10.1007@978 3 030 27173 2

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 Laura Katherine Smith
Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte KU Leuven
KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium
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

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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 phe-
nomenology 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 phi-
losophy, 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 mortal-
ity, 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 8.1–8.9 171–184

Fig. 9.1 One of Abu Zubayduh’s drawings, depicting the
suspension of his temporal horizons 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 vio-
lence 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 sug-
gest 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 becom-
ing 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 per-
sist. Those who argue against optimists like Pinker claim that the percep-
tion 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 scien-
tific 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 aca-
demic 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 his-
tory, sociology, and psychology but also in philosophy. Since the begin-
ning 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 dif-
ferent areas across philosophy. Political philosophers like C.A.J. Coady,
for example, focus on the relation between institutions, power, and vio-
lence, 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 vio-
lence, we see that many questions on this subject remain unanswered.
One of the topics that philosophers have not yet considered is the rela-
tionship between the concept of violence on the one hand and the con-
cept 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 reli-
gion, suffering, life, sport, and many others. Secondly, a common intu-
ition follows that violence is often associated with a loss of meaning, and
that, conversely, an abundance of meaning in life is a buffer against vio-
lence. 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 (con-
ceptual) 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 mean-

ing of violence. If, however, we focus further on ‘meaning’ on an existen-
tial 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 phil-
osophically in terms of the many different forms of violence. More spe-
cifically, 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 contri-
butions 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, commu-
nity, or society. This part’s contributions, from Nidesh Lawtoo, Stéphane
Symons, and Tammy Castelein, explore aesthetic representations of vio-
lence. Thirdly, the last part reflects upon the relationship between vio-
lence 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 philosophi-
cal 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 Lode Lauwaert

KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
KU Leuven Laura Katherine Smith
Leuven, Belgium
Husserl Archives 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 defini-
tion. 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 destruc-
tion 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” trans-
formations 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 3
L. Lauwaert et al. (eds.), Violence and Meaning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_1
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 under-
mines 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 vio-
lence 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 infer-
ences about a less well-understood abstract domain in light of our knowl-
edge 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 meta-
phors underpinned by analogical reasoning, while, in the fourth section,
I explain why and how this reasoning goes wrong. The specific criticisms
are that arguments that employ such extended definitions either are cir-
cular 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 with-
out 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 under-
stand something about conceptual metaphor.
What is a conceptual metaphor? It is a set of conceptual correspon-
dences between two different conceptual domains. These correspon-
dences 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 real-
ization 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 expres-
sions 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 under-
lies 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 move-
ments 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 map-
ping 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 excep-
tion (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-
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 lin-
guistic expression in order to convey semantic meaning.
For the purposes of the argument I develop in this chapter, it is impor-
tant to know that new mappings between concrete source domain and
abstract target domains also play a role in the development of philo-
sophical terminology (Fischer 2009, p. 80). When it comes to the termi-
nology 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 con-
temporary 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 rea-
soning 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 spon-
taneous, 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 pro-
cess 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 unfa-
miliar experience, phenomenon or knowledge terrain, we are predisposed
to draw on our knowledge about similar situations in order to make infer-
ences 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 com-
plex reasoning” (Fischer 2014, p. 7). Thus, what looks like the outcome
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 “illu-
sions 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 con-
tent. That is, we cannot explain what they mean except in the terminol-
ogy 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 argu-
ment. 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 cogni-
tive 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 uncer-
tainty—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 under-
stand abstract concepts in light of a concrete source domain. In this sec-
tion, 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 map-
ping 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 map-
pings 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 con-
ceptualize analogous properties of persons. We generally experience such
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 sus-
pending 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 fur-
ther experience that a stationary object only moves if force is applied, that
the application requires contact, and that the application of force tempo-
rally 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, inaugurat-
ing, 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 rela-
tions 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
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 spon-
taneous 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, tau-
tological 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 lin-
guistic 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 anal-
ogy 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 ele-
ments 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 under-
stood analogously to the concrete domain of physical forces and objects
at all. Indeed, advocates of expanded definitions are at pains to distin-
guish 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 dif-
ference, 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 vio-
lence of naming and the secondary violence of its concealment (Derrida
1976, p. 112). A version of this argument returns in Judith Butler’s pro-
posal that it is the “normative violence” of language that forcibly enacts
classifications and thereby conditions the overt violence of physical force,

while at the same time hiding this violence from us by rendering it nor-
mative (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 lan-
guage 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 lan-
guage 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 defini-
tions 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 philoso-
phers are willing to accept this as the price for rejecting the so-called posi-
tivistic paradigm. Thus, we have claims that violence is something
“ineffable,” something that is “uncontainable, unrepresentable, and ulti-
mately 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 vio-
lence 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 “injus-
tice” 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 vio-
lence 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 per-
sons, 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
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 vio-
lence 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 applica-
tion of the concept becomes.
By “valuable” here I mean: rendering reliable knowledge about a spe-
cific 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, speak-
ing, 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 seman-
tic 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 prob-
lem. On this argument’s own terms, it is impossible to reconcile the moral
end that is being pursued—recognizing, resisting, overcoming a pre-
sumed 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 possi-
bly 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, revolu-
tions, 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
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 judg-
ing 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 meta-
phorical extension of violence, it remains for me to propose an alterna-
tive. 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 defini-
tion 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 defini-
tion—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 vio-
lence 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 concep-
tion 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 inter-
personal 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 analogi-
cal 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 indi-
vidual 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
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 rea-
soned 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, epis-
temic 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 oppres-
sion, 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 con-
crete 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, inten-
tional 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 cen-
tury. 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-
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 expan-
sion 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).
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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 exclu-
sively 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
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_2
28 L. Lauwaert
Examples of research questions asked by researchers in the recent and

highly diversified domain of violence studies are the following: Has vio-
lence 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 vio-
lence 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 vio-
lence itself is largely undesirable. This decision not only nuances the
image of the violent person, it is also relevant for policy makers, thera-
pists, 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 empiri-
cal 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 con-
cept of violence is generally understood. Don’t we expect a study on vio-
lence 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
“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 ‘vio-
lence’. 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 defini-
tion, 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 con-
cept 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 char-
acterizes 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 char-
acterizes ‘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 under-
stand 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 sup-
port 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: aggres-
sion, coercion, cruelty, sadism, masochism, brutality, roughness, wild-
ness, 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 asso-
ciations 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
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 vio-
lent 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 ‘physi-
cal 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 physi-
cal 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 descrip-
tion does imply, however, that anyone who intentionally causes psycho-
logical damage (without physical consequences) is not violent. The daily
humiliation of a person, in such a way that the person suffers from anxi-
ety 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 vio-
lence is too limited, because violence can include physical and material as
well as psychological damage. However, we can easily amend that short-
coming. 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 function-
ing is made impossible? Or is that too strong an interpretation, and is it
sufficient that functioning is merely hindered? However, both descrip-
tions 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 charac-
teristic 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 percent-
age 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 character-
istic 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
tradition of the Just War Theory, which goes back to Augustine, is mean-
ingless. 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 ‘conser-
vative’, 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, vio-
lence 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 fol-
low 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 specifi-
cally, ‘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: vio-
lence 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 suffer-
ing? 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 terror-
ism. 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
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 denomina-
tor 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 interpre-
tation 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 conse-
quences 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 behav-
ior.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 vocabu-
lary. 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 han-
dling 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 defini-
tion against which the already-existing concept of violence can be mea-
sured 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 ‘vio-
lence’ 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.
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 anni-
hilating in its effects, but violence aims towards a nothingness in which
is disclosed a certain fragility of meaning. The obliteration of the singu-
lar, 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-differen-
tiation. Annihilating violence—whether of the individual raped and tor-
tured or the community left bereft through war, colonization or natural
F. Ó Murchadha (*)
NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_3
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 reten-
tional and protentional orientations. The vulnerability of temporal con-
stitution, which violence discloses, reveals a fundamental absence at the
core of time itself and a nothingness threatening the stability of normal-
ized 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 animal-
ity, 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 hap-
pening 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 com-
puter 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 nonethe-

less 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 earth-
quake 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 pain-
ful. 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 ambiva-
lence with regard to experience itself: experience responds to that which
escapes from it and remains beyond the experiencing self, but such dis-
tance tends to negate that which can appear as formed within any par-
ticular 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 differ-
ence 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 under-
mine 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 some-
thing occurs which radically changes the real, then there is no point of
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 famil-
iarity 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, how-
ever, 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 oth-
erwise, certain characteristics—etymologically meaning marks on the
soul or body—maintain a manner of being towards one another, incor-
porated 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 ambigu-
ous 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, nor-
mality 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 pre-
established harmony, but a harmony nonetheless in which nothing is
that does not come to be within the horizon of an order which is re-
affirmed in each moment, while being incomplete, unended, pre-
cisely temporal.
Novelty is constitutive of temporality, but as already noted that nov-
elty 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 affec-
tive modes of approaching the new, in which the new is disclosed in its
essential unexpectedness—the expected being optimally the completely
seen (ex-spectare)—is encountered with various degrees of intensity: sur-

prise, shock and horror.
In surprise the self is overtaken by an event, such that—if only momen-
tarily—the self finds itself unprepared for what has happened, respond-
ing 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 diffi-
culty 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 dis-
ruptive 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 appear-
ance (of a musician on stage at a concert). In each case something hap-
pens 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 chal-
lenges 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 pre-
sumption 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 prepa-
ration 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 prac-
tices remain. Indeed, it is not by accident that in most cultures it is pre-
cisely 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 corre-
sponds to the self ’s capacities for action—either in actual or conceptual
terms—and its sedimented past is left without any relevance to the pres-
ent. In horror we are faced with that loss as that which negates all possible
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 character-
ize 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 oth-
ers. 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 vulner-
able 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 inter-
rupts 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 attempt-
ing 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 ‘ven-
geance 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 sug-
gests 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-
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 con-
tinuity, 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 signifi-
cance. The habitual is that which allows the contingent, whether in phys-
ical 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 func-
tion 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 rep-
etitions 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 pre-
cisely that which cannot be given form, rather that which threatens with
formlessness, the loss of boundaries and limits and the disclosure of lim-
itlessness, 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 continu-

ity, 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 recogni-
tion 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 con-
sciousness 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 direct-
edness 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 incit-
ing of temporal movement in the twin senses of retention and proten-
tion. 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 phenom-
enon which appears to me as a secondary manifestation of itself. In
appearing to me it expresses itself before me. It expresses itself as a par-
ticular futural tendency which comes to me from elsewhere.
It is precisely this having-been futural tendency as expressive of a phe-
nomenon 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
that the temporal is constituted through the new, that the temporal rela-
tion 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 tem-
poral structure of consciousness or indeed the narrative structure of tem-
poral 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 habitua-
tion 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 poten-
tial fragility of all unity. The contexts of these discussions differ and can-
not 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 nei-
ther 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 identifi-
able 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 iden-
tity is to be understood as without parts, as a oneness without any mul-
tiplicity, 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 multi-
tude 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
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 noth-
ing 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 limit-
less 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 sup-
pressed 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 vio-
lence, but this is not to be understood as a dialectical opposition.
Rather, divine violence breaks the dialectic of law-making and law-
preserving violence rooted in the manifestation of force whereby myth-
ical 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 annihilat-
ing force which threatens any worldly sense—has been shattered. The
lacuna, the interval, is not without sense, however. It demonstrates a fun-
damental contingency of meaning rooted in the manner in which tempo-
ral 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.
Notes
1. Dastur (2000) gives a powerful phenomenology of the surprising, but
understands the surprising as a general term for what I am here distin-
guishing 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.
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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 vari-
ous 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 phenom-
enological 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

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_4
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 situa-
tion 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 con-
temporary 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 pre-
tend 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 self-
righteous 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 con-
temporary 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 conse-
quence 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 global-
ized 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 undertak-
ing since it exposes the truly cardinal but generally disavowed dichoto-
mies that are so dear to our traditional philosophical attempts at coming
to terms with the very phenomenon of religion—and its assumed irratio-
nality, opacity, and heterology. Confronting it indeed calls upon us to
escape the undercurrents of our beloved modernist waters that have tac-
itly 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 exis-
tential problem of the “truth of religion,”1 indeed amounts to miscon-
ceive or rather “duck” the question of such truth. Most convincingly, this
argument has been propelled by John Caputo’s radical hermeneuti-
cal 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 after-
life. Religious truth is not a matter of information—as if it reveals certain
facts of the matter otherwise unavailable to empirical inquiry or specula-
tive “reason”—but a matter of transformation, with the result that reli-
gious 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 reli-
gious 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 ambiva-
lent 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 irra-
tionality 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 sys-
tematically be developed.
ontemporary Continental Philosophy

C
of Religion, Its Potentials, and Discontents
In contemporary continental philosophy of religion Heidegger’s “destruc-
tive” 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, recov-
ered 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 imagi-
native creativity to the ineradicable potential of “radical evil.”
On another note, Levinas’ “atheist” distancing from the lure of idola-
trous 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, embod-
ies a move which paves the path for retrieving an inherently religious rela-
tionship 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 founda-
tion of the ethical, one that takes the traditional figure of the logon dido-
nai 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 vulner-
able, 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
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 tradi-
tion—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 with-
drawal 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 unfree-
dom. 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 “strug-
gle 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 theol-
ogy 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, how-
ever, this conception also needs to mediate the primordial violence that it
nolens volens has to retain; such violence indeed is, as I argue, a constitu-
tive part of the very experience of “transcendence,” the “sacred,” “revela-
tion,” 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 pro-
found 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 knowl-
edge, 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 iden-
tify 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
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 misun-
derstood 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 dem-
onstrated convincingly, “violence” firstly is—due to the inherently exces-
sive affective status of the sacred, transcendent, and so on—an inherent
part of religious experience (as, e.g., hierophanies or the very phenome-
non of revelation clearly demonstrate). Due to its affective character, this
primordial “violence” remains a structural part of our irreducibly embod-
ied, 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 per-
ception, 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 phe-
nomenally 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 fre-
quently 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 condi-
tion,” as if, for example, the uprooting impacts of globalization necessar-
ily 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 unfathom-
able 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 performa-
tive 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 man-
kind’s attempts to poetically reconfigure and practically transform every-
dayness 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
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 cre-
ative potential of this quest remain within the limits of “a poetics of the
human will”—that is, its possible poetical articulation—which, in con-
fronting 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 poi-
etical transformation of the world—that is driven by the attempt to over-
come 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 “pros-
thetic” 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 impor-
tance. 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 aforemen-
tioned 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 dem-
onstrated, procedural, functional as well as discursive accounts of religion
remain inadequate to incorporate the liberating claims of religious rea-
soning and “truth” into the normative fabrics of late modern societies.
Quite the contrary, the mere attempt to do so quickly results in sacrific-
ing 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 fla-
grantly 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, overshad-
ows the motivating power of religion and thus has quite dangerous con-
sequences. 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 stan-
dards 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
still remains how to confront “religion” beyond this apparently bad alter-
native 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 uncom-
municable 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 purport-
edly 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 con-
stellation, as I argue, attests to a variety of fault lines that have under-
mined the functional coherence of social order, traditionally conceived,
thus giving rise to new social imaginaries that somehow exploit this rela-
tionship to transcendence. As Stoker (2012) has demonstrated in system-
atic fashion, the experience of transcendence today does not only resonate
across a variety of fields that unfold beyond the narrow domain of reli-
gion, including first and foremost culture, art and politics. It rather has
changed most basically inasmuch as contemporary articulations of tran-
scendence are actively called upon to practically translate a variety of exis-
tential truth claims that appear to be eclipsed more and more in the
context of our contemporary individualist social ontologies and technol-
ogies. 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 con-
trast, 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, rang-
ing from the return of tribalism and the rise of populism and the resur-
gence 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 legiti-
mizing 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 vari-
ety 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
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 intertwin-
ing 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 interna-
tional 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 consump-
tion 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 fundamen-
talism 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 develop-
ment. What appears striking to me about this so-called post-secular
constellation, however, is not simply the “return of the religious,” a con-
tested concept still lingering ambiguously between “sociological fact”
and “philosophical artifact.” Truly striking about our changing percep-
tions, assessments, and evaluations of religion rather is that its novel
articulations seem to revolve around a largely unthought transformation

of traditional understandings of transcendence. Recently, this transforma-
tion 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 transcen-
dence 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 transcen-
dence 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 tran-
scendence 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 disquiet-
ing call, for example, by translating and institutionalizing its transgressive
76 M. Staudigl
potential in the framework of everyday existence. If, however, we “experi-

ence 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 transcen-
dence 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 con-
tend that all this is about inherently affective experiences of transcen-
dence and meaningful practices of self-transcendence co-constituting
each other, finally to the effect that none of them may claim the prece-
dence 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 relegat-
ing 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 sim-
ply fall into consciousness through some hole in its closed intentional
structure. Or, as Kearney (2004, p. 18) has formulated the related meth-
odological 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 exem-
plary 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
openness to what affectively befalls us and shakes our categories of under-

standing 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 tran-
scendence 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 inter-
twining 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 estab-
lished what the expression “integrative account” shall mean. This can be
done by pointing out the deficits that the two leading paradigms in con-
tinental philosophy of religion today, that is, phenomenology and herme-
neutics, 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 affec-
tion,” 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 given-
ness,” “revelation,” and so on (Ricœur). Whereas various radical phenom-
enological 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 posi-
tions 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 phenome-

nology that can only assure adequate access to its key topics on the basis
of its disavowed religious character (this amounts to the well-known cri-
tique concerning a “theological turn”) (Janicaud 2000); with the herme-
neutic focus on pre-given meaning structures (esp. texts as well as
textualities), on the other hand, a reductive form of some merely descrip-
tive 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 spe-
cific 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 “frame-
work 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 con-
cerning 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 ten-
dency, however, leads to the prioritizing of belief and meaning as corre-
lates 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 reli-
gion in terms of a “total social phenomenon” to be found in contemporary
phenomenology. The focus in general rather rests quite one-sidedly on

personal religious experience but structurally eclipses its larger social, cul-
tural, 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 phe-
nomenology in fact offers a big variety of conceptual tools and methodi-
cal 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 phe-
nomenology of religion” at some point demands that “the absolute” has
to “declare itself here and now” (Ricœur 1980, p. 144) in order to inter-
rupt 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 phe-
nomena” 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 gen-
eral 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 experi-
ences of “transcendence” (“absolute affection,” “superabundant given-
ness,” “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 embodi-
ment 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 ambi-
guity, 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 vio-
lence” 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,” tran-
scendent, and so on, that is, as something inherently embodied, and
therefore never fully exposable to the principles of rationalist intelligibil-
ity 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 communi-
cation, we need to explore it as both being “beyond sense” and as yet
appresenting a socially meaningful “symbolic order”; as being both
vulnerable and capable of transcending its vulnerability by its very mas-

tery (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 transcen-
dence 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, tranforma-
tive 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 tran-
scendent. Such claims, however, are birthed, as Ricœur has demon-
strated 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 fra-

gility 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 com-
mon 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 expe-
rience 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 under-
stood, as Derrida propounds elsewhere, as a project that always has to
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 “radi-
cal evil” (Ricœur 2010, pp. 28–29), not only the irreducible possibility
of violence but also the pseudo-capacity for justifying it; not only sub-
lime 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 contempo-
rary fundamentalist violence, most notably the literal deduction of a
“theology of rape” issued by the IS; the eschatologically coded de-secu-
larization 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 origi-
nal source is usurped; as Sartre brilliantly demonstrated, a full-fledged
“theology of waste” needs to be constructed in order to justify man-
kind’s parasitic dependency upon a merely positively conceived idea of
God, instead of accepting her insistent “weakness” (Caputo) as some-
thing 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 creat-
ing 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 reli-
gion 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 empha-
size 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. 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 para-
sitic, has been outlined forcefully by Bauman in his account of moder-
nity and the violence that its very project entails (Bauman 1989).
6. That this hypostatization is frequently embellished in a semantics of uni-
versality 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 phenomenol-
ogy of religion since its very inception, see also Waldenfels (2012,
p. 353ff).
9. This reproach finds evidence in the major proponents of both a radical-
ized 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.
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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 univer-
sal 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 exem-
plifications. 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 totali-
tarianism (Arendt 1966) and Sartre’s and Camus’ reflections on violence
A. Cools (*)
University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_5
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 indi-
vidual. 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 con-
flict 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 genera-
tion 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 phenome-
non and the interpretation of the meaning of these manifestations accord-
ing 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-
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, aggres-
sion against their own partner or against their own child, suicidal behav-
ior (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 vio-
lence 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 devel-
opment 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 mod-
ern societies—which is primarily a logic of the general—has been inter-
woven 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 par-
ticular 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 articulat-
ing. 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 vio-
lence 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 differen-
tiate the social meaning of violence on the basis of the two logics appear-
ing 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
does not define a human person and does not presuppose a subject the-
ory. 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 fabri-
cated and experienced as singular. “The social logic of the particular con-
cerns 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 per-
meates 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 soci-
ety. 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 standard-
ization; 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 atten-
tion to the importance of the dimensions of the singular in many differ-
ent 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 move-
ments 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 funda-
mental 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 tech-
nology possible (Kulturmaschine). With regard to our purpose, the ques-
tion 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 devel-
opment of late modern societies. The processes of singularization put
the individual under acute pressure. The success of the project of self-
realization, 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, depen-
dent on the unpredictable contexts of appraisal and assessment. For that
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, disap-
pointments, 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 competi-
tive 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 inter-
action. 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 institu-
tions, 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 soci-
ety 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 singu-
larization 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 mani-
fests 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 juridi-
cal 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 spec-
tacular, extraordinary, beyond all measure, never seen before and in
that sense “singular.” Not only does the new quality of the act of vio-
lence 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 neg-
ative 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
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 singu-
lar 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 gen-
eral 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 pro-
cesses of singularization in late modern society transform the manifes-
tations 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 under-
standing of the social meaning of violence in terms of sacrifice, whereas
the manifestations of the violence of the singular challenge this under-
standing. 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 vio-
lence 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 character-
istic of modern societies—the logic of the general—no longer under-
stands 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 gen-
eral, 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 gen-
eral, which he distinguishes from the religious meaning of sacrifice. In a
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 sac-
rifice. Offering is no more a question of being related to a transcen-
dence, 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 conse-
quence, 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 unleash-
ing an excessive violence, without limitations, demanding and manifest-
ing 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 con-
tract 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 mean-
ing 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 con-
cerns 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 transcen-
dent God at the beginning of modernity, and that he too refers to
Rousseau in order to explain the newness of the moral view of authentic-

ity. 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 authen-
ticity 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 the-
sis concerning the social logic of the singular and to examine how it con-
tributes 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 free-
dom 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 influ-
ences” (Taylor 2003, 27).
104 A. Cools
In two ways, the idea of self-determining freedom inverts and under-

mines 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 strength-
ens, 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 dis-
turbing 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, authentic-
ity, identity, love and recognition. The deviancy in the culture of authen-
ticity derives from the denial of this dependency and thus from an
overestimation of the idea of self-determining freedom. However, I won-
der 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.
Following his analysis, the violence of the singular arises from the esca-
lation 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 affir-
mation 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 indif-
ference and oblivion with regard to the concerns of the general (the atten-
tion for the common goods), on the one hand and on the other, the
weight of isolation which makes the meaning of being different the per-
sonal 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 lim-
ited to the conflicts related to the struggle for recognition and its rele-
vance 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 pos-
sible 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 radi-
cally transform contemporary culture and social interaction, Taylor
had already thematized the three crises that Reckwitz considers char-
acteristic of late modern society, deriving them from processes of sin-
gularization over the last four decades: the instability of social
recognition creating new inequalities; the increase of deficit experi-
ences 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 dis-
tinction 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
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 founda-
tion and organization of modern society. In Taylor’s analysis of authen-
ticity 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 power-
lessness 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 addi-
tional, contextual and individualized analyses. The violence of the singu-
lar 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 sin-
gular” 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 spätmod-
erne 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 verwan-
deln” (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).
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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 fea-
tures 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 reli-
gious (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

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_6
112 J. W. Alvis
source of authentic faith and sacredness and the means by which a suspen-
sion 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 anthropo-
logical 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/nonvio-
lence 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 lan-
guage itself. Yet (B) interestingly, 30 years later, he insists upon the impor-
tance 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 mean-
ings 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 under-
girding 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 philo-
sophical language, a deep and implicit violence. Claiming to elude vio-
lence 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 cri-
tique; 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 irreduc-
ible, 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 simulta-
neous 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 philoso-
phies 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 phenom-
enon. 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” neces-
sarily 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
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 cir-
cumstances 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 understand-
ing 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 philosophi-
cal 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 infin-
ity. 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 infi-
nitely 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 cri-
tique 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-
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 con-
cerns 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 “indica-
tion”). 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 phenome-
nology needs to overcome its allegiance “to intuition as a source of sense
and evidence…” which signifies “…the certainty, itself ideal and abso-
lute, 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...relent-
lessly 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, significa-
tion, 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 dis-
course (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, seri-
ously; 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 dis-
course are always necessarily related (following Heidegger’s insights).
There is but one “way to repress the worst violence, the violence of primi-
tive 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
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 phenom-
ena 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 ques-
tion 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) autoim-
munity 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 lan-
guage of especially Western Christianity. There is a unique universality
in Christianity via its lingua franca, Latin.5 Globalization and mediati-
zation 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 contra-
diction to the Jewish Yahweh’s demand of Abraham, “all of this must
remain absolutely secret: just between us. It must remain uncondition-
ally 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, publi-
cize, 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 mes-
sage 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 ‘globalatiniza-

tion’ [mondialatinisation], it is also in order to question what is going on
when a non-Christian says, ‘Islam, or Judaism, or Buddhism is my reli-
gion’. 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 transla-
tion of ‘religion’. Is Judaism a ‘religion’? Buddhism is certainly not a reli-
gion. (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 cosmopolitan-
ism, by seeking to be transparent, to make everything that is implicit
explicit, and not keep secrets, is but the negative backside of Derrida’s
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 reli-
gion. The basis of the phenomenological method is the epoché, sus-
pension, 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 suspen-
sion 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 nega-

tion, 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 affirma-
tion. 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 globalatiniza-
tion. 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 univer-
sal language or tongue. The at once “political, economic, and reli-
gious” (Derrida 2001, p. 62) of Christian hegemony arises in
Globalatinization, even though Judaism and Islam (as the most resis-
tant to certain globalatinized forms of universalization and mediatiza-
tion) also engage in globalization.
This has led to certain cultural results—an autoimmunity of these reli-

gions, 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 cre-
ated 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 sin-
gular, 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
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 “abso-
lute” 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 simi-
larities 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 sup-
posed 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 confi-
dence, the testimonial that is always beyond proof, demonstrative reason,
intuition); and the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holi-
ness, 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 vio-
lence) 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, dissimu-
late 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, includ-
ing 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 with-
out limit, to the same world market. They are at the same time producers,
actors and sought-after consumers, at times exploiters, at times victims.
<At stake in the struggle> 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 technosci-
entific performance as in the entire capitalistic economy indissociable from
it. (Derrida 1998, p. 79)
So here globalatinization falls prey to a deep violence in a slightly differ-

ent 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 “faiths-
in” 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 perma-
nent 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 counterbal-
ance of religion through revolting within globalatinization and its crystal-
lization 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 con-
ducts 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 whole-
ness (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 liv-
ing 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 other-
wise—might the insistence upon the irreducibility of violence amount to
a new violence?
Again, Derrida seems completely justified to insist upon the meta-
physical 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 some-
thing that can hold this tension in place. Necessary is something that can
refract between light and dark, between the supposed humility of non-
violence (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 “incon-
spicuousness” 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;
while on the other hand does not amount to a full refusal of phenomenal-
ity (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 ines-
capability, 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 func-
tion 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 infi-
nite, 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
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 philo-
sophical 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 free-
ing 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 philoso-
phy and international law. There is in St. Paul a concept of cosmopoli-
tanism, a concept of world citizen, of human brotherhood as children of
God, etc., which is closer to the concept of universalism as today it dom-
inates the philosophy of international law than are other figures of uni-
versalism … 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 monothe-
istic. 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 reli-
gions 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 globa-
latinization 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 intrin-
sically 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).
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 ‘telemediatiza-
tion’ on the one hand and the ‘reactive’ force of faith, which is a singular-
ity 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 philo-
sophical 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 transcen-
dental 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).
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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 repre-
sentations of violent affects (pathoi) that are constitutive of Western aes-
thetics—from Greek tragedies to modern plays, war movies to computer
games. One posits that an emotional participation in fictional representa-
tions 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 (*)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_7
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 neurosci-
ences, the answers to such questions vary not only depending on philo-
sophical, 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 perspec-
tives that articulate competing hypotheses on the relation between vio-
lence 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 con-
temporary 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 diag-
nostic 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 perspec-
tives, 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 argu-
ably one of the most incisive contemporary theorists who, after a period
of marginalization in the last decades of the twentieth century, is cur-
rently 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, generat-
ing 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 mean-
ing 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 mean-
ing to both individual and collective violence can be summarized as fol-
lows: first, the subject starts desiring what the other desires, a formula
Girard inherits from a Hegelian/Kojèvian philosophical tradition con-
cerned 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 con-
tested “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 conta-
giously 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 pro-
cess 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 psycho-
analysis, at the structural level, the analogies between Girard and Freud
run deep and provide latent building blocks that give a specifically diag-
nostic meaning to violence: Girard’s general emphasis on desire as the
defining feature of subjectivity, his reliance on a triangular form that dis-
tinguishes between two emotional ties (desire and mimesis), his emphasis
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 sug-
gests 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 ambiva-
lent 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 hypo-
thetically posits in illo tempore; and it provides a theo-logical narrative
that ties the immanence of psychic and social violence to a transcenden-
tal, religious, and ultimately Christian revelation.4 Girard’s mimetic the-
ory, in other words, entails a transdisciplinary attempt to give patho-logical
meaning to violence in terms that connect individual, social, and reli-
gious 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 diag-
nostic 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
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an innocent sacrificial victim, or “scapegoat,” whose death entails a thera-

peutic 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 func-
tion” (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 chan-
neled against a sacrificial victim, what he calls a “scapegoat” (or pharma-
kos), 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 irra-
tionality 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 sacrifi-
cial 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 read-
ing 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 sac-
rificial killing had to be concealed in the dramatic and literary use of
catharsis” (Girard 1972, p. 291). For Girard, then, a discharge, or purifi-
cation 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 audi-
ence 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:
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 trag-
edy, 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 anthro-
pology 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 ratio-
nal 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 specta-
tors of their passions and provoke a new katharsis, both individual and collec-
tive. 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
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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 uncon-
scious (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,
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 psy-
chologist 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 asso-
ciative 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 repres-
sive 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 constitu-
tive not only of Greek tragedies but of contemporary psycho-social reali-
ties 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 explana-
tions. 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 (mime-
sis) 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
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 scape-
goat (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 diag-
nostic 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 ‘poi-
son’ as much as a ‘remedy,’ the dosage of the harmful thing alone produc-
ing 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,
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continues to rely on a tragic play that gives a specifically Oedipal mean-

ing 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 hypoth-
esis 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 kathar-
sis, can simply be subordinated to a rational logos. Aristotle, for one, men-
tions 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 fol-
lows. 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 contempla-
tion (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.
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 theo-
retical 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 vio-
lent 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 mime-
sis 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—emerg-
ing 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 representa-
tions of violence we are now generally accustomed to seeing on contem-
porary 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.
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 per-
verse, 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 expe-
rience 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 dis-
guised 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 cur-
rently “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—includ-
ing 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 his-
tory 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 circu-
lation 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 reac-
tions, 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 develop-
ments 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 fre-
quently 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 simi-
lar 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
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 com-
peting 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 behav-
ioral mimicry of violence is ancient, precedes Aristotle’s cathartic hypoth-
esis 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 character-
istic 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 situ-
ates 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 bat-
tles 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 con-
cludes 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 tradi-
tion, 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 cen-
tered 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 repre-
sentation (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 ori-
gins 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-
rative (mimesis) and, consequently, does not narrate the violent pathos of
epic wars and tragic actions from a third-person narrative distance (dieg-
esis); rather, he dramatically impersonates heroes like Achilles or Oedipus,
“likening” himself to these fictional figures “in speech and bodily bear-
ing” (p. 638:393c) and thereby re-enacting the violent pathoi such theat-
rical 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 vio-
lent 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 gene-
alogists 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 dimen-
sion 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 con-
tain 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 culmi-
nate 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 vio-
lence instigates” (Bataille 1962, p. 193). Hence the need to follow both
what he calls “the path of work” and of “transgression,” relying simultane-
ously 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-immer-
sive 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 con-
tinental 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
better and worse, human character and behavior in ways that are irratio-
nal, 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 per-
formed 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 com-
munication 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 our-
selves” (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 philo-
sophical 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 domi-
nant 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 “pri-
mary 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 mecha-
nisms still needs to be determined and is likely to continue to generate
stimulating discussions. Still, despite some initial resistance and skepti-
cism 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 mod-
ernism from Nietzsche to Bataille, and also Conrad to Lawrence, Charles
Féré to Pierre Janet to Gabriel Tarde, can no longer be dismissed as irrel-
evant 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 philo-
sophical 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, (vir-
tual) 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 rep-
resentation 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
both ways as it can generate mechanisms that can be put to both cogni-
tive (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 com-
pelling neurobiological mechanism underlying imitative violence induced
by media violence” (Iacoboni 2008, p. 211). Surveying an abundant lit-
erature 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 longitu-
dinal studies that follow the development of large populations (700 fami-
lies) 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 stud-
ies, and longitudinal studies all support the hypothesis that media vio-
lence induces imitative violence” (p. 208). Along similar lines, philosophers
like Susan Hurley argue that “the correspondence is not just visual: hear-
ing 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 con-
cluding 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 pow-
ers of mimetic violence.
No wonder that Plato was particularly worried about mimetic imper-
sonations 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 meta-
physical 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 gene-
alogists of violence more importantly, a philosophical physician con-
cerned 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, minori-
ties, 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 for-
mative, performative, and deformative effects nonetheless. In the digital
age new generations are, in fact, permanently exposed to all kinds of

violent models and actions dramatized in virtual fictions that are increas-
ingly immersive in their degree of hypermimetic participation (3D films,
computer games, double lives on social media, etc.), and, over time, rep-
etition, and good doses of visual bombardment are likely to shape behav-
ior, 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 neces-
sarily 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, cul-
tural 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
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 gene-
alogy of theories as well: it requires “a knowledge of the conditions and
circumstances of their growth, development, and displacement,” a trans-
disciplinary knowledge that calls for “some schooling in history and phi-
lology, 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 irre-
sistible 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 mime-
tism 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
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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 real-
This 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 (*)
T. Castelein
Independent Scholar and Translator, Leuven, Belgium

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_8
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, photo-
graphs 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 irre-
deemable 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 alien-
ating 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, how-
ever, oppose the view that the work of photography is primarily a
discomforting and perhaps even alienating business. For Jünger, the cam-
era 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 sol-
diers unsuccessfully seeking shelter in the trenches and the sudden adren-
aline 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 some-
thing 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
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 ineluc-
table 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 remark-
ably well with the environment of obliterated nature.4,5
Photo 8.1
Photo 8.2
The warbooks reveal that fighting is not chief amongst a soldier’s activ-
ities 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 them-
selves. 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 indi-
vidual 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
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 differ-
ences are blotted out and replaced by patterns, repetitions and resem-
blances. 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 inex-
haustible dynamic of labor and machinic mobilization (Jünger
1930a, p. 610).
Photo 8.3
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
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 interchange-
able 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 “human-
ity” (Jünger 1931b, p. 617). The latter is built on the willingness to fight
and the capacity to embrace moments of danger as opportunities of fun-
damental 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
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 over-
looks the historical variables that make each armed conflict different, and
could perhaps also convincingly point out the chances for a peaceful out-
come (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 signifi-
cant 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 our-
selves, 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,”
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 ideal-
istically, through technology” (Benjamin 1999b, p. 319). In Jünger’s pho-
tobooks, technology is indeed worshipped as a natural force, while the
violence of war is thereby being pushed back into a universe of unshake-
able essences and values. Jünger does not hold back in heralding the
arrival of a “New Primitiveness” [Neue Primitivität] that discovers pre-
cisely 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 founda-
tion. 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” conscious-
ness that manages to look the moment of danger squarely in the eye.
Adjourning all type of moral consideration, this novel form of conscious-
ness “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 jux-
taposition 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 dehuman-
ized 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
Photo 8.6
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
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 fasci-
nation 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
Photo 8.8
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 hor-
rors 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 evoca-
tion 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 reli-
gious 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 redeem-
able 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 contin-
gent to the actual fighting. What is of ultimate significance to Jünger is
the full affirmation of the fight itself. With the Great War, Jünger wit-
nessed the rise of a novel generation that is willing to “surrender itself for
an idea” (Jünger 1922, p. 100). This generation, of which Jünger consid-
ers himself to be a proud member, understands dying as the greatest “ful-
fillment,” “perfection” and “completion” in the “most imperfect world”
(Jünger 1922, p. 100). The willingness to die for the cause is sui generis:
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
focus on the violence of war, the images that were compiled in these pho-
tobooks 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 vio-
lence but too little of it. On account of Jünger’s overblown rhetoric about
fate and sacrifice and his reference to the possibility of religious redemp-
tion, these images are bound to miss the very thing they set out to illumi-
nate. 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 gath-
ered 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
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 pho-
tography 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 transla-
tion 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 con-
nection between intoxication and smoke, Rausch and Rauch, is the man-
ner 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
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).
16. Jünger, Hier spricht der Feind, 66.
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).
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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.),
Jünger, E. (1933). ‘Einleitung’ to Die veränderte Welt. In S. O. Berggötz (Ed.),
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 phenomenologi-
cal research over the last few decades. Whether inspired by the tumultu-
ous 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 (*)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_9
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 pro-
pose 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 sub-
jects, 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 inter-
personal 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 tor-
ture’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 cam-
paigns, 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 philoso-
pher 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 prolegom-
ena 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 embod-
ied subject. Here, the work of Améry and Susan Brison, who herself suf-
fered 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 nota-
bly in acts of torture. Here, I draw upon the work of classic phenomenol-
ogists, 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 vio-
lence 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 vulner-
ability. After this, I begin to address the event of violence and its sponta-
neous 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, exacer-

bating 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 per-
haps 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 constitu-
tion 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 tor-
turous 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,
“Violence articulates fundamental elements of human relations, specifi-

cally those of interdependence” (Ó Murchadha 2006, p. 9). In our vul-
nerability 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 intersubjec-
tive 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 consti-
tution of time being a fundamental aspect of consciousness and our expe-
rience 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 unex-
pected, it has a focus such as a bomb blast which breaks with the continu-
ity 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 vio-
lence. 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 vio-
lence breaks down a sense of community, that violence interrupts the inter-
subjective 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 vari-
ous orders” and so “transforms our own body into a sphere of vulnerabil-
ity 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 interac-
tion 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 mortal-
ity. 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 vul-
nerability 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 vio-
lence, 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 con-
stancy 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 vio-
lence 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
of Susan Brison, “When the trauma is of human origin and is intention-

ally 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 iden-
tity 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 intersubjec-
tive 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 phenomenologi-
cal 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 atti-
tude.” 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 resis-
tance 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 meaningless-
ness 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
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 com-
munity is broken. Cavanaugh persuasively argues that that was the aim of
the Pinochet regime in Chile: to dismantle any social body that was com-
peting 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 commu-
nity. Torturous violence is a particular example of how violence system-
atically 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 con-
stituted and meaningful world, collapses around the subject. To under-
stand 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 spa-
tial 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 con-
sequences 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 primar-
ily 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 draw-
ing on the work of Susan Brison and her studies of trauma.
It is useful to begin with the observation of Diane Enns, which con-
nects 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 experi-
enced. In order to understand how this occurs and its connection to the
suspension of spatial horizons, the connection between the body’s con-
stituting 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 abnor-
mality focuses consciousness on the body. The alienation from the
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-estab-
lish]…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 pres-
ence, 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-con-
stituted, as the body fills the attention of consciousness. The world, which
the body normally spreads through, that is, projects its actions and proj-
ects 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 tem-
poral horizons
The threat of death implicit in violence cuts off protensions regarding

the future. In fact, this is commensurate with the teleology of pain devel-
oped 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.
Unsurprisingly, the more violent (and this is not necessarily physical vio-
lence) 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 shat-
tering 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 vio-
lence, 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 con-
tinue, as interrogators claim they “need to be sure,” but in truth the infor-
mation 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 emphati-
cally, 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, tor-
turous 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 imag-
ining 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 phe-
nomena—ones that denote the isolated aspect of subjectivity in pain. In
this section, I argue that in light of these previous analyses that subjectiv-
ity itself is constituted and wounded by torturous violence, specifically in
its meaning-making capabilities (in its self-constitution) and its intersub-
jectivity constituting capabilities. In other words, I argue that through
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 vio-
lence 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 overcom-
ing 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 confes-
sion 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 analy-
sis, nonetheless what he calls the dehumanizing process of torture, its
“perverse liturgy” (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 30), can be understood phenom-
enologically. The process of dehumanization is a process of desubjectiv-
ization—the stripping of the subject in its constitutive powers. Cavanaugh
expresses this in a similar language: “The feeling and reality of powerless-
ness 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 meaning-
making 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 pos-
sible 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 lawmak-
ing or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither of these predicates, it for-
feits 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
existing law. For him, law is not merely a particular element of jurispru-
dence, 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 sover-
eignty to be recognized by other sovereignties.30 Torture could be consid-
ered 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 particu-
lar yet universal scale in torturous violence. Scaling back from a perspec-
tive 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 retali-
ation” (Ó Murchadha 2006, p. 216). This is why subjects engage in vio-
lence: 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 modi-
fies 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, vio-
lence arises not merely from existing conflict, but from the will that is
vulnerable seeking out power to make itself invulnerable to prevent vio-
lence against it, while perpetuating violence on others. Améry himself
claims that to resolve the tortured’s dilemma of seeking justice, of re-estab-
lishing power, they must in turn become torturers (Améry 1986, p. 33).
208 J. Heuslein
Through the process of dehumanization or desubjectivization, tortur-

ous violence undermines the subject’s capabilities to produce meaning or
co-constitute meaning in an intersubjective community. Moreover, tor-
turous 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, sus-
pending 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 resis-
tance, 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 sub-
jects 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 resis-
tance to the state’s power” (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 67). Embodied subjects
have powers, projects, and their own aims. Regimes that employ tortur-
ous 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 qual-
ity of this Third Reich, but its essence” (Améry 1986, p. 24). In the face
of torturous violence, subjects offer resistance, to not be constituted by

the torturous violence of regimes, to defy their laws and their sovereign-
ties, 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 hun-
ger, in the blow that I suffered, in the blow that I dealt. My body, debili-
tated 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 vio-
lence, that is, the resistance against the violence of the other that vio-
lence 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 drag-
ging 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 rela-
tional. 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 pro-
duced 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 con-
stituents are dissolved.
9. These themes are developed and analyzed in my forthcoming disserta-

tion, “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 ulti-
mately 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,” pro-
posing 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 expe-
rience in the torture chamber and her experience in prison, Cassidy con-
veys 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 com-
petes 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-zubaydah-
drawings-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.
30. This thought goes beyond this essay and into international political phi-
losophy, 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 observ-
able 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.
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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 creat-
ing 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

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_10
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 vic-
tims 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 pro-
duction 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 per-
son’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 fol-
lows: 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 vio-
lence, 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 distin-

guishes 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 poli-
tics 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 phe-
nomenologies 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 moral-
ity. 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 essen-
tial 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 rac-
ism, 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 ideolo-
gies. 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 onto-
logical reality shared by all into the unique fault of some. In this perver-
sion 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,
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 riv-
eted to a body entails the negation of being determined by it. In delineat-
ing 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 sand-
wiched 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 understand-
ings 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 con-
sider 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 our-
selves, 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 for-
eign 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 impossibil-
ity 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 naked-
ness 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 ontol-
ogy 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 tormen-
tors—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 complic-
ity. Torturers are more subtle. They use the promise of escape, freedom,
to enlist their victims’ collusion. Signing confessions, the tortured pro-
vide written proof of their shameful powerlessness and attest to the power
of the torturers’ values. Their passivity becomes a weapon in the torturer’s
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 hard-
ships. 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 con-
crete circumstances of one’s life—the most concrete circumstance being
one’s body—Hitler’s bio-racist politics forecloses the possibility of escap-
ing 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 cre-
ation” (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 dem-
onstrated 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 under-
standing the phenomenological truth behind Levinas’ On Escape. By cre-
ating 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/liv-
able 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 resis-
tance 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 rac-
ists 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
rebellion by creating conditions designed to produce unlived bodies.

Sometimes they succeeded. Other times they did not. Their limited suc-
cess marked a turning point in our understanding of the violence of rac-
ism. 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 get-
ting 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 con-
tinues 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 naked-
ness (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 contin-
gency. 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 condi-
tion from the shame of violating social norms. Witnessing the scene in
the library where the self-taught man, having been exposed as a pedo-
phile, 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 try-
ing to justify his existence through the existence of someone else, that is,
by writing the biography of the Marquis de Rollebon, Roquentin experi-
ences 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 him-
self, 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 hap-
pen…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.
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 tat-
tooed with numbers that obliterated their names, singular persons were
transformed into disposable bodies that exemplified the nausea of exis-
tence—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 superflu-
ous 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 imme-
diate 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 suc-
cumbing to the fate of the Musselman. For Améry experiencing the
shame of existing for others who identified him as superfluous, but reject-
ing 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 sug-
gests 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 cru-
cial 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
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 bot-
tom. 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 liv-
ing corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions charac-
terized 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 mat-
ters (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, sug-
gests 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 inhu-
man 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 lan-
guage 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 dig-
nity and humanity. As a free man his refusal to be silent, to insist on say-
ing 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 distin-
guishes 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
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 passiv-
ity 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 one-
self by judging oneself. Living as prisoner in Auschwitz, Levi cannot con-
test 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 resis-
tance 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 con-
firms the power of Auschwitz. As an invisible action upon himself, how-
ever, 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 mid-
dle 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 rela-
tion 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 pre-
serve 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, gen-
erosity 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 reap-
pearance 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 wit-
nessing. He identifies the ability to resist, judge, desire and think as inte-
gral, 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.
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 expe-
rience, 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 resis-
tance 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 sur-
vived with his humanity wounded but unbroken (Améry 1980, p. 9). It
is as someone who survived the disaster of absolute helplessness but expe-
rienced its effects that he finds it necessary to speak for the ultimate prod-
uct 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 human-
ity 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 suc-
cumbing 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 vul-
nerability 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 poli-
tics 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
trust, he rebels against those ideologies that materialize this contingency.

Second, in joining with others who, having been tortured, have experi-
enced 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 know-
ing 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 pris-
oners 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 per-
haps 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 hap-
pen to a human being? Being ashamed for the Musselman rather than of
them, ties the shame of their unlivable humanity to the unique vulnera-
bility 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 vulner-
ability 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 resis-
tance to the edict that severed her brother from his humanity. Where she
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 dehu-
manizing its inmates. Where Douglas saw the impossibility of dehuman-
ization 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” poi-
gnantly 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 psychoana-

lytic 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 psy-
choanalysis” (Castoriadis 1984, p. 99), and for having “revitalised the
reading of the Freudian texts … and introduced some substantial exten-
sions 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

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_11
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 understand-
ings of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the subject (Williams 1999).
Alternatively, when a complementary reading is offered, it tends to privi-
lege Lacan. For example, while Yannis Stavrakakis is guided by the con-
tention that Castoriadis’s affirmation of the imaginary is not “something
alien or antithetical to Lacanian theory, particularly to the Lacanian con-
ception 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 dimen-
sion 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 lat-
ter. 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 neg-
ative 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 vio-
lence 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 divi-
sion 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 sur-
vival 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 intro-
jection of social norms plays in it.
Having shown that Lacan and Castoriadis agree that violence is funda-
mental to the psyche’s entrance into the symbolic and, by extension, for-
mation 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 imag-
inary 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 recog-
nize 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 disorga-
nized, fluid amalgamation of perceptions to an objective identity, albeit
one that is only ever “a mirage” (2006b, p. 76) constituted by the “illu-
sion 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 him-
self 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
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 expe-
rience, 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 sub-
stance 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 dan-
ger 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 dra-
matic 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 psychoanaly-
sis is that the unconscious is intimately tied to language. However, rather
than language being an instrument for the expression of the subject, sym-
bols 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 signi-
fied. 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 mean-
ing 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 move-
ment from signifier to signified, but is created from the constant and
incessant movement between signifiers. It is the difference between signi-
fiers 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 pres-
ence” (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 mean-
ings depending on the other signifier that it is, at that moment, related to
and differentiated from. Indeed, the symbolic system is marked by struc-
tural 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
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 brev-
ity, 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 dif-
ferential relations occur prior to the subject and, indeed, are the condi-
tions 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 indi-
cate that” (2006a, p. 38). Castoriadis (1997d, p. 185) criticizes this
emphasis on machinic production because he associates it with mechani-
cal 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 com-
plete, 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 mis-
take therefore to reduce the Lacanian subject to a determined effect of the
symbolic that conditions it or the symbolic to a form of mechanic sym-
bolic production. The subject’s experience is underpinned by and ema-
nates 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, sur-
rounded 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 signi-
fier and so, prior to his own use of signifiers, brings him to start to
appreciate their importance and, indeed, that he is designated by one

(1991a, p. 155). This, in turn, feeds into the construction of an imagi-
nary identity as he comes to associate himself with that name; a signifier
that, it will be remembered, emanates from other people, and so re-
affirms 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 vio-
lence 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 suf-
fered 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 bom-
bards the psyche through the psyche’s ‘mere’ social existence. Such bom-
bardment 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 signi-
fiers correctly so as to participate in the world. It should, however, be
emphasized that, strictly speaking, the psyche never pre-exists the sym-
bolic 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 Name-
of-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-the-
Father” (2017, p. 165). The function of the Name-of-the-Father is both
productive and prohibitive: the former because it (1) defines the privi-
leged 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.
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 develop-
ment. Castoriadis comes to a similar conclusion, albeit through a differ-
ent 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 cre-
ativity (2007b, p. 206). To correct this, Castoriadis insists that the “foun-
dation” 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 imagi-
nary” (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, refer-
ences 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 mean-
ings” (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 significa-
tions 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 total-
ity 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 ques-
tions 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 lan-
guage that composes it. Crucially, however, the symbolic cannot be con-
sidered 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 pri-
mary, 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 cre-
ates 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.
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 collec-
tive actions of the individuals created by and constitutive of them. This
brings us to the issue of the individual and, in particular, the other mani-
festation 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 dif-
ferent 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 imagi-
nary, “it is also, and more importantly (for without this the receptivity of
impressions would produce nothing) [defined by] the emergence of rep-
resentation 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 equiva-
lent 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 con-
tinual 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 conse-
quence 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, mani-
fested 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 imagina-
tion, 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
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 require-
ments” (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 condi-
tion 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 empha-
size 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 signi-
fications, 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 vio-
lence. 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 autis-
tic 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).
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 them-
selves 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 vio-
lence 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 inconsis-
tent 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 criti-
cisms 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 fundamen-
tal 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 overwhelm-
ing 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 partici-
pate in the process that satiates his hunger. By successfully satiating its
somatic need, the psyche experiences a sense of re-unification (i.e. a full-
ness 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
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 imagi-
nary 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 dis-
junction between the two: “Carrying the bad object, [s]he is hated; car-
rying 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 rela-
tions 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 incom-
plete, 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]ntro-
jection is at the root of socialisation; any communication between sub-
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 empha-
sizes 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 conse-
quence, and despite the substantial differences that otherwise exist
between their frameworks, both agree that violence is key to the forma-
tion 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 expe-
riences 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 inher-
ently 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-
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 “suc-
cess.” 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 accor-
dance 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
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Index1
A E
Affect, 69, 72, 77, 82, 137–142, Essentialism, 27–36
144–146, 149–151, 153–162, Eternity, 167–185
203, 205, 207, 219, 221, 228,
231, 234, 249, 251
I
Immanent, xvi, xvii, 79, 139, 150, 153
C Individual, xvi, xvii, 12, 17, 20, 28,
Catastrophe, 42–45, 176 41, 47, 49, 55, 56, 75, 82,
Catharsis, 137–162 91–98, 100–107, 112, 140,
Conceptual, xv, 4–8, 10–13, 21, 34, 141, 143, 169, 172, 177, 195,
48, 51, 61, 65, 79, 240, 249, 198, 199, 201, 239–261
252 Intersubjectivity, 193–204
D M
Destruction, 3, 41–56, 85n6, Meaning, xv–xvii, 3, 5–7, 11, 18, 41,
169, 170, 177, 193–204, 42, 45, 49, 53–56, 59–84,
233–235 91–95, 97–102, 104–107,
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2
268 Index
111–117, 122, 137–162, 167, Sense, xv, xvi, 4, 5, 9, 11–13, 15, 19,
168, 180, 182–185, 204–206, 20, 22n1, 28–31, 33, 35, 36,
208, 209, 218, 220–226, 228, 41–56, 61, 66, 72, 78, 81, 82,
231, 234, 241, 244, 245, 247, 93, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104,
249, 250, 253, 254, 257–260 107, 117, 118, 121, 124, 126,
Metaphor, 3–21, 116, 151, 245 127, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150,
Mimesis, 74, 137–162 157, 158, 160, 161, 168, 169,
Moral, 4, 14, 16–21, 28, 32, 34, 36, 193–200, 209, 234, 236, 242,
101–105, 107, 127, 177, 209, 244, 246, 250, 253, 256, 259
221 Shame, xvi, 198, 217–237
P T
Phenomenology, 57n1, 59, 62, Torture, xvi, 191–209, 222, 233,
77–80, 114, 115, 117, 118, 234
126, 218, 219, 221 Transcendent, xvi, xvii, 67, 75–77,
Photography, 167, 168, 177, 185 80, 81, 101, 102, 251, 252
Politics, 3, 71, 75, 96, 98, 99, 105, Trauma, 42–45, 50, 52, 54, 145,
107, 124, 146, 148, 176, 146, 197, 200, 203, 204
217–237
Psychoanalysis, 138, 144, 145, 239,
240, 243 V
Violence, xiii–xvii, 3–21, 22n1,
22n3, 22n4, 22n5, 22–23n7,
R 23n8, 23n9, 27–36, 41–56,
Religion, xv, 34, 59–80, 82–84, 59–84, 91–107, 111–128,
111–128, 142 137, 168, 170, 176, 177, 182,
Resistance, 19, 20, 97, 123, 158, 184, 191–209, 218, 220–223,
193, 198, 199, 203, 205, 225, 230, 234, 239–261
208–209, 218, 219, 221, 224,
229–231, 233, 235, 236, 246
Revolt, 91, 95, 97, 107, 111, W
217–237 War, xiii, xiv, 14, 18, 30, 32, 33, 41,
73, 74, 92, 99, 102, 111, 121,
124, 125, 137, 154, 155, 169,
S 170, 175–177, 179, 182, 184,
Sacrifice, 63, 74, 100–102, 107, 142, 259
143, 155, 183, 184, 199 Warbooks, 172

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Violence and

ISBN 978-3-030-27172-5 ISBN 978-3-030-27173-2 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

Part I The Concept of Violence 1

2 Violence and Essentialism? 27

Part II Transcendental Violence 39

3 The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution

4 Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence: A

5 The Violence of the Singular 91

6 Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion, and the

Part III Immanent Violence 135

7 The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis and Mimesis137

8 The Last Second, or Eternity: Ernst Jünger Looking at

Part IV Individual Violence 189

9 Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach to the

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

11 Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan on the

Jason W. Alvis is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy

Debra Bergoffen is Bishop Hamilton Lecturer in Philosophy at

Tammy Castelein is an independent scholar and translator. She holds a

Arthur Cools is Professor of Contemporary Philosophy and Aesthetics

Jeremy Heuslein is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy,

Lode Lauwaert is a visiting professor at the Institute of Philosophy in

Nidesh Lawtoo is a principal investigator of the European Research

Felix Ó Murchadha is Senior Professor of Philosophy at NUI Galway.

Gavin Rae is Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Experienced Research

Vasti Roodt is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy

Laura Katherine Smith is postdoctoral researcher in Cultural Studies at

Michael Staudigl teaches philosophy at the Department of Philosophy,

Christian Sternad is a postdoctoral research fellow at Charles University

Stéphane Symons is an associate professor at the Institute of Philosophy,

Photos 8.1–8.9 171–184

Pinker, is actually the real decline in violence. If this relation at first

continental philosophy, it is clear that, for example, (post)structuralists in

other nine contributions reflect philosophically on the existential mean-

multi-directional (since it focuses on the manifold of relations between

Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte Lode Lauwaert

a­dopting an expanded definition of violence and its intelligibility. We

ulary (in English) consists of metaphorical extensions of terms that were

of careful deliberation might be nothing more than the random result of

Reasoning About Violence: Violation and Force

An act of violence occurs when the integrity or unity of a subject (person

We saw earlier that many cognitive metaphors rely on image-schemas

physical entities as “singular and integral” (Landau et al. 2010, p. 1055).

otherwise would not do are understood analogously to having a body or

consciousness forms of violence that lack an identifiable agent. However,

How Reasoning About Violence Goes Wrong

In the previous section, I showed that abstract notions such as linguistic

that there is no element in the concrete source domain that can be

classifications and thereby conditions the overt violence of physical force,

So far, we have seen that arguments that rely on expanded definitions of

order to prevent a greater injustice, we nevertheless would not claim that

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War. London: Verso.

Although thinkers throughout history have written quite a few pages

Examples of research questions asked by researchers in the recent and

“violence”’. But what do we read? In this paragraph, which is very short,

head, we understand this as an act of (violence) that causes damage,

5. Nick Haslam (2016), ‘Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts

Violence tends to the destruction of meaningful entities and of that in

Part I The Concept of Violence 1

2 Violence and Essentialism? 27

Part II Transcendental Violence 39

3 The Temporality of Violence: Destruction, Dissolution

4 Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence: A

5 The Violence of the Singular 91

6 Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion, and the

Part III Immanent Violence 135

7 The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis and Mimesis137

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

Part IV Individual Violence 189

9 Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach to the

10 Oppressed by Shame: From Auschwitz to a Politics of

11 Forming the Individual: Castoriadis and Lacan on the

Photos 8.1–8.9 171–184

Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte Lode Lauwaert

adopting an expanded definition of violence and its intelligibility. We

Reasoning About Violence: Violation and Force

How Reasoning About Violence Goes Wrong

Trauma, Accident, Catastrophe

Time, Habit and World

ontemporary Continental Philosophy

a bandonment and retrieval of God” (Kearney 2009, p. 167; cf. Kearney

emarks Concerning the Relationship

ontemporary Social Imaginaries and Their

oward an Integrative Phenomenological

The Opening of a Question: Religious Violence

hy Speak About the Singular in Relation

he Violence of Meaning: The Metaphysics

iolence of Nonviolence in “Violence

Derrida on Religion, Faith, and Knowledge