Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy

IN MAY OF 1996, AT THE INVITATION OF THE CRITICAL Theory Institute of the University of California, Irvine (whose director at the time was John Carlos Rowe), I gave their annual series of three public lectures: the prestigious Wellek Library Lectures. The title had been announced as “On Politics and History: The Issue of Extreme Violence and the Problem of Civility.” This was a great honor and an extraordinary experience for me, given the quality and responsiveness of the audience. It had always been the tradition of the Welleks that the full text of the lectures, sometimes in a revised and expanded version, be quickly available as a volume published by Columbia University Press. So, over a long period of time, with her characteristic combination of authority and graciousness, Jennifer Crewe, the editor of the series, kept asking when I would deliver the final version, which they were ready to print immediately. It never came, in spite of her insistence; the warm encouragement that I received from my friends and colleagues at UCI, where I had been coopted in the meantime; and my own increasing feeling of guilt. I will not bother the reader with explanations or justifications: suffice it to say that—apart from obvious problems of style and correctness due to my very imperfect acquaintance with written English, that any good assistant could have helped me to deal with (and one, who was very competent, was offered by the Critical Theory Institute: Erin Ferris), I was blocked by the fact that I perceived the lectures as lacking a clear conclusion, which I spent years looking for in various directions, none of which proved satisfactory.

But there was also the fact that, during those years, I had embarked on other investigations and discussions. They focused mainly on two related issues: (1) In which form, after the crisis of the “welfare state” in developed capitalist countries (which, for various reasons, I prefer to label the “national-social state”), could a renewed notion of the citizen be vindicated and problematized? (2) How to trace a genealogy of the two antithetic movements that (such is my hypothesis) keep inhabiting the contradictions of the “political” in the wake of the great “civic-bourgeois” revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a becoming citizen of the subject (qua counterpart of the sovereign) and a becoming subject (in the moral, juridical, social sense) of the citizen?¹ I can see now (greatly helped by many discussions, public and private, in academic or militant circles) that the question of “anti-violence” as a condition of possibility for the “survival” or the “rebirth” of active politics in moments of existential crisis; the question of continuities and transformations in the ideal of the citizen, incorporating the revolutionary principles of political universality (for which, inspired by a long tradition, I coined the portmanteau name equaliberty); and finally the question of how subjectivities oscillate between the poles of what contemporary philosophers (notably Foucault) call subjection and subjectivation when the “normal” status for political and social participation is the “free and equal citizen” (called a bourgeois by Marx), are all components of a single problematic. I don’t say that they form parts of a system of political philosophy, because it is my conviction (long acquired and confirmed) that “philosophy” (qua theoretical practice, as my master Althusser called it) and “systematicity” (as distinct from conceptual rigor) are in fact conflictual terms (which is why I believe that all the great philosophical “systems” become interesting wherever they exceed and deconstruct their own systematicity), and because the concept of politics that is “looked for” in all these essays could not be isolated in a purely philosophical realm or genre, but calls for alternative combinations of the philosophical discourse with its others: history, philology, anthropology, economy, legal theory. … Instead of assembling the parts of a system, what I was doing in those years was identifying in an experimental manner (very often also prompted by pressing contemporary issues: neo-racism, transnational citizenship, “minority” rights, alter-globalization, “internal exclusion,” “new wars,” etc.) genealogical lines along which the inherent complexity and instability of “politics” can be described, as a tension of insurrection and constitution, and a permanent displacement of its typical “figures” and “places.” But these different genealogical lines intersect continuously. And what matters above all for a combination of theoretical elaboration and practical (or militant) involvement is a permanent alertness to the “unpredictable” or “uncontrollable” conjunctures in which (at a very local or quasi-global scale: the household, the factory, or the school are no less important than the world-system) politics can slip into anti-politics—its own impossibility which (borrowing from—among others—Roberto Esposito, while “secularizing” his definition), I called generically the unpolitical.²

This could not but take me back to the issue that I had tried to deal with in my Wellek Lectures: “extreme violence (or cruelty) and civility (or antiviolence),” which is just a way of articulating in other terms the fragile nexus of politics and the unpolitical, or asserting that “politics” must always become conceptualized (according to the shifting conditions of history: since global “governance” in the era of neo-liberalism is not fascism …) from the point of view of the unpolitical, i.e., taking into account the fact that its conditions of possibility (Law, the State, the economy, the collective ideologies) are also, in a volatile manner, conditions of impossibility (this time a formula of Derridian descent). I would be led, in a sense, to relativize the formal thesis that I had proposed in my lectures from 1996: that “civility” or anti-violence (with its multiple “strategies”) forms as such a “politics of politics” (or a meta-politics in charge of “creating” the conditions for the institution of the political, including this very special form of institution which is a revolution), because (as I had also argued in another essay) the politics of politics is to be identified not so much with one modality (or one concept) of historical action as with a varying combination of several modalities: “emancipation,” “transformation,” and “civility.”³ But for the very same reason, I would be liberated from the obsession of reaching a “conclusion” for my quest of the strategies of civility (or a conclusion that would not be the continuous elaboration of the problem itself). I would become more clearly aware of the fact that our quest, both theoretical and practical, is a quest for unprecedented forms of civility, combined with inventions of (postnational, postcolonial, postcapitalist, postdisciplinary, postpatriarchic) citizenship, which also by definition means experimenting with other modes of subjectivation.

In 2010 I handed over to Jennifer Crewe a thick volume in French, which by then had the title Violence et Civilité. Wellek Library Lectures et autres essais de philosophie politique, which had just been published by Editions Galilée in Paris, and I asked her (and Columbia University Press) if they would still be interested, after so much time, to have it translated into English to appear in their series.⁴ Needless to say, I saw no reason why she (and the Press) would feel any obligation to do it, but to my great satisfaction and pleasure they agreed to consider the proposal, they received some favorable reviews, and we started working on it. It is from this French volume that the current book derives, in a perfect translation by Michael Goshgarian (among other achievements the editor and translator of several important posthumous works by Louis Althusser). In order to bring it closer to what had been the initial project, we agreed that this American edition should leave aside an entire section in which I had gathered essays of “political philosophy” (on war and politics; the issue of violence in Marxism, Lenin, and Gandhi; and the relationship of Carl Schmitt to Hobbes), of which many in fact are already available in English. They were complementary to the main text, no doubt, expanding its implications in the form of various critical readings and discussions, but also exceeding the format that we wanted to keep. With the agreement of Editions Galilée, we decided to limit ourselves to the text deriving from the Wellek Lectures and their immediate environment.⁵ I am immensely grateful to the Press, and to Jennifer personally, for enthusiastically receiving my proposal and working efficiently and intelligently to devise the best solutions and format for an American edition. I may say that I have the feeling that the book is now coming home, something important for me and for those who initially ordered it—but it is coming home as the enfant prodigue in the parable, having benefited from the delay and above all the tribulations involved in translating it into another language.

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

It is not for me, of course, to say if this is a good book. By definition, I always fear the opposite could be the case. … But I must try to capture in a few sentences what I think now was the guiding thread of my project. As I have indicated, I became convinced in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s that a critical attitude with respect to the concept of politics must in fact articulate at least three different concepts (or “ideas,” some would prefer to say), which I called “emancipation,” “transformation,” and “civility,” in a manner that is partly conventional but that also encapsulates some philosophical legacies. My idea is not that one should try and derive them logically from a single one, or from some superior essence of the political. On the contrary, one should always “problematize” how they become articulated in different conjunctures and political practices: this is the only “meta-politics” thinkable, and it is bound to remain “aleatory” (as Althusser would say), or historically singular.⁹ We, as individual and collective subjects, are the agents and actors of these various configurations. But even if they are made of our own “deeds,” we are not the masters (much less the creators) of the conditions in which violence (which is inherent in politics, whether in the “frozen” forms of institutions, powers, law, and government, or in the “fluid” forms of revolutions and deterritorializations) becomes extreme violence. Extreme violence in particular (I discuss in the text the phenomenological criteria and modalities of this “excessive” development) is one to which no symmetric counter-power or counter-violence can be opposed that does not disseminate and worsen it (think of the case of the “War on Terror”), pushing therefore politics toward its own self-destruction. For that reason “politics” is never granted, it is never founded on and by means of ideals, principles, institutions, or laws, but it is “fragile,” or “vulnerable.” In other terms, as it proceeds toward certain goals by mobilizing material or social instruments and human or moral forces, it must also, through different strategies of civility, re-create itself, or its own structural conditions of possibility that involve primarily a demarcation between “violence” and “cruelty.” Quite often we, the political actors (who can no longer remain “passive” figurants), become aware that this vital condition cannot be dispensed with when we have already reached the shores of destruction, or anti-politics (e.g., fascism), or we have become subjugated by and enrolled in extreme violence. This is another side of the tragic element, and a good reason there is no a priori strategy of civility. But (as philosophers, or theorists) we can try and schematize the paradoxical trajectories along which modalities of extreme violence and strategies of civility meet, and clash. This is what I have attempted, in an allegoric manner, through the designing of a “topography” inspired by Lacan’s use of the “Möbius strip,” which can be read also as a sort of inverted picture of the structures and superstructures where classical and post-classical Marxists tried to locate the antagonism of conservative and revolutionary politics. In a previous publication I called it “the other scene” of politics. It is disturbing for a conventional form of rationality, but conceptually decisive, that the other scene is always the same scene, in one of its unpredictable metamorphoses.¹⁰

This topography, however, has another function, which is more analytical. It must “schematize” the idea that modalities of extreme violence or cruelty are intrinsically heterogeneous or can never become reduced to a single, simple causality, and the idea that they continuously overlap and reinforce each other, so that in the end generalized “economies of destruction” may arise and gain momentum.¹¹ Disjunction and fusion must be represented as complementary characters of extreme violence. Therefore we must propose differential phenomenologies of what I tentatively called “ultra-subjective” and “ultra-objective” violence, which coincide at the limit, or become indiscernible when the impossible is a reality and crystallizes in antinomian figures (such as “creative destruction” becoming the economic form of utility, and what—building on the analyses of Hannah Arendt—Bertrand Ogilvie has called provocatively “the production of disposable humans”).¹² And although we must insist on the theoretical notion that extreme violence (as I said in my concluding essay) figures an anthropological limit of politics, whereby the question is posed of the penetration of the inhuman into the human, we must remain all the more consistently on the terrain of history, material structures, and lived experiences, and therefore avoid every speculative idea of an anthropological “foundation,” even a negative one, which by definition would be unique. Limit and foundation here are antithetic categories. In ethical terms, this makes it impossible to discuss the anthropological limit constituted by phenomena of extreme violence within a problematic of evil. As we know, there are religious, mythical, or transcendent figures of evil, but there are also mundane figures, which identify it with a social “system” (capitalism, or totalitarianism, or utilitarianism, as the single root of evil), or with the almighty “subjects” who are supposed to run the system. But if extreme violence in history were a figure of evil, its antithesis (called civility or otherwise) would be a figure of the good. This is what, in my stubborn “structuralism,” I try systematically to avoid. I defend that delirant assertions of “collective identity,” leading to extermination processes in the form of genocides or “ethnic cleansing,” as well as the disturbing but very banal phenomena of institutional cruelty, where the State (and the legal apparatus itself) seem to exact “vengeance” from the “public enemy” (a criminal, a terrorist, a deviant personality subjected to what the U.S. Constitution calls “unusual punishment”). Generally speaking, what I called ultra-subjective violence cannot be causally or phenomenologically confused with manifestations of ultra-objective violence, such as physical and moral destruction of the individual’s autonomy generated by overwork, extreme poverty, and precariousness inherent in the logic of the capitalist system, especially when it finds itself released from the constraints imposed by social policies, moral outrage, or the class struggles themselves. Nevertheless, “elimination” processes mark a point of encounter, and combinations of the different modalities of extreme violence within a single “economy” are plain, whose possibility we must represent in the discourse, as we run against it in the experience. This is not the logic of the single cause; it is the logic of the combined effects, which is much more real and important for politics.

It is this complexity that I try to describe, and for which I seek names. And, as I describe and name it, I find myself disturbingly uncertain about the possibility of politically “escaping from it,” as Hobbes would write about his “state of nature” (which, as we see now, is essentially a historical state). What seems to be the case is rather a situation of no escape. This observation generates “pessimism of the intelligence,” according to the famous Gramscian formula, but also seems to threaten the “optimism of the will.” However, what it means philosophically is essentially that we must renounce eschatological perspectives, even in their secularized forms—which, as we know, were always insistent in the revolutionary discourse about politics, especially in its communist variants, seldom liberated from the myth of the “end of history.” To renounce the idea that extreme violence (and violence itself) could be eliminated from politics and history, while maintaining that anti-violence is called for most urgently where it is most difficult to invent, thus acknowledging the intrinsic “fragility” of politics, is not tantamount to assuming that nothing changes or can change in history, except for the worse. On the contrary, it goes along with the idea that changes are actually taking place, as they did take place in the past, including emancipations from various forms of domination, and transformations of the structures of power and exploitation. But as we observe these changes and try to “accelerate” their rhythms, we must name the risk that is immanent in political action, and we must intellectually explain its necessity. Outside of that risk and that necessity, there is only conformism or barbarity—or both. We must become “outraged” (as Stéphane Hessel famously exclaimed: Indignez-vous!) and stand up against violent powers, structures, and ideologies. We must issue a call to arms (of which there are many kinds) when necessary in the name of equality and freedom. But we must arouse ourselves against the possibility that politics of emancipation and transformation that combat barbarity produce other forms of barbarity. In other words, we must take risks and know which risks we take. This is the nexus that—with the limited instruments of philosophy—I wanted to elucidate philosophically while I was writing these essays, and composing them into a book.

I thank in particular Jennifer Crewe and her collaborators at Columbia University Press; Michael Goshgarian; Michel and Joanna Delorme, along with Cécile Bourguignon and Agnès Rauby at Editions Galilée. I also want to thank John Carlos Rowe, Alex Gelley, Gabrielle Schwab, and all other members of the Irvine Critical Theory Institute who invited me in the first place; Ellen Burt, David Carroll, Suzanne Gearhart, Rei Terada, and other longtime colleagues and friends at University of California Irvine; Bertrand Ogilvie and other colleagues and students at Université de Paris 10—Nanterre, with whom I discussed and criticized many of the arguments gathered in this book; Alfredo Gomez-Muller, with whom I maintain a durable exchange of ideas on ethics and politics; Warren Montag; James Swenson; and Debra Keates, who also helped with the project.