Chapter 10: The Trouble with Violence

In reimagining praxis, critical theory immediately confronts the problem of violence: Is it possible to advocate physically violent practices when the core values of critical theory are equity, compassion, and respect? If a reconstructed critical horizon arcs toward a pure theory of values, then how can critical praxis involve violent revolution or insurrection?

In reaction to black bloc protesters who destroyed property at an anti-fascist demonstration in Berkeley in 2017, Judith Butler condemned the violence. “The turn to violence,” Butler wrote, “further destroys hope and augments the violence of the world, undoing the livable world.”²²⁶ Instead of violence or insurrection, Butler embraced an ethics of love. Others as well have turned to King, Gandhi, and the tradition of nonviolent resistance in order to avoid such problems. The line of physical violence serves to demarcate peaceful assemblies, social movements, and political organizing from vanguard revolution, separatist insurrections, and certain forms of political disobedience. For many critical theorists today, especially given the demise of a Marxist philosophy of history, that bright line determines what is and is not acceptable practice.

The trouble is that once again we face an illusion: the very concept of violence that we traditionally employ is a construct of liberal theory that embeds a particular vision of society. The ways that we typically think of violence—both in terms of the distinction between physically-violent versus physically non-violent actions, and between physical and property damage versus non-violent actions—are the product of the liberal conception of state power and liberty. As a result, they are loaded with particular libertarian values.

This presents a real quagmire and is difficult to unpack. The future of critical praxis would be a lot simpler if critical theory could just ignore the problem of violence and stick with a liberal definition. But that would undermine the entire project of reconstructing critical theory.

This is an area of theoretical quicksand, so I would like to caution readers: please be patient because the problems with violence can be disorienting. If they become too disorienting, please rejoin the conversation at Chapter 12, after I will have explored the quagmire in this chapter (Chapter 10) and various ways of resolving it in the next (Chapter 11).

I.

The problem of violence actually permeates the question of critical praxis. Violence is not just in play in situations of armed resistance or insurrectional strategies. It pervades all modalities of resistance, even non-violent forms of organizing. Seeking change in society—or, for that matter, maintaining the status quo—is inherently violent in the sense that it necessarily entails redistributions, affects ownership rights, upsets educational practices, and involves political and economic transformation: these inevitably involve impositions of values on many people who do not share a critical vision of society. It will necessarily entail changes that will affect people’s lives, life prospects, and well-being. Reinstituting a robust inheritance tax in the United States, for instance—which is necessary—is a violent act: it is enforced through the penal law on threat of fines or incarceration. For the wealthy, it is the functional equivalent of someone taking their property; just, instead of having a gun at their head, they are threatened with tax enforcement and penal sanctions. It’s blinking reality to ignore the violent dimensions of social reform. From a critical theory perspective, the problem of violence comes up even in non-revolutionary strategies: transforming society (or not) necessarily entails redistributions that are inherently coercive.

Liberal theory does not need to confront this problem, because it defines the contours of violence in limited ways and claims not to be imposing values on others. On the liberal view, violence is cabined essentially to disobeying the law, damaging private property, or physically harming others. The liberal concept of violence is what allows liberal theorists to avoid the hard questions of violence.

II.

Since Hobbes and Locke, the liberal tradition has narrowly defined violence as the illegitimate interference with the legitimate pursuits of other individuals. “Force or fraud,” “coercion and misrepresentation”: these are the exceptional circumstances that justify the state’s use of force against its citizens. As long as subjects are legally pursuing their ends, as long as they are staying within the hedges or fences of law, they should not be disturbed. As long as they are not interfering with each other in pursuit of their personal interests, subjects should be left alone.

As Max Weber reminded us, the liberal state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. A liberal government is entitled to use legitimate force, even physical violence, to prevent subjects from getting into each other’s way or harming each other. It is precisely getting in each other’s way, in fact, that is conventionally defined as crime—either a crime of violence or a property offense. State enforcement of the law, by contrast, even the use of lethal force or capital punishment, is not viewed as illegitimate violence. On the liberal view, in essence, violence is conceptualized as individuals getting in each other’s way, whereas state policing and enforcement of the laws is not considered violent. These are, respectively, illegitimate and legitimate forms of coercion.

In the liberal scheme, then, the problem of violence is limited to interpersonal acts of aggression and property damage—on the model of street crime. The laws themselves never do violence to individuals, unless they are misapplied or violated. Economic conditions do no violence to people. The accumulation of capital does no violence to people. Violence—or, more technically, “illegitimate violence”—is limited to actions of subjects against each other or against the state. (Hobbes went somewhat further, regarding the latter, and argued that any and all resistance to the sovereign would amount to rebellion.²²⁷)

This narrow definition of violence effectively masks all the potential violence that the state or economic conditions might administer onto subjects. So, for instance, the failure to maintain proper water utilities in Flint, Michigan, from 2014 to 2016, which resulted in the exposure of thousands of children and over 100,000 residents to lead contamination and potential brain damage, was not violent, strictly speaking, on the liberal view. The 2008 economic meltdown and the collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market, which resulted in tens of thousands of Americans losing their jobs, health insurance, homes, and retirement savings, with potentially devastating health consequences for many, were not violent according to the liberal view. These forms of harm are masked by the liberal definition of violence. None of them fall in the neat category of one subject using force or fraud against another or of a state actor illegitimately using force. The fact is, however, they are systemic forms of violence that may actually cause more physical harm overall than all property crimes combined.

Arguably, liberal theorists could stretch the bounds and argue that the Flint water crisis or the 2008 financial crisis included actionable misrepresentations. It might even be possible, if there was malicious intent or extreme negligence, to imagine possible prosecutions—and some commentators have argued for that. There is nothing absolutely preventing it. But the fact is, from the dominant or mainstream liberal perspective, those are not incidents that would typically be called “violence.” And that’s because violence is limited to the interpersonal, to the model of one subject interfering with another’s pursuit of their liberty or enjoyment of their property, or to the state ultra vires. It is imagined along the model of street crime. That’s just how violence is generally understood in liberal terms.

Now, this liberal understanding of violence has significant effects on our political condition. Just as the illusion of liberalism naturalizes political outcomes and renders them legitimate as, for instance, the product of merit, the narrow definition of violence also produces its own illusions that naturalize political outcomes. It gives rise, for instance, to the impression that interpersonal physical violence is somehow far more serious, in kind and degree, than the harm produced by economic conditions—even when the latter may be quantitatively far worse in scope. The first calls for state intervention; the second does not. The liberal state focuses its police and enforcement powers on common law crimes, but ignores, and thereby shields and protects from criticism and oversight, economic harm. This means that the state focuses aggressively on street crime, and ignores economic exchange even when the latter produces detrimental health and personal outcomes. This then produces what has been called “neoliberal penality”: the paradox of mass incarceration and a strong police state on questions of common law crimes, but laissez faire in the area of political economy.²²⁸

III.

Critical theory challenged the liberal conception of violence. Under the rubric of a “critique of violence”—from Walter Benjamin’s through Derrida’s The Force of Law to Zizek’s essays on Violence—critics have questioned the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the narrow liberal definition of violence. These critiques often begin with a critique of the state, which then, naturally, exposes the violence of the state.

Benjamin began, for instance, with a clear denunciation of the legitimacy of state force. The liberal theoretic conception of violence rests on a very limited, state-centric notion of violence, Benjamin argued. The use of lethal force by the police is not violence on the liberal view, but rather the justified use of force; violence tends to be limited to unlawful (not falling within a legal justification, such as necessity) applications of physical force, deliberately and directly applied.²²⁹ In this way, the liberal definition of violence excludes violent actions of the state that are justified: the death penalty, law enforcement, police or military actions, or self-defense.²³⁰ Political violence becomes either ultra vires action by the state or a state agent, or most of the time, practically all the violence of individuals.

Benjamin and other critics of violence then expanded the category of violence to include more ordinary power struggles in both the public and personal realm: to broaden the notion of violence to include the effects of poverty, lack of health care, discrimination, domestic relations, etc. This is the idea of “objective violence,” which Zizek defines, by contrast to “subjective” or interpersonal physical violence, as the forms of systemic violence that have no identifiable authors, but pervade our world, hidden or masked by all the subjective violence that we so easily identify. It is the idea in Benjamin that extortion, or means-ends rationality, is itself a form of violence. The idea that violence pervades ordinary relations of state and citizen, as well as the interpersonal. It is structural. It is pervasive. It suffuses our relations of power.

Foucault, notably, developed this critique using the metaphor of civil war. As opposed to the Hobbesian idea of a “war of all against all” ending with the establishment of public order, Foucault sought to reinstate the notion of civil war within the Hobbesian commonwealth. Civil war, for Foucault, is not the collapse of a political union that would plunge us back into a state of nature. It is not opposed to political power, but rather constitutes and reconstitutes it. Civil war is, in his words, “a matrix within which the elements of power come to play, reactivate, dissociate.” Political relations must be thought through the prism of war: “The important thing for an analysis of penality is to see that power is not what eliminates civil war, but what leads and continues it.”

In an important letter dated December 1972, Foucault wrote to Daniel Defert that he had begun to analyze social relations on the basis of “the most denigrated of wars: not Hobbes, nor Clausewitz, nor class struggle, but civil war.”²³¹ This notion of civil war and the related concepts of discipline and delinquency are keystones to his theory of power-knowledge. The idea of civil war, for Foucault, marked a break with previous analyses—notably those that deploy the concepts of repression, exclusion, and transgression—and a turn to the productive functions of civil strife.

The critiques of violence, then, begin to see violence everywhere. Benjamin, for instance, even identified violence in the legal, non-violent action of the striking worker. Zizek makes a similar move in the first of his “sideways reflections” on Violence: to expose the symbolic and structural forms of violence that surround us every day—not only in state relations, but with each other. These do not have the typical physical trappings of physically violent acts. Violence here is the economic system that imposes early death on the poor and unemployed. Violence is the coercive dimensions of the free market. Violence is the gender norms that produce domination, and the racial stereotypes that aggress persons of color.

In this way, violence extends, even beyond state action, to our ordinary social interactions. It becomes possible to see how much violence it takes to maintain an ordered society. This is where Sartre, Benjamin, and Foucault come together. By placing existential freedom above everything else, and social relations as limits on our freedom, Sartre too imagined violence in practically all social interactions. As the tape recorder plays, at the bitter end of The Condemned of Altona:

The century might have been a good one had not man been watched from time immemorial by the cruel enemy who had sworn to destroy him, that hairless, evil, flesh-eating beast—man himself. One and one make one—there’s our mystery.²³²

For Sartre, in a world marked by scarcity, all actions that are antagonistically related to the projects of other men are violent. Along these lines, physical violence is no different than conceptual mystification or non-physical acts of protest or liberation.²³³ Sartre broke down the distinctions between public and private, between state and citizen, between the personal and political, in order to argue that we are all necessarily implicated in a violent struggle for existence and betterment in a world marked by scarcity.²³⁴

The violence that surrounds us: Marx saw it well and described it for us in his discussion of “Primitive Accumulation”—all the policing it takes to begin to accumulate capital. Weber at times as well. He described the grueling discipline, military and industrial, necessary to mold the men and women to a Protestant ethic. Foucault especially, who minutely detailed the timetables, grids, measured movements, and repetitions necessary to produce the docile body of the Industrial Revolution. Recall the earlier passage about the accumulation of bodies necessary for the accumulation of capital. In the nineteenth century, Foucault reminds us, we learned not to punish less, but to punish better—without leaving traces on the body, without disfiguring beauty with brutality, without showing the violence.

There is so much violence hidden today, veiled behind a polished veneer. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of the tiniest few who accumulate it beyond any possible imaginable use, while others roam the streets destitute and begging—literally sleeping on the pavement. The poor police their own neighborhoods and guard their brothers and sisters behind bars. But we do not see it. We do not want to see it. We so desperately do not want to see it that we tell ourselves stories about our own ingenuity and enterprise, about the virtues of hard work, about the American dream. We lavish attention on the few lucky ones who escaped their lot and made it to the top. We praise the sweat and tears of those who turned their lives around. And we refine elaborate political theories of liberalism that privilege individual responsibility, self-sacrifice, and self-interest: liberal theories that claim to be entirely neutral as to the good life and to set forth only procedural rights and rules that would allow each and every one of us to pursue our ambitions freely and unhindered by the other. We build an intricate politics on the foundation of individualism, independence, merit, and responsibility. We construct a line around physical violence. What an illusion! Perhaps the most sophisticated, politically. They go hand in hand: the illusion of liberal legalism and the illusion of violence. The amount of hidden violence, of violence we do not even see, that is necessary to maintain urban, suburban, or rural existence is frightening.

But once critical theory exposes the illusions, the world becomes much more complicated. There is far more violence that surrounds us, to begin with. There is harm all around—not just in the physical violence that takes place domestically and on the streets, but in the economic structures and property relations. The Millian harm principle, that most intuitive of all liberal principles, is of no avail; it only served as a limiting principle to government action where there was harm, but now we notice harm almost everywhere. There isn’t a way out using the rule of law, since laws necessarily impose values and redistribute resources. Even our own actions appear violent now. They inevitably impose a particular vision on others. They cannot not affect others. In a society where relations of power are correctly mapped onto civil strife, it is impossible to act without confronting others. We are inevitably violent ourselves.

In part, we have become better at identifying violence. We have learned to talk about racial micro-aggressions. We have begun to document police killings. We have stopped thinking—for the most part—that marital rape is just part of the marital bargain. We’ve started to notice campus rape. We’ve begun to understand that imposing our values will do violence to others. It makes little sense to quantitatively compare the amount of violence today to that in other periods in history or other centuries or places²³⁵—such as, for instance, mid-twentieth century Europe or even the Middle Ages—since the legibility of violence has changed over time. (Also, more often than not, we construct those earlier periods in order to make ourselves look more enlightened. We create museums of inquisitorial torture instruments filled with fakes and strange imaginations from the 18^th century.) No, if we honestly look around us today, there is no doubt we are surrounded by violence.

As critical theorists, we now see the violence in ways that we did not see it before. It has become more legible at both the local and the global. We see the violence and brutality of disciplinary actions. This is, in part, the effect of Foucault’s work—perhaps the first genuine “Foucault effect,” before governmentality. We now see how routine forms of discipline displace the overtly corporal in order to control us better—we now recognize discipline’s violence. We see the violence that we inflict on our brothers and sisters trying—as we and our parents did—to better their lives.

On the liberal view, so much of this is hidden by the harm principle and notions of physical harm—and so many of us default back to the physical/non-physical violence distinction, even the most critical among us. We so often end up privileging the physicality of harm, somehow. We are just wedded to it, practically unable to see past it. But critical theory has always resisted and tried to expose the forms of violence that surround us: the excessive accumulation of private property (and its police enforcement), residential patterns that are no more than racial segregation now imposed by real estate values, the evisceration of public education, the two fists of the state, workfare and mass incarceration. It takes remarkable amounts of violence, tucked away, to maintain this peaceful existence of ours. Critical theory has taught us that there is no non-violent way of proceeding—that all political interventions are necessarily violent, that the matrix of social relations is civil strife, or class struggle, or racial, or gender conflict.

IV.

Things become doubly complicated when we recognize the potential pleasure in violence—the dark side of humanity, a touchstone of critical theory—as well as the possible productivity of violence. Here, the quicksand almost suffocates.

It is practically always to Nietzsche that we turn when we raise these issues. To Nietzsche and his fellow travelers, before and after him. To the Marquis de Sade, to the film director, Pier Paolo Passolini, to writers like Georges Bataille or Jean Genet. To that disturbing literary strand that extolls the dark side of humanity, the human underbelly. One can almost hear them laughing at all this—all this discomfort with cruelty, all this squeamishness. What a waste of time and energy, and how weak, they might say. Our discomfort simply reflects a slavish morality, the fact of our own frailty. Nietzsche, Passolini, Bataille—they line up far better with civil war: expect torture, understand that it is part of the process, anticipate it, prepare for it, know it, and use it yourself. Don’t imagine a time without torture, violence, and cruelty.

“Let us not become gloomy as soon as we hear the word ‘torture,’” Friedrich Nietzsche advised in his meditations On the Genealogy of Morals in 1887; “there is plenty to offset and mitigate that word [torture]—even something to laugh at.”²³⁶ Nietzsche reminded us of the ugly truth: men often take pleasure in cruelty and torture. In fact, there has rarely been a time without them. To make suffer, Nietzsche observed, can be “in the highest degree pleasurable,” and “fundamentally,” he added, “this world has never since lost a certain odor of blood and torture.”²³⁷ Pain and suffering have always functioned well for us, in one way or another. “Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself.”²³⁸

Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (1785) laid the groundwork for much of this—confronting us, appalling us into seeing the possibility of obscene pleasure in pain. Sade’s novel is, as advertised, “the most extreme book in the history of literature.”²³⁹ It reads in passages, especially in later chapters, like a numbing laundry list of sexual torture scenes. One could go on endlessly, the manuscript is a parade of horrifying violent acts presented as jouissance. The presentation tells it all: “the escalating sex-crimes of four libertines who barricade themselves in a remote castle with both male and female victims and accomplices for a four-month, precipitous orgy of sodomy, coprophagia and rape leading inexorably towards torture and human decimation.”²⁴⁰ The sexual torture in Sade’s book is the extreme—presented as the extreme form of pleasure.

Coprophagia—yes, look that one up in the dictionary. Or watch Passolini’s 1975 film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, based on Sade’s fantasies, to see what it might look like: one of the adult male tormentors at his pretend wedding force feeding stool to his young male bride. Passolini piles onto Sade’s already shocking narrative new layers of hell from Dante’s Inferno, leading us after an Ante-Inferno down, rather than up, to the “Circles of Manias, Shit, and Blood.” Passolini’s film ends with the murder of most of the male and female victims in horrifying ways including scalping, burning, hanging—a remnant of the auto de fe—under the watching gaze of the four fascist libertines. Yes, torture is mastery, and here, utter orgasmic joy.

The sadistic pleasure in the film is conjoined with a drive to legalize the violence. It is not by coincidence that Passolini places his Salò in fascist Italy. It symbolizes a call for order, for command structures and hierarchy, for uniforms and black boots, for rules, for the chain-of-command—for the rule of law! And the law soon becomes itself another form of terror: drawing the list of approved methods, making clear the consequences, spelling out the inquisitorial procedures. The legal framework contributes and enhances the torturous methods.

Joseph Fischel has analyzed and dissected the TV series To Catch a Predator, and explored, phenomenologically, the feelings we experience when the culprit is caught, when justice is done in the face of a heinous offender. Fischel writes about the high we feel, the excitement, when the bad guy is caught. He uses an expression: “Getting just is like getting off.” We are, it seems, constantly in the abyss with Nietzsche. We can hardly escape, on any side. We are caught in the sovereignty of desire, not wanting to hear it, but desiring to punish it as well. We are caught, as Didier Fassin expressed in his Tanner Lectures, or as William Connolly wrote, in a desperate “will to punish.” And the truth is, this sovereignty of desire that we try to escape and avoid at all times, it explodes in every direction.

Fassin and Connolly remind us that there is often a pleasure to punishment. A desire for revenge. There is a will to punish. It is like the will to power. It is there. It makes little sense to deny it, or ignore it. It is not just a will for recognition of the other. It can also be a form of satisfaction, of pleasure. There is a sadistic will to punish. It is reflected in Donald Trump’s speech, in his oratory. “In the good old days, he’d be taken out in a stretcher,” Trump said, at a rally, of a heckler. “In the good old days,” that is a euphemism for days of more valor and masculinity and bare-knuckle fighting. “Let’s stop being politically correct”: that is a coded way of being permissive or even enjoying the violence.

Nietzsche also reveals, not just our pleasure in violence, but the productivity of violence—all the work that it does. To deny or ignore or sideline all that would be dishonest. Another illusion. It has to be discussed and recognized, at the very least. Because it functions so powerfully in real life, and has functioned so often in history. History is just littered with the productivity of violence. How could one imagine escaping that history?

As I argued in The Counterrevolution, violence and terror have been extremely productive, historically. They serve to terrorize the revolutionary insurgents, to scare them to death, and to frighten as well the general population in order to prevent them from joining the insurgent faction. The use of torture or “enhanced” interrogation methods, the targeted drone assassination of high-value suspects, the indefinite detention under inhuman conditions—these are a show of strength, a demonstration of who is in control, who will protect better, who has the resolve to win, or the barbarity to prevail. They not only eviscerate the enemy, they also alarm others into submission and obedience, into fidelity. Terrorizing is an essential and inescapable part of winning: Fear, trembling, terror, these constitute an essential strategy of the counterrevolution. The waterboard is no mere torture. It is instead a terrorizing technique intended to crush with deadly fear those it touches, and strike with terror anyone else who might even imagine sympathizing with the revolutionary minority. In effect, these techniques do much more work. They display a mastery that appeals and seduces the masses. They delimit and delineate what it means to be free, who is good and evil. They legitimize the guardian class, even the entire ideological system. They strike the fear of death in the hearts of the enemy—and one’s own people. Torture, throughout history, has always done far more than what is expected of it. It has always done so much work. One might even go so far as to say that violence is the linchpin of the counterrevolution. It alone, through all of its productivity, is what conquers the hearts and minds of the masses.

These violent practices exude a will to mastery. If anything, they call to mind that “life-and-death struggle,” that “trial by death”²⁴¹ that Hegel identified at the heart of his phenomenology of human existence, and that Alexandre Kojève in the next century placed as the touchtone of Hegel’s thought. Hegel recognized this will to mastery as an essential driving force in human development. As a foundational step, motivated by a deep need for recognition and a drive to conquer the other. The deep desire for recognition by others, on this account, is laced with violence and tied to this struggle to the death.

A trial to the death that achieves mastery and functions by instilling the deepest fear, terror, into the heart of the other: In that moment of near death, the subject is gripped with a fear of death, with a fear “not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations.”²⁴² Hegel was, here, speaking of the struggle to the death between master and slave, between lord and bondsman. He was speaking of terror, precisely—about that trembling feeling and the fright and the flight. As Adriana Cavarero reminds us, in her book Horrorism, the word “terror” traces back etymologically precisely to “the physical experience of fear as manifested in the trembling body,” “making it tremble and compelling it to take flight.”²⁴³ We are, with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, at the very heart of terror.

Violence manifests this will to mastery, to prevail, to dominate. These can be important in political struggle. They are surely important in warfare. “Warring,” Georges Bataille reminds us, is nothing else than “the unleashed desire to kill.”²⁴⁴ They are also important to ethics. This is the “Nietzschean view that life is essentially bound up with destruction and suffering,” in Judith Butler’s words.²⁴⁵ Writing in the wake of these traditions—from Sade to Nietzsche—Maurice Blanchot reminded us of the deep ethical dimensions here: that our lives are “founded on absolute solitude as a first given fact.”²⁴⁶ As Blanchot explained in Lautréamont et Sade, the Marquis de Sade reminded us, “over and over again in different ways that we are born alone, there are no links between one man and another.”²⁴⁷ The result would be a unique ethic—perhaps not one we would all subscribe to, but an ethic nonetheless: “The greatest suffering of others always counts for less than my own pleasure. What matter if I must purchase my most trivial satisfaction through a fantastic accumulation of wrongdoing? For my satisfaction gives me pleasure, it exists in myself, but the consequences of crime do not touch me, they are outside me.”²⁴⁸ How far off is this from self-interest, so valued in liberal thought since the eighteenth century, one might ask? What Nietzsche ultimately revealed, alongside Sade and later Bataille and Passolini, more than most, is the darker side of our psyche, the unsavory dimension of the will to power, the desire for recognition, the ambition of mastery. In sum, the productivity of violence.

This reminds me of a passage from Bataille’s personal diaries in about April or May 1944—that he published shortly thereafter as part of his Summa athéologica: Sur Nietzsche. It starts with an account of torture in the news pages of the Petit Parisien, April 27, 1944. “From a news item on torture,” he starts writing: “eyes gouged out, ears and nails torn off, the head cracked open through repeated butcher blows, the tongue cut off with pincers…”²⁴⁹

“As a child,” he continues, “the very idea of torture turned my life into a burden…” “I do not, still today, know how I would endure it…” “The earth today,” Bataille goes on, “is covered by flowers—lilacs, wisteria, irises—and the war at the same time is buzzing and humming: hundreds of planes fill the nights with the sound of mosquitoes.”²⁵⁰ A few paragraphs later, Bataille jots down, “the carnage, the fire, the horror: this is what we can expect in the coming weeks, it seems to me.”²⁵¹ “Seen today, from afar, the smoke of a fire in the vicinity of A.”²⁵²

Next paragraph: “Meanwhile, these last few days count among the best of my life. So many flowers everywhere! The light is so beautiful and incredibly high…”

And then, the next: “The sovereignty of desire, of anguish, is the hardest idea to hear.”

Should we hear it—this sovereignty of desire? Should we listen to this “hardest idea to hear”? Should we allow ourselves to listen, especially when it is so troubling? So repulsive at times? So unacceptable? Bombs are falling. Warplanes are buzzing. The Final Solution is at its apex. And these are among “the best days of my life”? That, I take it, is utterly unbearable… and yet, there it is.

And at this point, critical theory is really disarmed, it would seem. The critique of violence really only unmasks us, and our violence, and our pleasures nonetheless. It unmasks the productivity of violence—its productivity throughout history. To ignore this would be blinking reality. It would be falling dupe to another illusion. The fact is, violence has been an extremely productive force throughout human history, since antiquity at least.

V.

Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus the King, has captured our imagination for centuries on questions of destiny, power, and sexuality. But it is perhaps on the question of violence that the tragedy turns. At the heart of Sophocles’ Oedipus, at the pivotal moment where truth finally emerges for all to see and all to recognize, at the decisive passage that turns tragic, at the instant of the peripeteia, there is a torture scene:

[1265] Oedipus: So, you won’t talk willingly—then you’ll talk with pain.

The guards seize the shepherd

Shepherd: No, dear god, don’t torture an old man!

[…] I wish to god I’d died that day.

Oedipus: You’ve got your wish if you don’t tell the truth.

Shepherd: The more I tell, the worse the death I’ll die. [1275]

[1280] Oedipus: You’re a dead man if I have to ask again. […]

Shepherd: Oh no, I’m right at the edge, the horrible truth—I’ve got to say it!

Hidden in plain view, at the very heart of Sophocles’ play, there is the threat of torturous death that alone—at the culmination of a whole series of unsuccessful inquiries—produces the truth: it is torture that elicits the shepherd’s confession. It is violence that allows Oedipus to recognize his fate. But more than that, it is violence that reaffirms the order in Thebes, that reestablishes harmony in ancient Greece.

The social order is restored and set aright when Oedipus finally recognizes this “horrible truth.” Violence produces truth in Sophocles’ tragedy, but more than that, it constitutes and reestablishes the social order of antiquity—a social order where gods rule, oracles tell truth, prophets divine, fateful kings govern, and slaves serve.²⁵³ The structure of Sophocles’ play—in parallel with the structure of the investigation that Oedipus leads—reflects the three-part hierarchy of ancient Greece: the divine realm of gods and prophets; the sovereign realm of kings and queens; and the ordinary realm of the people, here the messenger from Corinth and the slave. That social order had been upended by Oedipus defying his fate—but not only Oedipus, by Jocasta as well; it is only through the torture of the servant that the truth of Oedipus’ crimes are known and the just rule of the gods reestablished.

Torture is the productive force that reveals the truth in Oedipus. The prophet Tiresias had exposed Oedipus in his cryptic way, but had not been believed, neither by Oedipus nor by the choir—who could trust an angry soothsayer? Creon and Jacosta had said enough to render bare Oedipus’ guilt, but they too had done so in a way that was not entirely convincing to the choir or the king himself. It was only in the third iteration, with those of lowest social rank—the ordinary pleb, the servants and workers—that the truth would emerge. But it would only emerge by means of torture. As Page DuBois argues in her monograph on slavery and torture in Greek antiquity, Torture and Truth, the idea of truth we hold so dear today in Western thought is indissolubly tied to the practices of torture and violence. In ancient times as today, violence can function as the metaphorical touchstone of truth and simultaneously as the means to establish social hierarchy and difference.²⁵⁴

Throughout history, violence has enabled and fueled political economic regimes and artistic progress. The medieval period was shaped by practices of confiscation. Confiscation threads through the entire history of the inquisitions. Confiscation was a central element of the edicts of King Peter II of Aragon in 1197, Pope Innocent III’s Vergentis in senium in 1199, and the various decrees of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II from 1220 to 1232.²⁵⁵ The construction of empires was built on these violent practices. This is reflected as well in Foucault’s analysis of the political economy of feudal law in Théories et institutions pénales.²⁵⁶ Foucault integrates confiscation as part of a much larger political economy of criminal justice that became, during the high middle ages, a primary space for the circulation of riches. These practices and effects, it seems, extend well into the present, and shape our political condition. The parallels between the judicial invention of confiscation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, on the one hand, and the parallel with the contemporary use of criminal fines in small municipalities like Ferguson, Missouri—where criminal fines represent the second largest municipal revenue—should not escape us.

The point is, in all this, that the experience of violence organizes much of civil life, and to ignore it is to put on blinders—or worse, to willingly embrace an illusion. Violence is, tragically, extremely productive. That is a key lesson of critical theory.