The Last Word of Violence
“Desire…is attracted to violence triumphant and strives desperately to incarnate this ‘irresistible’ force. Desire clings to violence… because violence is the signifier of the cherished being, the signifier of divinity”
- René Girard, Violence and the Sacred
In the conversation of the book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, among Girard and two psychiatrists, Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, the interlocutors describe desire as a “subject” having its own modus operandi, its methods, distinct from that of a particular desiring person. They talk about desire always being after “difference.” It is after transcendence, the rising above the banality of ordinary life and achieving a higher state of being, a state of permanent fulfillment.
In Things Hidden, this vaunted “difference” carries a violent connotation as it is contrasted to the sameness or “reciprocity” of rivals locked in conflict. There is an extended analysis of the process by which we acquire our desires through imitation of our model, only to, by constantly gravitating towards the same point as the model, we become indistinguishable from him, and thereby lose precisely that which we seek: distinction, transcendence.
The rivalry aggravates the lack of difference as the rivals not only imitate each other’s desires but also as they reproduce and return each other’s aggression in later, antagonistic stages of the relationship. Yet, while a disinterested onlooker sees their aggressive face-off as symmetrical, the rivals themselves see nothing but differences. With each move in the confrontation, they attempt to establish a difference, and they are often so obsessed about it that they can’t even acknowledge and recognize each other as rivals. Instead, they view the opposing party as some accidental or brazen interloper.
Thus, desire plays a cruel game on us: it sets us on a quest for difference that, not accidentally but unavoidably, leads to a maddening rut of sameness.
This existential rut of sameness, mediocrity, of banality, plays out all around us and in all aspects of our lives. I’ve heard the career rat race described in ways that evoke this dynamic: rat race is like trying to climb up a downward-moving escalator, except the harder you run up, the faster the escalator moves down, and you can never reach the top. There are similar dynamics obtained in romance: the harder you try to win over a desired person, the harder you fail. Our increasing efforts lead only to increased failures and frustration.
The angst and confusion that follow once we observe the pattern stem from our inability, or rather a refusal, to see the other participants in the game that we are playing. We visualize ourselves, authentic and serene, and our object, which for some magical reason keeps moving away from our reach. We refuse to recognize the others, our clones in the same pursuit. This delusion at the outset of our pursuit is one and the same as the delusion that we try to prove as the goal of the pursuit: it is the delusion of difference, of our self being special.
The object that is supposed to be inert or even amenable to our advances shifts as by magic out of our reach. But if we were to lose our tunnel vision and look around us, we would see the trick behind the magic. The object is pushed away by the hands of our rivals. You want to be the boss and command a certain career transcendence over your rivals? Maybe to that end, you succeed to obtain a good job with a high salary. Your rivals will not forgive you for your success; they are coming after you, and sooner or later they too will get a similar job. Or their company will fight to take your company’s customers or undercut your prices.
The woman you try to win to achieve that sexual nirvana, or, as Girard and I think Freud put it, that “position of libidinal impregnability,” shifts away too. Maybe she gets snatched away by a rival. Maybe she snatches herself away, so to speak, by moving herself out of your grasp in a narcissistic strategy: she saw your desire for her, and that desire proved her greater value to herself. It elevated her ego, and now that she has proof and assurance that she’s better than you, she will move on to pursue someone who’s of yet higher value than her, because she too is striving for that higher difference. This game is, of course, reversible between the genders.
And even if a man or woman is the victorious rival who gets the girl or the boy, the illusory object of prestige still shifts. They might enjoy a honeymoon phase characterized by an impression of that “libidinal impregnability,” causing jealousy as they romp through parties and Instagram-documented vacations. But sooner or later, everyone moves on. The envious gaze of the rivals moves away to other novelties and with that, the ephemeral difference that it generates disappears. And then it’s time for either breakup, or marriage: for facing each other not as objects of sexual desire but as human beings. This time, the rivals shift the object beyond reach by shifting away their gaze.
Yet desire never gives up. As the authors of Things Hidden put it, desire is always ahead of the game. It is a master strategist when it comes to saving the person from facing disillusionment and creating new pursuits. The moment we win some competition and grasp the object of desire is not the moment of final consummation, the “happily ever after.” The euphoria may last a minute, but it’s never permanent. Promptly, infallibly, our desire will interpret the latest victory as merely a step in a journey that will require one more pursuit. It will be ready with yet another quest for a yet higher object with yet more formidable rivals.
The dream of the final, impregnable position of libidinal or financial or physical satisfaction never leaves us. This dream is precisely the goal of all desire. And though desire never succeeds at winning the position for its subject, it never gives up on the quest. The vision is always there. Often, we see it in others, and there is nothing more viscerally attractive than a person who appears to possess this divine impregnability and self-sufficiency.
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The fantasies of difference repeatedly dashing against the realities of sameness are nowhere more manifest than when strife leads to open violence, even to war. To study the psychology of war is to study this paradox.
But before we talk about war, let’s consider plain old fist-fighting, which is a tiny and limited manifestation of the same thing. Most males hang some pride on their physical strength, and if they have no fresh fighting experience, they tend to grossly overestimate their fighting ability.
Every now and then, I run into someone who talks me up about boxing. Sometimes the person will explain their lack of interest in fighting sports by saying something like: “I’m not interested in boxing because I don’t want to get my ass kicked, thank you very much.” But sometimes he will ever so politely hint that he’s against violent sports on ethical grounds: it’s not right to hurt someone. I detect a gross assumption in this type of response – the assumption that the person talking would be the one doing the hurting.
From my experience as a novice and with novice boxers, I can testify that the inverse is true nearly one hundred percent of the time. The one thing that an experienced fighter worries about when boxing a beginner is avoiding hurting him too much, to the point when it would be taken personally or discouraging the person from the sport. (Note: weight does matter, but two fighters of very different sizes are never supposed to spar hard.) If and once you get to fight someone weaker than you, the unwritten but sacred code of honour stipulates that you contain your violence within the limits of sportsmanship.
The delusion of physical prowess, as, by the way, the delusion of intellectual superiority, is that same delusion of the difference pursued by all desire. From the start, we ascribe to ourselves a transcendental position. And I wouldn’t be too judgemental of it as a sort of narcissistic strategy -- the reality is that physical fights are generally rare, so there is no harm walking around acting all confident; confidence is attractive, and it’s good. But if a person does end up drawn into a fight, their delusions come to an immediate and overwhelming end.
As you quickly discover, unlike in movies and video games, in real life, when you punch a man, he punches you back, and ending a fight by knockout or submission is extremely hard. In this setting, the object of desire is the knockout, and the rival who constantly moves it out of your reach comes in the form of an angry fit dude trying to rip your head out of your shoulders.
The stakes become higher when it comes to war. The value of the stakes becomes unhinged; it becomes as high as it can be. War is a conflict in which the stakes have been blown out of all proportion and the fight has become a fight for everything. The combatants put all they got on the line – their lives.
And just as the stakes blow out of proportion, so does the delusion of difference and the banality of sameness. In war, the enemy is the devil incarnate, a force of pure evil coming after you and your children and your country, after everything that belongs to you and that you are. The passion to strike the final blow, to annihilate the enemy, to say the final word of violence is overwhelming. A soldier forgets the safety of his own life in the desire to end the life of his enemy.
Politicians, pundits, and generals egging on and commanding the soldiers to their deaths ceaselessly preach the essential, indubitable difference between them and their enemies. Any general worth his salt and interested in keeping his position and his authority must talk this talk. On the contrary, he becomes a traitor.
The rhetoric of a war leader attempts to project precisely that aura of serene impregnability, to give an impression that his army is above the banal, reciprocal conflict of warring twins, and that he has planned out a certain and final victory.
Yet, what is the reality of war? One side attacks and slaughters, and then the other side attacks and slaughters a bit more. One side bombs civilian infrastructure; the other side bombs more civilian infrastructure. One side commits atrocities; the other side returns the favour with interest. Even ideologies end up getting imitated and reproduced on different sides of the conflict.
The strategy of war is all about escaping from this reciprocity. A general locked in a stalemate gropes with all his intellectual power for a difference that would release his side from destructive reciprocity with the enemy and produce that decisive blow against him. He considers every possible advantage -- artillery, infantry, geography, logistics, attrition, ammunition -- and looks for a move that would be too powerful or too intelligent for the enemy to reciprocate.
And he chooses a move, and lo and behold, the enemy somehow does reciprocate. The general escalates, and the enemy escalates too; the general gets wise to an opportunity, and the enemy gets wise to it too. The war continues.
The maddening drive to establish difference by each side produces nothing but destructive sameness on both sides. The sameness becomes manifest in the inanimate objects too, in the form of razed cities: the harmonious differences of beautiful urban architecture transform into the sameness of flattened, charred ruins. Cultural structures are razed too, with economic and cultural hierarchies collapsing and anarchy and crime taking over.
The banal sameness that is pathetic and comical when it comes to fist-fighting becomes tragic when it comes to war. Two drunk men, each convinced of their “impregnable pugilistic position” get into a bar fight, and there is no stupider form of fighting than that. Their fantasies of superiority turn them into stooges reciprocally and repeatedly bonking each other over the top of their heads. Only they can’t even keep it up for too long; their fat drunken bodies tend to get exhausted within ten seconds; they topple over a table and remain on the floor in some clumsy grip of each other’s head or leg. Nothing is less transcendental than a drunken brawl.
In war, the insurmountable moral differences, tirelessly flaunted by pampered elites and other virtue-signalling civilians, all of whom imagine themselves heirs to martial glories and freedom-loving traditions of their glorious ancestors, produce nothing but an endless stream of dead young men and aggrieved parents, mostly from the lower socio-economic levels.
As the war in Ukraine drags on, the predictions and opinions on what is to be done become more polarized. The delusions of difference aggravate. Recognition of the adversary as one’s analogue becomes ever more difficult. Russia supporters are wondering why the Russian army doesn’t just go out there and smash the Ukrainian resistance once and for all. Why are they holding back with their overwhelming artillery? Ukraine supporters are outraged that NATO doesn’t ship some magic weapons to Ukraine and humiliate Putin once and for all.
These delusions of the inertness of the opponent, of the opponent as a receiving object, and not as a subject in their own right, are the same in essence as the delusions related to “objectifying” sexual partners, or the delusions of a wannabe fighter who daydreams about knocking out his opponent in one punch and without breaking a sweat. There is no such lover, and there is no such enemy. People punch back. Knocking out a grown man is very difficult; it’s exhausting; and it will cost you much more than you were going to wager. And knocking out an army, you must agree, is yet more difficult than that.
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All the conflicts described above - in business, romance, or war - never end in that final word of violence. The impregnable position of transcendence is never achieved. Rather than some orgasmic bang, the war ends in the whimper of exhaustion, of anemia due to excessive blood loss. There may be an armistice signed, there may be suing for peace, but in the eyes of the vanquished, that’s all provisional, just a respite to enable them to live and see another day. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated, as they say.
Take as an example one of the most spectacular attempts at one final word of violence in history: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If there ever was a war-ending blow, that was it. But did war really end there? Today, eight decades later, Japan is riddled with US army bases bracing for a great reckoning with emergent China. Pax Americana, like Pax Romana, or any other “pax,” is only relative. Only the dead have seen the end of war.
A smitten enemy may be forced to surrender and confess defeat, but he can never be forever subdued. The remnant of the enemy might be forced to withdraw and lick their wounds, or they might be subjugated one way or another, but as long as they live and breathe, they will dream of revenge.
Even the fantasies of exterminating the enemy to the last person are unlikely to close the account; there will always be someone else, someone related, someone who feels related, or someone not related at all, who will sooner or later pick up the cause of the victim or justify their violence as revenge in their name.
“What about forgiveness?” you may ask. I believe that true forgiveness exists. You may forgive, or I may forgive. But what about the generation after us? When peace melts away, it no longer looks like an essence, but like a mere respite from war, and at that moment forgiveness looks like a respite from revenge. Someone, somewhere, may nurture true peace and true forgiveness, but every new generation born after them carries a non-zero chance of casting these feelings away.
René Girard and Benoît Chantre talk about the impossibility of terminating modern war throughout Battling to the End, their book about Clausewitz, war, and mimetic theory. To hear it from Girard and Chantre, things weren’t always so wild. War used to be ritualized, and later institutionalized: it was limited in scope to warriors and battlefields. Armies would face off with their full might at a particular time and place. Thanks to a culture imbued with the sacred, and with that, imbued with powerful regulators of shame and honour, the losers of the battle would either die on the battlefield or yield to the victor’s demands after the battle. They had a greater intuition of war as the sacrificial ritual for diffusing or limiting violence and they respected its sacred rules.
War was contained by making it a specialized trade of various types of warriors: warlords, dukes, and knights. It was mostly the honour of this specialized social stratum that hung in the balance of war. A defeat was thus a shame only to them, and if they refused to accept that shame, the victorious army only needed to exterminate this small group. Nowadays, as entire ethnicities are lifted into the sacred violence of citizenship, of peerage, war increasingly raises to prospect of genocide as the way to destroy the enemy once and for all.
It was Napoleonic warfare, say Girard and Chantre, with its full mobilization that gave birth to the modern “total war,” freed from any constraints related to the sacred – “fear of God” – and characterized by the escalation to the extremes. Clausewitz was a first-hand eye witness to this great turning point in history and the first writer to intuit its destructive potential. Girard, himself an eye witness to the nuclear arms race of the twentieth century, went all the way to state that it may lead us straight to the Apocalypse.
But, that is not to say that, in the meantime, war has lost all effectiveness. There is an economy to war, and it is a sacrificial economy. The effectiveness of the archaic scapegoat was to unite and appease a village. The effectiveness of modern war is to appease and unite a nation within itself. The blood of the soldiers cleanses the society of internecine hatred and resentment. War sanctifies national identity. It creates reassuring and unifying differences between one’s compatriots as the good guys and the enemies as the bad guys. It produces history, heroes, and holidays. It crystalizes aims and strengthens purpose. It revitalized industries and creates fortunes. The blood of human sacrifice still has great generative power.
The continuity from the archaic sacrificial ritual to modern war is unbroken. Both assuage bloodlust with human victims, which are sacralized. Both end in a cathartic expulsion, either of the scapegoat or of the national enemy, who ends up expelled behind new borders.
The soldiers fighting the war, those going at each other’s throats and whipping themselves up into an ever more murderous rage, see none of the transcendence. If they don’t die, they come out shell-shocked, disillusioned, or – addicted to war. A victorious Caesar might get to celebrate his triumph (whether he personally participated in battle or not), and it’s a great party, but the next morning he will have to sober up and worry about his Brutus.
If anyone gets a boost out of war, it’s the third parties observing the conflict: the virtue signallers, the politicians, or the war profiteers. The sight of gladiatorial slaves killing each other has a therapeutic and reinvigorating effect on the sallow, sandal-clad patricians and plebs observing the slaughter from the shade of the Coliseum stands. Those running the show make a good buck selling the tickets; others sell weapons, drinks, dinners, and after-parties.
The final word of violence is the act of sacrifice; some die so that others may live.