Toward a Credible Pacifism: Violence and the Possibilities of Politics

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toward a

CREDIBLE PACIFISM violence and the possibilities of politics

DUSTIN ELLS HOWES

This page intentionally left blank.

To wa r d a C r e d i b l e Pa c i f i s m


toward a

CREDIBLE PACIFISM violence and the possibilities of politics

DUSTIN ELLS HOWES

Published by STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Howes, Dustin Ells, 1973Toward a credible pacifism : violence and the possibilities of politics / Dustin Ells Howes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-2861-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Political violence. 2. Pacifism. I. Title. JC328.6.H69 2009 327.1’72—dc22 2008054530 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for my parents


Contents Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction: The Problem with Violence

1

P A RT I PHYSICAL VIOLENCE CHAPTER ONE The Fragility and Ability of Bodies

15

CHAPTER TWO The Utility of Bodies

35 P A RT II

INTERSUBJECTIVE VIOLENCE CHAPTER THREE The Problems of Recognition and Freedom

51

CHAPTER FOUR The Experience of Discordant Dispositions

73

P A RT III THE POSSIBILITIES CHAPTER FIVE Self-Sufficient Power

OF

POLITICS 101

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER SIX Equivalent Action

121

CHAPTER SEVEN Demanding Thoughtfulness

149

Conclusion

175

Notes

183

Bibliography

237

Index

247

P r e fa c e THIS BOOK COMES LATE. The major events of the last century were largely defined by dramatic changes in the relationship between violence and politics. At the start of the century, Gandhi and a few hundred Indians in South Africa undertook experiments with confrontational political practices that eschewed physical violence. Within Gandhi’s lifetime, governments waged far and away the most destructive wars in history. The culmination of the world wars brought other innovations that deepened the already close relationship between violence and politics: nuclear weapons and bureaucratic genocide. For some, these events demonstrated the near-immediate obsolescence of the practices Gandhi set out to develop. Yet amid unprecedented violence, other epochal political events notably lacked violence. For the first time in history, women entered politics in large numbers, a revolutionary process, still unfolding, that achieved major successes without bloodshed. Toward the end of the century, the Soviet Union and a swath of repressive regimes in Eastern Europe were transformed from within while Russia had a large standing army at its disposal and retained thousands of nuclear weapons. Defying the centuries-old presumption that political entities desire first and foremost to retain their autonomy, European states engaged in the first large-scale, nonviolent integration of political entities. The politics of the last century have in large part been defined by the concurrent development of techniques and capacities that have vastly expanded our ability to commit physical violence— and our capacity to achieve monumental political outcomes without it. ix

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P R E FA C E

The role of political theory in these developments has been relatively small. John Locke and Karl Marx can be said to have articulated and in large part inspired the great political and social events of their day and the decades that immediately followed. The influence of Socrates’ philosophy on Greek politics is hard to measure, but Athens at least took sufficient notice of his ideas and methods to consider him a threat. New theories of politics played a role in the last century too. The ideas of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger are not easily disentangled from fascism and Nazism. Gandhi, King, Friedan, and Havel made crucial contributions to political thought. However, the twentieth century seems notable for the extent to which scientists developing military and bureaucratic technologies on the one hand and political movements of various shades on the other propelled political change and political theory. Political theory, for the most part, has been left to assess the damage and reaffirm the triumphs. The relatively small influence of political theory in the last century is not necessarily a bad thing and does not defy explanation. Political theorists have traditionally been preoccupied with the status and character of institutions. The major events of the last century co-opted, invigorated and destroyed institutions—but more generally seem to have overwhelmed their relevance. Totalitarian movements, social movements, the invention of nuclear weapons, even the development of international institutions all stand in a tangential, ambivalent, or hostile relationship to the state, or at least attempt to radically transform it.1 Yet philosophical reflection can still play a role in politics, even if only to help make sense of what has already happened. In fact, I think it has been clear for some time now that violence is no more or less reliable than other methods of achieving political outcomes. Perhaps the major events of world history prior to the twentieth century can be read as largely a matter of who physically dominated whom. But that view is no longer plausible after, to name just a few examples, Gandhi and the Indian independence movement, the Norwegian resistance to Nazism, the Velvet Revolutions, the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, and the debacles of U.S. intervention in Vietnam and Iraq. No realistic observer of the twentieth century can claim that physical superiority is easily parlayed into political outcomes. Force often worked in the

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twentieth century, but it failed too often to be understood as generally more reliable than other means. Yet we have not quite figured out how it is that physical superiority turns out to be not quite a sure thing and this is where political theory can make a contribution. Intuitively, as affirmed by both critics of pacifism and pacifists alike, we still imagine that achievements in the politics of the here and now must be a matter of material relationships and forces. But everywhere around us we see evidence that physical violence is just another way of conducting politics that sometimes works and sometimes does not. Put another way, this book argues that politics is more robust than is commonly assumed. Even if a certain number of people involved in politics are uninterested in anything we might consider political outcomes and even if a certain portion of humanity will always put the lives of others and the conduct of politics “proper” at risk, rapists, murderers, slavemasters, terrorists, and tyrants must deal with the inevitable political consequences of even their apparently unpolitical acts.2 Accomplishing something horrific in this world still requires accepting the possibility that others can endow one’s violent acts with unintended meanings. Murder, rape, and torture can reconfigure power and inspire new forms of action from others. And therein lie both the possibilities of physical violence and its political limit. Liberal democracies are keen to deal with violence by assigning to the judiciary or the legislature the task of interpreting what particular acts of violence mean and in that way either muster power in support of or against instances of it. But tyrants are no more immune from political dynamics. Only tyrants who are good politicians last. And even the best institutions, let alone politicians, are sometimes overwhelmed by the unintended political consequences of violence. Of course, from a moral standpoint, violence is not the same as any other method of conducting politics. The fact that this book is titled Toward a Credible Pacifism, might suggest that I have set out to discredit moral arguments against violence.3 On the contrary, such arguments should be part and parcel of any political consideration of violence. But I have tried to offer a version of pacifism that deemphasizes moral arguments because I think there are arguments for pacifism that might be more effective in convincing those who, like Machiavelli, care more

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about their cities than their souls. Neither the just war literature nor the extant pacifist literature adequately considers the issue of the effectiveness of violence. The legitimacy of violence—the justice or injustice of it—is, of course, closely connected to the issue of effectiveness. One of the most important factors in determining the political success of a given instance of violence is whether or not it is considered just. The morally troublesome aspect of violence sometimes makes it less politically effective because it is relatively difficult to legitimize, but it can also make it more effective because of its capacity to shock and transgress. Conversely, assessing the prospects for achieving political success is important in determining whether or not a given act of violence is justified. But the interrelated nature of these claims points precisely to the necessity of considering the effectiveness of violence as a political matter—something up for negotiation among human beings in a particular time and place. This book considers the relationship between politics and violence on the territory of those who take for granted that violence can be justified and legitimate. The title of the book also suggests that the argument is less than complete, gesturing toward a credible pacifism rather than conclusively establishing pacifism as politically credible. Two omissions are particularly important in this regard. First, while the book is aimed at swaying those with a certain brand of Machiavellian pragmatism, materialism, and realism, Machiavelli is only mentioned in passing in the text. His treatment of violence is perhaps the most nuanced and multidimensional of any prominent political thinker and requires a separate critique and line of thought to adequately address. (He should also be approached with a rigorously developed conception of violence and politics in hand, and that is the work of the present volume.) Second, this book leads to but does not offer a reassessment of democratic theory and institutions as relates to violence. Many of the thinkers I use to develop the theory of violence and politics offered here have democratic sensibilities, but how a political brand of pacifism relates to the main issues of republican and liberal thought remains to be worked out. The book is also titled toward a credible pacifism because of what might be considered a weakness, but I hope is also a strength. I freely traverse the personal, local, and global in my examples. While this leaves much work to be done in developing the theory for different contexts, I do

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intend to suggest that what I say here for the most part applies in interpersonal, intrastate, and interstate interactions.4 Which leads me to a final issue. I expect that this largely theoretical book will raise many immediate, practical questions. How does the theory recommend citizens respond to seemingly intractable repressive regimes around the world? How does it bear on the potential for international responses to genocides and civil wars? What does it tell us about how democracies can best respond to the techniques of terrorism? I have tried to provide a solid foundation for addressing such questions, but they must be more fully worked through elsewhere and in a different register. I have also avoided much discussion of terrorism because it seems strange to devote significant space to it in a book that is broadly about violence. If there is a sin of omission here, it is that I do not discuss the war in and around Congo, which raged for much of the time I was writing this book and was the most deadly conflagration since World War II. At any rate, if there is something new about the terrorism of Islamic extremists, I do not think that it involves inventing a form of violence that is particularly effective in achieving political goals, or that it is especially susceptible to being defeated with a violent response.


Acknowledgments THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE helped me write this book, through intellectual exchanges or material and emotional support. Some listed here contributed little more than the recommendation of a book or a word of encouragement, others offered support that lasted over many years. All were vital to the completion of this project or shaped my thinking about violence and politics. Family: Janet Howes, Ed Gwisdalla, Robert Howes, Randy Stoddart, Joann Stoddart, Marilyn Kelly, Brandon Howes, Colleen Howes, Randy Howes, Jason Howes, Cory Howes, Russell Howes, Sue Vincent, Betty Howes, Russell N. Howes, Freda Ells, Garland Ells, Lloyd Hall, Charles Hall, Kim Hall, Sharon Hall, William Houpt, Dan Hall, and Sarah Hall. Friends and Colleagues: Holly Tarr, Seth Baldwin, Chris Hardy, James Niels Rosenquist, Ian Finseth, Stephanie Hawkins, Jonathan Weiler, Adam Schiffer, Greg Petrow, Alec Ewald, Carisa Showden, Liz Markovitz, Bennett Hazlip, Erin Taylor, Stephen Moore, Heather Raffo, Greg McAvoy, Lisa Disch, Maurice Foisy, Sahar Shaqat, Michael Cain, Zach Messitte, Colby Caldwell, Alex Meadows, Nezia Munezero, Risa Sodi, Katarina von Kellenbach, Derek Pardue, Alexander Wendt, Ed Wingenbach, Jamie Mayerfield, Mary Hawkesworth, Phaedra Pezzulo, Ted Striphas, Brien Hallett, Elizabeth Wingrove, David Andrews, Michael Spear, Farha Ternikar, Cherlon Ussery, Travis Vande Berg, Bruce Altschuler, John Blumenthal, Claudio Fuentes, Ngeta Kabiri, Jan Krummrey, Ruth Bowman, Michael Bowman, John Protevi, James Stoner, Wayne Parent, Kate Bratton.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Bradley Hack deserves special mention for his unwavering emotional support. Teachers and mentors: Irene Goldzer, Ronald Mott, J. David Singer, Craig Howe, Jean Elshtain, Ralph Williams, Stephen Leonard, Peter Euben, Jacqueline Stevens, Stephen Biddle, Robert Keohane, Stephen Walt, Gary Herrigel, Thomas Oatley, Tim McKeown, Jud Miner, Paul Strauss, Charles Barnhill, John Belcaster, and George Galland. Michael Lienesch, John McGowan, and Susan Bickford deserve special mention. The three of them have been indispensable and extraordinary readers, mentors, and role models. I also found intellectual sustenance presenting papers at the meetings of the Association for Political Theory in 2006 and 2007, the American Political Science Association in 2003, 2005, 2006, and 2007, the Midwest Political Science Association in 2007, and “ ‘If This Is a Man’: The Life and Legacy of Primo Levi,” a conference held at the Cultural Center at Hofstra University in 2002. At SUNY Press, Michael Rinella helped me navigate the early stages of the publishing process, Laurie Searl took great care with the manuscript and showed remarkable patience with my tweaking of her cover designs, and Alan V. Hewat copy edited. Patricia Owens and an anonymous reviewer improved the manuscript by asking all the right questions. An earlier version of chapter 7 was originally published by Oxford University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as “ ‘Consider If This Is a Person’: Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, and the Political Significance of Auschwitz” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22, no. 2 (Fall 2008). Finally, to my partner, friend, and greatest love Rachel Hall, who gave me courage, read everything, and somehow understood more than anyone why this project was so important to me.

Introduction The Problem with Violence

WHEN YIGAL AMIR assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, he achieved a great deal. The eventual failure of the Oslo peace accords, stalled progress toward Palestinian sovereignty, and the subsequent expansion of Israeli settlements are in part attributable to his act. Bill Clinton remarked to M. J. Rosenberg that Amir is one of the few assassins in history who achieved his goal, because without Rabin, Arafat did not have a credible negotiating partner.1 Not all assassinations are so effective, but this case attests to the fact that killing a single individual can achieve significant political objectives. In 1970, American and South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia and killed more than twelve thousand people, disrupting supply chains and destroying critical infrastructure. The offensive prevented major military operations from the North Vietnamese for over a year and was a significant military victory.2 Yet despite overwhelming physical superiority in both this particular engagement and the war more generally, the United States could not prevent a communist government from taking power or stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Not all successful military campaigns are ineffective, but in this case the killing of many thousands of people failed to achieve the greater goal. The problem with violence is that it is difficult to know why it sometimes works and why it sometimes does not. Most Western 1

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M

political theorists, and the conventional wisdom, assume that violence generally does work. If we are willing to use enough of it, so the thinking goes, violence is reliable. Violence compels and destroys without requiring consent. Physically manipulating and attacking others frees us from dependence upon their opinions, reactions, responses, and desires. If others respond to violence with violence, one’s material and moral capacities may be exhausted. However, even in that case, violence prevails. When violence confronts violence, violence produces the winner. Setting aside legal, social, or ethical qualms allows us to make the world we desire. It seems as though the material quality of violence ensures that violence always works for those who are willing to use a sufficient degree of it. The special, reliable character of violence also apparently makes it indispensable to those who would not otherwise choose to use it. Even if we would not choose the method of our own accord, we must sometimes, temporarily, adopt violence in order to keep those who embrace it from running roughshod over everyone else. Also, since violence is a matter of physical superiority, temporarily adopting it must be more than just a half-measure. Putting on violence requires doing more violence than those who are truly committed to it. The world is full of difficult moral paradoxes. One of the more tragic, strange, and undeniable of these, so it would seem, is the necessity of using violence when one does not want to in order to stop those who insist upon it. Pacifists often respond to such claims by arguing that the effectiveness and necessity of violence are conditioned by the nature of our objectives.Violence achieves nefarious goals, but not spiritual and moral goals. Violence sets aside common interests and objectives in favor of more narrow and immediate material ends. According to pacifists, responding to violence with violence only exacerbates the problem. Even reactive violence implies that we are overly concerned with particular worldly ends. In addition, a violent response is likely to lead to yet more violence on the part of the initiator. Practicing love and tolerance, and approaching disagreements with a spirit of compromise and determination guided by conscience, is the only way to make the world less violent. Following this line of thinking, violence is always counterproductive if we are committed to the right objectives.

INTRODUCTION

3

Both the commonsense understanding of violence and much of the pacifist response to it are inadequate. Neither provides us with much assistance in solving the problem of why violence works or does not work in particular scenarios or contexts. Pacifists assert that violence cannot achieve worthwhile goals. Almost everyone else asserts that it can and does. In fact, despite vastly different understandings of the nature and appropriate use of violence, fascists, liberals, republicans, communists, pragmatists, postmodernists, and just war theorists share the assumption that violence achieves certain goals more reliably than other means, especially the goal of stopping the violence of others. This is true despite the fact that violence fails and succeeds in achieving all manner of objectives, defensive and offensive, moral and immoral, spiritual and material, personal and public. The difference between every other ideology and pacifism ought not turn on a disagreement about objectives. Instead, pacifism should distinguish itself by offering a careful and barefaced analysis of the character of violence. This book explores why violence works or does not work and argues that it is no more or less effective than any other political method. The first obstacle to such an inquiry is that the nature of violence is so rarely the subject of sustained analysis. Violence is usually understood to be an especially effective form of political action in part because it seems to reside in another, more self-evident reality outside of politics proper. Violence appears everywhere in political theory but almost uniformly as the given or assumed for present purposes.3 Even when thinkers argue strenuously for or against the necessity of violence, it can be difficult to know exactly what they mean by violence. Does it refer to incarceration as well as killing? Does it include the destruction of property as well as people? If killing is legitimate, moral, and constructive, is it still violence? Deciphering the character of violence in most political theory is a matter of sifting and culling, prodding and inferring, and almost never a matter of referring to clear, carefully developed concepts.4 There are numerous ways one might establish that the nature of violence is not self-evident. Perhaps the best way would be to trace the historical trajectory of usages of the word and words associated with it. Paying particular attention to political philosophy, we could begin with

4


an analysis of the contexts that accompany the appearance of bia, the Greek word for violence,5 and then move to an analysis of Roman,6 modern,7 and contemporary8 uses of the term. Such an undertaking is beyond the scope of what I want to do here. My approach is to denaturalize violence by showing how inconsistent and elusive its meaning is among even the most fastidious and influential political theorists. In the first four chapters, and chapters 2 and 4 in particular, I show that within and between prominent works of political philosophy, the meaning of violence is remarkably unstable. However, the treatment of violence I offer is mostly constructive, not deconstructive. In my attempt to build a clear and workable definition of violence, it has been necessary to build two. Part I examines the most painful possibilities of our physical condition, leading to a conception of physical violence. Chapter 1 begins with Hobbes’s claim that our bodies are fragile and able. Almost every individual has the capacity to destroy and be destroyed by every other individual. Using the notion of fragility and ability as a jumping off point, I identify aspects and valences of our physical vulnerabilities in various concepts: Marx’s alienated labor, Hegel’s slavery, Foucault’s discipline and punishment, Elaine Scarry’s torture, Sharon Marcus’s rape, Carl von Clausewitz’s war, and Sartre’s objectification. I show that each of these thinkers relies on certain implicit understandings about the character of our bodies. We can kill and be killed, deprive and be deprived, hold in fear and be held in fear of our lives. Our bodies can be raped, drawn, whipped, beaten, dismembered, beheaded, timed, placed, coordinated, trained, observed, and we can do the same to like bodies. We can elicit and sustain pain and have pain elicited and sustained in us. Taken together, these various analyses give us a stark picture of our physical condition. That all of these various aspects of our physical fragility and ability appear in different texts and contexts shows the need for an overarching conception of physical violence. I begin chapter 2 by demonstrating that Hobbes, Foucault, Benjamin, and Locke use the term violence in unsatisfactory, contradictory, overly wide-ranging, and, then again, overly narrow ways. The work of another thinker is more promising. By adapting and modifying Clausewitz’s theory of war, I posit that physical violence is the use or destruction of another’s body in order to subdue

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or destroy their will. This definition of violence draws together a wide array of related phenomena and excludes much of what nebulous or overdrawn conceptions include. It gives us a useful standard by which to assess, for instance, when environmental degradation and the destruction of property are violent or not. It also helps us distinguish between purposeful, aesthetic, and erotic violence. However, the idea that we can change others by physically manipulating and destroying them requires further explanation. Why exactly do we want to change one another? What is so upsetting about living with others in the first place? Part II examines the most painful aspects of our social interactions and leads to a conception of what I call “intersubjective violence.” Chapter 3 is an exploration some of the nonphysical ways we cause one another to suffer. To show the importance of these problems even in the midst of physical violence, I turn to two incidents recounted by Italian chemist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in his memoir Survival in Auschwitz. In the look of a German chemist and the brief touch of a Kapo, Levi is subject to profoundly disturbing interactions, which he suggests animate the physical violence that surrounds him. Building on and challenging Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas, I argue that Levi’s experiences are particularly instructive and devastating examples of the problems of recognition and the challenges of freedom. Levi shows us that the potential for misrecognizing others is sufficiently profound that for all practical purposes we can be both visible and invisible in the same interaction. Also, the fact that we are free beings means that even if we do fully recognize one another, we can carry ourselves in ways that are utterly anathema to another’s way of being. In chapter 4, I draw a conception of intersubjective violence from these problems. Perhaps surprisingly, the most extensive and sustained analyses of violence often understand it as a kind of interaction or a nonphysically destructive activity. For Dewey, Benjamin, and Derrida violence involves not only enforcing or breaking the law by physically acting on others, but the existence and breaking of the law in and of itself. For Pierre Bourdieu, certain gift-giving practices involve what he calls symbolic violence. For phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Levinas, our most basic faculties and capacities, such as perception, choice, and freedom retain an element of violence. However,

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these analyses are both overly expansive and too narrow, suggesting that almost every interaction is violent and at the same time failing to identify a common thread among the particular examples each provides. By synthesizing and strictly delimiting these conceptions I argue that intersubjective violence involves the experience of profoundly discordant dispositions, or encounters with individuals or groups that severely compromise or make our own way of being impossible. The two conceptions I develop, one physical and one nonphysical, constitute a theory of violence. The theory contends that physical violence springs from and is animated by intersubjective violence. We usually destroy and manipulate others’ bodies as a consequence of unbearably painful interactions with them. Living with others can be extraordinarily frustrating, and killing them or forcing them to be other than they are can relieve this frustration and ameliorate the pain, at least temporarily. Intersubjective violence can include instances of physical violence, but the deeper and unending source of conflict is the simple fact that we are free and unique beings. Institutions, cultures, social structures, and ethical mores set expectations, order the material world, and necessarily compromise new and different ideas and developments (and vice versa). Essential individual and group interests and identities sometimes have a zero-sum relationship to those of others. When these problems reach a certain degree of severity, we often resort to physical violence. This theory of violence includes the very worst forms of suffering we inflict upon one another but does not rely on many of the assumptions contained in other explanations for conflict. It makes no claims about the relative merits of particular purposes and offers no assessment of intentions. Nor does it presume that there is something inherently evil (or inherently good) about the human personality or the human body. It insists that both physical and intersubjective violence are embodied, but demonstrates that the demands and needs of the body are not exclusively, or even primarily, the cause of conflict. The theory also betrays no prejudice for or against public or private violence, or violence as understood by a particular ideology. Physical and intersubjective violence appear in interactions between individuals or groups of any size and are just as likely to be inflicted by legitimate institutions as outlaws and rebels.

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With this theory of violence in hand, we can then ask, what is the role of violence in politics? Part III consists of three meditations on power, action, and thoughtfulness, which lay out the principles of a credible pacifism. The core of the argument is the idea that all forms of action are roughly equivalent. Neither the assassination of a single individual nor the killing of thousands can produce results more reliably than any other political method. Speeches, diplomacy, demonstrations, foreign aid, civil disobedience, the signing of treaties, the passing of laws, and physical violence all fail and all succeed, depending on the circumstances. In fact, speeches, diplomacy, and civil disobedience can change the meaning of physical violence. Not only is physical violence no more reliable than other political methods in general, but it is no more reliable than other political methods in direct confrontations with acts of physical violence. This might seem like a strange assertion. Even if we notice that violence does not always work, it is easy to assume that it will work better, in some situations, than other political means. However, the factors that determine the success and failure of violence are not very different from those that affect every other action, and primary among these is power. Chapter 5 draws on the thought of Hannah Arendt to establish that power and violence are distinguishable. For Arendt, power involves people acting in concert with one another and is sustained by the freedom and plurality that characterizes intersubjectivity. I argue that the most important implication of this view is that power is selfsufficient in the sense that it can be sustained and nourished without the support of violence. Arendt’s assessment of the relationship between violence and power is not without problems. She underestimates the role that violence can play in forming power and sometimes overestimates the extent to which physical violence defies the constraints of “normal” political action. However, by distinguishing power and violence, she pushes us toward the idea that violence is dispensable. Power is self-sufficient and the lifeblood of politics.Violence is a marginal phenomenon that depends upon power and is subject to all of the usual constraints and frustrations of other kinds of political action. The dominant role of power in politics, however, is not sufficient to establish that physical violence is unnecessary. Physical violence might

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still be the most reliable response to violence and, therefore, periodically required. Chapter 6 argues that Gandhi’s method of satyagraha (holding fast to the truth) fairs just as much chance of success as physical violence in confrontations with even the most extreme forms of physical violence, though not exactly for the reasons Gandhi suggests. Gandhi’s most important political insight, usually overshadowed by his moral claims, is that physical violence is always political or susceptible to being politicized, even in the very moment it is being practiced. Factors such as fear and love, apathy and desire, material interests and group identities, determine whether those who resist violence or those who perpetrate it will hold sway over the meaning of a particular confrontation. The meaning others take from the interaction will determine who succeeds and fails, and none of these factors suggests that violence has an inherent advantage over satyagraha. Physical violence is political all the way down. To show that this is the case, I take up the perennial example of the rise of Nazism. I argue that the crucial factor in the undoing of Hitler’s regime was not so much the type of action the Allies took, but the coordinated exercise of power itself. While neither violent nor nonviolent resistance may have fared very well, satyagraha also stood just as much of a chance of slowing or stopping the Holocaust as violence. By arguing that intersubjective violence undergirds physical violence and by politicizing both physical violence and satyagraha, a credible pacifism blurs many familiar moral distinctions. Gandhi’s methods cannot solve conflicts of conscience, and he sometimes underplays the extent to which pacifism itself is implicated in intersubjective violence. Conscious suffering uses guilt and shame to change the meaning of violence. Strikes and boycotts incite fear in the hearts of politicians and owners who are invested in extant systems of justice and whose material interests rely on retaining legitimacy. The exercise of power without physical violence is the exercise of power nonetheless. The equivalence of action suggests that our usual assumption that satyagraha is always morally preferable to power that employs physical violence may not be correct. However, satyagraha still retains an advantage over physical violence. At the end of chapter 6, I argue that satyagraha functions like Socrates’s method of inquiry put into action. Refraining from killing others ensures that we remain perpetually open to correction. While

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not ensuring ethical action, Socrates’ words and Gandhi’s deeds at least make possible and even encourage future discussion about the ethical ramifications of the exercise of power. With this in mind, chapter 7 formulates an ethic of thoughtfulness. Extreme violence constitutes not only a physical challenge to would-be pacifists but a challenge to all attempts to formulate a humane ethic. Arendt argues that placing too much emphasis on suffering is a dangerous response to the Holocaust. While suffering and thoughtlessness make the death camps possible, they are essentially banal. The last bastion against evil when whole societies lose their way is a form of Socratic thoughtfulness. People who actively converse with themselves and determine that they do not want to be murderers can hold out against a world devoid of common sense. I argue that by turning definitively away from the issue of suffering, Arendt’s analysis is incomplete. In the poem that opens Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi asks us to consider: Are those who experience extraordinary suffering human? By posing this paradoxical and troubling question, Levi avoids essentializing suffering and yet demands we pay attention to it. Levi’s poem and his memoirs more generally suggest that anyone who has a stake in human community must actively consider whether or not they share in that community with those who suffer. Thoughtfulness alone is an insufficient guide to political action, but actions that demand and are inspired by thoughtfulness about the relationship between the comfortable and the suffering are more promising. From the standpoint of politics, Yigal Amir’s successes and the United States government’s failures in Vietnam are best explained in terms of power dynamics. How people respond to violence, or any other action, determines its success or failure. Effective political action rallies people to one’s side or wins tacit consent by convincing others that it is in their material interest or consistent with their moral sensibilities to support the action. Ineffective political action fails to inspire, falls on deaf ears, or produces active resistance. Without power, neither violence nor any other action has a chance of success. With power, nonviolent actions can defeat even the most extraordinary violence. This holds true even when the most powerful actors employ physical violence. Action either facilitates or destroys power; harming and destroying other people can both strengthen and weaken the capacity

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to act effectively. Violence has been the clarion call of new empires and the death knell for those whose power was slipping away. The brand of pacifism developed here strongly tempers the claim that acts of violence and so-called nonviolent means have a one-to-one relationship with injustice and justice. Power that does not employ physical violence is still potentially destructive and unjust. And even if physical violence always retains an aspect of immorality, Primo Levi’s account of Auschwitz shows us that sometimes our nonphysical interactions are worse than physical harm. The concept of intersubjective violence also troubles the relationship between violence and ethics because moral standards themselves can cause intersubjective violence. Ethical standards prohibit ways of life and can fundamentally compromise the identity and interests of others. Finally, many unethical or immoral actions fall outside of this theory of violence. Lying and cheating may not amount to intersubjective violence but may still be immoral. Environmental degradation or the destruction of property are not always instances of physical violence but may still be morally reprehensible. Physical violence, and refraining from it, is not the be all and end all of ethical standards. However, a credible pacifism can still distinguish itself by adopting a particular political orientation. The primary concern of a political pacifism is the amelioration of suffering, both physical and intersubjective—but this commitment is combined with an understanding of how and why suffering is so intractable. Pacifist methods demand discussion and thoughtfulness about our relationship to the suffering of others. Pacifism points the way toward a politics that refuses to diminish or reify suffering. Gandhi’s ascetic sensibilities and his soaring rhetoric of spiritual conviction that rejects all material ends, sometimes overshadow the more practical aspect of his philosophy, which acknowledges our limited ability to know what to do and the difficulty of attending to the physical and material suffering of others. A realistic pacifism acknowledges that taking action may involve doing intersubjective violence and, at times, injustice. Most importantly, it continually points us back toward deliberation about our actions. Speech, diplomacy, and civil disobedience, for instance, all ensure that others can at least express that the exercise of nonviolent power is unjust. Politics is the hard work of addressing the problems that arise

INTRODUCTION

11

among free beings. Pacifists are committed to solving these problems, even in the midst of physical violence. A credible pacifism faces up to the most horrific possibilities of life with others. Physical and intersubjective violence are deeply intertwined with and present a formidable challenge for politics. Pacifism cannot hope to overcome all of the forms of suffering we cause one another and may not be able to eradicate the use of physical violence. Pacifism suggests that political maturity involves a willingness to acknowledge the fact that living an active life will always cause and involve taking on some degree of suffering. However, pacifism gives us a good chance, and the best chance, of sustaining politics and tempering suffering. The possibilities of politics are immense because power is selfsufficient and all forms of action are equivalent. Words and deeds, informed by thoughtfulness about the relationship between the comfortable and the suffering, are up to the task of confronting physical violence. By encouraging discussion and proliferating power, pacifism also holds the promise of revivifying political society.


PART I

P h y s i c a l Vi o l e n c e


ONE

Th e F r a g i l i t y a n d Ability of Bodies

THIS CHAPTER DELINEATES certain features of our physical condition. I draw on a wide variety of thinkers, some of whom are particularly interested in the body and our material condition and others who set out to offer spiritualist or linguistic philosophies that discount or deemphasize the body. Yet each contributes something crucial to the notion that our bodies are fragile and able. I take the claim from Thomas Hobbes. In Leviathan, he emphasizes our abilities: Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.1 In De Cive, he highlights our fragility: For if we look on men fullgrown, and consider how brittle the frame of our humane body is . . . and how easie a matter it is, 15

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M even for the weakest man to kill the strongest, there is no reason why any man trusting to his own strength should conceive himself made by nature above others.2

In some ways, our bodies are resistant and robust. We can ward off many kinds of disease and heal when cut or injured. Compared with a mouse or a rabbit, our skeletal frame is strong. In other ways, our bodies seem less than capable. Other animals can fly unassisted or regenerate whole parts of themselves. In a footrace, we are no match for a cheetah or a horse. However, our bodies are fragile and capable in one important sense: with respect to one another. Though some animals can kill those of their own kind, very few animals can kill or be killed by any other individual of that species. Our soft skin, exposed cranium, and raw intelligence mean that nearly every person is eminently capable and, at the same time, eminently fragile with respect to all the rest. Hobbes’s notion of fragility and ability is limited to our capacity to kill and be killed, but we can expand upon his minimalist claim to get a more full sense of our physical standing in relation to one another. That we are fragile and able is perhaps so much a part of our basic knowledge of what it means to be a body that, even in philosophy, where the obvious is frequently the center of discussion, it is usually of secondary concern. However, by honing in on what is happening to and with bodies in various works of modern and contemporary political thought, we can garner an expansive understanding of this aspect of our physical condition. I begin with a discussion of some basic characteristics of our bodies, transition to an analysis of the ways in which the state of war and the wars of states dramatically transform our capacities, and, finally, drawing on Sartre, discuss the possibility that our simple physical presence is an important aspect of our fragility.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF OUR BODIES Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Michel Foucault, Elaine Scarry, and Sharon Marcus offer us analyses of alienated labor, slavery, discipline, torture, and rape that are situated in larger arguments about the nature of capitalism, the World Spirit, liberalism, creativity, and gendered discourse.

THE FRAGILITY AND ABILITY OF BODIES

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Even in Hobbes’s rudimentary description of our physical condition he makes reference to our capacity to think (“machination”) and coordinate our actions with others (“confederacy with others”). However, each of these thinkers also has something to say about the character of our bodies that fills out Hobbes’s simple observation that our bodies are fragile and able. Karl Marx’s discussion of alienated labor begins with an exploration of our abilities with respect to nature and, in particular, other animals. He argues that we are capable in a “universal” way. Like all animals our bodies have needs and are built to meet those needs but what makes us distinctive is that our bodies are capable of an astonishing array of activities and expressions beyond such needs,3 the capacity for art being of particular note.4 However, despite this ability with respect to nature, our “life activity” can be alienated from us. Marx writes: Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from the life activity of the animal. Only thereby is he a species-being. Or rather, he is only a conscious being—that is, his own life is an object for him—since he is a species-being. Only on that account is his activity a free activity. Alienated labor reverses the relationship in that man, since he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his essence, only a means for his existence.5 Drawing a sharp distinction between conscious life activity and the life of animals, Marx suggests that we have lost sight of our higher possibilities and purposes. Somehow, in a puzzling turn of events, beings that are able to escape the pressing needs of their physical bodies (i.e., their species-beings) find themselves doing, creating, and laboring merely in order to live. In alienated labor, we are, in fact, even lower than animals because we do not make objects of nature as a way of directly serving our own bodily needs (as animals do), nor as a way of expressing our beings (as we can and ought to do). Marx thus poses the question: “If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien and forced activity, to whom then does it belong?”6 The answer, of course, is “other men” (or other species-beings); and it is precisely because of our material relations—the characteristics of our bodies in relation to like bodies—that it is possible for one being to

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alienate another from her labor. Marx does not directly connect alienated labor with our ability to kill and manipulate one another’s bodies, but he comes very close. He writes: [T]he relationship of man to himself is objective and actual to him only through his relationship to other men. If man is related to the product of his labor, to his objectified labor, as to an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, he is so related that another alien, hostile, powerful man independent of him is the lord of this object. If he is unfree in relation to his own activity, he is related to it as bonded activity, activity under the domination, coercion, and yoke of another man.7 Here Marx suggests that the inception of capitalism turns on two ontological facts: (1) Distinctively human labor is possible because of our extraordinary ability to manipulate and create new things from the natural world; and (2) We can alienate one another’s labor by applying that extraordinary ability to manipulate the natural world to one another’s bodies. In drawing a parallel between an “alien, hostile, powerful object independent” of us—i.e., the product we create with our labor—and “an alien, hostile, powerful man”—i.e., the person who alienates us from that product—Marx is referencing the ability of our bodies, as bodies, to manipulate other like bodies. When he invokes the image of the “yoke,” the possibility of others corralling our fragile and limited material frame is not so implicit. But he does not expect us to actually wear the yoke. Alienated labor is labor that becomes but a “means for . . . existence.” Capitalism extracts labor by holding forth the possibility of the body’s death in a particular way. By grabbing one another’s products and bodies, we can deprive other bodies of their capacity to meet their animal needs. Supplementing Hobbes’s description of our potential for killing and being killed, Marx offers up the notion that we can deprive and be deprived, starve and be starved, take homes and be homeless. Between Hobbes and Marx, temporally and otherwise, we find Hegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit sets out to reduce bodies and physical life to a secondary status, but the “incidental” role the body plays is instructive.8 If Marx’s notion of alienated labor relies upon our ability


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to play upon one another’s physical capacities and needs, Hegel’s discussion of slavery suggests that Hobbes’s potential for killing and being killed, in and of itself, can extract labor from bodies. If Marx shows us that alienation from one’s labor is made possible by a structure, and by “men,” who threaten deprivation and, at times, the death of other men, as Hegel describes it, the consciousness of the bondsman is “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.”9 The difference here is perhaps a matter of degree. Certainly, from a historical and ethical standpoint there are many points of contact and divergence between wage labor and slavery and Marx and Hegel. What is notable for my purposes, however, is that the body is an entity that allows for periodic and subtle threats to its existence as well as a sustained and comprehensive “seizure.” Indeed, we are able to make one another work even to the point of creating a(nother) “hand” and, conversely, vulnerable to the whims of others even to the point of becoming but an extension of another “being-foritself ”10—all because we are able managers and killers of bodies, as well as fragile mortals. In Hobbes, Marx, and Hegel, we find three articulations of physical imposition and vulnerability that ultimately turn on the possibility of death, but the body allows for still more intricate manipulation. The purpose of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is not really to provide a meticulous catalogue of various characteristics of our bodies in relation to one another, but it does provide just that. With respect to our fragility, Foucault describes a broad and terrifying range of possibilities. Our bodies can be drawn, whipped, beaten, dismembered, and beheaded. As “docile bodies” they can also be timed, placed, coordinated, and otherwise trained. With respect to our abilities, Foucault’s narrative is constructed to demonstrate that technologies of discipline and punishment have developed and improved over recent centuries while raising troubling questions about such “improvement.” Certainly, his historical claims are important in their own right, but here I am more interested in the fact that a “political economy of the body” and a “micro-physics of power” exist than how they have changed over time. We have always maintained a wide range of abilities with respect to one another’s bodies. For millennia, even without modern innovations in

20


surveillance, architecture, and weaponry, we have managed to grab hold of bodies in order to incarcerate, train, and destroy one another. That other like bodies can cause pain in destroying or manipulating bodies is a crucial aspect of extracting labor, enslaving others, instilling discipline, and meting out punishment. However, the ability to act on our capacity for pain also provides for possibilities that warrant separate attention. Foucault mentions torture on occasion but is more concerned with describing “the gentle way of punishment.” Elaine Scarry, however, argues that torture is a demonstration of the fact that “the claims of the body [can be made to] utterly nullify the claims of the world.”11 Scarry describes all manner of ways for us to cause one another pain: confinements that contort the body; implements that poke, prod, or burn the flesh; assaults on our most sensitive nerve endings; and the use of our sensory capacities, to name but a few. She notes that during torture: Each source of strength and delight, each means of moving out into the world or moving the world in to oneself, becomes a means of turning the body back in on itself, forcing the body to feed on the body: the eyes are only access points for scorching light, the ears for brutal noises; eating, the act at once so incredible and so simple in which the world is literally taken into the body, is replaced by rituals of starvation involving either no food or food that nauseates. . . . The prisoner’s body—in its physical strengths, in its sensory powers, in its needs and wants, in its ways of self-delight . . . is made a weapon against him on behalf of the enemy, made to be the enemy.12 The sufferings described here complicate and add nuance to the notion of fragility. Our bodies are robust in the sense that they can “endure” the most profound pain, and yet this strength is precisely the “fragility” that allows us to experience torture. If our bodies could not survive such things, the pain would not be possible; if the body dies, torture has ceased. With respect to our abilities, Scarry suggests that it is the transforming of the pain of another into our object that is the crucial “utility” of torture. I discuss objectification below, but here we only need mention that we can mobilize our bodies to handle other bodies in a


21

particularly horrifying way: we can operate in the space between life and death by perceiving the possibility of eliciting and sustaining the pain of another living, sometimes barely alive, body. If torture acts upon every “source of strength and delight,” rape is in some sense another articulation of that set of phenomena. Yet rape too deserves separate attention, if only because what rape is and how we talk about it are central controversies in efforts to understand and stop it. Sharon Marcus’s work shows the extent to which the issue of our physical ability and fragility holds sway in discussions of rape. She writes: [L]anguage structures . . . the would-be rapist’s feelings of powerfulness and our commonplace sense of paralysis when threatened with rape. As intractably real as these physical sensations may appear to us, however, they appear so because the language of rape speaks through us, freezing our own sense of force and affecting the would-be rapist’s perceptions of our lack of strength.13 On the one hand, Marcus is concerned with demonstrating the ways in which language structures the position and disposition of our bodies— that is, creates the physical reality of rape. On the other hand, her argument is not so much (or not only) a retort to materialist ontologies, but the offering up of a different understanding of the characteristics of our bodies. That is, in explicitly claiming that language structures our material relations she implicitly claims that society at large (and some feminists) accept “a rape script” that assumes some things that are simply empirically wrong. By encouraging men’s “feelings of powerfulness” and “freezing [women’s] sense of force,” the rape script erroneously genders physical vulnerability and ability. In this respect, she seems to be relying on Hobbes-like assumptions. She critiques strategies of legal deterrence by saying they attempt to persuade men not to rape. Thus they assume that men simply have the power to rape and concede this primary power to them, at best men can secondarily be dissuaded from using this power by means of threatened punishment from a masculinized state or legal system. They do not envision strategies which will

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M enable women to sabotage men’s power to rape, which will empower women to take the ability to rape completely out of men’s hands.14

Though it is not clear what she means by “take completely,” she certainly means to suggest that women’s physical abilities with respect to men are woefully underestimated. If she means that women can kill or physically injure men, than she is pointing to our natural equality. Certainly, the weakest has strength enough to kill and destroy a rapist.15 Though Marcus does not do so, it also seems plausible to take that claim one step farther. Hobbes’s argument that even the weakest has the ability to kill the strongest applies to rape itself: Nature has made us “so equal in the faculties of body and mind [that] when all is reckoned together” the weakest has strength enough to rape the strongest whether “by secret machination, or by confederacy with others.”16 Without dismissing the special historical and cultural significance of rape or the role of rape in creating gendered bodies and vice versa, we might say that rape represents a certain possibility that attends all sexual bodies. That our bodies are the site of sexual pleasures and are built to assist in their own reproduction creates distinctive kinds of abilities and vulnerabilities. We can inflict harm, force sexual stimulation or sexually stimulate ourselves by way of another’s body; and our bodies can be stimulated or provide for the sexual stimulation of other bodies. We have the ability to maim, mutilate, and stimulate other bodies either by attacking or grabbing another’s genitals or by forcing that body to come into contact with our own sexual organs in order to stimulate ourselves; and our bodies are vulnerable to such attacks from others. Of course, as feminists point out, these possibilities are leveraged in manifold ways by men with respect to women—from sexual harassment to the construction of public spaces as zones of sexual vulnerability.17 In this way, feminists show that the physical possibilities that attend the sexual aspects of our bodies allow not only for the brutality of rape but for the kind of nuanced discipline Foucault describes. But these gendered possibilities mask a more general proposition as to what our bodies entail: our ability to rape and our vulnerability to being raped, irrespective of gender.18


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Beginning with a brief description of Hobbes’s understanding of the characteristics of our bodies, the notion that we are fragile and able helps us perceive a wide array of assumptions and assertions about our physical capacities and limitations. An understanding of the body as fragile and able is an essential aspect of the way various thinkers understand alienated labor, slavery, discipline and punishment, torture, and rape. Each case offers novel descriptions of the characteristics of our bodies and our capacity to employ such characteristics: Marx describes how we can alienate one another from our own activities by creating structures that hold out the possibility that our bodies can be deprived or harmed. Hegel argues that we can enslave one another by calling attention to another’s mortality and thereby hold her or him in fear of death. Foucault shows that discipline and punishment turn on the fact that our bodies can be dismembered, incarcerated, trained, and routinized. Scarry details our ability to identify and act upon one another’s sensory capacities and the pain centers of the body. By extension, Marcus demonstrates that rape inheres in our ability, irrespective of gender, to attack the sexual aspects of one another’s physical being. Taken together, these possibilities represent a formidable and frightening picture of what our physical being with one another can entail.

THE STATE OF WAR AND THE WARS OF STATES In some ways, war is nothing more than another possibility attending the characteristics of our bodies, another thing we can do when we are in one another’s physical presence. But war has a special relationship to our fragility and ability because unlike alienated labor, slavery, discipline, torture, and rape, the very fact of the contest reflects our condition of physical equality. Having set forth the notion that the dissolution of the body is the worst evil19 and that our bodies are equally fragile and able with respect to one another, Hobbes argues, to use Michael Oakeshott’s phrase, that “the nature of man is the predicament of mankind.”20 Most descriptions of that quandary, including Oakeshott’s, focus on Hobbes’s suggestion that we have a propensity for vainglory (Hobbes foregrounds the problems produced by pride and,

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for good measure, invokes our tendency to misuse language and fear a non-existent spiritual world).21 However, Hobbes also argues that the desire to survive and our physical condition alone are sufficient to bring us to a state of war.22 That is, he concludes that the simple fact of our fragility and ability combined with our desire to survive predispose us to a condition where “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”23 Hobbes is intent on offering a dramatic and minimalist rhetorical representation of the war of all against all because he wants to call us to a certain awareness. The state of war is the moment, or the “tract of time,” when we become cognizant of both our physical vulnerability and our ability.24 If we are being raped or enslaved the vulnerability of our bodies is called to our attention; if we are the line boss or the torturer we immediately grasp our ability with respect to other bodies. When we are at war, however, we are vulnerable and capable in the same moment. When a soldier shoots at another body from behind a tree, she fears for her life and takes aim at another’s body in the same instant; she is concerned with her defenses because she is aware of her fragility while attentive to her gun as facilitator of her ability. At these moments, we begin to feel, know, and understand the predicament that, according to Hobbes, is the central preoccupation of any egoistic rational being.25 Yet the state of war is not only particularly emblematic of our physical equality, it lurks behind perhaps the most important circumstance where one body gets the upper hand on another: the state. In this important respect, Marx’s capitalism, Foucault’s discipline and punishment,26 Scarry’s torture,27 and Marcus’s masculinized state relate to Hobbes in another way. Each suggests that certain characteristics of our bodies, characteristics that are more or less equally distributed among us, are made unequal by our organizational capabilities. If Hobbes provides the first coherent justification for the foundation of the secular state,28 his description of it suggests that we can never escape our physical fragility and ability. While not exclusively a physical rule, Hobbes emphasizes the destructive power of leviathan’s “public sword” and makes it clear that the sovereign’s destructive ability and the ability of individuals to destroy one another in the state of war are one and the same power:


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And in [the sovereign] consisteth the essence of the commonwealth, which (to define it) is one person, of whose acts a great multitude . . . have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient . . .29 The basis of the state is war in the sense that the forces of the state of war constitute the state. The state allows us to escape the state of war, but in another way the modern secular state is a state of war.30 Far from destroying our mutual fragility and ability, our capabilities and fragilities are all at once enhanced, denigrated, and distributed by bureaucracy and social and linguistic structures. Hobbes emphasizes that the state relies on the inexorable physical characteristics of bodies, but citizen bodies are simultaneously mobilized and made submissive by interjecting the not so physical capacity to organize and coordinate with one another.31 Workers, women, and criminals are caught up in, even produced, in a similar crucible. Aristotle argues that our capacity to organize around a particular idea of justice makes us political, but Hobbes suggests that we can trace even that propensity back to our bodies: Any idea of justice will do because the fear that the sovereign inspires is nothing but a transformation of our fear in, and of, the state of war. Hobbes does not really provide us with a detailed account of how our physical fragility and ability are transformed by the distinctive logic of war. However, a practitioner of war turned theorist gives us the specific rationale. The fact that war involves, all at once, the attempt to physically subdue bodies and the possibility of being physically subdued must lead us to extremes, or what Carl von Clausewitz calls “reciprocal actions.” As the use of physical power to the utmost extent by no means excludes the cooperation of the intelligence, it follows that he who uses force unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved, must obtain a superiority if his adversary uses less vigour in its application. The former then dictates the law to the latter, and both proceed to extremities to which the only limitations are those imposed by the amount of counteracting force on each side.32

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This first reciprocal action, the “tendency to destroy the enemy” and push the use of force to its “utmost bounds,” is accompanied by two others. The second relates to disarmament, or the attempt to “place [the enemy] in a situation which is more oppressive to him than the sacrifice which we demand,”33 and the third refers to our unending attempts to increase both “the sum of the available means and the strength of the Will.”34 We can go a long way toward understanding the capability and fragility of our bodies by limiting ourselves to the perimeter of our bodies per se. In each of the phenomena we explored in the first section of this chapter, we found references to physical possibilities and vulnerabilities that do not necessarily involve technological innovations. Individuals can enslave other individuals with the use of no, or very few, implements. Our capacity for slavery relies simply upon our use of one another’s mortality—our ability to hold and be held in fear of our lives. Likewise with rape (our sexual capacities and features), torture (our capacity to suffer and cause pain), discipline and punishment (our capacity to train, manipulate, and incarcerate bodies), and labor (our capacity to deprive and be deprived). Wars sometimes occur with a minimum of tools. The fight, or the struggle can consist of hand-tohand combat.35 Such phenomena seem to require nothing more than the simultaneous presence of more than one living body, regardless of our intellectual or technological development. However, each of these attempts to grasp and destroy bodies can be vastly enhanced by other factors. When Hobbes speaks of our natural physical equality he also mentions the use of our minds and the potential to kill others through “conspiracy with others.” In arguing that the underlying logic of warfare leads us to pursue extremes, Clausewitz gives us a full sense of what it means to enjoy “the cooperation of the intelligence” in our attempts to subdue one another. The employment of our creative and intellectual capacities, in combination with our ability for social organization, change the parameters of our fragility and vulnerability. They change the meaning, boundaries of, and possibilities attending “the body.” With respect to ability, those possibilities are astonishing. All the wonders of technology can be mustered to control, attack, manipulate, and destroy bodies. Writing in the nineteenth century, Clausewitz cites


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the invention of gunpowder and improvements in firearms technology as “sufficient proofs” that the most civilized nations are not immune from “the tendency to destroy the adversary which lies at the bottom of the conception of War.”36 Of course, in our time the minimal physical act of pressing a few buttons can initiate the destruction of an entire city. Electricity and medical equipment can be used to induce new kinds of pain and physical suffering.37 Foucault details how the architecture of a building can facilitate the disciplining of bodies. The possibilities that attend social organization are no less terrifying.38 We can raise an army committed to killing another group of living bodies. All governments are, in part, organized to keep in check, destroy, expel, and/or manipulate the bodies of criminals with the help of the police force and citizens. By coordinating our practices and routinizing the deprivation of bodies we create sweatshops and by routinizing the destruction of bodies we create rape, labor, and concentration camps.39 Fragility is, in some ways, proportionally related to our abilities. If we can do these things to others’ bodies, then such things can be done to ours. The same body that can launch a nuclear strike is vulnerable to the effects of radiation. Hobbes’s assertion that we are like bodies—that our bodies are all remarkably fragile—is affirmed by the existence of firearms, let alone more advanced weapons: the strongest body on the planet can be killed by the weakest with the relatively simple technology of the gun. Yet fragility cannot be reduced to the flip side of ability because, in the same way that the abilities of our bodies are in some respects extended into the world through the use of technology and by way of social organization, our bodies can be “protected” and privileged by way of technology and social organization. We build moats, walls, bunkers, and weapons that destroy weapons. Helmets, body armor and mace, are all attempts to directly shore up our bodies’ natural vulnerabilities without necessarily improving our abilities. In some cases, we coordinate specifically for the purposes of defense, for instance, when we post a person in the castle tower, organize a Coast Guard, monitor an estate, or institute a Neighborhood Watch or Take Back the Night program.40 Clausewitz suggests that our extraordinary attempts to extend our abilities, and protect ourselves from the abilities of others, can be explained by the mutual vulnerability and capability that is revealed in the context of war. Perhaps our attempts to create novel ways of

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disciplining, raping, torturing, and alienating one another are in part an outgrowth of our deep-seated understanding of our mutual fragility and ability—a combination of our sense of the truth of Hobbes’s ontological claims and our deducing the logic of extremes from the experience of actual war. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud suggests another explanation. He writes, With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Motor power places gigantic forces at his disposal, which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ships and aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements; by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance. . . . These things that, by his science and technology, man has brought on this earth, on which he first appeared as a feeble animal organism and on which each individual of his species must once more make its entry . . . as a helpless suckling—these things do not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an actual fulfillment of every—or of almost every—fairy-tale wish. All these assets he may lay claim to as his cultural acquisition. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. . . . Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.41 Troubles at times, indeed. We began the discussion of the capabilities and possibilities of our bodies with Marx’s suggestion that what makes us distinct from animals is our “universal” ability with respect to the world—as opposed to animals who produce only “under the domination of immediate physical need.” Freud reminds us that in our ability to imagine ourselves differently and act in concert with others we have extended our physical abilities to nearly limitless heights. We have also made ourselves vulnerable to complete destruction.


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THE FACT OF OUR PHYSICALITY Before straying too much farther from the body, we should discuss a final aspect of our fragility and ability—the very fact of our physicality and the attendant possibility of objectification. The idea that we know one another as objects has already begun to appear in the passages cited above—“the powerful object” is lord of “this object [i.e., the laboring body],” Hegel’s self-consciousness involves the “pure negation of the objective mode,”42 and Scarry tells us that in torture “the subjective characteristics of pain are objectified.”43 In each case, a discussion of various specific physical capacities and vulnerabilities is coupled with a more general allusion to our simple physical presence and being. Along with these explicit references to our status as objects, the Western philosophical tradition is rife with references to our status as animals, which usually intend to “bring us down to earth” or call attention to the fact that we are bodies. We have already seen Marx discuss “the life activity of the animal” and Freud write of civilization as an attempt to transcend the “feeble animal organism.” Similar tropes appear in similar contexts when Aristotle, for instance, writes that the art of war is in some sense a natural mode of acquisition. Hunting is a part of that art; and hunting ought to be practiced—not only against wild animals, but also against human beings who are intended by nature to be ruled by others and refuse to obey that intention—because war of this order is naturally just.44 In Mill we read that people in the lesser stages of intellectual and rational development (i.e., “savages” or “uncivilized races”) require, at least temporarily, the work of a government that “is almost always the work of an absolute ruler, deriving his power either from religion or military prowess; very often from foreign arms,”45 a government “which possesses force, but seldom uses it: a parental despotism.”46 Setting the ethical implications of such claims aside, what is at issue is the seemingly excessive physicality of those who are “hunted,” destroyed, or disciplined. Though both Mill and Aristotle seem to be identifying certain bodies as “more body” (and correspondingly less intellectual and

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morally capable) than others, we can take away a more general point: even if we ungracefully grant ourselves higher intellectual abilities than others, all of us are inexorably and inevitably bodies; and that very fact is closely related to certain kinds of possibilities and limitations. Aristotle and Mill do not argue that certain more intelligent or developed beings are not bodies, just that others are more beholden to that aspect of their being.47 If some thinkers invoke the physical fact of our bodies by alluding to our status as objects or animals, existentialists and phenomenologists attempt to assess more directly the possibilities that surround physical being as such. Despite various complications that I will address in later chapters, Jean-Paul Sartre’s influential account of objectification (or what he calls “objectivation”) in Being and Nothingness fits quite well with the notion that we are mutually fragile and able. He writes of being “moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice”48 to look through a keyhole. Prior to being discovered, Sartre experiences what we can call an initial objectification: our simple presence in a world of objects. He apprehends the situation through the keyhole in “a pure mode of losing myself in the world,”49 if he feels jealousy it is a consequence of “nothing except the simple objective fact that there is a sight to be seen behind the door.”50 A second objectification occurs when he hears footsteps in the hall. He is provoked to the discovery of the self. But Sartre not only discovers himself because another sees him, he “is [himself] presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other.”51 In this way, Sartre describes how we become an “object-forothers.”52 The cogito and awareness of the fact of our physical being elicit emotions such as anger, pride, shame,53 and fear. Fear . . . implies that I appear to myself as threatened by virtue of my being a presence in the world. . . . It is the object which I am which is in danger in the world and which as such, because of its indissoluble unity of being with the being which I have to be, can involve in its own ruin the ruin of the Foritself which I have to be. Fear is therefore the discovery of my being-as-object on the occasion of the appearance of another object in my perceptive field.54


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As Sartre describes it, such emotions are wholly appropriate to the possibility of being-looked-at. For at the core of these emotions is the fundamental vulnerability entailed in our status as physical beings. He asserts that “in the shock that seizes me when I apprehend the Other’s look, this happens—that suddenly I experience a subtle alienation of all my possibilities, which are now associated with objects of the world, far from me in the midst of the world.”55 We have seen that our ability to grasp and manipulate one another’s bodies is wide-ranging; Sartre here adds to the panoply the most delicate objective relation yet. Without endorsing Sartre’s not so subtle suggestion that such alienation characterizes every human relationship, our status as objects in and of itself, coupled with our capacity for looking and being looked at, is another articulation of our ability and fragility. By viewing one another’s physical being, we can inspire shame and fear. With the simple act of looking, we can constrain, humiliate and alienate one another. I might add that we can be touched but we can also touch, we can be overheard and also hear, and so on.56 Put another way, others can call our animality and physicality to our attention, but we can return the favor and note that they are “brutes” as well. In other words, so long as we remain bodies, the objectified can objectify—and we will perhaps at times be driven to do so in order to “defend” ourselves.57 In this chapter, I have attempted to give depth and breadth to Hobbes’s assertion that we are fragile and able with respect to one another. From a diverse group of thinkers discussing a diverse set of phenomena we find implicit or explicit assertions about the character of our bodies. We can kill and be killed, deprive and be deprived, hold in fear and be held in fear of our lives. Our bodies can be drawn, whipped, beaten, dismembered, beheaded, timed, placed, coordinated, trained, and we can do the same to like bodies. We can elicit and sustain pain and have pain elicited and sustained in us. We can force sexual stimulation and attack one another’s genitals, and the sexual aspects of our bodies can likewise be stimulated, maimed, and attacked. If none of these physical characteristics is sufficient to explain or describe the phenomena under consideration, labor, slavery, rape, and the like would not be possible if our bodies were different. Indeed,

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many of these phenomena are not possible among other living organisms. Turtles cannot hold one another in fear of their lives. Amoebas cannot exploit one another’s sexuality. Certainly, most of the animal world is not characterized by our distinctive mutual ability and fragility. If discipline and rape, for instance, are common enough among other animals, particular instances often turn on the one-sided muscular superiority of the parent or the most dominant male (and on occasion, female). Among homo sapiens, nearly everyone is vulnerable and able with respect to nearly everyone else. Children can and do kill parents. The relatively physically weak can and do rape the relatively strong. Our fragility and ability is profound. Hobbes suggests that in this condition we find a troubling predicament with dire consequences. Only through organizing our physical capacities and vulnerabilities can we hope to avoid instability and chaos. The foundation of the modern state inheres in the observation that we are physically equal to one another and must therefore mobilize and subdue our physical capabilities in one fell swoop. Through organization, our abilities can be enhanced, our fragilities exploited, and both, temporarily at least, distributed inequitably among individuals. This is the state of war, but in Clausewitz we find the most bold and detailed analysis of the logic of warfare itself. In Clausewitz’s theory, our mutual ability and vulnerability pushes us to extremes. Citing the will to destroy and the available means to do it, Clausewitz brings our technological and social capacities to bear by way of nothing more than the logic of “reciprocal actions.” In this way, the meaning of our “physical” fragility and ability is expanded and tested. If war seems to draw our other capacities to it, each of the phenomena we have discussed is changed by our nonphysical capacities. Nuclear weapons and high-tech prisons, well-trained armies and institutionalized sexism, the Great Wall and heat-seeking missiles, all turn on our ability to create tools and coordinate with one another, bringing new meaning to the terms fragile and able. Finally, Sartre demonstrates that our simple physical presence with one another holds the potential for threatening and painful interactions. If each of the phenomena we have discussed relies on a particular understanding of the character of our bodies, they all rely on the assumption that we are physical beings. Sartre shows us that even with-


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out those other possibilities, we are fragile and able simply because we are objects.58 Taken together, these observations and assumptions give us a stark picture of our physical condition, and the features we have identified here are an inexorable part of our condition for the foreseeable future. In particular moments, one or another of us can be made more vulnerable. The tortured, raped, and enslaved are not soothed by the more general proposition that we are mutually vulnerable and capable. In fact, institutions and technologies, social structures and the marshaling of tools and implements, have created conditions where millions are relatively more fragile and vulnerable while others are relatively more physically capable in a given moment. Yet history shows that the most physically capable beings among us are always and inevitably susceptible to the apparently most incapable beings among us. The strength of institutions and organizations is their very weakness—dependence upon careful coordination with others makes them vulnerable to diffuse and independent actors. The strength of technological development is its very weakness—complicated instruments fail and a counter technology is always in the making. Moreover, no matter how “strong” an individual may be, anyone who dares to be in the presence of a like being is vulnerable. Whether one is at the helm of an army or has access to a nuclear device, each individual is physically fragile. Only hermits or hermetically sealed bodies can dream of being invulnerable. Physically being with one another is full of horrific possibilities.


TWO

Th e U t i l i t y o f B o d i e s

THE PICTURE OF OUR physical condition I sketched in chapter 1 is not only horrific, but peculiar. In order to create a catalogue of material conditions, I have dehistoricized and decontextualized phenomena that get our attention precisely because of the context in which they occur. The best doctors cause pain and crack open bodies, and lovers manipulate one another’s bodies and look upon one another, but they can do so without torturing, disciplining, or objectifying. Our material condition makes rape, alienated labor, and war possible but those acts are not simply a matter of bodies.The purpose of this chapter, then, is to tentatively reintegrate subjectivity into these and other phenomena because we cannot muster a useful meaning of violence on the basis of the characteristics of our bodies alone. I say “tentatively” because proponents of violence often assume that it is its undeniable and irrevocable physical quality that makes violence useful and necessary. Offering a credible pacifism, then, requires confronting a conception of violence that stays as attentive to the characteristics of our bodies as possible. Since Hannah Arendt, the effort to develop robust and clear definitions has been moribund in political theory, perhaps because the worst of such efforts resemble apolitical and tone-deaf attempts to hold out against the linguistic turn. However, extant uses of the word violence in modern and contemporary theory are so utterly slippery and amorphous that articulating a clear conception of it is essential to any effort to critique or challenge its utility. I begin by reviewing some of the contradictory ways that the term is employed. Drawing on Clausewitz, 35

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I then develop a notion of physical violence as the use of bodies to transform or destroy subjectivity. I conclude with some thoughts about the promises and limitations of this conception of violence.

SOME MEANINGS OF VIOLENCE We find remarkable ambiguity in the use of the word violence, both within and among crucial philosophical texts. The confusion usually surrounds the degree, importance, or nature of contextual and subjective factors as related to physical destruction. Take, for instance, the “violence” in Leviathan and Discipline and Punish. Though Hobbes is careful to define almost all of his key terms, he never defines violence. The most important manifestation of this problem is our inability to discern whether violence is practiced by the sovereign, or only individuals in a state of war. Hobbes has no qualms about describing the destructive force of the state, writing of the “public sword,” terror, and punishment. However, the destruction wrought by leviathan is of a different type than that of individuals in the state of war, because “whatsoever [the sovereign] doth, it can be no injury to any of his subjects.”1 Hobbes defines injury as “breach or violation of covenant . . . consisting in some action or omission, which is therefore called UNJUST.”2 By associating injury with violation, which is of course etymologically related to violence, we might conclude that the sovereign cannot do violence. However, when Hobbes uses the term violence in the context of the state of war,3 it does not—indeed, cannot—refer to a breach of covenant, because the state of war is precisely a lack of covenant. If we hold Hobbes to his own exacting standards (no less than the first ten chapters of The Elements of Law, for instance, set out to carefully define key concepts), we are at a loss as to how or what sort of physical actions constitute violence. This, despite the fact that the sovereign’s destructive ability and the ability of individuals in the state of war to destroy one another is one and the same “thing.” In Foucault we find a similarly ambiguous usage on another issue of critical importance. A close reading of some passages suggests he does not consider the type of discipline and punishment his work explores to be violence. For instance, he writes that

THE UTILITY OF BODIES

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in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain “political economy” of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use “lenient” methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue.4 Speaking of the ways in which the body is involved in the “political field,” he elaborates further and uses the term violence again, writing: [S]ubjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence or ideology; it can also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material elements, and yet without involving violence [et pourtant ne pas être violent]; it may be calculated organized, technically thought out; it may be subtle, make use neither of weapons nor of terror and yet remain of a physical order.5 Foucault’s use of the term here suggests that an action can involve “pitting force against force,” and yet not be violence. Instead, violence is the “bloody punishment.” “Subjection” can be direct and physical and “make use of neither weapons nor of terror,” but violence seems to refer to actions that do involve weapons and terror. So some of the various possibilities that attend our body are “violent” and others simply bear “on material elements” or are “of a physical order.”6 A few pages later, however, Foucault upends his own distinction. He writes: “[T]o analyse the political investment of the body and the microphysics of power presupposes . . . that one abandons [qu’on renounce]— where power is concerned—the violence-ideology opposition.”7 It is difficult to discern the significance of the qualifier “where power is concerned” here. Perhaps Foucault means to suggest that his attempt to dissolve the distinction between power and knowledge assists us in eliminating the distinction between violence and nonphysical phenomena such as ideology. But it seems unlikely that he means to erase entirely the theoretical distinction between, and the historical development of “bloody” violence in relation to more subtle discipline that figures so prominently in the opening passages of Discipline and Punish. At any rate, he intends to offer an analysis wherein “violence” not only encompasses the difference between more and less bloody manipulations of the body

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but nonphysical, ideational manipulations as well. Both Hobbes and Foucault suggest that “violence” should account for the ways in which certain kinds of subjective relations inflect and inform bodily manipulations, but through their own use of the word each inspires confusion as to exactly what “violence” entails in that regard. I will reserve some of the more extensive treatments of the concept of violence for chapter 4, but two other examples are instructive here. In some ways, Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” seems to be concerned with developing a conception of violence that sticks close to the body and draws together much of what was discussed in chapter 1. For instance, an important purpose of the essay is to connect warfare and the discipline and punishment of the state,8 and he suggests alienated labor is violence.9 He also asserts that language, or “the proper sphere of understanding,” “is wholly inaccessible to violence.”10 However, at other times, Benjamin uses the term to reference events that have little to do with our fragility and ability. He asserts that organized labor is “probably the only legal subject entitled to exercise violence” because it holds the right to strike, which amounts to extortion.11 Further complicating matters, while this sort of “political” strike is violent, the proletarian general strike is not, for Benjamin says, quoting Sorel, it announces an “ ‘indifference toward material gain.’ ” Adding yet another complication and qualification, Benjamin says that the general strike can fade into “revolutionary violence” and something he calls “unalloyed violence.” This last sort of violence is “pure,” “divine,” and “sovereign,” whereas “mythical, lawmaking violence” and “law-preserving, administrative violence” are “pernicious.”12 To recap: Violence is inaccessible to language and understanding and yet it is mythical and nearly synonymous with extortion. It involves warfare, the law of states, and alienated labor, but also the divine, and strikes that aim for material gain.Though Benjamin’s essay is not without value, such usage is more or less haphazard.13 Finally, we should note another, less promiscuous but still troubling use of the term. John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government suggests that violence occurs not only between fragile and able bodies, but against certain things attending our bodies, that is, our “whole property.”14 At the same time, references to blood and beasts leave no doubt that for Locke violence is closely linked to our status as physical beings as well:


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[A] criminal, who having renounced reason, the common rule and measure God hath given to mankind, hath, by the unjust violence [emphasis added] and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or a tyger, one of those wild savage beasts, with whom men can have no society nor security: and upon this is grounded that great law of nature, Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.15 Like Hobbes, Locke does not use the word violence when speaking of the blood spilled by the properly constituted state and here contrasts violence with the enforcement of natural law (as consistent with reason and God), so we are left to wonder whether retributive and reparative justice qualifies as “violence.” What is clear is that Locke believes justice involves calling attention to the criminal’s status as an animal or the reduction of the criminal to his or her objective status as a “savage beast.”16 Thus, whether a bloody act can be called violence seems to involve determining whether it is done to a relatively beastly body (in which case it is not violence) or by a relatively beastly body (in which case it is).17 Taken all together, Locke’s conception of violence manages to encompass the destruction of nonsentient, nonfeeling objects claimed by certain fragile and able bodies and at the same time excludes the destruction of certain (relatively less beastly) fragile and able bodies themselves. Violence appears at important moments in essential texts and is used in a remarkably inconsistent and even contradictory fashion. The legal status of bodies, degree of physical harm, and social and spiritual context are sometimes relevant and sometimes irrelevant factors, depending on whom we consult. The state is portrayed both as quintessentially violent and incapable of doing violence. Ideology, words, threats, the divine, objectification, the destruction of property, and identical acts of bloody destruction are violence and not violence. But the trouble with these usages is not so much that they fail to reduce certain physical interactions to violence. In each of these texts the term is used in a way that suggests violence occurs when certain subjective relations inflect and inform bodily manipulations. The problem is that no political theorist offers us a coherent and generalized

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conception of these inflections that holds up across various contexts, philosophical or otherwise.

BODIES AS A MEANS TO SUBJECTIVITY In chapter 1, I touched on Clausewitz’s theory of war, but he attests that his true aim is to develop a vocabulary to describe the nature of actual warfare and, in particular, how wars are won or lost. There are three components of what might be called his “theory of actual war.” First, war is limited because of something Clausewitz calls the “political object.”18 The political object allows Clausewitz to masterfully navigate specificity and generality. War is not a particular physical act or a particular aim in a particular context and, in that sense, we can speak of “the political purpose” of war in the abstract. Yet whatever goal ultimately inhabits that abstraction defines the character of that particular war. Second, political purposes are achieved by changing the will of others. So not only are the parameters of war delineated by particular, subjective, political purposes but these goals are achieved by changing or manipulating the particular, subjective purposes of others. Finally, the distinctive feature of war is that we take up others’ bodies in order to achieve these purposes. The character of the political goal determines the character and intensity of the physical means, but the distinctive means, which he calls both “violence” and “force,” is always physical. Wars occur when people take up and destroy one another’s bodies in a contest of political ends. We should perhaps not be surprised that a philosopher of war would provide us with these sorts of theoretical insights. War has been fought for so many diverse purposes that it seems to necessitate a philosophical approach to “purpose.” The desire for resources (money, land, goods, colonies), justice (freedom, independence, equality, virtue), particular political systems (democracy, socialism, monarchy, theocracy), or just plain survival can all be accommodated by Clausewitz’s notion of political purpose.19 Other “reasons” for going to war, such as pride, duty, jealousy, honor, greed, vanity, and revenge, animate the more concrete aims of war and take the form of “the will” and morale, concepts that figure prominently in Clausewitz’s discussion of “fighting powers.”


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Clausewitz argues that our ability to threaten and kill one another to achieve our purposes is not so much an indication of chaos and disorder but a kind of law wherein the character and composition of the social body turns on “the decision by arms.”20 Where we find ourselves unable to achieve the political and social world we desire through other means, we can appeal to a “supreme court” that everyone must stand before, presumably because we are all unavoidably physical beings.21 He also argues that two individuals in a duel or a wrestling match involve the same fundamental dynamics as the physical relations of whole societies at war. Combined with his famous dictum that war is “a continuation of political commerce,”22 and given his own use of the closest German term for violence (gewalt), this theory of actual war is readily adapted into a theory of violence.23 Clausewitz suggests that violence is the use of another’s body in order to submit or destroy their will for some purpose. (Or, in keeping with the notion that we are as fragile as we are able: violence is the use of our body by another, who intends to submit or destroy our will for their purpose or purposes.) Violence on this definition involves the use of the body in order to change the character of subjectivity. The will is not the whole of subjectivity, but when the will is affected it changes our disposition and perhaps even our personality. Clausewitz also contemplates the destruction of the opponents’ will, and thereby subjectivity, if the means are available and the political purpose warrants such extreme measures.24 So this conception of violence encompasses two related activities: Taking up, manipulating, and/or harming bodies shapes subjectivity by affecting the will and purposes of the living. Killing bodies eliminates certain expressions of subjectivity altogether.25 Violence involves mustering our physical fragility and ability in order to achieve purposes, purposes that require changing the will and disposition of others. By providing a basis for this conception of violence, Clausewitz offers us something unique and significant. A Clausewitzian theory of violence is unlike any other extant theory because it has extraordinary breadth and yet maintains clearly delineated borders. The parameters of such a theory are simple enough: First, one person or group has a purpose that can be realized through a change in or the elimination of the disposition of another or others. Second, that person or group attempts to achieve that change in subjectivity by taking up or destroying the

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bodies of those others. These two parameters bring together an extraordinarily diverse set of activities. In their analyses of rape, torture, discipline, alienated labor, and slavery, political theorists have come across the various ways people use bodies to attempt to achieve changes in or destroy the dispositions of others. Clausewitz helps us notice the wide variety of purposes involved in these attempts, and also that the body becomes strictly a means. As Marx describes it, an employer’s capacity to deprive another is a means to her or his pleasure.26 Hegel depicts almost precisely the same relation between lord and bondsman,27 and Foucault’s concern with “the political economy of the body” builds on just this sort of thinking. Scarry argues that the “need for information” is a false pretence for the means of inflicting pain, but she describes a more or less true purpose when she says that “the fiction of power [is] the final product and outcome of torture.”28 In Marcus, rape is understood as a way of creating gendered understandings of bodies that suggests to men that they can use women’s bodies as they will.29 The notion that we can use one another’s bodies as a means to achieve political purposes is ubiquitous in political philosophy—in Aristotle’s description of war,30 Malcolm X’s call to use any means necessary,31 Hobbes’s suggestion that death is the summum malum,32 and Machiavelli’s assertion that those who use violence are only blamed if the results are not good.33 Adapting Clausewitz’s theory of actual war into a theory of violence requires acknowledging that the use of bodies for purposes does not always produce the contentious blow for blow dynamics that distinguishes war (as well as duels and wrestling matches) from violence more generally. Some victories are won more easily than others. More worrisome perhaps is that adapting his theory of war requires the licentious expansion of the meaning of “political purpose.” However, Clausewitz’s conception can bear such a burden, in part because the distinction between the purportedly political nature of the public realm and the antipolitical nature of the private realm has been called into question (by feminists in particular) and in part because his own use of the term has such marvelous flexibility. Whether our purpose is peace, the good, bodily pleasure, power, the construction of femininity, self-preservation, or political equality we are concerned here with instances where our fragility and ability is used to change or destroy the will, purposes, and identities of others. The purposes of vio-


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lence are limited only by our imagined ways of living with one another, be it how we distribute goods and land, practice religion, perform gender relations, or govern one another. The means of violence are limited only by the characteristics of our bodies.

USING A MEANING OF VIOLENCE As important as this conception is for all it manages to bring together and take into account, it also clarifies, excludes, and narrows. It includes such diverse phenomena as genocide, terrorism, coup détat, lynching, kidnapping, revolution, cannibalism, colonialism, murder, and ethnic cleansing. Yet by defining violence as the use of the body to subject or destroy the will, the definition excludes things such as consented-to medical procedures or pulling someone from a fire. It excludes a hug or a kind touch, which might also be understood as the use of our fragility and ability for some purpose but not the purpose of submitting or destroying the will of another. Whether or not phenomena such as abortion and euthanasia are included turns on whether we believe a fetus or the infirm have a will or are subjects, or perhaps, with respect to the latter, our ability to assess the character of another’s will.34 Suicide is excluded because it is the use of one’s own body for one’s own purposes; there is no attempt to change the character of subjectivity or, at least, the destruction of the will is one’s will. What is excluded is not necessarily ethical and what is included is not necessarily unethical. Violence typically has a pejorative connotation, so some readers will surely want to defend something I call violence from that “charge,” while others will insist that an activity is so reprehensible it deserves the term. But despite the fact that I am attempting to develop an alternative to violence, a credible pacifism is relatively less concerned with discrediting or delegitimizing violence and relatively more concerned with identifying what exactly it is and what exactly it can and cannot do. For instance, a more clear conception helps us sort through the various notions of violence mentioned above. On the one hand, whether or not a particular thinker uses “violence” carefully may not be of much consequence. Even the best definitions are, as Wittgenstein notes,

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like four-legged tables in that they are wobbly but workable,35 and certainly Hobbes, Foucault, and others offer functioning philosophical systems despite their use and abuse of the word. On the other hand, the fact that disparate and contradictory uses appear at important moments in essential texts both amplifies the significance of the concept and presents a real obstacle to effectively theorizing it. Invariably, the theory of violence offered here either surmounts such obstacles or points us in the direction of a solution. If Foucault is not sure whether subtle physical discipline is violence or not, my conception highlights the fact that incarcerating, training, and timing the body are attempts to change the character of subjectivity by manipulating our physical characteristics, even if such actions are less bloody than being drawn and quartered. If Hobbes and Locke are not sure whether sovereign and legitimate killing constitute violence, this theory sees justice as no less “purposeful” than killing someone for revenge or for their property.36 Whether an action is restorative, destructive, divine, evil, mythical, legal, or illegal is of no consequence. If it involves the purposeful manipulation or destruction of bodies by other like bodies in order to change the will, then it is violence. Such violence is clearly distinguishable from ideology, lying,37 extortion, and striking—even if such things might lead to, facilitate, or help us interpret acts of violence. Consider, also, how this theory helps us navigate the particularly thorny issue of the relationship between capital, property, labor, and violence. Certainly, the destruction of property can have a direct effect on another’s body; the demolition of another’s home or farm can threaten their prospect of surviving and flourishing as a living body. Likewise, for many, perhaps most of the people in the world, being employed or unemployed is often a matter of livelihood, so that Marx’s definition of alienated labor literally holds true in that our “life activity [is] only a means for [our] existence.” In addition, my conception agrees with Benjamin when he invokes the example of a doctor’s strike and calls it “an outstanding example of violent omission.”38 Yet in each instance (the stealing or destruction of property, wage labor, and the strike) we can fairly say that the body is often not primarily at issue and therefore not being used as a means. Writing graffiti on the side of a skyscraper, blowing up an oil pipeline, or pickpocketing someone may


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sometimes be violent, but typically such actions have little if any effect on bodies. Firing or threatening to fire someone may sometimes be violent, but some people have lots of opportunities for employment or live in a state with a social safety net so that the employer has no real capacity to deprive that employee of physical well-being. Likewise, while a strike that threatens to bankrupt a small family-owned business might be fairly understood as violence, it is hard to see how most industrial strikes adversely affect the bodies of anyone but the strikers themselves.39 Indeed, Benjamin’s assertion that all (political) strikes involve extortion because they entail “a conscious readiness to resume the suspended action under certain circumstances” seems to rely on overdrawn definitions of both extortion and violence.40 Environmental degradation provides another interesting test case. Global warming, chemical and nuclear pollution, deforestation, and other environmental problems pose a direct threat to the physical wellbeing of millions of living beings and perhaps even a long-term threat to the survival of much of the human species. The difficulty is that the bodily impact of environmental degradation is usually not aimed at the submission or destruction of the will. Certainly, corporations, stockholders, and consumers destroy the environment for a purpose—for profit, to get somewhere, for the pleasure of using a particular product, to grow a more lush lawn. It could even be argued that, given sufficient foreknowledge of the affects of a particular practice and a willful disregard for the physical well-being of others, affected bodies in some sense become a means to an end, a “cost of doing business.” But only when achieving such purposes is directly contingent upon the submission or destruction of the will of others is it violence. Environmental degradation that causes cancer or destroys an indigenous farming community may in certain cases be instances of violence but is usually not what is meant here.41 This raises the issue of our relationship to other animals. For reasons that will become clear in chapter 7, I have tried to avoid using the term human or people in referring to our bodies, even while emphasizing our unique physical status as a species. When we move animals off our land, kill those in our homes, make animals work for us, or eat them, we are using bodies as a means to change behavior or destroy their capacity to act in order to achieve our purposes. But whether such

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actions constitute violence and whether or not animals can commit violence ultimately depends upon whether or not we think they share in subjectivity. I am prone to think that at least some animals do have purposes and a will of sorts, but I am not sure of exactly what sort.42 For now, my discussion of violence focuses on interactions among homo sapiens, while leaving open the possibility that other species might participate in and be subject to violence. If violence involves using bodies to change the character of subjectivity, our conception excludes another sort of practice that might seem quintessentially violent: the destruction and harming of bodies for the sheer pleasure of doing so. An expanded conception of Clausewitz’s “political purpose” captures a great deal: crimes of passion, performances of violence meant to inspire awe and terror in a populace, rape for the purpose of sexual pleasure and dominance, labor extracted for the delights that attend huge profits. But serial killers who skin their victims or collect their heads, torturers who use medical instruments to test the limits of a living body, or rapists who dismember the bodies of their victims as part of the sexual act, make the body an end in itself. To the extent that the pleasure of manipulating or destroying the body comes from witnessing reactions to such destruction (e.g., the look of terror, the begging for mercy, the screams of pain), the body is still, in a sense, a means. But in such instances, the very fact that we can get at subjectivity by way of the body seems to call forth a “purpose.” We should not imagine that this sort of destruction is always or wholly private or apolitical. Thinkers such as Machiavelli, Franz Fanon, Nietzsche, and the Marquis de Sade, sometimes seem to suggest, respectively, that virtú, freedom, or the will to power have a special connection to the destruction and harming of bodies. Certain strains of Christian theology and practice maintain a longstanding fascination with the tortured body of Jesus Christ. However, this conception of physical violence cannot adequately accommodate the part of such analyses that transforms the compromise of the body itself into an aesthetic, spiritual, or erotic experience.43 Surprisingly, objectification, at least as Sartre describes it, fares a bit better. He points out that one’s own body can never, or only momentarily, be thought of as an instrument, but that the Other is “a point of view on which I can take a point of view”—a special “transcendence-


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instrument”—that nonetheless shares a physical presence with other objects in my world.44 What Clausewitz calls “our will” and the “political object” in Sartre appears as our “possibility” and, whether in the form of a watchful look or the pointing of a gun, objectification involves the “death of my possibility.”45 Sartre’s analysis is a phenomenological account of the theory of violence I am offering here, complete with a focus on the objective and instrumental quality of the body and an existentialist version of “purpose” and “will” that points to the incoherent nature of the self. Of course, not every instance of objectification is violence and in chapter 4 I will show that Sartre’s attempt to describe a form of social violence grounded in objectification is inadequate. But while the simple apprehension of another body as a physical being or even as an instrument is not violence, it is hard to imagine the sort of violence I have identified here without objectification. Which brings us to a final point. The conception of violence developed in this chapter gives us a theoretical vehicle for discussing diverse phenomena that often occur in close proximity or are indistinguishable from one another in practice. When depriving striking workers of a job and a living proves ineffective, bosses often bring more direct physical force to bear in the form of death squads or police action. The United Nations estimates that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of women and girls are trapped in sexual slavery.46 Many of these women are enslaved in the context of war, and the connection between slavery, rape, and war can be traced back to ancient times in both theory and practice. Foucault’s discussion of military training details one of the many connections between discipline and warfare and in order to discipline and punish those we capture in war we create prisons where, once we have incarcerated bodies, we are enabled to, and often do, rape and torture those bodies. The prerogatives of discipline, torture, and the history of slavery in the American South converged to create lynching. Often armies are comprised of soldiers who would have a difficult time providing for themselves and their families without the material support of the military, giving new meaning to the term alienated labor. The point is that the theoretical common thread that holds diverse instances of violence together expresses itself in practice. In each of these instances and innumerable others, we identify the physical

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possibilities of another’s body and decide that grappling with that body for our purposes is pleasurable, necessary, acceptable, or good. In taking up the body of another as means, we often find that we are able to change or subdue the will and, in identifying their mortality, can destroy the will if he or she resists. The wide variety of phenomena that involve this dynamic are usefully called violence. Indeed, understood in this way, violence expresses crucial aspects of each of all of the phenomena described in chapter 1 and identifies a shared ground that perhaps allows for the incessant blurring of alienated labor, slavery, rape, and other such practices. A realistic pacifism should demur from trying to solve every problem, unethical or otherwise, all at once. I will try to show, however, that a certain brand of pacifism offers a viable response and alternative to the kinds of actions that fall under the purview of this particular conception of violence.

PART II

I n t e r s u b j e c t i v e Vi o l e n c e


THREE

Th e P r o b l e m s o f Recognition and Freedom

IN PART I, I set out to develop a theory of violence that stays close to the body, and from this point forward I will refer to that Clausewitzianinspired conception of violence as physical violence. However, in the process of theorizing “physical” violence it was necessary to refer to certain aspects of subjectivity: Clausewitz’s “purposes” and “wills.” No plausible account of violence can refer only to the body; violence entails something more than our physical being together. With this in mind, Part II turns our attention away from the body and toward the character of subjectivity. If torture, rape, murder, slavery, and various other methods for using another’s body can be understood as aiming at the will, it raises the question: Why would someone want to subdue or destroy another’s will? Clausewitz’s answer is political purpose, and the flexibility of that concept is its strength in developing a wide-ranging conception of physical violence. However, it is a weakness to the extent that we can answer the question just about any way we want, which is tantamount to saying we cannot really answer it at all. The question of why violence also implies another, more profound, question: What is it about being with one another that is so upsetting, unsatisfactory, or devastating? The theory of physical violence we have offered is of limited use unless coupled with an unearthing of the deep and abiding roots of conflict.

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In political theory, conflict is usually traced back to the particular purposes (e.g., food, wealth, ideology, power, survival) of particular individuals or groups (e.g., capitalists, the poor, the unjust, criminals, men, black people, white people, infidels, foreigners, the ruling regime, traitors) or aspects of human nature (e.g., greed, pride, selfishness, the desire for glory). Most of these analyses are also supported by the idea that some prior act of physical violence precipitates the need for revolution, law enforcement, warfare, or self-defense. Put simply, we usually explain our desire to destroy and subdue the will of others with some version of the idea that (1) some of us (usually “them”) do things that are immoral or harmful and therefore need to be stopped, and (2) often these others must be stopped with physical violence because those bad acts involve an attempt to subdue or destroy the will of others. Pacifists respond to such explanations by arguing that we share a common humanity that transcends particular people and purposes, that the human character is prone to generosity and love, and that using physical violence to respond to physical violence only leads to more injustice. But neither the explanation for conflict nor the pacifist reply is very satisfactory. If Clausewitz’s notion of “political purpose” requires a more firm grounding in the character of subjectivity, nearly every other political theorist is too specific. Pointing to capitalists or the criminal element, believers or infidels, foreigners or the white man, to explain conflict is just as facile as pointing to our common humanity or God as a solution to it. Even if we grant that pursuing certain interests or holding particular beliefs usually leads to conflict, or that certain groups have historically practiced more violence than others, such explanations carry us only so far as we are, for instance, communists, liberals, Zionists, conservatives, black revolutionaries, Christians, or feminists. In the same way, the fact that pursuing the interests of “humanity” or believing in and abiding by certain religious tenets mitigates violence only convinces most people that a small portion of humanity are pacifists, not that everyone can or ought to be. Extant explanations for conflict are incomplete at best and yet it appears that they cannot be synthesized, since the theories contradict one another. To the extent that various explanations for conflict incorporate some prior act of physical violence, each provides a separate critique of the pacifist claim that physical violence is unnecessary. The

THE PROBLEMS OF RECOGNITION AND FREEDOM

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notion that conflict is caused by physical violence is sometimes circular or teleological, but usually involves distinguishing between different types of physical violence—the prior criminal, unjust, oppressive violence is different than the violence that preserves order, defends, or liberates. But even if we agree that all of the physical violence in this second grouping is just and good and all of the violence in the first grouping is unjust and bad (as incoherent as such a claim would be in application), the explanation for the initial action and the justification of the response are still limited to particular political perspectives. Fascists, liberals, black revolutionaries, and feminists may prove pacifist claims about physical violence wrong, but their insights cannot be drawn together to provide an overarching explanation of conflict.1 The antidote to this hodgepodge would seem to be theories of conflict that identify some aspect of human nature as determinative— Hobbes’s pride, for instance, or Rousseau’s envy. The difficulty is that, while there is ample evidence to support the notion that we are greedy, prideful, selfish, vindictive, and domineering, there is equally good proof that we are generous, forgiving, kind, loving, and just. No fairminded reading of history can claim that one or a few of our personality traits are more determinative, more true and enduring, than the others. Explanations for conflict that rely on the idea that human nature is inherently evil or corrupt face the difficulty of explaining how the qualities pacifists identify sometimes overcome the purportedly inexorable and irredeemable characteristics. Pacifists, however, are in the uncomfortable position of decrying the undeniable existence of all those qualities the non-pacifists articulate as the causes of conflict while maintaining they are only superficial.2 What is required then is an explanation that says something more than Clausewitz about the character of subjectivity but does not toe the line for a particular ideological agenda (including pacifism), reify a particular notion of humanness, or rely on the idea that physical violence causes itself (but helps explain why attempts to subdue and destroy the will are often understood in this way). As it turns out, this requires not so much an analysis of purposes, wills or subjectivity per se, but what goes on between purposes, wills, and subjects: intersubjectivity. To assist me in filling this tall order, I turn first to the Italian chemist Primo Levi and the first book of his memoirs, Survival in Auschwitz. In chapter 2, I

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said that physical violence aims to change the character of subjectivity, but here I will argue that there are definite and unchangeable aspects of intersubjectivity that no degree or kind of manipulation of bodies can change. If this sounds utopian, the reader will be disappointed to discover that the aspects of intersubjectivity I identify in Levi’s work make extraordinary suffering possible, and pacifist methods cannot hope to change them either. This chapter lays the groundwork for chapter 4, where I argue that certain aspects of intersubjectivity ground physical violence and develop an alternative understanding of violence that does not depend upon the characteristics of our bodies. It might seem strange to locate insight into problems of intersubjectivity in Auschwitz. Auschwitz seems like precisely the wrong place to begin, since there are few places in the history of the world so utterly defined by physical violence and where, arguably, subjectivity itself was threatened. Auschwitz is what empirical political scientists call a “least likely” or “critical case,” a case where a theory seems least likely to hold true.3 If problems of intersubjectivity help explain physical violence in Auschwitz, then they can help explain it anywhere. If physical violence is not its own explanation in Auschwitz, then it seems doubtful that it can adequately explain itself anywhere. I begin by recounting two critical incidents in Levi’s memoir that undermine the notion that the defining feature of the camps is physical violence. Then, drawing on Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, I argue that Levi’s experiences expose the potentially devastating effects of two rudimentary aspects of intersubjectivity: our inability to fully know one another and our freedom to comport ourselves as we may in the presence of others. While these features of intersubjectivity might not sound as closely related to suffering as the fragility and ability of our bodies, Levi’s account suggests that failures of recognition can be nearly all-consuming and a freedom that compromises freedom can cause great harm even when no other difficulties are present.

A CHEMICAL EXAM IN AUSCHWITZ Primo Levi’s memoirs, and Survival in Auschwitz in particular, are characterized by an extraordinary matter-of-factness in the description of


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horrible things. Survival tells of the destruction of bodies to achieve certain ends and purposeless assaults on the capacity to think; institutional indifference to individual personalities and regular, routinized beatings; suffering, disease, starvation, and the “selection” of comrades. His descriptions are not flat or unexamined, he waxes philosophical on many occasions and for good measure includes a number of incisive interpretive passages among the autobiographical facts. His presentation is not unfeeling either; while his descriptions often seem “technical,” his body of fiction skillfully dismantles the notion that scientific description and good literature are mutually exclusive.4 But his approach to these things is surprising because he offers studied restraint where we might expect to find moral condemnation and treatises of dispassion where we might expect tomes of rage. The technique leaves us with a sense of moral and emotional autonomy that, paradoxically, draws the reader close. He allows us a stake in the events he describes; he lets them sit with us. He calls certain things to our attention, but for the most part he leaves to the reader the work of deciding what—if anything—the events of his life mean. For much of the tenth chapter of Survival, Levi holds to this pattern. By the time the chapter “Chemical Examination” opens, he has spent three months in the Lager. He is weak and starving as a consequence of forced labor, pitiful rations, and the generally appalling conditions in the camp. In the Lager, persons able to demonstrate a talent of value to the industrial complex that is part of Auschwitz are more likely to survive. When a Chemical Kommando is formed, Levi volunteers; it is a potentially life-saving opportunity to be “a specialist.” The Kapo, Alex, tells Levi and the other volunteers that they will, at some point, have to take an exam. They are immediately assigned to other, more typical, menial labor, but when they arrive at the work site to unload sacks they are able to speak to one another of the possibility the Kapo raised: [T]o each one of us what Alex said seems a madman’s dream. With these empty faces of ours, with these sheared craniums, with these shameful clothes, to take a chemical examination. And obviously it will be in German; and we will have to go in front of some blond Aryan doctor hoping that we do not

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M have to blow our noses, because perhaps he will not know that we do not have handkerchiefs, and it will certainly not be possible to explain it to him. And we will have our old comrade hunger with us, and we will hardly be able to stand still on our feet, and he will certainly smell our odour, to which we are by now accustomed, but which persecuted us during the first days, the odour of turnips and cabbages, raw, cooked and digested.5

After three days, “three of those usual immemorable days, so long while they are passing, and so short afterwards,” the exam “we were already all tired of believing in” comes to pass.6 The exam is an oral exam, given by one of the three German chemists who work in the Polymerization Department at Auschwitz. Levi is the seventh of seven to take the exam because he has the highest number tattooed on his arm (he is the most recent arrival to Auschwitz in his Kommando). Since he is the last, he is sent off to work for the morning while the others take the examination: “What ill-luck, I cannot even talk to the others to hear what questions they are asking.”7 Later that afternoon, Alex brings him back to the Polymerization Department so he can take the exam. When Levi and Alex enter the office, Alex introduces him to a Doctor Pannwitz as “ ‘an Italian, has been here only three months, already half kaput. . . . Er sagt er ist Chemiker. . . .’ ”8 Alex is dismissed and Levi and Pannwitz are alone. Pannwitz sits “formidably behind a complicated writing table” and Levi, Häftling 174517, notes that it is, “a real office, shining, clean and ordered, and I feel I would leave a dirty stain whatever I touched.”9 The next moment is one of the most painful and puzzling of Levi’s life: When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me. From that day I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times and in many ways. I have asked myself how he really functioned as a man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization and the Indo-Germanic conscience; above all when I was once more a free man, I wanted to meet him again, not from a spirit of revenge, but merely from a personal curiosity about the human soul.


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Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.10 Since Levi is not prone to hyperbole and his tone is often muted in the face of suffering, his description of these first moments with Pannwitz stands out. He breaks from his usual dispassion. He also suggests that the circumstances test the limits of his formidable explicatory capabilities. In Pannwitz’s “look” there is immense power and subtle opacity.11 When the exam is finished, Alex escorts Levi back to the Kommando’s worksite, but in order to re-enter the Bude, they have to cross a space cluttered with crossbeams and metal frames. Here, a second moment provides the denouement of the chapter. The steel cable of a crane cuts across the road, and Alex catches hold of it to climb over: Donnerwetter [thunder weather], he looks at his hand black with thick grease. In the meanwhile I have joined him. Without hatred and without sneering, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of his hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex, if someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.12 Levi makes it clear that the occasion of a chemistry exam and this brief interaction with a Kapo distinguish themselves from the overabundance of strange and profound degradations in the Lager. Levi works hard to deflate any suspicion that he understands himself as occupying a position of absolute moral clarity (“I wanted to meet him again, not from a spirit of revenge, but merely from a personal curiosity“; “he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex”). Yet the interaction with Pannwitz provides Levi with his strongest sense of what constitutes the horror of Auschwitz and his encounter with Alex provides him with a personal moral barometer.

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In some ways, Pannwitz’s look and Alex’s touch seem to be instances of the sort of violence discussed in Part I. Part of what pains Levi about the interaction with Pannwitz is the transformation of chemistry, or more precisely, being a chemist into something reducible to his desire to survive. The interaction probably resides somewhere between Marx’s alienated labor and Hegel’s slavery: Viewing his emaciated body, ragged clothing, and shaved head, Pannwitz instantly knows that Levi’s physical being is at stake in their conversation. He speaks with Levi not as a fellow chemist but as someone whom he can further deprive or dispossess of his life.13 Foucault also provides us with insight into Levi’s encounter with Pannwitz. The interaction is precisely “the penetration of the disciplinary examination into the judicial inquisition”14 because Pannwitz questions and records in order to “know” Levi and thereby make decisions about his body.15 Foucault is particularly concerned with the gaze, and through Pannwitz’s look Levi “becomes the principle of his own subjection.”16 In Levi’s self-consciousness about his appearance (“these empty faces of ours, with these sheared craniums, with these shameful clothes”) we perhaps also see that he “who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power.”17 In Discipline and Punish Foucault demonstrates that something as subtle as the gaze can be ordered and employed by architecture, confinement, and ritual to create surveillance, the examination, and knowledge. Levi, however, seems to assert the reverse. For him, the architecture of the camp, or “the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany,” is grounded in “that look.” Indeed, while the understanding of violence described in chapter 2 can give us insight into Levi’s experience, what is more striking about Levi invoking Pannwitz’s look and Alex’s touch as exemplars of Auschwitz is the extent to which such events complicate that understanding of violence.18 First, while looking has a physical component, Pannwitz’s look is not important for its physical features but as a way of conveying a certain understanding of who he is in relation to Levi. That is, it is not so much that Levi appears in Pannwitz’s field of vision (i.e., is “objectified”) but what that appearance means or does not mean to Pannwitz. Touching, of course, is a physical act but it is not so much that Alex touches Levi—the touch is not physically injurious. Instead, what is of interest is that the touch conveys some-


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thing about Alex’s understanding of the significance or insignificance of Levi’s presence. Whereas a conception of violence drawn from the likes of Clausewitz, Hobbes, and Foucault focuses on the physical manipulation and destruction of the body, Levi seems more interested in the direct interface between personalities. Here, conflicting purposes and wills come to center stage, with the body playing a necessary but strangely incidental role as mediator. In addition, the nonphysical aspects of the violence described by Clausewitz are not quite adequate here. Alex’s wiping of the hand uses Levi’s body for a purpose, but the stakes are so low, the import of the act itself so miniscule, that it seems to be of an entirely different order than rape, torture, or alienated labor. Friends often tease one another by wiping their hands on each other’s shirts. That the act is such a profound offense to Levi, that it helps him delineate an ethical boundary condition, has little to do with the fact that his body is being used for a purpose, or even this purpose. Indeed, with respect to “physical violence,” Levi’s will is not really guided by Alex’s purposes. Instead, what is at issue is the disposition that Alex’s movement conveys. His decision to “use another’s body” is hardly a decision. The incident is shocking because the action is representative of his general demeanor; it is perhaps best described as an encounter between Levi’s being in the world and Alex’s way of being in the world. And so the moments between Levi and Alex and Levi and Pannwitz are just that—events “between two beings.” Levi deemphasizes the notion that something is done to or perpetrated upon him and instead describes the events, particularly the encounter with Pannwitz, as a relationship with certain characteristics. I do not mean to say that Levi’s demeanor hurts Pannwitz or Alex in the same way that their way of being hurts Levi (or even that Levi hurts them at all) or that Levi shares moral culpability for the pain the interactions produce. I only mean to say that Levi identifies the “essence of the great insanity” as inhering in one sort of relationship as opposed to another sort of relationship—a look “between two beings in different worlds” over and against a look “between two men.” When Levi wonders how Dr. Pannwitz “functioned as a man,” when he expresses curiosity as to how Pannwitz might act toward Levi in another context (when Levi is “once more a free man”), he suggests that their relationship is characterized by

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an astonishing fissure in ways of understanding. He seems to be wondering: How is it possible for two people to carry such widely divergent understandings of who they are and what their relationship ought to be like? More immediately, how can we fill out the somewhat vague notion that Levi is primarily concerned with a certain kind of relationship between beings? In the work of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas we find concepts and a vocabulary that assist us in interpreting Levi’s experience and help explain with greater precision the significance of his insights into the character of intersubjectivity.

SOME FEATURES OF THE PROBLEM OF KNOWING ONE ANOTHER The concept of recognition is a recent preoccupation of political philosophy. Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and others formulate a vision of political life where distinct individual and group identities are acknowledged and encouraged without compromising the needs and desires of others.19 Patchen Markell suggests that we ought to move beyond the notion that recognition is desirable or possible in favor of his less stringent conception of “acknowledgement.”20 In each of these texts, Hegel’s discussion of Self and Other in Phenomenology of Spirit is a touchstone because he suggests enabling and eliciting recognition is the central task of social interaction. Yet because Hegel’s description of the problem of recognition is so closely linked to the master/slave dialectic I used in chapter One, it can be difficult to disentangle from physical violence.21 Interestingly, in the work of those who follow in his footsteps the importance of physical mortality recedes. Sartre, MerleauPonty, and Levinas, even while taking up many of the themes Hegel foregrounds and even while differing with one another on important points, offer analyses of recognition that are better suited to the interpretation of interactions that involve a “look” and a “touch.” We should begin by describing some of the basic parameters of intersubjectivity. First, phenomenological analyses argue that simply being with one another necessitates a minimal, we might say primordial, recognition that nonetheless implies we do not fully recognize one


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another. For Sartre, being with “others” suggests both that we are not and therefore cannot know those others and, at the same time, delineates the boundaries of the self. This happens to both the self and other in a movement of “reciprocal scissiparity.”22 Put another way, being with others involves distinguishing them from us but also creating a self that is indelibly an “I-and-the-Other.” Levinas offers perhaps the most pointed description of this possibility when he writes: [The question] “who is it?” is not a question and is not satisfied by a knowing. He to whom the question is put has already presented himself, without being a content. He has presented himself as a face. The face is not a modality of quiddity, an answer to a question, but the correlative of what is prior to every question.23 Asking “Who is it?” both recognizes the presence that founds intersubjectivity, affirming a primordial recognition, and reveals that others are beyond our capacity to “know.” For Sartre, primordial recognition is closely associated with objectification.24 Merleau-Ponty, however, argues that our relationship to others is nonobjective, even defying or prefiguring cognition and perception, that we are social “by the mere fact of existing.”25 Levinas’s “face,” “presented . . . without being a content,” fits well with Merleau-Ponty’s notion that we are not an object of thought yet still primordially “in contact.” At the same time, it manages to preserve Sartre’s counterintuitive conception of the subject as a “being which has its own nothingness.” The first thing to note about intersubjectivity, then, is that the instant we recognize the presence of others we fail to fully recognize them. Being with one another implies a degree of recognition and also immediately introduces the problem of knowing one another. For Sartre, this sets the stage for further challenges and difficulties. If when we first recognize another we find that we are also unable to recognize her or him, this problem is compounded by the fact that we are also unable to recognize ourselves in the other. That is, Sartre reminds us that not being able to know one another means that we cannot know ourselves as the other constitutes us. Trying to see ourselves as others know us is like looking in a clouded mirror.26 Sartre writes:

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M I can not know myself in the Other if the Other is first an object for me; neither can I apprehend the Other in his true being—that is, in his subjectivity. No universal knowledge can be derived from the relation of consciousnesses. This is what we shall call their ontological separation.27

This “ontological separation” means that we are haunted by a perpetual insecurity: I can never fully comprehend another, and I cannot adequately assess whether, or to what degree, another comprehends me. Even though I can “indefinitely [make] explicit [the other’s] relations with other instruments in the world” (i.e., objectify and do “violence” to another in the sense of chapter 2) there is no getting around the primary failure of recognition that characterizes every relationship. For Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, if this failure depends upon an initial success, it must still be part of the fabric of a relation. MerleauPonty suggests that the moment where recognition fails comes when we find ourselves acting in ways that do not take into account the “inexhaustible ground” of the other. Subjectivity is not only indicative of the “nothingness” we cannot grasp, but an assertive being, a “transcendental subjectivity.”28 When we encounter one another it may well feel as though we are gazing into a clouded mirror, but Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that looking is a posture indicative of active engagement with others. This sort of action in the face of possible failure is the process by which subjectivity is “revealed,” which in turn cues us into, or even places us in, intersubjectivity. Likewise, Levinas argues: The impossibility of total reflection must not be posited negatively—as the finitude of a knowing subject who, being mortal and already engaged in the world, does not reach truth—but rather as the surplus of the social relation where the subjectivity remains in face of . . . , in the straightforwardness of this welcome, and is not measured by truth.29 The “surplus” of subjectivity is not a nothing but a welcoming, an open disposition, which is coterminous with the “finite” subject. Not only is subjectivity constituted by an “I-and-the-Other” that is me, not only does the failure of recognition reveal that we are ensconced in intersub-


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jectivity, but the “limitation” that makes me unknowable to the other is precisely what makes me a subjectivity in the first place. To recap: I cannot know the Other; the Other cannot know me; I cannot know what the Other knows of me; the Other cannot know what I know of the Other. However, as Sartre admits in moments that sound more akin to Levinas, all of this makes for our unlimited “possibles.” By offering a description of recognition and misrecognition with a view toward the character of intersubjectivity, these insights help us gain some traction with respect to Levi’s experiences in “Chemical Examination.” First, even if he does “not [make] the slightest effort to speak a slightly more comprehensible German,”30 Pannwitz nonetheless speaks to Levi and “raised his eyes and looked at me.” Alex too, before he and Levi enter Pannwitz’s office, plants his feet in front of me, he roughly adjusts the collar of my jacket, then he steps backwards, eyes the result with a disgusted air, and turns his back, muttering: Was für ein Musslemann Zugang. “What a messy recruit!”31 Being looked at and touched in this way implies a minimal and primordial recognition. It may require recognition of Levi’s status as an object, as Sartre suggests, but more importantly, as Levinas emphasizes, it requires recognition of a presence. To make someone “presentable,” in however ridiculous and gruff a fashion, suggests a someone. To initiate discussion, even to utter a command or a death sentence, is to suggest that a being “has already presented himself, without being a content.” Likewise, Levi does not find himself in a world that can be reduced to objects moving about him. His world, the world of Auschwitz, is social; he understands Pannwitz and Alex as presences of some sort, they are “in contact by the mere fact of existing.”32 In fact, we can say with certainty that Pannwitz’s recognition of Levi goes beyond this contentless primordial acknowledgment. As he begins to tell his qualifications to Pannwitz, Levi has “the definite sensation of not being believed, of not even believing it myself,” but as he struggles to understand Pannwitz’s formal German “it is impossible to doubt my identity with him, as my reservoir of knowledge of organic chemistry, even after so long an inertia, responds at request with

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unexpected docility.”33 Not only do Levi and Pannwitz hold in common the understanding that Levi is a presence, they come to hold in common the understanding that Levi is a chemist. Levi writes: And even more, this sense of lucid elation, this excitement which I feel warm in my veins, I recognize it, it is the fever of examinations, my fever of my examinations, that spontaneous mobilization of all my logical faculties and all my knowledge, which my friends at university so envied me. The examination is going well. As I gradually realize it, I seem to grow in stature.34 In the process of the examination, Levi is able to convey a crucial aspect of his identity. In the presence of Pannwitz, he brings forward his possibilities. With Pannwitz, he is able to establish his identity as a chemist. In the cloudy mirror, he discerns something, he is able to make out one of his most important features. Yet this recognition and the recognition of his presence are accompanied by a most profound and generalized failure of recognition. Indeed, this striking “success” is entirely inadequate. In a way that no philosophical prose can, Levi demonstrates the extraordinary possibilities that attend our limitations. The recognition of Levi’s status as a chemist demonstrates that when we recognize a certain aspect of another person’s self-understanding, there are no strings attached. We might presume that affirming someone’s stated proficiency in chemistry, with all it seems to imply about a being’s intellectual capabilities and experience, would elicit recognition of other aspects of that being’s self-conception; indeed, in applying for the Chemical Kommando, Levi asserts that he and Pannwitz are colleagues. Pannwitz tests, and then affirms Levi’s claim that the two of them share a profession, but this does nothing to assure Levi of recognition on any other count. Instead, Pannwitz presses ahead with whatever understanding of the relationship he held when he first looked at Levi. Indeed, if Levi imagines his relationship with Pannwitz, his “being ‘I-and-the-Other,’ ” as between a human being and vicious Aryan, colleagues in chemistry, two men, or some amalgam of these three relationships, nothing prevents Pannwitz from recognizing Levi’s claim to the professional relationship and noth-


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ing else. In the gestures of the guards and Germans in Auschwitz we find a “recognition” of the Häftling that seems to be nothing but the recognition of a bare presence.35 In “Chemical Examination,” we also find the ability to add something to that knowledge of a “who” as rich with implications as the ability to practice chemistry. Yet Pannwitz is able to strip away any sense of collegiality that might arise from the mutual affirmation of their common identity as chemists. In this way, Levi’s experience is a particularly striking example of the problem of recognition understood as a feature of intersubjectivity. If Pannwitz recognizes something of the “surplus of the social relation” when he considers that Levi might be a chemist, what is more remarkable is his ability to circumscribe that surplus. That is, where Levi is stunned by an ethos that reduces all of the prisoners to a bare presence, it is even more shocking to encounter someone who does not demonstrate an all-or-nothing attitude toward his possibilities. That Pannwitz is able to micromanage his being “I-and-the-Other” with such precision and ruthlessness, that he is able to understand himself as beyond reproach and Levi as a chemist and yet nothing else, forcefully demonstrates our “ontological separation.” We have nearly unlimited potential to imagine how we are and ought to be and, therefore, can experience or commit to a truly astounding range of possible recognitions and misrecognitions.36 From the perspective of intersubjectivity, the forms of the problem of recognition are limited only by what we can imagine ourselves and others to be, multiplied by that same capacity in others.

SOME FEATURES OF THE PROBLEM OF BEING WITH ONE ANOTHER This brings us to the issue of freedom. If the separation entailed in intersubjectivity allows for a simultaneous and radical knowing and unknowing of others, problems of recognition are also connected to the fact that we are free to be as we may. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas help us here, but the differences between the three thinkers on the topic of freedom are more pronounced. For Sartre, the problem of freedom is so severe that he sometimes reduces intersubjectivity to conflict. Merleau-Ponty understands the web of social relations as fundamentally

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peaceful, but in brief moments allows for the possibility that freedom is related to suffering. Levinas attempts to separate subjectivity and freedom, arguing that the former is peaceful and the latter is “murderous.” I want to stay away from characterizing subjectivity, social relations, or freedom as generally conflictual or peaceful. I am not sure exactly how much conflict intersubjectivity necessitates, though I think these analyses demonstrate that it occasionally necessitates some.37 More importantly, however, phenomenological thinking can help us understand how intersubjectivity, and the dynamics of freedom in particular, are implicated in conflict. Levi’s experiences, once again, help specify and elaborate on the problem. For Sartre, freedom is the primary upshot of our “ontological separation.” He argues that every individual “preserves a certain unpredictability” not only because we are ensconced in social relations where we do not fully know others, but also because “the other is free.”38 Even if we could know others with “the apodictic certainty of the cogito—i.e. of my own existence”39 we would be faced with the simple fact that we are separate, creative beings, with diverse dispositions and unpredictable aims. Thus: No logical or epistemological optimism can cover the scandal of the plurality of consciousnesses. . . . The task which an ontology can lay down for itself is to describe this scandal and to found it in the very nature of being, but [against Hegel] ontology is powerless to overcome it.40 Sartre discusses this problem almost exclusively in the context of objectification, which means that he only indirectly fulfills this task.41 But he does say that objectification is founded in an interplay of consciousnesses and that the interplay itself is awful and painful.42 For Sartre, the fact of separated consciousnesses means that there is a hole in the midst of intersubjectivity—a nothing intermingled with being that preserves unpredictability and ensures conflict. I mentioned above that Merleau-Ponty and Levinas insist that we ought to frame our inability to fully know one another more positively. Problems of recognition are indicative of our possibilities, the “inexhaustiable ground” of subjectivity, and the “surplus of the social rela-


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tion.” This leads Merleau-Ponty to argue that relations between children are fundamentally peaceful and that without self-consciousness (i.e., the cogito) there is no struggle between consciousnesses.43 However, on occasion he veers from this course and describes the possibility that social relations, even without the negative influence of cognitive and objective factors, are sufficient to cause harm and pain: [F]or the lover whose experience it is, love is nameless; it is not a thing capable of being circumscribed and designated, nor is it the love spoken of in books and newspapers, because it is the way in which he establishes his relations with the world; it is an existential signification. The criminal fails to see his crime, and the traitor his betrayal for what they are, not because they exist deeply embedded within him as unconscious representations or tendencies, but because they are so many relatively closed worlds, so many situations. If we are in a situation, we are surrounded and cannot be transparent to ourselves, so that our contact with ourselves is necessarily achieved only in the sphere of ambiguity.44 Whether we love another or betray another, our movements and actions are not primarily a matter of some subconscious impulse or our conscious representations of our experience. Against Descartes, Hobbes, and so many others, Merleau-Ponty argues that we are social first. Here, betrayal and crime are not grounded in objectification or any other form of physical violence and are not reducible to our thinking and deciding about how to interact with others. There is a sense in which context itself, our social relations with others in itself, creates love, betrayal, and crime. Though Merleau-Ponty only occasionally admits it, in this passage he conveys the idea that we are existentially bound to potential harm of and from one another as a consequence of the fact we are embedded in intersubjectivity.45 Levinas, even more than Merleau-Ponty, attempts to describe intersubjectivity, or fundamental aspects of intersubjectivity, as primordial and pleasant. At times, it appears that relations between subjects can only refer to the calling forth of discussion and conversation, which can involve “limitations” but never incommensurability or worlds out of

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sorts. He reserves terms such as interiority, spontaneity, expression, and subjectivity for the “unicity of the I” and makes the radical claim that this “I” is not dependent upon a non-I. Instead, subjectivity is its own infinite possibility, a face, where the other “[exceeds] the idea of the other in me.”46 Against dialectics,47 the “face to face” is a primary signification that is peaceful and yet “nonetheless maintains the plurality of the same and the other.”48 Against a totalizing ontology, he offers inexhaustible “[e]goism, enjoyment, sensibility and the whole dimension of interiority” best expressed by, and inextricably linked to, the idea of infinity. But when he raises the issue of freedom, Levinas’s tone changes. Freedom is strangely detached from intersubjectivity and even subjectivity, or, at least, represents an entirely distinct aspect of it. He writes: The Other is not initially a fact, is not an obstacle, does not threaten me with death; he is desired in my shame. To discover the unjustified facticity of power and freedom one must not consider it as an object, nor consider the Other as an object; one must measure oneself against infinity, that is desire him. It is necessary to have the idea of infinity, the idea of the perfect, as Descartes would say, in order to know one’s own imperfection. The idea of the perfect is not an idea but desire; it is the welcoming of the Other, the commencement of moral consciousness, which calls in question my freedom. Thus this way of measuring oneself against the perfection of infinity is not a theoretical consideration; it is accomplished as shame, where freedom discovers itself murderous in its very exercise.49 Here, Levinas provides us with a more detailed rendition of the issue that Sartre raises and Merleau-Ponty begrudgingly acknowledges. Irrespective of our status as objects, the simple fact that we are (the “facticity of power and freedom”) and that we exist in the context of community, means that we are “murderous.” His choice of words is both instructive and potentially misleading. Clearly, Levinas does not mean to say that by simply existing and exercising freedom we necessarily commit murder in the physical sense.50 Levinas uses the term murderous to emphasize the gravity of his claim that our existing together as subjects means that we will necessarily


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come up short—well short—of our conceptions of moral perfection. At the outset of the passage he states that our bare presence with one another is not one where another “threaten[s] me with death.” Instead, our presence with one another is first and foremost the moment where I desire to redeem myself and my shame, in that cloudy mirror of another. Why does Levinas invoke shame?51 What redemption is required and with respect to what transgression? According to Levinas, coming to grips with my very existence as a subject causes me to realize that by being and doing I am necessarily going to harm and destroy others and have indeed actively been doing so. Physical destruction and murder might be a result of this, or a manifestation of it, but the point here is to illuminate the nonobjective sense in which our being compromises being.52 This description of freedom elides Sartre’s focus on objectification while affirming in even stronger language the “scandal of plurality.” At the same time, he shows sympathy for Merleau-Ponty’s notion that something about intersubjectivity is fundamentally peaceful while altogether abandoning the notion that the freedom that destroys freedom can be traced to the cogito.53 In these discussions we find an indirect, incomplete but workable explanation of Levi’s experiences in “Chemical Examination.” In the process, despite the various weaknesses of phenomenological and existentialist thinking, we garner an explanation of the deep roots of conflict that does not rely on assumptions about the human personality, the relative merits of particular purposes, aims, groups, and individuals, or our physical predicaments and characteristics. Our freedom is indicative of our ontological separation, our elemental ability to be not entirely determined by our relationship with others. With such separation comes an ability to do and be in ways that on occasion prevent others from doing and being as they want, or is their habit, or proclivity. With separation we can carry ourselves in ways that are utterly anathema to others. We can be and do in ways that prevent others from being and doing as they may. If Alex’s and Pannwitz’s dispositions with respect to Levi are not physically murderous, that look and that touch are crushing in a different way. With intersubjectivity comes the potential for utterly divergent and incompatible ways of being. Levi’s description helps us challenge and fill out aspects of the three phenomenologists’ accounts of freedom and intersubjectivity. First, and

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perhaps obviously, his experience seems to defy both Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’s tendency to describe intersubjectivity, or certain aspects of intersubjectivity, as inherently “peaceful.” Levi’s response to Pannwitz’s look certainly requires self-awareness. Indeed, the identities of chemist and prisoner that he carries into the interaction give that look a distinctive quality and make for a particular impact.Yet in that moment, in his perception of “that look,” Levi is not self-aware. The shock of that immediate perception is no more dependent upon the cogito than the shock of running into a wall requires an awareness of our body. As Merleau-Ponty so persuasively argues more generally, Levi’s perception (of Pannwitz’s perception) precedes and calls attention to himself. Of course, our encounter with others’ perceptions can call attention to ourselves in ways that are not so painful or not at all painful. But Levi demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that our raw interface, the perception of gestures and the gestures of perception, can be tremendously painful. Levi also shows us that Levinas’s distinction between “murderous freedom” and all the other aspects of subjectivity is not sustainable. Though Levinas’s idea of the “face to face” is in part metaphorical and metaphysical, it is instructive that the moment between Levi and Pannwitz is literally a face to face. Levinas identifies our inability to recognize one another in the “the surplus of the social relation,” but seems hesitant to admit that the potential for us to shock and destroy one another in our simple being together is no less amenable to this more “positive” framing. If the face is the “way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me,”54 then it might represent a way of being that compromises my own. Everything that Levinas hopes to reserve for the ethical imperatives of the face to face are present in the moment that Pannwitz looks at Levi—the unique way of the I, interiority, expression, et cetera. Yet this profound disjuncture in ways of being is certainly not pleasant and does not call forth an ethics or the sort of conversation that Levinas suggests the face to face necessitates. This is not to say that the face is entirely unable to draw forth consideration from others; indeed, in chapter 6, I argue that Gandhi and Socrates show us how subjects can elicit consideration of one another’s way of being. However, Levi’s experience shows us that an ethical face


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to face is not essential—or at least no more essential than the interface of ways of being that prevent and destroy one another. Finally, in Levi’s persistent unwillingness to privilege his experience over any other experience (in Auschwitz or elsewhere), we get the sense that the importance of the events that surround the chemical examination are entirely due to his particular life and his situation. Technically, the point does not contradict Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, or Levinas and in part it is simply a function of the fact that Levi’s primary purpose is to write about his experience as opposed to a philosophical topic. Yet it seems important to note, against some of the tendencies in Sartre in particular, that the encounter between Levi’s way of being and Pannwitz’s look is not a matter of “the look of the Other” being inherently threatening, or even a matter of Pannwitz’s way of carrying himself per se. Certainly, the other members of the Kommando might have found Pannwitz’s look offensive, but Levi’s is a special and particular feeling of pain. In Pannwitz’s look, Levi is indeed placed, as Sartre says, “in the midst of [a] world which is at once this world and beyond this world.”55 Yet his coming to experience this moment is unpredictable in the strongest possible sense. Intersubjectivity implies that the moment when our world becomes another world, or when our world is crushed by an encounter with another way of being, it can involve any way of being. It is a matter of particular beings in particular circumstances, not looks or touches, or particular kinds of looks or particular kinds of touches. The experience of the bifurcation of being is entirely intertwined with our unique being and a lived moment. This is, in part, why moments such as that look between Levi and Pannwitz are so difficult to explain, identify, and isolate, and so inescapably a part of our experience. I have not yet answered the question as to why we sometimes desire to destroy or submit one another’s will, but we have moved a step closer to an explanation. I stated at the outset that the problem with most theories of conflict is that they are too specific. Conflict is almost always traced back to particular purposes, actions, or features of the human personality. What we have found is that the very fact of our multiplicity of purposes, personalities, and actions itself is an explanation for conflict. On the one hand, our freedom to project toward unlimited “possibles” combined with the fact that we are separate from

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one another means that we will often have difficulty knowing and recognizing one another—and discerning what others know of us. On the other hand, even if we could completely know and understand one another, the very fact of our separation holds the potential for suffering. Pannwitz’s way of being in relation to Levi’s understanding of their relationship makes their dispositions nearly mutually exclusive. The potential for this sort of disjuncture is embedded in the very fact that we are free, creative, unpredictable, separate beings—even in the midst of the most stultifying physical suffering. Like those aspects of our body described in chapter 1, the problems of recognition and freedom have always been with us and will be with us for the foreseeable future. If subjectivity is only limited by our extraordinary creative and intellectual capacities, those capacities are in fact limited. We cannot imagine what everyone else imagines, take into account all other perspectives and dispositions, or perfectly express and explain ourselves. If we could, there would be no intersubjectivity, only a subject, or the destruction of subjectivity. At the same time, our intellectual and creative capacities are self-limiting—that is, limiting of one another. The greater our intellectual and creative capacities the greater the chance that we will run up against another’s way of being, compromise their creative capacities, their habits, their way of being. Novelty and separation is the wonder and bane of our intersubjective existence. This is the “scandal of plurality” and the sense in which freedom is “murderous.”

FOUR

Th e E x p e r i e n c e o f Discordant Dispositions

IN THIS CHAPTER, I set out show that not only do the problems of intersubjectivity occur amid extreme physical violence, but that a second kind of violence—intersubjective violence—is the root of physical violence. While some people live their adult lives without ever having someone take up their bodies for the purpose of submitting or destroying their will,1 no one lives their adult life without experiencing pain and suffering in their interactions with others and, at least occasionally, very severe pain and suffering. However, intersubjectivity is not overwhelmingly or mostly characterized by pain and difficulty and all social suffering is not a form of violence. In chapter 3, I excavated characteristics of intersubjectivity that are implicated in suffering, but just as physical violence cannot be reduced to our various physical fragilities and abilities, freedom and our inability to know one another are not always painful. Our limited knowledge of one another can be trying, but also preserves our intellectual and experiential autonomy and makes possible gratifying exchanges where we come to recognize one another more fully. Our capacity to create different ways of being is terrifying, but is also the very thing that constitutes the diversity, richness, and marvel of living with one another. Also, even though Levi’s experience involves the problems of recognition and freedom, we can and ought to distinguish between our everyday frustrations with those problems and moments when subjectivity seems 73

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almost to turn on itself. Levi’s experiences in “Chemical Examination” are at the extreme end of a spectrum of difficulties and pleasures that attend living together. This chapter tries to determine more precisely what places certain kinds of interactions at that extreme end and show that such interactions fuel physical violence. Perhaps surprisingly, the most extensive and detailed philosophical reflections on violence are more apt to understand it as a social or intersubjective phenomenon than a physical one. Most promisingly, the three phenomenologists from chapter 3 at times make reference to violence in the realm of intersubjectivity. However, no one thinker gives us quite so useful a jumping-off point as Clausewitz does with physical violence. Instead, various thinkers provide us with a collection of sometimes indiscriminate definitions, which assert that particular gestures, actions, or institutions are inherently violent or even that nearly every social interaction, by the very fact it is an interaction, is violent. I begin with a survey of some of these works, which provide useful insight and important examples of overly expansive and/or overly restrictive conceptions of intersubjective violence.2 In dealing with the phenomenologists, the language can be somewhat rarified and confusing, so I ask the reader to bear with me through some sidebars. In particular, Levinas’s attack on political theory in the context of his attempt to collapse violence and freedom requires a direct rejoinder. But my main purpose is to set the table for a reappraisal and synthesis of various prominent understandings of intersubjective violence. I posit that intersubjective violence is the experience of severely discordant dispositions over time, a theory that delimits intersubjective violence and gives us a clear sense of how such experiences inspire and animate physical violence.

VIOLENCE AS THE LAW AND THE BREAKING OF THE LAW The term violence is perhaps most frequently used in reference to intersubjective phenomena in the context of discussions about the law. Socrates, speaking in the voice of Athenian law, tells Crito that he must do what the city commands because “violence is a sin [biazesthai de ouch

THE EXPERIENCE OF DISCORDANT DISPOSITIONS

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hosion] even against your parents, and it is a far greater sin against your country.”3 Though Athens has ruled that he ought to be put to death for philosophizing, Socrates tells us that trying to escape his death sentence, not the death sentence itself, would be the real act of violence. We find a similar usage in Greek tragedy. Justifying Antigone’s death sentence, King Creon tells his son Haemon: “He that breaches the law or does it violence [nomos biazetai]/ or thinks to dictate to those who govern him/ shall never have my good word.”4 Violence is something done to the law by the act of not obeying it, over and against the conspicuous physical punishment and killing practiced by the state.5 In more contemporary works, the physical punishments of the state are more likely to carry the term violence, but it is also often used to denote the violation of the law.6 In chapter 2, we saw that for Benjamin certain kinds of strikes are violent. He writes: “[H]owever paradoxical this may appear at first sight, even conduct involving the exercise of a right can nevertheless, under certain circumstances, be described as violent.”7 In particular, a right becomes violent when it is exercised “in order to overthrow the legal system.”8 While still portrayed as instrumental (i.e., “in order to”), violence here can be understood as neither physical nor for purposes. Instead, the “violence” of the general strike lies in the incongruity between extant law and the “right” of workers. The issue is the incompatibility between a state that claims certain rights with respect to property, the mode of production, and public order and the workers who claim the right to control their own bodies and actions. For this reason, Benjamin argues that the violence of the general strike is also potentially law making. Violence inheres in situations where two groups maintain and attempt to enact mutually exclusive understandings of their relationship. Benjamin particularly worries about that formative moment where a new understanding of law is enacted in the context of another conception of it. In his essay “Force of Law,” Derrida revises and expands Benjamin’s “Critique,” making both the formation and enactment of the law violent. When Derrida argues that “there is no such thing as law that doesn’t imply . . . the possibility of being ‘enforced,’ ”9 he means in part to refer to the propensity and power of the police to use bodies for their purposes. However, he also writes:

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M By definition the police are present or represented everywhere that there is force of law. They are present, sometimes invisible but always effective, wherever there is preservation of the social order. The police aren’t just the police (today more or less than ever), they are there, a faceless figure (figure sans figure) of a Dasein coextensive with the Dasein of the polis.10

The notion that the police “aren’t just the police” means that they are not just those who enforce the law, but those who perform the social order and constitute the being of the state. They are tasked with embodying the law—a living conception of “the right.” Whether this is “the problem with” the state and whether the police are usefully characterized as “faceless” depends upon one’s perspective, of course. What is of interest for my purposes is that, by imagining a “violence without form,”11 Derrida shows us that performing the law and breaking the law can both be linked to a “violence” indicative of an aspect of intersubjectivity or ways of being (here, specifically, Heidegger’s Dasein). In effect, he turns Benjamin’s notion that a right way of being can be violent in relation to extant law on its head, suggesting that the “violence” of the state exceeds simple physical and instrumental relations in similar ways.12 The most careful and perspicacious analysis along these lines, however, is John Dewey’s little-noted essay “Force, Violence, and Law.”13 Dewey offers a direct attack on would-be detractors of the use of coercive force saying, “To be interested in ends and to have contempt for the means which alone secure them is the last stage of intellectual demoralization.”14 More generally, utilitarianism and the Progressive Era concern with efficiency loom large in the article so that the tenor is antithetical to phenomenology and violence is often portrayed as instrumental and physical. But he also describes violence as a form of power and energy that “defeats or frustrates purpose instead of executing or realizing it.”15 He gives the example of making a turn in an automobile and argues that the motion could be both “power” or “violence” depending on the context. To turn is “an incident of locomotion” and therefore a case of power but to “run amuck in the street is a case of violence.” Added to this is the possible response to the “violent” sort of turning:


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To use energy to make a man observe the rule of the road is a case of coercive force. Immediately, or with respect to his activities, it is a case of violence; indirectly, when it is exercised to assure the means which are needed for the successful realization of ends, it is a case of constructive use of power.16 Turning a car and the “coercive force” of traffic law can be instances of “neutral” or even “worthwhile” energy17 as well as instances of violence, depending on one’s perspective and experience of those actions. If one’s purpose is to use the road to move from place to place with as little difficulty as possible, then the vigilance of the police is not violent because it does not conflict with those purposes. But if one’s purpose in driving is to try out every different way of turning at every crossroads, or to see how my car handles when it swerves back and forth over the middle of the road, then the police who prevent such activities by way of physical restraint or financial penalties are defeating or frustrating purpose. In either case, the relation between practices, not any particular practice, makes the difference. The turning of a car, the law prohibiting reckless driving, and even the use of force by the police are instances of violence and not instances of violence. My actions become “violence” when they prevent others from being as they may. The law becomes “violence” when it prevents me from being as I may, and my being as I may becomes “violence” when it prevents the law from being written and enacted as the group who made it intends. In this way, Dewey’s discussion is not primarily concerned with the means of guiding, submitting, or destroying the will of others. Instead, he observes that when we pursue ends in the presence and context of others, we will sometimes get in one another’s way. The law regularizes certain communal ends and individuals pursue ends that may or may not conform to those. If they do not, the “inefficient” results are violent. Greek usage and Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” show that being a certain way in relation to the law can prevent it from being the law and that this is a kind of “violence.”18 Derrida shows us that performing the law can involve enacting a way of being that constitutes violence, irrespective of its physical enforcement. Dewey offers a theory of violence that accommodates the insights of Benjamin and Derrida:

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violence involves relationships that are indicative of purposes that thwart one another.

A GIFT OF VIOLENCE Another particularly noteworthy use of the term in reference to intersubjective phenomena is Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of “symbolic violence.” Bourdieu sometimes suggests that symbolic violence is simply a transformation of “overt (physical or economic) violence”19 or, more often, that “symbolic capital” is simply capital, or material profit, in a different form. At other times, however, he argues that it involves something more. In the Kabyles community in Algeria the sense of obligation that follows the giving of a gift holds special significance. He writes: [T]he gentle, invisible form of violence, which is never recognized as such, and is not so much undergone as chosen [is] the violence of credit, confidence, obligation, personal loyalty, hospitality, gifts, gratitude, piety—in short, all the virtues honoured by the code of honour . . .20 Kabyles do violence to one another by way of their most hallowed values. According to Bourdieu, these sets of expectations and values create a habitus that allows for certain people to rule over others, most dramatically in the relationship between a “master” and a khammes, who receives only a very small share of a crop that in some cases he alone works.21 Such violence is grounded in social relations and yet orders and adjudicates among bodies. The code of honor “involves no abstract discipline, no rigorous contracts, and no specific sanctions.”22 In part, Bourdieu is no doubt imposing his own cultural conceptions and meanings on Kabyles culture. If the notion that such giving is purely altruistic is Panglossian, it seems overly cynical to reduce the meaning Kabyles give to their own practices to an “interested fiction.”23 However, by locating violence in the apparently pleasant activity of giving and receiving gifts, he provides a concrete example that entirely removes physical violence, or even the threat of it, from the equation.


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Using the terms power and violence almost interchangeably (symbolic violence seems to be symbolic power put into action), he writes: [S]ymbolic power does not reside in “symbolic systems” in the form of an “illocutionary force” but . . . is defined in and through a given relation between those who exercise power and those who submit to it, i.e. the very structure of the field in which belief is produced and reproduced.24 Clearly, there is no law here: no written or spoken expression of expectations, no explicit set of consequences for not living up to expectations. Violence is manifest in a structure where the relation between beliefs is at issue, not a geometric, architectural, or bodily relation. Violence inheres in “good” actions and is embedded in the deep structure of our relationships and our most fundamental cultural and social mores.

PERCEPTION AS VIOLENCE In chapter 3, I used Merleau-Ponty to help describe some features of intersubjectivity, and while he generally does not associate violence with the condition of plurality, he sometimes, if rarely, refers to intersubjective problems as violence.25 For instance, he notes that perception “aims beyond,” attempting to grasp an “inexhaustible ground,” and therefore “always asserts more things than it grasps.” This leads him to the startling claim that we pay a “price for there being things and ‘other people’ for us”: Perception is “a violent act.”26 Looking, hearing and touching involve committing to some line of conduct and are sometimes characterized by misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and misperception. This is not necessarily the result of negligence. We are inexorably embedded in a fundamentally peaceful intersubjectivity, but the nature of expressed subjectivity27 ensures that one or the other of us will get it wrong over some period of time simply because there is no extant “right.” While affirming and constituting our primordial connection, our perceptive capacities will anticipate a “perceptual future” that, on occasion, will be shattered by another perception or expression of subjectivity.

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The connection between perception and action more generally can be seen in another passage. He writes: It is true neither that my existence is in full possession of itself, nor that it is entirely estranged from itself, because it is action or doing and because action is, by definition, the violent transition from what I have to what I aim to have, from what I am to what I intend to be. I can accomplish the cogito and have assurance of genuinely willing, loving or believing, provided that in the first place I actually do will, love or believe, and thus accomplish my own existence.28 The reference to “violent transition” here might be little more than a euphemism for a “tumultuous” or “painful” transition. Yet mention of the cogito, the very source of struggle and conflict he identifies in his analysis of Hegel, suggests it is more deliberate. The person who commits to action, who leaps toward a way of being, a belief, or love experiences violence. The movement from “what I am to what I intend to be” recalls the notion that perception is violent because it “commits to a whole perceptual future.” Perception and action run parallel to one another here and in associating them with violence, Merleau-Ponty hints at a conception that takes into account our most subtle gestures, experiences, and actions.

CHOICE AS VIOLENCE Given his analysis of the look, we might expect Sartre to elaborate upon Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion that perception can be violent, and he does give us a more extensive analysis of violence. In fact, his Notebooks for an Ethics and Levinas’s Totality and Infinity offer perhaps the most intensive and sustained discussions of the nature of violence in Western philosophy. Yet Sartre gives us less than we would hope and less than he sets out to achieve. Published posthumously because Sartre thought the work was incomplete, one suspects that he was dissatisfied because it fails to firmly ground violence in the character of intersubjectivity.29


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For the most part, the Notebooks offer a conception of violence that is all but reducible to objectification. We might even read the work as a whole as little more than an attempt to transpose his discussion of objectification in Being and Nothingness into a definition of violence.30 However, he also makes halting attempts to describe it differently. For instance, he remarks that “the lie is closer to the ideal of violence than that of force.”31 And after an extensive analysis, haunted by objectification, he writes: All the preceding analyses allow us to understand how violence appears in the world as a pure possibility from the moment men appear. But to make this clear, before going any further, we will have to describe the true relations of one person to another, in order to situate violence at its proper ontological level, not as a sin or a crime, but as a type of relation to the other.32 The possibility that violence can be described as “a type of relation” is the conceit of the present chapter. If objectification is the receiving end of perception, Sartre seems poised to describe exactly what it is about “appearance,” what sort or relation between perceptions, gestures, and actions undergirds or constitutes violence. Unfortunately, on the issue of perception, Sartre does not even get as far as Merleau-Ponty.33 However, Sartre’s efforts are not entirely in vain, particularly when he deals with choice. In the context of a discussion of obligation and duty, he writes: [O]bligation is the presence in me of Freedom. Not as I am freedom or exist it, but as it is. Not freedom as a choice to be made in some situation, but freedom as a choice already made outside of any situation whatsoever . . . [T]he inexorability, unalterability, and immediacy of the choice are an act of violence. Duty is the violence of other people but internalized. The only right Freedom has over my freedom is just that it is freedom.34 “Obligation” expresses the idea that we must choose to answer to a demand because by existing we have a choice. Duty reflects our recognition of the violence that the other’s inexorable possibility of choosing

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represents (i.e., obligation is self-referring and duty is other-referring). The very fact that we exist gives us a choice but the possibility of choosing is not a choice.35 For everyone, having choice means that we are faced with the ever-present possibility of finding ourselves in a situation where obligation or duty contradicts right and where we will act even if we do not act.36 Sartre suggests that since choice is inexorable, unalterable, and immediate, it can always be called upon and is an example of violence.

FREEDOM AS VIOLENCE Despite his best intentions, Sartre’s most lucid moments in the Notebooks tend more toward a phenomenological account of a Clausewitzian conception of physical violence than a description of intersubjective violence.37 Levinas’s more complete and well-honed Totality and Infinity promises more. In chapter 3, I argued that Levi modifies and corrects Levinas in important ways, however, he still gives us perhaps the best extant philosophical analysis of the problems of recognition and freedom. In addition, he affirms that the source of misrecognition is intimately tied to violence38 and, not surprisingly, “murderous” freedom is directly referred to as violence. But does Levinas discern a form of violence in the problems of intersubjectivity that we can rely upon to explain the desire to submit and destroy the will? While the term violence enters into almost every discussion in the book, Levinas does not offer us a definition of it. At times it seems that violence is simply a catchall term for those things that Levinas finds disturbing or that ethics ought to address. He associates violence with everything from murder,39 death,40 and injustice41 to relatively less ominous-sounding phenomena such as “seduction” and “flattery,”42 “the naïveté of being,”43 feminine equivocation,44 and “enjoyment being broken up.”45 Yet he also distinguishes violence from labor—at least in the sense that doing labor (as opposed to being subjected to labor) is not the same as “doing violence”46 and, with respect to more mild forms of violence, argues that the “resistance of the other in conversation” does not qualify.47


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However, the fact that freedom compromises freedom is probably the most important meaning of violence. We get a good sense of Levinas’s distinct understanding of the depth of the problem by taking a detour through his critique of political theory. He writes that, for political theorists, [t]he spontaneity of freedom is not called in question; its limitation alone is held to be tragic and to constitute a scandal. Freedom is called in question only inasmuch as it somehow finds itself imposed upon itself: if I could have freely chosen my own existence everything would be justified. The failure of my spontaneity still bereft of reason awakens reason and theory; there would have been a suffering that would be the mother of wisdom. From failure alone would come the necessity of curbing violence and introducing order into human relations. Political theory derives justice from the undiscussed value of spontaneity; its problem is to ensure, by way of knowledge of the world, the most complete exercise of spontaneity by reconciling my freedom with the freedom of others.48 Levinas claims that freedom is of unquestioned value. “Political theory”49 tells us that self-sufficient individuals find justice in their right to be spontaneous, creative beings and this right is compromised only when we come into the presence of other such beings.Violence, then, is a matter of right that compromises right, which recalls and puts a finer point on the discussions of law-destroying and law-making violence above. A freedom that justifies itself, a spontaneity that is not called into question, also very nearly conveys our sense of Pannwitz’s and Alex’s demeanor with respect to Levi and we might also recall the Athenian’s warning to the Melians.50 Political theory, says Levinas, aims to solve the problem by ordering relations so that everyone can engage in “the most complete exercise of spontaneity.” But Levinas claims that the problem with freedom is not exactly as political theory describes it. Freedom is violent because it is situated within a preexisting and rich context of intersubjectivity, which inspires feelings of shame about freedom. He writes:

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M Shame does not have the structure of consciousness and clarity. It is oriented in the inverse direction; its subject is exterior to me. Discourse and Desire, where the other presents himself as interlocutor, as him over whom I cannot have power [je ne peux pouvoir], whom I cannot kill, condition this shame where, qua I, I am not innocent spontaneity but usurper and murderer. . . . [B]ecause I myself can feel myself to be the other of the other. . . . Conscience welcomes the other. It is the revelation of a resistance to my powers that does not counter them as a greater force, but calls in question the naïve right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being. Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent.51

My freedom is not a problem for me because others limit me, but because I limit them. Perhaps I cannot be spontaneous because others are doing what they want, but the core “problem” is that I feel shame because I immediately recognize that the very fact that I exist is destructive. For this reason, the project to set freedom free as framed by political theory is impossible and, if it could be achieved, undesirable. Any attempt to systematize our way out of, or organize our way around, freedom is foolhardy and suspect. Why? Because it either ignores or attempts to do away with ethics. Spontaneity and freedom cannot be both corraled and preserved and, more importantly, shame is the beginning of conscience and morality. In this way, Levinas’s barefaced critique of freedom is quashed by an immediate recovery of subjectivity, where Levinas circumscribes the extent to which “the surplus of being” can be implicated in violence. While freedom is violent and arbitrary, we realize this immediately and ethics is present at the birth of this realization. In fact, ethics appears so immediately that we should perhaps not consider it a realization. Levinas suggests that ethics is not grounded in knowledge and reason52 but in a prior “welcoming of the Other” that is closely connected to conversation (referred to above as “discourse”). This distinction between political theory and ethics is built on a distinction between freedom and “the face” and it is here where the problems with Levinas’s portrayal of intersubjectivity catch up with


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him. More than any other theorist, Levinas is willing to understand violence as an aspect of the simple interaction of spontaneous and free subjects. At the same time, he works hard to shelter all of those aspects of subjectivity he associates with the face from this understanding. He calls the principle “ ‘you shall not commit murder,’ the very significance of the face.”53 He writes of “the impossibility of killing” as conditioned positively by “the idea of infinity” because “a face is an ethical resistance that paralyses my powers.”54 Finally, he argues that as “nonviolence [the face] nonetheless maintains the plurality of the same and the other. It is peace.”55 Nice sentiments indeed; however, given all of the various aspects of subjectivity associated with the face, we are left with rather thin notions of “freedom,” “spontaneity,” and “violence.” Levi steps in to give us a more robust understanding of subjectivity, if only because he is recounting an actual face to face that seems indicative of precisely the compromising freedoms that Levinas calls murderous. A close examination of Levinas’s conception of intersubjective violence reveals an attempt to cordon off vast areas of subjectivity, such as expression and discourse, and even language and desire more generally, so that they are included in the face to face but unpolluted by violence. The result is that Levinas’s conception of violence is too narrow to explain our desire to destroy and submit another’s will and, in another way, too broad because even though his conception of freedom is atrophied, he seems to associate any instance of freedom, the simple fact of any freedom, with violence. He builds a pejorative vocabulary around freedom and a positive vocabulary around the face, when surely the aspects of subjectivity associated with both are both violent and not violent. In fact, there is no reason to believe that ethics is any less susceptible to a totalizing impulse than politics, or that politics is any less amenable to openness and infinite possibility than ethics. As I discuss in chapter 6, it seems more plausible that precisely the reverse is true since the claims of conscience and ethics tend to be uncompromising, up-ordown propositions that disallow or actively set out to delimit plurality. This is not to say that we should dismiss the possibility that some form of ethics arises from the violence of interacting freedoms, be it a physically violent Hobbesian response grounded in egoism and the rational pursuit of survival or a Levinasian response grounded in shame and the

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welcoming of the face. Levinas’s demonstration that the latter is just as plausible as the former is a tremendous breakthrough. But even if we abide by his elementary distinctions, there must be a primary connection between the totalizing non-ethics of “political theory” and the infinitizing ethics of the face to face. Even Hobbes suggests that the interaction of freedoms leads us to ethics, that intersubjectivity somehow brings forth moral responses that create the possibility of justice. Likewise, in the passage cited above Levinas invokes the phrase “my glorious spontaneity as a living being” and proceeds to say that it will elicit shame and self-consciousness—suggesting that his ethics comes from precisely the same intersubjective space as Hobbes’s politics. This is not to say that Levinas’s ethics are not preferable to political theory’s attempt to know the world and make a paradoxical “orderly freedom,” but what we would prefer is not really the issue. The distinction between ethics and politics is common enough but, if we take plurality seriously, it is of limited use as a characterization of intersubjectivity. I am sympathetic to Levinas’s critique of political theory in the sense that a credible, political brand of pacifism affirms the idea that the very fact of our freedom can cause suffering and that efforts to eliminate such suffering can be dangerous. Also, discourse, desire, and conscience are woven into the fabric of intersubjectivity and play a role in determining which ethics arises from our experience of freedom compromising freedom. However, our spontaneous freedom and the face we present cannot be separate phenomena.

T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F S E V E R E LY DISCORDANT DISPOSITIONS In the foregoing analysis we have seen that violence is often associated with social interactions that do not involve the use of bodies as a means to subjectivity. Instead, a diverse group of thinkers identifies violence in the enacting and breaking of law, the pursuit of ends that thwart one another, and the giving of a gift. In addition, the phenomenologists who gave us a sense of the problems of intersubjectivity in chapter 3 describe violence as inhering in particular aspects of subjectivity itself, such as perception, choice, and freedom.


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Yet none of these thinkers give us an adequate conception of violence, either because we cannot extrapolate from the particular example of violence offered or because their conception is so broad as to include almost any interaction. Most manage to fail on both counts. Surely, Benjamin and Derrida do not mean to understand violence as only a matter of law or the breaking of the law, but it is hard to see how their conceptions function outside of legal contexts. At the same time, they seem to understand the law or the breaking of the law as inherently and always violent or at least provide us with no good sense of what the exceptions might look like. Likewise, I doubt that Bourdieu means to suggest that all gift giving is violent, but he does not distinguish between violent and nonviolent belief structures, leaving open the possibility that not just gift giving but all cultural and social values are violent. And if the very fact that we have the capacity for perception, choice, and freedom implies violence, then intersubjective violence must be happening everywhere and all the time. Sartre seems to suggest that violence occurs every time duty and obligation come into play, and Levinas’s conception of freedom, thin though it might be, does not deny spontaneity is ubiquitous. Merleau-Ponty is a bulwark against such extreme views, but fails to tell us when or why perception usually avoids the problem of overreaching into illusory perceptual futures. Only Dewey offers a conception of violence that avoids these pitfalls, by suggesting that violence is connected to purposes that frustrate purpose. Dewey gives us a rudimentary way of distinguishing between instances where the law is violent and those where it is not, and this distinction functions just as well in nonlegal contexts (e.g., the interaction between two motorists). His conception is entirely subjective and context bound and yet not ubiquitous and amorphous. Different people in the same interaction experience the interaction as violent or not, but their experience is determined by a very definite relationship between divergent purposes. The problem with Dewey’s analysis is that he fails to distinguish between the various levels of frustration that might result from divergent purposes. Someone turning their car so as to prevent another from turning is not an offense we ordinarily call “violence.” The example of traffic law is itself a bit trivial and the fact that one might prefer—as opposed to need or strongly desire—to run amuck in the street seems insufficient

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basis for judging a law violent. At the same time, by invoking intentional and voluntary “purpose,” Dewey’s conception fails to account for the possibility that the phenomenologists might have identified the potential for violence in perception, choice, and the very fact of freedom (as opposed to a premeditated, self-conscious thought or judgment). A viable conception of intersubjective violence, then, raises the bar in order to exclude categories of “frustration” where we are mildly put out, inconvenienced, or perturbed by being with others. At the same time, it lowers the bar to include actions other than those that are purposeful or voluntary. This violence of intersubjectivity is best expressed as the experience of severely discordant dispositions. We can think of intersubjective conflict as reaching the level of violence along at least three axes. First, the severity of the discordance relates to the degree to which a given disposition is prevented or compromised. If someone’s way of being or carrying themselves is utterly compromised or entirely prevented by being with others then it is likely to be an instance of intersubjective violence, but not if others only hamper or make it slightly more difficult to maintain one’s disposition. Second, the severity of the discordance is exacerbated by the importance of a particular disposition or way of being to someone’s character more generally. If the activity or way of being in question is an essential aspect of one’s identity then destroying or preventing it is violent, but if the disposition is just an incidental way of being among more important activities, purposes, or desires then the interaction is less of a violation. Finally, time plays a role in intersubjective violence. If being with others is painful, we can often solve the problem by leaving. When we cannot avoid one another, or when circumstances conspire to keep us together over a longer period of time, discordant dispositions become more troublesome. There is no scientific formula for weighing these three factors and there is a vast gray area between intersubjective violence and the ordinary problems of intersubjectivity. For outstanding examples of intersubjective violence, we might think of great tragedies such as Oedipus Rex and Antigone. When Oedipus and his parents fail to recognize their relationship to one another, it leads them to actions that make it impossible for Oedipus and Jocasta to be the persons and rulers they are/were. It is not that marriage, or even killing someone, are inherently inflected with intersubjective violence. The violence of Oedipus’s


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actions inheres in (and is revealed when everyone learns) the relational significance of those acts. Being an incestuous and disloyal traitor, even unintentionally, or without conscious purposes, makes it impossible for Oedipus to continue on as king. In Antigone, everyone understands their relationship to one another perfectly well. Creon’s refusal to bury Polyneices’ body and Antigone’s refusal to leave the body uncovered are principled positions. However, in enacting mutually exclusive positions, Creon’s self-conception is destroyed and Antigone literally destroys herself. The character of their relationship, the severe discordance in their dispositions, results in extraordinary relational pain and suffering. Levi’s encounters with Pannwitz and Alex also clear the bar with room to spare. The interactions utterly compromise Levi’s capacity to comport himself as a colleague and a person among equals, by constituting him, respectively, as a specimen and a rag. With examples reflecting this sort of severity in mind, we can better comprehend the examples in the work of the thinkers we have discussed in this chapter, even while challenging and honing vague conceptions of intersubjective violence. For instance, Bourdieu’s provocative assertion that gift giving can be violent seems to depend on the implicit assumption that a particular khammes would live a significantly different sort of life without the cluster of habits, actions, and dispositions that surround the master’s gift. Violence occurs when (or if) Kabyles culture, or the “structure of the field in which belief is produced,” fundamentally compromises the capacity of individuals or groups to live as they otherwise would over time. Sartre’s suggestion that duty and obligation are violent, refers to the possibility that we can compromise one another’s dispositions over time even without physical constraint. Our knowledge of one another’s capacity to choose means that we oblige one another to continue on in discordant relationships. In fact, the very fact that we have choice or can choose not to act, our subtle gestures expressed in our capacity for perception, and the spontaneity and creativity we associate with freedom, all hold the potential for violence. However, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas have not identified phenomena that are generally or necessarily violent, any more than a particular purposeful action. If we take intersubjectivity seriously, no particular disposition, gesture, or quality of subjectivity is inherently violent, even if each holds the potential for suffering in

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relation to other gestures, dispositions, or qualities. Sometimes the pain of living with one another is pronounced and sometimes it is not. At times, in certain situations, our interactions will be painful enough to warrant the name violence. As with the conception of physical violence offered in chapter 2, this notion of intersubjective violence is not packaged with ethical or legal presuppositions, although the issue is a bit more complex. Destroying or making certain ways of being impossible might be a good thing or a bad thing, legitimate or illegitimate. For instance, for pedophiles, cultural and legal expectations and dispositions make it difficult for them to be as they may. If having sex with children is a practice at the crux of someone’s self-conception and others’ dispositions preclude such activities then those laws are instances of violence, even if the vast majority of people do not experience them as such. Likewise, Jim Crow laws prevented millions of people from being full citizens and everyone from living in a country of political equality. For many, this struck at the core of their identity and ensured an incomplete life. For others, such laws were either irrelevant to their disposition or supported their practice of white supremacy. From an ethical standpoint, laws that prohibit pedophilia and enforce political inequality are entirely different. However, Benjamin and Derrida help us understand that the idea of law in and of itself seems to imply the constraint of someone’s disposition. Whether or not this reaches the level of violence relates to ethics only insofar as our conceptions of right and wrong and legal and illegal are connected with our identities. The expectations and practices of not only traffic law, but all laws, are destructive or constructive, depending on one’s experience of them. In fact, our conception of what is properly legal or illegal, ethical or unethical, is just as likely to flow from our sense of the demands of say, property, tax, or civil rights law on our personality or group.56 To some extent this conception of violence assumes that there are coherent group and individual identities that exist over time. As a practical matter, we orient ourselves with respect to others by assuming that personalities, institutions, and cultures are at least semi-coherent. More importantly, we understand ourselves in this way. Also, the concept of intersubjective violence is entirely consistent with the idea that intersubjectivity forms subjectivity; it only means to highlight the fact that


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the process can be extraordinarily painful or even crushing. Fixing and holding fast to particular notions of identity often sets the stage for discordant dispositions, but it is also essential for our everyday functioning. Fissures in the character of our relationships are sometimes so great that they can only be experienced as destructive of who “we are” or “I am.” The fact that identities are both static and changing, makes the term disposition particularly useful. First, intersubjective violence refers not only to what one is doing but to what one might do, or has a tendency to do. In this way, the “discord” between actions and understandings can be implicit and not enacted. Merleau-Ponty’s claim that perception involves what I see as well as “a whole perceptual future,” and that action involves “what I am and what I intend to be,” is instructive. In the somewhat forward-looking aspects of perception and action—in what we are disposed to do—lies the potential for violence and the experience of violence. Yet, if our capacity to act and be in ways that thwart other ways of being springs from the habitual nature of subjectivity, it also emanates from our capacity for creativity and spontaneity. The word disposition reflects this flexibility. If I am disposed to do something one way, I might do it another way. Disposition refers to both our tendencies and our capacity for change and how we presently carry ourselves. If violence occurs in a moment of commitment, the nature of that commitment, as Sartre and Levinas demonstrate, is to have a choice and be free with respect to other beings. Finally, the word disposition has a cluster of connotations that bring together various aspects of how we comport ourselves. It reflects our mood and the status of our body. It encompasses our countenance and our practices more generally. By incorporating “position” it even seems to indicate that we are relating to others, that we are situated or situate ourselves. I should also clarify what I mean by the experience of dispositions. Though by drawing on phenomenology I have in some respects already invoked an understanding of embodied “experience,” I want to distinguish my use of the term from Sartre’s conception. In describing the aspects of intersubjectivity I have moved liberally between the notion of conflicting wills and purposes and the problems of being with one another. I have also frequently invoked subjectivity over and against objectivity. The sort of experience I have in mind, however, is very much along the lines of William James’s “pure experience,” where

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“[c]onsciousness as it is ordinarily understood does not exist, any more than does that Matter to which Berkeley gave the coup de grâce.”57 Experiencing discordant dispositions is not a matter of objectification because “the attributes ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ ‘represented’ and ‘representative,’ ‘thing’ and ‘thought’ ” are practical distinctions, but only “of a FUNCTIONAL order, and not at all ontological as understood by classical dualism.”58 In James’s understanding, experience is the “stuff ” that comprises and constitutes subjects and objects, consciousnesses and matter. When we encounter and experience violence, it is a matter of just this sort of experience. The “subjectivity” I have in mind is much more along the lines of Merleau-Ponty’s “revealed” subjectivity, than Sartre’s subject who objectifies. Just as a plausible conception of physical violence invokes the will and purpose, intersubjective violence refers to an embodied experience, not an entirely objectified field or a theoretical subjectivity with transcendental relationships. A pragmatic approach to experience repairs the artificial breach between the body and subjectivity suggested by Parts I and II of this project, functional though it may be.

INTERSUBJECTIVE VIOLENCE AND PHYSICAL VIOLENCE At the outset of chapter 3, I charted a course toward an explanation of our desire to destroy and submit one another’s will that does not rely on a particular ideological agenda, assumptions about human nature, or previous acts of physical violence. We have arrived at the experience of severely discordant dispositions. Clausewitz suggests wars can be fought for any purpose, but a conception of intersubjective violence explains why we fight for particular purposes in particular times and places. Encountering dispositions, habits, and ways of being that severely compromise our own produces frustration and inspires a burning desire to manipulate, destroy, or change others. If life is unlivable unless others change, it might lead us to pursue change at all costs. By locating an explanation for physical violence in intersubjective violence, we can remove the suspicion that our bodies or our nature possess some inherently evil quality—even while accounting for material desires and impulses.


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That intersubjective violence accounts for the physical violence that springs from religion, ideology, or identity is fairly obvious. When the presence of others prevents us from enacting political, social, or cultural understandings that are fundamental to who we are, it can produce frustration with, anger toward, and hatred for those others. However, to put a finer point on why this explanation for physical violence is distinctive, consider a standard explanation for conflict grounded in assumptions about human nature and our material desires: Two starving people come across one edible plant. The survival instinct and the reality of the physical circumstances dictate that the two attempt to kill and destroy one another in order to secure possession and consumption of the plant. The desire to destroy and submit another’s will seems to spring from the very capacities and needs of our bodies. The trouble with this explanation is that embodied subjectivity is not reducible to our physical being. We are fundamentally free. If the other person is my brother, mother, child, or partner, or if I maintain a radically altruistic ethic with respect to strangers, I could insist that the other eat first. I might rather starve myself than witness my partner die of starvation. The point here is not that most people will have such a reaction, or even should. The point is that when we use bodies to submit or destroy wills for purposes, the crux of this violence—even the simple killing of another for food—lies not in the character of our bodies but in the character of our relationships. Our dispositions, irrespective of material circumstances, can involve just about anything; yet they are always enacted and separated from one another if they are part of experience. When two starving people pursue limited food supplies, they are experiencing severely discordant dispositions, where each tries to create circumstances that threaten, inadvertently, the survival of the other. Of course, I do not mean to take back all I have said about our physical fragility and ability. Eating food that keeps me alive but simultaneously prevents someone else from living is intersubjective, not physical, violence. But physical violence is almost always intersubjective violence too. Dying is sometimes consistent with our way of being. Sometimes our most important purpose is dying well.59 However, in most instances having our bodies manipulated and destroyed by others prevents us from being as we may. For instance, if a group of people lives on a piece of land, preventing another group from living there or

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tilling the land, that intersubjective violence may lead the displaced group to attempt to destroy or subdue the inhabitants through war. But being killed in one’s home, or on a battlefield, in and of itself, is almost always an example of both physical and intersubjective violence. Destroying another’s body constitutes perhaps the most important example of severely discordant dispositions.60 Only in this way is physical violence a root cause of physical violence. In the vast region of overlap between physical and intersubjective violence, we find some of the most painful experiences of human living together. In these moments, physical and intersubjective violence are two sides of the same coin. Physical violence describes the body from the standpoint of subjectivity and intersubjective violence describes subjectivity from the standpoint of the body. On the one hand, Clausewitz’s theory of war implies that we set out to destroy or submit wills that are at odds with our own. On the other hand, no matter how deliberate, instrumental and thetic the use of bodies may be, the one who has their body taken up, manipulated, or destroyed has the simple experience of discordant dispositions. Perhaps the most poignant and careful attempt to identify intersubjective violence in the context of an act of physical violence is Cathy Winkler’s “Rape as Social Murder.” She writes: “Not only had he invaded my body with his repulsion, but he had invaded me mentally.” Here, the body is used to strike at her mind and her character. But she also recalls that her “student/friend/informant, Renata McMullen pointed out, ‘violation is a death in itself.’ ” Even without physical battering, McMullen’s body felt battered as if the date rapist had physically beaten her up because “[r]ape is the experience of social death.”61 Intersubjective violence is not just a matter of conflicting purposes. Violence inheres in the moment when we find ourselves impeded or crushed, physically or emotionally, because someone intends to do so, or they inadvertently do so, or in the very fact of their existence. Sartre says that violence always attempts to “constrain the other’s freedom” while acknowledging that it is a freedom62 and Levinas asserts that violence “can aim only at the face.”63 This is usually the case with physical violence, but intersubjective violence can be more subtle and for that reason more devastating. Intersubjective violence includes the sort of violence that compromises freedom and discombobulates the


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face, but it is fundamentally not attentive—it does not “aim.” It does not recognize and for this reason it sometimes does not exist at all, that is, if other practices are not in its way. When it does recognize, when it reflects a commitment to act and be a certain way, it does not do so for the purpose of destroying the other, at least not initially. Instead, intersubjective violence is simply a matter of realizing oneself in the presence of others in ways that bring another’s world crashing down on them. Only with resistance, only when the other’s experience of discordant dispositions causes them to push back, does the deliberate will of one against the other appear, and with it the recognition of a competitor and the identification of an enemy. Intersubjective violence causes, animates, and exceeds physical violence, but I should be a bit more specific about the sense in which it “causes” physical violence. Intersubjective violence does not overwhelm and thereby come to define the very nature of freedom as Levinas claims. The very fact that we have freedom and choice sometimes leads to severely discordant dispositions, but freedom has an upside! The frustrations that arise as a consequence of our living with other robust, creative, habitual subjectivities can take many forms, which include, but are not limited to, physical violence. Without intersubjective violence we would not have an overwhelming desire to submit and destroy others’ wills, but the presence of intersubjective violence does not necessarily lead to physical violence. I should note two other responses to intersubjective violence besides physical violence, one that tends to be associated with fascism and the other with pacifism. First, intersubjective violence helps us understand attempts to reject intersubjectivity outright. I mentioned in chapter 2 that the purposeless destruction of bodies could not be accommodated by a Clausewitzian conception of physical violence. By endowing the destruction or harming of bodies itself with meaning, we can imagine that subjectivity is just an epiphenomenon of our fragility and ability. Proving it seems rather simple. Unless one believes in ghosts, killing people kills subjectivity. That fact can seem like an interesting, definitive, or beautiful alternative to the frustrations of intersubjective violence. In addition, torturers and rapists not only submit or destroy the will through the body, but seem to produce subjectivity from the body by eliciting screams, answers, or tears. Marking, manipulating, or

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ripping apart the body, drinking blood or creating things from feces and urine, suggest that the pain of being with one another can be overcome by embracing the erotic and aesthetic features of the body itself. If being with others is intolerable, hope (if one can call it that) seems to lie in the fact that bodies and surfaces have a form and meaning of their own. One way to deal with intersubjective violence is to opt out of intersubjectivity by pretending that bodies themselves, dead or alive (it makes no difference), sustain meaning. The purposeless destruction of bodies, or erotic or aesthetic violence, is often specifically anti- or apolitical. However, it shows up in political theory in moments where a combination of desperation and idealism leads us to contemplate trading up the vagaries of intersubjectivity and the efficacy of physical violence for the worship of lovely bloodbaths. Between powerful descriptions of dehumanization and objectification, Franz Fanon discovers the destruction of settlers’ bodies has cleansing powers.64 Machiavelli senses that the citizens of his day would be better equipped to handle the bewildering unpredictability of politics if they adopted the bloody pagan rites of their Roman forebears.65 Sorel believes socialists can raise themselves “above our frivolous society” by embracing sublime annihilation.66 The vestiges of purposeful physical violence are more or less present in these works but so is exasperation. Fascism is the only political philosophy that attempts to build an antipolitical politics on the basis of the wholesale rejection of intersubjectivity. Fascist orders prove that the erotics and aesthetics of the destruction of bodies and all related activities (military encampments, parades, uniforms, etc.) can found an order and sustain the masses of people, at least for a time.67 From this perspective, freedom and choice, indeed, political purposes and meanings, were only a rumor. Our fragility and ability has meaning that transcends, defies, or produces intersubjectivity. The flip side of the fantasy that the experience of discordant dispositions can be overcome through the body is the fantasy that intersubjective violence does not exist or that it only exists in the harming and destruction of bodies. One of the important lessons for pacifism in a conception of intersubjective violence is that even if our bodies were not fragile and able with respect to one another, or we were somehow prevented from causing one another physical pain and suffering, we


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would still experience violence. As I will argue in chapter 6, Gandhi’s conviction that conscience can guide us to a single moral truth envisions an intersubjectivity that does not exist. Pacifists are no less prone than advocates of violence to the belief that all physical violence springs from previous physical violence. Instead of drawing the conclusion that previous acts of physical violence necessitate a volley of more physical violence, pacifists sometimes talk as though stopping that cycle and refraining from retaliation would make the world a place of unending justice, peace, and understanding. However, in all the aspects of our dispositions—in our gestures and words, our looks and movements, our performances and our simple being—there is the potential for preventing and destroying the dispositions of others. Intersubjectivity can be and may even be generally peaceful. But it also holds the potential for crushing violence that cannot be escaped.


PART III

Th e P o s s i b i l i t i e s of Politics


FIVE

Self-Sufficient Power

THE NEXT THREE CHAPTERS consider the relationship between violence and politics. How does the exercise of power relate to killing others in order to destroy their wills? How does taking action in politics relate to the possibility that living together will produce unbearable suffering? Politics is often understood as an alternative to violent conflict, but given what I have said about intersubjective violence, it might seem more likely to exacerbate it. If the very contours of intersubjectivity inspire our desire to take up others’ bodies, then the challenges for politics are stark. Exercising power implies we want to change the world to our liking or prevent others from changing it to theirs. Debating or negotiating with others and taking action in one’s community puts our sometimes intolerable differences on display. Even if we understand the political realm as a space that is relatively free of physical violence, we might also suspect that it generates the severe intersubjective frustration and suffering that causes physical violence. Politics is a result of and response to the problems that arise in living together with others. In the next three chapters I will argue that there is a close relationship between politics and violence, but that the incorrigibility of political problems and the promise of alternative political methods mean that physical violence is dispensable. This is not to say that someday people will not use physical violence; a few individuals, groups, or governments will probably always do so. However, it is possible to conduct politics without physical violence and even when others use physical violence, politics can still function and accomplish things. (In fact, those who use 101

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physical violence can be confronted effectively even without using it in return.) A robust, troublesome, inspiring and painful kind of politics, can exist and flourish without physical violence, just as it currently does in the midst of it. Power and politics, though often intertwined with violence in practice, are self-sufficient and can be entirely independent of physical violence. Politics does not depend upon violence. The crux of the argument is that physical violence is no more reliable than other methods of conducting politics and therefore can be replaced. The empirical evidence suggests that physical violence either does not work very well or that it is difficult to determine whether or not it is effective. After decades of research, evidence for the deterrent effect of the death penalty is inconclusive.1 Torture can work, but usually only when one would need it least (in peacetime, non-emergency conditions), and it generally “yields poor information, sweeps up many innocents, degrades organizational capabilities and destroys interrogators.”2 There is strong evidence that terrorist methods rarely work and that military responses to it are ineffective.3 Research on war suggests that physical superiority does not predict the outcomes of battles, let alone political results.4 Physical violence sometimes works; it sometimes subdues or destroys the will of those it aims at and thereby achieves its intended results. But it does not appear to be a particularly effective way to resolve the intersubjective frustrations that lead to it. For political theory, the question is: Why does physical violence not work as well as we might expect it to? And if it does not work particularly well, then why is it so attractive as a political means? The most controversial aspect of my argument is that physical violence is no more reliable than other means, even when confronting physical violence. I take up this claim in chapter 6. However, to prepare the ground for that more specific contention we need to first examine the character of power and action as they relate to violence more generally. For this, I turn to Hannah Arendt. Arendt was not a pacifist, if by that we mean someone who always opposes the use of physical violence. She waxed sentimental about Homer’s account of the great deeds of the Trojan War, admired the special quality of partisan life in World War II, and thought that a Jewish Army resisting Nazism could be the beginning of a new Jewish politics.5 However, on the whole her work attempts to distinguish violence and politics at a time when the wars

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and revolutions of the modern experience “[prompt] us to equate [the two].” If we collapse political action and violence, she argues, “political action becomes meaningless.”6 Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that Arendt is the foremost contemporary analyst of the relationship between politics and violence, the extent to which she successfully separates the two is a matter of dispute and confusion. Where one scholar suggests that “for Arendt, violence is not political at all,”7 another states that “far from articulating a clear antithesis between politics and violence she expresses a rather nuanced view.”8 Others suggest that she does not aim to separate violence and politics. Instead, “one of the most persistent themes of her thinking about action . . . is the question of how far action and violence can be detached from one another.”9 Or, despite her best efforts, “a political violence that Arendt can never completely banish troubles her vision of the political from start to finish.”10 Arendt’s views on violence are confusing because she usually says violence is like the nonpolitical activity of “work” but occasionally, especially in the context of warfare, associates it with inherently political “action.” By offering a critical reconstruction of Arendt’s work on politics and violence, this chapter shows that the most important implication of her analysis is that the political realm can be established and function independently of physical violence. The fact that violence lies somewhere between the activities of fabrication and politics leads Arendt to make two mistakes. First, she sometimes suggests that the antipolitical aspects of violence prevent it from creating power, when it can do just that. Second, and more importantly, to the extent that physical violence is political, she suggests that it partially defies the constraints of other political methods and activities. In this way, she underestimates the relationship between physical violence and power, but overestimates the effectiveness of physical violence as political action. However, with some minor course corrections, Arendt’s analysis sets us on our way toward a credible pacifism. Physical violence can destroy and facilitate power but, more importantly, she helps us distinguish between the two. Arendt is the first political theorist to demonstrate that power can be, and to some extent always already is, formed and maintained without physical violence. At the same time, though she barely notices, she gives us a way to delineate the limits of violence. If physical

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violence retains the qualities of political action, it faces the difficulties and obstacles that hinder every other political act. As long as people are concerned with political outcomes, physical violence, even extreme violence, holds no advantage over other methods of conducting politics.11 Physical violence can successfully achieve political outcomes, but it is no more effective, reliable, or predictable than speech, protest, or civil disobedience. Violence is an inessential feature of politics and power.

THE SELF-SUFFICIENCY OF POWER AND POLITICS A cursory reading of Arendt might lead one to the conclusion that politics is seldom seen or experienced. Strictly defined, politics is not a matter of our interests, pursuits, purposes, ends, or desires. We learn in her corpus that Marx’s labor, Plato’s work, Aristotle’s household, Socrates’ thinking, Christ’s love, Nietzche’s will, and even Rousseau’s sovereignty are all either nonpolitical or antipolitical.12 Moderns are less political than we ought to be and the feudal institutions of the Middle Ages were defined by “the very absence of a public realm.”13 Even the politics of Athenian democracy do not entirely meet her high standards.14 Yet when she describes what politics is, it must be almost everywhere and practiced by almost everyone. It occurs whenever people appear, speak, and act in one another’s presence. It involves revealing something unique about oneself to others. It is a matter of opinion and it results in stories and histories. This strange vision of politics can be explained in part by phenomenological commitments that by now should be familiar. Instead of finding violence in the ontological separation of intersubjectivity, Arendt finds politics. She writes: Action and speech go on between men, as they are directed toward them, and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even if their content is exclusively “objective,” concerned with the matters of the world of things in which men move, which physically lies between them and out of which arise their specific, objective, worldly interests. These interests constitute, in the word’s most literal significance, something which inter-est,


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which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between, which varies with each group of people, so that most words and deeds are about some worldly objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent. Since this disclosure of the subject is an integral part of all, even the most “objective” intercourse, the physical worldly in-between along with its interests is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether different in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another. This second, subjective in-between is not tangible, since there are no tangible objects into which it could solidify; the process of acting and speaking can leave behind no such results and end products. But for all its intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common. We call this reality the “web” of human relationships, indicating by the metaphor its somewhat intangible quality.15 The same activity can have both political and anti- or nonpolitical qualities, because intersubjectivity overlays and overgrows all of our other activities.16 Action and speech almost always reveal something about who we are to others, even if we are just trying to get something done in “the real world.” Politics seems elusive because it rarely appears in its pure form and is easily encroached upon and crowded out by competing forces and activities. At the same time, the opportunity for politics is omnipresent. In the presence of others, the very fact of our freedom and spontaneity can always reveal something that could not have been anticipated.17 Despite our modern predicament and the totalitarian attempt to defy intersubjectivity, then, politics is not atrophied or rarefied. The lifeblood of politics is power. Power comes into existence when people speak and act together. When performed “in concert,” revelatory, new, real, and unique words and actions are given meaning and can accomplish almost anything. A few people can rule over large and populous empires, and small nations can defeat rich and sizable ones. Power has

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no physical or material limitations or parameters, except that it requires the existence and living together of people. It “springs up” between us but cannot be stored any more than freedom and spontaneity can be accumulated. It can only be performed and enacted. Power can be divided without decreasing it because it involves the interplay of plural or agonistic individuals that vivifies or even generates more power, giving it boundless potential. Power, therefore, precedes, exceeds, animates, and, when it is lost, destroys formal governments.18 Government is one of power’s “special cases.”19 Using power or being in power does not map strictly onto the simple capacity to achieve desired outcomes. Everybody has interests. Interests are ordinary. Mobs, petty dictators, and criminals are drawn together to pursue interests and, in the process, instantiate a minimal kind of power. What they can accomplish is circumscribed and they are not long remembered. When we gather together strictly to pursue particular interests and ends, the conversation quickly stultifies or stalemates, and power tends to recede into latent potential. While power makes politics and government possible, its essence is not a group of people following a common command or pursuing a designated common purpose, any more than action, strictly speaking, is a matter of pursuing ends and goals. Distinguishing between those who are in and out of power and governments that are more or less powerful requires something more. When people convene to do great things, “the innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is independent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse.”20 If this sounds utopian or impractical, Arendt suggests it is just realistic. Power is extraordinary and can accomplish almost anything. So great, in fact, that what it accomplishes will, by the very nature of political action and speech, be unpredictable. If politicians, activists, citizens, or political theorists could identify the outcome of speaking and acting together, there would be no reason to gather and converse with one another. For this reason, Arendt distinguishes between political goals, which are guidelines and directives and can therefore be revised and negotiated, and the pursuit of ends, which she suggests can overrun politics by treating it as nothing but a means.21 The activities of politics—action, speech, and the power that enables


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them—have no particular ends, even if we are usually drawn together and act for some reason. Instead, following Aristotle, Arendt maintains that the activity of politics is its own end.22 Among all the various themes, activities, and phenomena that Arendt distinguishes from politics, violence is perhaps the most important. Her conception of violence is very close to the physical violence of chapter 2. She says that it is “instrumental” and “close to strength” where strength refers to the “property inherent in an object.”23 Violence relates to her conception of labor because slavery involves forcing others to bear the pain and necessities of providing for biological life.24 However, it is most closely related to work.25 Work is the destruction of the natural world in order to make things and artifacts, which all together make a home.26 Using tools, ingenuity, and craftsmanship, work achieves definite, reliable ends that take the form of durable objects such as chairs, tables, and buildings. Arendt suggests we ought to be wary of homo faber lest he “eventually help himself to everything and consider everything that is as a mere means for himself.”27 Violence is the application of the means/ends relationship and the tools and technologies of work to the fragile bodies of others. Arendt allows that there are numerous connections between violence and power. There is nothing “more common than the combination of violence and power, nothing less frequent than to find them in their pure and therefore extreme form.”28 In domestic and foreign affairs, governments try to keep power structures intact by destroying criminals, enemies, and other challengers. Governments and other groups concert action and take up weapons. Power can use violence. However, she maintains that there is one important, hard and fast, disconnection between power and violence, which she abruptly introduces while offering another important connection between the two. The “textbook case” of Prague Spring demonstrates that when power and violence do appear in their raw form, violence can take the day. Those who oppose violence with mere power will soon find that they are confronted not by men but by men’s artifacts, whose inhumanity and destructive effectiveness increase in proportion to the distance separating the opponents. Violence

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.29

The admission that violence can destroy power is a serious blow. Nonviolent protestors are no match for Russian tanks. If power only requires human togetherness, the effectiveness of violence increases in proportion to our “distance” from one another. Violence can destroy plurality and uniqueness, replacing it with predictability and sameness. Power seems helpless in the face of violence. However, Arendt argues that the reverse is true as well. Even the most repressive governments are helpless without the power to do violence. The active cooperation of the secret police and a network of informers is a minimum requirement for totalitarian regimes. According to Arendt, the importance of power is most evident in the history, or the plain fact, of revolutions. Extant governments are usually physically superior to would-be challengers, but even great material superiority is of no use when power is lost. Without power, governments cannot employ their weapons and even find that “the arms themselves change hands—sometimes, as in the Hungarian revolution, within a few hours.”30 The crucial insight here is with respect to the origin of power. Power can employ but cannot be made by violence in the way work makes a chair or a table. Power is self-sufficient and self-generating, residing in and reflecting the “second,” intangible, “subjective inbetween.”Violence can destroy power because subjectivity is embodied. But power does not require and cannot rely upon violence because it cannot be created by the manipulation or destruction of material things—even human bodies. This has not prevented people from trying. Attempts to create power with violence are usually a sign of degeneration and decay. If the Soviets were “successful” in the sense that they achieved their immediate objective of obedience, tanks cannot make the conditions for true consent or concerted action.31 Arendt writes: “To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.”32 So while it is true that power mobilizes tanks, the death of nonviolent protestors can be dispiriting and destructive of power. The


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killing or harming of bodies can destroy the plurality that creates the public realm but never add creative beings to the mix. In this way, despite its destructive capacity, violence can operate only at the margins of politics.

THE POSSIBILITY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE Although this extraordinary attempt to distinguish power from violence is the predominant theme in her description of the relationship between violence and politics, there is an important complication in Arendt’s analysis. She maintains that violence is political. She writes: “Neither violence nor power is a natural phenomenon, that is, a manifestation of the life process; they belong to the political realm of human affairs whose essentially human quality is guaranteed by man’s faculty of action, the ability to begin something new.”33 If power can only be enacted and power can take up weapons, then violent actions themselves must retain political qualities. In one sense, this is not surprising given that the same activity can be both political and antipolitical. Taking up weapons for the purposes of self-defense or to pursue our interests may be a relatively less political way to act, but if intersubjectivity “overlays” such actions, they must still retain political elements.34 “[L]ike all action [and unlike work] violence changes the world irreversibly,” even if “the most probable change is to a more violent world.”35 We might also expect that particular acts of violence can be more political than others, even if violence is situated firmly in the realm of fabrication. Just as speech can sometimes reveal more about what we want than who we are and in that way be more like violence, violence might sometimes be more like speech.36 However, the connection between violence and political action involves more than just the omnipresent fact of intersubjectivity for Arendt. Physical violence can be quintessentially political. The Trojan War, and Achilles’ actions in particular are exemplary in this regard. By refusing to let Agamemnon use him, Achilles’ physical violence reveals his daimõn and makes history.37 In rejecting the king’s purposes,38 Achilles replaces a concern with interests or ends with a revelation of who he is. It is especially significant that Achilles’ action ends his life:

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“Only a man who does not survive his one supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity and possible greatness.”39 Sacrificing one’s life signals that our practices are not aimed at our own nourishment or the creation of a habitable world for ourselves. Instead, action must be in reference to something in excess of our physical being, that second “in-between” of intersubjectivity, power, and politics. There is nothing more political than action that reveals our unique selves and then leaves it to others to discuss what we have done.40 Action and power are more likely to appear and are more easily described when they are manifest in circumstances that are relatively less “mediated” by the material and objective world, such as speaking with one another. However, any particular practice, even killing another person, can reveal “who” we are. In fact, physical violence can be a supremely political act if it involves simultaneously renouncing the claim to interpret it by sacrificing one’s life. While she is not willing to make the historical claim, Arendt says that the metaphorical and theoretical impetus for the polis was the Greeks’ desire “to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings” during the Trojan War.41 If violence is sometimes a bad substitute for decaying institutionalized power, institutionalized power can also grow out of the more purely political acts of war, or at least, certain “great” actions in the context of war. Though Achilles offers the best example of political physical violence, Arendt’s analysis of the Romans suggests that it is not rare or circumscribed to a single individual. Inspired by Homer’s capacity to recount a Greek victory from the Trojan perspective, the Romans set about to conquer the world by allowing enemy cities “to live on as an opponent.”42 This is indicated by the fact that the Romans incessantly forged political ties with those they conquered—making treaties, forming alliances, and drawing up contracts. Only in the case of Carthage, which would have required a modern understanding of politics to forge a bond among powerful equals, did the Romans resort to annihilation.43 Patricia Owens writes that, for Arendt, “the freedom to act with others to bring something new into the world . . . could happen in times of both war and peace.”44 So much so that Arendt admits that what happens on the battlefield itself can constitute the political actions that become part of subsequent peace treaties.45


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ARENDT’S UNDERESTIMATION AND OVERESTIMATION OF VIOLENCE Chapter 6 discusses the relationship between intersubjective violence and politics more extensively, but the concept gives us an expeditious avenue to the problems with Arendt’s assertion that physical violence cannot create power. As described by Arendt, power must be unencumbered by intersubjective (as well as physical) violence among those in power.46 Power depends upon and consists of plurality, uniqueness, and even agonistic action. However, when people adopt dispositions that severely compromise or destroy one another, their actions cannot be concerted.47 Intersubjective violence involves stalemate and suffering, disappointment and frustration, distance and dissolution. The very fact that we are free and unique means that, at times, our interactions will be severely discordant, and when this happens we cannot act together. At the limit then, action and power not only depend upon one another but are also at odds. Acting “in concert” involves setting expectations and drawing up plans. It relies on some preconceived notion of how we will be when we are together. At a minimum, we must agree to meet and where to meet. The existence of power presumes that certain aspects of our interactions are predictable. Yet the essence of action is spontaneity and unexpectedness. Arendt takes the notion that power involves people acting together from Edmund Burke, who describes it as liberty exercised in concert.48 If action is to remain action, power and the public realm must be both predictable and unpredictable, concerted yet free of utter uniformity. As Arendt describes politics, debate must be open and orderly, allowing the best to shine but also ensuring the participation of others. Protest must be flexible and fluid but not an entirely disorganized mob. Intersubjective violence always threatens to destroy power from within and, at the same time, our differences and spontaneity instantiate power and politics. In On Revolution Arendt argues that we can preserve and foster power by making promises. Covenants, compacts, and constitutions involve determining how we will comport ourselves in the public realm. In varying degrees, they curtail what we can do and who can act and appear in public at all. In addition, the American Founders show us that law can be established on the basis of intersubjective power alone,

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and this is why they attempt to preserve and combine power even after the law is in place. Arendt traces this back to the Pilgrims and the Virginia Company, who left behind law and authority with the confidence that power could sustain them, at least initially. The Mayflower Compact was made on the ship and signed upon landing, “confirmed by no one and as yet unsupported by any means of violence.”49 Madisonian federalism took note. Unlike the French Revolution, the American Revolution found a way to preserve the grassroots of power instead of expunging or replacing them. The Constitution combined and enlarged the power of the colonies by incorporating extant forms of self-government into the new federal government. However, this solution is less than satisfactory, and it leads her to underestimate the potential for violence to facilitate power. John McGowan notes that in her discussion of revolution Arendt fails to see that violence can be about the form, or particular “constitution” of power we adopt: What is oddly missing . . . is the fact that certain groups oppose—and oppose violently—the coming together of another group to form the space of the political. If power is the constitution and maintenance of the political realm, then humans can be seen to struggle violently about which political associations are allowed to come into being and to continue to exist.50 Part and parcel of this failure is her unwillingness to admit that violence can be crucially important in the formation of power itself. Situations of irreconcilable disagreement can be resolved by destroying certain members of a group. Violence is a potential means to creating the degree of predictability and stability necessary for power to manifest itself. This can be seen in the fact that covenants are made and maintained not only by the act of promising but by promising to do violence to those who are not part of the agreement or fail to live up to it. Arendt, in a way, acknowledges this. Even as she maintains that making promises is “the highest human faculty” because it reconciles the “grammar of action” and the “syntax of power,” she notes that there is “an element of the world-building capacity” in it.51 This can be none


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other than homo faber, the means/end relation, and violence. However, the upshot of this admission is that her claim that violence cannot create power is little more than a sleight of hand. Violence cannot literally create spontaneous actions in others, but it can determine who is present to act. By identifying and eliminating those whose presence consistently prevents the formation of the brand of political association a group has in mind, violence can directly facilitate concerted action among those who remain. Put another way, if power is limited “only” by “the existence of other people,” it is limited by the possibility or actuality of peoples’ death. Arendt often speaks of the dual quality of plurality: it makes action possible and at the same time ensures it almost never achieves its purpose. But “innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions”52 not only frustrate action but have the potential to prevent power from coming into existence at all. When the colonists fought a war with the British and killed or removed the vast majority of the original inhabitants of eastern North America, they were implementing and protecting their agreements. If violence cannot be the basis of government, if violence cannot operate without some extant power, the practices of every government in the history of the world suggest that the physical exclusion, punishment, or destruction of certain members of the community is one of the ways to support and sustain the capacity to act together.53 Yet even while underestimating the potential for violence to create the conditions for power, Arendt overestimates the reliability of physical violence as political action. Arendt suggests that violence is antithetical to and destroys politics, but a subset of violent practices meet the high standards of pure action. Those who manage to join the reliability of fabrication with the history-making potential of politics are the “indisputable master[s]” of their own identities and possible greatness. By sacrificing one’s own body in the same moment that one takes up other bodies to achieve political purposes, it is possible to “make” political outcomes almost as one makes a chair or a table. The problem with this formulation is that the sort of action Achilles’ performs is a feature of every war. Wars always reveal personalities who renounce the value of material life and make history. Everyone who experiences war firsthand returns with stories of fallen comrades and enemies who did something they will never forget and

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could never have predicted. Wars produce dead bodies and unique stories told by those who survive and often about those who did not. In addition, almost every person involved in war shares at least the prospect of physical death if they decide to join in the killing. The willingness to sacrifice one’s physical well-being in the process of achieving something else through another’s death is a primary feature of war. In this way, the second, intersubjective in-between must characterize all warfare and violent conflict. When we contend with one another through physical violence, need is pressed against need and utility pressed against utility. Arendt shows us, inadvertently, that it must also necessarily involve action pressed against action.54 We can push the point farther. Regardless of whether one dies in the act, physical violence is always political. Physical violence seems fundamentally different than speech or other political acts because we know, for instance, that those who are dead will no longer act or react and that we can activate one another’s pain centers through various tortures. Other political acts do not have such predictable results. But when we take up another’s body our aims do not usually include those consequences. Arendt’s claim that the most likely change violence produces is a more violent world is demonstrably false.Violence sometimes works in short order. Wars eventually end. At the same time, Achilles was no more assured of being master of his identity than if he had made a speech, which is why Arendt paradoxically says he was the master of his possible greatness. Physical violence affects politics, but its fabricating and objective qualities do not overturn or transcend freedom. Arendt’s attempt to keep violence and politics separate generally obfuscates the most important implication of the political quality of physical violence: its outcome is unpredictable. Following Clausewitz and Machiavelli, Arendt notes that luck and fortune play an important role in the practice of war and violence.55 But the unpredictable aspect of military engagements distracts us from the main issue. Military results and political outcomes are not the same thing. Every act of physical violence, not just Achilles’ violence, renounces the claim to interpret its meaning simply because it must. Physical violence gives us no more control over intersubjectivity than speech. If a person or group forces another to scream or cry, or kills a great number of people, they can never be sure how their acts of physical violence will be understood by


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survivors or witnesses. This holds true even if a whole community is annihilated and the survivors and witnesses only consist of the perpetrators themselves.56 The meaning of physical violence will inhere in what is revealed to those who are present and survive. And if someone kills everyone except her or himself, that action, arguably, has no meaning at all because power is lost completely. Arendt misses an opportunity to underscore the political unpredictability of violence in her discussion of the Romans, where she admires their ability to use war, almost as a pretense, for fostering political ties. Her portrayal of the relationship between violence and politics as practiced by the Romans is, quite surprisingly, unpolitical. As Arendt tells the story, Roman warfare predictably produces power and the political realm.57 We might understand the rise and fall of Rome as a warning about how even a city with an abiding love for politics can be overrun by the violent means it uses to achieve political goals.58 Or we might understand it as a story about power appearing under the sign of a political principle, and then disappearing and dissolving when intersubjective, and then physical, violence makes concerted action with others impossible. Roughly, these are the age-old explanations of overexpansion and internal dissolution. But Arendt suggests violence neither overran the Romans, nor led to the dissolution of power; instead, it so reliably produced the law (lex) that it “forced them against their own will—indeed absent any will to power or lust for domination—to rule the entire globe, a dominion that once achieved could only collapse.”59 If the Romans were political until the end, it does not make much sense to say that they were “forced” to pursue their goals, or guided by a static principle of action for hundreds of years. Instead, if what was revealed on the battlefield over many centuries led to peace treaties, agreements, and contracts of a particular character, it seems more apt to say that their goals and their enemies changed in unpredictable ways. Indeed, Roman wars over time changed who was considered an enemy and a Roman. If one’s intent is only to kill people then violence can reliably achieve that end, but usually the purposes that guide physical violence depend upon and are transformed by how people react to the production of dead or injured bodies. Even if this is not exactly persuasion, it attempts to change or destroy another’s will through direct engagement

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with them. The results of this process on both “the doers and sufferers,” to borrow an Arendtian phrase, is inherently political and unpredictable. In a sense, my conception of physical violence inverts Arendt’s claim that intersubjectivity overlays our interactions even when we are concerned with the world which “physically lies between” us. Physical violence always involves acting directly to one another, with nothing between us, in a quintessentially political fashion even while our bodies “overlay” intersubjectivity.60 Aesthetic and erotic violence aside, we take up one another’s body in order to affect subjectivity, not to produce the banal and reliable outcomes of death and pain per se. Physical violence produces reliable outcomes, just not reliable political outcomes.

THE DISPENSABILITY OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE This critique of Arendt might appear to have done little to affect our overall assessment of the role of violence in politics. On the one hand, power not only employs violence but can support and facilitate its appearance. On the other hand, the political quality of physical violence means it faces the same difficulties and obstacles as any action. However, Arendt’s occasional overestimation of violence is a more decisive mistake than her underestimation of it because correcting the former mitigates the latter. Physical violence can create power, but not any more reliably than speech or other non-physically violent deeds. To create power with physical violence we remove certain people from the mix, not so much to “win over hearts and minds,” but to change the configuration of intersubjectivity itself. Using physical violence to remove or destroy the dispositions of certain individuals or groups, however, still relies (at least) on the tacit support and habits of those who remain. In order for physical violence to create power, those who are not killed or harmed must retain their present dispositions. The trouble is, acts of physical violence can produce unexpected reactions. Since physical violence is fundamentally a political action like speech and other deeds, it holds the potential to entirely reconfigure our relationships by revealing something unexpected about those who perpetrate violence. Like any action, violence may break the stalemate, further harden it, or inspire a new one.


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When Arendt periodically admits that physical violence has political qualities she is so astonished by the fact that something so work-like could be made political that she exaggerates the importance of those actions. This is not surprising, because the purported reliability of physical violence is directly connected to the idea that it is necessary. In producing some things with utter certainty (e.g., dead bodies, pain, screams), the political aspects of violence gain a veneer of dependability. However, despite these lapses, Arendt insists that the likes of Plato, Machiavelli, and Robespierre are wrong; power can never be made with technical skill or material violence.61 I have argued that, to some extent, this is incorrect. Intersubjective violence can prevent power from coming into existence and physical violence can break the stalemate by destroying one “side” or another. However, the political quality of action shows us that despite its capacity to eliminate aspects of intersubjectivity, physical violence is no more reliable than other methods for creating power.62 In fact, the more important point is that Arendt demonstrates, somewhat haltingly, that physical violence is not necessary to create and sustain power.The Revolutionary War and the killing of Native Americans helped facilitate and create the possibility of concerted action, but Arendt raises the possibility that the American covenant did not actually require such violence. A self-governing America might have been possible without killing the British, as was the case for India one hundred and fifty years later. American power might have been further vivified by preserving not only colonial but indigenous power, as is the case with surviving Native governments. In distinguishing between the American and French Revolutions, Arendt shows that bodies politic can “rely on contracts and treaties” or rule and sovereignty and suggests that the latter, from a historical standpoint, are less viable than ever.63 We can even discern between the law, which has an element of violence but is a result of power, and the genuine political actions involved in “the fever of American constitution-making.”64 Even if power can employ violence and be formed by violence, even if action can be violent and destroyed by violence, Arendt shows us that power is fundamentally distinct from violence and makes possible all violent and nonviolent political action. In the midst of passages characterized by her familiar attempt to separate violence and politics,

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Arendt sometimes hints at something much more important and little noted. She remarks that “not even wars, let alone revolutions, are ever completely determined by violence,” “violence is a marginal phenomenon in the political realm,” and “[a] theory of war or a theory of revolution . . . can only deal with the justification of violence because this justification constitutes its political limitation.”65 Every act of physical violence, even the most dramatic instances of concerted physical violence such as one people attempting to destroy another, are beholden to politics because subjectivity is unpredictable and dead people do not act. If a government is intent on committing genocide, the tacit support of those who are not killed and those who witness the killing are indispensable. Less dramatic acts of physical violence are completely dependent upon the social context that they partially destroy and in which they are yet still inevitably embedded. Unless everyone is dead, killing must always be justified or power will be lost. “Power is indeed the essence of all government, but violence is not.Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues.”66 The dispensability, dependence, and marginality of violence and the indispensability and self-sufficiency of power do not mean that there are no such things as military victories or physical triumph. It does mean that victories only have meaning if accompanied by political power. Achilles and Pericles both disclosed the meaning of their actions with the hope that they would be entirely self-sufficient, but Achilles needed Homer just as much as Pericles needed Thucydides, and all four needed an audience or a “concert.” Whether in the form of physical violence or speech, power is “gained” because of who I am, and who I am is always revealed somewhat inadvertently. We pursue interests, ends, and goals with the idea of exercising power in mind. But others will only act with us, action will only be concerted, in ways and for reasons that are not entirely predictable. Pericles’ words and Achilles’ violence made them powerful, and their victories were only made possible, because they inspired others to act with them. In fact, while a credible pacifism acknowledges that physical violence is a form of political action, like all action it depends upon and can therefore always be overwhelmed by power. Indeed, a few well-


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organized men can rule over a vast empire, but they can also be brought down by the appearance of new power. Arendt writes: Popular revolt against materially strong rulers . . . may engender an almost irresistible power even if it foregoes the use of violence in the face of materially vastly superior forces. To call this “passive resistance” is certainly an ironic idea; it is one of the most active and efficient ways of action ever devised, because it cannot be countered by fighting, where there may be defeat or victory, but only by mass slaughter in which even the victor is defeated, cheated of his prize, since nobody can rule over dead men.67 Who we reveal ourselves to be when we are together creates reality, and physical violence is either a part of this reality, beholden to all the usual vagaries of politics, or must destroy it entirely. So, while one individual revealing him or herself may be particularly important in a given configuration, power is essentially a communal phenomenon, distinguishable from and independent of violence. Individuals or groups who dream of employing power without the rest of the world or on the basis of material fears, interests, or ends, or alone, soon find themselves out of power or overshadowed by those more in touch with the reality of intersubjectivity, which is just to say, reality.68 Even though physical violence is dispensable, we have come across important reasons for its appeal. The veneer of reliability that comes with being able to physically manipulate or destroy bodies in combination with the fact that violence can achieve political goals, break stalemates, and foster power make it an attractive method for coping with the frustrations of intersubjectivity. The flip side of Arendt’s assertion that power does not depend on numbers is that we can kill a lot of people and still remain powerful. Killing destroys plurality but plurality also remains. The challenge for a credible pacifism, then, is to describe and foster forms of action and power that expose the illusion that physical violence is a special kind of action necessary for sustaining power.


SIX

E q u i va l e n t A c t i o n

EVEN WHILE ARGUING THAT physical violence is a marginal phenomenon in politics, we saw in the previous chapter that Arendt sometimes suggests it is an especially reliable way to achieve things. This is particularly true when she considers direct confrontations between violence and power. She writes: In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi’s enormously powerful and successful strategy of nonviolent resistance had met with a different enemy—Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England—the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission.1 Such statements comport with the conventional wisdom and are frequent even among sympathetic interpreters of Gandhi.2 Russia and Germany are used to indicate powerful collectives that demonstrate extraordinary willingness to employ physical violence. Common sense tells us that Gandhi’s “enormously powerful” independence movement, if met with a comparably powerful regime intent on using physical violence, could not prevail.Violence may rely upon power and power may not depend upon violence, but even Arendt admits that when power takes up weapons it can easily defeat and destroy unarmed power. This suggests that, while not necessary for politics, violence is at least required to stop groups committed to using it. 121

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This chapter argues that, on the contrary, Gandhi identified and developed political methods that are on more or less equal footing with physical violence, even when squaring off with physical violence. Returning to Hobbes and Clausewitz, I show that the practice and theory of satyagraha, or “holding firm in the truth,” offers rejoinders to the most important and persuasive arguments for the special effectiveness of physical violence. I mentioned at the outset of the previous chapter that as long as people are still concerned with political outcomes, physical violence holds no advantage over other methods of conducting politics. But how exactly is the attempt to submit or destroy another’s will political? Commanding and ruling over others by manipulating or destroying their bodies seems less like politics and more like brute dominance. Conscious suffering demonstrates that physical violence is always political, can be refused, and is, therefore, always vulnerable to reframing or reinterpretation. In addition, satyagraha requires no more personal sacrifice or risk than physical violence and relies on both moral and material appeals. Using these insights, I take up the perennial example of the rise of Nazism to show that Gandhi’s methods may have faired as well as physical violence in resisting Hitler’s Germany. Satyagraha and physical violence carry the same prospects for success or failure, even when confronting one another. Paradoxically, this means that satyagraha is not as distinctive as Gandhi suggests. A credible pacifism holds that all forms of action are equivalent in the sense that they succeed and fail for largely the same reasons. In order to be effective, satyagraha relies on appeals to apathy, habit, and even, to some extent, fear. Likewise, physical violence relies on moral appeals, arousing and inspiring the will to suffer and sacrifice, and, in some measure, our love for others. This raises the question of whether satyagraha is preferable to physical violence. Satyagraha arises from and often exacerbates intersubjective violence, at least in the short term. In particular, Gandhi does not own up to the severe problems and suffering that can result from conflicts of conscience. However, unlike physical violence, satyagraha works to mitigate the problems of recognition that obscure more fundamental problems and conflicts. Gandhi’s methods are imbued with the spirit and tenor of the Socratic method. Satyagraha transforms the idea that human wisdom is limited and diverse perspectives are worthy of consideration into a

E Q U I VA L E N T A C T I O N

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form of political action. Even while vigorously pursuing particular goals and ends, satyagraha leaves in place subjectivities that contradict and challenge our own way of being and encourages us to continually consider those perspectives. Refraining from taking up another’s body when disagreements arise is a potent, important, and sensible signal that encourages and fosters politics in the face of violence.

POLITICIZING PHYSICAL VIOLENCE Showing that Gandhi’s methods are on par with physical violence presents both theoretical and practical challenges. First, every major political ideology except pacifism accepts that physical violence is an essential part of politics and offers an argument for when and why it must be used. Liberalism, republicanism, communism and fascism, for instance, each provide different justifications for violence, which in turn imply different notions of the necessity, limits of acceptability, and even, as we have seen, meanings of violence.3 Second, the forms of physical violence catalogued in Part I each present unique challenges. Gandhi claims that nearly every form of physical violence can be confronted or replaced by either nonviolent or much less violent means. However, a detailed assessment of the difficulties presented by the many variations of physical violence and all of the various ideological arguments for violence is beyond the scope of this analysis. My critique is focused on the assumption and assertion that physical violence is generally more effective than pacifist methods, especially as a response to physical violence. There are surprisingly few thinkers who argue explicitly that violence is a more effective way to achieve one’s aims than other methods.4 Machiavelli is perhaps the most important example, and his overestimation of the effectiveness of violence has had deleterious effects on the liberal republican tradition. However, developing this argument is tricky because of the nuanced relationship between virtù and violence in his work.5 More promising for our present purposes is Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation.” Picking up where Machiavelli leaves off, he affirms his idea that one may have to sacrifice his or her soul for the sake of their city. Following the advice of the Sermon on the Mount might win salvation, but the “decisive means for

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politics is violence.”6 Good politicians embrace the fact that evil sometimes leads to good outcomes and good means sometimes produce evil.7 This makes the use of violence dangerous and paradoxical, but being a pacifist precludes the possibility of success in politics. For Weber, a principled commitment to use only good methods abdicates responsibility for the character of the world. However, Weber never gets around to telling us why violence is so indispensable.8 The most measured and potent arguments for the special character of physical violence are those we have already encountered. Causing pain and making threats work because, as Hobbes tells us, finite and physical beings want to remain alive. Our most fundamental interest, self-preservation, demands that we avoid physical injury and comply with credible threats.9 If threats fail, Hobbes and Clausewitz emphasize that simply eliminating bodies will not. Killing can destroy certain expressions of subjectivity altogether, and imprisonment can remove them from the public realm. Even if we acknowledge that violence depends on power and cannot achieve political goals with utter certainty, at the limit it can only fail when and if others respond to violence with violence. In fact, violence, according to Clausewitz, cannot be refused. Our ability to take up or destroy one another’s bodies amounts to “a supreme law: which is the decision by arms; that where this is really demanded by one, it is a redress which cannot be refused by the other.”10 “[I]f the enemy should choose the way of a great decision by arms, our means must on that account be changed against our will, in order to correspond with his.”11 Otherwise, physical violence produces submission, obedience, or destruction. Our fear of pain and death and the fact that our dispositions are inextricably bound up with our bodies means that we can control, produce, or destroy subjectivity with physical means. Gandhi often suggests that the strength of the will alone can achieve political aims and hold violence at bay,12 but Clausewitz reminds us that we cannot separate the possibilities of body and soul in this world. No matter how strong the will of one party may be, he or she is still ultimately vulnerable to designs on his or her body. Gandhi’s term satyagraha draws together a vast array of techniques, some of which he developed and most of which have long been part of the repertoire of human interaction.13 Strikes, marches, demonstrations,


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boycotts, civil disobedience, nonviolent raids, fasting, and noncooperation all share a connection. They suggest that every individual and group ultimately rules itself,14 that some things are worth suffering for, and that we can produce political change without physically harming or destroying one another.15 However, Gandhi offered a particular form of satyagraha as a direct response to violence. Tapas, or self-suffering involves doing precisely what Clausewitz says is impossible: refusing to submit one’s will and yet also refusing to respond to violence with violence.16 By directly contradicting assumptions about what those who are subject to violence will do, conscious suffering takes control of a situation and reframes it. The method can be used for a wide variety of goals and purposes, from bread and butter issues to moral and spiritual aims. However, it always aims to change the meaning of physical violence. In doing so, it also changes material circumstances. Gandhi’s experiments did not directly threaten the British with physical harm, but by changing the meaning of their acts of violence the independence movement did directly threaten British economic interests in India. Likewise, schoolteachers and teenagers filled the jails in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 because segregation was unjust. But segregation was inseparable from the material interests of both the black and white community and when the police acted to protect that system, physical violence foundered because the state had lost control of its meaning. Conscious suffering forces concessions through reorganizing physical relationships and delegitimizing violence, which in turn directly threatens the moral and material interests of the authorities. In this way, conscious suffering exposes the fact that physical violence is political all the way down. Like Arendt, the conventional wisdom holds that violence can trump or gain significant victories over power because in the moment when physical violence is perpetrated politics is reduced to work or takes on the work-like qualities of reliability. Most of us believe that command and rule can trump unarmed power and politics (despite the fact that physical violence also relies on power). However, satyagraha shows that suffering well and dying well can be just as politically effective as killing and harming well. In the process of physically crushing someone we can end up achieving the victim’s goals. In a way, every war tells this story. But Gandhi observed

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that the effectiveness of dying well is sometimes undermined if we are killing others in the process. By refraining from returning blows, every instance of violence can be turned into a dramatic portrayal of the ways in which the interests of one group utterly compromise the desires and well-being of another. As Gandhi frames it, an act of physical violence countered with an act of conscious suffering changes physical superiority into moral wretchedness and injustice. True as this may be from the victim’s perspective, it also just very succinctly demonstrates that the purposes of the perpetrators are narrow and particular and that the victims have interests too. Gandhi’s methods erode the illusion that physical violence is beyond the pale of politics by reminding us that we are actors even when we are being harmed and even in the process of dying.Violence attempts to set the terms of politics by establishing physical superiority. Conscious suffering short-circuits this process by going directly to politics. Gandhi may not abide by Clausewitz’s claim that the body and soul are inseparable. But even if Clausewitz is correct, that very fact ensures that no matter how physically dominant a group or individual becomes, they are always vulnerable to designs on the meaning of their actions. Changing the meaning of physical violence is not exactly the same as changing the will of the perpetrator but physical violence does not exactly change the will of an opponent either. Instead, both attempt to make a particular course of action so counterproductive that the opponent chooses to submit. Gandhi’s hard and fast distinction between physical force and soul force sometimes obscures the fact that they are both embodied forces ensconced in intersubjectivity. Both require risking one’s physical well-being, both can be motivated by any political purpose, and both rely on appeals to moral and material interests to defeat opponents.17 Two immediate concerns arise when considering conscious suffering as a reply to physical violence. First, it seems to reject our usual understanding of achieving political goals because even if one succeeds in changing the will of the perpetrator, the conscious resister will not be around to enjoy that change. Intuitively, conscious suffering seems risky because by taking up arms we at least have a chance to kill our opponent or persuade them to back off. Gandhi himself encourages us to think of conscious suffering as a rejection of worldly ends. However,


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returning a blow for a blow may be just as risky or more risky than conscious suffering. Using physical violence often emboldens our opponent’s desire to kill or harm, because using physical violence puts a premium on one’s own death. Using physical violence against others sharply increases the benefits they gain from killing you. Conscious suffering, at least, holds out the possibility of assuaging fears and changing the calculations of one’s opponents for the better. Pacifists often hear that “victory” is hollow if it is engraved on one’s headstone. Victories won by physical violence are no less likely to be enjoyed in that fashion. The second difficulty with conscious suffering is that as a means to changing a perpetrator’s will, it seems less reliable than violence. If someone is already committed to pursuing their interests through harming or killing another, they have decisively set aside the habits of peacefulness. Threatening someone’s survival or physical well-being in such circumstances seems like a more reliable way to raise the costs of doing violence than “moral suasion.” But even if our opponents are more afraid of suffering physical and material losses than becoming morally wretched, physical violence may not be more effective. First, if moral costs are less threatening than material costs, that can be a good thing. Threatening physical costs can produce intransigence and entrench differences where there might have otherwise been potential for resolution. More importantly though, conscious suffering holds just as much potential for raising material costs as any act of physical violence. Gandhi suggests that if we can sufficiently raise the moral and spiritual costs of perpetrating physical violence, the natural result is the cessation of violence. However, in practice he found that both physical violence and conscious suffering provoked violent responses and given what was at stake this is not very surprising. Physical violence and satyagraha succeed and fail for the same reasons. Power requires getting others to join in. Individuals assess both violent and nonviolent actions on the basis of some combination of material and moral interests. If we join, support, consent to, or obey others in their actions, we activate and embolden power. If we refuse, obstruct, counteract, or prevent others’ actions, “their” power dissipates. A strike or a rebellion, a nonviolent raid or an act of war succeed or fail as a consequence of how those who remain act. Arendt and Gandhi emphasize that power does not count on numbers and this is true for

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both violence and conscious suffering. One ruthless and skillful tyrant can rule an empire and one committed and skillful satyagrahi can stop a tank battalion. However, action requires at least the passive participation of others to work. A nod of approval, if it involves great numbers, can be the basis of power and a look of disapproval can be its finish. In addition, numbers always matter in the sense that previously apathetic or indifferent people, if inspired to act, can change power dynamics dramatically. Of course, this is not to say that all individual actions are equally effective. Well-used violence bests poorly executed satyagraha and vice versa. The skillful use of physical violence involves compromising the material well-being of some individual or group and offering up good reasons for it. The skillful use of conscious suffering involves formulating a plausible alternative to the perpetrator’s reasons for physical violence and thereby usurping the circumstances for one’s own political purposes. Both require mobilizing people to act and act together. Both involve appeals to moral sensibilities and material interests. Both count on at least the tacit consent or noninterference of those who do not act. I mentioned at the outset that I would not attempt to demonstrate that every form of physical violence can be countered with a comparable form of satyagraha. However, Gandhi’s conception at least helps us see that wherever physical violence occurs we find creative forms of nonviolent resistance. Alienated labor inspires work stoppages and slowdowns, protests, and strikes. Slaves reclaim their bodies from masters by running away, or force masters to harm “their property” by refusing to work. Prison inmates organize hunger strikes, show a willingness to get sent to the hole, or refuse to move when told to. Even victims of rape and torture can sometimes say or do things that the perpetrators could not anticipate and thereby stop or reduce the impact of physical violence, if only momentarily. Certainly, various groups and governments have set out to change the meaning of rape and torture as practiced by other groups and governments, in order to undermine the aims the perpetrators hope to achieve. I mentioned at the beginning of chapter 5 that the empirical evidence on the death penalty, torture, terrorism, and warfare raises questions about the effectiveness of physical violence. The effectiveness of every form of violence depends upon its relationship to power. This is most apparent in warfare. The United States killed twenty times more


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people than it lost in Vietnam but was defeated because of what those deaths meant to those who remained. Far from being an aberration, physical superiority in warfare predicts the prospects for victory or defeat no more reliably than a coin toss.18 Even rape and torture fail to achieve goals without the sense that those acts are good, or at least necessary or inevitable. While rape and torture almost always have an aesthetic and erotic component, they cannot support patriarchy or the ascendancy of the state, for instance, without power. The effectiveness of action, whether satyagraha or physical violence, is bound to the political dynamics surrounding it.

A RECURRENT EXAMPLE In order to establish the credibility of the claim that physical violence and satyagraha are on equal footing in direct confrontations between the two I will take up the particularly troublesome example of the rise of Nazism.19 The frequent reference to extraordinarily violent states in critiques of pacifism is always grounded in two hypotheticals: (1) Pacifist methods would have failed in historical instances where large numbers of people showed an extraordinary capacity for cruelty (e.g., Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Interahamwe in Rwanda); (2) Offering widespread violence in return succeeded or would have stood a fair chance of success in these circumstances. On the one hand, such hypotheticals underestimate the extent to which skillful, well-organized, and psychologically sophisticated uses of power make any sort of resistance difficult and ineffective. On the other hand, they ignore all of the various instances and forms of resistance that occur even under the most stringent conditions.20 However, without endorsing the use of hypotheticals in serious discussions of history (or political theory for that matter), it seems that arguing for the equivalence of various forms of action requires addressing this frequent obstacle to pacifism head on. The rise of Nazism involved two calamities: Hitler’s attempt to rule Europe, and the Holocaust. It was the first that most concerned the rest of the world. The Allied response to Germany’s incursions into surrounding countries was perhaps the most spectacular appearance of

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power in history. By disregarding international norms and threatening the material interests of others, Hitler inspired an extraordinary effort to defeat him. He counted on the Axis powers, the German people, and ordinary German soldiers in particular, to pick up the slack by destroying the vast coordinated action of numerous governments. The first question before us is whether or not this appearance of power could have taken a different form than it did, or if the defeat of Nazism required that Allied power be employed to physically destroy much of Germany and a large portion of the German Army. Satyagraha could have involved some combination of civil defense and battlefield tactics. The prospects for civil defense were promising. The experience of nonviolent resistors to Nazism in Norway, Bulgaria, and Denmark suggests that totalitarian tactics were vulnerable to widespread noncooperation.21 If the French or the Poles had mustered similar resistance it might have slowed Germany’s progress substantially.22 An organized, multinational effort to refuse cooperation with German authority might have made the world ungovernable for Hitler. Given the number of people killed by the German Army, however, one might imagine that the Germans would simply have killed everyone who resisted. Satyagraha has never been used to directly engage an invading army on a battlefield, although people have sometimes confronted occupiers in the streets.23 Gandhi recommended directly engaging Germany with conscious suffering. If satyagrahis “would offer themselves unarmed as fodder for the aggressor’s cannon . . . [t]he unexpected spectacle of endless rows upon rows of men and women simply dying rather than surrender to the will of an aggressor must ultimately melt him and his soldiery.”24 Whether this statement strikes us as outrageous or sensible depends on our assessment of the character and interests of the ordinary German soldier. Using satyagraha would have dramatically affected the dynamics of the war. First, certain moral standards, and a stake in believing one’s actions take account of such standards, are a part of every society, Nazi Germany and the German Army included. As H. J. N. Horsburgh remarks, “Even the actively malignant are partial to moral cosmetics.”25 Second, the norms and standards that accompany military training would be severely tested by an engagement between an army poised for


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physical destruction and an army or a population poised for conscious suffering. German soldiers were not trained for interactions with people who would do them no harm, so that most of the strategy and tactics they brought to the field would have been rendered obsolete. Third, the fact that German soldiers would no longer have to protect their bodies from the assault of others would have removed one of the driving forces in combat: the fear of losing one’s own life. It seems plausible that satyagraha would have been effective in this case for precisely the reason we might think it would fail. The German army killed upwards of ten million Russians but this was surely, in part, made possible because Russian soldiers killed three million Germans.26 The vast majority of the Russians that Germans killed were facing them down with guns and tanks. Certainly, it would have shocked German soldiers to find that the communist menace described by Hitler was both unwilling to submit and unwilling to kill them. The German Army demonstrated great potential for harming the armed and unarmed. However, we cannot take from this that ordinary German soldiers had the moral capacity or could have been convinced that they had a material interest in killing ten million people who openly engaged them without weapons in fields, or in the streets of their villages and cities. We must be careful not to hold satyagraha to a higher standard than violence. Just as physical violence often fails as a response to physical violence, satyagraha is not always effective in the face of violence. From the crushing of the peaceful protests in Tiananmen Square to the Soviet triumph over the Czechoslovaks, demonstrating a willingness to suffer for one’s principles does not always succeed. Some German soldiers would have killed as many people as could be lined up before them. However, it seems reasonable to assume that the prospects for conscious suffering were comparable to physical retaliation. Only the belief that most German soldiers had a special penchant for inhumanity allows us to think that the German Army would have continued apace with the destruction of Europe if all of Europe and the Russians had refused to destroy them. In combination with the fact that ruling over satyagrahis would be extraordinarily difficult, it seems at least plausible to assume that an Allied force using satyagraha could have bent the will of Nazi Germany.

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In connection with the capacity of ordinary Germans to inflict suffering we must, of course, contend with the second calamity connected with Nazism. Under the auspices of the Final Solution, Germans and Nazi sympathizers showed an extraordinary willingness to destroy and harm people who, for the most part, did not attempt to retaliate. In some respects, the death camps are examples of aesthetic violence. For committed Nazis, the physical destruction of Jews was not a means to some other purpose. The destruction of Jewry was itself the end. No change in practice or beliefs, no degree of submission, was sufficient. In addition, the Holocaust must be counted as one of the most skillful uses of violence the world has seen. It was carefully designed to thwart resistance of all kinds by anticipating and manipulating the desires and fears of the victims, namely by holding out hope of survival through cooperation. Even if we grant that Gandhi’s methods might have achieved some success as a response to the Nazi war machine, responding to bureaucracies intent on physically destroying certain members of society seems to be another matter altogether. There are important reasons to think that widespread violent resistance to Nazi policies may have had important positive effects. If a sufficient number of Jews had formed armed militias in response to the racial laws or the first mass deportations to ghettos it might have frustrated Nazi efforts by preventing the government from functioning effectively. By embracing the will to fight that fascism so highly prizes, extensive resistance in Germany might have also made it more difficult for SS and SA men to dehumanize Jews. Greater resistance in the early stages might have also called more attention to Nazi policies and garnered support from inside or outside Germany. In the later stages of the Holocaust, the prospect of millions of Jews adopting violence could have tipped the balance of forces on the international scene dramatically. On the other hand, an early violent response to the Nazi assault might have achieved very little. Hitler’s grip on the implements of state power would have ensured the rapid defeat of even the most optimistic scenario where, say, half of the estimated 210,000 Jews in Germany in 1939 decided to take up weapons against the government.27 Open and armed resistance would have provided a pretense for accelerating the process of deportations and a solution to the problem of “overwhelming numbers” in the East.28 In a country as vehemently anti-Semitic as


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Germany of the late 1930s, armed resistance would have also fed into fears about “the Jewish threat.” Jewish violence also might have made foreign governments all the more sympathetic to an aspect of Hitler’s worldview that already had broad international appeal.29 A pacifist response to Nazi policies might have had a better chance of slowing the government in this initial stage. For instance, if we imagine that half of German Jews committed themselves to satyagraha prior to deportation to Eastern ghettos and death camps, their actions might have achieved two important objectives. First, as with violent resistance, it would have presented a logistical obstacle to the deportations. SS or SA men would have been forced to open every other door to every other house and physically drag, or by some other means transport thousands of people to trains. Satyagraha or violence would have substantially increased the amount of time and energy required to coordinate the expulsion of the Jewish community. Of course, authorities might have simply shot people in their homes or in the streets, as they often did to those who openly resisted the regime. This is where satyagraha holds a significant advantage over violence. To the extent that a violent response would have made Germans, Poles, and others more sympathetic to the public killing of Jews, it would facilitate the killing. The Shoah teaches us that people have tremendous potential to inflict suffering on unarmed civilians, but also that such cruelties are best conducted in highly circumscribed and tightly controlled social environments. The bureaucratic aspects of the deportation and death camp system ensured that every individual perpetrator was insolated from full responsibility. Each intermediate step between deportation and gas chamber could be understood as having a purpose other than killing (e.g., enforcing the law, transportation, confining to a ghetto, sorting the sick from the healthy, creating a work crew). When the killing finally commenced, the Germans often forced Jews themselves to do much of “the work.”30 Exceptions abound, perhaps most strikingly in the Einsatzgruppen, where police battalions summarily executed thousands of unarmed civilians in relatively public places.Yet historians of the police battalions tell us that, at least before becoming inured to it, many of those who participated in killings of this sort were hesitant, troubled, or outright tormented by their actions.31 In part, the difficulties with this approach led to the development of the less “hands-on” techniques

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of gas vans and chambers.32 Also, the battalions did not operate in Germany proper, but were safely out of the view of friends and family. Widespread satyagraha would have changed the emotional and physical dynamics of the killing. In place of highly routinized and secret camps, the Germans who were willing to kill Jews would have had to either drag thousands of people through the streets of Germany or kill them in the neighborhoods and streets of the Reich. The same would have held true in the occupied territories. Instead of killing people who had been made to stand at attention at the edge of town, the Einsatzgruppen would have killed people standing in their homes or with other community members in an open refusal to submit to orders. It would have forced the killers to touch and remove bodies in public space and it would have taken place in front of witnesses to both the resistance and the killing. In this way, satyagraha could have worked to affect public opinion, by dramatically portraying not only the moral but material threat of Nazi authority. Given that Jews were a minority community in all of the countries in question, public support was a crucial factor in Nazi successes and failures.33 Perhaps the most important evidence in support of such a view is the extent to which the German government felt compelled to seclude the killing. If the skillful use of violence involves giving good reasons for it, removing it from view limits the number of people one has to convince. Even knowing that ordinary Germans were capable of Kristallnacht and even in the context of the saturation bombing of cities,34 the authors of the Final Solution believed that mass killing could not happen in public. If Germans and occupied populations could have stomached the idea of the wholesale slaughter of Jews, and the Nazis did not believe most could, the public was certainly not capable of actually witnessing it. Instead, the German government committed itself to the logistical task of transporting millions to remote and “private” locations. The extraordinary time and effort involved in keeping the operation secret and, more importantly, moving the bodies from sight, suggests that the Nazi elite were fearful the public could not bear the burden. The “special responsibility” of ridding the world of Jews included “bearing secrets.”35 If Jews and the other targets of the Holocaust had forced the government to do the killing in public, things might have been different.


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Then again, the outcome might have been much the same. Other genocides have occurred in public.36 Barring the coordinated resistance of a good portion of the eight million Jews and the many others who were subject to Nazi machinations, perhaps neither satyagraha nor violence would have stopped it. The only adequate practical response to genocide on such a massive scale was and is an international response. However, the actual conduct of the Holocaust and what we know about the potential for satyagraha to change the dynamics of violence suggest that physical violence and satyagraha had similar prospects for success and failure. There is a final reason for skepticism of satyagraha. Satyagraha has never involved the numbers or attained the organizational stature of warfare. Perhaps this means that sacrificing one’s life without the prospect of killing an opponent is not psychologically feasible on a large scale. However, past satyagraha and the practice of wars themselves suggest otherwise. First, if not on the scale of millions, many hundreds of thousands of people have risked their physical well-being outside of the dynamics of combat. Activists, strikers, citizen groups, and grassroots movements break the law or demonstrate, publish literature or speak out, fill public squares or refuse to obey government officials, and do so in the face of death or imprisonment. Second, war itself shows that we have the capacity to sacrifice our lives en masse. World War I is the most striking example, because battles so often involved almost certain death for thousands. While some soldiers may comfort themselves with the knowledge that they are killing others on their way out, most probably sacrifice themselves for reasons consistent with the practice of satyagraha. That the Holocaust is often understood to be a definitive rebuttal of pacifism is deeply and tragically ironic. While condemning the events, we affirm their logic: sometimes the physical destruction of bodies is the only viable method for achieving desirable outcomes. The very power of satyagraha as a direct response to physical violence lies, in part, in the fact that it is a shocking, almost unimaginable, method. However, the greatest obstacle to the expanded use of satyagraha may be the belief that it does not work as well as unimaginable violence.37 The truth is that satyagrahis who die for family, country or comrades can be just as sure as any soldier that they will not have died in vain.

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M POLITICIZING SATYAGRAHA

On some occasions, Gandhi’s contemporaries judged satyagraha to be unethical because it posed a fundamental threat to the duty of obedience. Among such critics, estimations of the practical stature of satyagraha rose correspondingly: it was “ ‘more likely to prove an effective weapon than any other.’ ”38 Without endorsing the view that obedience is a cornerstone of ethics, there is good reason to question Gandhi’s claim that satyagraha has a special affinity with morality and spirituality. Power that refrains from using physical violence is still power.39 To demonstrate the equivalency of nonviolent and violent action requires showing that Gandhi’s techniques are more dependant on material factors than he allows and, at the same time, bringing to the fore the spiritual and moral factors in physical violence. Gandhi’s conception of violence is much broader than the one I develop in chapter 2. Violence (himsa) and truth (satya) are the two animating forces of the Gandhian universe, standing in opposition to one another and characterizing, to a greater or lesser degree, all actions or interactions. In theory, he argues that violence can never achieve its aims and that, at any rate, we ought to be unconcerned with political consequences and ends.40 However, in his more practical register, violence usually refers to something like the instrumental and material conception of chapter 2. His arguments against the use of violence simultaneously comprise his positive affirmation of satyagraha. Though he highlights the ethical strengths of satyagraha and the ethical weaknesses of violence, throughout this discussion I will moderate those claims. Gandhi points out that, most of the time, the vast majority of individuals and groups are not engaged in physical violence. “[T]he general work of mankind is being carried on from day to day by the mass of people acting in harmony as if by instinct. If they were instinctively violent, the world would end in no time.”41 His claim is both ontological42 and historical43 and is connected with the notion that love and truth are the dominant features of life and existence. If physical violence is the supreme court, as Clausewitz says, and our desire to physically survive drives our actions, as Hobbes expects it to, one might think physical violence would be the primary mode of interaction


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among a few technologically adept and well-armed survivors. Yet, contrary to Hobbes’s assertion that without government our natural state is war, even a world with weak international governance supports six billion people living in relative harmony. From this perspective, the question I posed at the beginning of chapter 5 about why violence is so attractive is turned on its head: perhaps people have already noticed that physical violence is not any more reliable than other political means and are therefore not very apt to use it. In fact, warfare occurs so infrequently that it presents special problems for large-n analyses in the international relations literature.44 However, our peacefulness is also a consequence of more mundane factors than those Gandhi mentions. He often argues that purveyors of violence will wear out when faced with nonviolent resistors. Surely, we refrain from physical violence in part because our goals are often just not worth the effort that physical violence requires. Effective though it may be, Clausewitz and Hobbes expect violence to make trouble and meet resistance. In addition, though he often associates our natural peacefulness with satyagraha, refraining from attacking others is not exactly the same as taking action and exercising power. While the habit of peacefulness may be phenomenologically closer to satyagraha than physical violence, both kinds of action rely on the apathy or the implicit consent of the uninvolved. Without discounting our desire and capacity to ameliorate conflict, the baseline of human interaction may be peaceful mostly because on most days we do not have the energy to subdue and destroy the will of others, which in turn instantiates a habit of tolerance and peacefulness. The importance of Clausewitz’s claim that violence cannot be refused is not lost on Gandhi. Conscious suffering and satyagraha are possible because of a feature of human existence. The possibility of responding with neither submission nor violence relies on his concept of swaraj, or self-rule. [A]t the back of the policy of terrorism is the assumption that terrorism if applied in a sufficient measure will produce the desired result, namely, bend the adversary to the tyrant’s will. But supposing a people make up their mind that they will

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M never do the tyrant’s will, nor retaliate with the tyrant’s own methods, the tyrant will not find it worth his while to go on with his terrorism . . . 45

Physical violence only achieves its ends conditionally. Success or failure is ultimately determined by the reaction of its targets. Our physical predicament does not utterly determine our aims and desires—the “decision by arms” can be refused. Our condition of freedom means that violence can be thwarted by pressing ahead with our way of being. Self-rule is not only a goal, but a fact.46 As Gandhi tells it, we develop our capacity for self-rule and courage through self-sacrifice, discipline, and orienting ourselves toward the moral and spiritual order. However, violent responses to violence demonstrate just as clearly as noncooperation that our desire to survive and avoid physical pain does not reliably trump all other motives. Wholehearted participation in an immoral war is just as much a risk to one’s physical well-being as refusing a tyrant.47 In addition, the interests and desires of those who use satyagraha are not always pure and noncooperation does not have to be inspired by God. Noncooperation that avoids both reciprocation of and submission to violence is also not necessarily a consequence of transcendent discipline. Our interests and desires may make it worth our while to defy the desires and interests of others. At the same time, the costs of war may still remain sufficiently high (or the habit of pacifism sufficiently strong) to dissuade us from returning blows with blows.48 A stubborn refusal to cooperate with our opponents combined with unwillingness to offer a counterattack may be the best course of action even if our interests are immoral or we are unconcerned with maintaining the moral high ground. The habit of peacefulness, self-rule, and conscious suffering all contribute to Gandhi’s conception of satyagraha, which, like violence, is highly flexible. “Truth (satya) implies Love, and Firmness (Agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. . . . [Force] born of Truth and Love or Non-violence.”49 Satyagraha is holding firm to the truth and also being born by the truth, “insisting on something without becoming obstinate or uncompromising.”50 At times, it seems to encompass any and all actions that reflect harmony, love, and peace,


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expanding or receding in inverse proportion to the escalation or diminution of violence. At other times, it seems to be only a very small subset of actions. Even conscious suffering is not always animated by truthfulness and love and therefore not pure satyagraha.51 True satyagraha aims only to convert and has not a hint of coercion.52 However, as with violence, Gandhi uses the term in a practical register that suggests satyagraha is simply political action and the exercise of power without an implicit or explicit threat to harm another’s body. He is particularly interested in instances of direct confrontation with physical violence, but more broadly satyagraha, as Parel writes, is an attempt to transform “protest politics into an art and a science.”53 In fact, despite his frequent claims as to the ethical superiority of satyagraha, Gandhi also emphasizes that ethical claims and material consequences are deeply intertwined. Usually, as Parekh notes, he maintains that “political pressure was only designed to facilitate and intensify the moral [pressure].”54 However, by drawing all of the various forms of nonviolent action under one banner his conception of satyagraha shows us that acting and acting together is just as likely to intensify material pressures by changing the meaning of violence. Satyagraha is effective for reasons that are often attributed to physical violence. For instance, while satyagraha works to assuage the fears of opponents by refusing to make physical threats, when people act together to oppose an existing way of life it is bound to strike fear in the hearts of those who are invested in it. Satyagraha wins concessions by rearranging bodies, claiming and creating public spaces, changing incentive structures, and threatening others with the loss of legitimacy. Even the last of these, while in some sense a moral appeal, effects people in concrete ways. Groups care about legitimacy not only because of what others think, but what they do. Even the most nonviolent exercise of power puts pressure on opponents by realigning material interests. In addition, though Gandhi hesitates to acknowledge it, the moral sensibilities of satyagrahis are inextricably linked to their economic and political interests. With rare exceptions, even the most explicitly religious and spiritual movements either couple moral appeals with economic appeals or refrain from seriously challenging their constituents’ political and economic interests.

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At the same time, physical violence is effective for reasons often attributed to satyagraha. Few instances of physical violence are mobilized with appeals to raw economic interests or political power alone. Instead, the physical sacrifices and risks of using violence require justifications that refer to a higher power, freedom, group identity, or some other moral appeal. Physical violence also relies on love. Many a subject and citizen submits to violence because they do not want to leave their family or friends in the lurch or because refusing to submit will expose their loved ones to violence. In addition, we care about our own pain and death not only for its own sake, but because we want to be around to help those we love. Just like satyagrahis, soldiers who resist the physical violence of others have to overcome not only their fears but their love for those closest to them. The threat of physical violence would be much less potent without leveraging our deep psychological, emotional, and spiritual attachments to family and community. Satyagraha subdues, transforms, or destroys the will of others for largely the same reasons as physical violence because our moral and material interests are so inextricably linked. Satyagraha aims at, and when successful achieves, the destruction of ways of life. Gandhi’s methods prohibit the physical destruction of others but prevents them from pursuing truth as they understand it. The opponents of Indian independence and the civil rights movement, for instance, were protecting systems that to their mind provided safety and stability, economic well-being and a just, proper, and civilized moral order. The satyagrahis believed that the dictates of conscience, the demands of self-rule, and their material deprivation required that they press into being an entirely different world from the one that sustained the identity of Britons and Southern whites. Satyagraha brings severely discordant dispositions to the fore and exacerbates them, deepening and shifting the pain of extant intersubjective violence on to one’s opponents. The violence of “nonviolence” is of some concern to Gandhi and he took steps to overcome it or explain it away. Like Socrates and Martin Luther King Jr., he maintained that only a person who follows the law as a matter of course can rightfully practice civil disobedience. Satyagraha challenges the extant order but instead of destroying the state, it aims to reform and in certain ways strengthen it.55 He insists that satyagrahis retain pure motivations, that “there is not the remotest


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idea of injuring the opponent,”56 so that a purely motivated act of physical violence, though very rare, is preferable to an act of satyagraha that strays from the truth.57 Such views are grounded in his conviction that matters of the spirit are never fundamentally contradictory. Every religion and prophet teaches the same things “more or less” and “[n]ot one of them has professed to teach himsa [violence]. . . . Man as animal is violent, but as Spirit is nonviolent.”58 Satyagraha depends upon faith in God and when God guides us we cannot do violence.59 Satyagraha does not so much defeat and humiliate opponents as uplift them.60 The British and Southern whites were not prevented from pursuing truth, they were educated to the ways of love and truth. Certainly, some Southern whites and Britons were converted by Gandhi’s methods, and the systems that replaced the previous ones were more equitable, more just, and generally characterized by less intersubjective and physical violence. In addition, movements that explicitly embrace satyagraha generally seem to be on the side of social justice, from Solidarity in Poland and The Friends of Tibet, to Aung San Suu Kyi’s organization in Burma and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. However, even the most purely moral satyagraha aims to humiliate and defeat an opponent in at least one sense. Satyagraha tries to elicit feelings of guilt and shame. Conscious suffering, in particular, reveals perpetrators of physical violence to be foolish, flawed, and brutish. We might think that eliciting such feelings is perfectly appropriate in certain cases.61 However, as an attempt to wield morality, satyagraha must be implicated in destroying or compromising critical aspects of subjectivity. Ethical and moral structures, even if not physically enforced, can be normalizing, stifling, and destructive. The movements we usually associate with satyagraha involve the powerless confronting the powerful, but if satyagraha is “soul force,” it is also part of every established ethical system. (Recall Bourdieu’s discussion of gift giving as a way of indenturing others.) Gandhi was certainly no stranger to Puritanical mores. When groups act together to shame actions dubbed as immoral and impure it can be as painful as physical violence. Gandhi’s inability to acknowledge this can be traced to his reliance on conscience as a means for tapping into a nonviolent, unified, and harmonious Spirit. Despite his talk of loving the enemy, Gandhi does not recommend compromising our conscience in order to avoid causing

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others emotional or spiritual suffering. If upon examining our conscience we find that our way of life is sufficiently more in line with the truth than someone else’s, Gandhi’s love demands that we oppose and prevent their way of being. In Arendt’s essay on civil disobedience in The Crises of the Republic, she takes Thoreau and Socrates to task on this point. She reminds us, recalling Locke, that “conscience will stand against conscience” and cites the example of Mississippi governor Ross Barnett’s willingness to go to jail to prevent desegregation.62 “[C]onscience is unpolitical”63 because it relies on the inner dialogue of the individual as opposed to the acting together of groups.64 The practical limitations and “unpolitical” character of appeals to conscience defy the notion that there is a unity of spirit. Instead, like Weber, she reminds us of Machiavelli’s assertion that he loved his city more than his own soul.65 We might be tempted to dismiss British colonialists or Southern segregationists who claimed to act in good conscience as insincere and selfish. However, there is no doubt that relying on the “ ‘still small voice’ within”66 can have strange and painful consequences. When pro-life activists lie down in front of the entrance to an abortion clinic, it often takes a moral and emotional toll on the women and their supporters entering the clinic. Pro-life activists do such things because they experience another person getting an abortion as they experience the news of someone being murdered. On both sides of the issue, it is easy to dismiss the other’s position as cynical and disingenuous—a pretense for controlling women’s bodies on the one hand or an excuse to selfishly set aside “the life of a child” on the other. Yet it seems just as plausible that both groups are acting as they see fit. In the process, they prevent one another from realizing the world that the other’s conscience demands. Gandhi overestimates the harmony of intersubjectivity and underestimates the destructive force of satyagraha. He claims that perpetrators of physical violence always make a moral sacrifice and that those who endure it are almost guaranteed to have the moral high ground. However, along with acknowledging that satyagraha reorders the material world and thereby applies political and economic pressure, owning up to the power of satyagraha requires seeing the potential brutality of moral force. The conception of intersubjective violence developed in chapter 4 shows us that there are things worse than dying. A look, a gesture, or a


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word can be utterly devastating even if done in good conscience. Protests, strikes, and boycotts, not to mention all of the various social and moral structures that involve people acting together without physical violence, can be extraordinarily destructive and unjust. No degree of physical sacrifice can resolve conflicts of conscience. Genuine love for our opponents might come off as a bit patronizing when coupled with actions that make their way of being impossible.

EMBODYING THE SOCRATIC METHOD Even while positioning satyagraha as having special access to a single moral order that defines the universe, Gandhi insists that satya is political. Satyagraha means holding firm in the truth, but it is “a fundamental fact of human life that men [perceive] truth differently, that ‘we see truth in fragment and from different angles of vision’, and that all knowledge [is] fallible and corrigible.”67 In fact, “[d]espite the tremendous faith Gandhi had in divine power, the technique of satyagraha is based upon the admission of relative truths and the rejection of absolutes which are not knowable for mortal man.”68 Gandhi professes a universal moral order but provides us with a radically pluralistic and democratic approach to confrontations of conscience. Even if such conflicts are irresolvable, satyagraha forces us to think of conflicts in terms of what is right and wrong and acknowledge that no one has complete access to truth. Horsburgh writes that the process operates on two levels: A Gandhian appeal [challenges] opponents to recognize the justice of a certain cause but also to develop an attachment to satya [truth] itself, thereby entering into a co-operative inquiry into human needs. It also attaches more importance to a cooperative pursuit of truth than to the recognition of the truth which the specific cause is thought to represent. Thus, it holds particular disagreements in perspective, insisting that a fundamentally co-operative relationship is possible between those who disagree about even the most important specific issues. Such a general appeal draws power from many sources including the latent co-operativeness of the other party and his desire

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M to justify himself both in his own eyes and in those of other people. To reject such an appeal out of hand is to discredit oneself. On the other hand, to accept it is to open the way for a less prejudiced consideration of the satyagrahi’s case on the disputed issue.69

Without promising to entirely overcome our differences, satyagraha attempts to elicit mutual recognition of divergent positions and, more importantly, commence inquiry into the character of “the truth” that will best meet human needs. Satyagraha will not prevent intersubjective violence, but it strives to begin a discussion of how we might overcome our most fundamental differences. Satyagraha lays bare the character of the intersubjective violence that underpins physical violence. It may not be able to ameliorate such violence and, in the short term, may even exacerbate it. But at least we will have a better sense of why living with one another is causing so much suffering and commence a discussion about how to ameliorate it. The parallels between Gandhi’s and Socrates’ epistemologies are striking. Socrates sets out to improve his city by challenging commonly held presumptions and preconceived notions. The dialogues usually begin with him eliciting positions from his interlocutors, who we suspect he thinks are unwise in one way or another. His first step is to get others to explicitly articulate their claims and lay their cards on the table. Once eliciting these claims, Socrates does something odd. Instead, of directly contradicting or refuting those claims, he lets them stand. After encouraging his interlocutors to stake their positions, Socrates responds by deftly and persistently recontextualizing those positions. He badgers and irritates his opponents with new questions, clarifications, and, on occasion, offers assertions of his own. His opponents accuse him of twisting or giving new meaning to their words. But Socrates never says an interlocutor is wrong.70 As Dana Villa writes, his method aims mostly to “enable the individual to become fully aware of his own opinion and its specific truth.”71 He only shows them that their own positions and definitions are self-contradictory, incomplete, or unfounded.72 Sometimes the dialogues end without doing much to solve the issue at hand and other times we feel we have made some


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progress in understanding the character of justice. We are rarely led to a definitive and absolute conclusion. Satyagraha is Socratic elenchus expressed in action. Satyagraha, especially in the form of conscious suffering, is similarly provocative but offers bodies in the place of arguments and positions. In the same way that Socrates dances around and prods at the meaning of his interlocutors’ words, Gandhi elicits and then probes the meaning of his opponents’ actions by surrounding them with others acting on the basis of different assumptions. Instead of refusing to say his opponents are wrong, he refuses to physically destroy them. He literally lets them stand even as they abuse and destroy the bodies of others in the same way Socrates’ opponents abuse logic. Gandhi believed, as Parekh writes, that “[i]n order to be justified in taking the extreme step of harming or killing someone, one must assume that one is absolutely right, the opponent totally wrong and that violence would definitely achieve the desired result.”73 Neither Gandhi nor Socrates is ever so sure of himself. Socrates is never so certain as to say someone is definitively wrong and Gandhi is never so certain as to kill someone. At Socrates’ trial, he says he has had little time for politics74 but also suggests that his conversations are political because they are concerned with justice, stoke dissent, and challenge citizens to think.75 If uttering words, posing questions, and thinking about the meaning of the good is political practice of a sort, satyagraha is a way to embody an understanding of the good while remaining open to other practices and thoughts.76 In Gorgias, Socrates suggests that punishment and the death penalty can be just, but that he would hesitate to inflict such a penalty. Toward the end of the dialogue, he tells Callicles: Let someone despise you as a fool and throw dirt on you, if he likes. And, yes, by Zeus, confidently let him deal you that demeaning blow. Nothing terrible will happen to you if you really are an admirable and good man, one who practices excellence. And then, after we’ve practiced it together, then at last, if we think we should, we’ll turn to politics, or then we’ll deliberate about whatever subject we please, when we’re better at deliberating than we are now.77

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Here, Socrates articulates the connection between his methods and a nascent form of conscious suffering. Gandhi embraces physical suffering as a way of confronting and exposing severely discordant dispositions. Socrates embraces the intellectual burden of living with the diversity of human thought. Neither shies away from conflict and yet both offer a method that preserves space for the opponent. Socrates persists in lines of questioning and Gandhi persists in action that produces tension and uncertainty.78 Yet Socrates never walks away from an interlocutor and Gandhi never refuses to talk with an opponent. In fact, satyagraha is not only analogous to the Socratic method but also leads us to actual dialogue and inquiry.79 When Socrates said that “to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not,”80 he might not have realized that a combination of intellectual humility and a willingness to accept death could be developed into a full-fledged method of conducting politics and pursuing truth in tandem. Then again, Socrates’ most direct link to Gandhi is his own contribution to the development of that method. By refusing to avoid his death sentence, Socrates practices satyagraha. During his trial, Socrates responds to the possibility of ceasing his activities in strident terms, saying, “Gentleman, I am your very grateful and devoted servant, but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you; and so long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet.”81 Yet when his friends try to persuade him to flee Athens in order to avoid the death penalty, he insists on suffering the consequences of his actions. Instead, he will be as he needs to be and avoid doing “violence [biazesthai]” to the law of Athens and the jury he could not persuade.82 By persisting in his conversations right up until the moment he ingests the hemlock, Socrates changes the political meaning of his death penalty. Even if satyagraha can be immoral and unethical, it retains a consistency between means and ends that distinguishes it from physical violence and must be counted as beneficial to politics. Admittedly, had Socrates advocated killing his jailor (he actually converted him into a sympathizer), it would have borne some relationship to his practicing philosophy in defiance of Athens, just as killing a British soldier bore some relationship to living independent of British rule. Both actions might have been justified. However, continuing to practice philosophy


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or marching to the sea to make salt was more consistent with the goals that Socrates and Gandhi sought. Dana Villa’s masterful description of a distinctive brand of Socratic citizenship is sometimes troubled by a worry that Socratic detachment from politics, while it retains essential advantages, may “slow down” and hamstring action.83 Like Socrates, Gandhi was hesitant to engage in “formal” politics. At the same time, both Arendt and Gandhi frequently reject the idea that political action ought to be concerned with ends. Arendt worries that the pursuit of ends will overrun and destroy politics; Gandhi and Socrates seem more interested in placing ethical goals above political pursuits. However, a rejection of ends in theory seems to translate into an endorsement of pursuing concrete goals, in a spirit of compromise, in practice. In some ways, the three thinkers correct one another’s weaknesses on this issue. The observation that Gandhi’s methods are largely consistent with or even a more active expression of Socratic methods, alleviates the worry that a Socratic brand of citizenship is too detached. Noticing that Gandhi’s ethical claims are always accompanied by a “nondogmatic form of moral aspiration” alleviates the worry that ethics will trump or overrun politics.84 And despite her worries about conscience, Arendt cannot help but admire certain aspects of civil disobedience, which she expects will reinvigorate (not overrun) American politics. With satyagraha, one’s means are more consistent with one’s goals and the pursuit of those goals is insistent but not absolutist. Given the character of intersubjectivity, using satyagraha is therefore more realistic and more honest than using physical violence. Satyagraha implies an acceptance of the unreliability of action by leaving others in place, whereas physical violence implies a denial of it by pretending to solve the problem of intersubjectivity through elimination. Neither is more or less subject to the unpredictability of politics, but satyagraha embraces unpredictability.85 By making our means more consistent with our ends satyagraha also retains a degree of transparency that physical violence avoids. Sataygraha involves unmistakable actions where actors own up to and take clear responsibility for their purposes. As Václav Havel writes, “Living within the truth, as humanity’s revolt against an enforced position, is . . . an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.”86 Physical violence often obscures the purposes of action, because actors are physically destroying others instead of doing

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what they really want to do (e.g., living on a particular piece of land, registering to vote, drilling for oil, or working for a better wage). No matter how laudable one’s ends, from the opponent’s perspective it can be hard to see perpetrators of physical violence as anything more than murderers. In this sense at least, there is something fundamentally more forthright about satyagraha than physical violence.87 Unless we wish to live in isolation, we must act. Gandhi’s advice is to hold firm in the truth and convince others to act with us in this endeavor. Even if we retain a degree of humility, this might go wrong in practice. We might also question whether in vociferously and actively opposing others we can really maintain openness to their perspective.88 However, satyagraha offers, at the very least, a clear signal of good faith. Iyer writes: No doubt, we cannot ignore the intentions of the user but neither can we go solely by them in identifying instances of coercion. But there are so many degrees and varieties of coercion that we must distinguish between the types of constraining influences that are exercised. An important and relatively unambiguous way of making a distinction is to consider whether physical force is being used.89 I would go a step farther and say that our condition of plurality means that exercising power and action will probably involve doing violence to others at some point. However, refraining from using physical violence, especially in the face of physical violence, is a potent and unmistakable gesture that says we are not only actively engaged in the world but open to new ideas and committed to cooperative inquiry. This does not guarantee that satyagraha will be more just than physical violence. However, it may be more open to correction.

SEVEN

D e m a n d i n g Th o u g h t f u l n e s s

IN THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS, not only has physical violence lost the veneer of political reliability but “nonviolent” action and power have lost the veneer of moral reliability. Following one’s conscience and refraining from physical violence does not ensure moral action. The use of pacifist methods often intends to upset or overturn our basic assumptions about right and wrong in a way that is potentially immoral in its own destructiveness. Nonviolent techniques run up against the self-limiting character of moral appeals.1 At the same time, the political character of physical violence makes it less threatening to politics than we sometimes assume. Destroying politics would require destroying all of humanity. Arendt remarks that the “entire truly human world, which in a narrower sense forms the political realm, can indeed be destroyed by brute force, but it did not arise from force, and its inherent destiny is not to perish by force.”2 The last part of the statement is uncharacteristically optimistic and speculative for Arendt, but barring the most unlikely of calamities her confidence in the durability of politics seems justified. However, such confidence presents two problems. First, if nonviolence is not as morally distinctive as it purports to be, and physical violence only destroys politics if and when it destroys everyone, then, politically at least, we have little basis for condemning physical violence. Physical violence may destroy plurality, but plurality is a matter of uniqueness, not numbers. Five people acting together can be more powerful and more political than five hundred who rarely talk with one another. Destroying people always forecloses the possibility that they will 149

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engage in politics, do or say something unique, or become powerful. But as I argued in chapter 5, physical violence, like all action, can also facilitate people acting together and making history. Disturbingly, the distinctive understanding of politics I have adopted from Arendt makes it hard to find any reason why losing a few nobodies—a few mindless consumers or predictable bureaucrats—does much harm to politics. Second, and the reason the above statement is uncharacteristic, is that Arendt was highly attuned to the possibility of unlikely calamities. Her analysis of the Nazi concentration camps in particular suggests that even without physically killing everyone, physical violence can compromise our political capacities so severely that it threatens to extinguish them. The most obvious, and the usual way out of such quandaries for pacifists, is ethics. Killing people may not be bad for politics, but the Decalogue tells us that it is against God’s will. The destruction of politics aside, adopting the position that love, peace, and justice are the true way of humanity permits a categorical rejection of Nazism. Without entirely discounting such responses, pacifism should be able to offer a more political solution. I have already suggested that pacifism’s solution when ethics creates deadlocks is to push us toward politics. When conscience squares off with conscience, satyagraha leaves space for correction, encouraging us to discuss things with one another or start thinking about the problem for ourselves. Also, satyagraha is relatively honest about the suffering involved in politics. Satyagraha is at least more conducive to politics than physical violence, in the sense that it asks us to bear the difficulties of politics even while proliferating those difficulties. But there is another, more direct connection between suffering and politics for pacifists. Pacifism is distinguished from other ideologies by its elevation of the goal of alleviating suffering to the status of a political principle. Just because one’s action causes other people to suffer does not ipso facto mean it is wrong. A realistic pacifism keeps our limited ability to alleviate suffering, and even the dangers of attempting to do so, front and center. It also allows us to consider not just physical but intersubjective suffering. There are many practical difficulties with adopting this principle, not least of which is the fact that most people may never adopt it. However, in this final chapter, I will try to disconnect a concern for suffering from heavy-handed moralism and demonstrate that such concerns can be deeply political.

DEMANDING THOUGHTFULNESS

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I turn again to the Nazi concentration camps and a final go-around with Arendt, Primo Levi, and Socrates.The Holocaust not only presents the physical challenge to pacifism described in chapter 6. Instances where many thousands of people engage in physical violence toward noncombatants undermine our most basic ethical sensibilities and raise questions about the viability of pacifist principles in particular. For Arendt, the Nazi experiment reveals and reaffirms the ancient distance between suffering and politics. Totalitarianism tries to build a politics on the basis of suffering and thoughtlessness, but understanding it in those terms and examining the suffering it causes is distracting and dangerous. Instead, Arendt wants us to notice that totalitarianism is an attack on politics and humanness as such. However, Primo Levi finds that the suffering the camps produce, and in particular the suffering of those he calls “the drowned,” does raise political questions. Challenging her diagnosis of the Nazi bureaucrat as generically thoughtless, Levi and Socrates demand something more specific.

THE BANALITY OF SUFFERING AND THOUGHTLESSNESS A great deal has been written about Arendt’s distinctive understanding of the importance and nature of totalitarianism, both critical and appreciative.3 For Arendt, totalitarianism serves as the central antipode to politics as described in chapter 5 and the camp is the “most consequential institution of totalitarian rule.”4 Politics relates to deeds and speech, involves unique revelations of the human personality, is agonistic and unpredictable, and creates history through storytelling.5 Despite grandiose rhetoric and colossal ambitions, totalitarianism trades in the ordinary, relies on and reproduces the indistinct, and creates and involves two things that are altogether banal: suffering and thoughtlessness.6 I take each in turn. In her discussion of “total domination” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt refers to three aspects of the human personality: the juridical, the moral, and the unique or individual. She shows how the camp systematically destroys each of these and argues that the last—uniqueness— is the most important. More than anything else, totalitarianism sets out to

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destroy spontaneity, or “man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events.”7 Arendt explains that the transformation of a person into a being whose condition seems to defy all attempts at connection is the goal of the camp. She writes: “No ideology which aims at the explanation of all historical events of the past and at mapping out the course of all events of the future can bear the unpredictability which springs from the fact that men are creative, that they can bring forward something so new that nobody ever foresaw it.”8 The camp destroys the capacity for “action” by making impossible the unpredictable, irreversible, and history-making words and deeds that, when practiced in concert with others, create power and set politics in motion.9 Among Arendt’s more striking claims is that understanding suffering does not help us understand the camps. First, she argues that the extreme degree of suffering that occurs in a relatively limited space and time is not the camp’s distinguishing feature. Instead, the immensity of the suffering in the Lager is a distraction from the real issues at hand. She writes: What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and their shamefulness therefore is not just the business of their inmates and those who run them according to strictly “scientific” standards; it is the concern of all men. Suffering, of which there has been always too much on earth, is not the issue, nor is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake, and even though it seems that these experiments succeed not in changing man but only in destroying him, by creating a society in which the nihilistic banality of homo homini lupus is consistently realized, one should bear in mind the necessary limitations to an experiment which requires global control in order to show conclusive results.10 Though Nazism failed,11 Arendt takes seriously the possibility that human nature itself could be transformed. Such a transformation would


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require “global control”—which might appear to be a heartening limitation except for the fact that Arendt was writing in the shadow of an ascendant Stalinist Russia. The deliberate imposition of suffering, even a great deal of suffering, is nothing new. The insight that man is wolf to man is a “nihilistic banality,” signaled by the fact that it is an old Roman proverb, not a twentieth-century German one. However, what is new is the carefully orchestrated and meticulously designed mobilization of suffering for the purpose of attacking humanness as such. Second, Arendt claims that the suffering caused by the camp tells us nothing about the appropriate political response to it. She refuses to give meaning to the conditions and experiences created by the camp and asks us do the same. She writes: If it is true that the concentration camps are the most consequential institutions of totalitarian rule, “dwelling on horrors” would seem to be indispensable for the understanding of totalitarianism. But recollection can no more do this than can the uncommunicative eyewitness report. [Both] types of writer are so much aware of the terrible abyss that separates the world of the living from that of the living dead, that they cannot supply anything more than a series of remembered occurrences that must seem just as incredible to those who relate them as to their audience. . . . Such thoughts are useful only for the perception of political contexts and the mobilization of political passions. . . . The reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions separates him as radically as mental disease from everything within him that is personality or character.12 The experience of people reduced to a “bundle of reactions,” to “specimen[s] of the animal-species man,”13 is unintelligible, unimaginable, and incredible. Those experiences—and the process of thinking about those experiences—provide us with no solutions to the problem. Whether used for good or for evil, “the experiences themselves can communicate no more than nihilistic banalities.”14 The image of the camps can serve only as a yardstick for judging what not to do—and this has little to do with the suffering they cause. They tell us how not to live and what sort of conditions to fight against, but they do not tell us what the

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alternative should be. Indeed, there is potentially great danger in believing that suffering implies its own solutions. Those who wish to mobilize political passions will take up the suffering of one group or another, on one occasion or another, and imbue it with meaning. In this regard, she mentions the post–World War II attempt to build “intraEuropean understanding”, post–World War I “pacifism devoid of reality”15 and, elsewhere, Revisionist Zionism.16 Arendt is more famous, or infamous, for her claim that the sort of evil represented in the non-personalities of Nazi functionaries such as Adolf Eichmann is banal. The seed of that claim is the assertion that the suffering such functionaries cause is banal. Arendt is not indifferent to suffering. But she argues that as much as we might be appalled by the suffering produced in the camps, we need to steel ourselves against such feelings. As Patricia Owens writes, Arendt’s was “a cool realism” that “faced unpleasant facts head-on and refused to romanticize and feel pity for victims.”17 This “critique of the politics of pity,”18 as Cynthia Halpern calls it, suggests emotional political demands stifle competing claims by gesturing toward animal functions and vulnerabilities that are not open to debate. The bane of the modern age, which totalitarianism realizes in its most elemental form, is the attempt to build a politics—a predictable, scientific, inhuman politics—on the basis of the body alone, or on what Agamben calls “the bare life.”19 Politics is often implicated in suffering,20 but giving meaning to that suffering leads only to more suffering, whether through the sort of naïve pacifism that claims that suffering speaks for itself, or through the undue certainty attributed to political solutions that stake their claim on the moral and emotional weight of past wrongs. Both are based on “the superstition that something good might result from something evil.”21 Echoing Plato, Arendt suggests that dwelling on what we have lost only distracts us from the kind of deliberation required for a proper political order.22 One of the challenges of mustering a political response to the camp grounded in deliberation (as opposed to predictable reactions) is that totalitarianism places its bureaucrats in a world beyond judgment. Totalitarianism invents actions that are impossible to explain on the basis of human standards and objectives. She writes: Totalitarian regimes have discovered without knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive.


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When the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer “human” in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness.23 This troubling “success” became a central concern of the rest of Arendt’s work on the Holocaust—work that turned steadily toward incisive examination of the experiences of the perpetrators. Presumably, her interest in this particularly vexing problem of an evil with no discernable purpose and no discernable remedy is what drew her to the Eichmann trial. What she observed there further reinforced her view that the usual motives we attribute to those who do evil were not a factor in bureaucratic murder. Eichmann was no more greedy, powerhungry, or self-interested than most of us. However, Arendt did identify the personality trait that allowed him to do what he did. And while she maintained that his actions were unforgivable, she came to the conclusion that judging and condemning him and others like him was not only possible, but necessary. That is, despite the misgivings that she expressed in Origins, she came to believe that human judgment is the best reply to Nazism. The personality trait—or rather non-trait—that she identifies is that of thoughtlessness. She writes of Eichmann that: “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”24 In the condemnation of him that comes at the end of the book, she expresses astonishment at the degree to which this thoughtlessness protects him not only from others but, in a perverse way, from himself. When Eichmann goes to the gallows he repeats some common refrains, which leads Arendt to conclude that he could think of “nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life.”25 His actions suggested that his own standpoint was irrelevant to him— that he literally “forgot that this was his own funeral.”26 His ability to be

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“completely himself ”—his thoughtless self—in the face of death convinces Arendt of the banality of evil. The idea that Eichmann is safeguarded from the reality of other perspectives (as well as his own) by his thoughtlessness is the kernel of the concept of thoughtlessness that Arendt further develops in essays published under the title Responsibility and Judgment. Arendt suggests that the crucial capacity that Eichmann and other functionaries lacked is closely related to Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment, or “common sense,” whereby we take into account the perspectives of others in making some judgment.27 Though Kant hopes that common sense can come to include all of humanity, Arendt feels that it must exclude those who, for whatever reason, refuse to judge or are not “judging subjects.” If someone does not have an opinion, if someone does not consider whether something is beautiful or ugly, then there is no basis for including this person in the community. Arendt tentatively adopts this theory of aesthetic judgment as a standard for political judgment.28 Eichmann lacked common sense both in his failure of imagination with respect to other people’s perspectives and in his refusal to assess the world in which he lived. That is, he was neither worthy of inclusion in a community of judgment nor a person who might set out to cultivate such community. This lack of common sense and political judgment is not rare. In fact, it is widespread. And it can become the lifeblood of bureaucratic murder. That Eichmann was not alone in his failure of imagination raises another set of issues. Arendt attempts to demonstrate the importance of considering the judgments of some and dispensing with the “judgments” of others. The latter seems to involve finding the wherewithal to judge that some people, perhaps even one’s whole society, has rejected the capacity for judgment.29 This is a tall order, but Arendt argues that identifying the qualities of those who are able to do so is actually “relatively simple.” Her analysis is worth quoting at length: The nonparticipants, called irresponsible by the majority, were the only ones who dared judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they disposed of a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and conscience.


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. . . The nonparticipants were those whose consciences did not function in this, as it were, automatic way. . . . Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command “Thou shalt not kill,” but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves. The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking.30 Like other moral philosophers, Arendt suggests that after Auschwitz we cannot rely on our simple capacity to apply laws, of whatever form, in particular situations.31 Close examination of the law can lead to the inaction of perplexity or the license of nihilism32 but moral (Kant), religious (the Decalogue), or community prescriptions can fail because they are easily swapped with others. Thus, we must rely on Socrates’ definition of thinking, which posits that we are all “two in one.” If others refuse to think and judge, Arendt argues, we can carry on a conversation with ourselves much like the conversations we have with others. Though we are all more or less conscious, only in thinking do we actualize the reality “I am I.”33 This sort of thinking is not so much the be-all and end-all of judgment as it is the last resort in extreme situations or times of crisis. Remembering that there is only one person with whom we will always share company—ourselves—is a bulwark against evil in situations where thoughtlessness has become the norm. Eichmann, as his words before the gallows demonstrate, did not live together with himself, or at

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least, did not do so very frequently. Usually, it is thinking in combination with consideration of others’ judgments that produces the sort of political judgment that Eichmann sorely lacked and Nazism worked so unrelentingly to extinguish. Despite her criticisms of the trial, Arendt makes a compelling case in Eichmann in Jerusalem for the importance of judging Eichmann’s crime. At the conclusion of what amounts to her own judgment and sentencing of Eichmann, Arendt condemns both the suffering he caused, which never should have happened, and his unwillingness to think about what it meant to participate. The stubbornly ordinary, thoughtless obedience of this stubbornly ordinary person haunts human existence. In one passage she seems even to embrace explicitly the logic of Nazism in condemning Eichmann, writing that no one can be expected to “share the earth with you.” However, we can discern a bright line between the judgment of the court with respect to this individual and the nonjudgment involved in carrying out mass murder. In her “Postscript,” Arendt affirms those aspects of Eichmann’s actual judgment that stated manifestly that criminal orders must not be obeyed34—even when disobeying is extraordinarily difficult. We must judge the individual case even if “the judge who condemns a murderer can still say when he goes home: ‘And there, but for the grace of God, go I.’ ”35 Such a death sentence is entirely different from the many thousands of death sentences that Eichmann facilitated because his actions were not judgments or sentences at all. By holding an individual accountable, the court restored to Eichmann something that he refused to sustain in himself. Eichmann spent his life acting without considering the judgment of others, without thinking about “living with” himself, and without considering his own unique standpoint and capabilities as a human person. The court in Jerusalem transformed cogs “into perpetrators, that is to say, human beings”36 and, thereby, offered the only appropriate response to someone who participated in stripping such capacities from thousands of other individuals.37 Through her analysis of suffering and thoughtlessness, Arendt intends to show that totalitarian rule over the living dead is nothing but the destruction of judgment, politics, and humanity. At the same time, she demonstrates that the resources it draws upon are everywhere. There will always be suffering, and we are often thoughtless. Perhaps


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we can even say that most of us spend very little time, if any, thinking in the Socratic sense of the word. Yet, for Arendt, the idea that there is an “Eichmann in every one of us”38 is just as facile as the idea that Eichmann was a monster. Each individual is responsible for his or her actions, even if bureaucratic murder requires only the all-too-common abdication of common sense and thoughtfulness. Suffering and thoughtlessness, alone or together, are not sufficient for creating totalitarian systems. However, the ubiquity of suffering and thoughtlessness means that totalitarianism is an ever-present threat.

THE PARADOX OF COMFORT AND SUFFERING Both Arendt and Primo Levi are particularly attuned to the magnitude of the moral challenge presented by the camps. Arendt’s experience at Eichmann’s trial and Levi’s encounter with a German chemist in Auschwitz (as described in chapter 3) convinced them that the camps were made possible by ordinary people who were culpable for the most heinous crimes and yet, strangely, devoid of active malice.39 However, while there is much agreement between the two thinkers,40 Levi’s work is distinguished by his presentation of a peculiar paradox that defines much of his thinking about the Holocaust. In Western political thought, paradoxes of practical importance are often expressed as tragic moral problems. For instance, Augustine laments that a wise judge will sometimes have to torture innocents in order to save others,41 and Plato suggests that the first law in his city of words should be the restriction of speech.42 However, perhaps because doubt can be so uncomfortable, few thinkers suggest that we ought to place paradox—and certainly not a particular paradox—at the center of political practice. Levi is an exception. Both Survival in Auschwitz and the original Italian version, Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man) begin with the following poem: You who live safe In your warm houses, You who find, returning in the evening, Hot food and friendly faces:

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T O WA R D A C R E D I B L E PA C I F I S M Consider if this is a man Who works in the mud Who does not know peace Who fights for a scrap of bread Who dies because of a yes or no. Consider if this is a woman, Without hair and without name With no more strength to remember, Her eyes empty and her womb cold Like a frog in winter. Meditate that this came about: I commend these words to you. Carve them in your hearts At home, in the street, Going to bed, rising; Repeat them to your children, Or may your house fall apart, May illness impede you, May your children turn their faces from you.

Levi chooses words that are vibrant and insistent so that the sensitive reader will be jarred, and at a minimum, understand that the author holds this question to be of the highest import. Indeed, where the poem appears outside of Levi’s memoir, it is entitled Shema, indicating that Levi intended to echo a prayer central to Judaism.43 Yet, provisional answers to the question posed by the poem are readily apparent. We might hypothesize that “yes, of course these are people,” or “no, of course these are not people,” and in both cases believe that we are empathizing with Levi and understand his point. That is, upon an initial reading, the poem is likely to be felt as a statement rather than a question. We think, “What Levi is saying here is that the Shoah was an awful event because people did not realize that these poor souls were people”; or, alternatively, “He’s telling us that the conditions in the camp were so horrific that people could not possibly be people anymore.” But Levi’s request to “meditate that this came about” is not a coy way of suggesting a particular answer to his question.


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Indeed, the fact that we can imagine two contradictory replies to Levi’s question, and in both cases feel as though we understand his meaning, reveals the core of the problem that Levi presents. If we imagine that Levi’s implicit assumption is that these beings are people, and that his asking us to “consider” whether they are is simply a sardonic reference to the fact that they are not understood to be such in the Lager (camp), then we deny our position of privilege. A reasonable question to ask might be whether beings like us, who are steeped in the comforts of home and society, when stripped of all the things we hold dear, remain beings “like us” at all. On the other hand, if we imagine that Levi is trying to tell us that these people really are not people, our position is just as precarious. The conclusion that “I am human and they are not” seems to be a betrayal of the highest order. While my experience may be entirely different from those “on the bottom,” to assert that our worlds share no common ground seems presumptuous and dangerous. In effect, the conclusion that “this is a person” fails to capture the magnitude of the crime perpetrated at Auschwitz, but the conclusion that “this is not a person” affirms the horrific logic of the Lager. We can put an even finer point on the paradox because Levi specifies both his audience and the subjects for consideration in vivid and shockingly disparate terms. Levi asks how or whether those who are comfortable ought to relate to—or are even capable of relating to— those who suffer. His readers, who are in a condition of comfort, are tasked with considering beings at the edge of oblivion. He asks: Are we, the comfortable and the suffering, a “we” at all? The first thing to note about such a question is that we in warm houses—or even those who have, at a minimum, the wherewithal and time to read and think about Levi’s words—seem eminently unqualified to answer it. In a few short phrases, Levi demolishes a vast expanse of common ground between the comfortable and those experiencing extreme suffering. In the Lager, Levi encounters beings for whom there is no dignity in work, no time for rest, no assurance of the next moment, no recognized or recognizable identity, no memory, and no prospect of new life. With so little common ground and so little understanding of the experience of those who suffer, any attempt by the comfortable to posit a “we” seems doomed to be at best idle conjecture and at worst arrogant naiveté.

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While the poem first and foremost “commends [the] words” of the poem itself when it asks us to “consider if this is a man” or “if this is a woman,”44 Levi’s placement of the poem at the beginning of his memoir also tells the reader to consider carefully what he recounts in the book that follows. Survival in Auschwitz (as well as much of Levi’s other work) can be understood as an extended exploration of the troubling relationship between the comfortable and the suffering. The purpose of Survival in Auschwitz is to bring the comfortable reader closer to Levi’s experience. But we do not find a resolution of the paradox; rather, we find that those who survived Auschwitz are themselves subject to the paradox of comfort and suffering. The prospect of finding a connection between the comfortable and those described in the poem seems dim to begin with; but Levi’s memoir goes on to describe the even more extensive destruction of essential qualities such as the ability to speak, to think, to play, and to mourn. Those in the poem still fight for a scrap of bread; others lose the will to struggle altogether. As we read Levi’s memoir, we find that the question of whether or not we exist as a “we” becomes a personal and ever-present quandary for Levi, articulated through his relationship to those he calls “the drowned.” For Levi, the story of Auschwitz is the story of those who did not survive. He is haunted by images of those who form “the backbone of the camp,”45 and in part, these images lead him to write.46 Yet his attempt to liberate himself from the memory of the drowned seems doomed to failure. While Levi cannot turn his back on the image of a being who experiences life at the edge of death, neither can he engage it because the experience of one who survives is never the experience of one who does not. He writes in The Drowned and the Saved: I must repeat: we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the “Muslims,” the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance.47


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Since Auschwitz is the story of the drowned, and only the saved can tell it, the paradox of the suffering and the comfortable splits not only the survivors from the comfortable, but also the survivors from those who died in Auschwitz. Describing a coherent “we,” even just a “we” who experienced Auschwitz, seems impossible and constitutes one of the most pernicious and enduring humiliations that the Lager imposes upon survivors. Of course, in describing to his readers the obstacles that bar the drowned from entering into community with us, Levi attempts to draw in the comfortable as well. At the beginning of his memoir he tells us that he is driven “to make the rest participate in it,” and that if this can be done, it will amount to “an interior liberation.”48 Levi persistently locates his experiences somewhere between the extremes of radical comfort and utter suffering. To contemplate a connection between comfortable readers and those who suffered in Auschwitz requires that his readers face the inscrutable articulation of the paradox of comfort and suffering that confronts those who managed to survive. The task described in the poem, difficult as it is, becomes significantly more challenging: if the obstacles impeding the survivor’s view of the drowned are imposing, for those who never experienced the Lager, the drowned are perhaps entirely eclipsed. In the context of Levi’s other works, we sense that the urgent tone of Levi’s poem springs in part from a need to reconcile himself to his own life. Asking whether or not “we are” becomes a personal matter for someone who has traversed so much ground between suffering and comfort; we might even go so far as to say that for Levi, asking whether or not “we are” becomes a question of whether or not “I am.”49 As the narrator in his novel The Monkey’s Wrench observes: “I really did feel a bit like Tiresias, and not only because of my double experience. . . . I felt as if I had two souls in my body, and that’s too many.” Levi carries the burden of trying to reconcile two apparently incommensurable experiences and asks us to share it with him.

CONSIDER IF THIS IS A PERSON Levi is something of an amateur when it comes to political theory and the paradox he reveals may not seem immediately relevant to politics,

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but his thought provides a powerful supplement and corrective to Arendt’s understanding of the relationship between suffering, thoughtlessness, and politics. In describing the paradox of comfort and suffering, Levi asks us to consider the reader’s standing in relation to survivors of Auschwitz, the survivors’ experience in relation to those he calls “the drowned,” and the disjunctures in the survivors’ experiences that result from living a life both inside and outside the Lager. To these complexities he adds the following: We must consider whether we can establish a link that we can label human between the suffering and the comfortable. He asks, Do we the comfortable form a human community with the suffering? In regard to himself, his work takes up a question that at first might inspire disbelief or giggles: Am I a person? And, Was I a person in Auschwitz? By tying his paradox to the question of humanness, Levi tries to demonstrate that the paradox does not arise from the idiosyncratic parlance of a particular historical circumstance. Addressing his poem to the comfortable, he demonstrates that the issue transcends the relationship between the survivor and those who did not survive. Tying it to the character of humanity, he makes the problem relevant to anyone who might place her- or himself among “us.” The larger question—the problem that Levi’s experience highlights more than any other—is our inability to decipher where the boundaries of human community begin and end, or indeed, what kinds of beings are those we call human. With respect to nation and clan, we might readily identify talismans that provide the basis for community: a constitution, a common ancestor, a particular ritual, or a language. Perhaps the difficulty in identifying which of these things is the basis for the human community springs from the fact that there are so many possibilities. Levi’s discussion of the various ways in which prisoners in the Lager strive to maintain their dignity is instructive. Ex-sergeant Steinlauf finds that holding fast to military discipline in grooming and washing allows him to “remain alive, not to begin to die.”50 Rabbis Wachsmann and Mendi spend long evenings discussing Talmudic questions.51 Levi maintains himself perhaps through curiosity, observing the horrors that surround him with a degree of detachment that allows him to carry on in his struggle for physical survival.52 Or perhaps the issue is dignity. The notion of dignity seems to be a potentially useful concept for framing and drawing


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together our disparate ways of imagining ourselves. The United Nations Charter proclaims faith in the “dignity and worth of the human person” and the “equal rights of men and women.” Perhaps this is a sufficient basis for the claim that “we are,” and in particular that we are a human community. Levi’s poem, and Survival in Auschwitz more generally, show us that the Lager and the multiplicity of ways of suffering therein are a direct attack on such possibilities. At a minimum, the Lager demonstrates that our ability to imagine ways of maintaining dignity is matched by our ability to destroy them.53 With heart-wrenching detail Levi shows how the accoutrements of a comfortable life provide the basis for our sense of community. From the personal items we keep and the presence of family members, to the assurance that our next meal is coming and the security of a stable government, certain familiar objects and comforts help us to know that “we are.” Levi notices such things because they are systematically stripped from him.54 Steinlauf, Levi, and the rabbis may have persevered for moments in time, but nothing is more obvious than the contingency and fragility of their methods.55 It is difficult to see how those who fight for a scrap of bread, who cannot speak, or are too weak to have a memory, maintain anything resembling dignity and worth. The Lager produces beings who appear to be beyond the pale of human community, “the divine spark dead within them.”56 These passages leave no doubt that Levi would affirm Arendt’s claim that the Lager is an attack on human nature “as such.” Indeed, there are moments when Levi seems ready to resolve his paradox: the camp, he says, is constructed to perpetrate something “our language lacks words to express . . . the demolition of a man.”57 But Arendt elaborates on Levi’s claim that the drowned signify “all the evil of our time,”58 saying “radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.”59 In Origins, Arendt writes that the Lager establishes that “the psyche can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man; that, indeed, psyche, character, and individuality seem under certain circumstances to express themselves only through the rapidity or slowness with which they disintegrate.”60 The Lager successfully creates “inanimate men” whose “return to the psychologically or otherwise intelligibly human world closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus.”61 The idea that survivors

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are “unchanged”62 by their experience of suffering is of course patently untrue. A charitable reading suggests that what she means is that whatever sense of self a survivor recovers in the wake of experiencing the camp ought not to be attributed to the experience of suffering. However, she clearly means to say that thinking about experiences such as Levi’s or those of the drowned will do us no good and might even do us harm. Survivors’ memories are both incomprehensible and useless (except for the “mobilization of political passions”).63 Those who, like Levi, did not touch bottom, find that their personhood was rapidly deteriorating and that the drowned were not people at all. The perpetrators too, in refusing to think and judge, placed themselves outside the bounds of human community. In the larger context of Arendt’s characterization of politics, this assessment would seem to bring Levi’s inquiry definitively to an end. Her conception of politics64 sets certain phenomena beyond its purview and forecloses the possibility that survivors of the camps might in some way be able to integrate their experiences of “our” world with their experiences of the camp. For Arendt, asking whether “this is a person” is offensive to the very idea of humanity. When a being is robbed of any status before the law and stripped of his or her unique personality, there is nothing to debate. To use an Augustinian analogy, we might say that considering such a waif is like looking at darkness or listening to silence.65 The camps are a place entirely beyond the purview of action and power as she defines them and, therefore, stand “outside of life and death.”66 All of this is as astonishing as it is shameful; the camps provide us with a sine qua non of how not to conduct politics and a yardstick by which all ideologies can be measured.67 Like Arendt and everyone else who has studied the Lager seriously, Levi is overwhelmed by evidence that the institution is removed from human experience.Yet, he seems determined to thwart attempts to treat such evidence as conclusive. He demands that we actively consider the possibility of a connection between the comfortable and those who experience extreme suffering. He demands that the comfortable “meditate that this came about” and carve on their hearts the experiences of those who suffer. He demands that the Lager not be sealed off from the world that “we”—whatever that might mean—inhabit.


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This leads Levi to a distinctive understanding of the purpose and import of thinking about the Lager. Long before the rise of our “new culture of Holocaust awareness,” Arendt argued that the camp provides us with a veiled example of what we ought not to do and how we ought not to be.68 But by describing the Lager as a phenomenon that “stands outside,” she also suggests that it cannot inform our daily lives and political practice—at least not if “we” means humanity. To understand the Lager we would have to experience it, and to experience it means to be robbed of the ability to understand. Thus, the relevance of the Lager consists in our desire to avoid a largely incomprehensible marvel.69 Levi does not offer an outright denial of these claims. He is keenly aware of the extent to which the Lager defies language and he would probably endorse the view that a healthy fear of it can play a role in preventing its reappearance.Yet, he does not believe that the world of the Lager is utterly incommunicable70 or that fear and loathing of its obscure form is an adequate response to it. The Lager can and must touch us in a way that Arendt suggests is not possible. For Levi, the living fact of the Lager in this world, indeed in a single person’s experience, reinvigorates in a disturbing and urgent fashion the question of what it means to be human. Arendt and Levi agree that, for some, the Lager crushes all possible links to human community. Irrespective of how we define humanness, the distinctive feature of the Lager is that it seeks out and eliminates every aspect of what we know and desire—even the desire to survive physically.71 Yet while Arendt is justifiably troubled by the fact that spontaneity can be taken from us, Levi helps us notice another issue. Even with spontaneity destroyed, there is someone, some “thing,” left standing. That the Lager leaves a presence, a being of some sort, is the most troubling fact of all. Arendt definitively turns away from this being, abandoning it to incomprehensibility. Levi suggests that we must hold on to and consider the drowned. Indeed, their presence in our collective memory, however tenuous and unbelievable, is not just an object of morbid fascination. It is among the range of ways “we” can be. Their fate is not just a past to be feared or a future to be prevented, but an ever-present possibility that attends the living. Time and space did not sever on the platform at Auschwitz. Each of the drowned

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traveled with the same body from a life of relative comfort to the condition of extreme and nearly incomprehensible suffering. In this way, Levi suggests that, in considering Auschwitz, our claims to personhood—the claims of those in warm houses—are just as much at stake as for those who have been stripped of their homes. The fate of the drowned demonstrates the mutability of the presumption that we, the comfortable, comprise the human community. If we proffer language, moral sense, or rationality as our talisman, the drowned seem to reply: “We have none of these. Yet here we stand.” For Levi, our inability to understand fully the experience of the drowned is no sin. But our willingness to affirm that we understand what it means to be human in the face of such suffering may be one. It should be said that Levi’s work is extraordinary in this regard. Arendt is not alone in assuming that the drowned are irrelevant to politics. Levi may be the only person to stand before the “terrible abyss” that separates the comfortable and the drowned and posit a wobbly bridge—one that can appear only in the form of a question. In this way, the faces of the drowned become the starting point for—instead of the conclusion of—a rigorous analysis of the Lager. The drowned are beings at the outer reaches of human experience, and this is precisely why they cannot be ignored. Levi shows us that witnessing the drowned raises questions and this leads us back to the issue of thoughtfulness. Levi would perhaps agree with Arendt’s diagnosis of Eichmann as thoughtless. Since it is unlikely that large numbers of us will adopt the mental habits of Socrates anytime soon, however, it appears that the prospects for resisting calamities are slim.72 By positing a middle way between banal thoughtlessness and the navel-gazing that can lead to nihilism, Levi suggests that the problem is more specific and perhaps more manageable than simple “thoughtlessness.” Levi’s plea to consider whether this is a person constitutes a substantive agenda. Eichmann clearly was not entirely thoughtless; he thought quite a bit about his career and about the perspective of those who might improve his position. Presumably, he thought about the opinions of friends and family and occasionally offered opinions of his own to them. While he may not have spent much time conversing with himself, I am not convinced that such “two


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in one” thinking in and of itself would have protected the world from him, or him from himself. Put another way, we might ask of Arendt: What exactly does Eichmann fail to think about? What does he not consider? What exactly should we take into account in figuring out what kind of person we want to live with? If what we ought to think about is simply a matter of aesthetic judgment, I am not sure we have enough evidence to diagnose, let alone condemn, Eichmann. Even Socrates, as wide open as his considerations may be, persistently presses us to be thoughtful about a particular issue: the nature of justice and injustice. Levi gives us a pointed understanding of just what sort of thoughtfulness is required. Not only must we consider the judgment of others, not only must we consider those who exercise their capacity to judge, we must consider our relationship to those who do not judge. In a way, by offering her judgment of Eichmann, Arendt practices what she refuses to preach. That is, instead of ignoring Eichmann she restores something to one who does not judge. But whereas Eichmann refuses to judge, others simply cannot judge because they are reduced by suffering. Levi’s paradox shows us that our relationship to beings in this situation is the necessary topic of, and can even be an inspiration for, thoughtfulness. Not because those who cannot judge and those who are subject to extreme suffering are human too, but because whether or not they are human is an open question. Eichmann does not seem to consider that this might be a topic worthy of exploration, and Arendt slams the door on the question. Despite this crucial difference between Levi and Arendt, becoming somewhat inured to suffering, or at least putting one’s own suffering in perspective, is part and parcel of the disposition Levi describes and models.73 Arendt argues in her judgment of Eichmann that “politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.” The use of the word obedience signals that she is speaking more to the banality of thoughtlessness than suffering, but we know from her analysis that thoughtlessness and suffering go hand in hand. Someone else’s violence is frequently understood to be “the cause” of our own decision to use it. If thoughtlessness facilitates obedience, suffering encourages reaction. For Levi and Arendt, simplistic reactions to suffering are inadequate and dangerous.

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However, Levi also shows us that the question of suffering must play a prominent role in our thinking.The ubiquity of suffering and the fact that we share the capacity to suffer with all animals does not definitively place it beyond humanness. Suffering may be banal and ordinary, but it also begs for consideration. In “Some Moral Considerations” Arendt ponders the Socratic maxim that it is better to suffer injustice than to perpetrate it.74 She suggests that it cannot be right and at the same time has difficulty formulating a clear and decisive rejection of it. Socrates’ persistence in raising the issue of justice and injustice means that he does not let us off the hook so easily. Roslyn Weiss has recently forwarded the claim that Socrates’ “weapon of choice” is paradox and that we ought to take those paradoxes more seriously.75 When citing Socrates’ “two in one” thinking as the last bulwark against a society gone wrong, Arendt seems to forget that Socrates was a poor man. It is no accident that thinking led him to stroll the stoas of the agora barefoot. It is no accident that Socrates was the only member of the Council to argue against executing the ten commanders and the only one to refuse to arrest Leon of Salamis when the Thirty Tyrants ordered him and four others to fetch Leon for the death penalty. Thoughtfulness and judgment, thinking about justice and injustice, cannot be separated from the paradoxical relationship between human freedom and human suffering. The difference between living with a murderer and being someone I can live with turns on a consideration of whether the suffering and death I inflict is somehow necessary given the circumstances. Was I defending myself? Was I pursuing my own interests? Was I saving another life? These questions are relevant because considering suffering must be a cornerstone of thoughtfulness. When Socrates argues “that weighing up the prospects of life and death is just another form of thinking one is wise,” he clearly means weighing up the prospect of one’s own life and death. Considering the life and death, comfort and suffering of the community, physical and otherwise, are foremost among the concerns of justice and injustice. The problem of our capacity to cause suffering and the problem of how we ought to be are intertwined. In one of the most arresting moments in Survival, Levi offers a version of the Socratic admonition that we ought to be more concerned with the care of our soul than our prospects for living and dying. Mary


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Dietz, having summarized Arendt’s description of total domination, cites the passage as a kind of encapsulation of Arendt’s view.76 Levi writes that in the camp’s strange and cruel infirmary (Ka Be), one nonetheless has a moment to think of “other things than hunger and work” and “to consider what they have made us become”: [W]e have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life; and the old wise ones instead of warning us “remember that you must die,” would have done much better to remind us of this great danger that threatens us.77 That Levi finds the moral imperative of memento mori unhelpful is not surprising given that the possibility of death impinges on nearly every thought and moment in Auschwitz.78 But the importance of the statement lies not in the Socratic reply to the old proverb. It lies in the fact that the Socratic idea reverberated, even arose, in Auschwitz. Levi occasionally inserts philosophical reflection into his biography, but here he recalls that the idea was learned, by a “we,” in Ka Be. Notwithstanding the fact that Arendt’s own examination of total domination is steeped in the literature of survivors,79 she tries to establish that such a thing is not possible. If Arendt attempts to definitively separate the experience of suffering from humanness, Socrates and Levi declare themselves ready to inquire into the matter. If Socrates urges us to give care of our soul the highest priority, Levi suggests that the care of his personality requires pursuing a certain line of questioning. In his discussion of “Shame” in The Drowned and the Saved Levi’s tone is neither self-deprecating nor defensive. He does not occupy the “gray zone” like the prisoners who manned the crematoria, but he feels shame because it was “nevertheless a rule [that] the best all died.”80 For Levi, reconciling the “two in one” involves figuring out how to live with himself, a person who faced impossible moral choices, once he returned to the world.81 In addition, he describes “another, vaster shame, the shame of the world.”82 He writes: “[T]he human species—we, in short—had the potential to construct an infinite enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.”83

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Levi was not a pacifist. However, in his formulation of a paradox that challenges us to take account of our relationship to suffering he provides pacifism with a political ethic. For Levi, the best response to suffering is to consider whether we are part of a human community, even in the presence of those who refuse to consider. This means taking responsibility for one’s own actions in the midst of suffering and injustice (assuming that it is possible to do so), especially when suffering and injustice are imposed upon you. For him, suffering does not mean that one will never use violence or cause others to suffer. The more important point, however, is that suffering does not imply its own solution. If it did, then it definitively would be the end of politics and humanness. Arendt, Levi, and Socrates tell us—each in a distinctive way—that injustice ought not decide how the victims of injustice think about and respond to it. Satyagraha retains a fundamental tension. Holding fast to the truth requires a deep and abiding faith, a sense of moral purpose, a willingness to make considerable sacrifices, and a determined commitment to confront injustice wherever and whenever it occurs. At the same time, proper satyagraha requires humility, patience, listening to others, questioning one’s own values, and a willingness to make compromises. In fact, while refraining from physical violence may help one avoid injustice, satyagraha is susceptible to misuse and overuse. Drawing on Kateb, Villa emphasizes that Socrates’ insistence that he does not know what justice is, forces him to scale back his ambitions—he may not be able to be just but perhaps he can avoid doing injustice.84 Perhaps, then, he would be skeptical of Gandhi’s more active version of his methods. But Gandhi too warns that “ ‘[s]atyagraha offered on every occasion seasonable or otherwise would be corrupted into duragraha.’ ”85 Duragraha is Gandhi’s term for stubbornness, or persistence in wrongdoing. Bondarant says it means something close to prejudgment. The duragrahi is not genuinely interested in finding the truth, because she or he believes they already know what it is.86 Knowing the difference between holding fast to the truth and holding fast to injustice must be among the most difficult challenges the would-be pacifist faces and, as Iyer remarks, must be a matter of moral and political judgment.87 Thinking about Levi’s paradox can help guide our judgment. It seems almost silly to make an argument for the relevance of the ques-


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tion, “What does it mean to be human?” Yet, Levi helps us to see that an unresolved and paradoxical form of the problem accompanies us in at least two important ways. The most straightforward sense in which the question manifests itself is in the global relationship between the comfortable and the suffering. Anyone who has the wherewithal to read these words is free (at least at this moment) from the many shades of suffering that are an ever-present part of life on the planet. Arendt argues that in the creation of the Lager, suffering “is not the issue;” instead, humanness itself is at stake.88 Levi shows us that the Lager is the most potent demonstration of the extent to which suffering and the question of what it means to be human are inseparable. Indeed, while the extreme suffering that characterizes the Lager is the most pointed challenge to the would-be bearer of the humanist mantle, the “lesser” suffering of those who have the pleasure of starving with their families, or experiencing tortures less severe and extensive than those of the Lager, raises the same questions. On what basis do I ground the claim that the thousands of people who will lose their struggle with hunger today are human like me? Likewise, in the absence of such a basis, which of my attributes allows me to dismiss them as “already dead” and affirm my status of personhood with impunity? The question of what it means to be human enters our lives in another immediately potent way as well. The fragility of all that we hold dear, the potential for each of us to be “reduced to suffering and needs,” suggests that our bonds with all forms of community are tenuous. The identities associated with family, a sports team, a labor association, a profession, a village, or a nation are always imminently revocable. Our daily struggle to belong is in part a struggle to delineate that elusive set of meanings that will establish our position in these communities and, ultimately, humanity. The totalitarian assault on each and every basis of connection to community shows us that the question of what it means to be human pertains to, and yet is more than the sum of, all of these fragile meanings. Julia Kristeva argues that, contra Arendt, Levi’s work is characterized by an “irreparable disenchantment with human plurality.”89 On the contrary, where Arendt’s capacity to engage human plurality reaches its limit in the face of the camps, Levi finds a way. In the totalitarian menace, he uncovers an irrevocable plurality of experience—the

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unique standpoints of the comfortable and the suffering.90 Perhaps we can attribute this discovery to Levi’s ability to muster the broad resources of the poetic heritage that “accompanies humanity in its history and its anguish.”91 Through poetry, Levi connects the paradoxes and problems inherent in our (and his) relationship to the drowned to the question of what it means to be human. In doing so, he calls our attention to the question of politics while keeping the suffering that totalitarianism creates front and center. He suggests that both our everyday experience of comfort and the extreme deprivation of the drowned are directly relevant to our present lives. With the help of Levi and Socrates, a credible pacifism can be sure of one thing: considering the suffering of others is an essential part of politics. When we encounter others who fail to consider suffering, we can confront them with Levi’s ever-present paradox. In a way, the purpose of satyagraha is to reveal the existence of Levi’s paradox in a particular moment and context, so that others can no longer ignore it. This does not amount to a resolution of it. In fact, forwarding Levi’s paradox contains a paradox itself: by placing his paradox at the center of politics we may bring suffering upon ourselves and others. Satyagraha often, like Socrates’ questioning, is painful. But it is a kind of suffering we can be fairly certain will reduce suffering in the long run. I have tried to distance a concern for suffering from familiar ethical claims. We may not be God’s property, or retain human rights, or be able to guarantee that the human imperative is to love one another. However, consistent with and yet more specific than Socrates’ elenchus, pacifism demands that we perpetually consider a particular question: Are those who suffer and those who are comfortable part of the same human community? In this way, Levi’s paradox serves as the centerpiece of a sober pacifist political ethic. Without bearing in mind the substantive problem of the relationship between the comfortable and the suffering, politics (and political theory for that matter) is no different from play-acting or a sporting event and little more than a venue for selfaggrandizement.

Conclusion I RECENTLY SAW a bumper sticker taped up behind a counter at a languishing general store in rural Louisiana that read:“If there had been no Pearl Harbor, there’d have been no Hiroshima.” It would have been equally disturbing—and held equally true—had it read “If there had been no London, there’d have been no Dresden” or “If there had been no Cambodian Offensive, there’d have been no Khmer Rouge” or “If there had been no 9/11, there’d have been no Afghanistan and Iraq.” Each violent action in these pairings does bear some connection to its partner. Even though the Iraqi government played no role in the September 11 attacks, it is doubtful that the United States government would have been able to mobilize public support for the war had they not occurred. The easiest way to justify violence is on the basis of another’s violence. Our commonsense understanding that violence is the only viable response to violence means that someone else’s violence is the best pretext for our own. We comfort ourselves with the thought that our violence is just an extension of another’s action. Our violence is a put on, not who we really are or want to be. They had a choice, but we did not. The logic of reactive violence plays a role in almost every ideology and political philosophy. Without the repressive ancien regime there would be no storming of the Bastille, without alienated labor there would be no socialist revolution, without criminals and rebels there would be no police, without colonialism there would be no fight for independence, and without slavery there would be no revolt. What is often disparag175

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ingly referred to as “the cycle of violence,” is simply a matter of natural or inevitable historical processes for most political persuasions. Fascists go so far as to assert that the contest of physical forces produces what is right, but even ideologies that call a great deal of violence into question claim that some form of reactive violence is necessary. In each case, connecting a second act of violence to a first trades on the interconnectedness of events and people, even while endorsing actions that explicitly attempt to transcend or overcome that reality. There are many practical and philosophical implications of the claim that physical violence is no more reliable than other means, even as a response to physical violence. Most immediately, given that arguments for physical violence so often depend upon appeals to necessity, it allows us to reclaim human freedom. Physical violence is sometimes said to be the best or only way to win or defend “freedom.” Certainly, violence can destroy the power of repressive governments or embolden that of less repressive ones. However, a close examination of the character of violence allows us to once again (or perhaps for the first time?) take the ontological claims of democratic thought seriously. Certain strains in democratic theory not only claim that we ought to be free but that we are fundamentally free. This raises a number of tricky issues that are beyond the scope of this study (namely, the question of the meaning of freedom in democratic thought), but even among the not-so-liberal thinkers that I have examined herein, such as Sartre and Levinas, we find that freedom involves the irreducible capacity of individuals to act and, for Arendt, act together with others as well. On this rendering, freedom is not something any group or government can either secure or compromise. Plurality, diversity, and creativity are not just goals, they are, for good and for bad, facts of human living together. Every use of physical violence implicitly posits that we can be reduced to our physical needs and fears, but pacifism embraces the idea that no matter what someone else does, we have the potential to reclaim and comport ourselves as we will. Freeing politics, and individual decision makers, from the demands of so-called necessary physical violence also throws into relief some of the difficulties that arise when we consider the problem of “ultimate ends.” Throughout this book I have referred to various political ends, but does pacifism, even a realistic pacifism, imply that politics has a pur-

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pose? Arendt sometimes remarked that, in politics, “life [i.e., the bios] is not the highest good” and suggested that the point of politics is not some particular end but the living of an active life and the preservation of the political realm itself.1 Arendt saw in the goal of preserving life a dangerous proclivity to reduce politics to nothing but a means for improving the physical well-being of the community. The Marxism of the U.S.S.R. and the republicanism of the French Revolution, under the banner of improving life for the poor, led to a lot of death. Liberal individualism, grounded in Hobbes’s valuing of life and Locke’s valuing of property for the purpose of preserving life, results in the troublesome devaluing of the political realm in favor of consumer society and mass culture. In fact, while Arendt is less apt to see it, others suggest that liberalism’s valuing of life leads to a lot of physical violence as well.2 Pacifism breaks the link between the aim of preserving life and the practical result of so-called necessary violence in two ways. First, the realization that physical violence is no more effective than other methods of resisting physical violence holds true even if our primary aim is the preservation of life. Physical violence used as a response to physical violence sometimes stops others from perpetrating more physical violence and sometimes encourages more of it. Diodotus remarks in the Mytilene debate that: Cities and individuals alike, all are disposed by nature to do wrong, and there is no law that will prevent it, as is shown by the fact that men have tried every kind of punishment, constantly adding to the list, in the attempt to find greater security from criminals. It is likely that in early times the punishments even for the greatest crimes were not as severe as they are now, but the laws were still broken, and in the course of time the death penalty became generally introduced. Yet even with this, the laws are still broken. Either, therefore, we must discover some fear more potent than the fear of death, or we must admit that here certainly we have not got an adequate deterrent.3 In the two millennia since Thucydides recounted Diodotus’s words, we have developed punishments that some of us fear worse than death. Yet despite the most strenuous efforts of interrogators, police, scientists,

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military strategists, bureaucrats, guerilla forces, and terrorists, the technicians of violence have yet to figure out how to use and destroy bodies in a way that produces predictable results. Physical violence is no more reliable than other methods even when one’s only aim is to put an end to a cycle of violence “once and for all” or to prevent the violence of others from harming whatever group or individual’s “life” has been privileged. Second, while pacifism places a high value on the preservation of life, it is not its highest value, and preserving life also, quite astonishingly, does not come at the expense of politics. The number of people that might die or be injured in exercising power without physical violence is of course a matter of great importance to Gandhi, King, or Havel, but life does not take precedence over all other considerations.4 The stated alternative, according to most pacifists (and Socrates) is to place justice above both life and politics. Yet, as I have tried to show, despite—or as part and parcel of—their moral convictions, Gandhi and Socrates offer methods that preserve and encourage politics and discussion over and above the dogmatic application of ideology. A credible brand of pacifism acknowledges the dangers of applying moral precepts too rigidly to political realities or clinging to physical life at the expense of everything else. A credible pacifism does not demand that we always set a course toward the ultimate end of preserving life or that the claims of justice should always trump political considerations or that politics is the highest form of human activity. Instead, it allows us to hold in perspective the claims of life, ethics, and politics. The exercise of power without physical violence, and the discussion it inspires, is the way forward in adjudicating among these claims. In this way, the observation that physical violence is not a necessary response to physical violence allows us to reclaim the importance of exercising political judgment. In part, this is a backhanded or indirect way of placing politics at the center of things. A realistic pacifism holds life, ethics, and politics in perspective but it is politics that helps us adjudicate between the various claims made by each. However, the brand of pacifism I offer here is not without concrete commitments and primary ethical concerns.5 In chapter 7, I suggested that a certain kind of thinking should be central to pacifism. Satyagraha is guided by an ethic that grounds action in thinking about our relationship to suffering and offers a way to call attention to it. I call this an ethic, and it is an ethic consistent with

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freedom, because it can be refused. We should, but we do not have to think about Levi’s paradox. We can refuse to make sacrifices in order to ameliorate and minimize the suffering of others. However, the paradox in Levi’s poem is an effective response to the likes of Dr. Pannwitz and Eichmann, because in another way it exercises a controlling influence, even if we choose to ignore it. Few people organize their lives around a consideration of suffering but everyone spends some time thinking about it, if only in their relationship to a sick friend or family member. Levi shows us that the suffering of those more distant from us affects the comfortable too. This is no superstition. Levi’s paradox is a political ethic because it does not require faith in first principles but instead captures something about our experience of living together. Whether we actively think about it or not, the relationship between the comfortable and suffering determines the character and quality of the human condition. The issue of freedom also has bearing on characterizations of responsibility. I have periodically mentioned Max Weber’s argument in “Politics as a Vocation” that pacifism involves a naïve and spiritualist “ethic of intentions” that denies responsibility for the world for the sake of one’s soul. Precisely the reverse is true. The purveyors of violence rarely take full responsibility for their actions or the world it creates. Instead, in the hope of preserving their worldly legitimacy and reputation (and perhaps surreptitiously for the sake of their soul), those who use physical violence almost always claim that, in whole or in part, the victims of physical violence are responsible for their own suffering. By claiming that necessity makes certain demands and that one must use violence when others use it,6 the proponents and purveyors of violence often suggest that we are not really free, that we have no choice, and that we cannot be held responsible for our actions. Even those who use violence with a sense of tragedy, usually do so with a sense of tragic inevitability. This is not to say that violence is never justified by previous or ongoing instances of violence. Slave revolts are justified. Killing an attacking rapist is justified. The police have a right to shoot someone who immediately threatens another’s life. However, pacifism maintains that the decision to act should be only partially based on what others are doing, and primarily on our own capacities and resources for

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action. Admittedly, the infliction of pain and suffering encourages certain biological reactions. The perpetrators of violence usually claim that they are victims of violence too, and it is often true. However, freedom means that each of us is ultimately responsible for our own judgments and actions, even when others attack us. The possibilities of politics and the manifold ways of employing power and resisting injustice encompassed by the concept of satyagraha suggest that even instances of justifiable physical violence may nonetheless be irresponsible. When reactive violence is justified, there may be alternative courses of action that would be more in line with the consideration of suffering and the quality of human living together.Victims of violence share responsibility for the world because they retain the capacity to act.7 Taking freedom seriously also means accepting that plurality and diversity is no utopia. Our capacity to sustain different ways of organizing ourselves, attribute various identities and meanings to our lives, and the manifold ways of distributing goods and services, indicate that we will almost necessarily cause one another pain and come into conflict with one another. Intersubjective suffering is unavoidable at times. Every ideology gives us a different solution to this problem, usually through institutional structures that include enforcement provisions. More than any other ideology, democratic thought gives us institutions that attempt to account for freedom. However, Machiavelli’s good republican laws, Locke’s impartial judges, and Montesquieu’s separation of powers make room for, or even rely on physical violence when push comes to shove. When institutions fail, every ideology suggests we must fall back on or “resort to” physical violence. By showing that physical violence is no more reliable than any other means, pacifism offers a reaffirmation, and a realistic view of human freedom that does not depend upon institutions for its preservation. If we take freedom seriously—as a fact, as opposed to a goal—and we truly believe that certain principles of government are conducive to human happiness, then the use of physical violence is always suspect. Physical violence is diametrically opposed to the liberal claim that freedom is a fact and that certain ideas are self-evident, or at least more useful, than others. Institutions are certainly preferable to no institutions. However, when institutions fail, satyagraha provides us with a way to recover politics in the midst of violence.

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Certain aspects of democratic institutions are a venue for and help facilitate and encourage the sensibility of pacifist methods. When severely discordant dispositions make consensus impossible, it may require that we willfully take on suffering. Democratic institutions already imply and ask for this. The loser of a particular policy dispute accepts defeat and lives to try again another day. Pacifism demands that we be invested in “the next time” in a similar, if more extreme, way. Even in the face of severe and irreconcilable differences—even in the midst of war and strife—we can encourage politics by doing the unexpected and proliferating new meanings for the events. Pacifism demonstrates that losing well can be more important than victory if it encourages dialogue, because the dialogue that follows action determines the character of victory and defeat. Persisting in one’s way of being and yet remaining open to others is difficult. Human freedom is exhilarating but also the source of much suffering. However, instead of trying to shift our suffering to others, perhaps we should accept it as the price human beings pay for freedom8—freedom that is, in some sense, irrevocable.


Notes

PREFACE 1. Those who disagree with my somewhat deprecatory view of political theory in the twentieth century might point to John Rawls, who rarely discusses violence and has little to say about the major events of the twentieth century. However, on the possibility that Rawls’s ideas will influence politics in the future see Samuel Richard Freeman, Rawls, Routledge Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 2007), 457–58. 2. One of the major obstacles to accepting that violence holds no special purchase on political outcomes is the fact that there are people with political influence, or who at least meddle in politics, who do not seem particularly interested in political outcomes. That is, some people seem interested, first and foremost, in killing, enslaving, and harming others. The two sides of almost any violent political conflict are perhaps prone to feel this way about one another. One side’s political goals are often understood as a matter of survival for the other. When someone kills or harms people we care about, any political goals our opponents might be trying to achieve can seem irrelevant or recede into the background. Also, there are good political reasons for portraying one’s enemies as nothing but murderers, torturers, and rapists, even if we can see some connection between our opponent’s acts of violence and some political goal. And of course, it might be that some people in politics really are unconcerned with political outcomes. There is perhaps no assumption more sensible, taken for granted, or apparently indisputable than the notion that pursuing political outcomes requires restraining, excluding, or destroying those who would threaten the political realm in the first place. This book challenges this assumption. 3. James Stoner brought this to my attention.

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4. For the classic statement of the usefulness of separating these “levels of analysis” see Kenneth Neal Waltz, Man, the State, and War; a Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).

INTRODUCTION 1. M. J. Rosenberg, “Mea Culpa?,” IPF Friday, no. 283 (July 28, 2006), http://www.ipforum.org/display.cfm?rid=2160. Of course, it could be that regardless of the assassination Clinton was overly optimistic about the prospects for peace in 2000. For a more extensive analysis of the 2000 meetings see Galia Golan, Israel and Palestine: Peace Plans and Proposals from Oslo to Disengagement (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006). 2. The United States and the South Vietnamese lost fewer than two thousand troops. Many more were wounded. See John M. Shaw, The Cambodian Campaign: The 1970 Offensive and America’s Vietnam War, Modern War Studies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 158. 3. For recent examples of interesting work that nonetheless largely assumes the meaning of violence see Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2006); Christopher Finlay, “Violence and Revolutionary Subjectivity: Marx to Zizek,” European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 4 (2006); Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2003). Perhaps the most remarkable example in the past few decades is Piotr Hoffman’s work. Hoffman offers a brilliant analysis of the relationship between violence, doubt, and certainty, yet always uses violence as the explanatory vehicle as opposed to the concept to be explained. This, despite a careful phenomenological account of other key concepts in philosophy. Piotr Hoffman, Doubt, Time, Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Piotr Hoffman, Violence in Modern Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 4. Arendt remarked in 1970 that few political theorists take up the topic of “violence as such,” a statement that holds true today. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 8, n 6. Fewer than a dozen articles and books in contemporary philosophy and political theory explore the nature of violence and none of them provides a consensus definition of it. Arendt is not alone in noting the problem, which typically elicits cursory attempts to define violence. For one of the better recent attempts see John Keane, Violence and Democracy, Contemporary Political Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31–41. The few extant works that touch directly on the nature of violence include J. Glenn Gray, On Understanding Violence Philosophically, and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1970);

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Newton Garver, “What Violence Is,” The Nation, June 24, 1968; and Jerome A. Shaffer, ed., Violence; Award Winning Essays in the Council for Philosophical Studies Competition, David McKay College Text (New York: McKay, 1971); Susan J. Brison, Aftermath:Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). During the Vietnam era there was also a heated debate in the Journal of Philosophy surrounding a particularly provocative piece on the meaning of violence; see Robert Paul Wolff, “On Violence,” The Journal of Philosophy 66, no. 19 (1969). See also, coming out of this discussion, Ted Honderich, Violence for Equality: Inquiries in Political Philosophy, Enl. and rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1989), 8–9. Among self-identified political theorists, the exceptions prove the rule by way of their brevity. See Terence Ball, “Two Concepts of Coercion,” Theory and Society (1978): 97–112; Sheldon S. Wolin, “Violence and the Western Political Tradition,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 33 (1963): 15–28. 5. For a brief but valuable discussion of bia see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 31–33. Citing Pindar’s fragment 169 and Socrates’ alteration of that text he argues that Bia and Dike (justice) are typically set in contrast to one another and sometimes provocatively and dangerously conjoined in nomos (law). Citing Wilmowitz-Möllendorf ’s Platon he also says that the use of biaion is rare in Greek. Arendt mentions the term as distinct from the Greek word for torture. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 129. Wolin cites Thucydides’ use of the term to denote “the violation of the constitution.” Wolin, “Violence and the Western Political Tradition,” 24, fn. 6. Keane says that the earliest English usages of the term come from the Latin violentia, which joins vis (force) and latus (the past participle of “to carry”), which, citing no one, he says describes “the ‘exercise of physical force’ against someone who is thereby ‘interrupted or disturbed’ or ‘interfered with rudely or roughly’ or ‘desecrated, dishonoured, profaned, or defiled.’ ” Keane, Violence and Democracy, 34. Wolin, citing Cicero, says that the Roman word referred to “ ‘vehemence,’ a passionate and uncontrolled force, the opposite of a calculated exertion of power.” He also claims, offering no citation, that “an ancient and enduring meaning of the word is that of a force working to pervert (rather than divert) some object, natural or human, from its ‘natural’ course of development or from the way it would otherwise express itself.” Wolin, “Violence and the Western Political Tradition,” 23. 7. Attempting to delineate a meaning in modern French, Haidu, citing a French lexicon, states that there “is no single equivalent to ‘violence’ in Old French, even though the term itself derives from Old French violer, meaning the use of force in general, as well as its particular use meaning ‘rape’. One

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source lists a total of forty-five Old French equivalents for the modern French violence.” Peter Haidu, The Subject of Violence: The Song of Roland and the Birth of the State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). On modern legal definitions of violence across various languages and cultures see James B. Brady and Newton Garver, Justice, Law, and Violence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 8. For a sense of the expansive nature of the contemporary term, refer to the six-part definition offered in the Oxford English Dictionary. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: Complete Text Reproduced Micrographically (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), under violence.

CHAPTER 1. THE FRAGILITY AND ABILITY OF BODIES 1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 13:1, 74. 2. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version Entitled, in the First Edition, Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1:3, 45. 3. Whereas the “animal produces under the domination of immediate physical need . . . man produces free of physical need and only genuinely so in freedom from such need.” Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, trans. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 64. 4. “The animal only produces itself while man reproduces the whole of nature. The animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body while man is free when he confronts his product. The animal builds only according to the standard and need of the species to which it belongs while man knows how to produce according to the standard of any species and at all times knows how to apply an intrinsic standard to the object. Thus man creates also according to the laws of beauty.” Ibid. 5. Ibid., 63. 6. Ibid., 65. 7. Ibid. 8. For Hegel, the rejection of the “objective mode” and our “specific existence” is not only the laudable achievement of a self-conscious spirit, it is a necessary part of the movement toward the culmination of history and the achievement of Being. Paradoxically, this means that the mutual mortality of our bodies and our mutual ability to kill one another is indispensable: “Thus the relation of the two self-conscious individuals is such that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle. They must engage in


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this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth, both in the case of the other and in their own case. And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won. . . . Similarly, just as each stakes his own life, so each must seek the other’s death, for it values the other no more than itself; its essential being is present to it in the form of an ‘other’, it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Arnold V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), para. 187, 113–14. 9. Ibid., para. 194, 117. 10. Aristotle, for instance, conceptualizes the slave as an extension of the master’s body, when he writes: “[A] wrong exercise of his rule by a master is a thing which is disadvantageous for both master and slave. The part and the whole, like the body and the soul, have an identical interest; and the slave is a part of the master, in the sense of being a living but separate part of his body.” Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1:6:9, 16–17. 11. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 33. On the history of torture see also Darius M. Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 12. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 48. 13. Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 390. 14. Ibid., 388. 15. With phrasing that would perhaps satisfy both Hobbes and Marcus, Susan Brison remarks: “Later in my recovery, as depression gave way to rage . . . suicidal thoughts were quickly quelled by a stubborn refusal to finish my assailant’s job for him. I also learned, after martial arts training, that I was capable, morally as well as physically, of killing in self-defense—an option that made the possibility of another life-threatening attack one I could live with. Some rape survivors have remarked on the sense of moral loss they experienced when they realized that they could kill their assailants (and even wanted to!) but I think that this thought can be seen as a salutary character change in those whom society does not encourage to value their own lives enough.” Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, 65. 16. For an interesting dramatic treatment of the possibility of women raping men and, in particular, as an affirmation of physical equality see Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden (New York: Penguin, 1992). 17. See Rachel Hall, “It Can Happen to You: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management,” Hypatia 19, no. 3 (2004). 18. Again, this is not to say that colloquial uses of the term rape are not linked to gender, but only that theorists such as Marcus point out that to

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reserve the term for the rape of a woman by a man reifies the notion that rape is gendered. So, for instance, Andrea Dworkin argues that there is little hope of separating sex from rape because women’s bodies are “made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation.” Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 123. I would only point out that male bodies can be entered, rape does not require entering a body, and there are many instances of bodily entry (for instance, kissing, medical procedures, and the consumption of food) that do not constitute rape. See also Catherine A. MacKinnon, “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: ‘Pleasure under Patriarchy,’ ” Ethics 99, no. 2 (1989). 19. Hobbes says that our preeminent desire is to avoid the summum malum: death. In De Cive he writes, “[Every man] shuns what is evill, but chiefly the chiefest of naturall evills, which is Death; and this he doth, by a certain impulsion of nature. . . . It is therefore neither absurd, nor reprehensible; neither against the dictates of true reason for a man to use all his endeavours to preserve and defend his Body.” Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version Entitled, in the First Edition, Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, 1:7, 47. 20. Michael Joseph Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 31. 21. For Hobbes, souls are corporeal and mortal if they exist at all. See David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation, Studies in Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 142–50. 22. From our physical abilities and vulnerabilities comes mistrust, “[a]nd from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation, that is by force or wiles to master the persons of all men he can, so long till he see no other power great enough to endanger him. And this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed.” Hobbes, Leviathan, 13:4, 75. Here, Hobbes describes a rudimentary version of what the international relations literature calls the security dilemma. The argument is as such: State A builds weapons in order to gain physical superiority and ensure its survival with respect to armed state B. But state B is likely to respond in kind, i.e., by building more weapons of its own because, of course, it wants to survive too. As each attempts to outbuild the other, state A’s original purpose is thwarted, and the result is an unstable security environment. In this way, every state is caught in a security dilemma, wherein not building weapons leaves one vulnerable to attack and building weapons causes an unstable world full of weapons. For Hobbes, each individual must try to ensure his or her survival by attempting “to master” those who might kill him. Yet, as the logic of the security dilemma suggests, Hobbes is keenly aware that attempting to master potential competitors, whether by building more weapons or trying to kill them, is no real solution to the problem. He writes that “it is supposed from


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the equality of strength and other natural faculties of men, that no man is of might sufficient to assure himself for any long time, of preserving himself thereby, whilst he remain in the state of hostility and war.” Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, World’s Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 15:14, 81. Indeed, while it is reasonable for, indeed the right of, every individual to kill beings who might pose some danger (i.e., all other people), the consequences are disastrous. Why? Because if all want to survive, then all will act with “anticipation”—that is, with attempts to eliminate or subdue competitors. Thus, when we become aware of our fragility and ability and the fragility and ability of others, we are presented with a predicament. From the standpoint of the individual, killing and destroying other people is the only way to ensure survival; yet to kill others who want to survive is likely to inspire others who feel threatened to take aim at the killer. It is a problem that anyone who has lived through the uncertainty and chaos of wartime understands: Do I shoot the person who has come to my door or is walking toward me on the street? What if I miss or fail to kill the person and by shooting encourage her to shoot at me? And, of course, the logic holds for groups in conflict as much as it does for individuals: The only way to ensure that Israelis are not going to kill Palestinians is to kill Israelis (and vice versa) but, of course, by refraining from killing Israelis the Palestinians will improve their chances of not being killed by them. The logic of the predicament more or less tracks the theme of Hamlet. Hamlet’s inquiring into whether life is worth living is wrapped up with the question of when, where, and if he ought to kill Claudius; the question of to be or not to be is transformed into the question of to kill or not to kill; a predicament of survival becomes intertwined with a predicament of killing. In this way, an irresolvable tangle of calculations and countercalculations emanates from the basic features of our physical condition—a predicament that Hamlet laments can turn “enterprises of great [pitch] and moment” into those that “lose the name of action.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Oxford World’s Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3:1, 87–89. See John Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma.,” World Politics 2 (1950). Hobbes’s claim that the desire to survive inspires the drive to dominate others is reflected in the “offensive realist” international relations literature. See John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001). For analysis and critique of this use of the survival assumption see Dustin Ells Howes, “When States Choose to Die: Reassessing Assumptions About What States Want,” International Studies Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2003): 678–79. 23. Hobbes, Leviathan, 13:9, 76. 24. “For WAR consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known. And

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therefore, the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together, so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.” Ibid., 13:8, 76. 25. Stephen Holmes argues that Hobbes was well aware of the complexity of human psychology but believed that “in an ideal world, people would pursue self-preservation alone.” I would be more inclined to say that, while he understood there were nuances that his model of human nature would not capture, that “ideal world” necessarily imposes itself as a physical reality. That is, if various aspects of human psychology distract people from pursuing self-preservation they are no less subject to the possibility of being killed. So whereas Holmes suggests that “Hobbes was not biased toward consistency,” I would be more apt to say that Hobbes simply thought some aspects of human psychology were more decisive than others. In Mary G. Dietz, ed., Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 145, 122. 26. Along with his analysis of discipline and punishment, Foucault sometimes argues that the modern state is born from and, in some respects, little more than a variation on war. See Michel Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76, 1st Picador pbk. ed. (New York: Picador, 2003). 27. Rejali goes so far as to define torture as something that can only be done by states. Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 37–39. 28. Leo Strauss goes so far as to say, “Hobbes . . . philosophized in the fertile moment when the classical and theological tradition was already shaken, and a tradition of modern science not yet formed and established. At this time he and he only posed the fundamental question of man’s right life and of the right ordering of society.” Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Its Basis and Its Genesis (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1936), 5. 29. Hobbes, Leviathan, 17:13, 109. 30. So if Hobbes came to believe that “the problems confronting his political philosophy could be resolved only by changing reality itself,” he did not think we could change the nature of our capacities. Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation, 70. 31. I will pick up on this theme in my discussion of power in chapter 5. 32. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. J. J. Graham, New and revised ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 102. 33. Ibid., 104. 34. Ibid. 35. Even “objectification,” which we will discuss below, can be understood as the simple ability of our bodies to look and be looked upon, know and be known.


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36. Clausewitz, On War, 103. 37. With respect to objectification, thousands of people can be watched at the same time with surveillance technologies. 38. Of course, social organization and the division of labor is necessary for the production of technologies, and technologies facilitate various forms of social organization, so I do not mean to suggest that our technological and social possibilities are unrelated. On the contrary, they can be mutually reinforcing and enabling. Concentration camps can make use of medical equipment, innovations in shipping together with the bureaucratic techniques of multinational corporations facilitated the slave trade, and successful militaries have always relied on a combination of creative schemes for organizing bodies and the latest technologies of destruction. 39. We should also note that the extraordinary abilities and fragilities that attend our creative capacities and our ability for social organization are often employed in the service of those possibilities themselves. That is, the division of labor that produces technologies is often a product of alienated labor, labor that turns on our ability to leverage the potential for our bodies to be deprived or killed. Social organization, whether in the form of a gang, a corporation, a government, or a military is often characterized by the disciplining and destruction of bodies. Below, I discuss more extensively the idea that the destruction and manipulation of bodies can serve a social purpose (even the purpose of organizing to destroy and manipulate bodies). 40. Interestingly, many social configurations designed to manipulate and destroy bodies—the police, the military, the gang—can be understood as “offense” in certain contexts and “defense” in another. 41. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), 43–44. 42. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 187, 94. Hegel is even more explicit at times. In describing the first encounter between subjects he writes: “Appearing thus immediately on the scene, they are for one another like ordinary objects, independent shapes, individuals submerged in the being [or immediacy] of Life—for the object in its immediacy is here determined as Life.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 186, 94. 43. She continues: “Although the prisoner’s internal experience may be close to or identical with that of a person suffering severe pain from burns or a stroke or cancer . . . it is, unlike this other person’s, simultaneously being externalized.” Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 52. 44. Aristotle, Politics, 1:8:11, 21. 45. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism; on Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy, New ed. (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1993), 213. 46. Ibid., 214.

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47. Susan Brison, citing Sara Ruddick, notes that this suggestion is often gendered: “ ‘[P]hilosophers have tended to associate explicitly or metaphorically, passion, affection, and the body with femininity and the mind with masculinity.’ How some bodies came to be viewed as ‘more bodily’ than others is a puzzle.” Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, 42. 48. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993), 347. 49. Ibid., 348. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 349. 52. “Beyond any knowledge which I can have, I am this self which another knows. And this self which I am—this I am in a world which the Other has made alien to me, for the Other’s look embraces my being and correlatively the walls, the door, the keyhole.” Ibid., 350. 53. Shame is “not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but in general of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for the Other.” Ibid., 384. 54. Ibid., 383. 55. Ibid., 354. 56. While our status as objects means that we can sense one another’s presence in multiple ways, Sartre focuses on one that seems to have special importance in the Western tradition. On vision and one part of the Western tradition, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 57. Sartre writes, “[The] objectivation of the Other . . . is a defense on the part of my being which, precisely by conferring on the Other a being for-me, frees me from my being-for the Other.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 359. 58. Paradoxically perhaps, I do not mean to say that objectification is reducible to the fact of our physical being. Instead, as with the other phenomena I have discussed, I only mean to say that objectification requires that we are bodies and our bodies make it possible. I explore this issue in depth in chapters 3 and 4.

CHAPTER 2. THE UTILITY OF BODIES 1. 2. 3. danger

Hobbes, Leviathan, 18:6, 112. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, 1:16:2, 88. Hobbes says the state of war is characterized by “continual fear and of violent death” Hobbes, Leviathan, 13:9, 76.


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4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Pittsburgh: Vintage Books, 1995), 25, italics mine. 5. Ibid., 25–26, italics mine. 6. We might also note that, aside from the hermeneutic question at hand, the second quotation references precisely that aspect of our physical fragility and ability cited in the previous discussion of alienated labor. Foucault begins here by associating his analysis of political power with that of Marx (“the body is bound up . . . with its economic use”) and, perhaps inadvertently, with Clausewitz (“complex reciprocal relations”). Then, he specifically suggests that productive bodies are made to be so by a system that turns on our ability to deprive one another, or what he calls “need . . . meticulously prepared.” In this way, our physical relations can constitute bodies that are both productive and subjected. 7. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 28. 8. He writes: “If, therefore, conclusions can be drawn from military violence, as being primordial and paradigmatic of all violence used for natural ends, there is inherent in all such violence a lawmaking character.” Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 283. I examine the notion that violence is “lawmaking” in chapter 4. 9. He refers to “a violence indirectly exercised by the employer.” Ibid., 281. 10. Ibid., 289. 11. Acknowledging that not everyone would consider a strike violent, he writes: “[V]iolence . . . is necessarily introduced, in the form of extortion . . . if it takes place 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. Understood in this way, the right to strike constitutes in the view of labor . . . the right to use force in attaining certain ends.” Ibid., 281–82. 12. Ibid., 300. 13. I return to it in chapter 4. Hanssen uses the essay as a bridge between critical theory and poststructuralism, which affirms its open-ended character. See Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory, Warwick Studies in European Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2000). 14. Using violence as a foil for liberty, the construction in the following passage, for instance, suggests that violence involves “the arbitrary will of another” and can be carried out not only upon a “person” per se, but their “actions” and “possessions”: “[T]he end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom: for liberty is, to be free from restraint and

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violence [emphasis added] from others; which cannot be, where there is no law: but freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists: (for who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him?) but a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.” John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1st ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 6:57, 32. 15. Ibid., 2:2, 11–12. 16. On the notion of the criminal as a beast, or “wolf-man” see Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, chapter 6. 17. Which, for Locke, amounts to the distinction between whether someone has violated the natural law and the whole of mankind, or is preserving and repairing them. 18. “If the aim of the military action is an equivalent for the political object, that action will in general diminish as the political object diminishes, and in a greater degree the more the political object dominates. Thus it is explained how, without any contradiction in itself, there may be Wars of all degrees of importance and energy, from a War of extermination down to the mere use of an army of observation.” Clausewitz, On War, 110. 19. Some argue that Clausewitz was more concerned with “existential warfare, or . . . warfare related to one’s own identity” in his early years and that the “instrumental view” only prevailed later in his work. Andreas HerbergRothe, Clausewitz’s Puzzle: The Political Theory of War (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 20. “We have seen, therefore, in the foregoing reflections, that there are many ways to the aim, that is, the attainment of the political object; but that the only means is the combat, and that consequently everything is subject to a supreme law: which is the decision by arms; that where this is really demanded by one, it is a redress which cannot be refused by the other; that, therefore, a belligerent who takes any other way must make sure that his opponent will not take this means of redress, or his cause may be lost in that supreme court; hence therefore the destruction of the enemy’s armed force, amongst all the objects which can be pursued in War, appears as the one which overrules all others.” Clausewitz, On War, 136–37. 21. Clausewitz claims, on a number of occasions, that the decision by arms cannot be refused. He writes: “If the enemy should choose the way of a great decision by arms, our means must on that account be changed against our will, in order to correspond with his.” Ibid., 135. 22. Ibid., 119. 23. Given that I have applied a rather rigorous hermeneutics to other thinkers, we should note that Clausewitz’s use of the term violence allows for


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and almost encourages the idea that it is part and parcel of, and yet a somewhat more encompassing phenomenon than, war. The following passage suggests that war is one particular example of an “act of violence” and is also the basis for much of my interpretation of Clausewitz thus far: “We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of War used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the countless number of duels which make up a War, we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw his adversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance. War is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will. Violence arms itself with the inventions of Art and Science in order to contend against violence. Self-imposed restrictions almost imperceptible and hardly worth mentioning, termed usages of International Law, accompany it without essentially impairing its power. Violence, that is to say, physical force (for there is no moral force without the conception of States and Law), is therefore the means; the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will is the ultimate object. In order to attain this object fully, the enemy must be disarmed, and disarmament becomes therefore the immediate object of hostilities in theory. It takes the place of the final object and puts it aside as something we can eliminate from our calculations.” Ibid., 101. 24. In Clausewitz’s discussion of war it is sometimes difficult to discern whether the proximate goal of war is the destruction or disarmament of the enemy. In practice, he suggests, we need not actually destroy the population of an enemy state—we need only destroy that enemy’s military power. Yet even having done so, and even having occupied a country, war “cannot be considered as at an end as long as the will of the enemy is not subdued also.” Ibid., 123.This ambiguity is instructive. If what is required is more than just disarmament, it seems that the means, or proximate ends, of war might overwhelm the ultimate end of war. That is, if the political purposes are of sufficient importance and one has the wherewithal, the goal becomes not just the submission of the will of the enemy but the destruction of the will of the enemy. For a highly useful discussion of the flip side of this insight (the limitations on destruction imposed by political goals) see Julian Reid, “Re-Appropriating Clausewitz: The Neglected Dimensions of Counter-Strategic Thought,” in Classical Theory in International Relations, ed. Beate Jahn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 25. I discuss the use of the body in relation to the will and subjectivity more extensively in chapters 5 and 6 and understandings of freedom in connection with subjectivity more extensively in chapter 4. We should note here the close relationship between the will and freedom. Augustine, writing of the relationship between the will and an all-powerful God, claims that because God is all-powerful “there are some things he cannot do”—such as die or be

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mistaken. He then writes: “The same applies when we say that it is ‘necessary’ that when we will, we will by free choice. That statement is indisputable; and it does not mean that we are subjecting our free will to a necessity which abolishes freedom.” Augustine’s notion of the will is also closely connected with control of one’s own body, which suggests that the notion of affecting subjectivity by way of the body is a reversal of sorts. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Scowcroft Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 5:10, 194–95, see also 13:24, 587–89. 26. “That the product of labor does not belong to the worker and an alien power confronts him is possible only because this product belongs to a man other than the worker. If his activity is torment for him, it must be the pleasure and the life-enjoyment for another.” Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 65. 27. Where “thing” refers to the body of the slave, Hegel writes: “For the lord . . . the immediate relation becomes through this mediation the sheer negation of the thing, or the enjoyment of it.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 190, 96. 28. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 57. 29. The “horror of rape is not that it steals something from us but that it makes us [women] into things to be taken.” Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” 399. 30. “Life as a whole is also divided into its different parts—action and leisure, war and peace; and in the sphere of action we may further distinguish acts which are merely necessary, or merely and simply useful, from acts which are good in themselves. . . . War must therefore be regarded as only a means to peace . . . as means to acts which are good in themselves.” Aristotle, Politics, 7:14:12, 317. 31. See “The Founding Rally of the OAAU” in Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary; Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter (New York,: Pathfinder, 1970). 32. “[I]t is not against reason, and therefore right for a man, to use all means and do whatsoever action is necessary for the preservation of his body. Also every man by right of nature is judge himself of the necessity of the means, and the greatness of the danger.” Hobbes, Leviathan, 14:7–8, 79. 33. “It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects, and that when the effect is good, as it was in the case of Romulus, it always justifies the action. For it is the man who uses violence to spoil things, not the man who uses it to mend them, that is blameworthy.” Niccoló Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 1.9. 34. See Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life, Oxford Ethics Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 35. Early on in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein offers an example of the inconstancy of words, which demonstrates the problem with attempting to


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demarcate precise meanings. He writes: “When I say “N is dead”, then something like the following may hold for the meaning of the name “N”: I believe that a human being has lived , whom I (1) have seen in such-and-such places, (2) who looked like this (pictures), (3) has done such-and-such things, and (4) bore the name “N” in social life.—Asked what I understand by “N”, I should enumerate all or some of these points, and different ones on different occasions. So my definition of “N” would perhaps be “the man of whom all this is true.”—But if some point now proves false? Shall I be prepared to declare the proposition “N is dead” false—even if it is only something which strikes me as incidental that has turned out false? But where are the bounds of the incidental?—If I had given a definition of the name in such a case, I should now be ready to alter it. And this can be expressed like this: I use the name “N” without a fixed meaning. (But that detracts as little from its usefulness, as it detracts from that of a table that it stands on four legs instead of three so sometimes wobbles.)” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 37. 36. The degree of coordination is also irrelevant in this regard. Acts of violence include both the organized destruction and threatening of bodies by the state and the chaotic destruction and threatening of bodies in the “state of war.” 37. Sartre suggests that Trotsky “considers lying as violence” and offers an extensive discussion of the idea. Jean Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 160, 195–204. 38. The example adds an interesting wrinkle to our conception of violence because it involves an attempt to use a certain set of bodies (that of the patients) in order to affect the will of other people (i.e., hospital administrators or others in control of doctors’ wages). Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 292. 39. That is, they affect the striker’s livelihood but only the corporation’s profit margin. Fasting is a similar technique. I pursue the notion of using one’s own body to affect the will of others in chapter 6. 40. From the standpoint of this theory of violence, we can perhaps understand such phenomena as “means to another means.” In destroying one another’s property, threatening to fire someone, or striking, we attempt to act on the financial capacities and resources of an individual or business. Sometimes, changing the material world surrounding a person or business involves curtailing a profit margin or causing an inconvenience; at other times it involves something more. By adjusting the conditions of one another’s material world, we can deprive and even destroy one another’s bodies. In such cases, acting on the material world is a means to the use of another’s body for our purposes. We might also understand such actions as an extension of the technological capacities discussed in chapter 1, in that technology employed for

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violence also involves manipulating or changing the material world in ways that eventually result in the destruction or manipulation of bodies. 41. Instances where environmental degradation is aimed at the will and fits my conception of violence would include, for instance, a company that pollutes a reservoir in order to destroy crops and force people off their land. Also, in the same way that smart bombs do not “intend” to kill noncombatants but do, some actions so clearly affect the bodies and subjectivities of others as a consequence of purportedly different purposes, they are not readily distinguished from purposeful actions and are therefore captured by the definition. Finally, I would remind the reader that this theory of violence does not imply that environmental destruction is not immoral in and of itself (perhaps even more so than acts of violence), or deny that environmental destruction is often directly implicated in acts of violence (for instance, when environmental degradation leads to scarcity, which in turn leads to warfare). 42. For some recent discussions of this issue see Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Stanley Cavell, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Cary Wolfe, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 43. I discuss this issue further in chapter 4. Understanding why the harming and the destruction of the body might itself be pleasurable is best explained by a conception of intersubjective violence. Paradoxically, a conception of violence that does not depend on the body is perhaps the best way to explain a form of violence that is obsessed with it. 44. “Earlier we pointed out that I could not take any point of view on my body in so far as it was designated by things. The body is, in fact, the point of view on which I can take no point of view, the instrument which I can not utilize in the way I utilize any other instrument. When by means of universalizing thought I tried to think of my body emptily as a pure instrument in the midst of the world, the immediate result was the collapse of the world as such. On the other hand, because of the mere fact that I am not the Other, his body appears to me originally as a point of view on which I can take a point of view, as an instrument which I can utilize with other instruments. The Other’s body is indicated by the round of instrumental-things, but in turn it indicates other objects; finally it is integrated with my world, and it indicated my body. Thus the Other’s body is radically different from my body-for-me; it is the tool which I am not and which I utilize (or which resists me, which amounts to the same thing). It is presented to me originally with a certain objective coefficient of utility and of adversity. The Other’s body is therefore the Other himself as a transcendence-instrument.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 446–47.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

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45. “I apprehend my possibilities from outside and through him at the same time that I am my possibilities, somewhat as we objectively apprehend our thought through language at the same time that we think it in order to express it in language. This inclination to run away, which dominates me and carries me along and which I am—this I read in the Other’s watchful look and in that other look—the gun pointed at me. The Other apprehends this inclination in me in so far as he has anticipated it and already prepared for it. He apprehends it in me in so far as he surpasses it and disarms it. But I do not grasp the actual surpassing; I grasp simply the death of my possibility. A subtle death: for my possibility of hiding still remains my possibility; inasmuch as I am it, it still lives; and the dark corner does not cease to signal me, to refer its potentiality to me. But if instrumentality is defined as the fact of ‘being able to be surpassed toward ———,’ then my very possibility becomes an instrumentality. My possibility of hiding in the corner becomes the fact that the Other can surpass it toward his possibility of pulling me out of concealment, of identifying me, of arresting me. For the Other my possibility is at once an obstacle and a means as all instruments are.” Ibid., 353–54. 46. Barbara Limanowska, Trafficking in Human Beings in Southeastern Europe (Belgrade: UNICEF, 2002).

CHAPTER 3. THE PROBLEMS OF RECOGNITION AND FREEDOM 1. I will return to the idea that physical violence requires a violent response in chapter 6. 2. Those who simply assign the bad qualities to one group and the good qualities to another avoid this problem, but then it is no longer a discussion of “human” nature, but the nature of men, women, workers, or capitalists for instance. 3. Harry Eckstein, “Case Studies and Theory in Political Science,” in Regarding Politics: Essays on Political Theory, Stability, and Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 4. The Periodic Table goes a step farther, mixing autobiography and fiction while interweaving scientific insights and concepts. See Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, 1st American ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1984). 5. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf, 1st Touchstone ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 102–103.

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6. Ibid., 103. 7. Ibid., 105–106. 8. Ibid., 105. 9. Ibid., 105–106. 10. Ibid. 11. As readers, we cannot be sure of exactly what is happening during the exam. That in what follows I find myself devoting more words to the experience than the individuals who had the experience seems dangerous. Indeed, perhaps the most important aspect of Levi’s response to the situation is his curiosity as to—and acknowledgment of his inability to know—exactly what Pannwitz is thinking. As I discuss below, this helps us understand certain aspects of intersubjectivity. That fact, does not, however, give me license to trample upon the defining moments of Levi’s life. Put another way, while what I say here will undoubtedly be an incomplete and distorted representation of his experience, I hope that the reader will at least have a better understanding of why that is the case. 12. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 107–108. 13. As he talks with Pannwitz and remembers chemistry, Levi recovers thoughts and experiences from his life outside the camp and feels himself “grow in stature.” Yet Pannwitz drains every prospect of collegiality from the interaction: “The brain which governed those blue eyes and those manicured hands said: ‘This something in front of me belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress. In this particular case, one has to first make sure that it does not contain some utilizable element.’ ” Ibid., 106. 14. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 227. 15. At the conclusion of the exam, Levi writes: “It is over: the excitement which sustained me for the whole of the test suddenly gives way and, dull and flat, I stare at the fair skin of his hand writing down my fate on the white page in incomprehensible symbols.” Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 107. 16. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 203. He calls this a “real subjection” born of a “fictitious relation,” suggesting that there is an underlying assumption in such relations that is both not true and yet made to be true. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 202. 17. Foucault, Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison, 202. Levi’s chapter “Shame” in the Drowned and the Saved is also apropos here, though it complicates Foucault’s assertions in important ways. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, 1st Vintage International ed. (New York: Vintage International, 1989). 18. I do not mean to suggest that we ought to assume the events of “Chemical Examination” are violence; chapter 4 will grapple with that question. I only mean to say that the understanding of violence offered in chapter 2 does not adequately capture Levi’s experiences with Pannwitz and Alex.


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19. Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 20. Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 21. The ease with which some theorists do so is unsettling. However, recent works that contextualize or counter the centrality of the master and slave dialectic more generally offer a more credible way out. See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, 1st MIT Press ed., Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 22. “It is necessary that there be a being ‘I-and-the-Other’ which has to be the reciprocal scissiparity of the for-others just as the totality ‘reflectivereflected-on’ is a being which has its own nothingness; that is, my selfness and that of the Other are structures of one and the same totality of being.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 397. 23. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 177. 24. It does not, however, require a life and death struggle. Sartre does not rule out the possibility that it will lead to a life and death struggle but he also specifically singles out Hegel for criticism when he says: “[I]f consciousness is affirmed in the face of the Other, it is because it lays claim to a recognition of its being and not of an abstract truth. In fact it would be ill conceived to think that the ardent and perilous conflict between master and slave had for its sole stake the recognition of a formula as barren and abstract as the ‘I am I.’ ” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 323. 25. “Our relationship to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception or any judgment. It is as false to place ourselves in society as an object among other objects, as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, and in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object. We must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any objectification.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge Classics (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 421. 26. “In order for me to be able to appear to myself as an object in the Other, I would have to apprehend the Other as subject; that is, to apprehend him in his interiority. But in so far as the Other appears to me as object, my objectivity for him can not appear to me. Of course I apprehend that the Other-as-object refers to me by means of intentions and acts, but due to the

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very fact that he is an object, the Other-as-a-mirror is clouded and no longer reflects anything.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 327. 27. Ibid., 328. 28. “Transcendental subjectivity is a revealed subjectivity, revealed to itself and to others, and is for that reason an intersubjectivity. As soon as existence collects itself together and commits itself in some line of conduct, it falls beneath perception. Like every other perception, this one asserts more things than it grasps: when I say that I see the ash-tray over there, I suppose as completed an unfolding of experience which could go on ad infinitum, and I commit a whole perceptual future. Similarly, when I say that I know and like someone, I aim, beyond his qualities, at an inexhaustible ground which may one day shatter the image that I have formed of him. This is the price for there being things and ‘other people’ for us, not as the result of some illusion, but as the result of a violent act which is perception itself.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 421. I deal directly with the idea that perception can be violent in the next chapter. 29. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 221, ellipsis his. 30. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 106. 31. Ibid., 104. 32. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 421. 33. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 106. 34. Ibid. 35. I take this phrase from Agamben’s “bare life,” but whereas Agamben has the bios in mind, I mean to describe a kind of bare subjectivity. See Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 36. That Levi invokes his knowledge of chemistry in the midst of Auschwitz and that this knowledge is entirely insufficient to garner even the most rudimentary openness to his “face,” provides us with twofold assurance that this ontological separation has damning implications for empiricist epistemologies. First, Pannwitz’s knowledge of Levi’s status and capabilities as a chemist—a very robust sort of knowledge—is insufficient. Second, the very basis of Enlightenment hope and humanist faith—the common practice and language of science—shows itself to be entirely inadequate as a basis for recognition and community. Subjectivity is indeed “not measured by truth.” 37. The creative, imagined, and therefore unpredictable nature of intersubjectivity suggests that it is, strictly speaking, unquantifiable. 38. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 351. 39. Ibid., 329. 40. Ibid. 41. In this passage and in others, Sartre seems to be suggesting that the fis-


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sure in ontology is not reducible to our status as objects, but he is unable to discuss it in any other context except objectification. 42. “The essence of the relations between consciousnesses is not the Mitsein [being with]; it is conflict.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 555. 43. “With the cogito begins that struggle between consciousnesses, each one of which, as Hegel says, seeks the death of the other. For the struggle ever to begin, and for each consciousness to be capable of suspecting alien presences which it negates, all must necessarily have some common ground and be mindful of their peaceful co-existence in the world of childhood.” MerleauPonty, Phenomenology of Perception, 414. 44. Ibid., 444. 45. This might sound like the antithesis of freedom, but keep in mind that Merleau-Ponty maintains that even as we are socially constituted every individual is “inexhaustible.” It is just that this “transcendental subjectivity” is revealed to itself and to others, which makes it intersubjective. 46. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 50. 47. “The infinite does not raise up the finite by opposition. Just as the interiority of enjoyment is not deducible from the transcendental relation, the transcendental relation is not deducible from the separated being as a dialectical antithesis forming a counterpart to the subjectivity, as union forms the counterpart of distinction among two terms of any relation.” Ibid., 148; see also 203, 213. 48. Ibid., 203. 49. Ibid., 84. 50. While Part I of this project might be read as an affirmation of the idea that the possibility of physically killing one another is an important aspect of our freedom, the point here is specifically not related to our physical capabilities or status. Levinas clearly states that in order to “discover” the problem of freedom, we must “not consider it as an object.” 51. Levi offers a thorough discussion of the feelings of shame that arise for prisoners in Auschwitz in The Drowned and the Saved and provides an interesting counterpoint to Levinas’s view that shame inspires and is indicative of moral self-awareness. 52. Whether or not we agree with Levinas’s claim that our coming to this awareness of our “murderous” facticity is a result of “the idea of infinity” is another matter. 53. By invoking shame, Levinas specifically counters Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to relegate discord between subjects to the cogito. If the idea of perfection, self-awareness, and the awareness of another all play a role in revealing to us that we come up short of an ethical ideal, this “realization” is with respect to freedom that is already “murderous.” The “unjustified facticity of power and

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freedom” is “discover[ed]”—not created—by the cogito. This is not to say that the cogito and objectification cannot exacerbate the problem of freedom. Levinas’s conception of hatred affirms how both might be employed in tandem: “To inflict suffering is not to reduce the Other to the rank of object, but on the contrary is to maintain him superbly in his subjectivity. In suffering the subject must know his reification, but in order to do so he must precisely remain a subject. Hatred wills both things.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 239. 54. Ibid., 50, italics removed. 55. “The Other’s look makes me be beyond my being in this world and puts me in the midst of the world which is at once this world and beyond this world.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 350.

CHAPTER 4. THE EXPERIENCE OF DISCORDANT DISPOSITIONS 1. Interestingly, almost all of us are subject to at least some instances of physical violence as children—either from other children or adults. 2. Two additional examples of work that develops nonphysical conceptions of violence are David Campbell and Michael Dillon, The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1993); Johan Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3: 291–305. The first deals with international relations and the second tries to develop a notion of cultural violence for social scientists. 3. Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant, Penguin Classics (New York: Penguin, 1993), Crito 50b-51c, 91. 4. Sophocles, Sophocles, trans. David Grene, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ln 715–19, 187. A subsequent reference to violence, however, suggests that Creon himself commits violence in his refusal to bury Polyneices and his “burial” of the living Antigone because in doing so he acts against the natural order of things. Sophocles, Sophocles, ln 1144, 202. In other translations the references occur at lines 663 and 1073. 5. Wolin cites Thucydides’ use of the term to denote “the violation of the constitution.” Wolin, “Violence and the Western Political Tradition,” 24, fn. See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner, Rev. ed. (Harmondsworth; Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), 8:53, 568. 6. See also Brady and Garver, Justice, Law, and Violence. 7. Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 282. 8. Ibid. 9. Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 925.


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10. Ibid., 1009–11. 11. Derrida uses “force” and “violence” interchangeably. So in parallel to the above passage he writes that Benjamin “admits that the problem with the police is that they are a faceless figure, a violence without a form (gestaltlos).” Ibid. 12. For a recent exchange on the meanings of violence in Derrida’s work see John P. McCormick, “Derrida on Law; or, Poststructuralism Gets Serious,” Political Theory 29, no. 3 (2001); Ben Corson, “Transcending Violence in Derrida,” Political Theory 29, no. 6 (2001); John P. McCormick, “Justice, Interpretation, and Violence: A Rejoinder to Carson,” Political Theory 29, no. 6 (2001). 13. It came to my attention through Joseph Betz, “Violence: Garver’s Definition and a Deweyan Correction,” Ethics 87, no. 4 (1977). 14. John Dewey, “Force, Violence and Law,” in Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner (New York: Modern Library, 1939), 494. 15. Ibid., 488. 16. Ibid., 489. 17. “Power or energy [or force] is either a neutral or an eulogistic term. It denotes effective means of operation; ability or capacity to realize ends. Granted an end which is worth while, and power or energy becomes a eulogistic term. . . . Energy becomes violence when it defeats or frustrates purpose instead of executing or realizing it.” Ibid., 488. 18. Here we find a direct connection with civil disobedience, and, as I discuss in chapter 6, so-called nonviolent methods do sometimes involve intersubjective violence. 19. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 191. 20. Ibid., 192. 21. Ibid., 190. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 195–96. 24. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 170. 25. His most extensive treatment of physical violence is in Humanism and Terror, where he offers a critique of Hegel, Marxists, and liberals for their embrace of violence and terror. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem (Boston: Beacon, 1985). 26. The full passage is as follows: “Transcendental subjectivity is a revealed subjectivity, revealed to itself and to others, and is for that reason an intersubjectivity. As soon as existence collects itself together and commits itself in some

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line of conduct, it falls beneath perception. Like every other perception, this one asserts more things than it grasps: when I say that I see the ash-tray over there, I suppose as completed an unfolding of experience which could go on ad infinitum, and I commit a whole perceptual future. Similarly, when I say that I know and like someone, I aim, beyond his qualities, at an inexhaustible ground which may one day shatter the image that I have formed of him. This is the price for there being things and ‘other people’ for us, not as the result of some illusion, but as the result of a violent act which is perception itself.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 421. 27. This even applies to some degree to objects, e.g., the “ash-tray” he mentions in the full passage. 28. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 444–45. 29. For a book-length discussion of Sartre’s understanding of violence see Ronald E. Santoni, Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). The subtitle refers to two different ways in which Sartre’s analysis of violence is curiously ambivalent: Sartre’s forthright acknowledgment that the concept is “ambiguous,” and Santoni’s assertion that Sartre’s view of the use of violence, as justified or not, is curiously ambivalent. 30. Indeed, he often refers to each of the elements of the conception of physical violence in chapter 2, confirming that objectification can be understood as the use of bodies as a means to change the character of subjectivity for some purpose. He writes: “We might define it something like: to make use of the facticity of the other person and the objective from the outside to determine the subjective to turn itself into an inessential means of reaching the objective. In other words, bring about the objective at any price, particularly by treating man as a means, all the while preserving the value of its having been chosen by some subjectivity.” Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 204. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 215. 33. Instead of turning to an analysis of the sort of relationships that are possible among us, Sartre turns toward possibilities that are deeply intertwined with deliberate, thetic, and cognitive processes. To complete the paragraph above: “Therefore we need to study the different kinds of claims that can be made on the other: prayer, appeal, expectation, proposal, demand, along with the other’s response: refusal or agreement. Threats. Defiance.” In each of these conceptions we find either the cogito or a consciously constructed conception of the other. Each is intersubjective, of course, but we are in the territory of Hegel’s conscious struggle, not the bare presence of subjectivities. Appeal and refusal expresses the desire for recognition, not our inability to recognize one another. Threats and defiance are our response to a particular way of being as opposed to the possibility that our way of being will simply exclude another


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or be excluded. The crux of the problem is revealed in the fact that Sartre does not seem to believe that all prayers and proposals are violent, but offers no way for us to discern what kind of prayers, proposals, or refusals qualify. As Part III should make clear, Sartre is not discussing violence, but (mostly) political responses to it. Prayers, appeals, proposals, and demands are attempts to alleviate and cope with the problems of intersubjectivity, not the problems themselves. 34. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 254. 35. Earlier in his discussion, Sartre says that “the violent man” espouses “Being as it would be without finitude, temporality, the necessity of waiting, of going from the parts to the whole, the diversity of things, the determination of means by the end.” Ibid., 185. This seems to suggest that even if the “violence” of choice effects everyone, certain individuals embrace Merleau-Ponty’s transition from “what I am to what I intend to be” without apology even while ignoring the true character of our relationship to others. 36. He affirms this elsewhere as well, writing that “reflection that is not yet another choice is at least the choice not to choose.” Ibid., 359. 37. For instance: “So here I am totally alienated. The other person is in me as a fixed gaze, he steals my thoughts from me by determining them through the projection beyond me of a fixed future . . . by determining them through motives created and maintained in me (fear and hope). Finally, he steals my acts from me by making them, on the one hand dreamlike initiatives, sleepwalking forms of nothingness, and, on the other hand, the realizations of an automaton. From this moment on, I am dehumanized, reified both internally and externally, therefore the object of the perpetual violence whose result is strictly comparable to a physical force.” Ibid., 202. 38. Recall that the question “Who is it?” arises from “the surplus of the social relation,” which makes it impossible for us to know one another and even know ourselves definitively. We can see that something very closely related to this, the “surplus of being over thought” is violent: “The act of thought—thought as an act—would precede the thought thinking or becoming conscious of an act. The notion of act involves a violence essentially: the violence of transitivity, lacking in the transcendence of thought. For the transcendence of thought remains closed in itself despite all its adventures—which in the last analysis are purely imaginary, or are adventures traversed as by Ulysses: on the way home. What, in action, breaks forth as essential violence is the surplus of being over the thought that claims to contain it, the marvel of the idea of infinity.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 27.The connection between action and thought is important here because it suggests a violent disposition. Below, we will see that this momentary admission that the idea of infinity can be consistent with violence is also important (and rare). 39. Ibid., 233. 40. Ibid., 224.

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41. Ibid., 70. 42. Ibid., 180. 43. Ibid., 171. 44. Ibid., 264. 45. Ibid., 164. 46. Ibid., 160, 162. Howard Caygill argues that Levinas, however, is more generally intent on resisting the Hegelian-Marxist claim for the universality and liberatory potential of work by associating it with violence and war. Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political: Thinking the Political (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 74. 47. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 196–97, see also 223. 48. Ibid., 83. 49. It is not clear exactly who Levinas has in mind here, but his critique is framed broadly enough to apply just as well to liberal republicans as existentialists and Marxists. 50. “Then we on our side will use no fine phrases saying, for example, that we have a right to our empire because we defeated the Persians, or that we have come against you now because of the injuries you have done us—a great mass of words that nobody would believe. And we ask you on your side not to imagine that you will influence us by saying that you, though a colony of Sparta, have not joined Sparta in the war, or that you have never done us any harm. Instead we recommend that you should try to get what it is possible for you to get, taking into consideration what we both really think; since you know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 5:89, 401–402. 51. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 84. 52. More precisely: knowledge and reason as typically conceived. Levinas reads Socrates quite favorably, however. On reason, see: Ibid., 216–19. 53. Ibid., 262. 54. Ibid., 199. 55. Ibid., 203. 56. I do not mean to say that personal or group experience precedes ethics or the law in any profound way, only that there can be interactive effects between them that shape identities. 57. William James, The Writings of William James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 193, italics removed.

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58. Ibid., 194, italics removed. 59. I will return to this theme in my discussion of Arendt’s portrayal of Achilles in chapter 5. 60. Unless the other is suicidal and purposefully provokes our desire to destroy and manipulate. 61. Cathy Winkler, “Rape as Social Murder,” Anthropology Today 7, no. 3 (1991): 13, 14. 62. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 204. 63. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 225. 64. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 94. 65. Niccoló Machiavelli, Selected Political Writings, trans. David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), II:2, 168. 66. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1914), 240–51, 299. 67. Susan Sontag writes of the enduring appeal of fascist symbols. Consistent with the idea that fascism trades in the fantasy that meaning can be found outside of intersubjectivity, she says: “Sadomachism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.” Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Facism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Picador, 1980), 105.

CHAPTER 5. SELF-SUFFICIENT POWER 1. For an overview of the literature see John Donohue and Justin Wolfers, “Uses and Abuses of Empirical Evidence in the Death Penalty Debate,” Stanford Law Review 58, no. 3 (2006). 2. Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 478. Rejali provides an overview of the evidence in chapter 21. Jane Mayer’s interviews with military and FBI officials suggest that most of the high level detainees tortured by the Bush administration were emotionally and physically destroyed and that the information

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produced by their torture was unreliable or false. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 106, 134, 161, 167. 3. Max Abrams, “Why Terrorism Does Not Work,” International Security 31, no. 2 (2006): 78; Seth G. Jones and Martin C. Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering Al Qa’ida (Santa Monica: Rand, 2008); Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, “The Terrorist Endgame,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 2 (2005). The empirical evidence on the first score is strong; the empirical evidence on the second score is still forthcoming. 4. Stephen D. Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 5. See Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Owens also suggests that Arendt would generally be willing to, or at least relatively willing to use physical violence to stop genocide. See also Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish Army—the Beginning of a Jewish Politics?,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2000). 6. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 1st ed. (New York: Schocken, 2005), 192. 7. George Kateb, “Political Action: Its Nature and Advantages,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Richard Villa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133. 8. Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 134. 9. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 141. She goes on to say that Arendt’s “reflections on the subject are extremely complex.” 10. John McGowan, “Must Politics Be Violent? Arendt’s Utopian Vision,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig J. Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 264. McGowan also argues that we can trace variation in Arendt’s work, with the middle works being more utopian and her later works acknowledging the “intermingling” of violence and politics. McGowan, “Must Politics Be Violent? Arendt’s Utopian Vision,” 291. 11. Arendt wrote in the wake of World War II and under the menace of the Cold War, so it is not surprising that she worries physical violence will entirely overrun politics. In fact, violence could still destroy the world. However, as I argue in chapter 6, even in attempting to stop the worst conflagrations, physical violence holds no advantage over other methods of politics. 12. On work, labor, love, and the household see Arendt, The Human Condition. On sovereignty and the will see Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future:


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Eight Exercises in Political Thought, enlarged ed. (New York: Penguin, 1977); Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990). On thinking see Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, one-volume ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981); Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2003). 13. Arendt, The Human Condition, 34. 14. Roy T. Tsao, “Arendt against Athens: Rereading The Human Condition,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002). 15. Arendt, The Human Condition, 182–83. 16. Habermas goes so far as to say that The Human Condition is intent on describing a “structure of unimpaired intersubjectivity.” Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 176. I owe the idea that a given deed can have political and antipolitical qualities to conversations with Susan Bickford. 17. Freedom is one of the few concepts she is willing to unreservedly associate with politics. See Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. 18. Gandhi’s theory of the state dovetails nicely with the idea that acting in concert plays a decisive role in sustaining it. Parekh writes: “For Gandhi not consent, nor will nor fear but co-operation was the basis of the state. Every state, democratic or otherwise, depended on the co-operation of its citizens, be it silent or vocal, passive or active, willing or unwilling. Since the state was an agency of action, co-operation with it consisted in rendering it specific services such as carrying out its orders, paying taxes, fighting wars and obeying laws. The state did not exist independently of its citizens and was ultimately nothing more than an institutionalized co-operation between its members. Its actions were not only made possible by their actions, but they, as self-conscious moral agents, all were ultimately accountable for its activities.” Bhikhu C. Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 123. 19. Arendt, On Violence, 47. 20. Arendt, The Human Condition, 205. 21. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 193–94. 22. The previous three paragraphs are drawn from Arendt, The Human Condition, 199–207; Arendt, On Violence, 44. She is also sympathetic to Montesqueiu’s idea, consistent with Aristotle’s conception of constitutions, that particular peoples or groups are animated by a “principle of action,” such as fame, freedom, or justice. For instance, she suggests that the principle of action in the United States is an active and participatory brand of consent. See Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 195; Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 85. The discussion that follows bears some

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resemblance to Joseph Nye’s comparison of “soft” and “hard” power, except that he cedes a great deal of what is captured by Arendt’s conception of power to “hard power.” Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, 1st ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence, 2nd ed., Scott, Foresman/Little, Brown Series in Political Science (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1989). 23. Arendt, On Violence, 44, 46. 24. Arendt, The Human Condition, 119, 130. 25. Ibid., 139. 26. Arendt is more eloquent (and presumptive, with respect to gender): “Material is already a product of human hands which have removed it from its natural location, either killing a life process, as in the case of the tree which must be destroyed in order to provide wood, or interrupting one of nature’s slower processes, as in the case of iron, stone or marble torn out of the womb of the earth. This element of violation and violence is present in all fabrication, and homo faber, the creator of human artifice, has always been a destroyer of nature.” Ibid. 27. Ibid., 158. 28. Arendt, On Violence, 46–47. 29. Ibid., 53. 30. I mentioned in chapter 1 that the inevitable spread of technology is indicative of our inherent fragility and ability over time. However, extant governments usually possess superior technologies and tools. Arendt goes so far as to say: “In a contest of violence against violence the superiority of the government has always been absolute.” Ibid., 48. 31. On consent versus obedience, see Ibid., 40–41. Even more powerful than consent are “promises, covenants, and mutual pledges” that rest on “reciprocity and mutuality.” Arendt, On Revolution, 181. 32. Arendt, On Violence, 53. 33. Ibid., 82. 34. Consider the following passage: “[I]t is also true that man’s capacity to act, and especially to act in concert, is extremely useful for purposes of selfdefense or of pursuit of interests; but if nothing more were at stake here than to use action as a means to an end it is obvious that the same end could be much more easily attained in mute violence, so that action seems a not very efficient substitute for violence, just as speech, from the viewpoint of sheer utility, seems an awkward substitute for sign language.” Arendt, The Human Condition, 179. The construction is difficult, but even while calling violence “mute” and relatively political speech a substitute for it, Arendt clearly means to say that violence is consistent with the capacity to act and act in concert. It is just that something more must be at stake than just the means/ends relationship.


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35. Arendt, On Violence, 80. 36. She specifically states the former. “Without the disclosure of the agent in the act, action loses its specific character and becomes one form of achievement among others. It is then indeed no less a means to an end than making is a means to produce an object. This happens whenever human togetherness is lost, that is, when people are only for or against other people, as for instance in modern warfare, where men go into action and use means of violence in order to achieve certain objectives for their own side and against the enemy. In these instances, which of course have always existed, speech becomes indeed ‘mere talk,’ simply one more means toward the end, whether it serves to deceive the enemy or to dazzle everybody with propaganda; here words reveal nothing, disclosure comes only from the deed itself, and this achievement, like all other achievements, cannot disclose the ‘who,’ the unique and distinct identity of the agent.” Arendt, The Human Condition, 180. 37. Ibid., 193. 38. “ ‘[H]ow lily-livered I should be called, if I knuckled under to all you do or say! Give your commands to someone else, not me!’ ” Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, 1st Farrar, Straus, and Giroux ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 1:ln 346, 15. Parallel discussions of “action” of this sort occur in at least two other notable descriptions of physical violence. Arjuna’s hesitation before going to war in the Bhagvad Gita is finally overcome in Book XI as a consequence of seeing Krishna in his full glory and thereby seeing the worthlessness of ends. Also, a key passage in Pericles’ Funeral Oration, to which Arendt seems particularly attuned, remarks that the men died despite their own personal ends and without certain knowledge of victory: “No one of these men weakened because he wanted to go on enjoying his wealth: no one put off the awful day in the hope that he might live to escape poverty and grow rich. More to be desired than such things, they chose to check the enemy’s pride. This to them, was a risk more glorious, and they accepted it, willing to strike down the enemy and relinquish everything else. As for success or failure, they left that in the doubtful hands of Hope, and when the reality of battle was before their faces, they put their trust in their own selves. In the fighting, they thought is more honourable to stand their ground and suffer death than to give in and save their lives.” Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2:42–43, 149. 39. Arendt, The Human Condition, 193. 40. Critics have sometimes charged that Arendt’s use of the Greeks in this regard means that her entire conception of action must be rooted in violence. Kateb argues that “we must insist on remembering that so long as action is understood in Arendt’s Greek sense, it is necessarily cojoined to coercion and violence, even though to act is not the same as to administer or execute. The completion of action is often violent activity: Decision aims at enforcement.

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Such public action is indissoluble from doing harm.” George Kateb, Hannah Arendt, Politics, Conscience, Evil (Oxford: M. Robertson, 1984), 39–40. My argument here is more modest and, I think more attentive to Arendt’s careful definition of violence as physical and instrumental (as opposed to something that would encompass “harm”). Instead of arguing that Arendt’s entire concept of action must be linked to violence, I want to point to the qualities of action that inhere in violent acts. In this, my analysis seems more consistent with Canovan’s assertion that “Homer lies at the beginning, not at the end of one of Arendt’s trains of thought. Meditating on the Homeric model of heroic action, Arendt finds ways in which it was modified and politicised, in the first place by interpreting it in terms of plurality rather than individualism, and in the second place by disconnecting it from violence.” Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought, 140.While I do not think Arendt was entirely successful in that regard, I do not think she fails quite so profoundly as Kateb suggests. 41. Arendt, The Human Condition, 198. Implicitly, she makes a makes a parallel attempt to associate only certain instances of physical violence with action in her discussion of the close relationship between action, freedom, and Machiavelli’s virtú in Between Past and Future. See Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 153. The close relationship between physical violence and action also helps explain an otherwise opaque comment, where she suggests that the realm of international affairs, typically thought to be anarchic and overwhelmingly driven by interests and ends, is more political than the modern domestic realm: “Now, where life is at stake all action is by definition under the sway of necessity, and the proper realm to take care of life’s necessities is the gigantic and still increasing sphere of social and economic life whose administration has overshadowed the political realm ever since the beginning of the modern age. Only foreign affairs, because the relationships between nations still harbor hostilities and sympathies which cannot be reduced to economic factors, seem to be left as a purely political domain.” Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 155. 42. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 184. 43. Arendt suggests that only if the Romans had been able to apply the sensibility that inhered in the Greek polis to foreign affairs could the annihilation of Carthage be avoided but that it was too much to expect from them, since it was something the Greeks themselves could not manage. Ibid., 185–86. 44. Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, 31–32. 45. “Every peace treaty, even if it is not really a treaty but a diktat, is concerned with a new ordering not only of things as they existed before the outbreak of hostilities but also of the new thing that made its appearance in the course of hostilities and is shared by both doers and sufferers.” Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 177.


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46. As mentioned above, groups that are acting together can and often do employ violence. 47. So while Achilles might have been killing Trojans, he was not killing Greeks. Instead, his relationship with his fellow soldiers and Agamemnon was at times agonistic, but not so much so that it prevented him from acting together with them at the critical moment. If it had, power would have been lost. 48. See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Chicago: Gateway Editions; distributed by H. Regnery, 1955), 19. 49. Arendt, On Revolution, 167. 50. McGowan, “Must Politics Be Violent? Arendt’s Utopian Vision,” 288. Villa observes that Arendt’s inability to fully grapple with the implications of severe political disagreement encompasses moral disagreement as well. He argues that Arendt and Leo Strauss do not really take moral pluralism seriously because they were “too inclined to view political societies as self-contained moral worlds.” As a consequence, they tend to “diminish both the weight and the seriousness of the moral task confronting every individual” in modern liberal society. See Dana Richard Villa, Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 397–98. 51. Arendt, On Revolution, 175. The Greeks in particular viewed law this way, according to Arendt, as a “wall” as opposed to a “tie,” which was more the Roman way. See Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 178, 180. 52. Arendt, The Human Condition, 184, see also 220. 53. For instance, if the majority of those who participate in an election in Afghanistan agree to participate in the Karzai government but others have a different vision of how Afghanis ought to interact, action is relatively disconcerted. Even if everyone is acting, indeed, even if power inheres between certain members of the group, all together their actions inhibit power. If those who radically dissent from the Karzai government are destroyed or those who dissent destroy the Karzai government, the path is clear for their own performance of power. 54. Perhaps whether it appears primarily as one or the other is affected by one’s place in the military hierarchy. So while generals and politicians may think in terms of interests, necessity, or utility, the soldiers who go into battle—those who are willing to die—must in some sense be taking action. 55. She even says that these are “in addition” to the usual unpredictability of action, but then does not follow up on the implications of that more basic political unpredictability for the use of physical violence. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 106. 56. As Arendt notes, Homer gave an account of the destruction of Troy that was not as one-sided as we might have expected. She also suggests, how-

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ever, that wars of annihilation are categorically different in terms of their political ramifications because humanness as such as at stake. For a good summary, see Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, 109–10. I take issue with aspects of Arendt’s analysis of genocide in chapter 7. 57. Her story also, of course, runs counter to her assertion that violence cannot produce power. 58. For instance, Owens suggests that she understands totalitarianism as the unintended “boomerang effect” of imperialism. But even here, Arendt’s argument is akin to her statement that the “most likely” outcome of violence is more violence. Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, chapter 4. 59. In effect, she argues that that the Romans remained political until the end. It was just that the principle of action upon which their laws were based and the fact that violence so reliably produced it, had to lead to their demise. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 186–87. 60. Of course, weapons, armor, bombs, and walls, for instance, lie between us when we practice physical violence but we are not, in the moment when violence occurs, concerned with negotiating about or manipulating those material things per se. Instead, in its essence, physical violence is only concerned with getting at the bodies of our opponents as means to their subjectivity. 61. See Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 139–40. 62. To use an analogy: Physical violence tries to create power by treating intersubjectivity like bonsai. By pruning parts of what already exists, we hope to leave intact a more beautiful, coherent or praiseworthy shape. Experience seems to show us that trees and intersubjectivity can sometimes be made more healthy by cutting off pieces of it. Arendt warns that a vision of what the tree ought to be can sometimes lead us to overprune and kill it. I want to note that every limb has a vision of how the tree ought to be, is watching and responding to the cutting of the other limbs, and has clippers of its own. 63. Arendt, The Human Condition, 244. 64. Arendt, On Revolution, 145. 65. Ibid., 18–19. 66. Arendt, On Violence, 51. 67. Arendt, The Human Condition, 200–201. 68. “[T]he price human beings pay for freedom; and the impossibility of remaining unique masters of what they do, of knowing its consequences and relying upon the future, is the price they pay for plurality and reality, for the

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joy of inhabiting together with others a world whose reality is guaranteed for each by the presence of all.” Ibid., 244.

CHAPTER 6. EQUIVALENT ACTION 1. Arendt, On Violence, 53. 2. For instance, Parekh says “the patient suffering of the Jews or the Kulacks would never have converted Hitler or Stalin.” Iyer adds the Chinese invasion of Tibet to the list and remarks that Gandhi’s “profound tolerance and compassion may have prevented him from judging harshly a weak-minded votary of ahimsa [nonviolence]” who might “merely be committing suicide.” Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 169; Raghavan Narasimhan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 214. 3. Interestingly, each calls into question the legitimacy, necessity, and meanings of violence proffered by the others. For instance, communists deny the legitimacy and necessity of violent alienated labor and the enforcement of property rights, while liberals deny the necessity of violent socialist revolutions and question whether alienated labor is violence at all. 4. Almost every ideology forwards the idea that violence is more effective or necessary in achieving particular aims, but blanket appraisals and assessments of violence are rare. 5. See Anthony Parel, “Gandhian Satyagraha and Machiavellian Virtù,” in The Meanings of Gandhi, ed. Paul F. Power (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1971). 6. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 121. 7. Ibid. 8. On Gandhi and Weber see Anthony Parel, Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 198. For a recent critique of Weber’s treatment of violence see Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, “Argument and Rhetoric in the Justification of Political Violence,” European Journal of Political Theory 6, no. 2 (2007). 9. Hobbes even stands by this rule when it cuts against his urging us to give our will over to the sovereign, in that he expects and almost seems to justify criminals resisting arrest. He says in Behemoth that no one “when his life is in extreme danger . . . will voluntarily present himself to the officers of justice.” Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth; or, the Long Parliament, 2nd ed. (London: Cass, 1969), 50.

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10. Clausewitz, On War, 137. 11. Ibid., 135. 12. For instance: “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 2nd ed.,Vintage Spiritual Classics (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 157. 13. Iyer remarks that one can “regard satyagraha simply as the weapon of moral power which men have employed at different times in unspectacular ways but with singular effectiveness in certain situations. There are many examples in history of men who have stood firmly by their principles, upheld conscience in the face of injustice, willingly faced persecution and martyrdom, courageously refused to compromise with the dictates of State or Church. It is in the presence of this spirit of stubborn adherence to basic human values and stout resistance to injustice and oppression, and heroism of the martyrs and the courage of the reformers, that Gandhi had in mind when he said that satyagraha was as ancient as the hills.” Raghavan Narasimhan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1973]), 342. 14. See Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Cambridge Texts in Modern Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 15. When moral appeals proved to be insufficient in isolation, Gandhi expanded the meaning of satyagraha to include political and economic pressure as well, which is why he began to call it “non-violent warfare” and “peaceful rebellion.” See Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 153. 16. Gandhi writes: “Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force. For instance, the Government of the day has passed a law which is applicable to me. I do not like it. If by using violence I force the Government to repeal the law, I am employing what may be termed body-force. If I do not obey the law and accept the penalty for its breach, I use soul-force.” Mahatma Gandhi, For Pacifists, 1st ed. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Pub. House, 1971), 18. 17. I explore the last point more extensively below. 18. Biddle argues that the primary factor in victory and defeat is tactics and deployment. To the extent that these factors are connected to the political consequences of warfare, I think this is consistent with the Gandhian view. Of course, the most important unmeasurable variable is the importance of the political aim and the corresponding will to resist one’s opponent. But even this can be affected by how force is deployed and what tactics are used. See Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle.


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19. For other discussions of the prospects of nonviolent resistance in the face of totalitarian regimes, see Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence; the Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 226–28; Leroy H. Pelton, The Psychology of Nonviolence, Pergamon General Psychology Series (New York: Pergamon Press, 1974), 172–87. For a perspicacious and compendious pacifist history of World War II see Nicholson Baker, The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008). 20. On the Holocaust, for instance, see James M. Glass, Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Moral Uses of Violence and Will (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 21. See Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: P. Sargent, 1973). Also, cutting against her assertion in On Violence that power is no match for violence, Arendt remarks, “One is tempted to recommend the story [of the Danish resistance to Nazism] as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence.” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Rev. and enl. ed., Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics (New York: Penguin, 1994), 171, see also 87–88. For a lucid analysis of the theory and practice of civil defense more generally see Robert J. Burrowes, The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 22. For more extensive discussions of civil defense and what a full-fledged Gandhian alternative would entail see: Gene Sharp and Bruce Jenkins, CivilianBased Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); H. J. N. Horsburgh, Non-Violence and Aggression: A Study of Gandhi’s Moral Equivalent of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 23. Two small examples: According to Sarah Weintraub of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, “peace communities” in Columbia, including the small town of La Unión, have confronted invading paramilitaries without arms. They have met with mixed success, usually losing lives but also staying above the fray in Colombia’s deeply divided society. An instance recounted by Joan Bondurant, who cites a piece in the New York Times, speaks of Hungarian women who confronted Soviet soldiers in 1956: “On 4 December thousands of Hungarian women staged a mass march to the tomb of Hungary’s Unknown Soldier in Heroes Square, Budapest. They sang Hungary’s old national anthem and recited Alexander Petofi’s poem to freedom. Soviet soldiers posted around the heroes’ memorial tried to prevent the crowd from approaching it, whereupon the women cried: ‘We have no weapons, only flowers! Are you afraid of flowers?’ The soldiers gave way and the women heaped the monument with wreaths. During this demonstration one woman is reported to have angrily

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protested to a Soviet officer, who thereupon attempted to arrest her. Other women hastened to her side and pushed the Russian away. At this incident several shots were fired, one of the women was struck in the leg and carried away by others in the crowd.” Bondurant, Conquest of Violence; the Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, 227. 24. In discussing Hitler, Gandhi also writes that nonviolence would have been more apt to succeed because it would be entirely unexpected and elicit a special kind of recognition: “[Dictators] have up to now always found ready response to the violence they have used. Within their experience, they have not come across organized non-violent resistance on an appreciable scale, if at all. Therefore, it is not only highly likely, but . . . inevitable that they would recognize the superiority of non-violent resistance over any display of violence that they may be capable of putting forth.” Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 333. 25. The factors mentioned here and this point in particular are taken from Horsburgh, Non-Violence and Aggression: A Study of Gandhi’s Moral Equivalent of War, chapter 6. Horsburgh recounts a particular incident to illustrate the point: “A film of Hitler in his last phase, which the B.B.C. televised in 1964, is suggestive in this connexion. He is seen inspecting the latest conscripts of the German Army. The recruits are very young and Hitler pauses to pat their shoulders, trying to smile with fatherly benignity. He has clearly become a sick devil, quite different from the brutal leader of the great speech and parade days of his zenith. These pictures can be seen as a powerful vindication of the arms [i.e., the violent response of the Allies] by which he was brought to this condition. But they can also be seen as a belated recognition, by one of the most malevolent beings of whom we have any record, that even his system of education and training had not destroyed the responsiveness of Nazi youth to what was a bastard moral appeal, and that those whom he was barely any longer in a position to command might still be induced to follow him out of a misguided sense of loyalty, of love, or even of compassion. Again, while courage and pride may prevent a wicked man from begging for mercy it may be doubted whether cynicism has ever done so. On grounds such as these . . . it seems clear that none of us entirely discounts the effectiveness of moral appeals even if many of us are only prepared to rely upon them as a painful last resort.” Horsburgh, Non-Violence and Aggression: A Study of Gandhi’s Moral Equivalent of War, 161–62. Other factors to take into account include the putative rules of engagement, military tropes of honor and courage, and just war considerations of jus in bello. The German Army might have found it difficult to utterly disregard the notion that there is “a body of independent, objective and suprapersonal rules applying to all belligerents alike and governing the conduct of hostilities in a de facto situation.” Robert Kolb, “Origin of the Twin Terms Jus Ad Bellum/Jus in Bello,” International Review of the Red Cross 30-10, no. 320 (1997): 553–56.


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26. The statistics come from Grolier Online. http://gi.grolier.com/ wwii/wwii_6.html. 27. See Ronnie S. Landau, The Nazi Holocaust, 1st American ed. (Chicago: I.R. Dee, 1994), 316. About five hundred thousand Jews fled Germany and countries that imitated German discriminatory measures prior to the final solution. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (London: Lime Tree, 1993), 118. See also Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2002). 28. The RAF bombing of Hamburg in 1941 was used as a pretext to request the deportation of Jews to the East in order to use Jewish homes for non-Jews. Lawrence Rees, Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State (Warner Home Video, 2005). 29. This is not to say that Allied governments would have endorsed the Final Solution, but certainly there was no shortage of anti-Semitism in the United States, Britain, and Russia. The reluctance of Allied nations to accept Jewish refugees is one clear indication of this. Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945, 249–55.The Allies’ unwillingness to expend the resources to bomb the concentration camps despite clear intelligence must at least in part be counted as indicative of indifference to Nazi treatment of Jews. Landau, The Nazi Holocaust, 210. 30. For instance, while the SS in Auschwitz poured the Zyklon B pellets into the gas chambers, it was the Sondercommando who manned the entrance to the gas chambers and moved and cremated bodies. Rees, Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. On one occasion, the Sondercommando exploded one of the gas chambers in Auschwitz. 31. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 32. Rees, Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. 33. The examples of successful resistance strongly confirm that if public opinion went against the Nazis it could be decisive. Again, see Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action; Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. 34. Mass deportations and Allied bombing of German cities both began in late 1940. 35. On the special status of the “bearers of secrets” and “bearers of orders” see Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 27, 84. 36. However, the prime example of Rwanda is complicated by the fact it grew out of many years of civil war between the perpetrators and the victims and the special dynamics of large influxes of population that threatened the interests of existing power structures. 37. In this regard, pacifism and skepticism about pacifism may be selffulfilling prophesies. On this possibility explained with respect to violence and

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the logic of Realpolitick, see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge Studies in International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 263. 38. W. Cunningham, as quoted in Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, 337–38. See also Harold G. Coward, Indian Critiques of Gandhi, SUNY Series in Religious Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), chapter 5. 39. In this regard, Lukes’s charge that Arendt tends to emphasize “power to” at the expense of “power over” is apt with respect to Gandhi as well. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 34. 40. In a speech to volunteers who were standing in front of the barricades that prevented untouchables from entering the Vykom temple, he says, “I would ask you to forget the political aspect of the program. Political consequences of this struggle there are, but you are not to concern yourself with them.” Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 255. Elsewhere, he claims that a single individual can hold the whole of violence at bay. Anticipating a skeptical response to such a claim, he says, “Supposing I cannot produce a single instance in life of a man who truly converted his adversary, I would then say that it is because no one had been yet found to express ahimsa [non-injury] in its fullness.” Gandhi, For Pacifists, 26. 41. Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 202–203. 42. “Non-violence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. The spirit lies dormant in the brute, and he knows no law but that of physical might. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law—to the strength of the spirit.” Gandhi, For Pacifists, 4. 43. “[The] greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of this force [of Truth or Love] is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars of the world, it still lives on. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force. Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force. Hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul.” Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 88–89. 44. War is extremely rare relative to the total possible number of instances. See Gary King and Langche Zeng, “Explaining Rare Events in International Relations,” International Organization 55, no. 3 (2001). 45. Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 331–32.


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46. So Gandhi argues that whether the British leave India or not, “if we become free, India is free. And in this thought you have a definition of Swaraj. It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands. Do not consider this Swaraj to be like a dream. There is no idea of sitting still.” Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, 73. 47. Put another way, Hobbes’s claim that death is the summum malum must be normative, not empirical, unless we are willing to admit that risking one’s life in warfare and Gandhi’s strategy of noncooperation in the face of tyranny amount to nothing more than failures of reason. Gandhi often acknowledged the connection between the courage and discipline required for warfare and that required of satyagrahis. 48. For instance, in the first year of the American occupation of Iraq, Shia clerics and politicians pressed ahead with their interests and yet refrained from responding to Sunni violence. Only after persistent attacks and a chronic lack of security did calculations change and the habits of peacefulness founder. 49. Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 87. 50. Parekh writes: “When [satya and agraha] are combined there is a beautiful duality of meaning implying both insistence on and for truth. A moral agent insists on truth as he sees it, but acknowledges that he might be wrong or only partially right and invites his opponent to join him in a co-operative search for truth.” Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 143. 51. “In passive resistance there is always present the idea of harassing the other party . . . while in Satyagraha there is not the remotest idea of injuring the opponent. Satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one’s own person.” Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 88. 52. Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, 333. 53. Parel, Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony, 199. 54. Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 157. 55. On Gandhi’s view of the state see Ibid., chapter 5 and Parel, Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony, chapter 3. On the anarchist elements in Gandhi’s thought see Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, 172–87. 56. Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 88. 57. “Mutual trust and mutual love are no trust and no love. The real love is to love them that hate you, to love your neighbor even though you distrust him. I have sound reasons for distrusting the English official world. If my love is sincere, I must love the Englishman in spite of my distrust. Of what avail is my love, if it be only so long as I trust my friend? Even thieves do that.” Gandhi, For Pacifists, 6.

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58. Ibid., 9. 59. There is some tension on this issue in Gandhi’s thought, centering around his interpretation of some key passages in the Gita. All in all, though, it is clear that he wants to interpret the Gita—even the sections where Krishna urges Arjuna to kill—as counterposing God and violence. Mahatma Gandhi, The Message of the Gita, 1st ed. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1959). 60. “I do not believe . . . that an individual may gain spiritually and those who surround him suffer . . . I believe in the essential unity of man and . . . of all that lives. Therefore, I believe that if one man gains . . . the whole world gains with him, and if one man fall[s], the whole world falls to that extent. I do not help opponents without at the same time helping myself and my coworkers.” Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 303. 61. Recall the discussion in chapter 4 of Levinas’s notion that the very fact that we are free implies shame. For two recent discussions of the role of shame in politics, one disapproving and the other more nuanced, see Martha Nussbaum, “Inscribing the Face: Shame, Stigma, and Punishment,” in Nomos XLVI: Political Exclusion and Domination, ed. Melissa S. Williams and Stephen Macedo (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Christina Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato and the Contemporary Politics of Shame,” Political Theory 32, no. 4 (2004). 62. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 61. 63. Ibid., 60. 64. This is not to say that Arendt disapproves of civil disobedience. While aware of its dangers, she actually proposes and endorses the idea of a constitutional amendment that affirms more forcefully than the First Amendment the freedom of association. Ibid., 101. 65. Ibid., 61; Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 126. This critique also closely parallels Bhikhu Parekh’s claim that “Gandhi had considerable difficulty coming to terms with social conflicts. For him harmony, a form of good, was real whereas conflict, a form of evil was essentially negative, contingent, temporary and the product of a misguided head or a narrow heart.” Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 202. 66. Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, 184. Gandhi did consider the problem of acting falsely under the authority of conscience, offering the willingness to suffer as a test of it. See Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, 124–28. 67. Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 147. 68. Bondurant continues: “God was, in Gandhi’s definition, even the atheism of the atheist. There was no insistence upon an objective absolute. Absolute truth cannot be known absolutely to mortal man.” Bondurant, Conquest of Violence; The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, 193.


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69. Horsburgh, Non-Violence and Aggression: A Study of Gandhi’s Moral Equivalent of War, 162. 70. I disagree with scholars who understand Socratic practices as “purging” his interlocutors of their ideas. First, there is very little evidence in the dialogues that his interlocutors change their minds as a result of their conversations with him. Second, if they do, it seems likely that Socrates would attribute those changes not to his attacks on their ideas per se but to the contradictions that arise in their own thinking through of the problem with him. This is not to say that the process is not humbling, disillusioning, or painful. 71. Villa, Socratic Citizenship, 269. 72. Weiss calls this “shame therapy,” because although Socrates cannot teach people positive values (i.e., how to be good), he can show them that their own views are unsustainable. In this way, Socrates can at least “[humble] them or even [make] them more gentle.” Roslyn Weiss, The Socratic Paradox and Its Enemies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 213. 73. Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 147. 74. “This occupation has kept me too busy to do much either in politics or in my own affairs; in fact, my service to God has reduced me to extreme poverty.” Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Apology 23b. 75. For instance, he suggests that the reason he is being put to death is because he refused to confine himself to private life: “No man on earth who conscientiously opposes either you or any other organized democracy, and flatly prevents a great many wrongs and illegalities from taking place in the state to which he belongs, can possibly escape with his life. The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.” Ibid., Apology 31d-32. 76. Though no one has directly connected it to Socrates, the dialogic quality of Gandhi’s methods has not gone unnoticed. Bondurant begins the preface to the revised edition of her volume with the statement: “The technique to which Gandhi gave the name ‘satyagraha’ is at once a mode of action and a method of enquiry.” She writes therein that the satyagraha does “all he can to persuade the opponent of the correctness of his own position, but, while he carries on his own persuasive activity, he allows the opponent every opportunity and, indeed, invites him to demonstrate the correctness of his (the opponent’s) position and to dissuade him of his own position.” Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, v, 196. Bhikhu Parekh writes: “His satyagraha was basically a new kind of dialogue, a form of discussion which, although not rational in a narrow sense, was not irrational either. It involved trying hard both to persuade others of one’s point view and to understand theirs, and relied on each opening himself up to others by both sharing with them his thoughts and feelings and letting theirs flow into and inform his own. The method of satyagraha was ultimately a way of enabling

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men to realize their full potential for rationality and goodness and creating a new and tentative consensual truth.” Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 166. 77. Plato, Gorgias, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 527c-d. 78. Thinking along these lines, Martin Luther King Jr. writes in the “Letter From Birmingham Jail”: “Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 291. 79. Bondurant goes so far as to say that Gandhi describes a kind of open and never-ending dialectic—one that is usefully contrasted with Hegelian determinative and Marxist historicist dialectics. She writes: “The Gandhian philosophy, accepting the dynamics of the dialectical situation, and taking man as the measure of reason, centers upon a technique whereby one or both sides in a conflict can resolve the antinomy into a reinterpretation (which, in turn gives rise to another antinomy).” In this way the satyagrahi “seeks a victory, not over the opponent, but over the situation in the best (in the sense of the total human needs of the situation) synthesis possible [a synthesis that] differs acutely from the notion of compromise.” Bondurant, Conquest of Violence;The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, 194, 196. 80. Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Apology 29a. 81. Ibid., 29d. 82. “You did not have equality of rights with your father, or your employer (supposing that you had had one), to enable you to retaliate; you were not allowed to answer back when you were scolded or to hit back when you were beaten, or to do a great many other things of the same kind. Do you expect such license against your country. . . . Both in war and in the law-courts and everywhere else you must do whatever your city and your country commands, or else persuade it in accordance with universal justice; but violence is a sin even against your parents, and it is a far greater sin against your country.” Ibid., Crito 50d-51b. 83. See Villa, Socratic Citizenship, 300–301. Villa, following Arendt, also emphasizes Socratic alienation and estrangement from the world (Villa calls it “moderate” alienation). While certainly thinking compromises action, Gandhi’s methods throw Socratic methods into relief in another way: We notice that Socrates is always with other people. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, in tandem with his invention of the “two in one,” Socratic methods suggest that

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adequate thinking cannot be done in isolation—or at least not in persistent isolation. See Villa, Socratic Citizenship, 29–30. 84. Villa uses this phrase with respect to Socrates. Villa, Socratic Citizenship, 308. He might not allow that it can be applied to Gandhi, despite what I have said here. Villa takes issue with Arendt’s suggestion that Socrates is aptly compared to Thoreau, and both Arendt and Villa read Thoreau as someone whose ethics are uncompromising. They worry that his desire to avoid injustice spills over into an active attempt to make the world more just that threatens to destroy the world itself. See Villa, Socratic Citizenship, 54–55; Arendt, Crises of the Republic, 60–62. At least one observer has argued the reverse of what I am suggesting here: that in the Hindu tradition “soul force” was relatively passive and that Gandhi found inspiration in the more active “soul force” described by Socrates and Thoreau. Nicholas F. Gier, The Virtue of Nonviolence: From Gautama to Gandhi, SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 18. 85. Iyer describes Gandhi’s position in a way that is quite consistent with Arendt’s conception of the political realm: “Moral life was not for Gandhi mainly a matter of achieving specific objectives, nor was politics like a field game in which a concrete objective is given in advance and known to all. No doubt, he regarded satya as the supreme common end for all men but its content cannot be known in advance.” Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, 369. 86. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe,” ed. John Keane (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985), 45. 87. Of course, there is some danger in conscious suffering becoming detached from ends in the same way that physical violence is detached from its ends. Gandhi sometimes suggests that enduring physical suffering has inherent value, which threatens not only to subvert the political purposes it supposedly embodies on a given occasion but to discredit the legitimacy of conscious suffering as a method. On this problem see Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, 170. 88. Likewise, Socrates’ irony often undermines our sense that he is being sincere, and his questions can sometimes seem more obstinate than curious. 89. Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, 332–33.

CHAPTER 7. DEMANDING THOUGHTFULNESS 1. To the extent that instances of intersubjective violence are grounded in particular ethical claims or mores, our sense of justice is as likely to undergird

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and inspire physical violence in others as stop it. In fact, physical violence is such a common reaction to intersubjective violence that the possibility has been incorporated into the basic toolkit of nonviolent strategists under the banner of “provocation for the purpose of delegitimization.” As discussed in chapter 4, like physical violence, intersubjective violence is not the same thing as immoral action. Intersubjective violence is sometimes the result of unjust action and it perhaps always seems unjust to the person who experiences it. However, it often results from taking for granted the basic values of one’s own society, family, or culture or from the simple fact of our individuality, freedom, and uniqueness. Only the most simplistic sort of ethics labels the results of such actions “immoral.” 2. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 162. 3. See Michael Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1999), 174.The various impressions The Origins of Totalitarianism has inspired are perhaps best summarized by Eli Zaretzky who describes it as “brilliant, impassioned, loosely organized, and self-contradictory.” Eli Zaretsky, “Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of the Public/Private Distinction,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig J. Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 218. Other critiques include Eric Voegelin, “A Review of the Origins of Totalitarianism,” Review of Politics 15 (1953); Raymond Aron, “The Essence of Totalitarianism According to Hannah Arendt,” Partisan Review 60, no. 3 (1993); John Stanley, “Is Totalitarianism a New Phenomenon? Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Lisa Disch offers a particularly incisive analysis of Voeglin’s book review and argues that the title of Origins does not express Arendt’s epistemological proclivities. See Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 121–28. 4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 441. 5. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 6. There has been significant discussion of the evolution of Arendt’s thought between Origins and Eichmann. While there are important differences, the theme of banality is an aspect of consistency between the works. For a recent view that perceives a sea change see Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 99. 7. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 455. This project must be a very difficult one because, as Arendt writes elsewhere, spontaneity “in the final sense . . . arises from the individual, it can, even under very unfavorable conditions— an attack by a tyrant, for example—still preserve itself.” Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 128.


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8. Ibid., 458. 9. The concept of “action” is described in the third section of The Human Condition. 10. The Origins of Totalitarianism, 459. The Roman proverb Homo homini lupus means “man is wolf to man.” 11. The sentence that follows the above quotation reads: “Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed.” 12. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 441. 13. Ibid., 457. 14. Ibid., 442. 15. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 441–42. 16. For some recent thoughts on Arendt’s critique of certain forms of Zionism see Corey Robin, “Dragon-Slayers,” London Review of Books, January 4 2007. 17. On this issue, see Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (New York: Oxford University Press), 107–109. 18. Halpern applies this phrase to Arendt’s analysis of Rousseau and the French Revolution in particular. Cynthia Halpern, Suffering, Politics, Power: A Genealogy in Modern Political Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 126. 19. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 20. Arendt’s description of action in The Human Condition tells us that the unpredictable aspect of politics means that it almost never achieves its purpose and therefore inspires great frustration. It is not clear whether such frustration involves physical suffering or not. Violence seems to have both political and nonpolitical qualities, though Arendt generally tries to disassociate the two. Certainly, she characterizes politics as tragic and tumultuous. 21. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 443. 22. “[Sorrow} hinders the thing that should come to our aid in misfortune as quickly as possible. . . . [Deliberation] over what’s happened, and arranging one’s affairs to the way things have fallen like dice, however reason dictates as best.” Plato, The Republic. Translated by Raymond Larson (Arlington Heights, IL: Crofts Classics, 1979), Book 10, 604c. 23. The Origins of Totalitarianism, 459. 24. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. and enl. edn. (New York: Penguin, 1994), 49. 25. Ibid., 288.

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26. Ibid., 252. 27. She writes: “Common sense, by virtue of its imaginative capacity, can have present in itself all those who actually are absent. It can think, as Kant says, in the place of everybody else, so that when somebody makes the judgment, this is beautiful, he does not mean merely to say this pleases me . . . but he claims assent from others because in judging he has already taken them into account and hence hopes that his judgments will carry a certain general, though perhaps not universal, validity.” Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2003), 140. 28. As Arendt acknowledges, Kant clearly does not do so. “ ‘In taste,’ Kant says, ‘egoism is overcome’—we are considerate in the original sense of the word, we consider the existence of others and we must try to win their agreement, to ‘woo their consent,’ as Kant put it. In Kantian morality, nothing of this sort is necessary: we act as intelligible beings and the laws we follow would have validity for all intelligible beings—including the inhabitants of other planets, the angels, and God himself. We are not considerate for we need not consider the position of others and we don’t consider the consequences of our act which are immaterial for the law or for the goodness of the will from which the act springs.” Ibid., 142. 29. Here is where Arendt deepens and revises the idea in Eichmann that there can be criminals “beyond punishment”: “The trouble with the Nazi criminals was precisely that they renounced voluntarily all personal qualities, as if nobody were left to be either punished or forgiven. They protested time and again that they had never done anything out of their own initiative, that they had no intentions whatsoever, good or bad, and that they only obeyed orders. To put it another way: the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons. . . . Stubbornly remaining nobodies they prove themselves unfit for intercourse with others who, good, bad, or indifferent, are at the very least persons.” Ibid., 111–12. 30. Ibid., 44–45. 31. See, for instance, Peter J. Haas, Morality after Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). 32. Arendt is quite clear that there are dangers connected to examination of the self and others. Additionally, such thinking is impossible once we enter into the space of appearances, that is, the practice of politics proper. Ibid., 176–77, 89. 33. Ibid., 180–89. 34. Ibid., 292. Recall that the role of the cogito in facilitating acts of violence is a matter of dispute among Sartre, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty. They do not seem to consider the possibility that it could cause us to refrain from doing violence.


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35. Ibid., 296. 36. Ibid., 289. 37. We are reminded here of Socrates’ claim that just punishment must always benefit and improve the one who is punished. 38. Ibid., 286. 39. Levi was occasionally asked about Arendt and in one instance affirmed her notion that evil can be banal. He says, in an admittedly cursory treatment of Arendt appropriate to an interview: “We need to understand . . . [i]f he was really always a torturer or not. Perhaps he was simply someone who carried out all the tasks, gestures and acts of a torturer, but who in all other respects was just like us. In all probability that is how it was, and if so, it could not be more significant nor more sad. It is Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the ‘banality of evil’. Her idea is very close to what I’m saying, that the environment was much more important than intrinsic human nature. These were not monsters. I didn’t see a single monster in my time in the camp. Instead I saw people like you and I who were acting in that way because there was Fascism, Nazism in Germany.” Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon, eds., The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961-1987 (New York: New Press, 2001), 270. However, despite the relevance of her work to many of the issues he explores therein, Levi does not engage Arendt in The Drowned and the Saved, his final and most direct meditation on Auschwitz. Arendt died in 1975, but she was sent a proof copy of Levi’s second memoir by his American editor Peter Davison in the 1960s. Davison received no reply from her or the other American Jewish critics to whom he sent the volume. See Ian Thomson, Primo Levi (London: Hutchinson, 2002), 288. 40. Levi’s insights are sometimes discussed side by side with Arendt’s in studies of the camps and, on occasion, the two have been brought into conversation with one another. For the most part, students of Arendt and Levi find agreement or compatibility in their works. For instance, Robert Fine suggests that both are concerned with and affirm a distinction between understanding the camps and judging the actions of those who lived in the historical moment; and Olivia Guaraldo argues that Levi’s work embodies Arendt’s notion that storytelling is a way of doing politics—a way that avoids claims to universal truth, saving us from “both forgetfulness and simplification.” Robert Fine, Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (New York: Routledge, 2001), 105n99, 57n64; Olivia Guaraldo, Storylines: Politics, History, and Narrative from an Arenditian Perspective (Portland, OR: SoPhi, 2001), 197. 41. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), xix, 6–7, 860–61. 42. Plato, The Republic, Book 2, 380c. 43. Deuteronomy 6:4–9 reads as follows: “Hear, Oh Israel, The Lord is Our God, The Lord is One. . . . Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give

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you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” Observant Jews interpret the passage literally, reciting the phrase in the morning and before sleeping. It is often the first prayer taught to Jewish children and is the last thing that one is supposed to say before one dies. The section of Deuteronomy is also kept with three other prayers in phylacteries (tefillin), and is placed in mezuzot attached to doorframes. 44. That he believed the poem could stand alone is also indicated by the fact that Levi included it in his first collection of published poetry. See the translator’s preface in Primo Levi, Collected Poems, trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), xi. 45. “They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.” Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 90. 46. “I could not say whether we did or do so out of a kind of moral obligation toward those who were silenced or in order to free ourselves of their memory; certainly we do it because of a strong and durable impulse.” Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 84. 47. Ibid., 83–84. 48. Levi, Author’s Preface to Survival in Auschwitz, 9. It appears that “it” refers here to the survivors’ stories. The complete sentence is as follows: “The need to tell our story to ‘the rest,’ to make ‘the rest’ participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs.” 49. Primo Levi, The Monkey’s Wrench (New York: Penguin, 1995), 52. Of course, I do not mean to foreclose the possibility that his struggle dramatizes a more generalized problem. It may be that whether “we are” is the same question as whether “I am” even outside the unique experience of a camp survivor. For instance, DuBois’s analysis of the “double consciousness” that characterizes the experience of African Americans might be connected to the paradox of comfort and suffering. See W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996), 5. 50. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 41. 51. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 68. 52. If this is so, then asking whether “this is a person” is a supreme expression of that curiosity.


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53. In this way, Levi aligns himself with skeptics of humanism such as Foucault and Nietzsche. However, his willingness to press ahead with the question of what it means to be human marks a refusal to affirm that the destructive and insidious power of others is decisive. 54. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 26–27. 55. Levi is sympathetic but unconvinced when Steinlauf tries to persuade him of the importance of washing. He counters: “Is it really necessary to elaborate a system and put it into practice? Or would it not be better to acknowledge one’s lack of a system?” Ibid., 41. 56. Ibid., 90. 57. Ibid., 26. 58. Ibid., 90. 59. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 458–59. 60. Ibid., 441. Interestingly, Bar On argues that Arendt’s primarily intellectual concern is in the drowned, not those who are actually killed in Auschwitz, because those that Auschwitz actually kills are “just not alive enough to show what a life outside of the web of human relations is like.” Bat-Ami Bar On, The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding (Lanham, MD; Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 106. 61. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 441. 62. She continues from the passage above: “When, like Lazarus, he rises from the dead, he finds his personality or character unchanged, just as he had left it.” Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. The connection between being human and practicing politics is grounded in Arendt’s discussion of action and power. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 201–204. 65. Augustine, Concerning the City of God, 480. 66. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 444. 67. She writes: “The fear of concentration camps and the resulting insight into the nature of total domination might serve to invalidate all obsolete political differentiations from right to left and to introduce beside and above them the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not.” Ibid., 442. 68. I borrow this phrase from Samantha Power, who invokes it when listing the many American presidents who have stated a deep commitment to preventing genocide, but then failed to make genocide prevention a priority in practice. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xxi.

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69. This is not to say that this avoidance implies no practical political lessons. Owens argues that Arendt thinks wars to stop genocide are the only necessary wars, but also that they should only be fought under certain circumstances. Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, chapter 8. 70. He makes this explicit in the chapter entitled “Communicating” in The Drowned and the Saved. 71. Arendt describes the prisoner as a “bundle of needs,” yet Levi’s description of the drowned suggests that even the desire for physical survival is lost. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 90. 72. In a way, Arendt suggests this pessimistic view. Common sense is what is called for in normal circumstances and Socratic thoughtfulness is the last bastion of the few (though not of the elite) in times of crisis. 73. The opening words of the preface to Survival in Auschwitz send a strong and startling message in this regard: “It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German Government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average life-span of the prisoners destined for elimination.” Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 9. 74. Levi mentions it at least once, in passing, with apparent skepticism. Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve, trans. Ruth Feldman, Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics (New York: Penguin, 1995), 91. 75. Roslyn Weiss, The Socratic Paradox and Its Enemies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1. Weiss focuses, in particular, on Socrates’ claim that “no one does wrong willingly,” a poignant and unsettling paradox not unrelated to Arendt’s thesis that Eichmann’s evil was banal because it was thoughtless. 76. Mary G. Dietz, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002), 196. 77. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 55. 78. The less common, memento vivere (“remember that you must live”) seems more along the lines of what Levi has in mind. 79. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 439, fn 120. 80. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 82. 81. He recounts an incident, for instance, where he and Alberto shared a limited amount of water but excluded another. Ibid., 80. 82. Ibid., 85. 83. Ibid., 86. 84. Villa, Socratic Citizenship, 24, 40. 85. As quoted in Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, 310.

NOTES TO CONCLUSION

235

86. See Joan V. Bondurant, “Satyagraha Versus Duragraha: The Limits of Symbolic Violence,” http://www.mkgandhi.org/g_relevance/chap05.htm; Bondurant, Conquest of Violence; the Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, 42–44. 87. Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, 311. Iyer offers a sensitive critique of Gandhi’s attempt to distinguish between satyagraha and duragraha and a helpful accounting of restrictions on the use of satyagraha. While Gandhi develops many criteria for and restrictions on political action he has less to say about the primary decision as to whether or not injustice is occurring and/or warrants a response. 88. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 459. 89. Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 96. 90. To put it another way, Levi finds plurality despite what Arendt correctly identifies as the totalitarian commitment to “the principle of nonplurality.” John McGowan, “Must Politics Be Violent? Arendt’s Utopian Vision,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Calhoun and McGowan, 269. In this way, my argument is consistent with Frederic Homer’s claim that Primo Levi is an “optimistic pessimist.” The contradictory sensibility of an “optimism [that] must be seen against the backdrop of a tragic existence” is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Levi’s poem—wherein he demonstrates the loss of all human connection between the drowned and saved while at the same time trying to keep the possibility of such a connection alive. Homer, Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, 180. 91. Levi, The Voice of Memory, 74.

CONCLUSION 1. On this issue see Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, 32. 2. Foucault’s work on the liberal state’s defense of life and recent empirical work on democratic violence reveals a close connection betweens the theoretical valuing of life in liberalism and the removal of a social safety net, the waging of wars, and the development of various techniques of torture. Foucault’s most concise theoretical statement on this matter can be found in Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). For a more detailed discussion see Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76. The empirical work includes Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jonathan Daniel Weiler, Human Rights in Russia: A Darker Side of Reform (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004); Rejali, Torture and Democracy.

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3. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 3, para 45. 4. Some of Gandhi’s most harsh assessments of Western “ ‘civilisation’ ” mocked the notion that we ought to “make bodily welfare the object of life.” Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, 35. 5. In addition, the methods of pacifism not only encourage political engagement but also a moral independence that, like Villa’s Socrates, informs but is somewhat removed from formal politics. 6. Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 119–20. 7. The sort of responsibility I have in mind here is described by Vàclav Havel when he writes that “any genuinely meaningful point of departure in an individual’s life usually has an element of universality about it. In other words, it is not something partial, accessible only to a restricted community, and not transferable to any other. On the contrary, it must be accessible to everyone; it must foreshadow a general solution and, thus, it is not just the expression of an introverted, self-contained responsibility that individuals have to and for themselves alone, but responsibility to and for the world. . . . Patocka used to say that the most interesting thing about responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere.” Havel, “The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe,” 80. 8. Arendt, The Human Condition, 244.

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Index abortion, 43, 142 Achilles, 109, 110, 113, 114, 118, 209n59, 215n47 action, 67, 71, 74, 75, 121–148, 196n30, 196n33 Achilles’, 109, 113, 118, 207n38, 213n38 concentration camp destroys capacity for, 152, 166 in concert with others, 17, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 127–128, 130, 141, 150, 213n53 equivalence of different types of, 7–8, 11, 119, 122, 129, 136 ethics and, 9, 10, 36, 44, 53, 57, 79, 127, 130, 138, 141, 146, 149–150, 228n1 frustration or failure and, 62, 113, 128, 181, 229n20 Gandhi’s conception of, 136, 137, 138–139, 211n18 Hamlet and, 189n22 intersubjective violence and, 10, 77, 81, 87, 88–91, 148 nonviolent, 9, 119, 127, 139, 219n21 not a matter of pursuing ends, 106, 147 perception and, 80, 91 physical violence and, 7, 9, 37, 44, 45, 48, 103, 109–110, 113–114,

116–118, 133, 147, 150, 212n34, 213n36, 213n40, 213n41, 215n54, 229n20 plurality as condition for, 113, 148 power and, 9, 102, 110, 112–113, 115, 119, 233n64 political, 3, 9, 101, 103–104, 106, 109– 110, 113, 116–118, 123, 139, 147 principle of, 211n22, 216n55 responsibility for one’s own, 146, 147, 159, 172, 179–180 satyagraha as a kind of, 122–123, 133, 139, 145, 225n76 satyagraha as making difficult, 126, 143, 145–146 satyagraha as elenchus put into, 8, 145, 225n76 Socrates as slowing or preventing, 147 as speech, words, and deeds, 104–105, 106, 181, 213n36 as spontaneous and beginning something new, 109, 111, 113 thoughtfulness or thinking and, 9, 157, 178, 226n83 of totalitarians, 154–155, 158 unpredictability of, 106, 147, 215n55 see also Clausewitz, performance, politics, power, interaction, nonviolence, reaction, spontaneity Afghanistan, x, 175, 215n53

247

248

INDEX

Agamben, Giorgio, 154, 185n5, 194n16, 202n35 see also bare life ahimsa, see nonviolence, satyagraha Algeria, Kabyles, 78, 89 alienated labor, 4, 16–18, 23, 35, 38, 42, 44, 47, 48, 58, 59, 128, 175, 191n39, 193n6, 217n3 see also violence altruism, 78, 93 see also love Amir, Yigal, 1, 9 animals, 16–17, 28–32, 39, 45–46, 141, 153, 154, 170, 186n3, 186n4, 198n42 Antigone (Sophocles), 75, 88–89, 204n4 apathy, 8, 122, 137 Apology (Plato), 225n74, 225n75 Arendt, Hannah, 7, 35, 101–119, 149, 150, 151, 209n59, 210n5, 210n9, 210n10, 210n12, 211n22, 212n16, 212n30, 212n31, 212n34, 213n38, 213n40, 214n41, 214n43, 215n50, 215n51, 215n55, 219n21, 222n39, 224n64, 228n6, 234n69 against life as the highest good, 177 banality of suffering, 9, 151–154, 228n3, 228n7, 229n18, 229n20 banality of thoughtlessness, 9, 154–159,230n29, 230n32 on conscience, 142, 147, 156–157 definition of politics, 104–105, 233n64 definition of violence, 107, 109, 184n4, 185n5 freedom and, 176, 211n17 Gandhi and, 121, 127, 142, 147, 227n84, 227n85 overestimation of violence as relates to action, 113–115, 117, 125, 210n11, 215n56, 216n58, 216n59, 216n62 as providing a theoretical basis for pacifism, 7, 102–103 Primo Levi and, 159, 164–172, 173, 231n39, 231n40, 233n60, 234n71, 235n90 Socrates and, 172, 226n83, 227n84, 234n72, 234n75

underestimation of violence as relates to power, 7, 112–113 see also action, evil, experience, freedom, pacifism, physical violence, power, satyagraha, suffering, violence Aristotle, 25, 29–30, 42, 104, 107, 187n10, 211n22 Augustine, 159, 195n25 Aung San Suu Kyi, 141 Auschwitz, 10, 55–58, 63, 65, 71, 157, 159, 161–4, 167, 168, 171, 202n36, 203n51, 221n30, 231n39, 233n60, 234n73 as critical case study for theory of violence, 54 see also action, body, Levi, Survival in Auschwitz autonomy Primo Levi as fostering a sense of moral and emotional, 55 problems of recognition preserving, 73 states as wanting to preserve, ix Bar On, Bat-Ami, 233n60 bare life, 154, 202n35 bare subjectivity, 65, 202n35 Barnett, Ross, 142 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 30, 81, 201n24 Benjamin, Walter, 4, 5, 38, 44, 45, 75, 76, 77, 87, 90, 197n38, 205n11 see also Derrida, law, strike, violence Berkeley, George, 92 betrayal, 67, 161 Bhagvad Gita, 213n38, 224n59 Biddle, Stephen, 218n18 body ability and fragility of the, 4, 15–33, 54, 186n8, 190n35, 191n38, 191n39, 191n40 in Auschwitz, 221n30 law and the, 76 Levi’s experiences and his, 58, 59, 168 intersubjective violence and the, 6, 91, 94, 96, 198n43 neither inherently good nor evil, 6

INDEX Polyneices’, 89 preservation of the, 188n19, 196n32 rape and the, 94, 188n18 satyagraha and the, 123, 139, 145, 197n39, 218n16 soul and the, 124, 126, 163, 187n10 subjectivity and the, 70, 72, 73, 92, 95–96, 116, 192n58, 195n25, 196n25, 216n60 utility of the, 35–48, 51, 54–55, 59, 73, 94, 114, 116, 178, 193n6, 196n27, 197n38, 197n40, 198n41, 198n44, 206n30 wartime sacrifice of the, 113, 197n36 see also animal, bare life, creativity, dualism, experience Bondurant, Joan, 219n19, 219n23, 223n55, 225n76, 226n79 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 78, 87, 89, 141 Brison, Susan, 187n15, 192n47 Bulgaria, 130 Burke, Edmund, 111 Burma, 141 Butler, Judith, 184n3 Cambodia, 1, 184n2 Khmer Rouge, 129, 175 Canovan, Margaret, 214n40 capitalism, 16, 18, 24, 44–45, 52, 197n40, 199n2 symbolic capital, 78 Carthage, 110, 214n43 Caygill, Howard, 208n46 China Tiananmen Square, 131 see also Tibet Christ, Jesus, 46, 104 Sermon on the Mount, 123 Christianity, 46, 52 civil disobedience, 7, 10, 104, 125, 140, 142, 147, 205n18, 224n64 civil rights, 90, 140, 226n78 see also United States of America Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 28, 29 Clausewitz, Carl Von, 114, 194n19, 194n21

249

concept of political purpose, 40, 46–47, 51, 52, 53 does not provide adequate basis for conception of intersubjective violence, 51, 59, 92, 94, 95 provides basis for conception of physical violence, 4, 35, 40–43, 74, 82, 194n23 reciprocal action, 25–26, 32, 193n6 satyagraha as undermining important propositions of, 122, 124–126, 136–137 technological advancements in war, 26–27 war in practice, 40–42, 94, 194n18, 195n24 war in theory, 4, 25–27, 32, 40, 94, 194n20, 195n23, 195n24 see also conscious suffering, Gandhi, Hobbes, physical violence, political, power, war, the will Clinton, Bill, 1, 184n1 cogito, 30, 66, 67, 69, 70, 80, 203n43, 203n53, 206n33, 230n34 Cold War, 210n11 colonialism, 43, 175 communism, 1, 123 Congo, xiii conservatives, 52 conscience, 2, 97, 147, 149, 156–157, 218n13, 218n16, 224n66 Levinas on, 84–86 potential for conflict among, 8, 122, 140, 141–143, 150 conscious suffering (tapas), 8, 126, 141, 146, 227n87 demonstrates physical violence is always political, 122, 125–126 as doing what Clausewitz says is impossible, 125, 137 satyagraha and, 138–139, 145 potential for use against Nazi Germany, 130–131 risk compared to use of physical violence, 126–128 reliability of, 127 see also satyagraha

250

INDEX

consent, 2, 9, 43, 108, 127, 128, 137, 211n18, 211n22, 212n31, 230n28 see also noncooperation constitution(s), 111–112, 117, 164, 185n5, 204n5, 211n22, 224n64 creativity, 16, 17, 61, 66, 72, 83, 89, 91, 95, 152, 176, 202n37 bodies and, 19, 22, 23, 26, 42, 96, 109, 110, 191n38, 191n39 creation of totalitarian society, 152, 159, 173 possibility of creating power with physical violence, 112, 117 satyagraha and, 128, 139, 226n76, 226n78 see also spontaneity, subjectivity crime, 46, 52, 67, 81, 154, 158, 159, 161, 177 criminals, 6, 25, 27, 39, 53, 67, 106, 107, 155, 175, 177, 194n16, 217n9, 230n29 The Crises of the Republic (Arendt), 142, 212n22, 215n55, 227n84 critical case study, 54 “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin), 38, 77, 193n13 Czechoslovakia, 141 Prague Spring, 107 daimõn, 109 death, 18, 19, 21, 42, 68, 69, 82, 135, 140, 156, 162, 170, 171, 177, 186n8, 187n8, 201n24, 203n43, 209n67, 213n38 of possibilities, 47, 199n45 camps, 9, 132, 133, 155, 166 fear of, 23, 124, 177, 192n3 power and, 108, 113–114, 116 satyagraha and, 127, 129, 130 social, 94 Socrates’s thoughts on, 146, 170, 225n75 squads, 47 as summum malum, 42, 142, 188n19, 223n47 see also Auschwitz, death penalty, dying well, evil, face

death penalty and sentences, 63, 75, 102,128, 145–146, 158, 170, 177, 209n1, 225n75 deliberation, 10, 154, 229n22 democracy, xi, xiii, 40, 143, 181, 211n18, 225n75, 235n2 Athenian, 104 democratic theory, xii, 176, 180 De Cive (Hobbes), 15, 188n19 Denmark, 130, 219n21 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 75–76, 77, 87, 90, 205n11, 205n12 Descartes, René, 67, 68 despotism, 29 see also tyranny Dewey, John, 5, 76–78, 205n13 as providing partial basis for concept of intersubjective violence, 87–88 see also power, violence Dietz, Mary, 171 Diodotus, 177 diplomacy, 7, 10 Disch, Lisa, 228n3 discipline, 16, 19–20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 29, 32, 38, 42, 47, 78, 190n26 ex-sergeant Steinlauf and, 164 meaning of violence for Foucault and, 36–38, 44 satyagraha and, 138, 223n47 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 19, 36, 37, 58, 200n16 discordant dispositions, 6, 74, 88, 91–96, 140, 146, 181 see also intersubjective violence discourse, 16, 84, 85, 86 see also language, speech the drowned, 151, 162–163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 174, 233n60, 234n71, 235n90 The Drowned and the Saved (Levi), 162, 171, 200n17, 203n51, 231n39, 234n70 dualism, 92 duty, 40, 81–82, 87, 89, 136 see also obligation Dworkin, Andrea, 118n18 dying well, 93, 125–126

INDEX Eichmann, Adolph, 154–159, 168–169, 179, 234n75 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 158, 228n6, 230n29, 218n21, 221n35 elenchus (Socratic method), 8, 122, 140, 144–147, 174, 226n83, 227n88 see also satyagraha The Elements of the Law (Hobbes), 36, 189n22 enemies, 20, 26, 95, 107, 110, 113, 115, 121, 124, 143, 183n2, 194n20, 194n21, 195n23, 195n24, 213n36, 213n38 environmental degradation, 5, 10, 45, 198n41 envy, 53 equality, 42, 90, 208n50, 226n82 physical, 22–24, 26, 40, 187n16, 189n22 see also inequality ethics, 19, 29, 90, 93, 179, 208n56, 227n84 Levi’s experience with Alex as boundary condition for, 59 Levinas and, 70, 82, 84–86, 203n53 pacifism and, 150–151 physical violence and, 2, 43, 227n1 political ethic of a credible pacifism, 8–9, 48, 172, 174, 178–179 potential for intersubjective violence in, 6, 10, 141, 146, 227n1 satyagraha and, 136, 139, 141, 146, 147, 178 see also action, evil, morality, politics, Notebooks for an Ethics ethnic cleansing, 43, 235n2 evil, 6, 9, 44, 53, 92, 124, 157, 224n65, 233n45 banality of, 153–156, 230n29, 231n39, 234n75 death as greatest natural, 23, 188n19 radical, 165 experience, 67, 71, 103, 104, 161, 162, 202n28, 206n26, 208n56, 209n67, 216n62, 228n1 Arendt and, 153, 155, 159 definition of, 91–92

251

of discordant dispositions (intersubjective violence), 6, 74, 77, 80, 86, 87–88, 90–97, 142 Levi’s, 5, 54, 58, 60, 63–66, 69–71, 73–74, 200n11, 200n18, 232n49 of suffering and comfort, 9, 161–164, 166–168, 171, 173–174, 179 of physical fragility, 19, 20, 28, 30, 31, 113, 191n43 of nonviolence, 130, 220n24 see also intersubjective violence, William James existentialism (existentialists), 30, 47, 67, 69, 194n19, 205n49 see also phenomenology face, 55, 58, 159, 160, 224n61, 232n45 of death, 135, 156 Levinas and the, 61–62, 68, 70–71, 84–86, 94–95, 201n24, 202n36 police as faceless, 76, 205n11 of nonviolence, 119, 137, 148, 218n13, 219n19, 223n47 of suffering, 168 of violence, 108, 119, 123, 131, 148, 181, 213n38 faith, 141, 143, 148, 165, 172, 179, 202n36 Fanon, Franz, 46, 96 fascism, x, 3, 53, 95, 96, 123, 132, 176, 209n67, 231n39 see also totalitarianism fear, 4, 8, 19, 23–26, 30, 31, 32, 119, 122, 124, 127, 131–134, 139, 140, 167, 176, 177, 192n3, 207n37, 211n18, 233n67 feminism, 21, 22, 42, 52, 53 femininity, 42, 82, 192n47 Final Solution, 132, 134, 221 force, x, xi, 17, 21, 22, 25–26, 28, 29, 31, 36, 37, 40, 47, 55, 76–77, 79, 81, 84, 114, 115, 119, 125, 128, 133, 134, 136, 138, 142, 143, 148, 149, 157, 171, 176, 185n6, 185n7, 188n22, 193n11, 194n20, 195n23, 198n41, 205n11, 205n17, 207n37, 218n18, 222n43 soul, 126, 141, 218n16, 227n84

252

INDEX

“Force of Law” (Derrida), 75 “Force, Violence, and Law” (Dewey), 76 Foucault, Michel, 4, 16, 19–20, 22, 23, 24, 27, 47, 190n26, 193n6, 235n2 conception of violence, 36–38, 42, 44, Primo Levi’s experiences and, 58, 59, 200n16, 200n17, 233n53 see also discipline, political, power, punishment, violence freedom, 7, 40, 46, 110, 138, 170, 173, 179, 192n57, 219n23, 228n1, 223n46 Arendt and, 111, 211n17, 211n22, 214n41, 216n68, 224n64 as a fact, 5, 6, 65, 72, 88, 93, 105, 106, 111, 114, 138, 176, 180, 224n61 Hegel and, 187n8 Marx and, 17–18, 186n3, 186n4 murderous, 66, 68–70, 72, 82, 85, 203n52, 203n53 Levi and, 56, 59, 232n46 Levinas and, 70, 82–86, 89, 94–95 Locke and, 193n14 problems of, 5, 6, 11, 54, 65–74, 203n45, 203n50, 203n53 responsibility and, 179–181 Gandhi and, 138, 223n46 violence and, 81–89, 94–95, 114, 138, 140, 176 see also action, Arendt, intersubjectivity, Levi, Levinas, physical violence, recognition, spontaneity, swaraj (selfrule), violence Freidan, Betty, x friends, 59, 64, 134, 140, 146, 155, 168 Friends of Tibet, 141 France, 130 ancien regime, 175 Bastille, 175 French Revolution, 112, 117, 177, 229n18 Freud, Sigmund, 28–29 frustration, 6, 7, 73, 76, 77, 87, 88, 92, 93, 95, 101, 102, 111, 113, 119, 132, 205n17, 229n20 see also action, politics

Galtung, Johan, 204n2 Gandhi, Mahatma, ix, x, 8, 9, 10, 97, 122–128, 130, 132, 136–148, 172, 178, 211n18, 217n2, 218n13, 218n15, 218n18, 219n22, 220n24, 222n39, 222n40, 223n46, 223n47, 223n55, 224n65, 224n66, 224n68, 227n85, 227n87, 235n87, 236n4 Arendt and, 121, 127, 142, 147, 227n84, 227n85 Clausewitz and, 125–126 Gita and, 224n59 Socrates and, 70, 122, 143–148, 178, 225n76, 226n79, 226n83, 227n84 Weber and, 217n8 see also action, conscience, freedom, Indian independence movement, love, satyagraha, Socrates, swaraj, violence gender, 16, 21, 22, 23, 42, 43, 187n18, 192n47, 212n26 genocide, ix, xiii, 43, 118, 135, 210n5, 216n56, 233n68, 234n69 Germany, 57, 58, 121, 122, 129, 130–134, 221n27, 231n39 German Army, 130–1 German people, 134 police battalions (Einsatzgruppen), 133–134 Dresden, 175 see also Final Solution, Hitler, Kristallnacht, nonviolence, pacifism glory, 23, 52, 213n38 God(s), 28, 39, 52, 138, 141, 146, 150, 158, 174, 195n25, 224n59, 224n68, 225n74, 230n28, 231n43 Gorgias (Plato), 145 Gray, Glenn, 184n4 gray zone, 171 greed, 40, 52, 53, 155 Greeks, Ancient, x, 75, 110, 213n40, 214n43, 215n47, 215n51 see also Achilles, Aristotle, Pericles, Plato, Homer, Trojan War, Socrates, Thucydides Guaraldo, Olivia, 231n40

INDEX guilt, 8, 141, 192n53 see also shame Habermas, Jürgen, 211n16 habit, 69, 72, 78, 89, 91, 92, 95, 116, 122, 127, 137–138, 168, 223n48 see also pacifism, peace Halpern, Cynthia, 154, 229n18 Hanssen, Beatrice, 193n13 Havel, Václav, x, 147, 178, 236n7 Hegel, G. W. F., x, 4, 16, 18–19, 23, 29, 42, 58, 60, 66, 80, 186n8, 191n42, 196n27, 201n24, 203n43, 205n25, 206n33, 208n46, 226n79 see also slavery Heidegger, Martin, x, 76 Herz, John, 189n22 Hobbes, Thomas, 4, 15–17, 18, 23–25, 31–32, 36, 42, 44, 53, 59, 67, 85–86, 122, 177, 188n19, 188n21, 188n22, 190n25, 190n30, 192n3, 196n32, 217n9, 223n47 Clausewitz and, 26, 27, 124, 136–137 Foucault and, 38 Freud and, 28 Hegel and, 19 Levinas and, 85–86 Locke and, 39, 44 Marcus and, 21, 22, 24, 187n15 Strauss and, 190n28 see also action, body, death, fear, power, pride, security dilemma, summum malum, soul(s), war Hoffman, Piotr, 184n3 Holocaust (Shoah), 5, 8, 9, 129, 155, 159, 160, 167, 219n20, possibility of using satyagraha during, 132, 133–135, 151 see also Auschwitz, Levi, totalitarianism, World War II Homer, 102, 110, 118, 213n38, 214n40, 215n56 Homer, Frederic, 235n90 homo sapiens, 32, 46 see also human nature Horsburgh, H. J. N., 130, 143, 220n25

253

history (storytelling), ix-x, 1, 3, 19, 22, 33, 37, 47, 52, 53, 54, 108, 109, 110, 113, 115 117, 125, 129, 130, 136, 150, 151–152, 162–163, 164, 174, 176, 186n8, 187n11, 218n13, 219n19, 219n21, 222n43, 231n40, 232n48 Hitler, Adolph, 8, 121, 122, 129–130, 131, 132, 133, 217n2, 220n24, 220n25 The Human Condition (Arendt), 229n20 human rights, 174 humanness and human nature, 52, 53, 92, 93, 151, 152, 153, 164, 165, 167, 170–173, 190n25, 199n2, 216n56, 231n39 see also homo sapiens humanism, 233n53 Hungary, 108, 219n23 ideology, 3, 6, 37, 39, 44, 52, 93, 123, 152, 175, 178, 180, 217n4 immoral, 3, 10, 52, 138, 141, 146, 149, 198n41, 228n1 see also moral(s) Indian independence movement, x, 117, 121, 125, 140, 141, 223n46 inequality, 90 see also equality injustice, xii, 10, 36, 39, 52, 53, 82, 125, 126, 143, 169, 170, 172, 180, 203n53, 218n13, 227n84, 235n87 see also ethics, justice institutions, x, xi, xii, 6, 32, 33, 55, 74, 90, 104, 110, 151, 153, 166, 180–181, 211n18 interaction, 5–6, 8, 10, 32, 46, 57–58, 59, 60, 70, 73, 74, 81, 85, 86, 87, 88 intersubjective violence, 5–6, 74, 82, 85, 87 definition of, 6, 88–89, 91–92 ethics and, 10, 90, 142, 227n1 satyagraha and, 8, 10, 122, 140, 142, 144, 205n18 physical violence and, 6, 8, 11, 73, 92–96, 198n43 politics and, 101, 111, 117

254

INDEX

intersubjective violence (cont.) see also action, Clausewitz, ethics, experience, Dewey, freedom, Levi, pacifism, physical violence, subjectivity, violence intersubjectivity, 5, 54, 60–72, 73, 74, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 90, 91, 101, 105, 109, 110, 116, 119, 126, 147, 200n11, 202n37, 207n33 attempts to reject or overcome, 95–97, 105, 114, 116–117, 147, 209n67, 211n16, 216n62 freedom and, 7, 65–72 Gandhi and, 142 as having potential for pain, 54, 73, 88, 97 as peaceful, 66–67, 69, 70, 97 as primordial, 61, 202n28, 205n26 separation and, 53, 54, 69, 104 see also frustration, interaction, intersubjective violence, peace, recognition, subjectivity Iraq, x, 175, 223n48 Islam, xiii Israel, 1, 189n22, 231n43 Italy, see Rome Iyer, Raghavan, 148, 172, 217n2, 218n13, 227n85, 235n87 James, William, 91–92 Japan, 121 Hiroshima, 175 Jay, Martin, 184n3, 192n56 Johnston, David, 188n21, 190n30 Jews, 132–135, 217n2, 221n29, 231n39, 232n43 in Germany, 132–134, 221n27, 221n28 Jewish Army, 102, 132, 210n5 judgment, 57, 88, 136, 153, 154–158, 159, 166, 169, 170, 172, 178, 180, 196n32, 201n25, 217n2, 230n27, 231n40, 233n67 justice, xii, 8, 10, 25, 29, 39, 40, 44, 53, 83, 84, 86, 97, 118, 140, 141, 143, 145, 150, 169, 170, 172, 178, 179–180, 185n5, 196n33, 208n50,

211n22, 217n9, 225n75, 226n82, 227n84, 227n1, 231n37 see also ethics, injustice, and morality just war theory, xii, 3, 220n25 Kant, Immanuel, 156, 157, 230n27, 230n28 see also evil (radical) Kateb, George, 172, 213n40 Keane, John, 184n4, 185n6 King Jr., Martin Luther, x, 140, 178, 226n78 knowledge, 10, 16, 37, 58, 62, 63, 64, 65, 73, 83, 84, 89, 135, 143, 192n52, 202n36, 208n52, 213n38 Kristallnacht, 134 language, 21, 24, 38, 69, 74, 85, 164, 165, 167, 168, 186n7, 199n45, 202n36, 212n34 see also discourse, speech law, 5, 7, 25, 38, 41, 52, 74–77, 79, 83, 86, 87–88, 90, 111, 112, 115, 117, 132, 133, 135, 140, 146, 157, 159, 166, 177, 180, 185n5, 186n4, 193n8, 193n14, 195n23, 208n56, 211n18, 215n51, 216n59, 218n16 decision by arms as, 124, 194n20 natural, 39, 194n17 see also body, constitution(s), criminals, violence legitimacy, xii, 8, 139, 179, 217n3, 227n87 Levi, Primo, 5, 10, 53, 54, 66, 73, 82, 85, 151, 159, 199n4, 200n17, 203n51, 231n39, 231n40, 232n48, 232n49, 233n53, 233n55, 234n71, 234n73, 234n74, 234n78, 235n90 chemical exam in Auschwitz, 55–60, 63–64, 74, 83, 89, 159, 200n11, 200n13, 200n15, 200n18, 202n36, paradox posed by his poem Shema, 9, 159–174, 179, 232n44, 235n90 problem of recognition and, 64–65 problem of freedom and, 69–72 see also Arendt, autonomy, the drowned, ethics, experience, free-

INDEX dom, Foucault, Gandhi, gray zone, guilt, knowledge, life, pacifism, intersubjective violence, shame Leviathan (Hobbes), 15, 36 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 54, 60–63, 65–66, 67–69, 70, 71, 74, 80, 82–86, 87, 89, 91, 94, 95, 176, 203n50, 203n51, 203n52, 203n53, 207n38, 208n46, 208n49, 208n52, 224n61, 230n34 critique of political theory, 74, 82–86 see also action, conscience, ethics, face, freedom, Hobbes, power, violence liberalism, xii, 16, 123, 177, 235n2 life, 24, 73, 89, 90, 92, 136, 143, 161, 164, 165, 171, 173, 179, 189n22, 190n28, 191n42, 196n26, 196n30, 197n35, 222n40, 225n75, 227n85, 233n60, 234n73, 236n7 Achilles’, 109 activity, 17, 29, 44, 177 not the highest good for pacifism, 177–178, 235n2, 236n4 bios, 107, 109, 177 and death, 21, 166, 170, 186n8, 201n24 Eichmann’s, 155, 158 Levi’s, 55, 56, 58, 71, 163, 168, 200n11, 200n13 partisan, 102 physical, 18, 24, 110, 113, 131, 135, 142, 162, 170, 177–178, 187n15, 212n26, 214n41, 217n9, 223n47 political, 60 ways of, 10, 139, 140, 142 see also Arendt, bare life, body, death, material Locke, John, x, 4, 38–39, 44, 142, 177, 180, 194n14, 194n17 see also violence looking, 5, 15, 30–31, 35, 46, 47, 56–57, 58, 59, 60, 61–64, 69–71, 79, 80, 87, 91, 97, 128, 142, 166, 190n35, 192n52, 197n35, 199n45, 204n55 see also perception, objectification, touch Louisiana, 175 love, 2, 8, 52, 67, 80, 104, 115, 122, 136,

255

138–139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 150, 155, 174, 209n67, 210n12, 220n25, 222n43, 223n57, 231n43 Lukes, Stephen, 222n39 lying, 10, 44, 81, 197n37 lynching, 43, 47 Machiavelli, Niccolò, xi, xii, 42, 46, 96, 114, 117, 123, 142, 180, 196n33, 214n41, 217n5 see also action MacKinnon, Catherine, 188n18 Madison, James, 112 Malcolm X, 42 Marcus, Sharon, 4, 16, 21–22, 23, 24, 42, 187n15, 187n18 see also Hobbes, rape Markell, Patchen, 60 Marx, Karl, x, 4, 16, 17–18, 19, 23, 24, 28, 29, 42, 44, 58, 104, 177, 186n3, 193n6, 196n26, 205n25, 208n46, 208n49, 226n79 see also alienated labor, freedom, power material interests, desires, and ends, 8, 10, 38, 78, 92–93, 119, 125, 126–128, 130, 131, 134, 136, 197n40 interests linked with moral interests, 139–40, 142 explanations for conflict, 21, 35, 93, 122 Mayer, Jane, 209n2 Mayflower Compact, 112 McCormick, John, 205n12 McGowan, John, 112, 210n10 Means and ends (instrumentality), xi, 3, 7, 10, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 28, 32, 40–43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 76–77, 86, 102, 106, 107, 112, 113, 115, 118, 123–124, 127, 132, 137, 146, 147, 176, 177, 180, 194n20, 194n21, 195n23, 195n24, 196n30–32, 197n40, 199n45, 205n17, 206n30, 207n35, 212n34, 213n36, 216n60, 219n21 see also action Mearsheimer, John, 189n22

256

INDEX

Melian dialogue, 83 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5, 54, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 79, 80, 81, 87, 89, 91, 92, 201n25, 202n28, 203n43, 203n45, 203n53, 205n25, 206n26, 207n35, 230n34 see also perception, violence Middle Ages, 104 Mill, John Stuart, 29, 30 The Monkey’s Wrench (Levi), 163 Montesquieu, Charles de, 180 moral(s), xi–xii, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 55, 57, 59, 68, 69, 84, 86, 97, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 134, 143, 147, 149, 150, 154, 157, 159, 168, 170, 171, 172, 178, 195n23, 203n51, 211n18, 215n50, 218n13, 218n15, 220n25, 223n50, 227n85, 230n28, 232n46, 236n5 capacities, 2, 30, 131, 151, 187n15, material interests and, 136–141 potential brutality of, 142–143 see also ethics, immoral, soul Nazism, x, 8, 102, 122, 129–135, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 158, 209n67, 219n21, 220n25, 221n27, 221n29, 221n33, 230n29, 231n39 see also Germany, Hitler, pacifism necessity, 2, 42, 48, 60, 66, 68–69, 70, 83, 107, 114, 123, 129, 155, 169, 186n8, 190n25, 191n38, 196n25, 201n22, 203n43, 207n35, 214n41, 225n75, 226n78, 233n55 violence and, 2–3, 7, 35, 52, 89, 95, 97, 112, 117, 119, 121, 170, 176–179, 180, 193n11, 196n30, 196n32, 213n40, 215n54, 217n3, 217n4, 234n69 Neighborhood Watch, 27 Nietzche, Friedrich, x, 46, 104, 233n53 noncooperation, 125, 130, 138, 223n47 see also consent, civil disobedience, nonviolence, satyagraha nonviolence (ahimsa), ix, 87, 123, 125, 128, 137, 139–141, 149, 217n2, 220n24, 222n40

Bulgaria, 130 Denmark, 130, 219n21 equivalent to violence, 136 Germany, 8, 121, 217n2, 219n19, 220n24 Hungarian revolution, 108 Japan, 121 Levinas and, 85 moral reliability and, 149 Norway, 130 power and, 9–10, 108, 117, 121, 127 provoking violence, 228n1 Russia, 121, 217n2, 220n23 Tibet, 217 violence of, 140, 205n18 see also action, Burma, China, civil disobedience, Czechoslovakia, experience, face, noncooperation, satyagraha, soul (force), United States of America Norway, 130 Notebooks for an Ethics (Sartre), 80–81, 82, 197n37, 206n30 nothingness, 61, 62, 201n22, 207n37 nuclear weapons, ix, x, 27, 32, 33 Nye, Joseph S., 212n22 Oakeshott, Michael, 23 obligation, 78, 81–82, 87, 89, 232n46 objectification (objectivation), 4, 20, 29–30, 39, 46–47, 61, 66, 67, 69, 81, 92, 96, 190n35, 191n37, 192n57, 192n58, 201n25, 203n41, 204n53, 206n30 see also physical violence Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 88–89 Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 151, 155, 165, 228n3, 228n6 Oslo peace accords, 1 the Other, 30–31, 46, 61–65, 66, 68, 70–71, 81, 84–85, 94–95, 124, 187n8, 192n52, 192n53, 192n57, 194n20, 198n44, 199n45, 201n22, 201n24, 201n26, 203n43, 204n53, 204n55, 206n30, 206n33, 207n37 as clouded mirror, 61–62 Owens, Patricia, 110, 154, 210n5, 216n56, 216n58, 234n69

INDEX pacifism (search pacifists) Arendt and, 102, 103, 119, 154 burdens and obligations of, 3, 9, 11, 35, 53–54, 129, 172, credible and political brand of, xi-xii, 7, 8, 10, 43, 48, 53, 86, 96–97, 103, 118–119, 122, 150, 172, 174, 176–181, 236n5 critiques of, 123–124, 127, 129, 135, 154, 179, 222n37 Levi and, 172, 174 Nazi Germany and, 129, 133, 135, 151, 219n19 problems with present formulations of, 2–3, 52–53, 150 potential for intersubjective violence and destructiveness, 8, 149 habits of, 138 Socrates and, 174, 178 Weber and, 123–124, 179 see also elenchus, ethics, life, freedom, means and ends, satyagraha paradox, 2, 86, 114, 122, 124, 159, 170, 186n8, 192n58, 234n79 of comfort and suffering, 9, 159–165, 169, 172–174, 179, 232n49 see also Levi, Socrates Parekh, Bhikhu, 139, 145, 211n18, 217n2, 223n50, 224n65, 225n76, 227n87 Parel, Anthony, 139 patriarchy, 129 peace, 42, 97, 150, 160, 218n15 communities, 219n23 habit of, 127, 137, 138, 222n43, 223n48 intersubjectivity and, 66–70, 79, 85, 203n43 torture and, 102 war treaties and, 1, 110, 115, 184n1, 196n30, 214n45 with oneself, 157 see also intersubjectivity, pacifism, Oslo peace accords Pearl Harbor, 175 perception, 5, 21, 61, 70, 79–80, 81, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 153, 201n25, 202n28, 206n26

257

see also action, looking, touch, violence performance, 46, 97, 215n53 Pericles, 118, 213n38 see also Thucydides The Periodic Table (Levi), 199n4 phenomena, 5, 7, 21, 26, 31–32, 35, 37, 43, 47, 48, 74, 78, 82, 86, 89, 107, 109, 118, 119, 121, 166, 167, 192n58, 195n23, 197n40 phenomenology (phenomenologists), 5, 30, 47, 60, 66, 69, 74, 76, 82, 86, 88, 91, 104, 137, 184n3 see also existentialism Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty), 201n25, 202n28, 203n43, 206n26 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 18, 60, 187n8, 191n42, 196n27 physical violence, 60, 67, 78, 82, 151, 177, 204n1, 205n25, 206n30, 210n5, 210n11, 213n38, 214n41 definition of, 4–5, 40–48, 216n60 effectiveness and ineffectiveness of, xxi, 7–9, 102–119, 121–135, 176–178 explanations for occurrence of, 51–53, 59 freedom and, 176, 180 intersubjective violence and, 5–6, 54, 73–74, 90, 92–97, 111, 117, 228n1 political and anti-political qualities of, 8, 103–119, 122, 125, 149–150, 215n55, 229n20 power and, xi, 7–11, 76, 79, 101–119, 121, 124, 125, 127–130, 136, 148, 150, 176, 178, 185n6, 216n57, 216n62 rarity of, 136–137 responsibility and, 179–180 satyagraha and, 123–143, 144, 146, 147–148, 150, 172, 227n87 veneer of reliability, 2, 117, 119, 149 violence as required response to, 2, 7–8, 121, 130, 175–176, 178, 199n1 see also action, alienated labor, Arendt, body, Clausewitz, conscious suffering, creativity, discipline, ethics, experience, intersubjective violence,

258

INDEX

physical violence (cont.) means and ends, necessity, objectification, slavery, torture, rape, violence, the will Plato, 104, 117, 154, 157, 159 pleasure, 42, 48, 74, 196n26 consumer, 45 of harming bodies, 46, 198n43 sexual, 22 plurality, 7, 66, 68, 79, 85–86, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 119, 143, 148, 149, 173, 176, 180, 214n40, 215n50, 216n68, 235n90 scandal of, 69, 72 see also action Poland, 141 political economy of the body, 19, 36–37, 42, 193n6 ends, goals, objects, purposes and principles, 40–42, 46–47, 51–52, 96, 150, 176–178, 183n2, 194n18, 194n20, 195n24, 214n41, 218n18, 227n87 strike, 8, 38, 45, 124–125 see also action, Clausewitz political theory, philosophy, and theorists, x-xi, 2, 3–4, 16, 35, 39, 42, 52, 60, 96, 102, 103, 106, 129, 159, 163, 174, 175, 183n1, 185n4 Levinas’ critique of, 74, 83–86 politics aesthetic violence and, 96 ethics, justice and, 25, 85–86, 150, 172, 174, 176, 178–180, 218n15, 225n74, 225n75, 227n85 as its own end, 107 violence and, ix-xiii, 1–11, 101–150, 175–181, 207n33, 210n10, 210n11, 214n40, 218n18 satyagraha and, 122–129, 136–143, 145–147, 150, 172, 174, 178, 180, 222n40, 235n5 see also Arendt, action, freedom, frustration, intersubjective violence, physical violence, plurality, power, public, speech, unpredictability

“Politics as a Vocation” (Weber), 123, 179 poverty, 24, 52, 170, 213n38, 225n74 power, xi, 8, 68, 75, 155, 166, 208n50, 212n31, 221n36, 222n39, 233n64 as action in concert (Arendt), 7, 105–119, 150, 152, 215n47, 215n53 Clausewitz and, 25–26, 40, 195n23, 195n24 Dewey and, 76–77, 205n17 divine, 29, 143, 195n25 Foucault and, 19, 37, 58, 193n6 Hobbes and, 24, 188n22 Levinas and, 68, 84, 85, 203n53 Marx and, 18, 29, 193n6, 196n26 physical violence and, xi, 7–8, 9–10, 76, 79, 101–119, 121, 124, 125, 136, 148, 150, 176, 178, 185n6, 216n57, 216n62 rape and, 21–22 satyagraha and, 8–9, 10, 121, 127–129, 130, 135, 136, 137, 139, 142, 143, 148, 149–150, 180, 218n13, 219n21 self-sufficiency of, 7, 11, 101–119 separation of, 180 soft and hard, 212n22 torture and fiction of, 42 will to, 46 see also Arendt, action, creativity, death, nonviolence, politics, violence prayer, 160, 206n33, 207n33, 232n43 pride, 23, 30, 40, 52, 53, 213n38, 220n25 prison, 32, 47, 124, 128, 135 prisoners, 20, 65, 70, 164, 171, 191n43, 203n51, 234n71, 234n73 property, 3, 5, 10, 38, 39, 44, 75, 90, 128, 174, 177, 194n14, 197n40, 217n3 see also violence public personal and, 3, 6, 42 realm (space of appearances), 22, 42, 104, 109, 110, 111, 112, 124, 133–135, 139, 175, 214n40, 221n33, 230n32 satyagraha and leaving space for others, 146, 150 sword, 24, 36 punishment, 4, 19–20, 21, 23, 24, 26,

INDEX 36–37, 38, 47, 75, 113, 145, 154–155, 177, 190n26, 209n67, 230n29, 231n37 see also discipline, prison, prisoners rape, xi, 4, 16, 21–23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 35, 42, 46, 47, 48, 51, 59, 94, 128, 129, 185n7, 187n15, 187n18, 196n29 see also body, power rationality, 24, 29, 85, 168, 225n76 reaction, xi, 2, 9, 46, 93, 113, 116, 127, 138, 152, 153, 154, 169, 175, 180, 228n1 realism, xii, 10, 48, 106, 147, 150, 154, 176, 178, 180, 189n22 recognition, freedom and problems of, 63, 66, 73 a minimal amount of as necessary and primordial, 60–61 Oedipus and, 88 problems of, 5, 54, 60–65, 70, 72, 73, 81, 82, 95, 122, 161, 192n53, 201n24, 202n36, 206n33 satyagraha and, 143–144, 220n24, 220n25 see also autonomy, Levi Rejali, Darius, 187n11, 190n27, 209n2 republicanism, xii, 3, 123, 177, 180, 208n49 responsibility, 58, 124, 133, 134, 147, 172, 179–180, 236n7 see also action, freedom, physical violence Responsibility and Judgment (Arendt) 156 revolution, ix, x, 38, 43, 52, 53, 103, 108, 112, 117–118, 141, 152, 175, 177, 217n3, 229n18 Robespierre, Maximilien, 117 Rome (and Romans), 4, 96, 110, 115, 153, 185n6, 214n43, 215n51, 216n59, 229n10 Rosenberg, M. J., 1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 53, 104, 229n18 Russia (and Soviet Union), ix, 108, 121, 129, 131, 153, 177, 220n23, 221n29, 235n2

259

Russian soldiers, 131 see also nonviolence Rwanda, 129, 221n36 Sade, Marquis de, 46, 209 sadness, 229n22, 231n39 Sandel, Michael, 60 Santoni, Ronald, 206n29 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4, 5, 16, 30–32, 46–47, 54, 60–61, 63, 65–66, 68, 69, 71, 80–82, 87, 89, 91, 92, 94, 176, 192n56, 192n57, 197n37, 201n24, 202n41, 206n29, 206n33, 207n35, 230n34 see also looking, nothingness, objectification, the Other, plurality (scandal of), recognition, separation, violence satyagraha, 8, 122–148, 150, 172, 174, 178, 180, 218n13, 218n15, 223n15, 235n87 definition of, 8, 122, 124–125, 225n76 Holocaust and potential for use of, 132–135 World War II and potential for use of, 122, 129–131, 135 see also action, body, creativity, death, discipline, elenchus, ethics, civil disobedience, conscious suffering, intersubjective violence, noncooperation, nonviolence, physical violence, politics, public, recognition, soul (force), swaraj, truth, war Scarry, Elaine, 4, 16, 20, 23, 24, 29, 42 see also torture Second Treatise of Government (Locke), 38 security dilemma, 188n22 separation, 62, 65, 66, 69, 72, 104, 202n36 see also freedom, intersubjectivity, power, plurality segregation, 125, 142 self-defense, 52, 109, 187n15 selfishness, 52, 53, 142 serial killers, 46 sex, 22, 23, 26, 31–32, 46, 47, 90, 188n18, 209n67 see also violence Shakespeare, William, 189n22

260

INDEX

shame, 8, 30, 31, 55, 58, 68, 69, 83–84, 85, 86, 141, 152, 166, 171, 192n53, 200n17, 203n51, 203n53, 224n61, 225n72 see also guilt Sharp, Gene, 219n22, 221n33 slavery, xi, 4, 16, 19, 23–24, 26, 31, 33, 42, 47, 48, 51, 58, 60, 107, 128, 175, 179, 187n10, 191n38, 196n27, 201n21, 201n24, 209n67 socialism, 40 Socrates, x, 8–9, 70, 74, 104, 122, 140, 144–147, 151, 157, 159, 168, 169, 170–171, 172, 174, 178, 185n5, 208n52, 225n70, 225n72, 225n76, 226n78, 226n83, 227n84, 227n88, 231n37, 234n72, 234n75, 236n5 see also action, Arendt, conscience, elenchus, death, dying well, Gandhi, law, pacifism Socratic method, see elenchus Sontag, Susan, 209n67 Sorel, Georges, 38, 96 soul(s), 56, 124, 126, 163, 231n43, 187n10, 188n21 being more concerned about one’s city than one’s, xii, 123, 142, 179 care of the, 170, 171 force, 126, 141, 218n16, 222n43, 227n84 see also body, daimõn South Africa, ix space of appearances, see public speech, 7, 10, 104–105, 106, 109, 114, 116, 118, 151, 159, 212n34, 213n36, 220n25, 222n40 see also action, diplomacy, discourse, language, spontaneity spontaneity, 64, 68, 83–86, 87, 89, 91, 105, 106, 111, 113, 152, 167, 228n7 see also action, creativity, freedom, unpredictability subjectivity, 35, 36, 41, 43, 44, 46, 51, 52, 53–54, 62–63, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 79, 84, 85, 86, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 108, 116, 118, 124, 141, 195n25,

202n28, 202n36, 203n45, 203n47, 204n53, 205n26, 206n30, 216n60 see also bare subjectivity, body, intersubjectivity, nothingness, physical violence, the will suffering, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 20, 26, 27, 54, 55, 57, 66, 72, 73, 83, 86, 89, 96, 101, 110, 111, 116, 122, 125–128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 150, 151–154, 158, 159–166, 168–174, 178–181, 191n43, 204n53, 214n45, 217n2, 218n16, 223n51, 224n60, 224n66, 227n87, 229n20, 232n49 see also Arendt, conscious suffering, experience, face, frustration, paradox suicide, 43, 217n2 summum malum, 42, 188n19, 223n47 survival, 40, 45, 52, 85, 93, 127, 132, 164, 183n2, 188n22, 234n71 Survival in Auschwitz (Levi), 5, 9, 53, 54–55, 159, 162, 165, 170, 234n73 Stalin, Joseph, 121, 129, 153, 217n2 the state, 16, 21, 24–25, 32, 36, 38, 39, 45, 75–76, 125, 129, 132, 140, 188n22, 190n26, 190n27, 195n23, 195n24, 197n36, 211n18, 213n36, 218n13, 223n55, 225n75, 235n2 see also autonomy state of war, see war storytelling, see history Strauss, Leo, 190n28 strikes, 8, 38, 44–45, 75, 124, 127, 128, 135, 143, 193n11, 197n39 see also political (strike), violence swaraj (self-rule), 137, 223n46 see also freedom T Take Back the Night, 27 Taylor, Charles, 60 technology, x, 19–20, 26–28, 33, 197n40, 212n30 terror and terrorism, xi, xiii, 36, 37, 43, 46, 102, 128, 137–138, 178, 205n25, 210n3

INDEX thinking, 17, 25, 55, 66, 67, 104, 143, 145–146, 150, 153, 155, 157–159, 160, 161, 162, 166–167, 169–170, 171, 172, 178–178, 198n44, 199n45, 200n11, 207n38, 225n70, 226n83, 230n27, 230n32 see also action, paradox, thought, thoughtlessness, thoughtfulness, Socrates Thirty Tyrants, 170 Thoreau, Henry David, 142, 227n84 thought, 56, 61, 88, 92, 145–146, 153, 171, 187n15, 198n44, 199n45, 200n13, 201n25, 207n37, 207n38, 223n46, 225n76, 232n45 thoughtfulness, 7, 9, 10, 11, 159, 168–170, 234n72 thoughtlessness, 9, 151, 155–159, 164, 168, 234n75 see also Arendt Thucydides, 118, 177, 185n5, 204n5 see also Melian dialogue Tibet, 141, 217n2 see also China torture, xi, 4, 16, 20–21, 23, 24, 26, 29, 33, 42, 46, 47, 51, 59, 95, 102, 114, 128, 129, 159, 183n2, 185n5, 187n11, 190n27, 209n2, 231n39, 235n2 see also power totalitarianism, x, 105, 108, 130, 151–154, 158–159, 173, 174, 216n58, 219n19, 228n3, 229n11, 233n67, 235n90 see also communism, creativity, fascism Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 80, 82 touch, 5, 31, 43, 56, 58, 60, 63, 69, 71, 79, 134 see also untouchables Trojan War, 102, 109, 110, 215n47, 215n56 truth, 62, 97, 136, 138–139, 140, 141, 142, 143–144, 146, 147, 148, 172, 187n8, 201n24, 202n36, 222n43, 223n50, 224n68, 226n76, 226n78, 231n40 see also satyagraha

261

tyranny and tyrants, xi, 128, 137–138, 223n47, 228n7 see also Thirty Tyrants United Kingdom (Britain), 113, 117, 125, 141, 142, 146, 221, 223n46 London, 175 United Nations, 47, 165 United States of America, x, 1, 9, 128, 147, 175, 184n2, 211n22, 221n29, 223n48 African Americans, 125, 232n49 American Revolution, 112, 117 American South, 47, 90, 140, 141, 142 Founders of, 111 Native Americans, 113, 117 Constitution of, 112, 117, 224n64 see also civil rights, Pearl Harbor unpredictability, 66, 71, 72, 96, 106, 111, 114–116, 118, 147, 151–152, 202n36, 215n55, 229n20 see also freedom, spontaneity untouchables, 222n40 utilitarianism, 76 see also body, means and ends Velvet Revolutions, x violence alienated labor as, 38, 42, 44, 47, 48, 217n3 choice as, 5, 80–82, 86, 87, 88, 89. 91, 95, 96 cycle of, 97, 176, 178 deficiencies in definitions of, 3–4, 36–40, 87, 89–90, 184n3, 184n4 destroying property as, 3, 5, 10, 38, 39, 44, 194n14, 197n40 duty as, 81, 89 erotic and aesthetic, 5, 46, 96, 116, 129 freedom as, 82–85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94–95 gift-giving as, 5, 78–79, 86, 87, 89, 141 law and breaking the law as, 74–78, 185n5, 204n5 lying as, 10, 44, 197n37

262

INDEX

violence (cont.) meaning of for, Arendt, 107, 109, 184n4, 185n5 Benjamin, 4, 5, 38, 44, 45, 75, 76, 77, 87, 90, 205n11 Bourdieu, 78–79 Dewey, 76–78 Foucault, 36–38, 44 Gandhi, 136, 141 Hobbes, 36, 38, 39, 44, 59 Levinas, 5, 82–85, 87, 89, 91, 94, 95, 203n50, 230n34 Locke, 38–39, 44 Merleau-Ponty, 89, 230n34 Sartre, 80–82, 89, 91, 94, 206n30, 207n33, 207n35, 230n34 mythical, 38, 44 perception as, 79–80, 81, 86, 87–88, 89, 91, 202n28, 206n26 strikes as, 38, 44–45, 75, 193n11 symbolic, 5, 78–79, 235n86 usage of word in, English, 185n6, 186n8 French, 185n7 German, 41 Greek, 4, 74–75, 185n5, 204n5 Latin, 4, 185n6 see also Auschwitz, face, freedom, intersubjective violence, means and ends, necessity, nonviolence, physical violence, politics, power Vietnam War, x, 1, 9, 129, 184n2, 185n4 Villa, Dana, 144, 147, 172, 2151n50, 226n83, 227n84, 236n5 Waltz, Kenneth, 184n4 war, ix, xiii, 16, 23–30, 35, 38, 40–41, 47, 52, 92, 94, 103, 109, 110, 113–115, 117, 118, 125, 127, 128, 175, 190n26, 194n18, 196n30, 198n41, 208n50, 211n18, 213n36, 213n38, 216n56, 221n36, 222n44, 226n82, 234n69, 235n2 outcome of not predicted by physical

superiority, 1, 102, 129, 218n18 satyagraha and, 129–131, 135, 138, 181, 218n15, 222n43, 223n47 state of, 24–25, 32, 36, 39, 137, 189n22, 189n24, 192n3, 197n36 see also body, Clausewitz, just war theory, Trojan War, Vietnam War, World War I, World War II Weber, Max, 123–124, 142, 179, 217n8 Weiler, Jonathan, 235n2 Weiss, Roslyn, 170, 225n72, 234n75 Wendt, Alexander, 222n37 the will and willingness, 2, 5, 26, 32, 40–48, 51, 52, 53, 59, 71, 73, 77, 80, 82, 85, 91–95, 101, 102, 104, 113, 114, 115, 122, 124–126, 127, 128, 130, 131–132, 134, 137–138, 140, 142, 146, 150, 157, 158, 162, 168, 172, 176, 181, 189n24, 193n14, 194n21, 195n23, 195n24, 195n25, 197n38, 197n39, 198n41, 204n53, 210n12, 211n18, 213n38, 215n54, 217n9, 218n12, 218n13, 218n18, 224n66, 230n28, 234n75 see also physical violence Winkler, Cathy, 94 witnessing and witnesses, 46, 93, 115, 118, 134, 153, 162, 168 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 43, 196n35 Wolff, Robert, 185n4 Wolin, Sheldon, 185n5, 185n6, 204n5 the women’s movement, ix see also feminism World War I, ix, 135, 154 World War II, ix, xiii, 102, 154, 210n11, 219n19, possibility of using nonviolence during, 129–131 see also Holocaust X, Malcolm, 42 Zionism, 52, 154, 229n16

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