: the opinion stating that these acts are directed against the Belgian state and that the actors are refusing to live according to Belgian law was contradicted by another discourse about a lost generation that puts into question the very meaning of their acts. There are different reasons for this loss of evidence of the logic of inscription, which all have to do with an increased awareness about the shortcomings of the dominant model. As Michael Staudigl has pointed out in his introduction to Phenomenologies of Violence (2014), the acknowledgment of the manifestations of violence as a social phenomenon and the interpretation of the meaning of these manifestations according to the dominant model are dependent upon power relations and risk therefore to be themselves an object of conflict. Moreover, as a theory of violence, the dominant model insufficiently explains instances of vio-

5  The Violence of the Singular 

93

lence because the mere opposition between the general and the individual and/or the experience of that opposition does not necessarily provoke violent acts and therefore does not necessarily determine the meaning of their appearance. In addition, it risks being reductive and in that sense inadequate with regard to manifestations of violence that do not fit in this model and seem to make no sense, such as aggression of individuals against teaching, sanitary or medical staff or against bus drivers, aggression against their own partner or against their own child, suicidal behavior (especially when the life of others are put in danger), the violence of mobbing and stalking, running amok, random shootings, and others. It has been observed that these manifestations have gained a partially new dimension because of their increasing frequency and their apparently irrational quality. That the dominant model to understand the social meaning of violence in modern times is put in question does not mean that it disappears or loses its validity all together. This is clearly not the case, as the examples given at the start of this introduction demonstrate. But it raises questions about the change that is at stake in our understanding of violence. Do we evaluate the social meaning of violence in a new way or do we face new manifestations of violence? Does the dominant model privilege a specific meaning of violence and is it possible to delineate this? Is it thus possible to differentiate within the condition of modern times another social meaning of violence, which the dominant model has neglected? As these questions make clear, our understanding of a modern society is involved in the change that is at stake in our understanding of the social meaning of violence. Therefore, it is important to situate this change in a broader context and to examine in what way it correlates with the ongoing development and transformation of modern society. I intend to undertake this examination starting from the analysis of contemporary society by Andreas Reckwitz. In his book Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten (2017), Reckwitz shows how the social logic of modern societies—which is primarily a logic of the general—has been interwoven with processes and practices of singularization, drawing particular attention to the social effects of these processes and practices. According to his analysis, the main feature of the late modern society is that a logic of singularization has taken over the dominance of the logic

94 

A. Cools

of the general: “The late modern society, this is the kind of modernity developed since the seventies and eighties of last century, is a society of singularities to the extent that in this society the social logic of the particular has priority.”1 I will first summarize the central thesis of Andreas Reckwitz’s analysis of late modern society and examine how the social meaning of violence is concerned by the change in modern society that the author is articulating. Following his terminology, I will call the social meaning of violence, as it appears in the condition of a late modern society, the violence of the singular. The second part of this chapter intends to further clarify the social meaning of the violence of the singular and to examine whether, and in what way, it can be differentiated from the social meaning of violence as defined by the logic of the general. For that purpose, I will situate Reckwitz’s analysis of late modern society in a broader anthropological framework, relating it to the appearance of an ethics of authenticity which, according to Charles Taylor’s account of modern times (cf. Taylor 2003 [1991]), originates from the rise of modern society. My intention here is to examine whether, and to what extent, the ethics of authenticity involves a logic of self-sacrifice, which Moshe Halbertal sees at work in the development of a modern society (cf. Halbertal 2012). It follows from this examination that the logic of the general and the logic of the singular are both at work in modern society from the very start of its appearance. The question then remains whether it is possible to differentiate the social meaning of violence on the basis of the two logics appearing in modern society. I will argue that the social meaning of violence as defined by the logic of the general implies a sacrificial dimension, while the violence of the singular does not.

 hy Speak About the Singular in Relation W to the Manifestations of Violence in Contemporary Society? For our purpose, it is important to note first that Reckwitz’s concept of a society of singularities does not mean that late modern society has become a living apart together of individual subjects. The notion of singularity

5  The Violence of the Singular 

95

does not define a human person and does not presuppose a subject theory. The notion is meant to name the social logic at work in a late modern society and, in that respect, to call attention to the dynamics of social praxes and processes through which social entities such as places, moments, communities, identities, objects, lifestyles and others are fabricated and experienced as singular. “The social logic of the particular concerns all dimensions of the social: things and objects, subjects, collectives, spaces and temporalities alike. ‘Singularity’ and ‘singularization’ are cross-­ sectional concepts and denote a cross-sectional phenomenon, which permeates the entire society.”2 The notion of singularity is thus not opposite to, but the very expression of the social dimension of a late modern society. This remark is important when considering the meaning of violence of the singular as a social phenomenon. A second remark is important for our purposes. According to Reckwitz’s understanding of modernity, the social logic of singularity does not suddenly appear as a new beginning in the development of modern societies over the last decades. It is interwoven with the rise of a modern society from its beginning. “In modern times a social logic of the general and a social logic of the particular compete with each other.”3 Reckwitz talks about a double structure (Doppelstruktur). The social logic of the general is the logic of rationalization, objectification and standardization; the social logic of the singular is the logic of culturalization, authentication and singularization. The author refers repeatedly to Weber’s thesis of modernity as disenchantment with regard to the first, and with regard to the second he mentions the romantic movement (cf. Reckwitz 2017, 18) in the late eighteenth century, which draws attention to the importance of the dimensions of the singular in many different ways: the emphatic attention for the individual, the distinctiveness of cultures and languages, the originality of art creations, the uniqueness of the instant, the discovery of diversity in nature, the genius of places, the sensibility for authenticity, the expression of the inner experience and the search for the realization of the personal destiny and fulfillment. According to Reckwitz, the legacy of the romantic movement has inspired, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many counter movements and revolts against the logic of the general, which dominates the classic concept of a modern society and determines its development.

96 

A. Cools

Over the last 40 years approximately, however, the relation between the logic of the general and the logic of the singular has changed in a fundamental way in that the latter is no longer subordinated to the former and has taken over its dominance in determining developments in modern society. This does not mean that the logic of the general is disappearing but that its status is changing. Reckwitz sees two main reasons for what he calls a structural transformation (Strukturwandel) (cf. Reckwitz 2017, 15–16): the rise of the creative economy, the aim of which is to produce cultural goods (Kulturkapitalismus) and the digital revolution, which makes individualizing and personalizing the consumer byway of technology possible (Kulturmaschine). With regard to our purpose, the question now arises: is this structural transformation of society able to account for new manifestations of violence? Let us therefore consider how it comes to be that in contemporary society the logic of the general is loosening its grip on social interaction. In his book, Reckwitz discusses three structural crises characteristic of late modern society that follow from recent developments and indicate the current instability of the classic concept of modern society defined in terms of the ideal of social progress, namely the crises of recognition, self-­realization and politics (cf. Reckwitz 2017, 432–4). The first crisis is due to the fact that the processes of singularization in late modern societies create new forms of inequalities. Social recognition is rewarded according to meritocratic rules and this provokes a new social gap between highly qualified and less qualified workers, implying a radical devaluation of the labor of the low-qualified worker (considered to be replaceable) and a valorization of the personal lifestyle as a social good. Moreover, social recognition has become permanently unstable because of the unpredictability of commercial success and the changing criteria for successful performances, which may carry with it the experience of injustice. The second crisis troubles the central dynamics of the development of late modern societies. The processes of singularization put the individual under acute pressure. The success of the project of selfrealization, to which these processes converge and precisely because it has become the dominant model of social interaction, requires that the individual’s performances be unceasing and is, at the same time, dependent on the unpredictable contexts of appraisal and assessment. For that

5  The Violence of the Singular 

97

reason, the project of self-realization, which is allocated an evidently positive social meaning also has, according to Reckwitz, a reverse side: “the source of deficit experiences” (Quelle von Defiziterfahrungen, Reckwitz 2017, 434). These experiences include, for example, disappointments, overestimations, failure, decline, burn-outs, depressions and destructive behavior, for which again the individual is considered to be accountable. The crisis of the political is visible in that the political loses leading power and agency with regard to the dynamics in the field of technology, economics and lifestyle. The state reduces its functions and fields of competences that are concerned with the society as a whole and understands its task as creating the formal conditions for competitive production, innovation and private consumption. The public sphere has become the field for personal profiling and the political debate is shifting to semi-public digital platforms where concordant views reinforce one-sided opinions. In the late modern society in which processes of singularization are being developed, the logic of the general is losing its grip on social interaction. In a final part of his analysis, “Politik der Gewalt – Terror und Amok als Zelebrierung des singulären Aktes” (Reckwitz 2017, 423–8), Reckwitz examines what this transformation implies with regard to the manifestation of violence. In a modern society, the state and its institutions, which express, maintain and impose the logic of the general, are considered to possess the monopoly of political violence. Modern society deploys the power of its institutions, which represses and subordinates the violence of the individual, in order to enforce the law, the logic of the general. According to this logic, the individual’s resistance and revolt against this demonstration of state power have been interpreted as the legitimate reaction of the repressed and as the authentic expression of the promise of a truly peaceful society without violence, still to come. A society in which the logic of the singular is able to push back the logic of the general seems therefore to create the conditions to fulfill this promise. However, as Reckwitz, shows, this is not the case. The processes of singularization and its effects on social interaction create the conditions for new manifestations of violence. In order to assess this claim, Reckwitz refers to the increase of random shootings since the attack in the Columbine High school in Colorado in

98 

A. Cools

1999 and terrorist attacks since 9/11 in 2001 (cf. Reckwitz 2017, 423). However different the social and political meaning of these acts may be, they have one important feature in common: the individual perpetrator arrogates to himself the power to demonstrate violence and withdraws in this way the state’s monopoly. Violence is, in these cases, no longer a means to an end, but the aim of the violent act is the event itself, its manifestation, its visibility in the public sphere (cf. Reckwitz 2017, 424). The act of violence in the public sphere demonstrates the absence, even more: the illusion, of a well-ordered, peaceful living together and the powerlessness of the logic of the general. As such, it radically puts in question the main presuppositions of a late modern society: its politics of rationalization as well as its politics of culturalization. The act of violence in random shootings and terrorist attacks manifests a real, horrifying terror at the core of society; one that is out of control, out of a logic of benefits and alliances, even beyond the juridical logic of infraction of the law and punishment by the law. Such acts of violence are a devastating terror in which the victims are chosen at random and to which the damaging effects are indifferent (including the life of the perpetrator). The execution of the act needs to be spectacular, extraordinary, beyond all measure, never seen before and in that sense “singular.” Not only does the new quality of the act of violence in random shootings and terrorist attacks reflect the impact of processes of singularization on social interaction, but the profile of the perpetrator does as well. In most cases, his social position is on the side of those who do not fit in the competitive dynamics of the ongoing development and enhancement of individual skills and competences, and who are thus deprived of social recognition. The rejection of social recognition is the starting ground for a negative determination of the project of self-realization. The intention and careful preparation of an act of violence may become part of a personal lifestyle project. “Violence can become for the perpetrators an attractive form of life by containing the promise to transform the victim they were into the negative hero.”4 In this regard, Reckwitz calls the perpetrator a self-­ conscious, negative singular actor: “They are self-conscious negative singularities who deliberately aim to commit a negatively evaluated

5  The Violence of the Singular 

99

action. They are not a matter of pity for others. They celebrate being deviant, they are ‘laughing perpetrators.’”5 It is clear that Reckwitz’s analysis of processes of singularization in late modern society delivers an interesting systematic frame of social change that enables him to point to structural transformations in the manifestations of violence. The profile of the perpetrator, the way of celebrating his being outside social orders and norms, the staging of violence as a lifestyle project, the spectacular event of the violent attack, its “happening” and visibility as central objective, the indifference with regard to the victims, the indeterminateness of targets and casualties: the logic of the general seems to be unable to account for all these aspects not only in the sense that the state’s power lacks control and influence on these developments, but also in the sense that the social meaning of these manifestations of violence challenges and defeats the rationality of the logic of the general. The interesting point in Reckwitz’s interpretation of the politics of violence in contemporary society is that it resists the conclusion that the manifestations of violence of the singular are mindless or reasonless. His approach shows convincingly that the violence of the singular has a social meaning, for which clarification requires to take into account the transformation of the logic of the general in a late modern society. Yet, the logic of the general is still defining the political meaning of the act of violence of the singular, whether as a terrorist’s attack against the state, as an act of war, intending to replace its sovereignty, or else as “private,” as “mindless,” as “amok.” Although it may be clear that processes of singularization in late modern society transform the manifestations of violence—which challenge the logic of the general—it is this logic that still defines the political meaning of these manifestations. Reckwitz does not elaborate on this although it might be clear that the social and political meanings of the two examples he is starting with, a high school and the terrorist attack of 9/11, are very different. So, if Reckwitz is right to examine processes of singularization in order to account for new ­manifestations of violence in contemporary society, the question can be raised whether it is possible to further distinguish the violence of the singular.

100 

A. Cools

 ow to Distinguish the Violence H of the Singular? In this part, I will argue that the logic of the general implies an understanding of the social meaning of violence in terms of sacrifice, whereas the manifestations of the violence of the singular challenge this understanding. The notion of sacrifice is not mentioned by Reckwitz in his analysis of late modern society. It is used here in order to define the way the logic of the general is able to inscribe the act of violence within the logic of means and ends and to establish an intrinsic connection between the act of the individual and the logic of the general. However, the violence of the singular, as I intend to show, disturbs this sacrificial logic and disconnects the act of the individual from the meaning of the general. Let us consider first the claim that the logic of the general includes a sacrificial dimension. This claim seems to be first of all counter-intuitive. Practices of sacrifice are situated in a religious context (an offering from humans to God) and have been extensively examined in relation to the social meaning of rituals in primitive societies. In particular, René Girard has pointed to the foundational dimension of these practices of sacrifice and brings to the fore its ambiguous relation to violence: its capacity of controlling the devastating and contagious social effects of violence through the substitution of the victim that is sacrificed (cf. Girard 1972). Apparently, this meaning of sacrifice does not have any relevance for a modern society based upon rational principles. The rationality characteristic of modern societies—the logic of the general—no longer understands society in religious terms (as a relation to God) but in terms of a relation between the individual and the general. Members of modern societies are treated as individuals, who are equal with regard to the general, and their (inter)action is defined on the basis of the principle and the rights of freedom. Why, then, should we consider that a sacrificial dimension may be at work within the logic of the general? In the second part of his essay On Sacrifice (2012), which considers the transformation of sacrifice in the rise of modern society, Moshe Halbertal emphasizes the presence of a sacrificial logic within the logic of the general, which he distinguishes from the religious meaning of sacrifice. In a

5  The Violence of the Singular 

101

religious context, sacrifice is directed to God who remains transcendent to the giver and this transcendence implies the risk of the sacrifice being rejected. To sacrifice oneself makes no sense here because it destroys the relation to God. The manifestation of violence in the case of a religious understanding of sacrifice is thus limited to the risk of being rejected. Hence the importance of the ritual, which should be followed as purely as possible in order to avoid this risk. What the logic of the general, in the rise of modern society, has changed is the possibility of sacrificing to a God that remains transcendent with regard to the giver. It has instead interiorized the meaning of offering. The logic of the general requires that the individual is able to free him or herself from their relatedness to their own self-interests. In other words, the logic of the general is based upon a moral conflict. For Halbertal, Kant’s ethics is paradigmatic of this moral conflict. The categorical imperative articulates self-transcendence at the core of moral life. The tension between self-love and the categorical imperative describes the moral conflict, which demands a sacrifice: it demands that I free the maxims of my actions from the self-relatedness of my egoistic drives and desires. That this moral conflict is at the core of the political in modern times is, according to Halbertal, especially visible in the work of Rousseau: the political order is a stage on which the individual could transcend the realm of self-interest. Rousseau, who considered the entry into the political as a shift from an individual to a general will, offered the best articulation of this approach. The move into the political realm, for Rousseau, involves transforming human motivation from a self-centered craving to a concern with the commonwealth’s good. (Halbertal 2012, 107)

In two ways, then, the logic of the general changes the meaning of sacrifice. Offering is no more a question of being related to a transcendence, but self-transcendence has become central. In this sense, God is no more the addressee of the practice of sacrifice, and sacrifice is no more the expression of a worship of God. Moreover, and as a consequence, sacrifice consists no more in offering to God a limited, objective gift in order to solicit his appraisal, but it requires a change of the self in relation to the general. Self-sacrifice becomes an essential component of

102 

A. Cools

moral life because of the moral conflict that results from the search to free oneself from egoistic drives and to transcend oneself in relation to the social meaning of ethical or political values. For that reason, unlike the religious meaning of sacrifice, the logic of the general risks unleashing an excessive violence, without limitations, demanding and manifesting self-sacrifice, even sacrifice of one’s own live, either because the logic of the general claims this final sacrifice of each individual (e.g. in the context of a war between states) or because the individual accepts this self-sacrifice as a means to change the power structures installed by the logic of the general (e.g. in the context of a suicide attack against a political entity). Halbertal’s analysis of a sacrificial logic in the theoretical foundation of a modern society—apart Kant and Rousseau, he refers as well to the contract theory of Hobbes and Hegel’s account of self-transcendence in the objective mind (Geist)— might be convincing in order to understand why a sacrificial logic does not simply disappear in modern times. But Halbertal is focused on understanding the excessive and corruptive forces that derive from this logic and intends to rehabilitate the religious meaning of sacrifice. In this respect, he does not see, in his account of the transformation of sacrifice in modern society, the possibility of another logic that arises in modern times together with the logic of the general, which has the potential to disturb this logic of the general and that concerns the freedom of action of the individual. We must, therefore, change perspective and turn to the account of modern society that Charles Taylor has provided in The Ethics of Authenticity (2003 [1991]). Let us consider now the second claim for which I intend to argue, namely that in the context of modern society appears a new meaning of violence that is not related to, or directed by, the logic of the general and, in that sense, disturbs the sacrificial logic mentioned by Halbertal. The ethics of authenticity, which Taylor considers to be “relatively new and peculiar to modern culture” (Taylor 2003, 25), enables me to point to the social meaning of a violence that escapes the logic of the general. It is important to note that Taylor situates the birth of the ethics of ­authenticity in the same historical context that Halbertal has already mentioned, namely the context of the transformation of the relation to a transcendent God at the beginning of modernity, and that he too refers to

5  The Violence of the Singular 

103

Rousseau in order to explain the newness of the moral view of authenticity. But unlike Halbertal, Taylor does not emphasize in Rousseau the relation of the individual to the general will, a relation that, according to Halbertal’s account, provokes the interiorization of a sacrificial logic, but “the intimate contact with oneself, more fundamental than any moral view, that is a source of joy and contentment: ‘le sentiment de l’existence’” (Taylor 2003, 27). For Taylor, the starting point for the ethics of authenticity is precisely this change regarding the source of morality, which turns out to be deep in us. This change is able to explain the new idea that each individual has an original way of being human and of the ideal of being true to oneself: Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own. This is the background understanding to the modern ideal of authenticity, and to the goals of self-fulfillment or self-realization in which it is usually couched. (Taylor 2003, 29)

For Taylor, the romantic period in late eighteenth century is one of the main sources of the rise of the ideal of authenticity and this same period is the starting point for the development of processes of singularization in modern society according to Reckwitz’s understanding of modernity. That makes it interesting to reread Taylor’s approach after Reckwitz’s thesis concerning the social logic of the singular and to examine how it contributes to a better understanding of the violence of the singular. Taylor’s account of what he calls “the deviancy in the culture of authenticity” (Taylor 2003, 59), confirms and anticipates, as we will see, Reckwitz’s theory of contemporary society in many ways. The deviant forms of authenticity, according to Taylor’s thesis, derive from the confusion with the idea of self-determining freedom, which had a tremendous influence in the development of modern society. The idea of self-determining freedom implies that I chose and decide for myself what is important to me, freed from external influences: “It is the idea that I am free when I decide for myself what concerns me, rather than being shaped by external influences” (Taylor 2003, 27).

104 

A. Cools

In two ways, the idea of self-determining freedom inverts and undermines the ethics of authenticity. It provokes an escalation of the claim of being different. The moral source that I discover in me as my true self is no more the basis for deliberating and evaluating actions and choices in relation to others, but, inversely, my true self, my own originality is defined by what I chose and the way I act, independent of the others. When the affirmation of self-choice is decisive to determine the value of life, I am choosing my true self and what is significant in life as different from others and without considering what relates me to the other. Moreover, and as a consequence, the idea of self-determining freedom provokes an escalation of the demands of social recognition and strengthens, in this regard, the experience of a deficit. While self-choice isolates me from the other, the confirmation of this choice still depends on the relation to the other. Obviously, for Taylor, the confusion between the idea of self-­ determining freedom and the idea of authenticity has had an important impact on the development of modern society, and in particular a disturbing effect on the social relations of the individual. The goal of his analysis of the deviancy in the culture of authenticity is to disentangle this confusion. He argues that the ethics of authenticity requires and presupposes a shared horizon of significance that relates me to others: to discover my true self depends upon my dialogical relations with others and the search for self-exploration and self-fulfillment only makes sense because of shared beliefs in values such as freedom, selfhood, authenticity, identity, love and recognition. The deviancy in the culture of authenticity derives from the denial of this dependency and thus from an overestimation of the idea of self-determining freedom. However, I wonder whether, in arguing this, Taylor is pointing to a condition that enables us to better understand the appearance and the meaning of the violence of the singular in the context of modern society. Taylor does not mention it and is not intending to define a notion of violence in his examination of the ethics of authenticity. But his analysis clarifies why the individual is extremely under pressure, as we mentioned already in Reckwitz’s account of the logic of the singular in contemporary society, and without the support of a sacrificial logic in order to escape this pressure.

5  The Violence of the Singular 

105

Following his analysis, the violence of the singular arises from the escalation of and the interplay between the claim of being different and the demand of social recognition. If self-realization and self-fulfillment are effects of the affirmation of a self-choice, the individual is constantly challenged to create and to try out new, self-expressive meanings that break with already given shared values and beliefs, and to shape in this way his or her own life project as a unique way of life. This search for self-­ realization has nothing in common with self-transcendence because it is not motivated by the intention to free oneself from self-interests. The search for new, extreme and/or extraordinary experiences and the affirmation of transgressing already accepted social or personal limits cannot be interpreted as a kind of self-sacrifice because it is not directed toward a higher moral or political common good. The logic of the general is absent from this search in which the individual wants to be different. The price to pay for this self-centered search, however, is the increasing indifference and oblivion with regard to the concerns of the general (the attention for the common goods), on the one hand and on the other, the weight of isolation which makes the meaning of being different the personal commitment of each individual. Affirmation of self-choice implies, therefore, self-staging and visibility in public spaces. Here the claim of being different meets the demand of social recognition and the interplay between the two makes apparent the relevance and social meaning of the violence of the singular in modern society. For, this meaning is not limited to the conflicts related to the struggle for recognition and its relevance is not only indirectly given with the shortcomings of the politics of recognition. The interplay we are pointing to reveals a kind of structural deficit, a lack of a shared horizon of significance that would make it possible to equally recognize differences. Or, as Taylor states, “[w]hat has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which this can fail” (Taylor 2003, 48). It is precisely because of this deficit that the relevance and social meaning of the violence of the singular in modern society appears in a way that escapes the logic of the general. It manifests itself in the struggle for visibility and—related to this—in the experience of not being (sufficiently) visible or visible only in a negative way. It manifests itself, moreover, in that a performative and successful visibility replaces the social meaning of recognition.

106 

A. Cools

Taylor’s analysis of the deviancy in the culture of authenticity accords surprisingly well with Reckwitz’s analysis of what he calls the logic of the singular. In fact, in his account of the development of modern society, and at a time before digital technology began to radically transform contemporary culture and social interaction, Taylor had already thematized the three crises that Reckwitz considers characteristic of late modern society, deriving them from processes of singularization over the last four decades: the instability of social recognition creating new inequalities; the increase of deficit experiences as a reverse side of the search of the individual for self-realization and self-fulfillment; and the retreat of the political from public spaces and social life. In this regard, Taylor reminds us that the appearance of what we have called the violence of the singular has its origin in a broader, structural development of modern society. Meanwhile, his articulation of the confusion between the idea of self-­determining freedom and the idea of authenticity in the development of modern society enables us to better understand the appearance and social meaning of the violence of the singular arising from the escalation of and the interplay between the claim of being different and the demand for social recognition, and to grasp in this way its distinctive feature with regard to the dominant model that defines violence in relation to the logic of the general.

Concluding Remarks The aim of this contribution was to examine why the dominant model of understanding violence is challenged today and whether it is possible to differentiate within the condition of modern society another social meaning of violence, which the dominant model has neglected. Reckwitz’s account of contemporary society in Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten has laid the basis for this examination. Following his distinction between the logic of the general and the logic of the singular, we introduced the notion of the violence of the singular in order to differentiate it from manifestations of violence that the logic of the general generates and rationalizes. According to this logic, violence

5  The Violence of the Singular 

107

results from the oppressive power structures of the state and/or the revolt against it by the individual, and is therefore political. Halbertal’s reflections on sacrifice have enabled us to point to the continuation of a sacrificial dimension within this logic that is intrinsic to the foundation and organization of modern society. In Taylor’s analysis of authenticity and its relevance for the development of modern society, we have found a confirmation of Reckwitz’s distinction between the logic of the general and the logic of the singular and the means to differentiate the violence of the singular from a political understanding of violence. Following his analysis, we have argued that violence of the singular is not motivated by self-transcendence and not directed toward a shared horizon of moral or political values, but emerges from the clash between self-choice and the need for social recognition. From this examination, it is possible to conclude that on a structural level of modern society, violence is able to defeat the logic of the general and to challenge the evidence of the political, not in the sense that the violent act of the individual can be more powerful than the power of the state, but in the reverse sense that acts of violence can reveal the powerlessness and inadequacy of the logic of the general. This conclusion might have far-reaching consequences not the least concerning the politics of violence. But we should take care as well to define the outcome more precisely. For, the delineation of the notion “violence of the singular” still comprehends very different manifestations of violence, from ways of self-­ mutilation up to mobbing, random vandalism and mass shootings in cases of negative experiences of social depreciation. They all need additional, contextual and individualized analyses. The violence of the singular does not yet define the violent act of the individual person. In this regard, it is important to remember that the notion “violence of the singular” is meant to identify a structural component of the development of modern society in the way Reckwitz defines the logic of the singular in contemporary society in opposition to the logic of the general. It calls attention to another genealogy of violence in contemporary society and invites us to critically re-examine the strategies and power relations within which the logic of the general acknowledges and defines the meaning of violence.

108 

A. Cools

Notes 1. All translations of quotations from this book are my own. “Die spätmoderne Gesellschaft, das heiβt jene Form der Moderne, die sich seit den 1970er oder 1980er Jahren entwickelt, ist insofern eine Gesellschaft der Singularitäten, als in ihr die soziale Logik des Besonderen das Primat enthält” (Reckwitz 2017, 12). 2. “Die soziale Logik des Besonderen betrifft dabei sämtliche Dimensionen des Sozialen: die Dinge und Objekte ebenso wie die Subjekte, Kollektive, die Räumlichkeiten ebenso wie die Zeitlichkeiten. »Singularität« und »Singularisierung« sind Querschnittsbegriffe und bezeichnen ein Querschnittsphänomen, das die gesamte Gesellschaft durchzieht”(Reckwitz 2017, 12). 3. “In der Moderne konkurrieren eine soziale Logik des Allgemeinen und eine soziale Logik des Besonderen miteinander” (Reckwitz 2017, 27). 4. “Gewalt kann für die Täter so zu einer »attraktiven Lebensform« werden, indem sie verspricht, sie vom Opfer in den negativen Helden zu verwandeln” (Reckwitz 2017, 428, cf. Reemtsma 2016). 5. “Es handelt sich bei ihnen um selbstbewusste negative Singularitäten, die es gezielt darauf angelegt haben, eine negativ bewertete Tat zu begehen. Sie sind gerade keine Gegenstände des Mitleids von anderen. Sie zelebrieren ihre Abweichung, sind »lachende Täter«” (Reckwitz 2017, 426).

Bibliography Arendt, H. (1966). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. Benjamin, W. (1970). “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (1921). In Gesammelte Schriften. Band II.1 (pp. 197–203). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Derrida, J. (1967). “Violence et métaphysique. Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas” (1964). In Idem (Ed.), L’écriture et la différence (pp.  117–228). Paris: Seuil. Girard, R. (1972). La violence et le sacré. Paris: Grasset. Halbertal, M. (2012). On Sacrifice. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Levinas, E. (1974). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. Nijhoff: The Hague. Reckwitz, A. (2017). Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Reemtsma, J. P. (2016). Gewalt als Lebensform. Zwei Reden. Stuttgart: Reclam.

5  The Violence of the Singular 

109

Staudigl, M. (2014). Introduction: Topics, Problems, and Potentials of a Phenomenological Analysis of Violence. In Idem (Ed.), Phenomenologies of Violence (pp. 1–34). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Taylor, C. (2003 [1991]). The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Welten, R. (2006). Zinvol geweld: Sartre, Camus en Merleau-Ponty over terreur en terrorisme. Kampen: Klement.

6 Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion, and the Irreducibility of Violence Jason W. Alvis

It seems impossible to consider violence without an investigation of the role of religion. Put more hyperbolically, religion is one of the key features that gives acts of violence their meaning and phenomenality. It may even be that one of today’s wars concerns the appropriation of religion, given the attempts to commandeer, instrumentalize, and militarize the religious itself. As Derrida understood, in the twentieth century the religious (which is irreducible to being human, 1978a, p. 132) allied itself with tele-technoscience and exploited, as a kind of capitalism by other means, a “mediatization” inherent within the very idea of gospel or “good news.” Yet he also insisted that religion revolts against this tendency from the inside, declaring an internal war against itself as the “immemorial” This essay was written with the generous support of the FWF (Austrian Science Fund). It was conceived within the framework of the project ‘Secularism and its Discontents. Toward a Phenomenology of Religious Violence’ [P 29599], and concluded within the project “Revenge of the Sacred: Phenomenology and the Ends of Christianity in Europe” [P 31919].

J. W. Alvis (*) University of Vienna, Wien, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_6

111

112 

J. W. Alvis

source of authentic faith and sacredness and the means by which a suspension of metaphysical presuppositions of the infinite can take place. He is known for engagements in the question of religion and religiosity beyond the pale of the public understanding of individual “world views,” “belief systems,” or theological dogmas, and instead understood that the modern enlightenment project could never purchase a secularism that successfully extracts the always already religiosity enervating it. He coined terms such as “globalatinization” and “autoimmunity” to investigate the anthropological and social relevance that religion still bears today, albeit most often in an implicit and latent form interwoven into the metaphysical lattice of the Western lifeworld and social imaginary. What I find most fascinating about Derrida’s work in these regards, and what I intend to reveal in greater detail in this chapter, is (A) that in 1964 he presents the importance of how any presumed peace/nonviolence that the “infinitizing the other” attempts to purchase in fact amounts to a silence that harbors “the worst violence,” and that violence is irreducible (and therefore unavoidable) as an essential aspect of language itself. Yet (B) interestingly, 30 years later, he insists upon the importance of “the secret,” of the violence of speaking too much and too affirmatively, thus committing to an ontological violence of the other. It is this seeming contradiction I will work out more fully, interpreting his understanding of religion and violence in his 1998 “Faith and Knowledge” through his critique of “meaning” and infinity in his 1964 “Violence and Metaphysics.” For him “meaning” (attempting to bring to light and expose a single point of origination) and “signification” (as a process void of difference and bound to presence) are violent; yet even more violent is the dark of infinity and metaphysics. True, “it is violence as the origin of meaning and of discourse in the reign of finitude” (Derrida 1978a, p. 129) and “predication is the first violence” (Derrida 1978a, p. 147). Yet we must also be vigilant against both any pure negativity and the nihilisms of self-arrogant claims to nonviolence (the possibility of which gets presupposed in all Ethics), as well as any over-ascription of the meanings of violence, which, when considered in terms of religion, acts as if, by constantly telling the secrets of God via the “good news,” it is purged of all negligence.1 I conclude the chapter with a reflection on violence that seeks to go one small step beyond Derrida’s aporia, hopefully in

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

113

order to avoid both of the extremes that claim violence to be either (A) irreducible and unavoidable or (B) a determinable product of an undergirding cause-effect structure that presumes a neutral, nonviolent stance in the world. The former often abandons hope to describe violence’s intelligibility and falls once again into a bad infinity; the latter tends to operate with a blind optimism that violence is reasonable and therefore can be eradicated once we determine its meaning.

Violence and Metaphysics It is precisely discourses on nonviolence that often harbor, in their philosophical language, a deep and implicit violence. Claiming to elude violence in part is a violent endeavor, with infinity as a supreme version of the denial of discourse (Derrida 1978a, p. 117). Levinas’ critiques of violence of solipsism, abstraction, empiricism, and so on, all are predicated upon how the discourse of the other can be nonviolent. Contra the Levinas of Totality and Infinity (the text to which Derrida devotes his essay and critique; not the entirety of Levinas’ work) for whom in the infinite Other there is “a certain non-light before which all violence is to be quieted and disarmed” (Derrida 1978a, p.  85), Derrida emphasizes (multiple times throughout the chapter) how this abyss of non-light is in fact the worst violence.2 Further, there are originary and transcendental violence that are sutured to “phenomenality itself, and to the possibility of language” and “embedded in the root of meaning and logos” (Derrida 1978a, p. 125).3 This transcendental violence is pre-ethical (Derrida 1978a, p. 125) and concerns phenomenality and meaning; it occurs in the failure to recognize “the me” in the other, the other as an alter ego (Derrida 1978a, p. 129). In general, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida subjects Levinas’ idea of infinity, face, and Other in Totality and Infinity to being a kind of metaphysics of presence because “the face is presence” (Derrida 1978a, p. 101). Although Being as difference, a being-together comes “as close as possible to nonviolence” (Derrida 1978a, p. 146), Derrida’s tendency in this chapter is to hyperbolize by insisting upon how violence is irreducible, as it is found in the very heart of language. Similar to Benjamin’s understanding that there is implicit and institutional violence in capital

114 

J. W. Alvis

production (which also resembles the forms of religion), that there is a violence that constitutes the State, that maintains the State’s founding/ establishing law, and that destroys the law, Derrida seeks to situate our own complicity in violent productions via language. It is in “Force of Law” that Derrida reads Schmitt and Benjamin alongside one another by pointing to the undeconstructabilty of justice, which is the only thing capable of deconstructing the violence of the State with a “to come” that destabilizes our empiricisms. The one thing the State cannot predict or control is this to-come, yet the State is a structure that creates formal constraints that, as Georges Poulet will put it in another context, so easily “betray a mental universe” (Derrida 1978b, p. 13). This plays back into “Violence and Metaphysics,” in which a simultaneous praise/critique is directed toward Levinas. For Levinas, alterity is not just a question of difference, otherness, or estrangement, but also is a kind of ethical, infinite call from alterity itself. This is an Other that is present, an other to come is what haunts us. For Levinas, there is a bad solitude that does not respect the Being and meaning of the Other, and phenomenology and ontology in these respects so easily become philosophies of violence. Relation to alterity holds a violent potential, and Derrida expounds upon Levinas’ claim that to “investigate the other” or bring her under a microscope, is to reduce them to an object or phenomenon. Anyone familiar with Levinas already knows that making the other “the same,” whether by reducing them to being like me, or by reducing them to their present status of phenomenality, can only be rectified by insistence upon how the others face, every time and infinitely, presents itself as something unique as a challenge to me. At every moment, the face says, “do not kill.” Thus, to reduce her to a stable “meaning” necessarily is mean, so I must accept this challenge and, in some respects, turn my aggressive impulses inward toward my own subjectivity. Derrida edits Levinas, pointing to overarching kinds of violence such as “empirical violence” and “transcendental violence.” The former can justify violence and create indifference. It is a means of supporting the latter, often without our seeing it. As for the latter, this is where Derrida turns to a subtle critique of Levinas, building from the claim that even “purity” (see Of Grammatology, 1997b, pp. 244, 235, 290) can become violent. In regard to purity, over which there can be no

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

115

compromise, one excludes the other at all costs to retain it. As Levinas understood, a critique of the metaphysical reduction is also one of the other to the same. To encounter the face of the other is not inherently violent—violence is the interpretation and formal indication of the other. It is a putting-to-an-end of the other’s phenomenality. This is why violence is qualified precisely as a painful lack of phenomenality. Violence is not always an “intentional” experience (e.g. in extreme circumstances of violence we say “I do not have words to describe this”), yet it should not leave us indifferent to its appearance. As Derrida depicts it, the “call” of the other is transcendental, constantly throwing signification at me whether I like it or not. Thus, necessary is a means of understanding how violence arises between one’s meaning-giving system and the event of uncontrollable phenomenality, or to follow the title of his other essay this “form and signification.” Derrida then develops “three levels” of violence via Levinas: (1) the origin of language, or the inscription of the signifier into a generative system; (2) the violence of constructions, which serve to deny original violence; and (3) the violence in the trespassing of laws and ethical rules. All three of these levels are operative in Derrida’s claims that “violence is...the dissimulation or oppression of the other by the same” (1978a, p. 91). Ontology is violence as a defining that removes dynamic agency for change, via limitation of the Other. There is terror in the reductive gaze that makes one an object of another person, and philosophy, in its attempt to attain neutralized distance to ascribe meaning ad infinitum, enacts a violence by following a drastic distinction between the political and the epistemic. This is one reason why “Incapable of respecting the other in its being and in its meaning, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies of violence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition, in its meaning and at bottom, would make common cause with oppression and with the totalitarianism of the same” (1978a, p. 91). It is this cryptotheological tradition (especially claiming to have purged itself through a thorough detheologization) merged and mingled with a psuedo apoliticism/ethicism that has amounted to a metaphysics of infinity. It is here that violence takes its revenge most fully: Violence, certainly, appears within the horizon of an idea of the infinite. But this horizon is not the horizon of the infinitely other, but of a reign in

116 

J. W. Alvis

which the difference between the same and the other, différance, would no longer be valid, that is, of a reign in which peace itself would no longer have meaning. And first of all because there would be no more ­phenomenality or meaning in general. The infinitely other and the infinitely same, if these words have meaning for a finite being, is the same. (Derrida 1978a, p. 129)4

Phenomenality, a kind of meaning and intelligibility, gets completely crossed out when reliance upon the infinite is held as an overarching principle. The Absolute becomes a totality. And here lies Derrida’s critique of Levinas in its most distilled form: “infinitely other” also runs the risk of becoming a violent concept because it reigns supreme, not just with authority, but with dominion. And this is the cryptotheology that can rear its head in a form of violence whenever reference is made to the infinity of “the other.” By no means is this a critique of theology in toto, but rather, a critique of a theology that relies upon a Platonic eidos as a reference point of infinity that constantly terrorizes the mind with a kind of unthinkability and therefore banality. For Derrida, Levinas’ very idea of experience was always theological: “Levinas understood experience in a ‘metatheological, meta-ontological, meta-phenomenological manner’ as ‘the encounter of the absolute other’” (1978a, p. 85).

 he Violence of Meaning: The Metaphysics T of Presence This implicates Derrida’s critiques of structuralism, in the earlier “Force and Signification” essay. Structuralism relaxes its attention to force and instead attends to form—“form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force” (Derrida 1978b, p.  4), and this makes the structural perspective “interrogative and totalitarian” (Jean-Pierre Richard interpreted by Derrida 1978b, p. 6). Structuralism is driven by the power to “illuminate,” and form is a diversion from seeing the thing itself. Structuralism tries to distance itself from metaphor, but instead even more vigorously relies upon the hegemony of the metaphor of “light”: This becomes strangely a violence in the dark and unknown that over-

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

117

looks how the play of meaning overflows signification, as structures “betray the mental universe” (1978b, p. 13). In “Force and Signification,” Derrida is saying that expression concerns the process of the future-oriented force of signification, which is not so much an act, but an expression (recall that Derrida critiques Husserl for his limitation of expression and the privileging of “indication”). Expression is more of a volcanic impulse that erupts, a pushing out (ex-pression) than it is the description of a past meaning, a being-­ expressed (i.e. Husserlian indication). Signification does not “point back” but instead points forward by creating complex moments or assemblages as the play of meaning always overflows signification. The critique of this kind of “meaning” and phenomenality is made clear in his characterization of the “Metaphysics of Presence” to which he thinks especially Husserl fell prey due to Husserl’s focus on things being given and “presently perceived” as intentional objects on the horizon of consciousness: “the notion of being can arise only when some being, actual or imaginary, is set before our eyes” (Husserl 2001, p. 141). Thus, in Speech and Phenomena, Derrida seeks to demonstrate how phenomenology needs to overcome its allegiance “to intuition as a source of sense and evidence…” which signifies “…the certainty, itself ideal and absolute, that the universal form of all experience…has always been and will always be the present. The present alone is and ever will be” (Derrida 1973, p. 53). Further, “the schema of a metaphysics of presence...relentlessly exhausts itself in trying to make difference derivative” (Derrida 1973, p. 101). The reliance upon this “presencing” and meaning brings an end to the infinite chain of signification, thus contradicting the very hopes of phenomenology to turn to the phenomenon “as it if were the first time.” What makes this “metaphysics of presence” metaphysical is its presumption and reliance upon an absolutely and infinitely irreducible, yet inaccessible “other” source. The metaphysics of presence presumes “sense” as presence. If one could speak of a solution to this problem, it would be Derrida’s différance, which “is always older than presence and procures for it its openness” (Derrida 1973, p. 68); helps hold back any totalizing power of “purity”; and inherently concerns dialogue, signification, and the holding open of the intelligibility and phenomenality of the Other in a way that the ex-pression does not objectify her.

118 

J. W. Alvis

 iolence of Nonviolence in “Violence V and Metaphysics” Returning now to sum up “Violence and Metaphysics,” despite the many convincing arguments throughout the chapter, scholars tend to draw attention to how Derrida leaves us with the somewhat “dark” insistence that violence is everywhere (because it is imbedded in language) and the only “solution” is to pit violence against violence; to commit a kind of “soft violence” so we do not commit the “worst violence.” It is a full-­ throttled Faustian bargain in which we must reach a compromise with some form of violence. Derrida will follow Levinas’ critique of “light” and phenomenology’s insistence upon illumination, enlightenment, objective manifestation, and the like. But then Derrida also critiques pure “darkness,” which he aligns with peace, silence, and inactivity. Where Wittgenstein preferred “silence,” Derrida prefers writing and discourse (without privileging, like the Structuralists, “oral speech”): If light is the element of violence, one must combat light with a certain other light, in order to avoid the worst violence, the violence of the night which precedes or represses discourse. This vigilance is a violence chosen as the least violence by a philosophy which takes history, that is, finitude, seriously; a philosophy aware of itself as historical in each of its aspects (in a sense which tolerates neither finite totality, nor positive infinity), and aware of itself, as Levinas says in another sense, as economy. (Derrida 1978a, p. 117)

One must become vigilant about one’s own violence, one’s own polemos in language and dialogue. The denial of discourse is this “worst violence” (Derrida 1978a, p. 117). This implicates another kind of violence, which Levinas also emphases—“Ontological Violence,” because being and discourse are always necessarily related (following Heidegger’s insights). There is but one “way to repress the worst violence, the violence of primitive and prelogical silence, of an unimaginable night which would not even be the opposite of day, an absolute violence which would not even be the opposite of nonviolence: nothingness or pure non-sense.” This way is to avow violence “the least possible violence” in discourse, which “if it

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

119

is originally violent, can only do itself violence, can only negate itself in order to affirm itself ” (Derrida 1978a, p. 130).

Derrida on Religion, Faith, and Knowledge As mentioned in the introduction, over 30 years after the publication of “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida lays emphasis upon how violence can be enacted more so from another version of light—of trying to tell “the secret,” and therefore spreading the news or interpretation as to what one believes the secrets of the world, metaphysics, and God to be. This opens onto the question and role of religion, in part how “metaphysics as the ancestry of light” (Derrida 1978a, p. 118) is violent. First, and before making explicit what Derrida referred to as the “two sources of religion,” it is helpful to highlight four of Derrida’s treatments of religion, or in some respects a “religion” that is not simply one among many phenomena of cultural production, but rather one conceived according to a deep “religiosity of the religious” (Derrida 1978a, p.  91); for “the co-­ extensiveness of the two questions (religion and worldwide Latinization) marks the dimensions of what cannot henceforth be reduced to a question of language, culture” (Derrida 1978b, p. 30). These four treatments, which in many respects are fully intertwined, revolve around (1) religion as globalatinization; (2) religion as suspension of religion; (3) autoimmunity of religion; (4) religion as means of understanding absolute alterity. 1) Religion (Christianity) is described under the portmanteau Globalatinization (mondialatinisation); Latin—the common language of the global Roman empire—becomes the great-commission language of especially Western Christianity. There is a unique universality in Christianity via its lingua franca, Latin.5 Globalization and mediatization go hand in hand, thus making the European ideal and theory of religion inherently Christian.6 Latin establishes religare or relegare, the very roots of the word “religion”  that refers to a kind of “binding together.” This aforementioned dissemination goes entirely in contradiction to the Jewish Yahweh’s demand of Abraham, “all of this must remain absolutely secret: just between us. It must remain unconditionally private, our internal affair and inaccessible” (Derrida 2001,

120 

J. W. Alvis

p.  56). Thus the title of this article from Derrida “Above All, No Journalists!” God says to keep a secret, and do not broadcast, publicize, proclaim, what God commanded Abraham to do; do not make this secret into good news, and do not televise it. Globalatinization, as a means, form, and way hence structure the contemporary types of globalization today, which is “fundamentally Christian and not Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist” (Derrida 2001, p. 58).7 This latter point is exemplified strongly in St. Paul’s depiction of the worldlessness of the Gospel. The universalizing, cosmopolitical necessity of religion breaks it out of the private sphere, and Christianity spreads its Graeco-Roman wings.8 This does not entail that Derrida prefers Judaism over Christianity per se, but simply wishes to point out a certain fact to which he is opposed; namely, “any thinking within any religion that leaves no place for the secret” (as Naas so succinctly puts it).9 Naturally, for Derrida, there are “phenomena of mediatization in all religions... [but there is]…a trait that is absolutely singular in the power and structure of Christian mediatization” (Derrida 2001, p. 58).10 The media is the message here, and as Derrida, three years after writing “Faith and Knowledge,” puts it: If I have allowed myself to resort to the rather clumsy term ‘globalatinization’ [mondialatinisation], it is also in order to question what is going on when a non-Christian says, ‘Islam, or Judaism, or Buddhism is my religion’. He begins by naming that in a Latin manner. I don’t know if there is a word for ‘religion’ in Arabic, but it is certainly not an adequate translation of ‘religion’. Is Judaism a ‘religion’? Buddhism is certainly not a religion. (Derrida 2001, p. 74)

Globalatinization, the current means and form of Christianity informing the world, in other words cannot stop speaking or developing its words, and falls into both ontological violence (in part because it traps itself in soliloquy) as well as the “worst violence” described in “Violence and Metaphysics.” The presumed “peace” of globalization and cosmopolitanism, by seeking to be transparent, to make everything that is implicit explicit, and not keep secrets, is but the negative backside of Derrida’s

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

121

critique of Levinas’ supposed nonviolence and silence. It is a religion of too much light, of violation and objectivity, giving us our own sense of domination and powerful mastery. Here with globalatinization, we see light and infinity merge into this aforementioned worst violence. 2) This leads to point two, which is a more implicit thread running through “Faith and Knowledge”—religion is the suspension of religion. The basis of the phenomenological method is the epoché, suspension, or bracketing of a running thesis or presupposition momentarily in order to bring a thing’s various valences and strata under investigation in an unprecedented way. Religion, especially given its insistences on rebirth, has always been understood to operate similarly on the spiritual level. As Derrida once wondered, perhaps “even to suspend for an instant one’s religious affiliation...[is] the very resource, since time immemorial, of the most authentic faith or of the most originary sacredness” (Derrida 1998, p. 23). This is an inversion of how we typically understand religion today in its globalatinized forms, as that naughty metaphysics of presence composed of various predicative claims and assertions of values. Instead, religion as suspension wages war against that which constantly threatens it internally— the metaphysics of presence that seeks to dislodge this suspension from its proper role of the taking place of its unique truths as manifestation. It should be mentioned here that this suspension is not a pure negation, thus succumbing to nihilism, but rather, following his 1986 essay “Denegations,” is a Nietzschean affirmation that has gone through the trial of the negative, motivated by finding something worthy of affirmation. To stop with suspension would be to prove right all of those critics of “deconstruction”—that Derrida is merely a nihilist and critic, with nothing positive to affirm (I will return to this point later in the conclusion). 3) Point two is quite similar to the third that there is an “autoimmunity” of Religion: there are certain responses to, or prices of globalatinization. For example, Islam is the religion most resistant to forms of

122 

J. W. Alvis

mediatization, to keeping Allah free from multiple interpretations.11 Derrida is critical also of mediatization for its interruptions of the secret, seeking to make them public and identify them with a universal language or tongue. The at once “political, economic, and religious” (Derrida 2001, p.  62) of Christian hegemony arises in Globalatinization, even though Judaism and Islam (as the most resistant to certain globalatinized forms of universalization and mediatization) also engage in globalization. This has led to certain cultural results—an autoimmunity of these religions, in how they adopt the prevalent “form” of Christianity. As Derrida argues, “even those who, through acts of terrorist violence, claim to oppose this violent Europeanization, this violent Americanization, do so most often using a certain technical, techno-scientific, sometimes techno-­ economic-­scientific Europeanization” (Derrida and Chérif 2008, p. 61). Other religions use the technologies of Christianity, and in doing so undermine themselves. Christianity “has won,” so to speak, the battle for the globe. Yet Christianity also has an autoimmune function. It has created its own discontents through its means, thus harming itself. In its media and televising of itself, it presents a phony theory of time, of a metaphysics of presence via the voice: “In Christian televisualization, global because Christian, we confront a phenomenon that is utterly singular, that ties the future of media, the history of the world development of media, from the religious point of view to the history of ‘real presence,’ of the time of the mass and of the religious act” (Derrida 2001, pp. 58–59). 4) Finally, for Derrida, religion is a means of understanding absolute alterity. Derrida is not interested in religion as a state of being, but rather as an act of religio-sity. It is in this context that he returns to the etymology of religion. It often is a matter of debate as to whether Religio is rooted in either relegere (gathering, returning, starting over modestly and with piety) or religare (tying, binding, obligation, debt to God). Thus we should seek tendencies “common to the two sources of meaning thus distinguished” (Derrida 1998, p. 34). And in both cases “what is at issue is indeed a persistent bond that bonds itself first

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

123

and foremost to itself. What is at issue is indeed a reunion... a ­resistance or a reaction to disjunction. To absolute alterity” (Derrida 1998, p. 37). Following Derrida’s claim that “religion is the response,” religion is responsive, responsible, and marks the ability to respond (Derrida 1998, p.  26), this autoimmunity resists infinitely whatever seeks to pacify or quarantine religious life by parsing religion into little formulae in order to “sell it” on the world market. An infinite resistance to what might be referred to as an implicit weaponization of religion, following Derrida, may be today’s most true act of faith in relation to absolute alterity, yet it is able to resist allowing the religious to become entirely a form of “absolute” totalizing domination, precisely because it resists this absolutization absolutely.

 ountering the Supposed Nonviolence C of Globalatinization with Religion Itself Next, and of crucial importance for drawing the consistencies and similarities between “Faith and Knowledge” and “Violence and Metaphysics” is a deeper understanding of the “two sources” of religion (as Derrida summons the spirit of Bergson) I briefly sketched above. In short, these two sources are (1) a supposed peaceful and holy globalatinization (which “produces, weds, exploits the capital and knowledge of tele-­mediatization” 1998, p. 82), and (2) the auto-immunitive action that attacks the supposed holiness, sacredness and “immunity” of such globalatinization. Earlier in the essay, these two experiences “that are generally held to be equally religious” are described in other terms: The experience of belief, on the one hand (believing or credit, the fiduciary or the trust worthy in the act of faith, fidelity, the appeal to blind confidence, the testimonial that is always beyond proof, demonstrative reason, intuition); and the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holiness, on the other. (Derrida 1998, p. 70)12

Even though these two sources can be compared with one another, especially since they fall under the generative idea of “religion,” to

124 

J. W. Alvis

Derrida’s dismay, we far too often confuse them with one another, instead of distinguishing them rightly as two veins, strata, or sources. The first, the experience of belief, “I believe!” becomes translated into “therefore believe me!” thus making it an imperative and message for others also to believe. The second is how this concrete belief always gets troubled by being at an absolute loss regarding purity/holiness and sacredness (between the two Levinas is known for making an important distinction). Most essential to understanding the supposed peace (yet necessary violence) of the former, the first source of religion, is a rather long reference to the violence of peace via globalatinization: This declaration of peace can also, pursuing war by other means, dissimulate a pacifying gesture, in the most European-colonial sense possible. Inasmuch as it comes from Rome, as is the case, it would try...in Europe, upon Europe, to impose surreptitiously a discourse, a culture, a politics and a right, to impose them on all the other monotheist religions, including the non-Catholic Christian religions. Beyond Europe, through the same schemes and the same juridico-theologico-political culture, the aim would be to impose, in the name of peace, a globalatinization. The latter become henceforth European-Anglo-American in its idiom, as we said above. The task seems all the more urgent and problematic (incalculable calculation of religion for our times) as the demographic disproportion will not cease henceforth to threaten external hegemony, leaving the latter no strategems other than internalization. [...T]his war or of this pacification is henceforth without limit: all the religions, their centres of authority, the religious cultures, states, nations or ethnic groups that they represent have unequal access, to be sure, but one that is immediate and potentially without limit, to the same world market. They are at the same time producers, actors and sought-after consumers, at times exploiters, at times victims. is thus the access to world (transnational or trans-state) networks of telecommunication and of tele-technoscience. Hence for the religion ‘in the singular’ accompanies and even precedes the critical and teletechnoscientific reason, it watches over it as its shadow. It is its wake, the shadow of light itself, the pledge of faith, the guarantee of trustworthiness, the fiduciary experience presupposed by all production of shared knowledge, the testimonial performativity engaged in all technoscientific performance as in the entire capitalistic economy indissociable from it. (Derrida 1998, p. 79)

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

125

So here globalatinization falls prey to a deep violence in a slightly different way than Levinas’ insistence upon nonviolence and the infinity of the other in Totality and Infinity. In the name of nonviolence, this religion imposes itself and insists itself to be the proper overlord of all cultures. In order for other world cultures to enter the world market, an implicit blackmail is held over the juridico-theologico-political structures of non-­ Christian nations and cultures. Religion (“in the singular”) via its “faiths­in” becomes a production and performance of dissemination, and it has reached a point in history where it is nearly indistinguishable from the political and economic structures that accompany it in capitalism. In some cases, the supposed freedom of belief creates an anxiety and permanent indebtedness through this economy/fiduciary/faith-in structure. Globalatinization seeks to set up a limitless pacification, even of religion, through putting everything on “the world market” (Derrida 1998, p.  43).13 Religion in turn also gets instrumentalized by often-invisible authorities as a pacification machine that teaches subjects how to submit to authorities (Derrida 1998, p. 38). As for the second source, autoimmunity, it provides the counterbalance of religion through revolting within globalatinization and its crystallization of religion by its spreading of itself (and at times, its diseases that it presents as cures). In response to globalatinization, it reacts immediately, simultaneously, declaring war against that which gives it this new power only at the cost of dislodging it from all its proper places, in truth from place itself from the takingplace of its truth. It conducts a terrible war against that which protects it only by threatening it, according to this double and contradictory structure: immunitary and auto-immunitary. (Derrida 1998, p. 82)

For something to act “autoimmunely” is for it to attack itself without any reflection nor deliberation (auto) in order to restore healing and wholeness (holiness). The aim to achieve holiness is given expression in the return to the infinity of the sacred as a constantly troubling, insecure “leap of faith” where knowledge of that in which one has faith is at a loss as the Absolute. This source of religion’s “auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of

126 

J. W. Alvis

its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of autoimmunity” (Derrida 1998, p. 82).14

Conclusion: The Infinity of Irreducible Violence Overall, following Derrida’s trend of thought in his work on religion, his idea of the infinite in “Violence and Metaphysics” perhaps strangely may fall prey to a nihilism of pure negation and of nothingness—the worst violence. The argument is sound that the lights of the enlightenment are embedded in globalatinization, which are violent in their objectifying “light,” and also in their presumed nonviolence and peace or “darkness.” Yet it becomes necessary to ask back: does not reference to something as irreducible and unavoidable precisely lead to a dead end of thinking, leaving ex-pression and phenomenality once again stillborn? Put otherwise—might the insistence upon the irreducibility of violence amount to a new violence? Again, Derrida seems completely justified to insist upon the metaphysical black hole of supposed peace and nonviolence—an insistence that is predominant in both of the aforementioned essays addressed. We should follow Levinas’ critique of phenomenology as obsession with the light, but we also need to avoid, as Derrida puts it in “Violence and Metaphysics” any obsession with the dark. Since critique is to be directed at both enlightenment and endarkenment, of Aufklärung and Auf-­ dunkelung (to use an impossible German term here), it is our task to develop, not something in between the two as ambivalent (that also is a violence of indifference, as we learn from Derrida elsewhere!) but something that can hold this tension in place. Necessary is something that can refract between light and dark, between the supposed humility of nonviolence (dark infinity) and the hope for transparency, which gives a sense of domination (clarity of light). Without explicitly relying upon Derrida’s reflections in these regards, I elsewhere have referred to the idea of “inconspicuousness” as one way of addressing these extremes for it concerns, on the one hand, what is active with the ability to overcome the totality of spectacles of illumination without simply concerning the dark or obscure;

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

127

while on the other hand does not amount to a full refusal of phenomenality (via the aforementioned banality of unthinkability).15 As for religion today and its violences, Derrida is right to seek out their implicit violences within everyday life. Most of the religion with which we live on a daily basis is implicit and not explicit, contained within seemingly banal rituals and habits. Thus, it would not make much sense to expect violence associated with religion to always be explicit. Yet to presuppose that nonviolence is associable always with the worst violence (presuming the irreducibility of violence) is to overlook how violence hovers between infinite irreducibility and the call to freedom to actively seek overcoming it through peacemaking. Despite not beginning with the presumption of nonviolence in the infinitizing of the Other, Derrida still is driven by a moral hope, or at the very least, a hope beyond hope to do justice (that “undeconstructible” concept). This may not be ethics qua ethics, and only Derrida knows if he personally believes in the possibilities of nonviolence. Yet in short, however, Derrida’s own “irreducibility” (in my view, a new form of infinity via its becoming total and unavoidable) can become a dangerous form of crystalizing the presupposition, and therefore perhaps undermining his very interests in pointing out the culpability of neutrality. Although Derrida seems to point to an intertwining of nonviolence/ violence in the transcendental,16 he more so emphasizes violence’s inescapability, using the phrase “irreducible violence” to refer to how all pre-­ ethical “other relations” point to “Violence itself, or rather the transcendental origin of an irreducible violence” (Derrida 1978a, p. 128). I am employing Derrida’s own strategy from “Violence and Metaphysics,” of revealing the conflictual nature of dialogue, in order to demonstrate how it is possible to rub his own work on religion in the 1980s and 1990s against the grains of his claim to the irreducibility of violence in 1964.17 My overall critique lies in how Derrida runs a great risk by insisting upon violence’s irreducibility, precisely because to do so is to fall back into a new kind of infinity, an infinitization of violence itself. What is of special import here regarding the “Faith and Knowledge” essay is his insistence upon an infinity that infinitely resists infinity—the autoimmune function within religion. This is the kind of irreducibility that insists upon there always being something to reduce and analyze, as deconstruction is

128 

J. W. Alvis

always at work within the work. Even the tearing down of the dichotomies between light/dark, nonviolence/violence, can become itself a new infinite. In general philosophical terms, “irreducibility” concerns the point at which one arrives in an argument when all complexity is claimed to have been dissolved or resolved; a kind of state of the unconditioned. It is an un-analyzable simplicity without explanation (e.g. in Occam’s Razor) that can easily fall into an unconditional claim to non-reductionism. Thus, for Derrida to insist upon violence’s unavoidability in language, ontotheology simply metamorphosizes into ontoviolence. Put otherwise, violence replaces God, Levinas’ infinite other, and becomes the new infinite, the new supreme Absolute by merit of this pure irreducibility. It unfortunately would be the case that banality would then rule again our thoughts of violence via silence and unthinkability, reverting us once again to a “totalitarianism of the neutral” (Derrida 1978a, p. 132), and a form of negating nihilism found so prominently critiqued in Derrida’s “Denegations.” This is precisely the kind of domination Derrida seeks to avoid in his accusations of the dark nihilism of the neutral. To conclude by using Derrida’s own words against him (insofar as “violence appears with articulation...the very elocution of nonviolent metaphysics is its first disavowal”) (Derrida 1978a, p. 147), it seems that the very elocution of the irreducibility of violence in metaphysics is violence’s first disavowal. This then circles back to peace, namely, the secret hopes for a new peace by other means: the peace attained by naming everything inherently, inescapably, and irreducibly violent may succeed in absolving one of responsibility and anxiety, yet it is highly doubtful that reference to this irreducibility can ever stir us from our dogmatic slumbers of apathy, to convert violences into blessings with justice.

Notes 1. Although “Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas” was first published in 1964 in Revue de métaphysique et de morale, nos. 3&4, then three years later published in 1967 in his book L’écriture et la différence (Paris Éditions du seuil, 117–228), I will rely

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

129

primarily upon the 1978 translation “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” in Writing and Difference. 2. This is one reason why Derrida eventually will claim that “by making the origin of language, meaning, and difference the relation to the infinitely other, Levinas is resigned to betraying his own intentions in his philosophical discourse” (Derrida 1978a, p. 151). 3. See Michael Naas (2015b). 4. In a kind of reductio ad absurdum, insistence upon the other as being far too “infinitely” other entails that even the very idea of time is violent!: “In the last analysis, if one wishes to determine violence as the necessity that the other not appear as what it is, that it not be respected except in, for, and by the same, that it be dissimulated by the same in the very freeing of its phenomenon, then time is violence” (Derrida 1978a, p. 133). 5. de Vries interpets Mondialization in this way: “Derrida determines that if religion was ever dead and overcome, in its resurrected form it is much less localizable and predictable than ever before, most manifestly in the ‘cyberspatialized or cyberspaced wars of religion’ or ‘war of religions.’ Religion, the political religions, and religious wars and terrorisms in the contemporary world resist their very own demise or rumors thereof ” (de Vries 2015, p. 499). For an even deeper discussion on this topic, see Gil Anidjar (2009) as well as Asad (2009). 6. Naas makes this as clear as possible: the “essential relationship between mediatization, globalization—what Derrida calls globalatinization— and religion and that, since globalization is first and foremost a Christian phenomenon, only Christianity really deserves to go by the name of religion” Naas continues, for Derrida “religion is today inseparable from the media that have globalatinized it; inseparable from the distribution and ­dissemination of the religious message via books, radio, the Internet, and, especially, for Derrida for whom the medium is indeed always the meaning and the message, television” (Nass 2015a, p. 97). 7. For Derrida, “All these religions are doubtless religions with a universal vocation, but only Christianity has a concept of universality that has been elaborated into the form in which it today dominates both philosophy and international law. There is in St. Paul a concept of cosmopolitanism, a concept of world citizen, of human brotherhood as children of God, etc., which is closer to the concept of universalism as today it dominates the philosophy of international law than are other figures of universalism … Thus one would have to distinguish very precisely the values

130 

J. W. Alvis

of universality hat are at the heart of the three religions called monotheistic. The universalism that dominates global political-juridical discourse is fundamentally Greco-Christian … It is a Christianity speaking a bit of Greek” (Derrida 2001, p. 74). 8. For Derrida the other two monotheisms follow from the “prohibition of the image” (Derrida 2001, p. 58), whereas Christianity emphasizes the necessity, of spreading the good news. Elsewhere in the text, Derrida claims “What Judaism and Islam have in common is this experience of the imperceptible, of transcendence and hence of absence: they are religions of writing, of the experiences … of the infinite deciphering of traces … This is where the experience of the secret is bound up with the experience of the infinite gloss. There where the Thing does not reveal itself, does not manifest itself directly” (Derrida 2001, p. 84). 9. Nass (2015a, p. 99). Indeed Christianity is much more complex than this mere separation between Judaism and Islam via the good news/ secret. It also introduces an important “mourning,” as Naas continues “Christian incarnation is ‘a spiritual incarnation.’ As a result, it would be a religion of mourning, a religion in mourning for the lost body and its virtualization in the Eucharist, a mourning for ‘the Man-God’ that would have, says Derrida, ‘no place … either in Judaism or in Islam,’ which are instead ‘both thoughts of life and of living life in which mourning does not have the founding, originary place it has in Christianity’” (Nass 2015a, p. 99). 10. Naas summarizes this point well “Derrida argues in ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ from the language, namely, Latin, through which Christianity first spread and became a truly global religion, then globalatinization would not simply be a process that religion might or might not undergo but one that it cannot but undergo insofar as it defines the very nature of religion itself. Globalatinization would then be in its essence Christian, even when Judaism or Islam engages in it or pursues its strategies and techniques, and the very category religion, related now both to its Latin roots and to the publicity and mediatization to which it has given rise and from which it has benefited, would be itself an intrinsically Christian notion. From this perspective, then, Christianity would seem to be the only religion, the only set of practices or beliefs, worthy of the name religion” (Nass 2015a, p. 100). 11. Derrida, in Islam, regarding proselytization, “the letter should be repeated, but this repetition without alteration should leave the letter intact and thus efface itself as repetition … The body of the letter is what counts, above all else” (Derrida 2001, p. 88).

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

131

12. To Derrida’s understanding, Heidegger rejected the traditional notion of “belief,” in favor of a thinking imbued with a kind of affirmative faith: “Heidegger wanted a thinking without Glaube in the sense that belief for him was constructed according to authority and the lack of free thought.” Thus, although Heidegger was receptive to sacredness Heidegger was probably more resistant to “dogmatic or credulous belief in authority, to be sure, but also belief according to the religions of the Book....” “We are speaking here of the belief that is demanded, required, of the faithful...” (Derrida 1998, p. 62). 13. Derrida (1998, p. 43). As Raschke interprets “The new ‘war of religion’ is between the ‘Enlightenment’ force of globalization and ‘telemediatization’ on the one hand and the ‘reactive’ force of faith, which is a singularity and has its own ‘place of truth.’ The new war of religion is a profound struggle between ‘faith’ and ‘reason,’ but not in the classic sense at all. While the classic scuffle was between a doctrinal formulation of religious intuitions and revelations that could not be reconciled with either philosophical or ‘plain’ experience, the new battle is between the techno-­ rationalizing ‘war machine’ (Deleuze’s phrase) that ‘deterritorializes’ all significations of faith in the service of a global consumer regnum and the faith’s own reactive violence” (Raschke 2005, p. 1). 14. Derrida continues, “As always, the risk charges itself twice, the same finite risk. Two times rather than one: with a menace and with a chance. In two words, it must take charge of-one could also say: take in trust-the possibility of that radical evil without which good would be for nothing” (Derrida 1998, p. 82). 15. See Alvis (2018, pp. 181–193). 16. As Derrida puts it in regards to nonviolence/violence, “This transcendental origin, as the irreducible violence of the relation to the other, is at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other. It is an economy” (Derrida 1978a, p. 147). 17. See Jean-Luc Marion (2018).

Bibliography Alvis, J. (2018). The Inconspicuous God: Heidegger, French Phenomenology and the Theological Turn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Anidjar, G. (2009). The Idea of an Anthropology of Christianity. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 11(3), 367–393.

132 

J. W. Alvis

Asad, T. (2009). Response to Gil Anidjar. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 11(3), 394–399. Caputo, J.  (1997). The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chérif, M., & Derrida, J. (2008). Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crockett, C. (2017). Derrida After the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. de Vries, H. (2015). Phenomenal Violence and the Philosophy of Religion. In M. Jurgensmeyer, M. Kitts, & M. Jerryson (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion Violence (pp. 496–520). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, J. (1973). Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J.  (1978a). Violence and Metaphysics. In Writing and Difference (A. Bass, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1978b). Force and Signification. In Writing and Difference (A. Bass, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1987). Comment ne pas parler. Dénégations, en Psyché. Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Derrida, J.  (1992). How to Avoid Speaking: Denials. In H.  G. Coward & T. Foshay (Eds.), Derrida and Negative Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press. Derrida, J. (1995). Khora. In T. Dutoit (Ed.), On the Name. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, J. (1997a). A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. In J. Caputo (Ed.), Deconstruction in a Nutshell. New York: Fordham University Press. Derrida, J. (1997b). Of Grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Derrida, J. (1998). Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ Within the Limits of Reason Alone in Acts of Religion. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. (2001). Above All, No Journalists! In H. de Vries & S. Weber (Eds.), Religion and Media (pp. 56–94). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J., & Marion, J.-L. (1999). God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (J.  D. Caputo & M. J. Scanlon, Eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hammerschlag, S. (2016). Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Hart, K., & Sherwood, Y. (Eds.). (2004). Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments. London: Routledge.

6  Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion… 

133

Husserl, E. (2001). Logical Investigations (Vol. 1). London: Routledge. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Llewelyn, J.  (2008). Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mansfield, N. (2006). War and Its Other: Between Bataille and Derrida. Theory & Event, 9, 4. Mansfield, N. (2007). Under the Black Light: Derrida, War, and Human Rights. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 40(2), 151–164. Mansfield, N. (2010). The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida. New  York: Fordham University Press. Marion, J.-L. (2002). Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (J. Kosky, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Marion, J.-L. (2018). The Irreducible. The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (J. Alvis, Trans.). 17(2): 328–337. Mccance, D. (2014). Key Thinkers in the Study of Religion: Derrida on Religion: Thinker of Differance. London: Taylor and Francis. Nass, M. (2008). Derrida from Now On. New York: Fordham University Press. Nass, M. (2015a). Television and Modernity: Jacques Derrida and the Religion of the Media. Media, Culture and Society, 38(1), 96–106. Nass, M. (2015b). Violence and Historicity: Derrida’s Early Readings of Heidegger. Research in Phenomenology, 45, 191–213. Norris, C. (1987). Derrida. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raschke, C. (2005). Derrida and the Return of Religion: Religious Theory After Postmodernism. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 6, 2, 1–2,16. Sneller, R. (2005). God as War: Derrida on Divine Violence. In P. Jonkers & R. Welten (Eds.), God in France: Eight Contemporary French Thinkers on God (pp. 143–164). Leuven: Peeters.

Part III Immanent Violence

7 The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis and Mimesis Nidesh Lawtoo

Does violence have a meaning? And if it has more than one meaning, what reasons could possibly account for a human excess of violent affects that appear to be utterly deprived of rational foundations? To address the timely problematic this volume invites contributors to consider, I shall restrict my focus to a specific concern in continental philosophy with the good and bad emotional effects of representations of violence. At the most general level, this duplicity informs two related but diametrically opposed discourses (logoi) on the heterogeneous effects of fictional representations of violent affects (pathoi) that are constitutive of Western aesthetics—from Greek tragedies to modern plays, war movies to computer games. One posits that an emotional participation in fictional representations of violence serves as a cathartic therapy that purifies spectators of contagious affects like pity and fear according to a classical logos on the therapeutic properties of violent pathos—what I call, cathartic patho-­ logy; the other indicates that fictional representations of violence have the

N. Lawtoo (*) KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_7

137

138 

N. Lawtoo

mysterious power to generate fluxes of affective contagion that transgress the boundaries of visual representation, inject violent and irrational impulses in spectators, and trigger unconscious, contagious, and quite infective bodily reactions that manifest themselves in the real world— what I call, mimetic pathology. These competing diagnostic perspectives are, of course, far from new. They have haunted philosophers and social theorists for a long time, and have sparked politicized controversies in the media in recent time. Ultimately, their genealogy can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, two foundational figures who framed the double meanings of violence that, to this day, continue to inform polarized discussions about the good and bad effects of representations of violence on human behavior.1 And yet, for contemporary philosophers and critical theorists writing in the wake of psychoanalysis, affect theory, and recent discoveries in the neurosciences, the answers to such questions vary not only depending on philosophical, social, or political agendas, but also according to the model of the unconscious they explicitly or, more often, implicitly rely on. In what follows, then, I would like to adopt a diagnostic, transdisciplinary and, ultimately, genealogical approach to delineate the general contours of two competing perspectives on the problematic of violence and the unconscious that latently inform contemporary debates on the good and bad effects of representations of violence. This genealogy stages two antagonistic, yet deeply entangled perspectives that articulate competing hypotheses on the relation between violence and the unconscious. The first focuses on a psychoanalytical tradition that has its modern origins in an Oedipal conception of the unconscious, is implicitly aligned with a therapeutic reading of Aristotle’s enigmatic notion of catharsis and, in a recent anthropological version, finds a contemporary advocate in the French theorist of violence, René Girard. The second recuperates a pre-Freudian, physio-psychological tradition of the unconscious that finds an exemplary manifestation in modernist philosopher-­poets like Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, has its origins in Plato’s critique of the affective and infective side of theatrical mimesis, and finds recent representatives in theories of affect, contagion, and mirroring reflexes concerned with what I have called, for lack of a more original term, the “mimetic unconscious” (Lawtoo 2013).

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

139

The point of this confrontation between the Oedipal and the mimetic unconscious is not to re-enact an ancient quarrel on the virtues and vices of representations of violence—though I will eventually side with an empirical, materialist, and immanent tradition on a subject as elusive as unconscious violence. Nor is it to enter into the historical details that articulate the continuities and discontinuities between these diagnostic traditions—for informed studies already exist on the much-discussed “discovery of the unconscious” (Ellenberger 1970). Rather, my goal is to trace, in broad and admittedly partial strokes, the genealogical contours of two different philosophical models that, to this day, bestow a double diagnostic meaning on the relation between violence and the unconscious. My wager is that in an increasingly digitized world, representations of violence not only seem to have lost their cathartic properties; they might also contribute to generating violent affects that spread contagiously in the real world. But before adjudicating between these competing perspectives, let us consider the two sides of this Janus-faced genealogy.2

Violence and Catharsis: Girard, Freud, Aristotle On the question of violence and the unconscious, René Girard is arguably one of the most incisive contemporary theorists who, after a period of marginalization in the last decades of the twentieth century, is currently returning to give meaning to the human violence that still haunts the twenty-first century. Over the past half-century, Girard, in fact, engaged with a wide range of literary, anthropological, psychological, theological, and philosophical traditions in order to analyze how violence spreads mimetically, and thus contagiously, from self to others, generating actions and reactions that are irrational, automatic and, to a degree, unconscious. This is why Girard says that “in imitation there is always a certain degree of unconsciousness involved” (Girard 2007, p.  59). For Girard, in fact, imitation, violence, and the unconscious are intimately tied, part of a triangular relational structure that gives theoretical meaning to human violence. Understanding how this meaning is constructed in his mimetic theory is the first step to evaluate the validity of catharsis in practice.

140 

N. Lawtoo

Let us recall that the origins of Girard’s account of violence stem from his intersubjective conception of “mimetic desire” that leads subjects to unconsciously desire what others desire. Not just any other, but admired, exemplary others—what he calls “models” or “mediators”—with whom the subject identifies. For Girard, in fact, individual violence is already a relational and thus social violence insofar as it is rooted in a structural dynamic that leads to communal violence. The dynamic that gives meaning to both individual and collective violence can be summarized as follows: first, the subject starts desiring what the other desires, a formula Girard inherits from a Hegelian/Kojèvian philosophical tradition concerned with a master-slave dialectic predicated on “a desire for the other’s desire” (Girard 2010, p. 30); second, the relation with the other/model becomes increasingly “ambivalent,” for the model inevitably turns into an “obstacle” on the path of a mimetic desire directed toward a now contested “object.” And third, a dialectical fight to the death for the same “object” (which can be a human being, often a woman) is set in motion, framing the subject, the model, and the object in a rivalrous triangular structure that generates violent affects, which, in turn, can spread contagiously from self to others involving entire communities and societies at large. Here is how Girard articulates the logic of this unconscious dynamic in Violence and the Sacred (1972): “The more frenzied the mimetic process becomes, caught up in the confusion [tourbillon] of constantly changing forms, the more unwilling men are to recognize that they have made an obstacle of the model and a model of the obstacle. Here we encounter a true ‘unconscious’ [le véritable inconscient est là] and one that can obviously assume many forms (Girard 1972, p. 189).” This is a schematic account of a complex and wide-ranging theory, but it already reveals a fundamental structural point: Girard’s conception of the “true ‘unconscious’” is protean, adaptable, and manifests itself in “many forms;” yet its underlying structure rests on a privileged form. Despite, or perhaps because of, Girard’s critical stance toward psychoanalysis, at the structural level, the analogies between Girard and Freud run deep and provide latent building blocks that give a specifically diagnostic meaning to violence: Girard’s general emphasis on desire as the defining feature of subjectivity, his reliance on a triangular form that distinguishes between two emotional ties (desire and mimesis), his emphasis

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

141

on the “ambivalence” and “rivalry” that emerge from this triangulation and opens up a door to the “true unconscious” as well as to a “royal road to violence” (voie royale de la violence) (Girard 1972, p. 8) can be read as an innovative extension, deft inversion, and structural re-articulation of a triangular, familial, and Oedipal unconscious promoted by the father of psychoanalysis. “Be like me and don’t be like me,” the father figure unconsciously suggests to the Oedipal child, says Freud in The Ego and the Id (1923).3 And out of this double bind emerges a new, universalizing, yet not entirely original theory of unconscious desires and rivalries that structures Girard’s account of violent pathos—or patho-logy. This logos on mimetic pathos is not singular but plural and involves different disciplinary discourses: it accounts for the psycho-logy of mimetic rivalries that generate ambivalent and violent affects like jealously, ressentiment, and revenge, all of which find exemplary representations in Greek tragedies and Romantic novels; it offers an anthropo-logical hypothesis on the origins of culture based on the murder of a sacrificial victim, or scapegoat, Girard hypothetically posits in illo tempore; and it provides a theo-logical narrative that ties the immanence of psychic and social violence to a transcendental, religious, and ultimately Christian revelation.4 Girard’s mimetic theory, in other words, entails a transdisciplinary attempt to give patho-logical meaning to violence in terms that connect individual, social, and religious perspectives within a unifying, logically coherent, and potentially universalizing system. So far, so good. But how did such a system emerge in the first place? If we are genealogically attentive to what Nietzsche calls the “conditions and circumstances” that give birth to a theory,5 we should specify that Girard’s model of the unconscious that in-forms (gives form to) his diagnostic of violence, is implicitly based on a second, less visible, more ancient, but not less Freudian theoretical assumption. It not only explains the origins of violence by stressing the logic of rivalry that ties the subject and the model in a mimetic double bind; it also offers a possible patho-­ logical solution to a human, all too human violence by emphasizing its cathartic function. Starting with Violence and the Sacred, in fact, Girard develops a psycho-anthropological theory whereby the violent pathos triggered by the unconscious dynamic of mimetic desire is discharged on

142 

N. Lawtoo

an innocent sacrificial victim, or “scapegoat,” whose death entails a therapeutic effect for the community insofar as it has the power to generate what he repeatedly calls, “catharsis.” Hence Girard writes: “In societies where sacrifice is still a living institution it displays [a] cathartic function” (Girard 1972, p. 99); he adds, “if the sacrificial catharsis actually succeeds in preventing the unlimited propagation of violence, a sort of infection is in fact being checked” (p.  30); and he specifies: “There is every reason to believe that the minor catharsis of the sacrificial act is derived from that major catharsis circumscribed by collective murder” (p. 102). Violence, for Girard, is thus not only pathological. If it is channeled against a sacrificial victim, what he calls a “scapegoat” (or pharmakos), it can also work as a “remedy” (or pharmakon) that purges the community of mimetic violence. For Girard, this is how rituals, religion, and culture are actually born: that is, as a reproduction of the original sacrificial crisis, or collective murder, that brings about a cathartic social effect with unifying social functions. Clearly, within this theory, the irrationality of violent pathos is put to a meaningful social use. In a way, violence even generates meaning insofar as it is out of sacrificial rituals predicated on a re-enactment of a violent crisis that, for Girard, religion, culture, and laws are born. Girard is talking about the cathartic effects of sacrificial rituals that reproduce the original founding murder he hypothetically posits at the origins of culture. Yet, since he sees a mimetic continuity between sacrificial acts in the real world and tragic spectacles in the aesthetic world—or, rather, infers, via a hermeneutical effort, the violence of the sacred from the violence of Greek tragedy—his cathartic hypothesis endows his reading of tragic spectacles with a therapeutic meaning as well. As he puts it: “If tragedy was to function as a sort of ritual, something similar to a sacrificial killing had to be concealed in the dramatic and literary use of catharsis” (Girard 1972, p. 291). For Girard, then, a discharge, or purification of violent affects at play in the participation in sacrificial rituals continues to operate, at one additional remove, in Greek tragedies that re-present (present again, for the second time) ritual sacrifices to an audience positioned at an aesthetic distance from a scene of violence. Here is how Girard sums up his cathartic hypothesis in a passage that reveals further traces of the genealogical origins of his theory of violence:

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

143

If we wish to complete our picture of the various meanings of katharsis we must return, once more, to Greek tragedy…I have already established that tragedy springs from mythic and ritual forms. As for the function of tragedy, Aristotle has already defined it for us. In describing the tragic effect in terms of katharsis he asserts that tragedy can and should assume at least some of the functions assigned to ritual in a world where ritual has almost disappeared. (Girard 1972, p. 290)

The death of ritual, in Girard’s view, brings about the birth of tragedy, in the sense that tragedy re-presents (presents again) in fictions the sacrificial violence rituals previously enacted in real life. We move from the anthropology of violence to the aesthetic effects of tragedy, yet the cathartic effect remains essentially the same insofar as tragedy, for Girard, “springs” from ritual sacrifice. Genealogical lenses attentive to the conditions of emergence of a rational logos out of a violent pathos confirm that a contemporary theory that attributes to violence a therapeutic, religious, and structural meaning continues to rest on an ancient philosophical diagnostic. Aristotle’s Poetics is, in fact, the key text that allows Girard to bridge the divide between ritual and tragedy, anthropology and aesthetics, physical participation in violence and visual representation of violence. In his view, “Aristotle’s text is something of a manual of sacrificial practices, for the qualities that make a ‘good’ tragic hero are precisely those required of the sacrificial victim” (Girard 1972, p. 291). And revealing his paradigmatic example of tragic play upon which his theory of the scapegoat rests, Girard adds: As we have seen, the tragic figure of Oedipus becomes the original katharma. Once upon a time a temple and an altar on which the victim was sacrificed were substituted for the original act of collective violence; now there is an amphitheater and a stage [un théâtre et une scène] on which the fate of the katharma, played out by an actor, will purge [purgera] the spectators of their passions and provoke a new katharsis, both individual and collective. This katharsis will restore the health and well-being of the community. (p. 290; my emphasis)

Catharsis not only as the effect of sacrificial violence, then; but, rather catharsis as the purgative effect of a tragic representation of violence

144 

N. Lawtoo

whose “original” model is based on the case of Oedipus. The structural analogies that turn the pathos of unconscious violence into a meaningful clinical logos have been accumulating. Girard not only relies on Oedipus as the paradigmatic case study to frame the unconscious mechanisms of triangular desire and the ambivalent/rivalrous relation to the model it entails—a psychological move reminiscent of Freud’s second topography in The Ego and the Id (psycho-logical hypothesis). Nor does he solely develop the hypothesis of a founding sacrificial murder at the origins of culture—an anthropological move that recalls Freud’s speculative insights in Totem and Taboo (anthropo-logical hypothesis); though he does both these things. Above all, Girard borrows the concept of catharsis from Aristotle’s Poetics in order to articulate the therapeutic relation between violence and the unconscious—a diagnostic move reminiscent of what Freud, at the dawn of psychoanalysis in Studies on Hysteria (1895), called the “cathartic method” (cathartic hypothesis). There is an interesting theoretical loop at play in this triangulation between Girard, Freud, and Aristotle that, to my knowledge, has not been explored before and that we need to unravel if we want to evaluate how a therapeutic meaning is further injected into violence, especially violence that is not under the control of consciousness and is, in this sense, un-conscious. Schematically put, if Aristotle’s theory of catharsis has its origins in archaic rituals and culminates in tragic plays, Girard— via the mediation of Freud—inverts the process and maps the aesthetic concept of catharsis from Greek plays back to real life. The mirroring inversion, in turn, generates striking symmetries between the cathartic effects of violence in Greek tragedy (Aristotle), in the Oedipal unconscious (Freud), and in sacrificial rituals (Girard), mimetic symmetries that all rest on a tendentious medical account of catharsis as purgative therapy of violent, contagious, and pathological affects. Since attempts to give clinical meaning to violence, as we have seen, emerge from specific genealogical connections, let us now ask: where does this medical interpretation of catharsis come from? The idea that catharsis, for Aristotle, entailed a purgation of emotions that could be considered pathological was in the air in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was promoted by Jacob Bernays, a classicist specialized in Aristotle who also happened to be the uncle of Sigmund Freud’s wife,

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

145

Martha Bernays. Inspired by Bernays’s theory of catharsis as a “purgation” of “pathological” emotions (Bernays 2006, p. 164), Freud transferred the Aristotelian concept of catharsis from aesthetics to psychology in order to attempt to cure a mental pathology that was much en vogue in fin-de-­ siècle Europe, had attracted the attention of prominent physicians, most notably Jean-Martin Charcot, and still remained unexplained: namely, hysteria. Along with his colleague, the physician and experimental psychologist Joseph Breuer, the young Freud first developed the so-called cathartic method in Studies on Hysteria in order to offer a therapeutic solution to patients who suffered from hysterical pathologies, which, in the physicians’ view, were meaningfully connected with “reminiscences” of traumatic events in early childhood. Hence, the physicians turned the Aristotelian notion of “catharsis” into a therapeutic “method” that would pave the way for the discovery of the Oedipal unconscious. They argued that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (Freud and Breuer 1955, p. 7) and that an affective recollection of Oedipal traumas is necessary for a cathartic cure to ensue. As Freud and Breuer put it, the cathartic method, brings to an end the operative force of the idea which was not abreacted in  the first instance, by allowing its strangulated affects [eingeklemmten Affekte] to find a way out through speech [Rede]; and it subjects it to associative correction by introducing it into normal consciousness (under light hypnosis) or by removing it through the physician’s suggestion, as is done in somnambulism accompanied by amnesia. (p. 16)

This method, in other words, relied on hypnotic techniques to put the patient in an altered state of consciousness and, through speech, attempt to cure psychic traumas via a catharsis of repressed affects. How? Via an affective re-enactment or dramatization (what Plato called mimesis) of the very affect that had not been allowed outlet and had been “strangulated” instead. As Freud reminisces later in his career: “Under the treatment, therefore, ‘catharsis’ came about when the path to consciousness was opened and there was a normal discharge of affect;” and he adds: “an essential part of this theory was the assumption of the existence of unconscious mental processes” (Freud 1923, p.  211). The cathartic ­ method and the birth of psychoanalysis can thus not easily be dissociated,

146 

N. Lawtoo

if only because it is thanks to this method that Freud gives an Oedipal meaning to his diagnostic of the unconscious. We know the vicissitudes of what followed: Freud will abandon the cathartic treatment via hypnosis as well as the “seduction theory” it implied in favor of the method of “free associations;” he will also turn the idea of real familial traumas into psychic traumas predicated on a repressive hypothesis on the unconscious that has Oedipal dreams as a via regia. The success of this “Freudian legend” (Ellenberger 1970, p. 574) can be gauged by that fact that it is primarily thanks to Freud that when the notion of “catharsis” is invoked outside of specialized circles, it is still in Bernays’s medical sense of purgation of psychic pathologies that allow for some discharge of affect with therapeutic properties. Now, since Girard, on the shoulders of Freud, borrows the notion of catharsis from Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 BC) genealogists interested in the therapeutic meanings of violence might wonder: what is the relation between catharsis and violence for Aristotle himself? And, more generally, what shall we make of contemporary therapeutic appropriations of an aesthetic theory that endows violence with a cathartic meaning constitutive not only of Greek tragedies but of contemporary psycho-social realities as well? There are no easy answers to the first question. Aristotle’s theory of katharsis in Poetics is notoriously obscure, has puzzled classicists since its rediscovery in the Renaissance, and ultimately eludes definitive explanations. For our purpose, suffice to recall that Aristotle argued, contra Plato, or better, as a direct reply to Plato, that Greek tragedy does not generate irrational forms of mimetic contagion that threaten the stability of the body politic. On the contrary, tragedy is based on a representation (mimesis) of and action (muthos) whose specific formal properties have the power to generate the catharsis of contagious emotions, such as pity and fear. As Aristotle famously puts it in chapter 6 of Poetics: “Tragedy, then, is a representation of an action which is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude….in the mode of dramatic enactment, not narrative and through the arousal of pity and fear effect the catharsis of such emotions” (Aristotle 1987, p. 37). Catharsis is left untranslated here for it belongs to what Barbara Cassin groups under the category of “untranslatables” (Cassin 2014). It is generally understood that by watching a tragedy, spectators identify with the suffering of the hero, vicariously experience

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

147

her/his pity and fear, and through this affective participation experience the catharsis of these emotions. But why should catharsis be linked to the violent pathos of tragedy in such a therapeutic way? To address the riddle, classicists have stressed the importance of both re-inscribing this enigmatic concept in its original ritual context, and of situating it in the philosophical context of Aristotle’s Poetics in particular and of his philosophy in general. Let us schematically recapitulate these two related perspectives. On the one hand, Barbara Cassin and her collaborators in Dictionary of Untranslatables (2004) explain that the notion of “catharsis” has ritual origins that can be traced back to the ritual of Thargelia, in which a scapegoat (pharmakos) was sacrificed for purification purposes. As they put it: “Katharsis is an action noun corresponding to the verb kathairô (clean, purify, purge). Initially it had the religious sense of ‘purification’ and referred particularly to the ritual of expulsion practiced in Athens on the eve of the Thargelia” (Cassin 2014, p. 126). And summing up the diagnostic of the original ritual function of catharsis they specify: as a remedy—Greek, to pharmakon, the same word in the neuter gender, as the one designating the scapegoat—katharsis, implies more precisely the idea of a homeopathic medicine: purgation is a way of curing harm by harm, the same by the same, and it is also why every pharmakon is a ‘poison’ as much as a ‘remedy,’ the dosage of the harmful thing alone producing a good result. (pp. 126–127)

This theory of the original meaning of katharsis owes much to Jacques Derrida’s diagnostic of the Platonic pharmakon.6 And this diagnostic equally informs Girard’s claims that “Plato’s pharmakon is like Aristotle’s katharsis” (Girard 1972, p. 296) in the double, Derridean/Platonic sense that the cathartic effect of sacrificing a scapegoat (pharmakos) functions as both a poison and a cure (pharmakon). Hence this pharmaceutical double meaning is not only internal to Girard’s theory of unconscious violence but also partially justifies translations of catharsis in terms of “purgation” of pathological emotions that require a ritual participation to turn the poison in the remedy. Lastly, it opens the door to a conception of the unconscious that, in its Freudian, Girardian, or Derridean variants,

148 

N. Lawtoo

continues to rely on a tragic play that gives a specifically Oedipal meaning to the origins of violence. On the other hand, contemporary commentators of the Poetics have tended to restrict catharsis to a specifically aesthetic frame that calls for an articulation of both affective and rational responses to representations of violent pathos. Stephen Halliwell, for instance, a specialist of Aristotle’s Poetics upon whose translation I rely, is skeptical of the purgation hypothesis and stresses the aesthetic (as opposed to the therapeutic and ritual) properties of Aristotle’s account of katharsis. Thus, he writes: the likelihood presents itself that katharsis does not stand for a notion of pure outlet or emotional release, still less for a discharge of pathological emotions. It is more probable that the idea of release is only part of a more complex concept built around Aristotle’s belief that the emotions have a natural and proper role in the mind’s experience of reality. (Halliwell 1987, p. 90)

This does not mean that the pathos of violence, which is central to katharsis, can simply be subordinated to a rational logos. Aristotle, for one, mentions the centrality of “a destructive and painful action, such as visible deaths, torments woundings, and other things of the same time” (Aristotle 1987, p. 43) in the generation of pity and fear and the catharsis that follows. Still, the father of cathartic theory consistently subordinates such representations of violence to specific formal properties of tragedy, most notably the “reversal” (peripeteia) and “recognition” (anagnôrisis) that define a complex plot structure such as Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (429 BC). Thus, Aristotle specifies in chapter 7 that “tragedy’s greatest means of emotional power are components of the plot-structure, namely reversals and recognitions” (p. 38). On the basis of a close reading of Poetics and a comparison with other accounts of catharsis (most notably in Politics), Halliwell argues that what is at stake in catharsis for Aristotle is a “form of conversion of painful into pleasurable emotion within the contemplation (theôria) of mimetic simulations of reality” (Halliwell 2011, p. 31). In his account, it is this complex structure that generates a form of ­“emotional understanding” (p. 30), or, in our language, a patho-logy that converts a violent and irrational pathos into a pleasurable and rational logos.

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

149

In sum, the patho-logy at play in catharsis is not the product of simple exposure to, or participation in, violent, painful, and bloody spectacles, as Girard argues; nor is it the result of a discharge of pathological and traumatic emotions, as Bernays, and later Freud suggest. Rather katharsis is linked to both mimetic pathos and representational distance; and out of the combination of pathos and distance a patho-logy emerges that gives a double therapeutic meaning to the violence constitutive of tragedy. This also means that the view of catharsis as “outlet,” “purge,” and “release” dominant in the nineteenth century is far removed from Aristotle’s intended philosophical meaning. As the classicist Gerald Else confirms, there is “not a hint [in the Poetics] that the end of drama is to cure or alleviate pathological states” (Else 1967, p. 440). Still, thanks to its theoretical recuperation by influential figures concerned with the unconscious meaning of violence, perhaps more than with Aristotle’s thought, the idea of cathartic cure continues to cast a theoretical shadow on the twenty-­ first century.7 But does it necessarily follow that violence, and the representations thereof, have a real therapeutic efficacy today? The late Girard, for one, no longer thinks so. As he suggests, in his last book, Battling to the End (2007), we live in a world in which violence has not only lost its cathartic power; it actually contributes to reproducing more violence. As he puts it, “violence, which produced the sacred, no longer produces anything but itself ” (Girard 2010, p. x). For the late Girard, then, what is true of desire turns out to be equally true of violence; perhaps unsurprisingly so for they are both mimetic affects that spread unconsciously introducing sameness in place of difference. Thus, he continues: “Humans cannot control reciprocity because they imitate one another too much and their resemblance to one another increases and accelerates”; and he concludes: “Violence looks terribly frightening when we have understood its laws and grasped that it is reciprocal and will thus return” (Girard 2010, p.  19). In the end, Girard’s mimetic theory no longer promotes any cathartic, therapeutic, or pharmaceutical solutions to the plague of mimetic pathologies. On the contrary, it diagnoses the return of violent pathos—with a patho-logical vengeance. Our genealogical detour via Girard’s theory of cathartic violence and the heterogeneous logoi that inform it, brings us back to our initial

150 

N. Lawtoo

questions: does violence have a therapeutic meaning? And if so, can a conscious logos account for the visceral pathos of human violence that bubbles up from below the registers of consciousness and is in this sense un-conscious? The Girardian model does not fully say; nor does the Freudian one—perhaps because they both (latently or manifestly) rely on an increasingly questioned Oedipal myth as a via regia to a repressive unconscious that simply needs to be consciously acknowledged for violent symptoms to magically disappear.8 And yet, alternative models of the unconscious are also currently reemerging, revealing diagnostics that are not based on a repressive hypothesis, but on a mimetic hypothesis instead.9 Thanks to a recent return of attention to the immanent powers of mimesis to transgress the boundaries of representation in the digital age, which continue to haunt the psychic life of the ego, this model of the mimetic unconscious, as I call it, is now informing popular culture as well—emerging unexpectedly in cinematic blockbusters as a telling symptom that helps us pursue our Janus-faced genealogy of violence’s double meanings.

Intermezzo: The Vice of Violence Having considered a hypothesis based on a high, noble, complex, and past-oriented genre such as Greek tragedy to articulate the cathartic effects of representations of violence on human behavior, and having been left more informed in theory but not wiser in practice, let us briefly turn, as an intermezzo, to a low, popular, but future-oriented genre such as science fiction (sf ) film, in the hope of finding an alternative starting point for the second side of our genealogical operation. My mimetic hypothesis is that if a carefully crafted plot (muthos) structured around a violent representation of an action that was witnessed in homeopathic doses may have led to a complex understanding based on the interplay of affect and reason (patho-logy) in classical antiquity, the simple representations of violence we are now generally accustomed to seeing on contemporary digital media may generate affects (pathoi) that could lead to an increase of, dependence on, and perhaps even also desensitization and addiction to violent pathologies in the digital age. There are numerous symptoms that point in that direction.

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

151

A succinct, seemingly entertaining, and yet, as we shall soon confirm, empirically informed representation of the pathological effects of media violence on real violence can be found in a recent sf movie titled Vice (2015), direct by Brian A. Miller. Vice depicts a futuristic world in which a resort called VICE allows human costumers to unleash all kinds of perverse, sexualized, and violent phantasies on so-called artificials. That is, idealized, beautiful, female cyborgs who, we are told, provide “the most realistic experience possible” as a form of “pure entertainment” based on violent vices that go as far as including rape and murder. While the experience is represented as “realistic” within the plot of the film, Vice, as a sf movie, is not primarily concerned with a conception of mimetic realism that faithfully represents the real world; nor is the film exemplary in its imitation of a complex action based on classical Aristotelian norms— though reversal of fortunes and tragic recognitions continue to be at play. And yet, this does not mean that this film—largely based on Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973) and prefiguring Jonathan Nolan’s successful and ongoing TV series Westworld (2016–)—is deprived of philosophical insights into the mimetic pathologies that affect and infect our “real” and increasingly digitized world. The VICE resort is, in fact, a thinly disguised metaphor of the human, all too human vices that are played out on virtual screens in the digital age—full-immersive Computer Generated films, TV series, Internet pornography, computer games—and are currently “entertaining” a new generation of spectators/users accustomed to increasing doses of violence, including sexual violence. The diagnostic of the effects of media violence on real violence in Vice sounds realistic in the age of #Me Too and paves the way for a mimetic conception of the unconscious that is not without connections with all too manifestly violent social realities. The Detective investigating a crime (murder) that spilled from VICE to the real world, leading to the killing of a real, rather than artificial, woman, puts it to the owner of the resort (Bruce Willis) in the following, diagnostic terms: “You’d think that if people could commit any crime they could think of, they’d get it out of their system.” Here we find yet another confirmation that the cathartic hypothesis has, indeed, come a long way. But then, the Detective adds a meaningful twist to the diagnostic, as he specifies: “But these people get a taste, and they just can’t get enough.” This is no longer a purgation of

152 

N. Lawtoo

the same by same based on a patho-logical, cathartic principle; rather, it is a generation of the same by the same based on a pathological, mimetic principle. Thus, physical and affective participation in violent actions against women in the world of “Vice”—the resort, the virtual world it represents, the film, and the vices manifest in the real world as well—does not get violence out of people’s system. On the contrary, it triggers more violence instead. Exposure, affective participation, and full-immersion in mimetic representations of violence central to the world of Vice—including sexual assaults, rape, murder—does not lead to a therapeutic catharsis but generates mimetic, or as I call them, hypermimetic pathologies whose defining characteristic is to transgress the line between fiction and reality, representation and re-enactment, and have the performative power to inspire, shape, and induce violent actions and reactions in the real world. To be sure, Vice may not be a film that will be remembered in the history of cinema for its exemplary tragic representation of a carefully crafted Aristotelian action, or muthos. And yet, this does not mean that it is deprived of a certain diagnostic logos on the affective and infective circulation of violent pathos (or patho-logy), a contagious pathos that spills from the virtual world into the real world along hypermimetic lines symptomatic of our digital age. In fact, the film articulates a connection between the sphere of hyperreal actions and the sphere of mimetic reactions, virtual violence and real violence, what is seen on screens and what is felt in our bodies. Interestingly, this hypermimetic connection that emerges from within a cinematic fiction is in line with recent developments in philosophy, the social sciences and the neurosciences pursued in the real world. Susan Hurley, for instance, a contemporary philosopher concerned with the relation between media violence and real violence offers a diagnostic that literally echoes the Detective in Vice: “One frequently hears the view that media violence may have a cathartic effect, in defusing pent up violence impulses. Unfortunately, this is another piece of wishful thinking; the evidence simply does not support a catharsis effect, but rather the antithesis of it” (Hurley 2004, p. 182). Along similar lines, Rowell Huesmann, in an extensive review of the literature on media violence and social violence over the past 50 years, writes: ­reviewing “the actual scientific evidence that has been collected on the effects of media violence, the psychological process that have been identified as

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

153

causing its effects, and the exact role that imitation plays in the process” it becomes apparent that “media violence is stimulating violent behavior” (Huesmann 2005, p. 259). Such diagnostics are as timely as they are unfashionable. They not only challenge a dominant model of the unconscious that still informs many scholars in the humanities; they also go against powerful capitalist and corporate interests that fund the cultural industries, capitalize on a human fascination for violence, and amplify it by in-forming violent tastes. The lesson is, once again, not original; it is as old as the history of philosophy. Plato contra Aristotle, the mimetic hypothesis contra the cathartic hypothesis: the terms of the debate change historically, but the fundamental agon on the unconscious effects of violent representations remains fundamentally the same. Ultimately this agon rests on two competing philosophical traditions that struggle with the double meanings of violence.

Violence and Mimesis: Plato, Affect, Mirror Neurons The connection between mimetic representations of violence and behavioral mimicry of violence is ancient, precedes Aristotle’s cathartic hypothesis in Poetics and looks back to Plato’s realization in Republic (c. 380 BC) that subjectivity is, for better and worse, formed by exemplary models. How? Via a Janus-faced conception of mimesis that is not only characteristic of aesthetic representations but also, and more fundamentally, of a mimetic conception of humans—what I call, homo mimeticus. It is, in fact, worth recalling that Plato inaugurates the problematic of mimesis in Republic not so much on the ground of a metaphysical theory that situates artistic representations as shadows, or phantoms, three times removed from transcendental ideal Forms—we will have to wait for Book X for this foundational ontological distinction to appear. On the contrary, he inaugurates his theory of mimesis to account for the immanent, ­psycho-­social, and pedagogical power of mythic models to form subjects in general (of which the guardians are the representatives) and those

154 

N. Lawtoo

impressionable creatures who are children in particular. Hence, Socrates, thinking of war scenes in Homer’s Iliad says, for instance, that “the battles of the gods in Homer’s verse are things that we must not admit into our city either wrought in allegory or without allegory” (Plato 1963, p.  625:378d). It has not been uncommon to read such passages as a tyrannical, totalitarian exclusion of poetry tout court from the ideal republic; and this impression is aggravated by the fact that Plato concludes Republic by sending mimetic poetry in “exile” so long as “she is unable to make good her defense” (p. 833:608a)—an invitation, which, as we have seen, was picked up by Aristotle and the numerous defenses of poetry he inspired. But before unilaterally siding with Aristotle and the cathartic tradition, it is necessary to be more specific in our evaluation of the reasons that give a specific diagnostic or patho-logical meaning to Plato’s critique of poetry. Let us in fact recall that Plato’s target is specific and is not centered on poetry in general but on mimetic poetry; and by mimesis he means different things. Simplistically translated as “imitation,” as the classicist Eric Havelock puts it, mimesis “is the most baffling of all words in his [Plato’s] philosophical vocabulary” (Havelock 1963, p. 20). It is, in fact, a heterogeneous concept that designates not only an aesthetic representation (for the painter), but also a narrative mode (for the poet), a dramatic impersonation (for the actor) and an affective identification (for the audience), a protean meaning that reveals traces of the theatrical origins of this concept—mimesis, Gerald Else reminds us, comes from mimos, “actor” but also “performance” (Else 1958, pp.  73–90). Plato, then, does not ban poetry in general; nor is he only concerned with the violent content (or logos) of Homeric poetry—though he certainly worries about it; he is also concerned with its formal qualities (or lexis) of mimetic speeches characteristic of tragedy (but also comedy and, partially, the epic) that were not read but, rather, dramatized, and thus performed on a theatrical stage for what he calls “the nondescript mob assembled in the theater” (Plato 1963, p.  830:604e). As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe also recognized, in the early books of Republic “the question of mimesis has something to do with what must be called a psycho-logy” (Lacoue-Labarthe 1989, p.  98). And this psychology entails a patho-logy that diagnoses how in mimetic speech the actor (mimos) speaks in the first-person nar-

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

155

rative (mimesis) and, consequently, does not narrate the violent pathos of epic wars and tragic actions from a third-person narrative distance (diegesis); rather, he dramatically impersonates heroes like Achilles or Oedipus, “likening” himself to these fictional figures “in speech and bodily bearing” (p. 638:393c) and thereby re-enacting the violent pathoi such theatrical actions can trigger, from anger to grief, pain to revenge, and so on. There is an untimely diagnostic meaning operative in this Socratic lesson that has not lost its relevance in the digital age and concerns the pathological effects of fictional dramatizations of violent scenes on the formation of subjectivity. As Plato, speaking mimetically as Socrates, puts it, shifting from actors (mimos) who speak in mimetic speeches (lexis) to the psychic, ethical, and pedagogical effects of actors on the mob assembled in the public (homo mimeticus): “Have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life, settle down into habits and second nature in the body, the speech, and the thought?” (Plato 1963, p.  640:395d). This diagnostic observation suggests that mimetic dramatizations of violence do not generate the catharsis of violent affects but, rather, contribute to forming the character of subjects who will be inclined to mimetically reproduce such exemplary actions. In sum, for Plato, mimetic spectacles do not simply represent violence we can rationally observe from a distance (mimesis as a patho-logical representation); rather, they contribute to re-enacting violence among the public whose mimetic pathos can spill over the scene and spread contagiously into the real world (mimesis as a contagious pathology). This is not a cure of the same by the same but a diagnostic that the same re-produces the same. Looking back to the reasons that give a specifically diagnostic meaning to Plato’s suspicion of mimetic violence in classical antiquity urges genealogists to look ahead to the contemporary figures concerned with the double meanings of violence whereby we started. Girard, for one, may be more Platonic than Aristotelian in his emphasis on the contagious dimension of violence. If sacrifice and the scapegoat mechanism it reproduces are designed to “quell violence within the community” (Girard 1972, p. 30), Girard is also aware that this cathartic quelling often fails to contain the contagion of mimetic violence that, “like a raging fire…feeds on the very objects intended to smother its flames” (p. 31). Similarly, before

156 

N. Lawtoo

Girard, Georges Bataille developed a theory of violence that not only called attention to the sacrificial origins of culture, revealing striking mimetic continuities between ritual, tragedy, and literature that culminate in representations of violence, death, and murder (see Bataille 1998). He also stressed that “human violence is the result not of cold calculation but of emotional states: anger, fear, or desire” (Bataille 1962, p.  193). Hence Bataille is fully aware that philosophical attempts to give a cold, rational meaning to the irrationality of violent emotions, find themselves in a double bind insofar as “in being violent we take a step away from awareness, and similarly by striving to grasp the significance of our own violent impulses we move further away from the frenzied raptures violence instigates” (Bataille 1962, p. 193). Hence the need to follow both what he calls “the path of work” and of “transgression,” relying simultaneously on both the tools of critical external reason (logos) and of inner affective experience (pathos) in order to provide patho-logical accounts of violence. Paving the way for both Bataille and Girard, as well as drawing from a mimetic conception of the unconscious rooted in states of intoxication that manifest an ontological violence, Friedrich Nietzsche identifies a Dionysian mimesis that transgresses the Apollonian boundaries of both representation and individuation, affecting the “whole nervous system” [das gesamte Affekt-System erregt] (Nietzsche 1954, p. 519), as nothing less than the primordial womb out of which tragedy is born and, we should add, continues to be reborn. In fact, developing genealogical principles that go from antiquity to modernity, Nietzsche offers a harsh diagnostic observation that has not lost any of its relevance in the age of full-immersive video games, as he writes: “to witness suffering does one good, to inflict it even more so [Leiden-sehen tut wohl, Leiden-machen noch wohler]” (Nietzsche 1996, p. 48).10 For genealogists of violence this is perhaps an apt moment to rediscover an untimely tradition of the mimetic, all too mimetic tendencies at play in the unconscious. After a period of relative marginalization, mimesis is, in fact, currently being rediscovered in continental philosophy and the humanities but also in the social sciences and the hard sciences. The discovery of mirror neurons in particular provides an empirical confirmation of the ancient philosophical insight that the simple sight of gestures and expressions (­including violent ones) has mimetic, formative, and performative effects and that models shape, for

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

157

better and worse, human character and behavior in ways that are irrational, contagious, and largely unconscious. Discovered in the 1990s by a group of Italian neuroscientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti initially working with macaque monkeys, mirror neurons are motor neurons (neurons responsible for movement) that are involuntarily and, in this sense, unconsciously triggered not only by movement but also—and this is the “discovery”—by the simple sight of a gesture. This reflex mechanism leads the observer’s corresponding motor area of the brain to be activated and, consequently, the observer feels an unconscious reflex to mirror or mimic the movement seen. As Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia put it: “In humans, as in monkeys, the sight of acts performed by others produces an immediate activation of the motor areas deputed to the organization and execution of those acts” (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 125). On this empirical, neurological basis, they go further and posit the hypothesis of a pre-linguistic form of mimetic communication that allows humans to share emotions without the mediation of rational understanding, or of a theory of mind. As they put it: “Emotions, like actions, are immediately shared, the perception of pain or grief, or disgust experienced by others, activates the same areas of the cerebral cortex that are involved when we experience these emotions ourselves” (p. xii). Such an insight is not completely original. As Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia readily acknowledge, awareness of such mimetic reflexes are the daily bread of actors and, we should add, of philosophers who reflected on actors. Dramatic gestures, visual expressions, and theatrical movements, as Plato was the first to sense, have an enormous power of psychic impression for they lead the audience to feel, by unconscious mimesis, what the actor feels and, at one remove, perhaps re-enact his actions as well. This picture of homo mimeticus is only now reappearing on the philosophical scene. It will not go unchallenged since it offers a narcissistic blow to dominant notions of subjectivity understood in terms of free will, intentionality, and rational self-sufficiency that still inform dominant academic trends. Still, as Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia reassure us, there is a control mechanism that usually contains such mirroring reflexes. There is even a rational logos linked to the emergence of understanding that is unconsciously at play in what may appear as an irrational mirroring

158 

N. Lawtoo

pathos. In fact, the authors specify that the mirror neuron system’s “primary function” concerns “the role linked to understanding the meaning of the actions of others” (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 124). Mimesis and meaning might thus be intimately entangled in the sense that by unconsciously reproducing gestures, especially goal-oriented gestures (such as grabbing, pointing, and facial expressions), Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia claim, humans have an immediate insight not only into the other’s affects but also intentions and, by extension, minds and thoughts. The exact role mirror neurons play in such superior cognitive mechanisms still needs to be determined and is likely to continue to generate stimulating discussions. Still, despite some initial resistance and skepticism in the humanities, their presence in humans is now empirically ascertained.11 It thus seems increasingly likely that unconscious mimetic reactions that preoccupied a tradition in literary and philosophical modernism from Nietzsche to Bataille, and also Conrad to Lawrence, Charles Féré to Pierre Janet to Gabriel Tarde, can no longer be dismissed as irrelevant to philosophical analysis, or relegated to few pathological cases in the history of philosophy, as has been done in the twentieth century. Rather, they already play a constitutive role in emerging conceptions of homo mimeticus in the twenty-first century. And yet, as a classical philosophical tradition has taught us, imitation is not only used for cognitive, rational, and meaningful purposes, as Aristotle claimed; it can equally be put to irrational, violent, and senseless purposes as Plato insisted. In the wake of the discovery of a mirroring mechanism in the brain, there are thus good empirical reasons to return to the old Platonic insight that violent spectacles have formative and performative effects since they spread contagiously, especially among that mimetic beast par excellence which is the (physical) crowd, stretching to include, at one remove, (virtual) publics as well. Though direct causality is difficult to measure, there is, in fact, a growing consensus that violent visual spectacles are likely to have mimetic, or, better, hypermimetic effects that break the wall of representation and trigger unconscious reflexes that significantly increase the risk of reproducing such violent gestures in the real world in the short and long run. In recent years, neuroscientists with a philosophical inclination have started catching up with the old Platonic realization that mimesis cuts

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

159

both ways as it can generate mechanisms that can be put to both cognitive (rational) and violent (irrational) use, generating both pathologies and patho-logies. Marco Iacoboni, for instance, offers a contemporary variation of the double effects of what Plato called mimesis as he balances the cognitive implications of mirror neurons by calling attention to the elementary fact that there are good and bad forms of imitation. As he puts it: “mirror neurons can undoubtedly be good for us, enabling our feelings and actions of empathy for others, but they also provide a compelling neurobiological mechanism underlying imitative violence induced by media violence” (Iacoboni 2008, p. 211). Surveying an abundant literature on the relation between exposure to media violence and imitative violence based on laboratory experiments with children, Iacoboni writes that these findings show that “children who watch more violence tend to be more aggressive than other children” (p. 207). And turning to longitudinal studies that follow the development of large populations (700 families) outside of the lab over a long period of time (15 years) to see if media violence has long-lasting effects in adult behavior as well, he concludes: “Taken together, the findings from laboratory studies, correlational studies, and longitudinal studies all support the hypothesis that media violence induces imitative violence” (p. 208). Along similar lines, philosophers like Susan Hurley argue that “the correspondence is not just visual: hearing an expression of anger increases activation of muscles used to express anger” (Hurley 2004 p. 173). And social scientists like Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman report that since the 1970s a growing consensus from the major professional medical societies in the US have been confirming that “‘the data points overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children,’” thereby concluding that “a heavy diet of media violence contributes to a societal violence rate that is unnecessarily obese” (Anderson and Bushman 2002, p.  2379).12 As philosophers, we should be careful not to dismiss such claims as simply quantitative in nature and reductionist in meaning—if only because, as we have seen, this diagnostic conclusion is perfectly in line with the origins of philosophical reflections on the contagious powers of mimetic violence. No wonder that Plato was particularly worried about mimetic impersonations whereby an actor does not speak about a character in the third

160 

N. Lawtoo

person (diegesis) but, rather, embodies “in speech or bodily bearing” that role (mimesis). There is an important diagnostic meaning nested in this ancient formal distinction. If it has remained in the shadows of metaphysical discussions on the truth and lies of mimetic representations (mimesis as a mirror of reality) in past centuries, it should be center stage in genealogical diagnostics of the performative power of hypermimetic spectacles on subject formation (mimesis as a mirror in the ego) in the present century. At the dawn of philosophy Plato, in fact, already sensed, with tremendous patho-logical insight, that by enacting a given model of behavior in gesture, speech, and bodily posture an actor has the power— Nietzsche would say will to power—to generate a pathos that spreads, via mirroring gestures, irrationally, contagiously, and unconsciously from the mimetic actor to the equally mimetic spectators who, at an additional remove, mirrors the actor, or mimos. In short, Plato is not only an idealist metaphysician concerned with art understood as a “mirror” (Plato 1963, p.  821:596d) that reproduces “shadows” or “phantoms, not realities” (p. 824:599a)—though he is certainly that too. He is also, and for genealogists of violence more importantly, a philosophical physician concerned with the affective and infective powers of mimesis to trigger mirroring reflexes in real people, turning their ego into a “phantom of the ego,” as Nietzsche was quick to sense. True, the theater may no longer be the dominant medium in town to impress the crowd in the contemporary period; yet, contemporary cases of violent abuses and assaults directed especially against women, minorities, and children remind us that violence might be originary to homo mimeticus but it is certainly not original. At least in part, it can be the spiraling byproduct of reproductions of violent forms of “entertainment” that are currently being uploaded on all kinds of new digital media, immerse the subject in hypermimetic and immersive simulations that blur the line between fiction and reality and, as they are downloaded in the nervous system, cast a formative, transformative, and deformative spell on the psychic life of the subject. Digitized screens, in other words, may add another layer of aesthetic mediation that disconnect posthuman subjects from reality; and yet, they connect an increasing number of viewers and gamers to “avatar simulations” (Lawtoo 2015) that have formative, performative, and deformative effects nonetheless. In the digital

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

161

age new generations are, in fact, permanently exposed to all kinds of violent models and actions dramatized in virtual fictions that are increasingly immersive in their degree of hypermimetic participation (3D films, computer games, double lives on social media, etc.), and, over time, repetition, and good doses of visual bombardment are likely to shape behavior, influence tastes, desensitize subjects, and promote the reproduction of violent vices in real life, turning human nature into a potentially more violent second nature. * * * This necessarily compressed genealogy of violence and the unconscious does not offer easy therapeutic solutions that would cure us, once and for all, from the pathologies of hypermimetic violence; nor does it suggest that grasping the meaning of violence in theory provides for therapeutic solutions in practice. And yet, it indicates that the logoi used to diagnose the unconscious effects of representations of violent pathos might indeed benefit from recuperating a marginalized tradition of the unconscious that does not rest on a repressive or cathartic hypothesis but on a mimetic hypothesis instead. This tradition argues that representations of violent actions are not mere shadows far removed from reality; nor do they necessarily generate therapeutic cathartic effects. Rather, representations of violence in the age of digital reproduction continue to have real, all too real influences on the constitution of subjectivity that are, nolens volens, not under the full control of rational consciousness and are, in this sense, un-conscious. In the end, violence can continue to be unconsciously manifested in dreams, as Freud suggested; it can also have cathartic effects in sacred rituals, as Girard indicated. But an affective participation in the kind of formless, heterogeneous, and violent spectacles that massively inform our Internet-based culture is unlikely to generate cathartic or purifying effects in the long run. On the contrary, it is likely to generate addictions, cultural habits, and contagious mechanisms that bleed, via hypermimesis, from the virtual into the real world, potentially turning violent fictions in realities, and violent realities back into fictions. That our digital-addicted

162 

N. Lawtoo

culture did, indeed, “get a taste,” as the Detective in Vice puts it, can hardly be denied. Whether at some point it will “get enough,” remains to be seen. What we have seen in this Janus-faced genealogy of violence’s double meanings is that unconscious violence is not only expressed in dreams and latent desires; it is, above all, manifest in fictional and virtual actions that can trigger both good and bad reactions in the real world. The mimetic unconscious, I have argued, goes beyond the cathartic principle. It might even go further and bring us back to the reality principle. Acknowledgments  This chapter synthetizes a more general argument that is part of a book manuscript provisionally titled Violence and the Unconscious: Catharsis to Contagion, itself part of a broader transdisciplinary project, entitled Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 716181).

Notes 1. Stephen Halliwell notices that the ideas of Greek poetics “are part of the genealogy of arguments and attitudes in whose modern forms some of our own values may still be invested” (Halliwell 2011, p. 5). 2. This chapter is a radically condensed version of a longer, two-part article that appeared in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. See Lawtoo, N. (2019) ‘Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious (Part I) The Cathartic Hypothesis: Aristotle, Freud, Girard’. Contagion 25, pp. 159–191; Lawtoo, N. (2019) ‘Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious (Part II) The Contagious Hypothesis: Plato, Affect, Mirror Neurons’. Contagion 26, pp. 123–160. 3. The original formulation reads: “‘You ought to be like this (like your father)’…You may not be like this (you’re your father)—that is, you may

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

163

not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative’” (Freud 1960, p. 30) 4. I offer a more detailed account in Lawtoo, N. (2017) ‘The Classical World: Sacrifice, Philosophy, Religion’. In Alison, J. & Palaver, W. (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 119–126. See also the chapters in Parts I and III. 5. What Nietzsche says of his genealogy of moral values applies to the genealogy of theories as well: it requires “a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances of their growth, development, and displacement,” a transdisciplinary knowledge that calls for “some schooling in history and philology, together with an innate sense of discrimination with respect to questions of psychology” (Nietzsche 1996, pp. 8, 5). 6. See Derrida, J. (1981) ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. In Dissemination, Johnson, B, (tr.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 61–171. 7. Hence Halliwell suggests: “The main reason in recent times for the irresistible and largely fanciful obsession with the term [catharsis] is undoubtedly the appeal of such speculations to a Freudian age” (Halliwell 1987, p. 90). 8. This remains Girard’s final position as he writes: “We can escape mimetism only by understanding the laws that govern it” (Girard 2010, p. x). 9. For a genealogy of the mimetic unconscious, see Nidesh Lawtoo, “The Mimetic Unconscious: A Mirror for Genealogical Reflections,” in Borch, C. ed. (2019) Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society. New York: Routledge, pp. 37–53. 10. I discuss Bataille’s and Nietzsche’s take on the unconscious, violence, and mimesis more at length in Lawtoo, 2013, pp. 27–83, pp. 209–280 and Lawtoo, N. (2018) ‘Bataille and the Homology of Heterology’. Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5), pp. 41–68. 11. For a confirmation of single-neuron activity in human patients, see Mukamel, R. Ekstrom, A. D., Kaplan, J. Iacoboni, M., Fried, I. (2010) ‘Single-Neuron Responses in Humans during Execution and Observation of Actions’. Current Biology 20, pp. 750–756. 12. Huesmann concludes his review of the literature on the subject with a similar diagnostic: “In summary, exposure to electronic media violence increases the risk of both children and adults behaving aggressively in the short-run and of children behaving aggressively in the long-run. It increases the risk significantly, and it increases it as much as many other factors that are considered public health threats” (Huesmann 2005, pp. 11–12).

164 

N. Lawtoo

Bibliography Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2002). The Effects of Media Violence on Society. Science, 295(5564), 2377–2379. Aristotle. (1987). The Poetics of Aristotle (S.  Halliwell, Trans.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bataille, G. (1962). Erotism, Death and Sensuality (M. Dalwood, Trans.). San Francisco: City Lights Books. Bataille, G. (1998). Hegel, la mort, le sacrifice. In Oeuvres Complètes (Vol. 12, pp. 326–345). Paris: Gallimard. Bernays, J. (2006). Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy (J. Barnes, Trans., A. Laird, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 158–175. Cassin, B. (Ed.). (2014). Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ellenberger, H. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious: The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New  York: Basic Books. Else, G.  F. (1958). Imitation’ in the Fifth Century. Classical Philology, 53(2), 73–90. Else, G. F. (1967). Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freud, S. (1923). Two Encyclopaedia Articles. In S. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XVIII. (1920–1922), pp. 233–260). Freud, S. (1960). The Ego and the Id (J.  Rivière, Trans. & S.  Strachey, Ed.). London: W.W. Norton & Company. Freud, S., & Breuer, J. (1955). Studies on Hysteria. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 2. (1893–1895)). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Girard, R. (1972). Violence and the Sacred (Patrick Gregory, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Girard, R. (2007). Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture with P. Antonello and J. C. de Castro Rocha. London: Continuum. Girard, R. (2010). Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

7  The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis… 

165

Halliwell, S. (Ed.). (1987). In the Poetics of Aristotle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Halliwell, S. (2011). Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Havelock, E.  A. (1963). Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Huesmann, L. R. (2005). Imitation and the Effects of Observing Media Violence on Behavior. In S.  Hurley & N.  Chater (Eds.), Perspectives on Imitations: From Neuroscience to Social Science Vol. 2 Imitation, Human Development, and Culture (pp. 257–266). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hurley, S. (2004). Imitation, Media Violence, and Freedom of Speech. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 117(1–2), 165–218. Iacoboni, M. (2008). Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. (1989). Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (C. Fynsk, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lawtoo, N. (2013). The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Lawtoo, N. (2015). Avatar Simulation in 3Ts: Techne, Trance, Transformation. Science Fiction Studies, 125(41), 132–150. Lawtoo, N. (2019). The Mimetic Unconscious: A Mirror for Genealogical Reflections. In C. Borch (Ed.), Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society (pp. 37–53). New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, F. (1954). Twilight of the Idols. In W. Kaufmann (Ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (pp. 463–563). New York: Viking Press. Nietzsche, F. (1996). On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (D. Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plato. (1963). Republic. In E.  Hamilton & H.  Cairns (Eds.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (pp. 575–844). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2006). Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions and Experience (F. Anderson, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8 The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking at Photographs of the First World War Stéphane Symons and Tammy Castelein

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” so goes the saying. But it is of no help whatsoever to gauge the significance of photographic pictures. For almost all the most influential theorists of photography, from Benjamin to Barthes, Flusser to Berger, Sontag to Azoulay, emphasize the exact opposite. By now it has become a topos, if not a downright cliché, that photographic images are marked with the potential to expose the gap between reality and meaning. Presenting us with a reality that can in no way be denied, photographs nonetheless leave us guessing what this realThis chapter has been published in Dutch: Symons, Stéphane, Castelein, & Tammy. (2018). De laatste seconde, of de eeuwigheid: Ernst Jünger kijkt naar foto’s uit de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 80(4), 749–770. https://doi.org/10.2143/TVF.80.4.3286095.

S. Symons (*) KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] T. Castelein Independent Scholar and Translator, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_8

167

168 

S. Symons and T. Castelein

ity precisely consisted of, and why it should be of any concern to us in the first place. This interruptive effect evidences a specific type of violence on the part of all photographic images that is largely independent of the scenes they confront us with. Even the images of empty streets in early twentieth century Paris will, in Benjamin’s view, provide the final proof for the fact that “every square inch of our cities [is] a crime scene” and “[e]very passer-by a culprit” (Benjamin 1999a, p.  527). And even the cherished portrait of our loved ones can, under Barthes’s eyes, present us with the horrible “platitude of death” (Barthes 1981, p. 92). Rather than swaddling historical events with the refined threads of narration, photographs punch holes within its fabric and pose a threat to the texture of human thought and emotion. Photographs do not suffuse reality with meaning but they all too often dismantle the context in which they were made. As the early observer Siegfried Kracauer famously put it: “The turn to photography is the go-for-broke game of history” (Kracauer 1995, p. 61). The camera’s decontextualized presentation of the contingencies of reality comes with the power to unhinge the set of assumptions with which we look at our surroundings. Photographs confront us with irredeemable finitude: they are, in the words of Barthes, “without future” (Barthes 1981, p. 90). Photographic images, it is therefore often argued, do not recover an intuitive sense of belonging nor broach a novel well of meaning; they expose the limits of human understanding and risk alienating us from the world. “[P]hotography has no language of its own,” John Berger once wrote, since “[a]ll its references are external to itself ” (Berger 2013, p. 26). Around the end of the 1920s, the German philosopher and writer Ernst Jünger, as well, turned to the issue of photography. Collaborating with some of the most influential thinkers of the post-war right, Jünger co-edited a number of volumes that contain hundreds of photographic images and dozens of complementary essays. Jünger’s suggestions, however, oppose the view that the work of photography is primarily a ­discomforting and perhaps even alienating business. For Jünger, the camera is capable of retrieving a foundational truth that is at work within the world. He does not connect the photographic image with unmitigated contingency but with the recovery of an absolute force that is believed to be at work within the world. In Jünger’s view photographs do not work

8  The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking… 

169

against the reality they depict since these images even allow a principle of necessity to become visible within the realm of history. The photographic images that Jünger analyzes are therefore not believed to expose a reality that is shot through with ephemerality. To the contrary, they are read as the ultimate confirmation that what is being shown neither will nor should ever fully go away. What Jünger discovers in these images is not so much a present with no future as an event that is saturated with it. As is attested to by the title of one of these photobooks, Hier spricht der Feind: Kriegserlebnisse unserer Gegner (The Voice of the Enemy: War Experiences of our Adversaries), for him pictures do have a language of their own and they are worth a thousand words. However, whether the proper words and language of Jünger’s images deserve to be heard is an altogether different thing. For most of the images that Jünger selected were taken during the darkest days of the Great War and subsequently brought together in books that bear titles such as Die Unvergessenen (The Unforgotten, 1928), Luftfahrt ist not! (Aviation Is Urgent!, 1928), Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges: Fronterlebnisse deutscher Soldaten (The Face of the World War: Front Experiences of German Soldiers, 1930), and the already mentioned The Voice of the Enemy: War Experiences of our Adversaries (1931). These photographic renditions do not hold back in delivering us the all too real horror of the first war that was fully industrial. Aerial views of bombed out landscapes are followed by close-­ ups of dead bodies and ripped off body parts, ruined cityscapes that bear little or no trace of human habitation are juxtaposed with individual soldiers unsuccessfully seeking shelter in the trenches and the sudden adrenaline of body to body combat is pitted against endless rows of uniformed army men making their way through unhospitable surroundings. While these books do seem to capture the reality of the Great War, the act of looking at these images and reading Jünger’s reflections that come with them leaves one with an unsettling feeling. One gets the sense that something within these photographs is not quite right. Or, perhaps one should rather specify: everything within these photographs is all too right. While these images do not shy away from the sheer terror of modern warfare, when brought under Jünger’s gaze even this type of destruction has taken on the look of something eerily ordinary.1

170 

S. Symons and T. Castelein

This uncanny feeling of normality stems primarily from the fact that the universe that is conjured up by Jünger has taken on metaphysical weight. In Jünger’s view, the war allows for the recovery of a “fated time” [Schicksalszeit] in which historical events are believed to be both ineluctable and opportune (Jünger 1927, pp. 275–280).2 For Jünger, the use of machines in all fields of contemporary society, including armed battle, does not so much indicate the dawn of a new age for mankind as a novel confirmation of the age-old law that nothing is immune to being uprooted by strife and violence. In the introduction to the photobook Aviation is Urgent!, Jünger describes the wish that “this gorgeous armament of mechanical, economic and military powers be nothing but the external image of a more profound world that is rooted in the realm of destiny” (Jünger 1928a, p. 402). In the essay ‘War and Technicity,’ that is included in The Face of the World War, Jünger applauds the camera for its capacity to reveal that “life is in its essence absolutely of a warlike nature” (Jünger 1930b, p. 597). In the first decades of the twentieth century, it has finally become clear that reality can be transformed completely into war. It is indeed one of the paradoxes that underlie these books that the still images that are compiled manage so well to grasp the “total mobilization” [Totale Mobilmachung] that came over Europe in the years leading up to 1914. And this is an event that is wholeheartedly celebrated by Jünger. While not a few of the images in his books zoom in on what must have been a moment of terror and shock, the most important message that comes across is that the “war of the machines” gives “direction and meaning” to human beings (Jünger 1922, p.  102).3 Even when they are caught on camera in the midst of a sudden attack, the men in these photos (there are almost no women here) never seem to be truly caught off guard. Likewise, when the degree of destruction can finally become palpable after the moment of crisis, the ruins that are left behind take on a strangely familiar look, as if they are first and foremost to be received as a newly discovered and impressive type of landscape. And, surely the epitome of an irrational and unreasonable worldview, even the dead bodies leave behind no trace of dissonance in these images, since they blend in remarkably well with the environment of obliterated nature.4,5

8  The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking… 

Photo 8.1

171

172 

S. Symons and T. Castelein

Photo 8.2

The warbooks reveal that fighting is not chief amongst a soldier’s activities since waiting, marching, eating, drinking, sleeping, taking care of one’s gear, and sometimes even trying to have some fun are proven to take up much more of his time. But at no time do these images indicate the possibility of a truly different reality, with actions or experiences that are not subsumed by the craze for standardization and mechanization that marks an era in the throes of total mobilization. With the help of machines, we are being told, human beings have managed to prepare for the very worst, in the process having even become machinelike themselves. In one of the captions from the later photobook Die veränderte Welt. Eine Bilderfibel unserer Zeit (The Transformed World. An Illustrated Primer of Our Times, 1933), it is put as follows: “The decay of the individual physiognomy brings forth a strange world of marionettes.”6 Individual traits of soldiers disappear behind the uniforms they wear and these uniforms, for their part, are oftentimes rendered invisible by the geometrical patterns of marching masses. Soldiers are always nothing but

8  The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking… 

173

a member of a troop: they become one with their strategical position in the trenches or end up as little more than a mere dot in an endless line7,8 “[W]hat happens here is so lucid and mathematical, as if death has made use of us as a function in an equation” (Jünger 1922, p.  89). Jünger’s photobooks are made up of serial images, not only because they contain a seemingly interminable stream of oftentimes very similar photographs, but also because, in these photographs themselves, fundamental differences are blotted out and replaced by patterns, repetitions and resemblances. These photographs expose how modern warfare has become a never-ending affair, not because the conflicts between the warring parties are beyond reconciliation, but because these conflicts feed on an inexhaustible dynamic of labor and machinic mobilization (Jünger 1930a, p. 610).

Photo 8.3

174 

S. Symons and T. Castelein

Photo 8.4

Even the most significant opposition that undergirds warfare, the one between friend and foe, gets lost in these images of relentless dislocation and upheaval. In a remarkable photograph that is included in The Voice of the Enemy.9

8  The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking… 

175

Photo 8.5

British soldiers have dressed up in German uniforms and posed with the German motorcycles and weapons they have just captured. It is an image that suggests that the warring parties are ultimately interchangeable since if it were not for the caption which draws attention to the captured material, one would not be able to spot the difference. For Jünger, indeed, the opposition between the warring factions is not as foundational as the opposition between those who are war-enthused and the people who activate against it. In his introduction to The Voice of the Enemy, Jünger is adamant in proclaiming that so called “civil humanity” and “humanitarian conscience” have nothing to do with genuine “humanity” (Jünger 1931b, p. 617). The latter is built on the willingness to fight and the capacity to embrace moments of danger as opportunities of fundamental change. In war, one even comes “nearer to the enemy” and discovers how the enemy has a “vital law” [Lebensgesetz] of his own (Jünger 1931b, p. 618). “More important [than avoiding war] is the eradication of the assessments of a mendacious humanity, under the surface of which a late democracy pursues its own interests. A manly spirit, which knows

176 

S. Symons and T. Castelein

its own limits and knows how to respect those of the others, would serve the destiny of the peoples better” (Jünger 1931b, p. 618).10 While the possibility of a non-violent resolution to conflict is thus carefully kept out of his photobooks, Jünger presents the violence of war as part of an inevitable and even timely dynamic. It is of course this appeal to the eternal and ineluctable presence of war that exposes his writings to Walter Benjamin’s oft-cited criticism of “mysticism.” In Benjamin’s review of Jünger’s edited volume War and Warriors (Krieg und Krieger, 1930), his concept of a “cultic” war is rejected because it overlooks the historical variables that make each armed conflict different, and could perhaps also convincingly point out the chances for a peaceful outcome (Benjamin 1999b, pp.  312–321).11 Benjamin’s friend Siegfried Kracauer could not have agreed more. In his review of Jünger’s book The Worker (Der Arbeiter, 1932), he wrote that it is “anything but a political construction, but a ‘gestalt-show’ that opens up not so much a path into politics as a line of flight leading away from politics” (Kracauer, cited and translated in Werneburg and Phillips 1992, p.  63).12 The photographs that are selected by Jünger are not renditions of a historical reality but instantiations of what Vilém Flusser has called “magical” images where “everything is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context. Such a world is structurally different from that of the linear world of history in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences” (Flusser 2012, p. 9). The aesthetization of politics and the concomitant mythologization of war are particularly astute in the set-up of the volume The Moment of Danger (Der gefährliche Augenblick, 1931). Scenes of the violence of war are only presented after dozens of images of natural disasters (eruptions of volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.), random accidents (car and plane crashes, etc.) and registrations of sport events. In this manner, the point is driven home that waging war is in the end but an integral part of human history and even a specific form of training. “The times in which we find ourselves, and in which we enter each day more deeply, reveal to us very clearly how intimate the relation is between danger and order” (Jünger 1931a, p. 625). When the revelation of a foundational law is believed to inhere to the moment of danger, what gets lost is the opposition between violence (war), catastrophe (natural disasters) and accident (crashes) and, in the end, the very difference between history and nature. “War,”

8  The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking… 

177

Benjamin famously wrote, “in the metaphysical abstraction in which the new nationalism believes, is nothing other than the attempt to redeem, mystically and without mediation, the secret of nature, understood idealistically, through technology” (Benjamin 1999b, p. 319). In Jünger’s photobooks, technology is indeed worshipped as a natural force, while the violence of war is thereby being pushed back into a universe of unshakeable essences and values. Jünger does not hold back in heralding the arrival of a “New Primitiveness” [Neue Primitivität] that discovers precisely a deeply felt nihilism as the condition for the recovery of a spiritual ground (Jünger 1933, p.  629). Here, the affirmation of the absence of values has become inseparable from the retrieval of an absolute foundation. Celebrating the universal dislocation and upheaval that finds its culmination in war indicates at once “the sharpest consciousness” and something “miraculous” [wunderbar] (Jünger 1931a, pp.  625–626).13 For Jünger, it is precisely “reason” [Vernunft] which transforms a human being into the “servant of fate” (Jünger 1931a, p. 623). Jünger argues that the camera shares in a second, “colder” consciousness that manages to look the moment of danger squarely in the eye. Adjourning all type of moral consideration, this novel form of consciousness “is indicated by the ever more marked ability to see oneself as an object” (Jünger 1934, p. 200).14 Photography is the latest embodiment of such post-humanist indifference that outwits even the most grueling type of destruction. “The act of taking a photograph stands outside the field of sentiment. It has a telescopic character: one realizes that the event is seen by an impervious and invulnerable eye” (Jünger 1934, p. 201).15 The juxtaposition of two images of the cathedral of Arras, included in The Voice of the Enemy16 can be seen as a case in point. The first image was taken before, the second after the cathedral was largely reduced to rubble. However, because both of them were taken from the exact same position this montage confirms that the camera itself was allowed to remain unscathed. All lost, nothing lost. In Jünger’s view, moreover, the camera’s imperviousness can only be explained by the fact that it, as a dehumanized machine, shares in the very force of universal disturbance that it records so well. The camera “captures both the flight of the bullet and the individual at the moment before he is blown to shreds by an explosion. This, however, is our specific manner of seeing, and photography is an instrument of this characteristic” (Jünger 1934, p. 201).17

178 

Photo 8.6

S. Symons and T. Castelein

8  The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking… 

179

The many images of war scenes, disasters, accidents and sports events that are brought together in Jünger’s photobooks stem from this hope that the camera would freeze the actual moment of danger and thereby deliver an ultimate revelation of truth. One of the images that is included in The Moment of Danger, for instance, shows an overturned, roofless car at the exact instant when the driver’s body hits the ground. Its caption reads: “The Last Second”.18

Photo 8.7

180 

S. Symons and T. Castelein

Jünger’s desire to thus catch the very moment of dying on camera is wholly unrelated to a feel for transience. It is far removed from the fascination with the camera’s capacity to “split” the second that resonates in the writings of many of his contemporaries. Jünger releases the camera from its immediate relation with the contingencies of our surroundings and endows it with the force to capture snapshots of eternity. Since for Jünger, “to live means to kill” [Leben heißt töten], it is precisely death itself that sets up the a-temporal and unceasing lawfulness that is supposed to bridge the gap between history and meaning (Jünger 1922, p. 42). The camera is here not meant to confirm the infinite divisibility of time; what matters much more is its capacity to cross over to the non-temporal and indivisible core that is believed to reside deep within time. Take, for instance, the image that closes The Face of the World War. It shows a ruined landscape where only a large-sized crucifix with a sculpted image of Christ is left standing. Its caption reads as follows: “Quiet after the Storm. A Cross in the Field, with Christ having been left unharmed.”19

8  The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking… 

Photo 8.8

181

182 

S. Symons and T. Castelein

As the closing image of a collection of 200 images of the atrocities of the Great War, this reference to the possibility of religious redemption is discomforting, if not reprehensible. The suggestion that not even the horrors that were suffered are wanting an ultimate ground of meaning is at odds with the historical testimonies of a large part of these very men. Instead of drawing attention to the widespread presence of feelings of disillusionment and frustration, the image of the suffering redeemer leaves the last word to a seemingly unshaken belief in restored comfort and spiritual resilience. Deferring the final judgment about historical events to a redemptive dynamic that is inherently non-historical, this image pays no heed to the perspective of the human beings who lived through these events. Pushing the possibility of a peaceful and non-­ violent outcome wholly outside of the realm of history proper, this evocation of Christ’s suffering knows nothing of the denouncing, and political gesture, which inspired many artists of the same period, including Wilfried Owen, Käthe Kollwitz, Abel Gance and Otto Dix. What is more, one could say that this closing reference to the possibility of religious salvation is the visual translation of one of Jünger’s most well-­ known and problematical suggestions about the violence of the Great War. For these horrors of the war were in Jünger’s view not only a redeemable reality but they even constituted a redemptive dynamic in their own right. The Great War was for him no absurdity but an “inner experience” that replenishes the spiritual void of modern societies. It can be likened to a form of “hunt” or “feast” and is to be lived as a “primal relation” [Urverhältnis] (Jünger 1922, pp. 59, 48 and 16). Ultimately, the Great War serves Jünger as the embodiment of an “impersonal force” that should be embraced as a principle with absolute validity (Jünger 1922, p. 96). This entails that in Jünger’s view all historical variables, including the grounds and the goals of the struggle, are but “external” and contingent to the actual fighting. What is of ultimate significance to Jünger is the full affirmation of the fight itself. With the Great War, Jünger witnessed the rise of a novel generation that is willing to “surrender itself for an idea” (Jünger 1922, p. 100). This generation, of which Jünger considers himself to be a proud member, understands dying as the greatest “fulfillment,” “perfection” and “completion” in the “most imperfect world” (Jünger 1922, p. 100). The willingness to die for the cause is sui generis:

8  The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking… 

183

it does not derive its import from the cause but serves as sufficient ground for its own validity. “The cause is nothing, and the belief everything” (Jünger 1922, p. 100). There is, of course, a word for this strange logic in which suffering gets transformed into a wellspring of restored meaning: sacrifice. In Jünger’s view, the dead soldiers that are brought center stage in a large number of the images are not so much casualties as martyrs, not so much victims as heroes. For this reason, these photographs revolve more around the future than around the past. As is alluded to by one of the titles, The Unforgotten, these books are an integral part of the logic of sacrifice and redemption because they help set up the feeling that these men have given their lives for the spiritual renaissance of the nation. The photographs of the fallen trigger an “unrest” in us that installs the possibility to see one’s own life as part of a “whole” (Jünger 1928b, pp.  394 and 392). They restore the belief in the “greatness” of life that bestows onto it an ultimate “unnameab[ility]” (Jünger 1928b, p. 393). These photographs are meant to discover even loss as a restitutive force. It is therefore thanks to this belief in the powers of commemoration that the lives that were given in the past can be endowed with an ongoing relevance for the future. These books are not just meant as a tribute to lives that were abruptly ended, but they are meant to counter-act this untimely interruption. They are attempts to stamp a final and unnegotiable gravitas onto experiences that would otherwise run the risk of sinking back into the surreal. In this respect, a further refinement should be added to the idea that Jünger’s photobooks cross over to the murky grounds of myth. Perhaps the problem with these books revolves less around the idea that life is here in the end but an instantiation of death as around the suggestion that, vice versa, even the moment of death is believed to proclaim the ultimate victory of life. For in the worldview of Jünger it is the case not only that “to live means to kill” but also that ‘being killed means to live (on).’ Around the time when Jünger was compiling his books, Benjamin rejected the concept of sacrificial death, defining it as the moment when the tragic hero “dies of immortality” (Benjamin 1999c, p. 56). In Jünger’s view, the camera’s supposed capacity to catch the moment of dying does indeed, paradoxically, warrant that the dead “live on within us because they are more alive than the living” (Jünger 1928b, p. 394). Despite their

184 

S. Symons and T. Castelein

focus on the violence of war, the images that were compiled in these photobooks are meant to vouchsafe the feeling that no hero ever really dies. Surely, this would be the most pernicious outcome of the aesthetization of death and the mythologization of violence: that the dead are even deprived of their own death, and this precisely because the camera zoomed in on their moment of dying. In some way, it can therefore be argued that Jünger’s universe does not contain too much death and violence but too little of it. On account of Jünger’s overblown rhetoric about fate and sacrifice and his reference to the possibility of religious redemption, these images are bound to miss the very thing they set out to illuminate. Here, the appeal to an indestructible and eternal core of meaning stands in the way of the altogether simple observation that death is the standing proof of man’s finitude. Fortunately, not even a machine will tolerate being manipulated for such unwholesome purposes. In quite a few of the images that are gathered in these photobooks the camera has left behind markers that give away the tricks that Jünger is pulling on history. The motif of smoke, fumes and dust-clouds, that is, recurs in many of the photographs.20

Photo 8.9

8  The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking… 

185

These elements are at once the physical effect of the instant of danger that fascinated Jünger so much, and the visual reminder that something essential remains absent from the image. From the earliest days of photography onwards, fog-like and ghost-like stains were an integral part of the photographic image. In the first photographs, these blurry zones were already witness to the fact that something was being pushed out of sight because the camera was too slow to capture the movements and details of reality. Even now, almost 200  years after the invention of the camera, these hazy patches have retained the power to denounce any attempt to use the camera for the purposes of myth. Undoubtedly, Jünger would have interpreted these zones of smoke and dust-clouds as a visual translation of the “intoxication” that, in his view brought the soldiers to embrace death with enthusiasm.21 But this view is nothing short of a mockery of historical facts. Of much more fundamental importance than this connection between intoxication and smoke, Rausch and Rauch, is the manner in which these large-sized gray and black areas point out how the camera continues to expose the irredeemable gap between history and meaning.

Notes 1. The use of the expressions “not quite right,” “all too right” and “eerily ordinary” is borrowed from an essay by Geoff Dyer on the photographer Chris Dorley-Brown. This essay was inspirational, though it revolves around an analysis of work that is very different from Jünger’s (and is not even critical about the attempt to “photograph eternity”). See Dyer (2018). 2. Except when indicated, all translations from the German are by the authors. 3. On this issue, see Part I in Blok (2017). 4. Ernst Jünger, Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges: Fronterlebnisse deutscher Soldaten (Berlin: Neufeld & Henius Verlag, 1930), 186. The authors have attempted, to the best of their ability, to find out who holds the authorship rights of these photographs. They have not, however, been able to locate these since Jünger himself did not provide any indication of the authorship of the photographs, and the publisher of his books no

186 

S. Symons and T. Castelein

longer exists. If anyone holds the rights to these photos, they can make contact with the publisher. 5. Ibid., 74. 6. For an excellent analysis of this issue, and of Ernst Jünger’s photobooks at large, see Werneburg and Phillips (1992, pp. 42–64). See also Capeloa Gil (2010) and Bullock (1992, pp. 106–110). 7. Richard Junior, hrsg., Hier spricht der Feind: Kriegserlebnisse unserer Gegner, mit einer Einleitung von Ernst Jünger (Berlin: Neufeld and Henius [1931], 24. 8. Ibid., 25. 9. Junior, hrsg., Hier spricht der Feind, 149. 10. For the same argument see also Jünger (1931a, pp. 620–626). 11. For an enlightening comparison between the works of Jünger and Benjamin, see Bullock (1998, pp. 563–581). 12. The original reference is Kracauer (1932, pp. 122–123). 13. See, for instance, also the reference to an “intoxicating lucidity [berauschende Nüchternheit]” in Jünger (1922, p. 102). 14. Cited and translated by Werneburg and Phillips (1992, p. 52). 15. Cited and translated by Werneburg and Phillips (1992, p. 53). 16. Jünger, Hier spricht der Feind, 66. 17. Cited and translated by Werneburg and Phillips (1992, p. 53). 18. Der gefährliche Augenblick: Eine Sammlung von Bildern und Berichten, hrsg. Von Ferdinand Bucholtz, mit einer Einleitung von Ernst Jünger (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1931), 72. 19. Jünger, Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges, 312. 20. Jünger, Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges, 231. 21. For an extensive discussion of the concept of Rausch in Jünger’s work, see Bullock (1992, pp. 180–225).

Bibliography Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (R.  Howard, Trans.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Benjamin, W. (1999a). Little History of Photography. In M.  W. Jennings, H. Eiland, & G. Smith (Eds.), Selected Writings (Vol. 2). Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (1999b). Theories of German Fascism. On the Collection of Essays War and Warriors, Edited by Ernst Jünger. In M.  W. Jennings,

8  The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking… 

187

H. Eiland, & G. Smith (Eds.), Selected Writings (Vol. 2). Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (1999c). Trauerspiel and Tragedy. In M. Bullock & M. W. Jennings (Eds.), Selected Writings (Vol. 1). Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Berger, J. (2013). Understanding a Photograph. In G. Dyer (Ed.), Understanding a Photograph. New York: Aperture. Blok, V. (2017). Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology. Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene. New York/London: Routledge. Bullock, M. P. (1992). The Violent Eye. Ernst Jünger’s Visions and Revisions on the European Right. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Bullock, M. P. (1998). Walter Benjamin and Ernst Jünger: Destructive Affinities. German Studies Review, 21(3), 563–581. Capeloa Gil, I. (2010). The Visuality of Catastrophe in Ernst Jünger’s Der Gefährliche Augenblick and Die Veränderte Welt. KulturPoetik, 10(1), 62–84. Dyer, G. (2018, July 24). How to Photograph Eternity. The New York Times. Flusser, V. (2012). Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books. Jünger, E. (1922, revised in 1926). ‘Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis’ in Betrachtungen zur Zeit. Sämtliche Werke 9. Essays 1. Stuttgart: Klett-­ Cotta, 1995. Jünger, E. (1927). Die Schicksalszeit. In S.  O. Berggötz (Ed.), Politische Publizistik. 1919 bis 1933. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001. Jünger, E. (1928a). Luftfahrt Ist Not!: Vorwort. In S. O. Berggötz (Ed.), Politische Publizistik. 1919 bis 1933. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001. Jünger, E. (1928b). ‘Nachwort’ to Die Unvergessenen. In S. O. Berggötz (Ed.), Politische Publizistik. 1919 bis 1933. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001. Jünger, E. (1930a). ‘Das grosse Bild des Krieges’ printed in Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges. In S.  O. Berggötz (Ed.), Politische Publizistik. 1919 bis 1933. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001. Jünger, E. (1930b). ‘Krieg und Technik’ printed in Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges. In S. O. Berggötz (Ed.), Politische Publizistik. 1919 bis 1933. Stuttgart: Klett-­ Cotta, 2001. Jünger, E. (1931a). ‘Einleitung: Über die Gefahr’ printed in Der gefährliche Augenblick. In S.  O. Berggötz (Ed.), Politische Publizistik. 1919 bis 1933. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001. Jünger, E. (1931b). Hier Spricht der Feind: Einleitung. In S. O. Berggötz (Ed.), Politische Publizistik. 1919 bis 1933. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001. Jünger, E. (1933). ‘Einleitung’ to Die veränderte Welt. In S. O. Berggötz (Ed.), Politische Publizistik. 1919 bis 1933. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001.

188 

S. Symons and T. Castelein

Jünger, E. (1934). ‘Über den Schmerz’ in Blätter und Steine. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. Kracauer, S. (1932, October 16). Gestaltschau oder Politik? Frankfurter Zeitung, No. 774–776; Reprinted in I.  Mülder-Bach (Ed.), S.  Kracauer. Schriften. Vol. 5: 3. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990. Kracauer, S. (1995). Photography. In T.  Y. Levin (Ed.), The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Werneburg, B., & Phillips, C. (1992). Ernst Jünger and the Transformed World. October, 62, 42–64.

Part IV Individual Violence

9 Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach to the Violence in the Acts of Torture Jeremy Heuslein

And yet, twenty-two years after it occurred, on the basis of an experience that in no way probed the entire range of possibilities, I dare to assert that torture is the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself. —Améry 1986, p. 22 Only in rare moments of life do we truly stand face to face with the event and, with it, reality. —Améry 1986, p. 26. For Améry, this moment was the experience of torture

Introduction Violence has been a growing theme in philosophical and phenomenological research over the last few decades. Whether inspired by the tumultuous and violent geopolitical events of the early twentieth century or by a growing recognition of the constitutive role of violence in creating those J. Heuslein (*) KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_9

191

192 

J. Heuslein

same geopolitical actors, research into violence continues to evolve and expand. This is true beyond the philosophical field, as psychological and sociological research into violence has increased. One of the central issues, though, is defining different kinds of violence, as well as developing an understanding of what constitutes violence as such. In my chapter, I propose to investigate the kind of violence seen in acts of torture or what I call “torturous violence,” in order to dissect the essential structures of violence in terms of its effects on subjectivity. It must be remembered that not all violence is equal. Not all violence is equal in terms of its effects on subjects, in its physicality, in its disturbance of narrative and meaning-making capabilities, for example, one slap in the face from a partner is different from one slap in the face from an officer of the police. As several scholars have claimed and as I will be following in this chapter, not all violence is equal, because all violence is relational, that is, all violence is embedded in social bodies and relational contexts.1 For this chapter, I am confining my definition of violence to the realm of human relations and especially interpersonal relations, thereby excluding what could be considered as violent natural phenomena (e.g., earthquakes, forest fires, tsunamis).2 As Bernard Waldenfels argues, violence usually contains cultural signs and symbols that demarcate it as in the field of human relations, which I show in torture’s targeting of social bodies. There is a great range, even within the sphere of human relations, to violence: from rites and rituals of social cohesion3 and the violence of the law4 to the desolation contained in the atomic bomb and the programmatic use of torture in genocidal campaigns, violence is on a gradient.5 In this chapter, I propose that in the site of torturous violence, we discover a sort of fulcrum that allows us to see the red thread throughout the differing phenomena of human violence. Torture is a notorious use of violence, and one that inspires its own debates, usually considering its justification or injustifiability in liberal societies.6 It is not an unambiguous subject. Nonetheless, I argue that both an understanding of violence and of torture could be developed by investigating the quality of violence present in acts of torture, as these moments are the rare moments Jean Améry, an Austrian-Belgian philosopher who suffered torture and imprisonment at the hands of the Gestapo in World War II, speaks of: violence can confront the habits of subjects and fundamentally alter them, revealing oft-unseen aspects of reality.7 In this chapter, I argue that violence in the acts of torture opens the areas of

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

193

intersubjectivity, the constitution of space and time, and the nature of subjectivity to phenomenological reflection in ways that also could bring into question the phenomenological method itself.8 As I will proceed through each of these elements, I offer up some reflections as prolegomena to an understanding not only of violence but also of torture. Throughout these reflections, the notions of pain and of embodiment play an important role, and while these deserve their own development, the full development of their part in the experience of torture falls beyond the bounds of this chapter.9 In the first section, I delve into the notion of violence and its relation to intersubjectivity, noting the consequences of torture and violence on the sense of shared community and fundamental trust in the world, based in the fundamental vulnerability of the embodied subject. Here, the work of Améry and Susan Brison, who herself suffered a violent sexual assault, are drawn upon, as well as the work of others. In my second section, I turn to the collapse of the constitution of space and time in the experience of pain-producing violence, seen notably in acts of torture. Here, I draw upon the work of classic phenomenologists, as well as contemporary scholars. In my final section, I conclude with the effect of violence on the meaning-making capacities of subjects, noting both the destructive and the potentially constitutive nature of violence as it regards subjectivity. Here, I draw on Elaine Scarry and Walter Benjamin more heavily. In my conclusion, I offer up a glimmer of what could potentially counter the weight of violence and reconstitute subjectivity over and against torturous violence: resistance.

 iolence and Intersubjectivity: Communal V Destruction In this section, I develop an understanding of the effect of torturous violence on intersubjectivity, specifically on the self-understanding of the subject as part of a social body or community. First, I specifically address a notion of vulnerability, showing how all violence is premised on vulnerability. After this, I begin to address the event of violence and its spontaneous creation and breakdown of intersubjective community. At the end of this, I argue that the breakdown of intersubjective community is akin to a shift in attitude, that is, from the natural attitude to a “wounded”

194 

J. Heuslein

attitude. Finally, I note how torture is specifically used to do this, exacerbating the nature of violence. In his now classic work, At the Mind’s Limits, Jean Améry details his experience as a victim of the Gestapo and prisoner in Auschwitz, including his experience of being tortured. He writes, “I don’t know if the person who is beaten by the police loses human dignity. Yet I am certain that with the very first blow that descends on him he loses something we will perhaps temporarily call ‘trust in the world’” (Améry 1986, p.  28).10 This “trust in the world” for Améry is a sense of communal belonging, a kind of natural attitude of interpersonal belonging. This is a sense of being able to expect certain kinds of action from people, whose place in society is known and understood, for example, police officers. Being the victim of torturous violence breaks down the social bonds at an empirical level, which is seen in many forms of violence, for example, the strain on relationship in which there is physical abuse (to the extent that many would rightly call for the relationship to end). However, as I will argue below, torturous violence does not only break down social bonds empirically, but the capacity for the subject to form these bonds and take part in the intersubjective constitution of the world, at least as she had done previously. The place of the ego in the intersubjectively constituted world shifts through the event of torturous violence. Before explicating this, however, it is important to note the ways in which violence potentially brings different subjects together; then, I will follow the logic of violence through torture to find the solitary subject, isolated through pain and the violence in torture. Scholars focused on intersubjective violence claim that violence is only possible for the vulnerable subject.11 Essentially, without the capacity to be harmed or to be touched by the other, there could be no violence. Burkhard Liebsch puts it this way: “Violence presupposes vulnerability and depends on the vulnerability of the other” (Ó Murchadha 2006, p. 132). In short, vulnerability and violence are intimately connected— there could not be violence without vulnerability. However, not only am I vulnerable to the other, but the other is vulnerable to me; the borders of my flesh are permeable, as are the borders of the other. Violence exposes and damages these borders through the transgressions and violations of them. There is, in a sense, in the borders of my flesh a haunting of the other, who could come to me with an open hand or a fist. In the words of Felix Ó Murchadha in his edited volume on violence and victims,

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

195

“Violence articulates fundamental elements of human relations, specifically those of interdependence” (Ó Murchadha 2006, p. 9). In our vulnerability to one another, the constitution of ourselves and of the world is open to one another as well. Consequently, violence is only possible in relationships of interdependence, where the self is always already exposed to the alterity of the other. Indeed, this is fundamental to the intersubjective constitution of the world. However, this exposure is not merely one constituted in lived-time but one that is ontologically chiasmatic, that is, it is not merely the others that have come into my sphere of ownness that I am exposed to, but all others—all others sharing in the constitution of this world. As Didier Franck, a phenomenologist who argues that the flesh is the starting point for phenomenological investigation, writes, “[S]ince all flesh refers to another flesh, this means that difference and the carnal relation temporalize time” (Franck 2014, p. 163). With the constitution of time being a fundamental aspect of consciousness and our experience of the word, Franck argues that it only arises in our flesh and its incarnate relations to another flesh. The flesh always points to another. This reference of my flesh to another’s and another’s to mine entangles us. It is an aspect of my flesh that violence employs: violence entangles my flesh with others—just not the others I expected; the time of my flesh is transformed in the event of violence. This is why Ó Murchadha claims that “[n]o matter how predictable, a violent event when it occurs is unexpected, it has a focus such as a bomb blast which breaks with the continuity of the everyday, it brings together perpetrators, victims and witnesses who would as individuals have no awareness of one another” (Ó Murchadha 2006, p. 13). When violence erupts, the vulnerabilities of all others are exposed one to each other, and consequently a spontaneous intersubjective community is formed, one unified by the event of violence. This is seen in so many of the stories told by survivors or witnesses of violent events: there is a sense of coming together, of unity, where little to none previously existed. I grant that this claim is, at first, problematic to my argument that violence breaks down a sense of community, that violence interrupts the intersubjective constitution of the world. However, this is understandable and resolvable if we look more closely at the event of violence, the exposure of the self to violence, and the kind of community violence creates. The

196 

J. Heuslein

event of violence is rarely outside of context, although when it does occur, violence does surprise as it interrupts a constitution of time (see below). When Waldenfels claims that “[v]iolence arises at the intersections of various orders” and so “transforms our own body into a sphere of vulnerability up to the point of violence against life and limb” (Ó Murchadha 2006, p. 74), he claims that violence is situated in a context, at an interaction of various orders (legal, cultural, symbolic, et al.), and it is at that place that the embodied subject is exposed to its own finitude and mortality. Violence occurs where there are others, and the borders of the self are brought into question, as the body (the flesh) is marked in its vulnerability to violence, in its exposure to be injured, to be broken, to be killed. The vulnerability of the body is ultimately the threat of death, and violence carries with it this threat. Waldenfels himself argues this: “Because it is visible, tangible and open to attack, even to mortal attacks, our body forms a territory which opens the door to violence. Our body spreads through the world” (Ó Murchadha 2006, p. 81). Here, Waldenfels’ body is reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, and the body is subjected to vulnerability from anywhere and everywhere, as it spreads through the world. This is ultimately based on the embodied subject as a co-­constituting force of the world in an intersubjective community.12 In being exposed to violence, to the threat of death from the other, the community of subjects begins to break down. This does not merely expose me to ‘enemies,’ but the hue of the world changes. Ó Murchadha writes regarding this change in my perception of the world, “The world is no longer a secure place, but a constant source of penetration and infection. As embodied beings we live necessarily in dependence on the world around us and we depend on a certain constancy in that world for our well-being” (Ó Murchadha 2006, p. 236). Embodiment is crucial to the change wrought by violence in the attitude and relationship with the world. While previously I noted the potential creation of community through violence, it is remarkable that here violence comes full circle and isolates and individuates subjects from the intersubjective whole. The kind of community created in the event of violence is one perched on the edge of more violence, unstable and exposed. There is, in a sense, a community around a violent event that is not connected to the rest of the intersubjective community. In the words

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

197

of Susan Brison, “When the trauma is of human origin and is intentionally inflicted…it not only shatters one’s fundamental assumptions about the world and one’s safety in it, but also severs the sustaining connection between the self and the rest of humanity” (Brison 1999, p. 40). Violence, even if it is community-creating is fundamentally community-­destroying. The community created by violence is one of witness, those whom the event has not violated directly, or one of fear and not mutual trust; the victim and the perpetrator are not in a community, at least not one defined by a symmetrical relationships, but ones of violation and power. There is a sense in which an intersubjective community is given an identity through systematic violence or even a past violent event. Walter Benjamin’s analysis of violence and its role in producing a legality or sovereignty of a state supports this understanding,13 as well as Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of Benjamin.14 In the sociological work of René Girard, he claims that violence binds a community through ritual, and it is in these rites and rituals that transcendental violence is displaced for a time from its mimetic work within a community. However, it always returns and the violence has to be again displaced—he calls this the scapegoat mechanism.15 Violence, even in constituting a community whether more temporary or permanent, continuously threatens to break down the bonds between subjects. In my analysis, I am led to ask where the breakdown of an intersubjective community begins, or to use Améry’s language: when does one lose one’s trust in the world? Améry claims it is from the very beginning of violence: “At the first blow, however, this trust in the world breaks down” (Améry 1986, p. 28). At the instigate of torturous violence, the trust in the world is suspended. Could this trust in the world be something akin to the natural attitude, the everyday attitude that phenomenologists claim usually blinds us to seeing deeply into the order of things? I claim that it is, insofar as violence separates the self from the community of others, isolating the self in pain, and thereby violence initiates a different attitude that is taken toward the world. This is not similar to the phenomenological attitude, which is taken up when the epoché is performed, but rather is like the natural attitude, only twisted. It could be called a “wounded attitude.” In such a change of attitude the communality with other subjects in the world changes. There is a sense of separation that the experience

198 

J. Heuslein

induces. Indeed, even those who have also experienced the torture have not, could not, experience my torture. This solipsistically oriented attitude is formed from the singular nature of my bodily experience, as Améry claims in his own accounting of torture: “The pain was what is was. Beyond that there is nothing to say. Qualities of feeling as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limit of the capacity of language to communicate. If someone wanted to impart his physical pain, he would be forced to inflict it and thereby become a torturer himself ” (Améry 1986, p. 33). Elaine Scarry, develops a similar understanding in her work, The Body in Pain.16 Here, she schematizes the experience of torture and war, to show how torture through the pain inflicted begins to mark the limit of and undercut language (Scarry 1985, pp. 48–51). She claims that without language, there is no sociality, no intersubjective communality. Specifically, in torture, pain is used to transform the individual merely into a voice whose expression of pain only empowers the stature of the state. Indeed, this breakdown of language and subjectivity is seen most evidently in extreme cases of violence and pain: it is seen in torture.17 Améry moves from the first blow of the interrogator, in which the trust of the world is broken, to the full destruction of trust in torture. He writes from his personal experience, and he notes that while in the Belgian resistance in the Second World War, he often imagined the moment of capture and interrogation, but when the actual moment came, the blow burst not only his imagined perceptions of the moment but his sense of reality. He notes that “[w]hoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained” (Améry 1986, p. 40). The world for the tortured person, for the person subjected to the violence and the pain of torture, is distant. The process of constituting, of continuously making meaningful the world, is undone in the inexpressibility of the pain, in the objectification and the violation of the borders of the body, and the seemingly arbitrary nature of continued existence for the tortured subject. Moreover, the isolation, silence, and subjective experience of meaninglessness is something that leads to the lack of documentation often associated with torture claims, as survivors either cannot or choose not to speak of it.18 William Cavanaugh, a scholar who wrote on the Pinochet regime’s use

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

199

of torture, reasons that “[t]orture breaks down collective links and makes of its victims isolated monads. Victims then reproduce the same dynamic in society itself, with the net result that all social bodies which would rival the state are disintegrated and d ­ isappeared” (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 34). The individuals are isolated and individuated by torture, traumatized, and then they carry that same traumatizing into the social bodies around them until there is no longer a social body as there once was: the intersubjective community is broken. Cavanaugh persuasively argues that that was the aim of the Pinochet regime in Chile: to dismantle any social body that was competing with the societal (and economic) vision of the state.19 Returning to a subjective level, there is often another strategy invoked by the torturers for isolation. They will remark that the uncooperative disposition of the tortured, their resistance, is forcing them to take these actions and inflict pain. Cavanaugh notes the reasoning, “By focusing on their own pain and sacrifice, no matter how disproportionate to the pain of torture, torturers deny the reality of the other and confer reality on the concerns of the regime alone” (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 36).20 As I have argued above, violence creates but ultimately breaks down a shared sense of community, of belonging to an intersubjective community. Torturous violence is a particular example of how violence systematically isolates the person from social bodies, cutting them off from any form of empathy—from the torturer’s denial of their pain to the victim’s inability to express with exactitude the nature of the experience. This is only exacerbated by the destruction to subjectivity itself that is brought about by violence, as the horizons of space and of time, that is, the constituted and meaningful world, collapses around the subject. To understand how these horizons collapse, I turn to the constitution of space and of time.

 ollapsing Horizons: Violence and the Constitution C of Space and Time The role of violence and of torture in the collapse of subjectivity can be specifically seen in the collapse of the subject’s capacity to constitute spatial and temporal horizons. The constitution of space and time are crucial

200 

J. Heuslein

themes in phenomenological discourse, spawning many investigations and phenomenologists. Therefore, I will limit my discussion to the consequences of the experience of violence and of pain on the ability of the subject to constitute the world spatially and temporally. As mentioned above, the notions of embodiment of pain are going to be operative here, but they will not be fully developed. They will be used, insofar as the ongoing analysis on the violence of torture requires. I will first develop how the spatial horizons of subjectivity are dismantled, drawing primarily on Drew Leder, Elaine Scarry, and Jean Améry. Edmund Husserl’s analysis of a lived body’s place in the constitution of space hovers in the background here.21 After this, I will turn to the collapse of the temporal horizons, which is accomplished in three ways: the suspension of the future, the suppression of the past, and the totalization of the moment of torture in the narrative life of the subject. In the last part, I will be drawing on the work of Susan Brison and her studies of trauma. It is useful to begin with the observation of Diane Enns, which connects the isolation of the subject under violence to the collapse of spatial constitution. She writes, The victim of extreme violence provides us with an exemplary threshold for exploring questions of self-determination, for at the moment of violation, when an unspeakable reduction to flesh or pain occurs, when all that exists for the victim is bare life and the necessity of survival, it makes no sense to refer to relationality or non-totalising self-formations. (Ó Murchadha 2006, p. 170)

Enns reminds us here that what was analyzed in the previous section of this chapter (the individuating nature of violence) is connected to the reduction of the subject to flesh, which is caused by the pain experienced. In order to understand how this occurs and its connection to the suspension of spatial horizons, the connection between the body’s constituting role and the nature of pain must be developed. Drew Leder distinguishes this experience of the body as affecting the dys-appearing body, that is, the body that normally is non-thematic in consciousness now becomes the theme of consciousness as the intense pain or abnormality focuses consciousness on the body. The alienation from the

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

201

intersubjective community, and even the self, continues as the subject may “experience the painful body as merely an ‘it,’ that which is separate from the essential self,” in order to “[yield] some relief and [re-establish]…integrity in the face of an overwhelming threat” (Leder 1990, p. 77). In the body becoming the object of consciousness, the normally ecstatic structure of consciousness and of the body is suspended, with consciousness turning inward to the experience of the body that is always already “here.”22 The body no longer spreads out into the world, but its center appears as a maelstrom. To approach it slightly differently, Scarry writes about this in the following way: “In [the body’s] huge, heavy presence, the rest of the world grows light, as though all else has been upended and emptied of its contents” (Scarry 1985, p. 31). Pain causes the world to constrict, whether that is a long or slow process, it is one that promises the closure of death, where the concern or care or project is merely the final breath, and in that process the world becomes less and less co-constituted, as the body fills the attention of consciousness. The world, which the body normally spreads through, that is, projects its actions and projects into, becomes an intolerable place, as the focus of consciousness is thrusted back to the body and its pain. The interest of consciousness is in the survival of the body, the survival of the “here” of its world. Jean Améry reflects on this: “My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel” (Améry 1986, p. 28). In being forced by violence, in a kind of violation,23 the body is plunged into an obsessive awareness, where it is only concerned with the dissipation of the pain, that is, with the continued existence of its self. In all this, the spatial horizons are rolled back to the zero-point of orientation that is the body (Husserl 1989, pp. 165–166). Besides the suspension of spatial horizons, violence and pain induce a constriction and eventual suspension of temporal horizons; the future is less and less a part of the constituting subject. Or rather, the subject under violence no longer projects and understands its self and its projects with time enough: time is pressed, short, a few grains left in the hourglass being strained out. This is not a cliché, but an image that individuals who experience torture express. It is seen in Fig. 9.1, which is the work of Abu Zubayduh, who was detained and tortured at the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency.24

202 

J. Heuslein

Fig. 9.1  One of Abu Zubayduh’s drawings, depicting the suspension of his temporal horizons

The threat of death implicit in violence cuts off protensions regarding the future. In fact, this is commensurate with the teleology of pain developed by Leder (Leder 1990, p. 77).25 He argues that pain induces in the subject a suspension of other projects and now the subject only aims at the cessation of pain. This suspends any other future-facing projects. Another way that this is often put by philosophers and psychologists is in terms of narrative. The narrative that shapes subjective identity (the continuing constitution of the self ) is broken apart by the act of violence.

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

203

Unsurprisingly, the more violent (and this is not necessarily physical violence) the event, the more disparate the break in the narrative. Given the vulnerability of a narrative, it is useful to understand narratives ­temporally: “The trauma survivor experiences a figurative dismemberment – a shattering of assumptions, a severing of past, present, and future” (Brison 1999, p. 48). The event of violence constitutes a present moment in the narrative of the subject who has experienced it. The moment does not fade away, nor is it repressed. The shattering of the narrative mirrors the structure of trauma, in its past-present structure, that is, in trauma the past is not past but experienced as a present, an ongoing trauma. This structure is emphasized in torture and other moments of extreme violence, because not only is the future brought into question (and the threat of death itself used as a torture method),26 but also the past is brought into question. When torture takes on an interrogatory form, the past or past plans that the tortured person has information about becomes the focus. Yet even when information is obtained, the torture is likely to continue, as interrogators claim they “need to be sure,” but in truth the information and its veracity will not satisfy until the person tortured has been disposed of their past and their future, making the power of the torturers evident.27 Torture victims often note how difficult it is even to remember the truth: their past is nearly inaccessible (Cassidy 1992, p.  198). Moreover, the interrogatory form of torture is considered as ineffective in intelligence gathering, even by the experts (United States 2014, p.  3). This is simply seen, as well in how the resistance movements format themselves, by using false names and having a decentralized network of information, which makes interrogatory torture unsuccessful. Reflecting on the traumatic structure of torture, Améry notes the temporal stasis that torture can inflict: “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected” (Améry 1986, p. 34). He phrases it even more emphatically, noting a crucial difference between the violence inflicted in torture and ‘normal’ trauma: “It still is not over. Twenty-two years later I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms, panting, and accusing myself. In such an instance there is no ‘repression’” (Améry 1986, p. 36). In “normal” trauma, there can be a repression of the event, that is repressed and affects the subject in different ways, but one that is not actively

204 

J. Heuslein

raising itself in consciousness. For it to be raised as a phenomenon in consciousness is already a step in overcoming that trauma. However, torturous violence does not disappear, does not recuse itself into the past, but it presents and re-presents itself in the life of the tortured.28 In two different ways, the violence and the pain of torture collapses the temporal horizons that the subject normally constitutes: (1) it suspends the imagining of the future and a remembering of the past, and (2) it is the living moment of death, which is, in some accounts, impossible to remove from the narrative of the survivor’s life. This happens not only in torture, but in acts of extreme violence (that could be considered torturous), as in the case of Susan Brison, who, in her own words, had to leave her old self to die in the valley in which she was raped in order to survive (Brison 2002, p. 21). If she had tried to remain the same person, her life’s possibilities would have been closed off by the experience. Her spatial and temporal possibilities were brought into question; those horizons were collapsing. Her subjectivity twisted in on itself, and in order to survive, her bare life had to figure out how to cope with the destruction of meaning, which brings us to the final effect of violence. In this section, I have argued that through the infliction of pain in torturous violence the constitution of space and time collapses. As these spatial and temporal horizons draw back into the subject in pain, there is an effect on the subjectivity of the person in pain or subjected to violence. In order to develop these subjective consequences, I turn now to address them directly.

Violence and Subjectivity As stated above, the temporal and spatial horizons of the subject are deconstructed through pain and especially in torturous violence. In the first section, I also argued that pain and violence are individuating phenomena—ones that denote the isolated aspect of subjectivity in pain. In this section, I argue that in light of these previous analyses that subjectivity itself is constituted and wounded by torturous violence, specifically in its meaning-making capabilities (in its self-constitution) and its intersubjectivity constituting capabilities. In other words, I argue that through

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

205

the extreme affections of violence and pain in torture, the subject is no longer able to formulate meaningful relations with the world. Violence constitutes the subject as a passivity, and as such violence enables mastery over a subject. Using Walter Benjamin, I argue that the meaninglessness experienced by the tortured subject and the constitutive nature of violence are intimately related, as the subject’s own meaning is suspended by the constituting power of violence. Finally, I conclude this chapter by noting briefly the role of resistance in creating subjectivity and overcoming violence, torture, and pain. I begin by analyzing the aim of torture, as it targets subjectivity and meaning-making capabilities. From various sources, it is observable that in torture the intention of the torturer is not limited to the production of physical pain on the lived body, or even to the extraction of a confession or information from the tortured. Beyond all this, torture aims at subjectivity, at the constitution of the person tortured. This affect is also seen in torturous violence. In analyzing the use of torturous violence in the Pinochet regime in Chile, Cavanaugh argues that “[t]orture is intended to alter a person’s identity, degrade him and strip him of human attributes, but in most cases not to kill him” (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 38). Cavanaugh uses a theological language, filled out by sociological analysis, nonetheless what he calls the dehumanizing process of torture, its “perverse liturgy” (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 30), can be understood phenomenologically. The process of dehumanization is a process of desubjectivization—the stripping of the subject in its constitutive powers. Cavanaugh expresses this in a similar language: “The feeling and reality of powerlessness in torture is so extreme that the subject is no longer subject, but mere object” (Cavanaugh 1998, p.  40). Elaine Scarry has included a similar “step” in the process of torture. She argues that as the subjectivity of the subject is targeted and transformed into an object, the meaningmaking capabilities of the subject are included (Scarry 1985, pp. 50–52). Additionally, the ability of the subject to frame for herself the projects of her life is impaired, if not destroyed and only possibly reconstituted after the experience is over, by the suspension of the temporal horizon. For some tortured subjects, the torture chamber becomes all that their possible world consists of; the constituting subject no longer desires those goods that she did once; nothing more than escape or release, and even

206 

J. Heuslein

those barely, can be hoped for. This is analogous with Leder’s teleology of pain: the subject in pain only seeks to stop the pain (Leder 1990, p. 77). Améry once again offers a reflection from his own experience that touches on this: [The torturer] has control of the other’s scream of pain and death; he is master over flesh and spirit, life and death. In this way, torture becomes the total inversion of the social world, in which we can live only if we grant our fellow man life, ease his suffering, bridle the desire of our ego to expand. But in the world of torture man exist only by ruining the other person who stands before him. (Améry 1986, p. 35)

Even in Améry’s description all that the tortured subject does is exist for the torturer to ruin. Here we see that the intersubjective world is no longer freely accessible for the tortured person, and the language of the tortured is reduced to the scream of pain, which itself is controlled by the torturer. Scarry highlights a similar structure in her analysis of torture, that is, the goal of torture is to change the body into voice, to remove it from the world of possibilities, because once it is a voice, it can only speak what it is commanded or cry out in pain (Scarry 1985, p. 49).29 Without language, the meaningfulness of the event is unattainable for the tortured person, as well as access to the intersubjective community of subjects. In stripping subjects of human attributes, including language, torturous violence and pain aim at the reduction of meaning into nothing. Better said, torture aims to reduce all meaning that the torturer is not trying to constitute into nothing. In order to understand how torturous violence may constitute meaning, I turn to the torturers and Benjamin’s analysis of violence. There is another side to the torturous violence and pain that is wrought against the human subject: the power and purpose of the subjects wielding the violence and pain. As noted several times above, torture cannot be contained to merely a project of interrogation; it is used far more widely than that. Torture is a climax of the kind of violence that Walter Benjamin speaks of when he writes that “[a]ll violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all validity” (Benjamin 1996, p. 243). In Benjamin’s critique, violence functions as a means, with only two ends: create a new law or preserve the

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

207

existing law. For him, law is not merely a particular element of jurisprudence, but the whole system of legality, sovereignty, and nationality of a particular people. Violence, then, is considered to be constitutive of a people, as acts of mythic violence found those groups, uniting persons under a single legality or sovereignty. Benjamin, in developing his critique, also notes that “[l]awmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence” (Benjamin 1996, p.  248). Violence that makes the legality or sovereignty seeks to have power over subjects; as a program, torturous violence often expresses that desire to have power over subjects and then establish a legality and sovereignty to be recognized by other sovereignties.30 Torture could be considered as a radical form of the constituting violence that founds sovereignty, as it is the sovereign action of another over the life and the death of the tortured body. The executive violence sovereignty has is seen in a particular yet universal scale in torturous violence. Scaling back from a perspective of sovereignty and violence, Ó Murchadha offers another perspective to be taken into consideration: “The source of violence…is not in an autonomous will seeking mastery, but in an incarnate and vulnerable will which is motivated to violence long before it takes up its weapons of retaliation” (Ó Murchadha 2006, p. 216). This is why subjects engage in violence: we encounter vulnerabilities in others and in ourselves, and in order to minimize these vulnerabilities in us, we seek to dominate others, that is, to have power over them. This does not conflict with Benjamin, but modifies the idea of constituting violence: violence does not arise from power, but creates it—the torturer affects violence, in order to produce power, which then can be wielded over subjects. This is similar to Michel Foucault’s understanding of the production of power through the penal system—power is produced through fields of knowledge opened up in the technologies of the prison and surrounding jurisprudence (Foucault 1977). Torturous violence produces power, and uses that power to solidify their own position, which is usually tenuous or vulnerable. Moreover, violence arises not merely from existing conflict, but from the will that is vulnerable seeking out power to make itself invulnerable to prevent violence against it, while perpetuating violence on others. Améry himself claims that to resolve the tortured’s dilemma of seeking justice, of re-establishing power, they must in turn become torturers (Améry 1986, p. 33).

208 

J. Heuslein

Through the process of dehumanization or desubjectivization, torturous violence undermines the subject’s capabilities to produce meaning or co-constitute meaning in an intersubjective community. Moreover, torturous violence constitutes the subject in violence, producing power that is wielded over her as a sovereignty. The question remains: what can be done in the face of such violence? I conclude with a note on resistance.

Conclusion: On Resistance Despite everything that has been written in terms of the isolating, suspending of spatial and temporal horizons, and destroying meaning-­ making capabilities of torturous violence, it does not always collapse subjectivity; at least, not permanently. In this conclusion, I argue that torturous violence reveals that the target of such and all violence is resistance, a structure of subjectivity. However, resistance is an elastic concept and is seen in various phenomena, in both its failing and its succeeding. I define it through the experience of torturous violence and the structures of it outlined throughout this chapter. As I have argued above, torturous violence is rarely, if ever, primarily concerned with the production of information—either intelligence or a confession—but rather with the production of power over tortured subjects and in the establishing of a sovereignty more broadly. With this project in mind, it becomes clear that torturous violence, then, is not about words in a room, but the powers of bodies in a society. Cavanaugh notes this with regard to the Pinochet regime: “It was crucial to the Pinochet regime to have complete control over bodies. The regime understood perfectly well that the body could become a focus of resistance to the state’s power” (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 67). Embodied subjects have powers, projects, and their own aims. Regimes that employ torturous violence seek to undermine and exterminate those differences and competitions with the state. Améry argues that this programmatic use of torturous violence is not just something that can be used by a state, but it is something that can define one: “[R]ather, I am convinced, beyond all personal experiences, that torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich, but its essence” (Améry 1986, p. 24). In the face

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

209

of ­torturous violence, subjects offer resistance, to not be constituted by the torturous violence of regimes, to defy their laws and their sovereignties, to risk life and limb to do so. Améry notes that this resisting is mysterious, tied up with the very nature of subjectivity. He writes, “Where does the strength, where does the weakness come from? I don’t know. One does not know” (Améry 1986, p. 37). This strength is both physical and moral for Améry, as torture and its violence touches both the body and the spirit of the tortured. The strength to maintain trust in the world, the strength to keep the horizons of the future open, and the strength to originate the self and create meaning, is resistance. Resisting, the subject maintains its trust, its horizons, and its origin in the world. In some sense, resistance is as omnipresent and primordially as violence: the subject protecting its kernel of self against excitations, disturbances, and violence from the very beginning.31 Resistance, though, also arises in the face of violence, sometimes taking the form of violence. Améry shares the story of how he took up violence at Auschwitz, in order to maintain a sense of dignity, in order to resist the degradation of the camp: “I was my body and nothing else: in my hunger, in the blow that I suffered, in the blow that I dealt. My body, debilitated and crusted with filth, was my calamity. My body, when it tensed to strike, was my physical and metaphysical dignity” (Améry 1986, p.  91). Others have also noted the potentially dignifying use of violence, that is, the resistance against the violence of the other that violence originating from the self offers.32 Resistance, though, forms its own problematic, as Améry noted. This problematic opposes violence, resists violence, counters the torturous violence that seeks to dismantle subjectivity. Resistance opens up a community of subjects by creating a union around projects. Resistance opens up a spatial horizon, by dragging subjects to their feet and forcing open doors. Resistance opens up the horizons of the past and future, by remembering and imagining the importance of both. Resistance opens up subjects to new meanings, new possibilities, by offering hope in the struggle against the collapse of meaning through the violence and pain that aims to reconstitute them into objects, into cogs, into mere bodies slotted into determined forms. In the face of torturous violence, in the face of the event, subjects resist and so continue to be.

210 

J. Heuslein

Notes 1. Throughout the edited volume, Violence, Victims, Justifications, several scholars, including the editor, argue that violence is fundamentally relational. For examples see, “Introduction: Violence, Discourse and Human Interdependence” (9), “Violence as Violation” (80), “Freedom versus Responsibility? Between Ethical Indifference and Ethical Violence” (132), and the afterword (235). See F. Ó Murchadha, ed. (2006), Violence, Victims, Justifications (Bern: Peter Lang AG). 2. This is what Bernhard Waldenfels argues in his article, “Violence as Violation,” in Violence, Victims, Justifications, 73: “What seems to be especially important is to see that violence is a cultural phenomenon which cannot be transposed to some kind of brute nature.” 3. For some examples, see R. Girard (1989), The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press). 4. For an approach to the violence constituted in law, see W.  Benjamin (1996), “Critique of Violence,” in The Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, edited by M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). 5. This may seem to encompass too much, as violence could be seen in parenting as well as across the battlefields of war. Some might argue that these phenomena (e.g., spanking and shelling) differ not merely in degree but in kind. I argue, on the other hand, that they do not, insofar as both affect structures of subjectivity through similar means (pain produced in affective flesh). 6. See the arguments that response to the critiques of the use of torture and argue for its qualified use in M. Bagaric and J. Clarke (2007), Torture: When the Unthinkable is Morally Permissible (Albany: SUNY Press). 7. This is from the second epigram to this chapter; see footnote 2. The notion of the event is a complicated one in philosophy, as is reality, but here Améry is suggesting that his torture is an event that connects him to the fundamental nature of what is real, which is for him a kind of nothingness and meaninglessness. 8. It should be noted that phenomenology is normally tasked with the understanding of constitution, both in its constituting and constituted elements, but the act of torture and acts of extreme violence are acts of de-constitution, that is, where constituting functions fail and where constituents are dissolved.

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

211

9. These themes are developed and analyzed in my forthcoming dissertation, “The Flesh in Pain: A Phenomenology of Torture” (University of Leuven). 10. It is notable that here we can distinguish a phenomenological account of violence, as what is at issue is not human dignity but the fundamental constituting consciousness of the world. 11. See the afterword in Violence, Victims, Justifications, in which Ó Murchadha argues this point (235). 12. Here what has been called the problematic of peace and proximity runs up against that of violence—being in proximity to the another will ultimately cause violence to arise, not because of the other, but because of the “third,” another other who demands as much justice from me as the other. Categorization and other forms of violence then occurs. This is a detailed argument in Emmanuel Levinas’ “Peace and Proximity,” proposing another approach to the issues of polis than the usual political (violent) approaches. See E. Levinas (1996), Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T.  Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 161–169. 13. See Benjamin, “Critique of Violence.” This is seen throughout the essay, particularly in his development of the concept of mythic violence. 14. This interpretation is part and parcel of his work: G. Agamben (1998), Homo Sacer, trans. by D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press). 15. See note 4 above. 16. See E.  Scarry (1985), The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 17. One example is seen in Shelia Cassidy’s first-person account of torture under the Pinochet regime in Chile (S.  Cassidy (1992), Audacity to Believe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd)). Both through her experience in the torture chamber and her experience in prison, Cassidy conveys a sense of the breakdown of language and subjectivity, e.g., fellow prisoners did not speak about their tortures but only in brutal facts regarding their experiences, that is, not how it was experienced but what was. 18. This is seen in Cassidy’s narrative (above), as well as in dozens of cases documented by Amnesty International, who reference this problem in terms of collecting evidence of torture and other forms of abuse by the state. See, Amnesty International (2014), Above the Law: Police Torture in the Philippines (London: Amnesty International).

212 

J. Heuslein

19. Cavanaugh draws on how liberation theology, developed in Latin America, articulates a fuller image of the Kingdom of God, which competes with images of the state and its role in shaping citizenry. 20. Scarry articulates a similar structure in the experience of torture. See Body in Pain, 50–52. 21. Specifically, E.  Husserl (1989), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure and Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. by R. Rojcewicz and A.  Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers). Hereafter, Ideas II. 22. This is first described in Husserl, Ideas II, 165–166. It is taken up throughout Leder, The Absent Body. 23. See Waldenfels, “Violence as Violation,” in Violence, Victims, Justifications. 24. This image, along with others, were released under the Freedom of Information act. See, https://www.propublica.org/article/abu-zubaydahdrawings-pictures-from-an-interrogation; accessed 1 June 2018. 25. This is built upon the Husserlian analysis of the constitution of time, which can be found in E. Husserl (1991) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. By J.B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers). 26. The torture techniques that function on this principle most fully are (1) mock burial and (2) mock execution. Examples of these techniques can be found in Amnesty International (2014), ‘Welcome to Hell Fire:’ Torture and Other Ill-Treatment in Nigeria (London: Amnesty International), and United States and D. Feinstein (2014), The Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture: committee study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program (New York: First Melville House Printing). Hereafter, Report on Torture. 27. Unfortunately, this is extremely evident in the cases of torture outlined in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on Torture. 28. Not only is this Améry’s experience, but it is a phenomenon that is still detailed in today’s torture victims. See, M. Apuzzo, S. Fink, and J. Risen (2016), “How US Torture Left Legacy of Damaged Minds,” New  York Times (October 8). 29. Here, there is also the phenomenological problem of empathy, as it is seemingly reversed from a common understanding, in order to exploit the known vulnerabilities of what it means to be a subject.

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

213

30. This thought goes beyond this essay and into international political philosophy, but it is observable in the unstable regimes currently in the world, as well as past regimes (Pinochet in Chile, ISIS, and Boko Haram). The unstable position of the United States might also be observable in the use of torture. 31. Here, there is a connection with the philosophical anthropology that Sigmund Freud develops in his famous essay, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” See S. Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J.  Strachey, A.  Freud, et  al. (London: Hogarth Press). 32. See F.  Fanon (2014), The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin Books Ltd), particularly in J.P. Sartre’s preface, which emphasized the use of violence as a form of resistance.

Bibliography Améry, J. (1986). At the Mind’s Limits (S. Rosenfeld & S. P. Rosenfeld, Trans.). New York: Schocken Books. Amnesty International. (2014a). Torture in 2014: 30 Years of Broken Promises. London: Amnesty International. Amnesty International. (2014b). Attitudes to Torture. London: Amnesty International. Amnesty International. (2014c). ‘Welcome to Hell Fire:’ Torture and Other Ill-­ Treatment in Nigeria. London: Amnesty International. Amnesty International. (2014d). Above the Law: Police Torture in the Philippines. London: Amnesty International. Amnesty International. (2015a). Shadow of Impunity: Torture in Morocco and Western Sahara. London: Amnesty International. Amnesty International. (2015b). Secrets and Lies: Forced Confessions Under Torture in Uzbekistan. London: Amnesty International. Amnesty International. (2016). Hotspot Italy. London: Amnesty International. Apuzzo, M., Fink, S., & Risen, J. (2016, October 8). How US Torture Left Legacy of Damaged Minds. New York Times. Bagaric, M., & Clarke, J. (2007). Torture: When the Unthinkable Is Morally Permissible. Albany: SUNY Press.

214 

J. Heuslein

Benjamin, W. (1996). Critique of Violence. In M. Bullock & M. W. Jennings (Eds.), The Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Brison, S.  J. (1999). Trauma Narratives and the Remarking of the Self. In M. Bal, J. Crewe, & L. Spitzer (Eds.), Acts of Memory. Hanover: University Press of New England. Brison, S. J. (2002). Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cassidy, S. (1992). Audacity to Believe. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Cavanaugh, W. T. (1998). Torture and Eucharist. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Dodd, J. (2009). Violence and Phenomenology. New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish (A.  Sheridan, Trans.). New  York: Vintage Books. Franck, D. (2014). Flesh and Body: On the Phenomenology of Husserl (J. Rivera & S. Davidson, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury. Freud, S. (1953–74). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (J.  Strachey, A.  Freud, et al. Trans.). London: Hogarth Press. Geniusas, S. (2014a). The Subject of Pain: Husserl’s Discovery of the Lived-­ Body. Research in Phenomenology, 44(3), 384–404. Geniusas, S. (2014b). The Origins of the Phenomenology of Pain: Brentano, Stumpf and Husserl. Continental Philosophy Review, 47(1), 1–17. Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure and Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book (R.  Rojcewicz & A.  Schuwer, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (1991). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (J. B. Brough, Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levinson, S. (Ed.). (2004). Torture: A Collection (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1958). Phenomenology of Perception (C.  Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1969). The Visible and the Invisible (C.  LeFort, Ed., A. Lingis, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ó Murchadha, F. (Ed.). (2006). Violence, Victims, Justifications: Philosophical Approaches. Bern: Peter Lang AG. Peters, E. (1986). Torture. New York: Basil Blackwell.

9  Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach… 

215

Scarry, E. (1985). The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Staudigl, M. (2013). Towards a Relational Phenomenology of Violence. Human Studies, 36(1), 43–66. United States, & Feinstein, D. (2014). The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. New York: First Melville House Printing.

10 Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt Debra Bergoffen

Introduction This chapter is haunted by the figure of the Musselman, the Auschwitz spectacle described by survivors as a walking corpse whose humanity was eviscerated while they were still alive. Though the racist politics of creating a world where some human beings are said to be inferior to others is not new, pursuing a politics aimed at destroying the humanity of some to enhance that of others is. The Musselman is the face of this politics. To understand the radical implications of this politics it is necessary to distinguish the project of “normal” racism from that of Nazi racism. One begins by using the body’s race (however race is defined) to establish a hierarchy of humanity. The other uses the body’s race to distinguish those who are human from those who are not. The “normal” racisms of slavery and colonization are interested in producing inferior docile bodies that can be used productively for profit. The humanity of the slave and

D. Bergoffen (*) George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_10

217

218 

D. Bergoffen

c­ olonized body is essential to its value. It is undermined only insofar as it is a source of resistance and rebellion. The racist politics of Auschwitz was not aimed at assembling an army of docile work bodies. Calling its victims vermin was one way of making the case that they were of no value. Having no value there was no profit in recognizing their humanity. What began as a name that severed Jews from their humanity ended in the production of Musselman, obscene bodies that could no longer be called human. Ibram X. Kendi’s account of Frederic Douglas’ refusal to be introduced as “chattel” a “thing” a “piece of southern property” before he shared his story of the brutality of slavery brings the distinction between the Nazi racism of dehumanization and the slavery and colonization racism of inferiority into focus. Kendi tells us that Douglas justified his refusal by insisting that, “Whether enslaved or free, Black people were people…. Their humanity had never been eliminated – [this] humanity … made them equal to people the world over, even in their chains” (Kendi 2016, p.  183). Douglas believed that it was impossible to eradicate a person’s humanity. Auschwitz proved him wrong.1 Responding to the fact that having been brought into the world the Mussselman cannot be erased from it—to the fact that their existence transformed the possibility of dehumanization into a reality—compels us, I think, to return to the question of the human through the question of the relationship between the meaning of the human and the meaning of violence. Focused on the Musselman, the question may be put as follows: What do the dehumanizing effects of the violence deployed against the inmates of Auschwitz tell us about what it means to be human? Among the many ways of doing this, I attend to the testimonies of the Auschwitz survivors Primo Levi and Jean Améry within the context of Emmanuel Levinas’ and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenologies of shame, and Émile Benveniste’s description of the middle voice, to pursue the idea that some answers to the question of the source of our humanity might be found by understanding how one of these instruments of violence, shame, an ontological ingredient of our being, could be used both as a tool of dehumanization and a resource for resisting its effects.

10  Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt 

219

Levi testifies to this double edged power of shame when he distinguishes his relationship to shame from that of the Musselman. Describing the Musselman’s corpse body as a body that has lost the capacity for shame and all other emotions, he attributes his survival, in part, to his ability to hold on to the experience of being oppressed by shame, that is, to his ability to retain his affective relationship to others and the world. Once liberated, Levi writes of his shame, not to elicit our sympathy, but to ensure that we remember the evil of the shame of the Musselman. Améry also contests the destructive power of shame. He accuses the Nazis of condemning him to the shame of living in a world that denied his right to exist. He attributes his survival, in part, to his refusal to submit to this denial. After liberation his shame becomes the impetus for a politics of solidarity and revolt that rejects the right of the world to make such judgments. Levi and Améry take up different aspects of Levinas’ and Sartre’s phenomenologies of shame. Levi turns us toward the lived experience of embodied shame. Améry draws us to the ways that shame situates us as lived bodies among others. In alerting us to the complex ways that shame affects us, they also show us how/that the phenomenology of shame can become an anchor for an anti-Fascist politics. Reading their testimonies confirms Levinas’ and Sartre’s discussions of the central role shame plays in human life. They also reveal the ways that the phenomenological truth of shame was manipulated to serve the Nazi cause. As survivors of Auschwitz who testified to the ways that shame was used as a poison to destroy them, their testimonies also show that shame is a pharmakon, a source of resistance to its venom. Their accounts of their resistance set us on the path of developing a politics of shame that can respond to the tragedy of the Musselman.

Emmanuel Levinas Where cultural theorists, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists have linked the experience of shame to the norms and values of particular times and places, phenomenologists have embedded it in the ontology of the human condition. Among those phenomenologists who have ­analyzed

220 

D. Bergoffen

shame, Emmanuel Levinas, in his 1935 work On Escape, is especially insistent on decoupling shame from the dictates of conventional morality. Shame, he argues, must be understood as the announcement of the ontological “fault” of being inescapably riveted to a body rather than as a tool of social conformity. Reading this account of shame through the lens of his 1934 essay “Reflections on Hitlerism” suggests that though Levinas found that severing shame from its moralistic entanglements was essential for adequately deciphering its meaning, he was aware of the fact that shame, the oppressive experience of being riveted to a body, could be used to anchor a racist body politics of oppression. Levinas does not mention shame in the Hitler essay. He barely alludes to the body politics of shame in the Escape treatise. In the letter to Jacques Rolland that precedes Rolland’s Preface to the 2003 edition of On Escape, however, Levinas speaks of the forebodings hidden in the silences of the text, and of its bearing witness to an intellectual situation of meaning’s end on the eve of great massacres. I take these words as an invitation to read Escape and “Reflections on Hitlerism” through each other. Once ontological shame is seen as a (re)source for/of the violence of Nazi racism, the fact of being riveted to a body, described in On Escape as a fault, is better understood as a vulnerability that is exploited in racist ideologies. In this exploitation the shame of being riveted to the body is reserved for some bodies and erased from others. It is transformed from an ontological reality shared by all into the unique fault of some. In this perversion of the ontological givenness of shame, some bodies are stigmatized as shameful and marked as either inferior and/or inhuman. Rather than becoming the impetus for an interrogation into our relationship to being, the Nazis deployed the shame of being riveted to the body to legitimate a body politics that severed Jews from their humanity and asserted the exclusive humanity of the Aryan race. The Auschwitz survivors Jean Améry and Primo Levi were victims of this body politics perversion. Their accounts of their survival and their lives after liberation testify to the ways that the meanings of being riveted to a body confront each other in the Escape and “Hitler” essays. As described in the “Hitler” essay, the meaning of being riveted to a body became a politics of being determined by the body. Taking this idea to its limit the camp organizers created conditions of intolerable hunger,

10  Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt 

221

pain and suffering to make it clear to the prisoners that as determined by their bodies they were doomed. Reading On Escape makes it clear that there is a radical difference between being riveted to a body and being determined by it. As phenomenological truth, the meaning of being riveted to a body entails the negation of being determined by it. In delineating this truth, On Escape can be read as Levinas’ critique of and resistance to Fascism. In their materialized accounts of Levinas’ phenomenology of shame Levi and Améry reveal that there is a radical difference between being riveted to a lived body, a body that can feel shame and other affects, and an unlived/unlivable Musselman body, a body whose capacity for shame and all other feelings are destroyed. The meaning of the extreme violence of Auschwitz needs to be understood in terms of shame as an index of the distinction between a lived and an unlived body. Levinas’ brief but packed discussion of shame in On Escape is sandwiched between an account of malaise and a description of nausea. Identifying shame as the critical mark of an ontological malaise that is best described as a form of nausea, Levinas dismisses moral understandings of shame as superficial on two counts. First, insofar as we see shame as provoked by the transgression of moral standards, our attention is directed to our relationship to the other, the guardian of the standards that demand our submission, rather than to the fact that shame is first and foremost a self-reflexive phenomenon. Second, so long as we consider shame as a moral phenomenon, its self-reflexivity will be described as an experience of inescapable and intolerable alienation. As morally shamed, we are compelled to identify with a diminished form of ourselves, a “being who is already foreign to us and whose motives for acting we can no longer comprehend” (Levinas 2003, p. 63). To get to the heart of shame, however, we need to focus on our inability to escape this foreign self rather than on our inability to comprehend the motives of this alien/alienated self. More radically, we must abandon the idea that the shamed self is a foreign self. Leaving these accounts of shame behind, Levinas retains the definition of shame as an experience of self confrontation (Levinas 2003, p. 68). He taps into two widely held accounts of shame, its affiliation with the attempt to hide and its association with nudity. Once distanced from

222 

D. Bergoffen

their acculturated interpretations, the desire to hide and to cover oneself speak to two truths of shame. The first is that however successful one might be in hiding one’s shamed/shameful self from others there is no hiding one’s shame from oneself. “If shame is present,” Levinas writes, “it means that we cannot hide what we could like to hide. The necessity of fleeing, in order to hide oneself is put in check by the impossibility of fleeing oneself ” (Levinas 2003, p. 64). Levinas speaks of this impossibility as “the fact of being riveted to oneself ” (Levinas 2003, p. 64). Shame and the self are an inseparable couple. The second truth of shame entails its association with nudity. Nakedness here is not a matter of indecent exposure but of discovering the naked “fault” of having a body (Levinas 2003, p. 67). This fault, according to Levinas, is most clearly revealed in nausea—an encounter with the nakedness of the body that, as devoid of any collective representation, is the purest form of shame (Levinas 2003, pp.  66–67). Deciphering what Levinas means by fault in this context is critical for understanding how nausea is the material manifestation and confirmation of his ontology of shame. Fault usually designates a defect or weakness. Levinas seems to draw on these meanings to use it as a synonym for powerlessness. The physical phenomenon of nausea, vomiting, is such a vivid index of existential shame precisely because, like the nauseous person who has no choice but to vomit, we are powerless in the face of our naked embodied shame (Levinas 2003, pp.  67–8). Torturers and the organizers of Auschwitz know this. From a Levinasian perspective, the point of their violence is not the infliction of intolerable pain and suffering, but the production of irremediable shame and powerlessness. The victims of torture and the inmates of Auschwitz are shown that they are powerless to escape the violence and/or that the conditions of escape are set by their tormentors—conditions that confirm the persecutors power and their victim’s powerlessness. Auschwitz offered the inmates two routes of escape, the crematorium or the promise of life (for a while) in exchange for complicity. Torturers are more subtle. They use the promise of escape, freedom, to enlist their victims’ collusion. Signing confessions, the tortured provide written proof of their shameful powerlessness and attest to the power of the torturers’ values. Their passivity becomes a weapon in the torturer’s

10  Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt 

223

arsenal (Bergoffen 2012, pp. 35–41). No such promise of freedom was made to the inmates of Auschwitz. Here the promise of escape was more circumscribed. In exchange for their cooperation in running the camp, some prisoners were offered a temporary reprieve from some of its hardships. Their powerlessness was activated to serve their oppressors agenda. In both cases the promise of escape proves false. If the tortured person or the prisoner survived, they continued to be oppressed by the violence that activated shame of their passivity.2 The issue of escape is apolitical in Escape. The “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” essay indicates that Levinas realized that rather than becoming the impetus for getting out of being by a new path (Levinas 2003, p. 73), confronting the reality of being riveted to a body could have the effect of fostering Fascist racism. In this racism, as in all racisms, the truth of being riveted to a body is politicized in ideologies of biological determinism. Where the Western tradition, according to Levinas, expressed the idea that one was never determined by the concrete circumstances of one’s life—the most concrete circumstance being one’s body—Hitler’s bio-racist politics forecloses the possibility of escaping the ways that we are marked by our bodies. Our humanity is severed from the possibility of recovering “the nudity…[of ] the first days of creation” (Levinas 1990, p. 65)—days where nudity signified the freedom of having nothing to hide. For Levinas, to be deprived of this possibility of recovery and escape is to be deprived of the key to our humanity. In its challenge to the Western idea that being human entails the power to break the grip of determinism, Fascism should not, however, be seen as totally un-tethered from Western metaphysics. Though Levinas speaks of On Escape as bearing witness “to an intellectual situation of meaning’s end…on the eve of great massacres,” rather than bearing witness to an intellectual situation of a meaning’s end, the massacres may be seen as a matter of affirming a truth embedded in the tradition—the denigration of the body. In its insistence that our humanity is affirmed in its desire to transcend the body, the tradition, in its degradation of the body, ignored (refused?) the truth of the humanity of being embodied. Auschwitz demonstrated this truth by showing that attacking the integrity of the body could destroy the dignity of the person. Levinas reads the end of the metaphysical tradition as a demand to return to the body as itself a source

224 

D. Bergoffen

of transcendence. Fascism may be read as the disaster of refusing to leave the tradition behind. Taking its cue from the tradition it tinkers with it. The denigration of the body remains in place for some bodies. For others, the body is a source of pride. In both cases the determinism of the body forecloses the possibility of escape. In being riveted to a master-race body, however, escape is no longer desirable. In being riveted to a stigmatized body the desire to escape remains alive. As Frederick Douglas made clear, under “normal” conditions of enslavement it is impossible to alienate a person from their humanity by claiming that they are determined by their bodies. To insist, with Douglas, on the impossibility of squelching the human desire to escape biological determinism is one way of understanding the phenomenological truth behind Levinas’ On Escape. By creating unlived/unlivable, corpse bodies, that would submit to the determinism of their crematorium destiny, the Musselman, Auschwitz demonstrated that destroying this desire was possible. In this it marked the end of the tradition’s meaning. Levinas’ accounts of the body and shame direct us to reclaim the body from its denigration in the Western tradition. The testimonies of Levi and Améry and the silence of the walking dead Musselman direct us to navigate this reclamation by marking the difference between a lived/livable body and an unlived/unlivable one and noting the role that shame plays in this difference. The usual modes of resistance were deployed at Auschwitz. Rebellions were attempted and staged. Insofar as they treated Fascist racism like other forms of racism their attempt to escape did not target Auschwitz’s unique challenge to humanity. Levi and Améry, in invoking the resistance resources of bodily shame, speak to this challenge. Doing this they politicize Levinas’ metaphysics of escape. Auschwitz, guided by the principle “Everything is Permitted” might be viewed as the experiment that discovered the possibility of creating unlived bodies. Pursuing the teleology of racism to its logical conclusion, it revealed that creating and exploiting sub-human bodies for profit required retaining the aliveness of these bodies. Learning what other racists tried to ignore, the fact that however compromised a lived body might become, so long as it preserved its livedness it might be dangerous, the architects of Auschwitz attempted to remove the possibility of

10  Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt 

225

r­ebellion by creating conditions designed to produce unlived bodies. Sometimes they succeeded. Other times they did not. Their limited success marked a turning point in our understanding of the violence of racism. To make good on its claim that only some people are fully human it had to destroy the humanity of those it excluded from its definition of humanity by rendering them totally passive. This total passivity is the meaning of the Musselman. Their existence as a walking corpse is anchored in their lost capacity to experience shame. It is not the threat of being riveted to a shameful body that destroys one’s humanity but rather losing the ability to experience such riveting as shameful. This becomes clearer as we turn from Levinas to Sartre and continue to consider the testimonies of Levi and Améry.

Jean-Paul Sartre There is nothing to suggest that Sartre read On Escape before writing Nausea. I do not think, however, that Levinas could have found a more apt description of the powerless, passive nudity that constitutes the shame of being riveted to a body. The central character of Nausea, Roquentin, enacts Levinas’ insistence that getting to the heart of shame requires getting beyond its social constructions. Having isolated himself from others and the world, Roquentin describes himself as a solitary man entirely alone with his body (Sartre 1991, p. 65). Abandoned to himself, he has lost the ability to see himself as others see him. Separated from those who are under the spell of social norms, he now sees his face in the mirror as a jelly fish—nauseous, filthy, naked flesh (Sartre 1991, p. 18). As Roquentin’s nausea becomes more invasive, more than recognizing his face is at stake. Touching the roots of the chestnut tree that touches him, Roquentin recoils at the discovery that nausea is not something that happens to him. It is who/what he is. It is inescapable. As existence continues to reveal itself in the nausea, Roquentin finds that the diversity and individuality of things disappears. Like the piece of wax under the heat of a flame, the veneer of solid things and distinct persons melts. All that is left are soft, monstrous disordered masses, frightful and obscene nakedness (Sartre 1991, pp.  126–7). Within these obscene masses, the only

226 

D. Bergoffen

relationship that survives is that of being in the way (Sartre 1991, p. 128). All other relations/relationships are specious. They are built on illusions. Everything is superfluous. The truth of existence is that of radical contingency. The idea of rights and by extension the concept of human dignity is a lie. No one has any rights (Sartre 1991, p. 131). It is only in the last few pages of Nausea that shame emerges as the definitive meaning of the nauseous contingency of existence. Here Sartre, like Levinas, distinguishes the shame of the malaise of the human condition from the shame of violating social norms. Witnessing the scene in the library where the self-taught man, having been exposed as a pedophile, is expelled in shame, Roquentin is annoyed at him for feeling ashamed and ashamed at his shame (Sartre 1991, p.  168). Sometime later, having decided to return to Paris and to abandon the project of trying to justify his existence through the existence of someone else, that is, by writing the biography of the Marquis de Rollebon, Roquentin experiences existential shame. Like the crab face that appears only after the spell of social conventions is broken, this shame only occurs to someone who has faced the nausea of existence. Listening to the words of the song “One of these days you’ll miss me honey” Roquentin is ashamed for himself, not of himself. Unlike the self-taught man who is ashamed of himself for violating the rules of decency, Roquentin is ashamed for existing, for being superfluous. For Levinas, discovering the shame of being riveted to a body is the impetus for escaping the traps of western metaphysics. For Roquentin, it inaugurates the desire to escape the shame of being superfluous while holding on to the shame of existing. Is this possible? Roquentin suggests that it is. He says, that it would require creating something that would be above existence. “A story, for example, something that could never happen…It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence” (Sartre 1991, p. 178). He continues, “…it wouldn’t stop me from existing or feeling that I exist [but]…a little clarity might fall over my past. Then, perhaps, because of it, I could remember my life without repugnance” (Sartre 1991, p. 178). The task, it seems, is to acknowledge the shame of existence without being nauseated by the truth of being superfluous.

10  Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt 

227

Though it was written in 1938, before Germany occupied France and before the full extent of the Nazi threat became clear, Sartre’s account of the nausea of existence that negates the ideas of human individuality and dignity reads as an all too apt description of the Auschwitz project of creating superfluous inhuman beings. With shaved heads, dressed in ill-­ fitting uniforms that exposed the shame of their naked bodies, and tattooed with numbers that obliterated their names, singular persons were transformed into disposable bodies that exemplified the nausea of existence—being always and only in the way. Here putting the shame of existence on display sets the tune for the march to the ovens. Being condemned to live the malaise of the human condition is not the same as deciding to think about it. Yet understanding this malaise in terms of the shame of being riveted to a body whose existence is superfluous helps explain the effectiveness of the experiment with human life called Auschwitz. Were the shame of being riveted to a superfluous body existentially alien to us it could not be used to destroy us so effectively. Nausea is Sartre’s first word on shame. It is not his last. In Being and Nothingness, written a few years later, Sartre identifies shame as an immediate experience of our being-for-others. Passivity remains a key feature of shame, but now it is not the solitary passivity of being overwhelmed by the nausea of existence, but the passivity of being riveted to a body that renders me vulnerable to becoming an object in another’s world. Here shame no longer exposes the truth of my superfluous existence but rather the truth of the power of the other to define me. In the Being and Nothingness example of shame—the vignette of the jealous lover crouched at the keyhole—the man at the keyhole is ashamed of himself once he hears steps down the hall. Hearing the sound of an approaching other his attention shifts from what is happening on the other side of the door to the way he appears to those footsteps. Becoming an object for the other he can no longer define himself simply as jealous. He must now accept the other’s characterization of him as shameful (Sartre 1984, pp. 347–352). In this example more than objectification is at issue. Unlike Sartre’s stroller in the park, who in passing someone on a bench feels his freedom stolen from him but is not described as being ashamed of being objectified, the person at the keyhole feels shame because he and the person who sees him agree that his behavior is

228 

D. Bergoffen

r­eprehensible. Belonging to the same social world they share the same shame criteria. If this were Roquentin shame would not enter the picture. The testimonies of Levi and Améry indicate that it is not a matter of choosing between the On Escape and Nausea accounts of shame or the Being and Nothingness version. Each captures an essential aspect of shame. Together they portray the complexity of shame and the ways that the phenomenon of shame testifies to our status as embodied beings. As an affect that tethers self and body to each other, shame speaks both to the ways that we experience our bodies for ourselves and to the ways that we experience our bodies in the presence of others. For Levi, holding on to the shame that riveted him to his body for himself kept him from succumbing to the fate of the Musselman. For Améry experiencing the shame of existing for others who identified him as superfluous, but rejecting the values that legitimated this judgment separated him from the Musselman and became the impetus for a politics of revolt after liberation. The testimonies of Levi and Améry indicate that the passivity of shame is only part of the story, for within the dialectic of self and other captured in the confrontation between the jealous lover and the judging footsteps, another dialectic of self and other is at work. This dialectic concerns my relationship to the other’s judgment that I am shameful. Am I condemned to passively accept it or is it vulnerable to my critique? Roquentin suggests that this is an either-or proposition. Either, like the self-taught man, accept social constructions of shame or, like himself, reject them. Levi’s experience of being oppressed by shame indicates that as lived, shame is more complex. He and his persecutors share the same shame criteria. Their shared judgment that his filthy, emaciated body is shameful is crucial to his experience of shame as oppressive. They do not, however, agree on the meaning of this shame. For the Nazis, Levi’s shame legitimated their master-race values. For Levi it exposed the evil of these values. Shame, in registering our vulnerability to our being-for-others speaks to/ of the passivity of being riveted to a body. Insofar as the effectiveness of the for-others experience of shame requires that we accept the others’ judgments we are not condemned to passively acquiesce to their power to define us. By requiring our assent to these judgments, shame engages us as active participants in the collaborative process of world making. We may either endorse the shame values that are already in place or refuse to

10  Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt 

229

submit to them. Moving between the dialectic of self-other vulnerability and the dialectic of self-other world constitution, shame, in the case of Levi and Améry, takes on the role of resistance to the judgments that exploit our vulnerability in order to destroy us. The lived body embodies this moving dialectic of shame.

The End of Shame: The Musselman Primo Levi divides the prisoners of the Nazi labor and death camps into two categories: the drowned, those called Musselman, and the saved, those who like himself, through luck or circumstance, never reached bottom. The drowned, he says, were first destroyed as men and then slowly killed (Levi 1960, p. 36). Levi’s descriptions of the Musselman make it clear that though visually and metaphorically powerful, speaking of the Musselman as the drowned ultimately misses the mark. It is too benign. The inert drowned body marks the end of a human life, not the end of a person’s humanity. Like the corpse, the Musselman body is incapable of responding to anything. It knows neither fear nor shame. Unlike the corpse, however, it mimics life and moves. Levi describes this movement as inert. He calls the spectacle of this inert movement the dance of the dead (Levi 1960, p. 66). Exhibiting the torpor of a desperate apathy the Musselman, though still technically alive, is only questionably human. Unlike the corpse his existence is terrifying. Calling the Musselman a living corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions characterized by an inability to distinguish good from bad, noble from base, Améry, drawing out Levi’s analogy between the corpse and the Musselman, gets to the heart of this terror. Calling this bundle of physical functions the Nazi’s victory, he reminds us that a military defeat is not all that matters (Améry 1980, p. 9). Both Levi and Améry attribute the Musselman’s destroyed humanity to their lost capacity to relate to the world and everything in it. Levi traces this loss to a chronic hunger that survivors of the camps tell us no one outside the camps can fathom (Levi 1960, pp. 23, 54). Subjected to this unimaginable hunger some were able to keep a hold on their bodies. The Musselman could not. Losing this hold, they lost the capacity to feel

230 

D. Bergoffen

the beatings, to desire, to think or to judge. No longer existing as the vulnerability of a lived body in a world among others immersed in the dialectic of shame, the inert moving Musselman is imprisoned in the incomprehensible solitude of an unlived body (Levi, pp. 23, 54). A body riveted to itself in unimaginable hunger implodes upon itself. Roquentin’s route to existential shame becomes an Auschwitz death trap. Levi’s descriptions of the Musselman are intended to show what he means when he says that the Musselman were destroyed as men before they were murdered. The title of one of his books, If this be a Man, suggests that the Musselman’s monstrous existence, rather than signaling the end of man, puts the question of the human on the table. If this be a man—then what? If the nausea and nudity of shame can become the tool of the violence that transforms a lived human body into an unlived inhuman body, then what exactly is the truth of the human? How is this truth tied to the phenomenon of shame?

Primo Levi: Oppressed and Saved by Shame Primo Levi opens Survival in Auschwitz, insisting that there is no language to express the experience of living through the Nazi biological and social experiment aimed at the demolition of men (Levi 1960, p.  15). Nevertheless he writes. Like the obstacles to surviving in Auschwitz, the obstacle of language will not deter him from his determination to bear witness to what he calls “the image of evil in our time.” In Auschwitz, this determination was, for Levi, an act of resistance, an assertion of his dignity and humanity. As a free man his refusal to be silent, to insist on saying what others do not want to hear, meets the obstacles of the desire to forget (if not forgive) and to move on. Here too Levi’s witnessing is an act of resistance. Levi describes himself as someone the Germans succeeded in breaking, someone who is docile, incapable of violence or defiance. He distinguishes himself from the Musselman through his capacity to feel the shame of his degraded humanity (Levi 1960, pp. 113–4). So long as he can see his vile, filthy and skeletal body as disgusting and disgraceful, so long as he is vulnerable to the beatings and the judgments of others, so

10  Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt 

231

long as he can experience himself as oppressed by a shame from which he cannot hide, he is not destroyed. Though the fault of his extreme passivity may push him to the edge of humanity he can still hold on. The shame of degradation saves him from losing his humanity. As riveted to his shame he can still contest the “Everything is Possible” principle of the camps. The saving power of being oppressed by shame draws on the fact that shame is a self-reflexive phenomenon—an action where one affects oneself by judging oneself. Living as prisoner in Auschwitz, Levi cannot contest the power of the guards or refuse to obey their orders. In describing himself as oppressed by shame he indicates that the only form of resistance available to him is one that is invisible—action upon himself. It is in this way that the line between Levi and the Musselman is drawn through shame. Insofar as it is visible, the passivity of Levi’s shame confirms the power of Auschwitz. As an invisible action upon himself, however, it preserves his existence as a lived body and saves him from being destroyed as a person. The saving power of the invisible action of shame becomes clearer if we understand it as a middle voice phenomenon. According to Giorgio Agamben, Émile Benveniste, describes the middle voice as an action where “the subject who achieves the action by the very fact of achieving it …first of all… affects himself in the process… precisely for this reason… does not stand over the action but is himself the place of its occurring” (Agamben 2016, p. 28). In expressing a relation that one has to oneself, the middle voice is situated in a zone of indetermination between subject and object. The acting subject is also the passive object of the act. As oppressed by shame, Levi takes himself as the object of his action. In activating his subjectivity his shame affirms his status as a subject. Where Agamben found that Benveniste’s formula for the middle voice solved the puzzle of translating the word chresthai—a verb that expresses a unique relationship between subject and object (Agamben 2016, pp. 31–34)—he finds it necessary to go to Spinoza’s notion of desire to adequately decipher the meaning of the verb conor, to demand. We are still in middle voice territory. The question concerns the motivation for acting on oneself. Spinoza answers this question when he argues that “the being that desires and demands in demanding modifies, desires and

232 

D. Bergoffen

c­ onstitutes itself ” and that in demanding a thing expresses its desire to preserve itself (Agamben 2016, p. 171). For Agamben, aligning Benveniste with Spinoza was necessary to arrive at an adequate translation of conor. For me, joining Benveniste’s account of the middle voice as a self-­ affectation, to Spinoza’s idea of demand as a self-affectation that expresses a desire to preserve oneself, makes it possible to express his desire to preserve himself. Though neither Spinoza nor Agamben discuss the motive for self-preservation, in Levi’s case the motive is clear: his demand to survive is tied to the demand that the evil of Auschwitz be documented. Shame, the last spark of a lived body, can exist within the Lager, generosity cannot, for the Lager law of survival: eat your own bread and someone else’s too if you can, makes generosity impossible. Once the S.S. fled and the arrival of the Russians was imminent—once survival is assured and the threat of becoming a Musselman disappears—the reappearance of this lived body gesture announces the end of the Lager and “…the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again” (Levi 1960, p. 121). Becoming a man again Levi bends language to the demands of witnessing. He identifies the ability to resist, judge, desire and think as integral, but not essential to, our status as human. He finds that even when these abilities are destroyed our humanity survives in the experience of being oppressed by shame. The shameful experience of abjection makes it possible for those who are broken to resist the slow death of the Lager and when the Lager dies, to open their experience of shame before the other to an offer of generosity toward the other. In the first case my humanity is saved by experiencing my lived body’s vulnerability to the other. In the second it is reborn in recognizing the vulnerability of the other. That Levi’s account of the emergence of generosity as the possibility of freedom became a reality suggests that liberation from Auschwitz cured him from the oppression of shame. No such freedom is available for Améry. He cannot escape the shame of being condemned to live in a world that rejected his right to exist.

10  Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt 

233

J ean Améry: The Shame of Destruction, the Dignity of Revolt In his Preface to the first (1966) edition of At the Mind’s Limit, Améry describes it as a “phenomenological description of the existence of the victim” (Améry 1980, xiii). He tells us that though he survived the experience, he never overcame it. On the one hand his inability to overcome the experience of being a victim may be understood as a function of the inescapable passivity of being riveted to a victimized body. On the other hand, after the threat of being re-victimized is behind him, the inability of overcoming his experience of existing as a victim is transformed from the passivity of being ensnared in his body to an active politics of resistance that refuses to be determined by his body. Améry’s experience as a victim began when he received “the first blow” in the torture room. It was compounded when he was transferred to the Lager and became a numbered member of the camp’s theater of torture. Describing himself as one “who went hungry but did not starve to death, who was beaten but not totally destroyed, who had wounds but not deadly ones, who thus objectively still possessed the substratum on which in principle, the human spirit can stand and exist” Améry says he survived with his humanity wounded but unbroken (Améry 1980, p. 9). It is as someone who survived the disaster of absolute helplessness but experienced its effects that he finds it necessary to speak for the ultimate product and victory of the camps, the Musselman. The camps, Améry says, are misunderstood if they are merely (!) seen as the implementation of the Final Solution to the “problem” of the Jews. They were also, and perhaps more horrifically, the place that demonstrated that after a person’s humanity was destroyed, they could continue to live as dead before actually being murdered. What saves Améry from becoming a Musselman, he says, is that though he was shamed by the verdict that he has no right to exist, he refused to accept it. He describes the Mussselman as the effect of succumbing to this judgment. Living among them all of his ideas of inherent human dignity are disrupted (Améry 1980, 20). What is disrupted at the sight of the Musselman is not the idea of human dignity, but the idea that

234 

D. Bergoffen

it is inherent—immune from the matter of the vulnerability of the body to the wounding, depravations and blows inflicted on it and from the judgments that justify these assaults. Dignity, Améry discovers is a matter of vulnerability: the vulnerability of the lived body to becoming a living corpse. Confronting these vulnerabilities, Améry defines dignity as a matter of resisting the shame of the judgment that you have no right to live by confronting it through revolt (Améry 1980, pp. 89–90). For Améry, this meaning of dignity is fully revealed when he returns to the everyday world of neighborly smiles. Though the torture and the camps are behind him and his safety seems assured, Améry finds that his conviction that his status as human and that the dignity that is said to be given with this status has been destroyed. His faith that the world will always grant him the right to live, broken at “the first blow” and destroyed in the camp, cannot be restored. He now lives with the fact that the vulnerability of being human exposes him to the shame of becoming superfluous. In the essay “Torture” Améry says that this loss of faith is not unique to him. Torture, by reducing one to flesh destroys every torture victim’s faith in the world. “Whoever,” he writes, “has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased” (Améry 1980, p. 40). Unlike Levi’s experience of being oppressed by shame as essential to preserving his humanity, Améry’s experience of indestructible shame destroys his ability to believe that he will always be treated as a person. His humanity is in the hands of the other. Where Levi is oppressed by the shame of being riveted to a disgusting body, Améry suffers the shame of social vulnerability—the destruction of a world that allows him to live unreflectively and trustfully with others (Rukgaber 2018, p.  84). Here, shame is not a matter of how I judge myself or of how others judge me but rather an “interpersonal affect that results when trust and acceptance by others is shattered” (Rukgaber 2018, p. 101). For Améry the interpersonal bridge of trust that was destroyed at Auschwitz cannot be restored; it lives on in his sense that the conditions for trust in the world are never secure. Of the many ways to respond to this shame, violence or submission for example, Améry chooses the politics of revolt. He decides to confront the shame of social vulnerability in two ways. First, in announcing the contingency of a world that one can

10  Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt 

235

trust, he rebels against those ideologies that materialize this contingency. Second, in joining with others who, having been tortured, have experienced the shame of being rejected by the world, he takes up the world making dialectic of shame to create a community where the bonds of trust can be restored. In this way, the poison of the shame becomes a source of resistance to its venom. It transforms Améry from a passive victim of the other’s power to render him superfluous, into a member of a community in revolt. This becomes clear in his essay “The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew.” Rather than restricting the category of those who can no longer feel at home in the world to those who have been tortured, he opens it to others. Whether or not they were tortured or sent to the camps, the Jew, he writes, cannot escape “…feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression” (Améry 1980, p. 94). Captured by this tragedy, the Jew, he continues, must accept being foreign and through this experience of being alien assert his dignity in a solidarity of revolt with other Jews (Améry 1980, p. 99). It is not sufficient, I think, to reserve this politics of revolt to those who, because they were tortured and/or were Jews, were the immediate victims of The Final Solution, or to those who, because they are Jews are potentially victims of racist anti-Semitism. Never knowing who is next we all need to see ourselves as vulnerable and therefore obliged to create the bonds of trust that make this vulnerability livable.3 Learning from Améry that the lesson of Auschwitz is that the idea of inherent dignity is naïve means re-thinking the idea of dignity through the idea of becoming a stranger in a world that might deem us unfit for love or life—a world that has no place for the alien and where the identity of the alien is ever changing. In going beyond Levi’s commitment to bearing witness to the destructive shame of Auschwitz, Améry’s politics of revolt recognize our vulnerability to the other as it challenges their right to abuse it. If Améry cannot escape the shame of the other’s judgment that he has no place in the world, he will reject its legitimacy. He will refuse to hide or disappear.

236 

D. Bergoffen

Looking Back to Move Forward If the point of the extreme hunger of the camps was to alienate the prisoners from their bodies, and hence extinguish their capacity to feel, think or desire, the goal of the camps might be seen as severing the lived body from itself and from its attunement to the other and the world. It is in this sense that preserving one’s sense of shame, one of the last threads of the lived body’s aliveness, may be understood as resistance to the project of Auschwitz. The camp architects believed that by making all recognizable forms of resistance impossible they could transform vulnerable lived bodies into victim bodies and turn victim bodies into superfluous matter. Levi tells us something else. Speaking of his resistance to becoming Musselman in terms of the middle voice power of shame, he directs us to take up the question of the human by considering the tie between dignity and shame. This consideration might show that it is not the shameful sight of the Musselman that is a stain on the species, but rather that the threat to the species comes from another direction—the inability to see the ways that as the figure that embodied the end of the human they are also and perhaps more importantly the figure through which the idea of the human is tested. The test may be formulated through a series of questions. Should we be ashamed of them? Should we see their shameful existence, their inability to resist becoming living corpuses, as indicative of their status as the other of the human? Or, should we be ashamed for them? Should we recognize their destroyed lived bodies as something that could only happen to a human being? Being ashamed for the Musselman rather than of them, ties the shame of their unlivable humanity to the unique vulnerability of the lived human body. It ties the shame of being rejected by the world to the resistance that in recognizing our vulnerability to the other, refuses to be destroyed by it. Moving through shame to an intersubjective understanding of human dignity opens a path toward a politics of vulnerability that recognizes the shame of being riveted to a body as the impetus for demanding that the conditions of the lived body be met. The first steps on this political path might begin by returning to Antigone’s resistance to the edict that severed her brother from his humanity. Where she

10  Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of Revolt 

237

insisted that the fate of the city rested on the fate of her brother’s body, on recognizing his human right to the rites of a proper burial, we might begin by asserting that the fate of our humanity is tied to remembering the assault on the humanity of those who danced the dance of death at Auschwitz.

Notes 1. J. Lang (2010) disputes the argument that Auschwitz succeeded in dehumanizing its inmates. Where Douglas saw the impossibility of dehumanization from the perspective of the slaves’ insistence on their humanity, Lang looks at the dynamics of dehumanization from the perspective of the oppressors. Though he does not address the matter of the Musselman, he claims that preserving the humanity of the prisoners was essential to the Nazi’s sense of power. 2. See Ruth Leys’ From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After for a detailed account of survivor shame. 3. Martin Niemoller’s poem “First They Came for the Communists” poignantly makes this point.

Bibliography Agamben, G. (2016). The Use of Bodies (A. Kostko, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Améry, J. (1980). At the Mind’s Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (S.  Rosenfeld & S.  P. Rosenfeld, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bergoffen, D. (2012). Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape: Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body. New York: Routledge. Kendi, I. Y. (2016). Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books. Lang, J. (2010). Questioning Dehumanization: Intersubjective Dimension of Violence in the Nazi Concentration and Death Camps. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 24(2), 225–246.

238 

D. Bergoffen

Levi, P. (1960). If This Is a Man: Remembering Auschwitz. New  York: Summit Books. Levinas, E. (1990). Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, trans. Sean Hand. Critical Inquiry, 17(1, Autumn), 62–71. Levinas, E. (2003). On Escape (B.  Bergo, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Leys, R. (2007). From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rukgaber, M. (2018). Philosophical Anthropology and the Interpersonal Theory of the Affect of Shame. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 49, 83–112. Sartre, J.-P. (1984). Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). New York: Washington Square Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1991). Nausea the Wall and Other Stories (L.  Alexander, Trans.). New York: MJF Books.

11 Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan on the Socio-symbolic Function of Violence Gavin Rae

Violence is a central, if often ignored, aspect of a number of psychoanalytic accounts regarding the formation of the individual. The purpose of this chapter1 is to compare and contrast Cornelius Castoriadis’s and Jacques Lacan’s thinking on this issue. Whereas, to my knowledge, Lacan does not mention Castoriadis and certainly never engages with his thought, the same cannot be said of Castoriadis. Although he praises Lacan for breaking “up the stagnation of the [psychoanalytic] pool [of ] pseudo-‘specialist’ cretinism [by appealing] to disciplines external to psychoanalysis” (Castoriadis 1984, p.  99), and for having “revitalised the reading of the Freudian texts … and introduced some substantial extensions into psychoanalytic research” (1984, p. 99), Castoriadis claims that “Lacan’s decisive contribution … was that he forced people to think” (1984, p. 99). This positive assessment is, however, also accompanied by a polemic and, at times, caustic assessment of Lacan, who is held to be “maleficent” (1984, p. 53) and “boring” (1984, p. 53), Lacanians, who Castoriadis describes as mere “sheep-like followers [who] blea[t] and G. Rae (*) Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_11

239

240 

G. Rae

gap[e] in uncomprehending admiration” (2007c, p. 245), and Lacanian thought, which, for various philosophical reasons, Castoriadis dismisses as a “monstrosity” (1984, p. 48). Based on this, most commentators tend to hold that their relationship is one of opposition as evidenced by the supposed irreconcilability of Lacan’s affirmation of the symbolic realm and Castoriadis’s privileging of the radical imaginary (Dews 2002; Urribari 2002), their fundamentally distinct readings of Freud (Fel 1993), and/or their different understandings of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the subject (Williams 1999). Alternatively, when a complementary reading is offered, it tends to privilege Lacan. For example, while Yannis Stavrakakis is guided by the contention that Castoriadis’s affirmation of the imaginary is not “something alien or antithetical to Lacanian theory, particularly to the Lacanian conception of desire and to Lacan’s theory of signification” (Stavrakakis 2002, p. 523), he goes on to claim that it is possible “from a Lacanian point of view to interrogate and illuminate further this creative/instituting dimension and its ethico-political implications” (2002, p. 523). For Stavrakakis, then, Castoriadis’s insights are found within Lacan’s thinking, which, with a bit of conceptual development, actually points beyond Castoriadis’s formulation. In contrast, and while I do not wish to deny the substantial differences that exist between Castoriadis and Lacan, this chapter takes a different approach that focuses on the similarities between them, especially as it relates to the role that “violence” plays in forming the individual generally and the psyche’s entry2 into the symbolic specifically. There are, at least, two reasons for this: First, both agree that violence is integral to the psyche’s entry into the symbolic—for Lacan, “[t]he symbolic order has to be conceived as something superimposed” (Lacan 1997, p. 96) onto the psyche, which I take to involve a form of violence; whereas, according to Castoriadis, the socialization process (composed, in part, by entry into the symbolic) “always entails violence against the proper nature of the psyche” (Castoriadis 1991e, p. 148). Second, while commentators have paid attention to Castoriadis’s comments on violence (for an overview of the debates, see Rae 2019), the role it plays in Lacan’s schema has been largely ignored.

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

241

To start to rectify this, I first briefly outline the parameters of Lacan’s famous real, symbolic, and imaginary matrix before focusing on the psyche’s movement from the imaginary to the symbolic to show that he hints that violent imposition is a part of the child’s entrance into the latter. More specifically, while Lacan recognizes that the symbolic is defined by diachronic differential relations, I show that each manifestation of the symbolic is structured around key structural components that generate meaning. These master-signifiers—called the “Name-of-the-Father” (Lacan 1981, p. 34)—are associated with symbolic law and have to be both imposed onto and accepted by the psyche to facilitate its entrance into the symbolic and, by extension, development. Far from being a negative occurrence, such violent imposition is part of the process through which a fully functioning (adult) individual is created. From here, I move to Castoriadis to show that he comes to a similar conclusion—albeit through different means—regarding the role that violence plays in the psyche’s process of maturation. Whereas Lacan affirms the primary importance to the subject of symbolic differential relations, Castoriadis claims that the psychic unconscious is structured from a division between, what might be called, the “social unconscious” that “houses” the social norms internalized as part of its socialization, and “the primal unconscious, which is the monadic core of the psyche” (Castoriadis 1998, p. 298). While this monadic core is fundamentally asocial, its survival depends on it being incorporated into the dominant norms of its society, with this socialization creating the individual. Crucially, Castoriadis offers a far more detailed explanation than Lacan of how this takes place, including of the roles that violence and the voluntary introjection of social norms plays in it. Having shown that Lacan and Castoriadis agree that violence is fundamental to the psyche’s entrance into the symbolic and, by extension, formation of the individual, by way of conclusion, I engage with the apparent opposition that my argument establishes, wherein it appears that Lacan insists on a primarily symbolic account of individual-formation whereas Castoriadis affirms a social one. I reject this by showing that, for Lacan, the symbolic is inherently social and, for Castoriadis, the social is linked to symbolic relations. As a consequence, both agree that violence is key to the formation of the individual and is socio-symbolic in nature.

242 

G. Rae

Lacan and the Violence of the Symbolic Lacan aims to account for the subject’s experience by understanding it through the registers of, what he calls, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. In what follows, I will first undertake a brief analytic of these terms, before focusing on how a ‘normal’ psyche develops from the imaginary into the symbolic because it is here that the question of violence comes to the fore. Lacan’s analysis of the imaginary is developed primarily in two texts: “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” (2006b), presented in 1936 and published in 1949, and “Some Reflections on the Ego” (1953), first given as a lecture in 1951 before being published in 1953. For Lacan, the child is not born with an ego, but must develop it by passing into the imaginary realm through what he calls the mirror stage. This occurs between the ages of 6 and 18 months when the child, having previously been a bundle of disorganized immediate perceptions, comes to recognize himself as the unified object that confronts him in a mirror. As Lacan explains, “the mirror stage in this context [i]s an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] an image” (2006b, p. 76). By recognizing himself in image-form, the child moves from the disorganized, fluid amalgamation of perceptions to an objective identity, albeit one that is only ever “a mirage” (2006b, p. 76) constituted by the “illusion of unity” (1953, p. 15) and “an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure” (2006b, p. 78). There are, at least, three important issues to this: First, the mirror does not have to be an actual mirror, but simply anything that permits the child to see himself reflected. Typically, this takes place through the mother’s3 gaze and so establishes a specific dynamic between the child and the mother in which the former sees the latter as the source of himself and his bodily satisfactions. For the child to successfully enter in to the symbolic realm requires that his initial privileging of the mother be replaced by the acceptance of the paternal law of the Name-of-the-Father. Second, the mirror stage reveals a privileging of sight over the other senses.4 This is not, however, to say that blind children do not pass

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

243

through this stage, only that the reflection will take place in a different way. Third, the unity that results is defined by a moment of alienation: the child sees himself in another and recognizes himself as that which he previously took himself not to be: an object. Rather than a negative experience, this moment of alienation is a joyous one in which the child takes a “jubilant interest … at the sight of his own image in a mirror” (Lacan 1953, p. 14). While more could be said about Lacan’s notion of the imaginary, the basic point for present purposes is that the Lacanian ego is not a substance but a necessary fiction that provides the psyche with a mirage of stability and identity. The entire edifice is, however, fragile and must be maintained against and through a process that is always in “constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which [it] started” (1953, p. 15). The imaginary dominated Lacan’s thinking up to the early 1950s. This changed in 1953 when, with the famous “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (2006c), his thought took a dramatic turn towards the symbolic. As Louis Sass explains, with the symbolic, Lacan presents a realm that is understood to lie beyond our conscious grasp (a realm of semiotic structures encompassing the unconscious, which is “structured like a language”), yet which, in contrast with the illusions of the “imaginary” realm, supposedly constitutes the actual matrix and motor of much of our experience and action. (2014, p. 333)

To engage with and, indeed, justify his turn to the symbolic, Lacan returns to Freud to claim that the great insight of Freudian psychoanalysis is that the unconscious is intimately tied to language. However, rather than language being an instrument for the expression of the subject, symbols are understood to “envelop the life of man within a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him ‘by bone and flesh’ before he comes into the world” (Sass 2014, p. 231). To develop this, Lacan turns to the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and, in particular, his claim that language is composed of signs that are constituted by a particular relation between a signifier and signified. As Lionel Bailly explains, according to Saussure,

244 

G. Rae

the signifier (sound image/acoustic image) is not the material sound but the hearer’s impression it makes on our senses. Also, the signified (concept) is not the object (the chair in front of you) but the idea of the object (any chair—the property of being a chair—of which an example may or may not be before you at the time of speaking). (2009, p. 43)

Because the (immaterial) signifier represents an immaterial signified, Saussure maintains that signs are immaterial. Lacan, in contrast, holds that “language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but a body it is” (2006c, p. 248). The object designated by the signifier “chair” is not a chair apart from its signification—apart from its signification it is simply an object—but becomes a “chair” by being named as such. As such, the signifier is always (of ) material, while an object is turned into something through the signifier. The signifier “chair” does not however have meaning in-itself. Lacan accepts Saussure’s (1986, p. 118) claim that meaning arises from the relations between signifiers but radicalizes it by explaining that, if meaning is dependent upon the movement between signifiers, they must take precedence over that which is signified, which is simply derivative of that movement. Meaning is not generated from the movement from signifier to signified, but is created from the constant and incessant movement between signifiers. It is the difference between signifiers that generates meaning, with the consequence that “the empty spaces are as signifying as the full ones” (2006d, p. 327). Indeed, Lacan defines the chain of signification as “presence in absence and absence in presence” (1991b, p. 38): the (presented) signifiers only attain meaning from the difference (= absence) between them. For this reason, it is “in the chain of signifier that meaning insists, but … none of the chain’s elements consists in the signification it can provide at that very moment. The notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier thus comes to the fore” (2006e, p. 419). Importantly, signifiers do not occupy a single nodal point in the field of symbols; they “occupy” multiple positions and take on different meanings depending on the other signifier that it is, at that moment, related to and differentiated from. Indeed, the symbolic system is marked by structural criss-crossings in which “every easily isolable linguistic symbol is not only at one with the totality, but is cut across and constituted by a series

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

245

of overflowings, of oppositional overdeterminations which place it at one and the same time in several registers” (1991a, p. 54). Lacan shows this through his famous analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” He describes two scenes, but, for the sake of brevity, I will focus on the first. Located in the royal boudoir, Lacan notes that the Queen receives a letter. At this point, the King enters, thereby causing the Queen some discomfort as she does not want her husband to discover the contents of said letter. It appears that she is aided in this endeavour by the entrance of a third man, Mister D, whose appearance in the room distracts the King and so allows the Queen to hide the letter. Lacan explains, however, that Mister D has noticed the Queen’s attention to the letter and having dealt with the business of the day proceeds to “draw from his pocket a letter similar in appearance to the one before his eyes and, after pretending to read it, places it next to the other” (2006a, p. 8). After a little more conversation to distract attention from the letter he dropped, “he picks up the embarrassing letter without flinching and decamps, while the Queen, on whom none of his manoeuvre has been lost, remains unable to intervene for fear of attracting the attention of her royal spouse, who is standing at her elbow at that very moment” (2006a, p. 8). There are many facets to this story and Lacan’s analysis, but the key issue for present purposes is, as Lacan notes in Seminar II (1991b, pp. 198–199), that it reveals that there is not “one” letter; the letter takes on different forms and meanings depending on whether it is looked at in relation to the King, Queen, Mister D, Lacan, or, indeed, us the reader. Importantly, the differential relations generating symbolic meaning occur “with [their] own dynamism … which is autonomous to the human being and his experience” (2006a, pp. 115–116). That the symbolic differential relations occur prior to the subject and, indeed, are the conditions of possibility for the subject brought Jean Hyppolite to ask whether this meant that the symbolic should be thought of as a transcendental function. Lacan responded: “I don’t think so. The allusions I have made to a completely different use of the notion of machine might well indicate that” (2006a, p.  38). Castoriadis (1997d, p.  185) criticizes this emphasis on machinic production because he associates it with mechanical reproduction, but, for Lacan, the metaphor of the machine simply indicates that the symbolic realm is based on a constant rhythm of

246 

G. Rae

­ ifferentiation; at no point does it settle into a singular homogeneous d pattern of production nor does it produce in accordance with a prior plan or teleology. Furthermore, it must be remembered that the symbolic (and imaginary) is/are also intimately tied5 to a third register, termed the real, that describes that which “resists symbolisation absolutely” (1991a, p. 66), the “ineffable” (1991a, p. 86), that which “one cannot imagine” (2013, p. 76), and a “mystery” (1999, p. 131). While the real cannot be conceptualized, Badredine Arfi notes that it fulfils three functions within Lacan’s theory: First, it designates that “there always is resistance that is involved in thinking about, and in ‘experiencing’ the effects of, the [r]eal” (2012, p. 803). It simply is not possible to think of the real as it is in-­ itself; doing so causes problems for the subject. Indeed, how the subject attempts to symbolize the real to deal with it is inherently bound up with clinical treatment. That it cannot be symbolized means that, second, “the [r]eal is most characteristically thought of in negative terms” (2012, p. 803). And, third, “the [r]eal is more or less thought of as a limit to language/symbolic order, which can also be formulated as an attempt to conceptualise a totalization and closure (of sorts) of the symbolic order” (2012, p. 803). Not only does this mean that symbolization is never complete, it also ensures that the subject never is. For this reason, the subject cannot simply be reduced to language, but is constituted by a mysterious aspect; a part that cannot be symbolized and so understood. It is a mistake therefore to reduce the Lacanian subject to a determined effect of the symbolic that conditions it or the symbolic to a form of mechanic symbolic production. The subject’s experience is underpinned by and emanates from the differential relations inherent in the symbolic, is manifested as an illusionary imaginary identity, and is always defined by a lack that prevents totality or completeness. That the subject is an effect of the symbolic ensures that, in a very strong sense, “language [i]s the cause of the subject” (2006g, p.  704). While the psyche always exists in a symbolic world—it is, after all, surrounded by language—it is only once the psyche passes through the imaginary to the symbolic and so starts to talk that the subject can be said to form. The naming of the child plays a fundamental role in exposing him to the symbolic, insofar as the name designates the child by a signifier and so, prior to his own use of signifiers, brings him to start to

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

247

a­ppreciate their importance and, indeed, that he is designated by one (1991a, p. 155). This, in turn, feeds into the construction of an imaginary identity as he comes to associate himself with that name; a signifier that, it will be remembered, emanates from other people, and so reaffirms Lacan’s claim about the alienation inherent in the imaginary realm and the importance of the symbolic Other. However, whereas the child enters into the imaginary through his own actions—he sees and recognizes himself in a mirror—his entrance into the symbolic comes from outside: language imposes itself onto the child at all times. It is for this reason that “the symbolic order has to be conceived as something superimposed” (1997, p. 96). Lacan says no more than this, but it is here that I want to suggest that the issue of violence enters the scene. Whereas the imposition of the symbolic onto the child could be thought to involve physical violence so that the child suffers physical violence for using the wrong or “bad” word or, indeed, for not using words at all when that is demanded of him, holding that the symbolic is physically imposed onto the child is problematic because physical violence against children is not permitted by all symbolic systems. If the symbolic system is always imposed onto the child, but not all symbolic systems permit physical violence, then it stands that the imposition suffered by the child cannot simply be physical. Furthermore, holding that the symbolic order is physically imposed onto the child through an act of physical violence seems to misunderstand Lacan’s point that the symbolic order is pre-personal and occurs prior to and regardless of any subjective action. As such, Lacan’s claim regarding the primacy of the symbolic world seems to point to the notion that the symbolic world imposes itself onto the child in a way that cannot be reduced to something as simple and direct as physical violence. For this reason, and while Lacan never explicitly makes this move, I want to suggest that his insistence that the symbolic world always precedes and imposes itself onto the psyche points to a far more fundamental and insidious non-physical form of violence that describes the way(s) in which symbolic meaning constantly bombards the psyche through the psyche’s ‘mere’ social existence. Such bombardment impresses itself onto the psyche and pressures it into thinking and expressing itself in certain ways with this being re-enforced by the

248 

G. Rae

actions of others who expect the psyche to learn to use the symbolic signifiers correctly so as to participate in the world. It should, however, be emphasized that, strictly speaking, the psyche never pre-exists the symbolic in the way that the notion of ‘impress’ might suggest; it is always entwined with it and, indeed, is its effect. Rather than a passive psyche, upon which symbolic impressions are simply imposed, the Lacanian psyche is in dynamic interaction with its symbolic world: the symbolic imposes itself onto the psyche, which in turn perpetuates the symbolic world through its actions. Importantly, in order to be able to operate symbolically, the child must pass from its desire for the mother to accept the primacy of the paternal law, or, as Lacan calls it, the ‘“Name-of-the-Father”’ (2006f, p. 688). While it cannot be named or even identified as such, the Nameof-the-­Father is “a requirement of the signifying chain. Merely by virtue of the fact that you institute a symbolic order, something corresponds to, or does not correspond to, the function defined as the Name-of-theFather” (2017, p. 165). The function of the Name-of-the-Father is both productive and prohibitive: the former because it (1) defines the privileged norms of a symbolic system, (2) is the key through which signifiers are combined to create a symbolic universe, and (3) determines the structure and laws to be followed to execute a particular language; and the latter because it not only prevents the child from acting in particular ways, but is always a source of pressure that aims to channel the child’s satisfaction of need through the symbolic law. Rather than negative, Lacan holds that the violence inherent in the process through which the psyche learns to accept the Name-of-the-Father is not only necessary but also fundamental to the child’s psychic development insofar as it ensures that he will be able to fit into his environment, and, crucially, will be able to function and survive within that environment. Failure to accept the productive value of the prohibition inherent in the symbolic law may not only lead to significant mental health issues, but can also threaten the child’s survival.

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

249

Castoriadis and the Radical Imaginary For Lacan, therefore, violence is part of the process through which the child enters the symbolic. As such, it is integral to the psyche’s development. Castoriadis comes to a similar conclusion, albeit through a different conceptual framework. Due to space constraints, I will provide a schematic overview of his thinking that focuses on the notion of the “radical imaginary” (1998, p. 127). This concept is introduced as part of his polemic critique of Lacan’s symbolic account of meaning genesis which, on Castoriadis’s telling, is unable to account for fundamental creativity (2007b, p. 206). To correct this, Castoriadis insists that the “foundation” of social existence is the “radical imaginary” (1998, p. 127)—“the unceasing and essentially undetermined (social-historical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of ‘something’” (1998, p. 3)—which is split into the “radical imagination” (1998, p. 274) of the psyche and the “social imaginary” (1998, p.  3) that describes the institutions and meanings of each society. Castoriadis explains that he uses the notion of “imaginary” because these significations “do not correspond to, or are … exhausted by, references to ‘rational’ or ‘real’ elements and because it is through a creation that they are posited” (1997a, p. 3). He calls “them social because they … exist only if they are instituted and shared by an impersonal, anonymous collective” (1997a, p. 3). That they are “imaginary” does not, however, mean that they are abstract. Social imaginaries are inherently concrete because they are the mechanisms, signs, representations, affects, and intentions that structure and dominate a society. Without them, there would be no society. They are, however, not necessarily physical, nor do they transcend the society; they are, in effect, the fabric or “web of meanings” (1997a, p. 7) that glue a society together and, indeed, create one in the first place. As a consequence, we have “to think of the world of social significations as the primary, inaugural, irreducible positing of the social-­historical and of the social imaginary as it manifests itself in each case in a given society” (1998, p. 368). These (1) consist not only “of images or figures

250 

G. Rae

in the broadest sense of the term: phonemes, words, bank currency, jinns, statues, churches, tools, uniforms, body paintings, numerical figures, border-posts, centaurs, cassocks, lictors, musical scores—but all the totality of what is perceived in nature” (1998, p. 238); and (2) are particular to each society, arising from the way in which each society responds to a wide-variety of questions, including, but not limited to: “Who are we as a collectivity? What are we for one another? Where and in what are we? What do we want; what do we desire; what are we lacking?” (1998, pp. 146–147). These are not necessarily explicitly asked or responded to; rather, “it is in the doing of each collectivity that the answer to these questions appears as an embodied meaning; this social doing allows itself to be understood only as a reply to the questions that it implicitly poses itself ” (1998, p. 147). Importantly, the creation of a social-historical element is intimately tied to the instantiation of a symbolic system of signification, which is structured from the “rigid tie … between the signifier and signified, the symbol and the thing, that is to say in the actual imaginary” (1998, pp. 127–128). As a consequence, the instantiation of a symbolic system produces meaning from “the permanent connection” (1998, p. 127) that structures the binary oppositions of symbolic meaning. These are not universal, but specific to each social-historical formation and the language that composes it. Crucially, however, the symbolic cannot be considered primary. Without mentioning him, Castoriadis is engaging with what he takes to be Lacan’s affirmation of the foundational importance of the symbolic. He criticizes such a move because if the symbolic were primary, there would only be—on Castoriadis’s telling—rigid production rather than innovative creation (1984, p. 66). To explain the latter, we need to recognize that the “radical imaginary [i]s the common root of the actual imaginary and of the symbolic” (1998, p.  127). I have already questioned whether this is an accurate representation of Lacan’s thought, but it is important to note that Castoriadis accepts that the symbolic is a fundamental aspect of the generation of meaning in a social imaginary. He holds, however, that it is a second-order phenomenon dependent on the fundamental generative power of the (radical) imaginary, which creates the social imaginary, and, by extension, symbolic and which, instead of producing meaning from a predefined schema or opposition, is defined by open-ended creation.

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

251

So, according to Castoriadis, social imaginary significations are not created by an individual, a group of subjects, or a transcendent source. Rather, “[s]ociety must make itself and state itself in order to make or state anything” (1998, p. 269). That it has no definable source other than a general ineffable form of collective action ensures that the foundation of social imaginary significations is insidious, total, yet anonymous: “we are dealing with the power of the social-historical field itself, the power of outis, of Nobody” (1991e, p. 150). However, while their source cannot be located, social imaginary significations are sustained through the collective actions of the individuals created by and constitutive of them. This brings us to the issue of the individual and, in particular, the other manifestation of the radical imaginary: the radical imagination. The radical imagination describes the fundamental structure of the psyche. While the radical (psychic) imagination is distinct from and different to the social imaginary, it is important to note that the radical imagination is always tied to and embedded within a social imaginary. However, whereas the psyche receives impressions from the social imaginary, “it is also, and more importantly (for without this the receptivity of impressions would produce nothing) [defined by] the emergence of representation as an irreducible and unique mode of being” (1998, p. 283). That the psyche must continuously turn impressions into representations does not mean that the psyche pre-exists what it creates; it is not equivalent to a transcendental consciousness. Rather, the psyche “is a forming, which exists in and through what it forms and how it forms” (1998, p. 283). Whereas the traditional conception of the subject conceives of it as an “individual-substance” (1991d, p. 128) with a defined nature, Castoriadis explains that the psyche is “essentially … a perpetually surging flux of representations, desires, and affects. As such, it is creative, which also means that this flow and its products are as often as not undetermined” (2007a, p. 200). Because it is a surging flux, there is, strictly speaking, “no ‘site’ of the psyche properly” (1991c, p. 94). The psyche is indeterminate, which does not mean that it is not differentiated or, indeed, structured. The structure is, however, endlessly broken-up and re-ordered by “a continual irruption of newness, creation, self-alteration” (1991b, p. 70). In the first instance, Castoriadis explains that “[t]he human psyche is by necessity structurally divided, at least between a conscious and an

252 

G. Rae

unconscious level” (2007a, p. 199). Of the two, it is the unconscious that is key. As such, the radical imagination is unconscious, with the consequence that its fundamental creative actions occur at this level (1998, pp.  191–192). However, he goes further by splitting the unconscious between what might be called the “social unconscious,” defined by the internalization of the social imaginary significations of the society it exists within, and “the primal unconscious, which is the monadic core of the psyche” (1998, p.  298). This monadic psyche is defined by monadic enclosure and so is inherently asocial. It is also “master of all desires, of total unification, of the abolition of difference and of distance, manifested above all as being unaware of difference and distance, which, in the field of the unconscious, arranges all the representations that emerge in the direction of its own lines of force” (1998, p. 298).

The Socialization of the Psychic Monad By distinguishing between the social imaginary and the radical imagination, Castoriadis establishes an opposition between the two. While this has been criticized (Habermas 1987, pp. 330–334), Castoriadis insists on it to secure autonomy for the psychic monad from the pressures exerted on the (social) unconscious by the social imaginary. Crucially, however, he points out that the psyche’s initial asociality threatens its existence: “Left to [him]self, the newborn dies of hunger or, in the best of cases, becomes a wild child and irreversibly loses [his] capacity to be truly human” (1997d, p.  187). The psyche is brought out of this asociality both through the actions of others and because it feels the effects of its relationship to its somatic needs upon which it leans but by which it is not determined, and which it must satisfy to exist. Such satisfaction requires communication, which does not have to be conceptual, and the actions of others. For this reason, the survival of the psyche requires that it overcome the asociality of its monadic core and socialize with others. In turn, because the social-historical does not exist as a transcendent substance, but is dependent on the actions of those that constitute it, its continuation depends upon those who exist within it affirming its social imaginary significations. Society therefore “socialises (humanises) the

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

253

wild, raw, antifunctionally mad psyche of the newborn and imposes upon it a formidable complex of constraints and limitations” (1991a, p. 41). These bring the psyche to “renounce [its initial] absolute egocentrism and [the] omnipotence of imagination, recognise ‘reality’ and the existence of others, subordinate desires to rules of behaviour, and accept sublimated satisfactions and even death for the sake of ‘social’ ends” (1991a, pp. 41–42). The issue that arises from this is how this socialization takes place. If the psyche is inherently asocial, enclosed, and monadic, how is it transformed into the socialized individual? In response, Castoriadis explains that “this always occurs by means of a violent break-up of what is the first state of the psyche and its requirements” (1998, p.  311). Importantly, this is never simply voluntarily undertaken by the psyche: the new-born will always have to be torn out of his world, without asking him for an opinion he cannot give, and forced—under pain of psychosis— to renounce his imaginary omnipotence, to recognise the desire of others as equally legitimate with his own, and taught that he cannot make the words of the language signify whatever he may want them to, made able to enter the world as such, the social world and the world of significations as everyone’s world and as no one’s world. (1998, p. 311)

This, however, gives rise to the question of what precisely occurs within the socialization process for Castoriadis to claim that violence is necessary to it. Given that the psychic monad is autistic and self-referential with this having to be broken, it appears that, on Castoriadis’s telling, a condition of violence is that there is some form of imposition onto the sense of omnipotent enclosure that defines the initial psychic monad. It is because the monad insists on having it all its own way that it experiences any imposition as, in some way, violent. Accepting the connection between “violence” and “imposition” broadens the meaning of violence at play away from a narrow form of physical violence. In particular, I will emphasize the ways in which the psyche experiences violence from the symbolic and somatic aspects of its being. Regarding the former, Castoriadis explains that “socialisation begins on the first day of life if not before” (1997c, p. 155) as the child experiences others, in particular the mother

254 

G. Rae

who, presumably, cares for it. The mother, for Castoriadis, is not just a passive figure of care; “she is a social individual, and she speaks the tongue of such and such a particular society; she is the bearer of social imaginary significations specific to that society” (1997c, p. 155). The mother is then the bearer of social significations, which, through her interaction with the child, are imposed onto the child. That the child is surrounded by significations, some of which are directed at it, implies an imposition onto the absolute autonomy of the psychic monad that, on Castoriadis’s account, entails a form of violence. While this points to the symbolic violence inherent in the socialization process, this is accompanied by another form, called here somatic violence. It will be remembered that, for Castoriadis, the psychic monad is distinct from the somatic, but always leans on it so that it has to take the somatic into account to survive. Put concretely, the child has physical needs—hunger for example—that have to be satisfied for the psyche to be able to exist. From the perspective of the autistic monad, the somatic acts as an imposition onto its omnipotence. It calls for the psyche to act in a particular manner, one that breaks up the psyche’s unity due to the nature of the call—it does not come from the psyche but an “external” agency: the somatic—and the action that is required for the psyche to satiate the call: the psyche needs to interact with others to obtain the food necessary to satisfy its hunger with this interaction interrupting its autistic enclosure. This, of course, also means interacting with the symbolic and social forms of violence carried and transmitted by the care-giver that brings the child food. As such, the autism of the psychic monad suffers imposition—and hence violence—from the symbolic and the somatic. Experiencing such imposition from the symbolic and somatic breaks up the psychic monad and forces it to “enter the harsh world of reality” (1997b, p. 135). In exchange, it is not only provided with the means of survival but is also offered social “meaning” (1997b, p. 135). If successful, the socialization process brings the psyche to identify with the social imaginary it exists within and, through its socialization, the psyche learns to adapt to and even take pleasure in the social world that “is mediated by a ‘state of affairs’ which is not at [its] disposal” (1998, p. 315). The loss of its initial monadic unity will however continue to haunt the individual (2007b, p. 211).

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

255

For Castoriadis then, different forms of violence play a fundamental, necessary, and, crucially, creative role in the development of the psyche and, by extension, the survival of the human being. The somatic aspect of the human being and the social imaginary it exists “within” impose themselves onto the psyche to break-up its initial autism and, in so doing, bring it to act in accordance with the values, norms, and actions of that social imaginary. It should be noted that this imposition takes place both explicitly and implicitly, or consciously and unconsciously, with the latter being more powerful and fundamental to the process. The role that violence plays within Castoriadis’s schema has, however, been the subject of much critical debate. On the one hand, a number of commentators have argued that Castoriadis’s insistence on a necessary socializing violence is incompatible with the claim that the psychic monad is absolutely other to society. This is based on two sub-arguments: First, if the psychic monad and society are as heterogeneous as Castoriadis claims then it is simply not clear how the latter could interact with the former to break it (Whitbook 1996, p. 177). Second, it has been questioned whether the psyche is, in fact, an initial closed totality that must be forcibly opened for socialization to take place (Wolfenstein 1996, p. 717; Gauchet 2002, p. 10; Smith 2005, p. 11). From this perspective, Castoriadis’s thinking is logically inconsistent and based on a conception of the psyche that is simply wrong. There must be an original openness to the psyche for the socialization process to occur, which means that the violence Castoriadis insists upon is not necessary. Defenders of Castoriadis have, however, argued that these criticisms are based on a fundamental misunderstanding or partial reading of his thought (Curtis and Kalyvas 1998, p. 819; Klooger 2009, pp. 21–22; Marcela Tovar-Restrepo 2012, pp. 49–50). As a consequence, they claim that violence is necessary to socialize the psyche and so plays a fundamental role within his thinking specifically and the life and survival of human beings more generally. My intervention into this debate is to offer a compatibilist reading that agrees with his defenders that violence is inherent in the socialization process, but also accepts that his critics are on to something when they claim that it is reductionist to read the socialization process in terms of fundamental violence alone. For Castoriadis, socialization entails both

256 

G. Rae

violent imposition—from the social, symbolic, and somatic—and is an action in which the psychic monad necessarily and willingly participates. As he explains: “[t]he process of the social institution of the individual … is the history of the psyche in the course of which the psyche alters itself and opens itself to the social-historical, depending, too, on its own work and its own creativity” (1998, p.  300). This is further evidenced from Castoriadis’s analysis of what he calls the “triadic phase” (1998, p. 300).

The Triadic Phase The triadic phase describes the process through which the “great enigma” (1998, p.  301) that is the break-up of the initial psychic monad takes place. More specifically, it describes the process through which the psyche comes to distinguish between subject, object, and other to move from a monadic to a triadic structure. The initial moment that generates the break-up of the psyche is its relation to “somatic need” (1998, p. 302). As noted, the psyche leans on, without being determined by, the somatic. If the psyche does not respond to the somatic need “the infant w[ill] die” (1998, p. 302), but if it does respond—which it does in the overwhelming majority of cases—the satisfaction of its somatic need is “represented as the manifestation, confirmation, restoration of the initial unity of the subject” (1998, p.  302). Therefore, while somatic need imposes itself onto the psyche, the psyche has to decide to satiate that need: the child must partake of the breast, or object that substitutes for it, and so participate in the process that satiates his hunger. By successfully satiating its somatic need, the psyche experiences a sense of re-unification (i.e. a fullness or sense of totality) from which it derives pleasure. If pleasure is the return to its initial, autistic, unified state, displeasure “is the break-up of the autistic monad” (1998, p. 303). By leaning on the psyche, hunger reveals to the psyche that it is not an enclosed unity, but lacks something. Because hunger is normally satiated through the breast, the presence of hunger reveals the absence of the breast and “the absence of the breast is unpleasure in so far as it is the tearing apart of the autistic world” (1998, p.  303). Through this, the child starts to distinguish between itself and its other: the former associated with the presence of

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

257

the breast and the absence of hunger and the latter with the absence of the breast and the presence of hunger. However, because the breast is so often absent, the psyche finds itself in a conundrum: if it really were the unity it insists upon, it would not be able to experience the absence at the root of its displeasure. But yet absence and hence displeasure exist. To account for this and maintain its pleasurable unity, the psyche shifts the absent breast and displeasurable state outside itself. Note that it is the psyche that effects the division between itself and the breast: “an outside is created so that the psyche can cast off into it whatever it does not want, whatever there is no room for in the psyche, non-sense or negative meaning, the breast as absent, the bad breast” (1998, p.  303). In so doing, the psyche creates external space: “The psyche invents-figures an outside in order to place the breast of unpleasure there” (1998, p.  303). At the same time, it objectifies the “bad” breast to place it in the external space created. As such, the psyche is the one that comes to distinguish itself from the external object, thereby starting the process that, by allowing it to distinguish the subject from the object, permits the formation of the oppositions that structure the symbolic. Importantly, the object externalized is not yet “a real object” (1998, p. 304) but something akin to a quasi-object; an awareness of something other than itself. “The real object can only appear once the good breast and the bad breast begin to coincide for the subject, once the two imaginary entities appear as connected to a third entity which is the ground of both of them without being identical with either of them” (1998, p. 304). Following Freud, Castoriadis claims that this takes place “when the fact that the object ‘belongs’ to a ‘person’ is actually apprehended” (1998, p. 304). The two breasts, pleasure and displeasure, become then tied to the same person—the mother—who forever is associated with the disjunction between the two: “Carrying the bad object, [s]he is hated; carrying the good object, [s]he is loved” (1998, p. 304). Crucially, however, the other created is identified with “all-powerfulness” (1998, p.  305) “because the mother is the first person to say ‘no’ to the infant. So the mother is construed as all-powerful, and simultaneously with the ­recognition that she has an existence and a desire, a will, foreign to the infant … that it does not control” (2007b, p. 215). By projecting its pre-

258 

G. Rae

vious omnipotence onto the object-other, the psyche breaks open its own monadism to recognize the importance of the object-other. This is a key stage in the socialization process and one that again re-affirms the point that the socialization process relies upon the active participation of the psyche. While the triadic phase is fundamental to the socialization process, insofar as it brings the psyche out of its monadic autism to “recognize” an object-other—the mother—and so start to establish the differential relations that are key to the social imaginary, the basic problem with it is that it simply transfers the psyche’s initial omnipotence to the other (1998, p. 306). In so doing, the psyche, through the projection, remains at the “root” of the other’s omnipotence and, indeed, “is able to remain shut in with its mother, which produces extremely severe, now well-known pathologies” (2007b, p.  215). To further its psychic development, the child must continue to be socialized so that it breaks out of its dyadic relation with its “omnipotent” mother by deposing her “from the locus of her omnipotence” (2007b, p. 215). It is here that the Oedipus complex enters the scene, insofar as, by recognizing the mother’s desire for another, the child comes to see that the mother is not omnipotent; “she is incomplete, caught up in her desire by the other, which is to say, the father” (2007b, p. 215). By orientating herself around the father, the mother’s privileged position is toppled and the psyche learns that there is another to the dyadic relation: psyche, mother, father. Two issues stand out at this juncture: First, it is not sufficient that the process stops here. The child must recognize that the father himself is not the source of law. Rather, “[t]he father must also be recognised as one of many fathers, as not being the source of Law in himself, but rather as spokesman for the Law, with he himself being subjected to Law” (2007b, p. 216). With this, the child learns that the Law cannot be identified with an individual object, but takes on an ineffable, anonymous “form.” Second, at each stage of the psyche’s movement through the triadic phase and Oedipus complex, it projects itself into the world, but at the same time “introjects” from its interaction with the other. From day one, the child depends upon others who talk to him, name him, and identify him, and from whom he introjects the meaning imposed. For this reason, Castoriadis insists that while the psyche’s projection is crucial, “[i]ntrojection is at the root of socialisation; any communication between sub-

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

259

jects involves the possibility of receiving and incorporating words, meanings, significations coming from an other” (2007b, p.  214). By introjecting the meanings that are imposed onto it, the psyche learns and accepts what is appropriate, how it should act, and so on. Introjection, however, can only happen if the psyche participates in the process; it does not happen simply because the social imaginary imposes itself onto the psyche. Castoriadis is aware that this merely “represents a sketch of the psyche’s socialisation” (1998, p. 306), but it shows that, contrary to his critics, the psyche and social imaginary work together to socialize the former. This is not, however, achieved by reducing the psyche to society. Rather, the social imaginary sublimates the psychic monad within its ambit so that the psyche channels its energies in accordance with the social imaginary. At a minimum, this requires that the social imaginary “allow … the individual the possibility of finding and of bringing into existence for himself a meaning in the instituted social signification” (1998, p. 320). It also requires that the social imaginary look to release the asocial surging flux of the psychic monad for its own ends. Historically, the most obvious ways in which this occurred/s are the emphasis that capitalism places on competition and the violence of war; each of which permits the asociality of the psychic monad to be put to use for the ends of a particular social imaginary.

Concluding Remarks There is far more to Lacan’s and Castoriadis’s thinking, but this overview brings to the fore the ways in which both thinkers accept that violence plays a fundamental and constitutive role in bringing the psyche to develop so that it can participate in its social world. For Lacan, this is necessary to permit entry into the symbolic, whereas Castoriadis emphasizes the ways in which violence functions to socialize the psyche. This is not, however, to claim that Lacan affirms a symbolic account of violence and Castoriadis a social one. As noted, Lacan maintains that the symbolic is defined by differential relations and so is intimately bound to the Other, both in the sense of the Other tied to symbolic relations and the other person with whom the psyche interacts. There is then an inherent

260 

G. Rae

sociality to Lacan’s notion of the symbolic. For the psyche to enter into the symbolic is for it to become socialized. Similarly, for Castoriadis, a fundamental aspect of the socialization process is that it brings the psyche to accept, orientate itself to, and affirm the symbolic law. As a consequence, and despite the substantial differences that otherwise exist between their frameworks, both agree that violence is key to the formation of the individual and is socio-symbolic in nature. From this, both also agree that rather than simply being prohibitive, the violence inherent in the psyche’s development entails prohibitions that are, somewhat paradoxically, productive, insofar as they condition the psyche to express itself in ways that are socially acceptable; action that is necessary to ensure the psyche’s mental health, development, and, indeed, survival. While Lacan’s comments are under-developed, I have argued that he points to the idea that the violence at play is not physical but fundamentally symbolic, based on the idea that the symbolic law imposes itself onto the psyche to pressure the psyche into accepting the primacy of the symbolic law. This is seen more clearly and in much more developed form in Castoriadis’s thinking, where violence describes any imposition onto the initial autism of the psychic monad. With this, Castoriadis points to the fundamental roles that symbolic imposition, and hence violence, and, what I have called, somatic violence play in breaking-up the initial monadism of the psyche: the psychic monad experiences the hunger that emanates from the body on which it leans as a violent imposition onto its initial omnipotence, with the satisfaction of its somatic needs depending on its relations with others, which the psyche, in turn, initially experiences as entailing a form of (symbolic) imposition and hence violence onto its originary omnipotence. Bringing Lacan and Castoriadis together in this way not only points to a multidimensional account of violence that expands its meaning beyond “mere” physical forms, but also reveals that the process through which the psyche develops is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it is inherently violent; but, on the other hand, the experience of this violence is necessary to bring the psyche to accept the social-symbolic law and so ensure its survival by learning to express itself in ways that are socially and symbolically acceptable. The abiding and somewhat sobering lesson of their analysis is that psychic development does not take a smooth or regu-

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

261

lar course; it entails a fraught, violent process that brings the psyche, through its own actions and those of others, gradually and with difficulty from one form of itself to another without any a priori guarantee of “success.” Such, however, is the price of survival.

Notes 1. This paper forms part of the activities for the Conex Marie Skłodowska-­ Curie Research Project “Sovereignty and Law: Between Ethics and Politics” co-funded by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration under Grant Agreement 600371, The Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitivity (COFUND2013–40258), The Spanish Ministry for Education, Culture, and Sport (CEI–15–17), and Banco Santander. More information about the research project can be found at: https://sovereigntyandlaw.wordpress. com 2. Strictly speaking, for both Castoriadis and Lacan, the psyche is always embedded within a symbolic register because it is born into one. For this reason, the psyche is always surrounded by language. Crucially, however, the psyche does not always have the capacity to “use” the language of that symbolic registry. Developing this requires that it accept and act in accordance with the symbolic law. The process of learning the symbolic law is what I mean here by “entering”’ the symbolic. 3. It is important to note that, despite the heteronormative language, which is found throughout Freudian psychoanalysis, including in Castoriadis, the terms “mother” and “father” refer to functions rather than necessarily to actual individuals. To simplify dramatically, “mother” refers to love and care, whereas “father” refers to discipline or law. 4. For an extended discussion of vision in Lacan, see Jay (1994: 343–370). 5. While Lacan’s writings first emphasize the imaginary before moving to the symbolic and then the real, it is a mistake to hold that the three registers exist in a hierarchy. The three registers are entwined in a Borromean knot with the binding point called the “sinthome” (Lacan 2016: 11).

262 

G. Rae

Bibliography Arfi, B. (2012). Reconfiguring the (Lacanian) Real: ‘Saying the Real (as Khôra— χώρα) Qua the Impossible-Possible Event’. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 38(8), 793–819. Bailly, L. (2009). Lacan. London: OneWorld. Castoriadis, C. (1984). Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation. In Crossroads in the Labyrinth (K. Soper & M. H. Ryle, Trans.) (pp. 46–115). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castoriadis, C. (1991a). The Social-Historical: Mode of Being, Problems of Knowledge. In D. A. Curtis (Ed.), Power, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (pp. 33–46). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1991b). Individual, Society, Rationality, History. In D.  A. Curtis (Ed.), Power, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (pp. 47–80). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1991c). The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy. In D. A. Curtis (Ed.), Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (pp. 81–123). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1991d). The Nature and Value of Equality. In D.  A. Curtis (Ed.), Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (pp. 124–142). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1991e). Power, Politics, Autonomy. In D.  A. Curtis (Ed.), Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (pp.  143–174). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1997a). The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain. In World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (D.  A. Curtis, Ed. and Trans.) (pp.  3–18). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1997b). Psychoanalysis and Politics. In World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (D. A. Curtis, Ed. and Trans.) (pp. 125–136). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1997c). The State of the Subject Today. In World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (D. A. Curtis, Ed. and Trans.) (pp. 137–171). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1997d). From the Monad to Autonomy. In World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (D. A. Curtis, Ed. and Trans.) (pp. 172–195). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

263

Castoriadis, C. (1998). The Imaginary Institution of Society (K. Blamey, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castoriadis, C. (2007a). Psychoanalysis: Its Situation and Limits. In Figures of the Thinkable (H.  Arnold, Trans.) (pp.  188–202). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (2007b). The Psyche and the Society Anew. In Figures of the Thinkable (H.  Arnold, Trans.) (pp.  203–220). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (2007c). Remarks on Space and Number. In Figures of the Thinkable (H.  Arnold, Trans.) (pp.  244–259). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Curtis, D. A., & Kalyvas, A. (1998). Fighting the Wrong Enemy: Comments on Wolfenstein’s Critique of Castoriadis. Political Theory, 26(6), 818–824. de Saussure, F. (1986). Course in General Linguistics (C. Bally, A. Sechehaye, & A. Riedlinger, Ed., R. Harris, Trans.). Chicago: Open Court. Dews, P. (2002). Imagination and the Symbolic: Castoriadis and Lacan. Constellations, 9(4), 516–521. Fel, D. (1993). The “Real” Since Freud: Castoriadis and Lacan on Socialization and Language. American Imago, 50(2), 161–195. Gauchet, M. (2002). Redefining the Unconscious. Thesis Eleven, 71(1), 4–23. Habermas, J. (1987). Excursus on Cornelius Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (F. Lawrence, Trans.) (pp. 327–335). Cambridge: Polity. Jay, M. (1994). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klooger, J. (2009). Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy. Leiden: Brill. Lacan, J. (1953). Some Reflections on the Ego. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34(1), 11–17. Lacan, J. (1981). Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed., A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1991a). Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique (J.-A.  Miller, Ed., J. Forrester, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1991b). Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (J.-A.  Miller, Ed., S.  Tomaselli, Trans.). New  York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1997). Seminar III: The Psychoses (J.-A.  Miller, R.  Grigg, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.

264 

G. Rae

Lacan, J. (1999). Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge (J.-A. Miller, Ed., B. Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006a). Seminar on the “Purloined Letter”. In Écrits (B. Fink in collaboration with H.  Fink & R.  Grigg, Trans.) (pp.  6–50). New  York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006b). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. In Écrits (B.  Fink in collaboration with H.  Fink & R.  Grigg, Trans.) (pp.  75–93). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006c). The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. In Écrits (B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink & R. Grigg, Trans.) (pp. 197–268). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006d). Response to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung”. In Écrits (B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink & R. Grigg, Trans.) (pp. 318–333). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006e). The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud. In Écrits (B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink & R. Grigg, Trans.) (pp. 412–441). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006f ). The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire. In Écrits (B.  Fink in collaboration with H.  Fink & R.  Grigg, Trans.) (pp. 671–702). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006g). Position of the Unconscious. In Écrits (B. Fink in collaboration with H.  Fink & R.  Grigg, Trans.) (pp.  703–721). New  York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2013). The Triumph of Religion. In The Triumph of Religion, Preceded by Discourse to Catholics (B. Fink, Trans.) (pp. 55–85). Cambridge: Polity. Lacan, J. (2016). Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome (J.-A. Miller, Ed., A. R. Price, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity. Lacan, J. (2017). Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious (J.-A.  Miller, Ed., R. Grigg, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity. Rae, G. (2019). Taming the Little Screaming Monster: Castoriadis on Violence and the Creation of the Individual. In G.  Rae & E.  Ingala (Eds.), The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (pp.  171–190). Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Sass, L. (2014). Lacan, Foucault, and the “Crisis of the Subject”: Revisionist Reflections on Phenomenology and Post-Structuralism. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 21(4), 325–341. Smith, K. E. (2005). Re-imagining Castoriadis’s Psychic Monad. Thesis Eleven, 83(1), 5–14.

11  Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan… 

265

Stavrakakis, Y. (2002). Creativity and Its Limits: Encounters with Social Constructionism and the Political in Castoriadis and Lacan. Constellations, 9(4), 522–539. Tovar-Restrepo, M. (2012). Castoriadis, Foucault, and Autonomy: New Approaches to Subjectivity, Society, and Social Change. London: Continuum. Urribari, F. (2002). Castoriadis: The Radical Imagination and the Post-Lacanian Unconscious. Thesis Eleven, 71(1), 40–51. Whitbook, J. (1996). Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Williams, C. (1999). Reconstituting the Subject of Political Discourse: From Lacan to Castoriadis. In I.  MacKenzie & S.  O’Neill (Eds.), Reconstituting Social Criticism: Political Morality in an Age of Scepticism (pp.  103–120). Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolfenstein, E. V. (1996). Psychoanalysis in Political Theory. Political Theory, 24(4), 706–728.

Index1

A

E

Affect, 69, 72, 77, 82, 137–142, 144–146, 149–151, 153–162, 203, 205, 207, 219, 221, 228, 231, 234, 249, 251

Essentialism, 27–36 Eternity, 167–185 I

Catastrophe, 42–45, 176 Catharsis, 137–162 Conceptual, xv, 4–8, 10–13, 21, 34, 48, 51, 61, 65, 79, 240, 249, 252

Immanent, xvi, xvii, 79, 139, 150, 153 Individual, xvi, xvii, 12, 17, 20, 28, 41, 47, 49, 55, 56, 75, 82, 91–98, 100–107, 112, 140, 141, 143, 169, 172, 177, 195, 198, 199, 201, 239–261 Intersubjectivity, 193–204

D

M

Destruction, 3, 41–56, 85n6, 169, 170, 177, 193–204, 233–235

Meaning, xv–xvii, 3, 5–7, 11, 18, 41, 42, 45, 49, 53–56, 59–84, 91–95, 97–102, 104–107,

C

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2

267

268 Index

111–117, 122, 137–162, 167, 168, 180, 182–185, 204–206, 208, 209, 218, 220–226, 228, 231, 234, 241, 244, 245, 247, 249, 250, 253, 254, 257–260 Metaphor, 3–21, 116, 151, 245 Mimesis, 74, 137–162 Moral, 4, 14, 16–21, 28, 32, 34, 36, 101–105, 107, 127, 177, 209, 221

Sense, xv, xvi, 4, 5, 9, 11–13, 15, 19, 20, 22n1, 28–31, 33, 35, 36, 41–56, 61, 66, 72, 78, 81, 82, 93, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 107, 117, 118, 121, 124, 126, 127, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 157, 158, 160, 161, 168, 169, 193–200, 209, 234, 236, 242, 244, 246, 250, 253, 256, 259 Shame, xvi, 198, 217–237

P

T

Phenomenology, 57n1, 59, 62, 77–80, 114, 115, 117, 118, 126, 218, 219, 221 Photography, 167, 168, 177, 185 Politics, 3, 71, 75, 96, 98, 99, 105, 107, 124, 146, 148, 176, 217–237 Psychoanalysis, 138, 144, 145, 239, 240, 243

Torture, xvi, 191–209, 222, 233, 234 Transcendent, xvi, xvii, 67, 75–77, 80, 81, 101, 102, 251, 252 Trauma, 42–45, 50, 52, 54, 145, 146, 197, 200, 203, 204

R

Religion, xv, 34, 59–80, 82–84, 111–128, 142 Resistance, 19, 20, 97, 123, 158, 193, 198, 199, 203, 205, 208–209, 218, 219, 221, 224, 229–231, 233, 235, 236, 246 Revolt, 91, 95, 97, 107, 111, 217–237 S

Sacrifice, 63, 74, 100–102, 107, 142, 143, 155, 183, 184, 199

V

Violence, xiii–xvii, 3–21, 22n1, 22n3, 22n4, 22n5, 22–23n7, 23n8, 23n9, 27–36, 41–56, 59–84, 91–107, 111–128, 137, 168, 170, 176, 177, 182, 184, 191–209, 218, 220–223, 225, 230, 234, 239–261 W

War, xiii, xiv, 14, 18, 30, 32, 33, 41, 73, 74, 92, 99, 102, 111, 121, 124, 125, 137, 154, 155, 169, 170, 175–177, 179, 182, 184, 259 Warbooks, 172