This right to present themselves to society belongs to all mankind in virtue of our common right of possession on the surface of the earth on which, as it is a globe, we cannot be infinitely scattered, and must in the end reconcile ourselves to existence side by side: at the same time, originally no one individual had more right than another to live in any one particular spot.
—Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace
Political violence is a form of violence that legitimizes itself, a form of violence that becomes legitimate through the simple fact that it occurs. Such violence divides: it designates “foes,” acceptable victims, but it also brings people together. It brings together all those who consider legitimate the violence exercised against the “foes” in question and identify with it. This is why political violence is always a way of forming groups by dividing the community between those who are “friends,” namely, people, good citizens, and those who are “foes”: traitors, terrorists, or members of some minority. In order for the transfer of violence to be successful, so that it can last and give rise to a stable institution, “foes” have to be eliminated from the group, expelled to the outside, where they remain available as “foes” and potential victims. Opposition to the “foe” also has to give rise to solidarity, and establish helpful, supportive relationships among “friends.” Indeed, solidarity and hostility are two faces of the same reality. Each is a condition for the other. While the failure to transfer violence makes solidarity impossible, absence of solidarity in return undermines the transfer of violence and brings conflict back inside the community.
The modern state, holder of the monopoly of legitimate violence, results from a successful transfer, from a “unanimous” shift of every individual’s violence onto “foes,” for it manages to impose only its violence as legitimate. This monopoly is by definition limited in space. It supposes an outside inhabited by “others” who are “foes.” The success of the transfer entails that the state’s violence, because it alone is legitimate, ceases to be violence, whether it is exercised inside or outside. In the former case, it becomes the coercive power of law, in the latter, legitimate defense.
The eruption of political violence within the space pacified by the monopoly of legitimate violence is always a challenge to the monopoly of legitimacy. The return of political violence is the sign of a breakdown in the mechanism that engenders the state. It reveals the state’s failure to provide substitute victims. The violence of a state against its citizens is the expression of attempts to re-create its monopoly. The state then designates an internal group as responsible for the violence, and turns that group into a set of sacrificable victims so that it can try to legitimize itself by the violence it exercises against them. The growth in the number of victims is a sign of the failure of these attempts at reestablishing its foundation, an even more definitive failure of the mechanism for transferring violence. It demonstrates the inability to transform each individual’s violence into legitimate violence. The genocides perpetrated by governments against their own nationals is the ultimate form of this incapacity.
This failure of the political transfer of violence toward substitute victims comes, paradoxically, from what makes the state possible, namely, the abandonment of reciprocal obligations of solidarity and the rejection of duties to engage in violence. The modern state has been able to acquire the monopoly of legitimate violence because solidarity groups have fragmented into individuals as traditional obligations have lost their power. Actors gradually ceased considering as legitimate the violence that obligations imposed on them, and became disposed to identify with the state’s superior power. However, this was only a negative condition for establishing a monopoly of legitimate violence: that solidarity groups no longer constitute obstacles to its formation. In order to hold the monopoly of legitimate violence, one need only hold the monopoly of violence, but in order to hold onto that monopoly, one must still succeed in imposing one’s violence as a substitute for the violence of all. It is not sufficient to remove the obstacles that would normally prevent the formation of unanimity against the same “foes”: one has to succeed in pointing out those “Others” to each, and leading the violence of all to converge on them.
It follows that the success of the political transfer of violence onto substitute victims supposes a limit on the fragmentation of members of society. This transfer requires that certain ties of solidarity remain among them. Initially, in the absolutist state, traditional solidarity was weakened but had not entirely disappeared, and the state received, so to speak, the homage with which the great are honored. Each individual’s loyalty to the state passed through each individual’s loyalty to his or her immediate superiors. So long as the two legitimacies reinforced each other, so long as they did not pull in different directions, the monopoly of violence was stable. The French Revolution put an end to the interlocking relationships that had integrated the various levels in the social hierarchy. It placed the state face to face with isolated individuals. Recourse to political propaganda in the broad sense then became necessary as a means of reaching actors individually, outside of the social relationships in which they were involved. Political propaganda is a tool that makes it possible to reach each citizen without going through the network of his or her social interactions and, if necessary, to get him or her to oppose the solidarity that structures those interactions. Means of communication, such as newspapers, and organs of opinion such as salons, clubs, and various associations, allow individuals to become publics that share similar interests. Media and associations, as well as public meetings, parades in uniform, social movements, and political parties, can become means of transforming these publics, in other words, these statistical groups, into organized groups. To put it in the now antiquated language of Marxist philosophy, they are means of transforming the class in itself into a class for itself. These various communications practices are ways to create solidarity ties between people who are not bound by any reciprocal obligations, and to make it possible for them to engage in common action, political action. However, although it may be necessary, propaganda is not sufficient to produce the political shift in violence. The transfer of each individual’s violence onto victims outside the community requires real violence able to ensnare and disorient hatred and resentment.
These two initial conditions for political violence, namely, first, the fragmentation of members of society through the abandonment of traditional obligations followed by their aggregation into statistical groups, and, second, the necessity of real violence, entail that, contrary to what occurs at the time of the resolution of the sacrificial crisis as described by René Girard, we are never dealing with a unique victim. Isolated, alone, defenseless and rejected by all perhaps, the victim nonetheless still belongs to a group. He or she falls into a general category: Jews, bourgeois, Shiites, women, homosexuals, “Prussians,” agents of imperialism, and so on. It is impossible to make a single victim the point of convergence of the violence of members of a statistical group or public that is, by definition, an imagined community that, to speak like Kant, cannot be the object of possible experience. For the shift in violence to be able to take place everywhere members of the imagined community are found, it suffices that there be numerous potential victims who, while necessarily different from one another, are nonetheless “the same victim”: members of a group.
The growth in the number of victims of political violence occurs when the transfer mechanism is derailed. Two forces contribute to this malfunction. Both result more or less directly from exacerbation of the process of fragmentation of members of society and their aggregation into different publics owing to the ever more complete abandonment of reciprocal obligations. The first is exploitation of political violence by individual agents. By hijacking political violence for private ends in order to resolve personal disputes, agents prevent the shift of violence onto substitute victims and confine its exercise to precisely where it should be most distant: the heart of the community. This individual exploitation of political violence shows the violence’s failure to establish a group of “friends” united in their opposition to common “foes.” It bears witness to the violence’s inability to transcend the isolation of individuals. The second force contributing to the malfunction is the temptation, owing to the difficulty in overcoming the agents’ separation, to have recourse to greater violence in order to more clearly mark the difference between “them” and “us.” Here also the shift in violence fails because the growth in the number of substitute victims does not attract onto them the violence of those who do not participate in it. The sacrificial mechanism is, properly speaking, an economical form of violence. All exercise their violence against “the same victim.” Its social efficiency is proportional to this thrift, to the “savings,” to the reduction in the number of victims. In contrast, the greater the number of victims, the less efficient the mechanism is and the less the transfer occurs.
We then witness the total failure of the sacrificial mechanism and its modern substitute: political violence. There are indeed still shifts in violence and substitute victims, but the convergence of all against the victims no longer occurs. On one hand, individual exploitation of collective violence tends to reduce the average distance of the shift of violence: we no longer sacrifice “others,” but assassinate “the same.” On the other hand, the shift of violence onto an innocent victim no longer quenches the resentment of many simultaneously. The abandonment of reciprocal obligations of solidarity creates indifference, disinterest in the fate of those whose death does not concern us. It is the indifference of those who continued to do business while under their eyes others were giving patriotic speeches as Alain de Monéys burned. The fairgoers of Hautefaye were indifferent to the fate of someone who was for them only an unknown, but they were just as indifferent to whether or not the victim was a “Prussian.” Like Sartre, they did not assign much importance to whether the member of the group whose lynching they were witnessing was simply “thought to be a traitor” or “really a traitor.”
Rather than political violence, in other words, violence that is legitimized by the simple fact that it occurs, violence appears in such situations because it is legitimate, authorized, encouraged, recommended, or even simply accepted and tolerated by the authorities. Such violence does not require murderers to hate their victims. Imitation is enough. The fact of knowing that killing Jews or Tutsis can be done with impunity, and that it may even be profitable in the form of a cow to roast or alcohol to be distributed once the “work” is done, is enough to lead people to kill neighbors for whom they feel no hatred. Mimesis is the imperceptible transformation of the social and moral worth of a form of behavior by the simple fact that others are doing it and it has become acceptable.
Political violence is a means of dealing with this indifference and protecting us from the unlimited violence that it makes possible. It is an attempt to create ties of solidarity among agents who are not bound by any reciprocal obligations and to redirect them away from their single-minded concern with their “self-interest.” The modern state protects us against our own violence by directing it onto “others” who are external to the area where it exercises its authority. The “others” are all the more sacrificable when they are far away. Territory establishes physical distance and cultural strangeness as measures of remoteness that authorize recourse to greater violence, and it makes these two measures coincide. Its stability implies a dual relationship of enmity (adversariality and hostility) in which growing distance makes greater violence permissible. Interactions between territorialized nation-states give rise to measured conflicts, to wars regulated by shared law. Outside of that circle there is the area of “non-nations,” political entities of a different type that are more distant both in space and culture. The conflicts that occur there are not so limited in the use of violence, and the wars that take place there are of a different type. The racism that was omnipresent in the West in the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century was the cultural expression of this threefold division of international space.
The enemy within violates this spatial organization of hostility. Such enemies bring the most intense violence back as close as possible to the community. The enemy within tears apart the area unified by the monopoly of legitimate violence, and inverts the relationship between violence and externality. However, until recently, the violence of the enemy within did not entirely escape the territorial system. For example, while it may have drawn the line separating “friends” from “foes” differently, for example, between social classes, the public that this violence sought to form into a new group of “friends” shared the same physical and social space as those whom the violence struck. The notables and police officers whom the Red Brigades and Prima Linea murdered were neighbors and fellow citizens, “friends” in the territorial order, of the workers, students, and proletarians whom they wanted to incite to revolt. The violence aimed to reestablish a different territory rather than reject territory as a form of organization of political space. Finally, the struggle against the enemy within, in the form of the traitor, always seeks to give the clash a territorial dimension and make it “normal” in a sense. Not only is a traitor an agent from outside, but that outside is a territory, another state to which the traitor has sworn allegiance.
The image of the Islamic terrorist that haunts the West today is very different. He or she is not a traitor, but a stranger among us. His or her allegiance is not to another state or nation, not to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Afghanistan, but to a nonterritorialized ideal: Islam or the community of believers. More than place of birth or nationality, this is what makes him or her “foreign.” Al-Qaeda, the organization considered responsible for terrorist attacks, does not correspond to a specific territory. It has at least as many enemy states (and certainly many more terrorist activities) in the Muslim world as in the West. This is why, despite the clumsy attempts of Western political propaganda, al-Qaeda cannot be associated with any location in particular in the space of international relations. Al-Qaeda is a network of exchanges, communication, and power that links agents beyond and despite states, and creates ties of solidarity between them independent of any territorial anchoring.
The Islamic terrorist appears to us both as the most foreign, because capable of the most extreme violence, and as the most similar, because he or she is invisible, the same as everyone else: an unknown among others until the fatal detonation. This invisibility distresses us. We would like to send the “foe” back to an identifiable elsewhere, give him or her visible foreignness, as can be seen from the obsession with veils and scarves that, commencing in France, is spreading everywhere in Europe. Terrorists’ duplicity transgresses the territorial order. The same goes for the war we conduct against them. We violate the borders of countries with which we have friendly relations to bomb places that are supposed to shelter terrorists and schools where they are indoctrinated. This war disregards the nationality of agents and assassinates nationals of countries with which we are not in conflict. Moreover, in many countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom, the War on Terror authorizes the discretionary, indeterminate imprisonment of citizens and foreigners on the basis of suspicions of which the intelligence services are the only judges. It in no way takes into account equal rights or presumption of innocence.
Because it territorializes the “friends-foes” opposition, the modern state, the nation-state tends toward equality among citizens. This equality is the normal form of solidarity in states built on the abandonment of reciprocal solidarity obligations. It is like an attractor toward which they are “naturally” drawn. In contrast, the abandonment of territory as a structure underlying conflict management reduces the pressure toward equality. Contrary to what one might think, this renunciation of territory is not dictated by the enemy who has to be fought—Islamic terrorism—but by the internal evolution of modern states. The reason the confrontation between groups is now taking on a new form is the new structure of states, which remain fundamental political players.
Modern states have become networks. They are networks of services that extend beyond their borders. Within national borders, they often provide access to their services to residents who are not citizens and even to foreigners who are passing through. They are above all resource distribution and production networks grafted onto other shipping, communications, commercial, and financial networks. It is not only that states have interests everywhere in the world: it is that states no longer depend on their territory in the same way as before. Territory is no longer the fundamental reservoir of labor, raw materials, soldiers, know-how, basic industrial production, capital, or even financial resources. Thus, the United States does not produce enough graduates to meet its needs in most scientific areas. The needs are met by importing foreign brains. Likewise, some rich countries, for example, the United Kingdom, “purchase” from poor countries entire graduating years of nurses and laboratory technicians. The wealth and power of privileged states depends less and less on their national territory, and more and more on the strategic location they occupy in these networks of exchange and communication, as well as their ability to exploit them to their advantage.
The material basis of the most powerful modern states no longer corresponds to their national territory in two distinct manners. First, they have to seek beyond their territory to obtain their wealth and power, in terms of natural resources and economic markets, obviously, but also in terms of know-how, skills, workers, technology, and industrial capacity. Second, some parts of their territory are losing more and more of their economic and political interest. They are becoming dead weight that costs but does not pay. States need both more and less than their territory. Above all, they do not need territory. Certainly, they need some anchor points in physical space, which explains the growing importance of large cities, but it is no longer indispensable to them to exercise authority in a homogenous way everywhere in the country. While a territory is a plane or surface, a network is made of nodes and communication lines that link those nodes beyond the empty space separating them. States no longer have the same interest in defending their territory, or, if one prefers, they no longer have interest in protecting it in the same way. For them, it is no longer a question of protecting an area and ensuring their authority over each of its points, but of defending the integrity of a network. For that, it suffices to control certain points in particular and the communications between them. All the rest can be abandoned if it does not disturb the functioning of the network.
The passage from the territorial system to that of the sanctuary illustrates this transformation of our political space. Moreover, the flows and networks that are indispensable to the wealth of countries such as Canada and the United States are also those that create the wealth of France and Japan. A network space, unlike that of a territory, is not exclusive. Of course, it may be advantageous to prohibit some from having access to a network, but by definition the purpose of all networks is to include and bring into communication. It follows that many countries have interest in protecting and developing the networks on which they depend and with which, to a certain extent, they identify. Increasingly strict controls at borders, more stringent requirements concerning residency, and deportation of foreigners in irregular situations suggest an attempt to reterritorialize the face of the enemy, to assimilate terrorists with foreigners from the outside. However, this attempt is doomed to fail because there is no longer an outside.
We have to consider that Islamic terrorism is telling the truth when it portrays itself in the framework of an opposition between the Christian world and Islam. This is how it understands itself, and this is how we have to understand it. Of course, the call to throw the “crusaders” out of the lands of Islam appears to us to be simplistic and to be hiding more complex political stakes. Moreover, we are no longer quite sure that we are still “the Christian world.” Yet what is at issue is very clear: the designation of an enemy par excellence against which the community of believers, divided by conflicts and split into different nations, can be marshaled. The violence directed against the Western world operates as a means of unifying the Muslim world by turning the violence that is tearing it apart toward the outside. We are that outside, just as we want it to be our outside. It follows that, on both sides, the public to which this violence is intended to give form does not share the same physical and social space as those on whom the violence is exercised. Certainly, the operation has not been very successful so far, despite all the efforts to encourage it and to portray us as the paradigmatic enemy of Islam. With respect to Islamic terrorists, we occupy the place that we want them to occupy for us. We are doubles. This is why it is impossible to reterritorialize the conflict.
Things did not used to work like this. The Hereros of Namibia, who were exterminated by the German army’s expeditionary force in 1904, never set off bombs in Berlin or Frankfurt. Between them and the German Empire, there was a fundamental asymmetry. Their territorial exteriority in relationship to those who had decreed their destruction was equivalent to their incapacity to become the Germans’ doubles, to eliminate the difference that made them victims rather than enemies. This asymmetry and externality are today in the process of disappearing now that the war that the West takes to others suddenly continues in New York and in the subways of London and Madrid.
Indeed, there is no longer any exterior able to limit our confrontation, for the nonterritorial nature of the adversaries makes nuclear weapons inefficient. Transcendent violence, the threat of total destruction that protected us until the fall of the Soviet bloc, is now unable to limit or constrain the violence of our confrontations. The asymmetry or imbalance of power that used to separate countries with nuclear weapons from those who did not have them has been replaced by a new asymmetry of a different form. The asymmetry between the nuclear powers and the others was territorial in that the weapons of mass destruction were designed to guarantee that the security of certain lands and territory is the only appropriate target for nuclear weapons. An “appropriate target” is a target that the nuclear weapon can destroy completely and for which it is an absolute threat. Nuclear weapons can be used as supreme violence against such targets. Those who have such weapons are, in relation to those who do not, in positions of absolute exteriority, and they can exercise on the latter the violence of warlike hostility. This asymmetry, this radical imbalance of power between nations, gave to those who had nuclear weapons the advantage of intensifying the relationship of enmity and provided the threefold division of the space of hostility with a geographical, territorial embodiment.
In contrast, there is no sense in trying to destroy a terrorist network using nuclear weapons. Such a network can use such weapons, but it can not be their target. This new asymmetry has no possible spatial translation. The modern political order is born of territorialization of the relationships of solidarity and hostility. Its two fundamental institutions have been the modern state, holder of the monopoly of legitimate violence, and European colonial expansion. The fact that it is now impossible to reterritorialize these relationships threatens us in ways we have never before experienced. It also opens the way to political developments that we are unable to imagine.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from The Barren Sacrifice: An Essay on Political Violence (Michigan State University Press, 2015). All rights reserved.
Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer