Senseless Violence: Liminality and Intertwining

Abstract

The claim of this article is that the perpetrators of violence are “liminal” figures, being inside and yet outside of the world in which they act. It is this liminality, this existing on the border, that makes their violence senseless. Because of it, their actions can be understood in terms neither of the actual reality of their victims nor of the imagined reality that the perpetrators placed them in. Sense, here, fails, for the lack of a common frame. Liminality exists in a number of forms: economic, religious, and political—each with its potential for violence. What distinguishes political liminality is the scale of its violence. As Carl Schmitt shows, the liminal sovereign or ruler is both inside and outside the state, employing its means for violence even as he is unconstrained by its laws. I contend that this sovereign exists in a continuum with the practitioners of terrorist violence, who are also liminal figures. To analyze this liminality, I explore the intertwining between the self and the world that sets up the common frame that gives sense to actions. I then examine the causes of its breakdown.

Keywords:

• Violence
• terrorism
• liminality
• intertwining
• recognition

Notes

1. The victims had been watching a midnight screening of the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises. Steve Almasy, “In notebook read to jury, James Holmes wrote of ‘obsession’.” http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/26/us/james-holmes-trial-notebook/.

2. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Holmes_(mass_murderer).

3. This lack of common frame applies even to actions where the instrumental character is less tenuous, such as the attacks on tourists in Tunisia. The supposed purpose of these attacks was the destruction of the tourist trade, the ultimate object being the creation of an Islamic caliphate that would somehow arise from the economic and social chaos caused by terrorist actions. If we assume this, then the perpetrators stand outside the economic and social order of Tunisia. Willing its destruction, they have as little in common with it as they do with the beach-goers they murdered.

4. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 8.

5. Ibid., 9. This, of course, does not mean that Merleau-Ponty believes the world is literally within us. It does, however, signify that it appears through our flesh and our actions. These are its place of disclosure.

6. Ibid., 123.

7. Such a sense, of course, is distinct from that generated by the scientific reduction of the sensible world to quantifiable material relations, such as the reduction of sound to the frequencies and amplitudes of sound waves. The sense of being in the world, in other words, is psychological rather than physical in the physicists’ sense.

8. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 205.

9. For the exclusion caused by bodily disability, see Mensch, “Violence and Embodiment,” 4–15. Such exclusion is tied to the loss of the “I can,” that is, the loss of the various bodily abilities by which we “line” the world, thereby making sense of it.

10. Ogilvie, “Violence et représentation,” 126. Cited in Balibar, Violence and Civility, 54. It is precisely to prevent this that many societies, most notably, the United Kingdom, make considerable efforts to extend employment possibilities to the disabled. The tacit violence that Ogilvie and Balibar see at work in the exclusion of the unemployed naturally does not refer to the failures of such efforts.

11. Ibid., 127. Cited in Balibar, Violence and Civility, 54.

12. Balibar, Violence and Civility, 54.

13. An example of this insufficiency is the San Bernardino shooter, Syed Rizwan Farook, who lacked any apparent economic motives. He had worked as a food inspector for the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health for five years before the shooting and became a permanent employee on February 8, 2014.

14. Balibar, Violence and Civility, 54.

15. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 326.

16. Buber, I and Thou, 127.

17. Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 76.

18. In Kant’s words, “I then become aware at once that I can indeed will to lie, but I can by no means will a universal law of lying; for by such a law there could properly be no promises at all since… others… would not believe my profession” (ibid., 71).

19. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 85, 60, 98, 123. To demand an intelligible account of his actions, as Kierkegaard writes, is to involve oneself in “the most absurd contradiction, namely that the single individual who stands precisely outside the universal be brought in under universal categories when he is expressly to act as the single individual outside the universal” (ibid., 99). Here, it should be noted that Kierkegaard penned Fear and Trembling under the name of Johannes de Silentio. How far the position represented here is Kierkegaard’s own is a matter of dispute. Certainly, orthodox Christianity advocates, in the name of love of neighbor, more than simply a one-to-one relation to God.

20. Žižek commenting in Violence on Dostoyevsky’s claim, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted,” remarks: “He couldn’t have been more wrong: the lesson of today’s terrorism is that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of his will, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any ‘merely’ human’ constraints and considerations. … In the absence of any ethical standards external to your belief in and love for God, the danger is always lurking that you will use your love of God as the legitimization of the most horrible deeds” (116).

21. For Husserl, as he writes in Cartesianische Meditationen, intersubjective recognition is based on this agreement of behavior: “The experienced animate organism of the other continues to manifest itself as actually an animate organism solely through its continually harmonious behavior. ... The organism is experienced as a pseudo-organism precisely when it does not agree in its behavior” (144). “Harmonious” here means harmonious with my own behavior. The other’s actions must “agree” with this in order to establish the similarity necessary for the transfer. As Husserl expresses this, the other’s ego is “determined as thus governing his body (and, in a familiar way, constantly confirms this) only insofar as the whole stylistic form of the sensible processes that are primordially perceivable by me must correspond to what is known in type from my own governing my body” (148). This is also the case with the “higher psychical occurrences”—such as verbal behavior. They have “their style of synthetic connections and their form of occurring which can be understandable to me through their associative basis in my own style of life, a style empirically familiar to me in its average typicality” (149). All translations from the German in this article are my own.

22. Husserl, Ms. E III 1, 7. The same point holds with regard to different societies. Societies are “not egotistical”—i.e., not intolerant—Husserl writes, if they can affirm one another’s “particular goals and particular accomplishments” (Ms. A V 24, 4). I am grateful to the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium, for permission to quote from the Nachlass of Husserl.

23. See Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1876.

24. Tolerance so defined does have its limits. Understood as a positive ideal, its goal is the “fullness” (or filling out) of the possibilities of being human through the maximum of cultural diversity consistent with social harmony. By “social harmony” I mean that such possibilities must be compossible, that is, that their mutual actualization must not be impossible. The limits of tolerance involve those actions that do undermine such actualization. A few common examples will make this clear. Tolerance, understood negatively as a prohibition—ultimately, as a prohibition of intolerance—forbids lying and theft. The first, to the point that it is collectively actualized, undermines the possibility of speech to communicate verifiable information. Thus, lying undermines those human possibilities, such as civil society, which presuppose this possibility. Theft, when collectively actualized, has a similar effect on the possibility of possession and, hence, on the possibilities, such as commerce, springing from this. Insofar as lying and theft cut off such possibilities, they result in a narrowing of human potentialities and are actually acts of intolerance. For a more complete account of this, see Mensch, “Sustaining the Other.”

25. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 223.

26. As Žižek notes, in Violence: “The problem is not cultural difference… but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them” (730). This identity, however, is not acknowledged by them.

27. These are an analogue to the norms of the workplace, from which the unemployed have been excluded.

28. See Lacan, Écrits, 50, 55.

29. It is this radical division that is necessary for altruistic violence. In Sacks’s words in Not in God’s Name: “Suicide bombings, the targeting of civilians and the murder of school children are not normal. Violence may be possible whenever there is an Us and a Them. But radical violence emerges only when we see the Us as all-good and the Them as all-evil, heralding a war between the children of light and the forces of darkness. That is when altruistic evil is born” (48).

30. It is at this point that what Balibar calls in Violence and Civility “ultraobjective” and “ultrasubjective violence” meet. The former results from the economic “reduction of human beings to the status of useless and, therefore, superfluous or redundant objects.” The latter from “an obsession with identity or introducing this obsession ‘into the real’” (74).

31. Ibid., 69.

32. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 108, 86, 84.

33. The exact number has been a matter of dispute. See, e.g., Andrew Osborn, “Belgium Confronts Its Colonial Demons,” The Guardian, July 18, 2002. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/18/congo.andrewosborn.

34. Modern “western” states by and large trace their origins to Locke rather than Hobbes. This does not mean, however, that there are no traces of the Hobbesian tradition in them. Derrida, referring in “Force of Law” to Pascal’s statement that “justice without force is impotent,” argues that the force of law is prior to the law. As such, it cannot be limited by the law (943). An example of what Derrida is pointing to was provided when the Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, invoked the War Powers Act in 1971. Although the Act, which suspended civil liberties, was of short duration, it did exhibit, in the military presence in Montreal and the ensuing multiple arrests, the unlimited, extra-legal character of such force.

35. Hobbes, Leviathan, 96. The founding thus occurs when the sovereign “has the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that by [the] terror thereof he is enabled to form the wills of them all to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad” (132); 98, 134. The spelling has been modernized in all quotes from Hobbes.

36. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 35.

37. Schmitt, Political Theology, 6. “What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. In such a situation it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes” (12).

38. Ibid., “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (5); 7, 13, 31.

39. Buber, I and Thou, 117, 118. Here as elsewhere, I have altered Kaufman’s translation by substituting “thou” for “You.’

40. De Rougement, Journal aus Deutschland, 60, 61. Bataille also comments on this in “Psychological Structure of Fascism”: “the religious value of the chief is really the fundamental (if not formal) value of fascism” (81).

41. De Rougement, Journal aus Deutschland, 73–74.

42. They form part of what Bataille calls in the “Psychological Structure of Fascism,” the “heterogeneous” elements of society. Its opposite, a “[h]omogeneous society is productive society, namely useful society” (65).

43. In Bataille’s words, the fascist leader “derives his profound meaning from the fact of having shared the dejected and impoverished life of the proletariat” (ibid., 82); 68, 78.

44. Ibid.,78.

45. The Koran, Surah 2, v. 256, 367. Rather than seeking justice, the Koran advises, “let them rather pass over and pardon the offence. Don’t you desire that God should forgive you? And God is gracious and merciful!” (Surah 24, v. 22, 445).

46. Both Judaism and Christianity, for example, ask that we love God and our neighbor as ourselves. What this signifies for Christianity is given by Jesus’s response to the lawyer’s question: “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke, 10:29). Jesus replies with the story of the Good Samaritan—the man who bound up the wounds and looked after a person who was neither his co-religionist nor a member of his race. The neighbor, in this account, is simply a fellow human being. In the Koran, this follows from the fact that we are all children of Adam and Eve: “O mankind! Allah created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other (not that you despise each other)” (Surah 49, v. 13). An Islamic commentator writes: “we are all made the same way. We have the same basic makeup. We all need, want, and feel. We all frown, cry, smile, laugh, hate, love. … We worship differently, talk differently, dress differently, judge differently, and are taught differently, but we are all still human.” For this text and commentary, see http://hubpages.com/religion-philosophy/What-Islam-says-about-loving-thy-neighbor.