From Extreme Violence to the Problem of Civility by Étienne Balibar

Author:Étienne Balibar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy, Cultural Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

From Extreme Violence to the Problem of Civility

The problem I would like to broach in these lectures is the interrelation between the question of violence and the concept of politics.

The first question is how to pose it. For reasons I hope to bring out, it has in the past few years appeared to me more clearly than before that this problem commands an essential segment of our thinking about the past and future of politics—all the analyses and projects that aspire not just to understand but also to reinvent it. “Quite some discovery!” you will reply. The issue of violence is everywhere. It is in discourses and the images and scenes that present and represent politics. It is also, patently, the object of constant manipulation, serving propaganda purposes and blackmail of all sorts. We might therefore be tempted purely and simply to ignore it for fear of being trapped in a mechanism of conditioned reflexes and false problems. Rightly or wrongly, I do not take that position. I think that public opinion here reflects a real question, in however distorted a fashion: that of the different conceptions of politics, among which violence (as it is perceived, utilized, and confronted) operates as a distinguishing criterion.1 To be sure, this point of heresy is also, par excellence, the ambivalent point at which politics wavers between proclaiming its autonomy or its inadequacy, which can inspire it to go looking for a supplement of significance (and, occasionally, transcendence) in philosophy, morality, or religion.

Any discussion of the relationship between violence and politics is based on examples, value judgments, and ideals that inform the very choice of words used to define violence. Mine will be no exception to the rule. To designate violence of the type I shall be describing as extreme, the kind I would like, above all, to discuss here, I shall use the term cruelty. I do not claim any originality there either. The subject is banal; it assails us at every turn in our “global village.” Or, rather, it is a subject whose banality is once again forcing itself on our perception of the world around us as the most widely shared thing there is, on which no region and no civilization has the monopoly and to which none is immune. What I wish to submit to discussion is the question of the extent to which the banalization and universal extension of cruelty call not only for commitment and action or defensive reaction (that much would seem to go without saying), but also for a conceptual response, a recasting of the very concept of politics that would pinpoint its specificity insofar as politics takes place in the element of violence and as a function of its effects. More precisely, I would like to pose the following problem: if we must admit that there exists an “extreme” violence whose forms are not just a counterpart to the functioning of institutions, a violence that politics cannot “manage” even when it takes the forms of

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