Chapter 11: A Way Forward

Critical theory reveals the naïve way that we so often speak about violence. It unveils the pervasiveness of violence that surrounds us. It exposes even, at times, the pleasure in violence, and the productivity of violence. But once we unveil and understand that our political condition is an endless struggle, how can we reconcile critical praxis with the core critical values of compassion and respect? What is the way forward for a renewed critical praxis?

The logical place to turn for an answer would be to start with the very critiques of violence that have helped us get to where we are today—cognizant, that is, of all the violence that surrounds us. These critiques not only expose violence; they also offer justifications of violence. Maybe they could offer some guidance on how to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence.

I.

In the process of unveiling and redefining violence, the traditional critiques of violence draw distinctions and justify certain forms of violence. The question is whether they offer viable means to resolve the puzzle of violence.

A. Nonviolent Violence

Walter Benjamin redefined violence in instrumental terms, as a practice that is used to attain an end. In the context of a worker’s strike, Benjamin defined a strike as “violent” when and only when it is deployed as a form of extortion to achieve an end, such as better wages or conditions—when it takes place, in his words, “in the context of a conscious readiness to resume the suspended action under certain circumstances that either have nothing whatever to do with this action or only superficially modify it.”²⁵⁷ In that case, the strike is “violent” insofar as it represents “the right to use force in attaining certain ends.”²⁵⁸ This is the “political” strike that Benjamin discussed, as distinguished, originally by Sorel, from the “proletarian general strike” discussed next.

By contrast, in the context of a “revolutionary general strike,” defined as one intended to overthrow the government, the question of violence became more complicated for Benjamin. This is the “proletarian general strike” that, as Benjamin explained, “sets itself the sole task of destroying state power.”²⁵⁹ It is viewed by the state as being violent insofar as it is intended to be lawmaking—and the function of violence is understood to be lawmaking (or law-preserving). From the state’s perspective, the first strike is legal and non-violent, but this second is pure violence and must be repressed by violent means.²⁶⁰ But for Benjamin, by contrast, this second proletarian strike, which falls under the rubric of violence and is discussed as a type of violence, is nevertheless “nonviolent” violence.²⁶¹ Benjamin explained:

While the first form of interruption of work is violent since it causes only an external modification of labor conditions, the second, as a pure means, is nonviolent. For it takes place not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification to working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike not so much causes as consummates. For this reason, the first of these undertakings is lawmaking but the second anarchistic.²⁶²

“Während die erste Form der Arbeitseinstellung Gewalt ist, da sie nur eine äußerliche Modifikation der Arbeitsbedingungen veranlaßt, so ist die zweite als ein reines Mittel gewaltlos.” In English, “While the first form of interruption of work is violent (Gewalt) since it causes only an external modification of labor conditions, the second, as pure means, is nonviolent (gewaltlos).”²⁶³ (291) Massimiliano Tomba refers to this as “nonviolent violence.”²⁶⁴

Nonviolent violence: Benjamin valorized this kind of anarchistic strike, intended by its very action to break down the state and simultaneously instantiate this breakdown. It feels like pure action, or pure disobedience, not soiled by extortionate demands, pure in its intentions. It enacts a new political relation. It resembles, in many ways, the euphoria and enactments of the Occupy Wall Street movement: the idea that the general assembly was at one and the same time both a form of resistance and a prefiguration of a new political relation. The anarchistic strike, as revolutionary movement, represents in Sorel’s words “a clear, simple revolt” that leaves no place for “the sociologists or for the elegant amateurs of social reforms or for the intellectuals who have made it their profession to think for the proletariat.”²⁶⁵ For Benjamin, this is a “deep, moral, and genuinely revolutionary conception” that cannot be branded “violent.”²⁶⁶

Benjamin characterized the “nonviolent,” following Sorel, by the pure revolutionary movement, by the purity of the act of resistance. “Sorel rejects every kind of program, of utopia—in a word, of lawmaking—for the revolutionary movement.”²⁶⁷ Insofar as the anarchistic revolt seeks nothing else than the destruction of the state—and not some kind of lawmaking—it is nonviolent. It is only “allegedly” violent. “[T]he violence of an action can be assessed no more from its effects than from its ends, but only from the law of its means,” Benjamin wrote. “The law of its means”: in other words, the rightness of its means. We must judge actions not by the justness of their ends, but from the rightness of their means.

Destruction of the state—that is what Benjamin admired and valorized in his critique: “on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.”²⁶⁸ Benjamin wanted to imagine an attack on law, believing that “revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible.”²⁶⁹ It is divine, destructive, revolutionary violence that Benjamin advocated. And so he ended:

[A]ll mythical, lawmaking violence, which we may call executive, is pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, administrative violence that serves it. Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution, may be called sovereign violence.²⁷⁰

In this, Benjamin was close to Foucault. He was in the territory of relations of power modeled on matrices of civil war.²⁷¹

In sum, Benjamin favored anarchist revolutionary action that involves an instantiation of a self-transformative practice as opposed to a logic of means-and-ends. He opposed, most centrally, the state monopoly of violence and power, the legalistic mindset of proceduralism and means-ends rationality (the priority of the right over the good), as well as natural law oriented just ends (the priority of the good over the right). In this sense, he opposed the state, positive law, and natural law. He embraced instead forms of resistance that are law-destroying—as opposed to violence which he defines as lawmaking or law-preserving. He had in mind—he favored—a kind of “nonviolent” violence that is a means all to itself. Not in relation to an end, not even a just end.

The trouble here is that we seem to be caught in time, back in the foundational utopian moment of critical theory. There is a tautological element to Benjamin’s definition of nonviolent violence: it is nonviolent because it accords with his utopian vision. And insofar as we have overcome those foundational horizons, Benjamin’s justification of violence no longer functions. His notion of divine violence, that is destructive and not ends oriented, but aimed at the end of the state, does not help us if indeed we have a reconstructed critical utopia.

Another problem is that Benjamin’s is such a cryptic endorsement—for the most part, few understood well what Benjamin really meant by “divine violence.” Even Slavoj Zizek, when he engages Benjamin’s critique of violence within the larger framework of his book, Violence, acknowledges that these pages are “dense.”²⁷² Benjamin’s idea, in the end, that the type of violence that might put an end to the state is non-violent violence seems more mystifying, than enlightening. It rings of illusion.

B. Vanguardism

For his part, Zizek makes a number of “sideways reflections” in his book on Violence. He expands the definition of violence so that it includes not only instances of physical violence—the type of events that we habitually refer to when we think of violence, such as urban riots, violent crime, “street crime” effectively, domestic abuse, all of which he refers to as “subjective violence”—but also objective and systemic violence. Second, he ties acts of violence to the loss of a neighbor relation.²⁷³ Third, he turns violence on its head to make it reveal our cultural selves. So the abuses at Abu Ghraib—in contrast to the brutal methods of the Middle Eastern interrogators—really reflect our American ethos more than anything else.²⁷⁴

This leads to three lessons, Zizek tells us, in conclusion. First, to condemn violence explicitly is just ideological masking—“an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence.”²⁷⁵ Second, it is harder than one thinks to be truly violent. It exhausts and takes effort to be truly evil.²⁷⁶ Third, and perhaps most puzzlingly, that the most violent thing to do at times is to do nothing. Voter abstention in today’s democracy, for instance, is really more powerful than other things, he claims. Those are his closing words: “If one means by violence a radical upheaval of the basic social relations, then, crazy and tasteless as it may sound, the problem with historical monsters who slaughtered millions was that they were not violent enough. Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.”²⁷⁷ That final point is most puzzling, since it does not seem to endorse physical violence, but instead passivity as the most violent forms of (in)action.

Elsewhere, though, Zizek does seem to advocate violence. In his essay in the London Review of Books, “Shoplifters of the World Unite” from August 19, 2011, he discusses the London riots of 2011, and criticizes the rioters and other recent protesters (the Spanish indignados, the Greek protest movement, even the Arab Spring) for failing to articulate a program. “[T]his is the fatal weakness of recent protests,” Zizek writes. “They express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.”²⁷⁸ Buried in the last line of the essay, Zizek calls for a vanguard party: “This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganization of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.”²⁷⁹ Not so subtly, Zizek embraces his penchant for a Leninist vanguard party. But this too presents the same problem as Benjamin, then. It too is wedded to a foundational critical praxis that is no longer sustainable if we reconstruct critical theory.

C. Self-transformation

Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre explicitly advocated for violence. For Fanon, the violence of the wretched of the earth is a catharsis. Self-tranformation: that is precisely what Fanon had in mind, particularly when he drew on Aimé Césaire’s play, And the dogs were silent. In that play, the rebel is confronted by his mother, defending himself against the charge of barbarity for having killed his master. “I had dreamed of a son who would close his mother’s eyes,” his mother says—struck by the fate that awaits her son.²⁸⁰ “Spare me, I’m chocking from your shackles, bleeding from your wounds,” she says.²⁸¹ “God in heaven, deliver him.”²⁸²

The son responds: “the world does not spare me… There is not in the world one single poor lynched bastard, one poor tortured man, in whom I am not also murdered and humiliated.”²⁸³ And then, the son goes on to describe the night:

“It was a November night…

And suddenly clamors lit up the silence,

we had leapt, we the slaves, we the manure, we beasts with patient hooves.

[…]

The master’s bedroom was wide open. The master’s bedroom was brilliantly lit, and the master was there, very calm…. And all of us stopped… he was the master…. I entered. It’s you, he said, very calmly…. It was me, it was indeed me, I told him, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave slave, and suddenly my eyes were two [bugs] cockroaches frightened in a rainy day… I struck, the blood spurted: it is the only baptism that today I remember.”²⁸⁴

That was a transformative moment of pure violence for the son, one that was not simply a means to some end, but in itself a pure means, a baptism. It was, in itself, that “cleansing force.”²⁸⁵

Sartre, like Fanon, developed a dialectical understanding of violence as a means that would give birth to a new and better man. The fact that the anti-colonial rebel takes arms and is willing to die for his brothers and sisters means that he has overcome death and is a “dead man en puissance.”²⁸⁶ By accepting death and seizing the violent act, the rebel has broken the hold of scarcity, and gives his life for his fellow’s humanity.²⁸⁷ He has placed the freedom and humanity of others above his own existence in a Hegelian relation. And this fraternity will then give rise to the first institutions of peace, grounded on a praxis of liberation and socialist fraternity.²⁸⁸

In other words, the self-transformation that attends certain violent acts can justify the use of violence. That, however, is hardly convincing. Many things may be cathartic, that does not mean they are valuable. What if we learned, for instance, that James Harris Jackson, the white Army veteran who traveled from Baltimore to New York City to kill an African-American, also experienced a baptismal (delusional) moment of rebirth when he plunged a knife into 66-year-old Timothy Caughman on March 20, 2017, in Chelsea, New York?²⁸⁹ “Since he was a boy,” we are told, “he has hated black men. A bitter hatred of black men that boiled in his mind and consumed him.”²⁹⁰ “Mr. Jackson was particularly offended by black men who were with white women,” the prosecutor tells us.²⁹¹ According to a law enforcement official, “He told the cops, ‘I’ve hated black men since I was a kid. I’ve had these feelings since I was a young person. I hate black men.’”²⁹² So what if it was a baptismal moment in his mind? Would that matter?

Should I be allowed to discuss, in the same breath, the violent history of colonialism and the delusional beliefs of a mentally unstable White Supremacist? No. But on the other hand, if what we are trying to identify is when violence is legitimate, must we not ask the difficult question? “I struck, the blood spurted: it is the only baptism that today I remember.”²⁹³ Surely context matters. It must be the case that not all violence for Fanon—even baptismal violence as a pure end—would serve the liberatory aspirations envisioned by Fanon or Benjamin. So the criteria would have to include self-transformative and the correct politics. But that then justifies any violence that is properly politically motivated. At that point, the justification is merely instrumental.

The traditional critiques of violence, it turns out, hardly offer a convincing way forward. To be sure, they do reveal that the workers, or the colonized, or the young protesters in the banlieu that deploy violent means of resistance—torching cars or breaking windows—are themselves immersed in a violent world and subject to the violence of the state, the police, and social workers. That their whole milieu is violent. They highlight, as Fanon does, the grossly violent operations of the colonial system—and unearth its pervasive violence.

But by distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence, in a world pervaded by violence—in a world where relations of power are defined as civil war—these critiques of violence set up criteria that are either too foundational, too instrumental, or too hard to follow, or simply break down. At other times, they simply fail to offer any comprehensible criteria at all. And this then makes it difficult to critique “illegitimate” violence.

Benjamin’s litmus test—namely, avoiding means-end rationality or instrumental reason—and his embrace of an anarchist anti-state ethos seems noble but misguided, unhelpful for praxis today. It also is far too foundational or dogmatic—as if the withering of the state was an orthodoxy. Zizek, for his part is at times too cryptic and merely provocative, at other times too rigidly Leninist—as if a vanguard party was the solution to everything. And Fanon’s criteria are no more convincing.

The problems with Fanon abound. First off, it has to be the case that the political context of the violence would matter. One can only imagine that, contra Benjamin, the ends would cast a shadow on the legitimacy of the means.²⁹⁴ Second, as Arendt reminded us, the exigency of death and feelings of solidarity—the self-transformation—can be very short lived. They are not necessarily permanent self-transformations:

It is true that the strong fraternal sentiments collective violence engenders have misled many good people into the hope that a new community together with a “new man” will arise out of it. The hope is an illusion for the simple reason that no human relationship is more transitory than this kind of brotherhood, which can be actualized only under the conditions of immediate danger to life and limb.²⁹⁵

Finally, how can critical theorists like Benjamin or Zizek tell others to engage in violent revolution when they themselves are not putting their lives at stake? How can you only theorize violence? How can you glorify divine violence or nonviolent violence if you are not yourself engaged in struggle?

The classic critiques of violence relativize the use of violence to shield certain privileged or foundational modalities of resistance. That can’t be right. Moreover, the fact that these critiques are apologia of violence ultimately undercuts their effectiveness as critiques of state violence. In the end, they create criteria of violence that do not withstand scrutiny—and some offer no criteria at all.

II.

How then do we resolve the different critical insights—namely, that our political condition involves endless struggle, that we imagine a future of equity, compassion, and mutual respect, and that political praxis is necessarily violent?

Taking a purely instrumental route feels like a cop out—another grand illusion. The idea that we could bracket our values and violently impose a just society, in which violence would then disappear, is not only unrealistic, it defies everything reconstructed critical theory stands for. It’s pure mystification—and dangerous at that, since it is likely, actually, to push us onto the path of authoritarianism. Anyone who would be so vicious as to champion a state of exception—even a temporary use of what would have to be overpowering violence, to quickly get the job done—would likely to be the kind of person who would abuse that license. In effect, we are right back where we started: facing illusions. How do we move forward?

This section will set aside three possible avenues that have been advocated by critical theorists, before proposing a more promising path forward in the next and final section.

A. Interpreting Violence Away

You will recall that the pure theory of illusions rests on the infiniteness of interpretation, on the lack of any originary source. It rests on the lack of any foundation. What if we returned to this insight to simply interpret violence away? Let me explain.

If we live in a world characterized by the infinite regress of interpretations, going vertically all the way down, then might it not be the case that the entire construct that “relations of power are violence”—the entire critique of violence—is itself an interpretation, and in that sense a fabrication foisted upon us through a struggle for power or for intellectual dominance? What if this interpretation is itself an imposition of a will to power?

What might that mean, you may ask? What would it mean if we extended endless interpretation to the question of praxis? Would it then be possible to rethink violence entirely? To reconstruct categories in such a way as to wash away the problems of violence? Nietzsche famously spoke of the “invention” rather than the origin of knowledge.²⁹⁶ What would it mean to take that insight seriously—particularly in the most tangible space of all, in the realm of violence? What would it mean, in the context of critical praxis, to take seriously the idea that all knowledge is “invention”?

What it might mean is that the claims that have been circulating throughout this book—namely that violence functions in such and such a way, that critical praxis is inevitably violent, that it may be justified if self-transformative, etc.—that all those myriad claims are, well, invented. We invent our relation to violence. This does not, in any way, deny its facticity. A punch in the face is still a punch in the face, and it is committed without consent. Those facts do not change. The victims did not ask for it, they are not to be blamed. Again, that does not change. But it is what we claim to know about these facts that is invented. What they tell us about when violence is justified, when it is legitimate—all these things are, well, invented. All that is made up. It tells us more about who we are and what we want to believe that anything reliable about reality. And, in the process of these inventions, we shape our own subjectivity, we shape who we are. That is one of the most important consequences, at least for Foucault reading Nietzsche: “it’s not God that disappears but the subject in its unity and its sovereignty.”²⁹⁷

The invention of knowledge, rather than its origin: this surely destabilizes our interpretations. It highlights the creativity of interpretation—and asks us to question what is motivating the invention. Our critique of violence may have multiple meanings and functions, all of which do a lot of work. But what we say about violence and praxis, in the end, is our imposition, our interpretation, our reading, our will. Ultimately, our stories of violence tell us more about our history than they do anything about violence per se.

But where would this leave us? Well, understanding that the liberal conception of violence advances a project that privileges private property and individual liberty. And that the critique of violence advances a will to equity, compassion and respect. In other words, that the interpretations are political. But we knew that from the beginning. We’ve known—this was the whole point of Part II—that the critical tradition is motivated by values. This does not help us resolve the quagmire of critical praxis. It does not get us out of the interpretive realm and into a space of materiality. Instead it brings us back to square one: how do we reconcile our values with our praxis?

B. Doing Violence to Violence

A second path forward might be to turn the critique back on itself: Perhaps we should, as Simone de Beauvoir suggested of Sade, burn our own justifications of violence. Violently turn against our own critiques and apologias of violence.

“Faut-il bruler Sade?” Beauvoir asked. Well, should we burn our own justifications of violence? Burn our theories at the stake, as the Inquisition would have? Recall that Sade’s son burned the ten volumes of his final work, Les Journées de Florbelle. Should we place Sade’s and Nietzsche’s works on a black list? Should we destroy Bataille’s works as well? And Passolini’s films? Should we simply extinguish the apologias of violence—Benjamin as well, and Zizek and Fanon—and be done with violence once and for all? Could we?

Now, remarkably, Beauvoir answered her own question in the negative. As Judith Butler remarked later, “By posing the question in this way and at that time, Beauvoir makes it clear that feminism and philosophy ought not to participate in anti-intellectual trends, that it ought to distance itself from inquisitorial practices, and that its intellectual task is to remain open to the difficulty and range of the human condition.”²⁹⁸ Beauvoir read into Sade an ethic—misguided in certain respects, but an ethic nonetheless, related centrally to freedom. Butler similarly tried to “find there something of importance for a feminist philosophy of freedom, including a philosophy of sexual freedom?”²⁹⁹ Butler writes:

Although one may well conclude that Sade has little in common with feminism, it is important to note that he defended sexual freedom and the expressive impulses of individuals. Moreover, Sade did not believe that sexuality was meant only to satisfy the requirements of procreation.³⁰⁰

Both for Beauvoir and Butler, the task was to seek “neither to romanticize nor to vilify Sade,” but rather “to understand the ethical significance of Sade.”³⁰¹ And of course, there is always some redeeming ethical feature to discover in Sade or Passolini. For Passolini, for instance, it was his political conviction and queer sexuality. His opposition to the fascist nature of the state and the authoritarian nature of the Church. For Sade, it was his philosophical tendency—as a philosopher of the boudoir or de la boue, to be sure, but a philosopher nonetheless who questioned man’s true nature at a time when man was becoming almost divine.

In locating his torture chamber in fascist Italy, immediately post-Mussolini (July 1943), Passolini targets fascism itself in Salò—the Italian bourgeoisie, the desire for fascistic power, the submission to order, the following of orders. In his film, Passolini sides with Albert Camus who, as Butler reminds us, saw in Sade the precursor to the fascisms and totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. As Camus noted of Sade, “Two centuries in advance and on a reduced scale, Sade exalted the totalitarian society in the name of a frenzied liberty that rebellion does not in fact demand. With him the history and tragedy of our times really begin.”³⁰² Passolini’s Sade “belongs to the inaugural moments of modern fascism.”³⁰³ And Passolini’s deployment of those three circles of hell, with their allusion to Dante’s Inferno, challenged more forcefully than most other works the Catholic Church—one of Passolini’s most impassioned and frequent political targets.

The Marquis de Sade, for his part, targeted the sexual repression of his own aristocratic peers in a purportedly pedagogic or perhaps didactic manner, as evidenced by his Philosophy in the Boudoir. This is the ethical dimension, something about a way of living one’s life in his work—at least, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler seem to suggest. “He argues, in effect, that under conditions of bourgeois morality, where the interchangeability and indifference of individuals reign, sexual cruelty is a way to reestablish individuality and passion,” Butler notes, with Beauvoir.³⁰⁴ Sade is exposing the unrestrainable truth of nature, of our warped nature. By contrast to the newfound faith and Enlightenment belief in the compassion of man, in the goodness of natural man, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of man in his natural condition—as Dominique Lecourt emphasizes on his reading³⁰⁵—Sade demonstrated in his writings the twisted timber of humanity. If you want to follow nature and natural man as the Enlightenment thinkers did, Sade tells us, then look at this! “This book,” Georges Bataille writes of 120 Days of Sodom, “is the only one in which the mind of man is shown as it really is. The language of 120 Days of Sodom is finally that of a universe which degrades gradually and systematically, which tortures and destroys the totality of the beings which it represents.”³⁰⁶ Imprisoned in the Bastille, having encouraged the revolutionaries from his prison window, it is said, liberated and liberating others, Sade embodied, despite it all, an element of liberation sexology—a revolution for the libertines. Sade’s writings also betray a unique morality that, as Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille reminded us, rests on our own solitude as humans—“absolute solitude as a first given fact.”³⁰⁷ These are important ethical and political questions. There is, then, there must be some value along political and moral dimensions to Sade’s interventions, and Passolini’s.

Plus, both Sade and Passolini were themselves the objects of the punitive arm of the state—of the will to punish, of the sovereignty of desire. Sade: eleven years in Vincennes and the Bastille on what appear to have been a familial lettre de cachet, another thirteen years in the Charenton asylum, for a total of thirty-two years of his life in closed institutions. Passolini: tried by the Italian government for offense to the Italian state and religion, in 1963, many years even before Salò. Did they not suffer enough for their sins—or for their courage? Perhaps. And, perhaps, we as a society should not condemn Sade or Passolini, or Nietzsche—no more than we, as former colonizers should not condemn Frantz Fannon when he advocates violence against the children of the colonizers, the same violence of the colonizers.

No, it seems that violently sacrificing our own critiques and apologias of violence reflects an anti-intellectualism or anti-theoretical sentiment that is far too simplistic. It solves nothing—and it does us all an injustice. It would be like embracing an illusion.

We must not burn Nietzsche or Sade, we must not self-censor our critiques of violence, because there is always resistance embedded, something ethical in there that we need to search for, rather than extinguish. To collectively condemn, in other words, is too easy—and so false. It does nothing. We need to do more somehow. Even at the extreme, even at the limit, even here with violence. We need to understand it—dark side and all. And then resolve the puzzle of praxis.

The point is that collective condemnation is, just that, too simple, too easy. And the dream of a world without violence is, again, just that, a dream, an illusion. We need to plumb the complexity of the human soul, with all its dark sides, and simultaneously reimagine the place of excess and violence. And, perhaps, to take it upon ourselves to condemn. But only as ethical beings, not as a society.

C. Radical Non-Violence

A third path is to radically eschew violence, force, and compulsion, along the model of Mahatma Gandhi: to turn all the suffering onto oneself and completely avoid compelling others to change, so as to inspire others instead to self-transform. This was the model of Satyagraha that Gandhi developed and lived. It rests, I would argue, on recognition of the critique of violence: recognition that everything we do outwardly is a form of aggression against others, and therefore that everything we do should be oriented inwardly.³⁰⁸

The neologism satyagraha that Gandhi coined—the literal meaning of which is “to hold on to truth” or “to cling to truth” or “a tenacity in the pursuit of truth”³⁰⁹—refers to a personal ethic and self-transformation through which an individual remains true to his or her ideals of justice, and seeks to convince or convert others by working on him or herself and taking on the burden of the sufferings of injustice. The term is often simplified, in translation, to mean “non-violent resistance,” and at a practical level it is narrowly associated with the imperative of non-violence. But the concept has to be understood through the larger framework of an ethic or a faith that gives someone the strength to turn the suffering of injustice onto themselves. The resulting non-violence is not so much a practical maxim or a political strategy—although it is always political and strategic—so much as it is the necessary product of steadfastly staying true to one’s ethical or spiritual beliefs and the ethical imperative not to hurt others.

The concept of satyagraha recognizes the pervasiveness of violence in social interaction, and tries to contain it. It does so by means of three core elements: truth, self-care, and suffering. The first is true belief or faith—holding onto a personal truth—that empowers and lends force to satyagraha. Gandhi defined satyagraha as “Truth-force” (satya means “truth”)—though in other places he also referred to “Soul-force” or “Love-force.”³¹⁰ It is only when the believer is entirely committed to “the truth of his cause,” Gandhi emphasized, that he or she will have the force to succeed in non-violence.³¹¹ It is that faith in the truth of one’s cause that ensures that the reformer will not lash out at an opponent, but instead work harder on him or herself, and be prepared to sacrifice him or herself. In this sense, satyagraha does not give rise to an instrumental form of non-violence, but instead to an unconditional, entirely committed faith, like a spiritual belief or a moral commitment.

The second component is work on the self, rather than on others: Non-violent resistance requires self-transformation. It involves work by and on the individual him or herself. It cannot be achieved from outside the person. It is deeply subjective. Gandhi explained this in discussing the case of protest at temples, where he opposed for instance blocking the way of those who refused to admit the untouchable. “The movement for the removal of untouchability is one of self-purification,” Gandhi wrote. “No man can be purified against his will.”³¹² Gandhi explained that any and all steps, even in drastic situations, “have to be taken against ourselves.”³¹³ These are, as Mantena explains, “practices of ascetic self-mastery.”³¹⁴ As Gandhi wrote, “Satyagraha presupposes self-discipline, self-control, self-purification.”³¹⁵ Notice the omnipresence of the self. It is care of self that comes first. As Gandhi explained: “the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but on one’s self.”³¹⁶

The third and perhaps most important element is self-suffering: The willingness to bear the suffering of injustice, to take that suffering onto oneself, is at the very heart of remaining true to oneself and converting one’s opponents. It is by suffering that one truly demonstrates the sincerity of one’s beliefs and the stakes of justice. It is also the most powerful way to convince others to change themselves. It shows that the satyagrahi is not there to hurt, but rather to impress upon others the justice of their position.

Self-suffering—or the broader concept for Gandhi of “the law of suffering”—is what converts others, on Gandhi’s view. Conversion is the operative term: “I have deliberately used the word conversion,” Gandhi wrote. “For my ambition is no less than to convert the British people through non-violence, and thus make them see the wrong they have done to India.”³¹⁷ And it operates through the emotions and affect of the opponent. The goal is to “draw out and exhibit the force of the soul within us for a period long enough to appeal to the sympathetic chord in the governors or the law-makers.”³¹⁸

For Gandhi, non-violence had to extend to thought as well as action. It meant avoiding anger, it excluded even swearing and cursing.³¹⁹ It implied, in the anti-colonial context, scrupulously avoiding “intentional injury in thought, word or deed to the person of a single Englishman.”³²⁰ It even involved being courteous and polite toward the police that are arresting you and the prison officials who are detaining you.³²¹ Gandhi wrote:

It is a breach of Satyagraha to wish ill to an opponent or to say a harsh word to him or of him with the intention of harming him. And often the evil thought or the evil word may, in terms of Satyagraha, be more dangerous than actual violence used in the heat of the moment and perhaps repented and forgotten the next moment. Satyagraha is gentle, it never wounds. It must not be the result of anger or malice. It is never fussy, never impatient, never vociferous. It is the direct opposite of compulsion. It was conceived as a complete substitute for violence.³²²

Gandhi’s practices of fasting represent the kind of work on the self and the suffering that characterizes and defines satyagraha.³²³ Gandhi’s views on direct action were extremely nuanced and contextual. Civil disobedience was not always appropriate and had to be judged based, for instance, on whether individuals were doing it because they expect some personal gain.³²⁴ Fasting, as well, could be used for good or ill depending on the context. “Even fasts may take the form of coercion,” Gandhi wrote, “there is nothing in the world that in human hands does not lend itself to abuse.”³²⁵

There is a pragmatic dimension to satyagraha that should not be ignored. In fact, Gandhi justified violence under certain extremely limited circumstances of domination and weakness—in cases of extreme self-defense or helplessness—not as a form of satyagraha but as a form of vulnerable self-defense. “I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence,” he wrote, and added, “I took part in the Boer War, the so-called Zulu rebellion and the late War.”³²⁶ The illustration he gives is of a time when he was almost fatally assaulted, and would have wanted his son to defend him, even using violence. He even adds, “I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.”³²⁷ In situations of helplessness, of utter weakness, violence may be appropriate.³²⁸ But he then added that “I do not believe India to be helpless. I do not believe myself to be a helpless creature.”³²⁹

The problem with this third path, though, is that it is, honestly, too demanding and also too absolute. Gandhi’s writings are of unparalleled exigency: one must take the burdens of injustice on oneself, turn suffering onto oneself, purify oneself as an exemplar to others, fast and engage in civil disobedience when appropriate, at sacrificial cost, bear no anger or resentment against one’s oppressors, even remain celibate or, if married, chaste. The full measure of Gandhian satyagraha is arduous. And regardless of the criticisms of Gandhi’s actual practices and weaknesses—Gandhi has been criticized for hypocrisy, for misogyny, even for racism and casteism—Gandhi’s writings, taken on their face, demand a level of commitment and persistence that is practically unparalleled in other political traditions and impossible to achieve. They call for the kind of existence exemplified—as Gandhi himself suggested—by Buddha and Christ. One can hardly imagine a more demanding and exigent standard.

Non-violence of this sort is too demanding and does not offer a viable answer for critical praxis. It is, first, practically impossible to instantiate except in a watered down and instrumental version. The idea, for instance, that one must not love one’s children more than others is far too demanding. Remaining celibate or chaste. Again, too demanding. Avoiding evil thoughts towards one’s oppressor. Not realistic, possibly counterproductive. Assuming all the suffering, taking it all on oneself in order to convert others. At the end of the day, that does not ethically seem right.

Moreover, it is far too dangerous. In many situations, it would mean leading sheep to slaughter. Gandhi’s writings about Jewish resistance in 1936 and 1938, where he espoused satyagraha, is a case in point. As Uday Mehta notes, “Gandhi’s words provoked shock, controversy and considerable condemnation.”³³⁰ Rightfully so, even if they were pronounced before many knew the worst of it. Non-violence may be appropriate in some limited conditions, but not in all. In part, this reflects again the problem with foundational thought—with the inappropriate generalization of one particular form of praxis. It would be misguided to resolve the problem of violence in the search for critical praxis by adopting wholesale Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha.

Satyagraha did function in 1920s and 30s in India, in a country of hundreds of millions of inhabitants that was governed in contrast by a hand-full of British civil servants and soldiers. It had political effects in the context of a military occupation and a vast disproportion of population. In a situation where the occupying force—as is so often true—lacked legitimacy and moral authority. These factors conspired to make satyagraha so potent then. But satyagraha is not the answer to the broader problems of violence in critical praxis. It does not resolve the critique of violence.

III.

There is, however, a more promising path forward: to understand violence as a necessary part of human existence, of social interaction, and of our political condition, but not to valorize or embolden it. Violence on this view is integral to human experience—from nightmares, to death and loss, and separation, and natural catastrophes. Violence, fear, and terror are part of becoming fully human. They are an inevitable element of human development. But they are one among a set of forces that shape the human experience. The task of critical praxis is to curate that balance and, in the process, to reduce and devalue the role of violence.

The famous passage on the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit might offer a path forward.³³¹ Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel before the war—especially his lectures from 1934 to 1939 at the École pratique des hautes études—put the dialectic of master and slave at the center of our contemporary reading of the Phenomenology. It is really Kojève who drew our attention to a reading of Hegel according to which the gradual achievement of the highest form of knowledge and recognition happens through a series of dialectics that are almost all modeled on that of master and slave. It would lead to some excesses of interpretation.³³² But it also provides insight to resolve our problems of violence.

What drives the confrontation between the master and slave, on Hegel’s account, are three driving forces. The first is the desire for recognition—the desire to be recognized as a fully human person.³³³ Hegel writes, early in his analysis of this encounter between master and slave, that “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”³³⁴ The struggle between those who will become master and slave begins, in fact, because of the quest for recognition. Each of the actors engage in this life and death struggle to be certain of themselves—barring which, as Hegel writes, “he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.”³³⁵

Kojève explains that in this struggle, “The Master is the man who went all the way in a Fight for prestige, who risked his life in order to be recognized in his absolute superiority by another man.”³³⁶ In doing so, the master has overcome nature, in the sense that he has shown that he is not governed by natural fear or self-preservation, but that the recognition by another human is more important than death. He has also expressed the desire for an idea of recognition, overcoming here mere biological function. It is in this sense that Hegel writes that “Death certainly shows that each staked his life and held it of no account.”³³⁷

The master thus achieves recognition by making the slave work for him. The former now leads a life of pleasure, while the slave toils for another. But this has the potential—the paradoxical or dialectical potential—of undermining the master’s recognition, since he is now no longer recognized by a full human, but rather only by a slave: “What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality an unessential consciousness and its unessential action.”³³⁸ “The outcome,” Hegel writes, “is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal.”³³⁹

Recognition remains, though, a motor of history for Hegel—which explains in part the role of recognition in the later writings of Axel Honneth, or Jay Bernstein, or other contemporary descendants of the Frankfurt School.³⁴⁰ It is the universality of the desire for recognition that drives this fight to the death, and (at least on the reading of Kojève) feeds the historical account. As Kojève says, “human, historical, self-concious existence is possible only where there are, or—at least—where there have been, bloody fights, wars for prestige.”³⁴¹ This is the desire to master, to defeat the other, without which there would no battle, no conflict. But it is self-defeating, in the end. From the perspective of recognition—that first driving element of the conflict—as Kojève said, “Mastery is an existential impasse.”³⁴²

The second motivating force of the dialectic between master and slave—and the one that interests me most here—is the encounter with nothingness, with le néant (and right here, incidentally, one sees well the influence of Kojève on Sartre). It is the encounter with nothingness that forces the slave to face his death, his own mortality, and to overcome his own human condition.

It is here that Hegel uses the language of violence and terror—terror, which, recall, in its etymological origins, traces to the act of trembling, of the physical experience of fear and the manifestation of a trembling body.³⁴³ To terror as fear, dread, trembling, shaking to one’s foundations. It is by means of fear, terror, trembling that the slave, according to Hegel, “he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it.”³⁴⁴ Hegel writes in The Phenomenology of Spirit, regarding the slave in his encounter with the master:

[T]his consciousness has been fearful, 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. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness […]³⁴⁵

It is important to underscore here that it is terror—the terror of the battle to the death with the master, this struggle of life and death—that forces the slave to face up to nothingness, to his mortality. The terror was necessary. It was a necessary step in the development. Kojève explains : “Through animal fear of death (Angst) the Slave experienced the dread or the Terror (Furcht) of Nothingness, of his nothingness. He caught a glimpse of himself as nothingness, he understood that his whole existence was but a ‘surpassed,’ ‘overcome’ (aufgehoben) death—a Nothingness maintained in Being.”³⁴⁶

The important point for us—and this is truly crucial—is that terror plays a central motivating force in the struggle for recognition and human development. It would not be possible to achieve forms of self-recognition without it.

The third and final motivating force is of course the relation to labor. For Hegel, it is by means of his toil that the slave overcomes his own nature, realizes a conceptual end that makes possible comprehension, science, techniques, arts, etc.³⁴⁷ It is only “Through his service,” Hegel writes, that the slave “rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it.”³⁴⁸ Or, to be more blunt: “Through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.”³⁴⁹ It is by means of his work that the slave recognizes that he too can overcome and dominate nature—just as the master had in the struggle by pursuing his own desire to be recognized, above and beyond his biological existence—and thus the slave recognizes his freedom and autonomy.³⁵⁰ Hegel writes that “Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.”³⁵¹

For all this to happen, Hegel suggests, there need to be the two formative moments of fear and service.³⁵² And not just any fear, but absolute terror—utmost dread. It is only then that labor can produce its effects. The slave, Hegel maintains, “realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own.”³⁵³

To sum up, the three motivating forces are recognition, terror, and labor. Does that mean that we “need” torture and cruelty? Of course not, if we think with Hegel that we are part of a human spirit that recognizes and learns not only or exclusively by acting, but by a process of communal consciousness, shared, intellectual progress. And if we realize that we do face our own mortality, our nothingness, all the time—in our youth, in our nightmares, with the loss of our parents—we are all facing the terror of death. So there need be no valorization of terror or violence, nor a justification.

Instead, we need to understand Hegel’s argument as allegory, and take a few steps back.³⁵⁴ As history, or even as phenomenology, Hegel’s account is no doubt lacking.³⁵⁵ But as metaphor, the Hegelian narrative shows, brilliantly, the place of violence in the formation of one’s identity and consciousness. It would be practically impossible to imagine human self-development without it—and without, as well, the desire for recognition and the work of labor. These are all integral to our human experience. The question, then, is to balance them properly—not eliminate any one of them. To calibrate properly. Not to be governed too much by it. That is, incidentally, the challenge that Ockham raised for us.

The path, then, is to contain or limit violence. The classic critiques of violence end up justifying violence. That can’t be right. Instead, we need to recalibrate human experience to deemphasize terror and violence, to the benefit of the other modes of human interaction. Since it is impossible to exorcise, we should devalue violence instead—again, within a pure theory of values.