Notes on the Problem of Violence

The oppressor/oppressed binary is, even as a matter of ordinary observation, the easiest to deconstruct. The latter apes the brutality of the former out of the ‘tragic necessity of struggle’ and out of the same ‘tragic necessity’ comes simply to replace him. Habituated to the ‘tragic necessity’ of violence he can do no other. The man who kills crosses a Rubicon and there may be no way back. Violence is his friend; his trusted tool and he will always be true to it. We need a deeper moral language than is covered by this distinction which blurs so readily even a child can see it. In fact, it may just be a distinction for sentiment, necessary sentiment perhaps but not grounded in the intrinsic reason of things.

Give yourself once to butchery and I can’t see, barring miracle, how you can can go back. Once you taste power in the form of power over a life you have crossed a line you can’t simply uncross. You have eaten forbidden fruit and the taste can only get sweeter if it does not dull with simple familiarity. THAT at least is the great danger in violence. Do it once and it becomes easier next time. Make it the solution to a great problem and you will find that it suits ever smaller ones just the same. It takes a power like grace to overcome this specific form of gravity both in the perpetrator and in those who must forgive him.

People always evoke the idea of the ‘tragic necessity’ of doing this or that rape or murder or atrocity. Every genocide presents itself as a terrible thing that, sadly, regrettably, needed to be done. Our paradigm here is Agamemnon. He must kill Iphigeneia. He has no other choice. There is too much at stake. Yet he falls to it with a will and a fury. Something in his soul is at one with this ‘necessity’. Its ‘will’ is finally his own and it brings forth nemesis. Perhaps it's that he hates his own flesh and blood if THAT proves to be any obstacle to violence and pride. Perhaps it’s the embodiment of his own death wish. Still, when he returns from Troy he says nothing of her. She has been erased.

But what after all is this ‘tragic necessity’? As soon as we descend to the particularity of action we no longer see it. We enter the realm of contingencies. I could commit THIS rape or THIS massacre or perform another action. Those other actions, though, may be insufficiently cathartic. I may miss the thrill of Agamemnon killing his own daughter; the unity of self and will achieved in an act of pure violence. THIS is the necessity underlying the situation. The necessity of unifying the self in action. THIS is what we speak of when we evoke ‘tragic necessity’ and narrow our options down to one: the most brutal.  

This is why there are acts of hatred against oppressors that are not acts of resistance but of catharsis. Indeed, any sane person concerned with justice has to consider the difference between acting out of protest and acting out of simple hate. Affective or symbolic violence is grounded in the ur-violence of levelling the individual in the name of the typical. It is not HER I rape or HIM I kill but THEM in him or her. This is why I make no calculation concerning the revenge the other will take against US. The matter is above calculation and bears no ultimate relation to mere ends and means. It is sacred, holy violence not grubby plotting and planning. It is PURE and elevates, even cleanses the soul of its own petty taints. I am finally one with myself in action.

Revenge is an attempt to say ‘I matter’. I am not a thing. Yet the limitation of it is that the message cannot be received in the form in which it is sent. It only elicits the same communique in kind: “Yes and I am not a thing either”.

The justice that is taken from the oppressed is the same justice that is owed impartially to all. That is why you can’t rape and pillage your way to peace. Negate common justice and you negate particular justice with it, the very justice you claim has been outraged in your case. This is why the avenger simply and directly becomes an object of revenge in his own right.

If the oppressed are molded directly to the form of action of the oppressor, if they are fated by ‘tragic necessity’ to replicate the same actions, then it is possible to wonder if the oppressed/oppressor binary is all that it is made out to be (at least in the moral sense). The oppressor, of course, has a much wider scope for his malice. We can all see this. This difference though is contingent and simply external. It means only that the oppressed cannot do all the harm he would. He lacks the power to be an oppressor himself for the oppressor stands in his way. One small advantage of being oppressed, though, is that you have less opportunity to form vicious habits: at least the vicious habits of the open sadist though you may form all the masochistic vices. 

The problem with revenge is that the form and content of the avenger’s action is identical to the wrong being avenged. Indeed, the very concept of revenge entails the identity in kind of the two harms. This is why the object of vengeance does not stop and reflect regretfully on the wrong he has done but falls straight to a crime of his own. The avenger is trying to send a message that the avenged will never receive. Yet the illusion somehow persists that if I hurt this person hard enough he will learn to respect me. Yet it never happens. The avenged never gets the memo. He never repents for the reason given above. Then the avenger must double down so the avenged REALLY gets it this time. And so on to infinity.

Who IS the oppressor? He or sometime she who is in the role of agent. Who IS the oppressed? He and often she who is in the situation of patient. These are not moral or ontological categories and that is why the meaning of these terms is always shifting according to situation. A man who is oppressed all day can be an oppressor for ten minutes in a dark alley at night. He is not essentialized and nor is his victim. Here one needs to be a bit of a nominalist. 

Of course one COULD say that the oppressed is he whose violence is purely reactive though reactive violence leaves the other exactly as dead and maimed as the other kind. Plus what IS the other kind? Is any violence anything but reactive? What is this mysterious aura that makes our violence excusable but theirs not? What is this halo that surrounds a murder if only the right people commit it? Excuses, if legitimate, only temper punishment. They do not expunge guilt. 

One final point: there is no contradiction in the perpetrator of the atrocity expressing 'regret' for the lives he has, alas, been forced to take. One can readily imagine Agamemnon on the plains of Troy feeling a twinge of regret for poor Iphigeneia.                           

 

               

 

 

 

    

 

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