1Because it is capable of assuming several forms that are bound up in appearance, the phenomenon of violence does not necessarily refer to a unique and homogeneous reality. Clearly, it is always possible for someone to feel that there has been a violation of his freedom or his capability of expression and fulfillment, as if there were a physics of being that could be relied upon to determine the violent character of a relationship or situation. Yet this physics of being, on which psychoanalysis rests in order to ensure that any violence that has been experienced and never spoken about will necessarily come to light, even only in the form of symptoms and perhaps even only in the next generation, is always set within and ultimately depends upon historical and social frameworks that end up by characterizing it in such a way that the assessment of the primary phenomenon can change entirely. Moreover, the multitude of meanings associated with violence and the impossibility of arriving at any definition that might refer to a core meaning as well as to specific differences are there to attest to the futility of any attempt at grasping the essence of the phenomenon and to the indeterminacy of a concept whose ultimate meaning depends on a cultural, anthropological, and philosophical context that is the only one capable of suggesting criteria for identification.

2To make the phenomenon of violence intelligible, we must employ a criterion that is necessarily outside of and prior to the phenomenon itself. Most of the meanings and descriptions on offer refer to the quality and intensity of a force, both of which are identifiable on the basis of its illegitimate use. If we acknowledge the irreducible presence of force in human relationships, violence never emerges except as a combination of the intensity of its force and its illegitimate character. As a result, violence cannot be conceptualized except in relation to indicators that allow it to be characterized as excessive. Given that the most frequently used criteria are those of naturalness and legitimacy, we are led to believe that there is a mutual determination of violence and politics such that it is ultimately only by studying links of mutual inclusion and exclusion between the two that the essence of both is likely to appear.

3This brings to mind the distinction made by Kant between the notion of scope and that of limits in the second section of Book II of Critique of Pure Reason, which is devoted to the transcendental theory of method. While scope merely indicates the extent of knowledge, limits affect the very conditions of the possibility of knowledge. We known scope a posteriori, but we know limits a priori. In this sense, politics might in some way constitute the scope of violence, while conversely, violence would be the limit of politics, the very condition for its conceptualization and realization. In the manner of Éric Weil, we could say that it is possible to grasp the relationships between violence and politics but that it is impossible in this context to understand the very notion of political violence.

4All political philosophy presents itself as a reflection upon the just order, upon the criterion that allows for a distinction to be made between pure and simple domination and legitimate coercion. In some respects, the distinction is entirely permeated by the relationships that are established and implemented between violence and politics. How then may we determine the criterion needed for characterizing the just order as well as the unjust order? How do we evaluate the relationships between violence and politics? To which conception of man’s humanity and the underpinning of human sociality do these relationships refer? At this point, two configurations emerge that make it possible to grasp the contemporary conceptualization of the relationships between violence and politics: the suppression of violence as the foundation of authority, and the recognition of violence as the foundation of interaction. If we start from these two configurations, it becomes possible to grasp what is meant in contemporary political thought by the relationship between acceptance or rejection of violence on the one hand, and the definition of the political on the other.

The Suppression of Violence as the Foundation of Authority

5The first configuration does not pit Ancients against Moderns. On the contrary, it draws them together in the same reference to natural law. It is well known that both Ancients and Moderns founded man’s sociality upon the idea of nature. However, since the first principle of natural law is to posit a radical mutual exclusion between violent phenomena and political rationality, politics defines itself as the suppression of violence and the assumption of a comprehensive power understood as authority.

6In the Aristotelian conceptualization, the political is nature, and violence is against nature. According to Physics, any act that forces something or someone to perform a gesture that cannot be conceived as actualizing nature is violent. Thus political violence cannot exist except in a conceptualization that turns man into a political animal.

7To make this conceptualization intelligible, we need to refer to the distinction between immoral and amoral. What is immoral is what is contrary to what is moral, while what is amoral does not belong to the order of morality or comes before the establishment of morality. Similarly, violence does not refer to the “impolitical,” which thwarts the political order, but to the apolitical, which consists of everything that requires men, either individually or collectively, to conduct themselves in a manner inconsistent with the essentially and teleologically political being they consist of. Violence is what becomes unthinkable from the moment we posit the essential naturalness of the political as the determination of man’s humanity.

8The political is not a second element that has been added onto society. Rather, it is its constitutive dimension, and should the city functioning as the locus of the actualization of reason undertake civil compulsion, this does not constitute violence since it is exercised among equals and tends toward the realization of their nature. The political, therefore, is not linked first to the question of power but to that of enabling conditions for reasonable action, involving human beings speaking and acting according to the logos. Here, man is conceptualized less as someone who communicates with his voice but rather as someone who discusses and deliberates with speech and who is therefore capable of thinking through what is just and unjust, justice being based on physics, or a recognition of the objective qualities of the being as well as the value of things and not of judgments made about them.

9If the cosmological and epistemological configuration of modern natural law plainly breaks with that of classical natural law in its premises, the relationships between violence and politics are nevertheless not conceived of in radically different ways. The vision of the world that underpins modern natural law is set apart by the destruction of the cosmos and the geometrization of space, that is, the destruction of a world conceptualized as a finished and ordered whole, in which the spatial structure embodies a hierarchy of values and perfection, and the substitution in its place of an undefined universe, without any hierarchy, unified only by the identity of the laws that govern it in all its parts. This is the replacement of the Aristotelian conception of space, of a differentiated whole of inner-world places by a conception that is differentiated by the space of Euclidean geometry, a homogeneous and necessarily infinite extension of an identical structure. What follows is the rejection by the scientific approach of considerations based on notions of value, perfection, and harmony, a divorce between facts and values, and the devaluation of the being. The search for causes and the recognition of purposes are abandoned in favor of the discovery of laws, which no longer designate a principle internal to a being’s development but instead describe the operation of a mechanism. As for man, his true nature, that of thought, pits him against nature, of which he considers himself master and owner.

10In these conditions, the political can no longer be based on a common measure that unifies the city, and what the Ancients considered natural becomes a problem and an enigma for the Moderns. Without primary aggregation and finalization, the individual becomes the discrete element upon which the analysis of society is based. Society is nothing more than a mediation between oneself and one’s self, and there is nothing that is good except that which is specific to each individual. In this context, the ius naturale introduced by Grotius is founded upon the idea of an order of inalienable relationships among men, which goes against all positive law. This is a view of human nature based on reason, which underpins the rationality of both law and sociality and is itself is a purely rational legal principle. Social nature is thus no longer a given that needs to be understood but a concept that is established at the outset and from which conclusions are drawn.

11This does not, however, fundamentally transform the relationships between violence and politics since sociality is a tendency of the individual, which leads to the same conclusions as the old conceptualization of a political nature as a universal power regulating men's lives in the city. Moreover, when Hobbes rejected the idea of a natural human sociality, it was only in order to better honor the constructivist intention underpinning Grotius’ hypothesis. However, Hobbes goes beyond Grotius as regards the effectiveness of human nature in relation to the principle of all law, he pushes the construction back to a point prior to Aristotle's primary distinction between political power and despotic power. Hobbes's position, according to which the sovereign can never commit an injustice against the citizen, appeared untenable to Kant because Hobbes’s contract is not a relationship between public and private, between citizen and sovereign. However, Kant also denies the citizen any right to resist or disobey the sovereign because disobedience is unthinkable in the sense that the purpose of the political community is not happiness, that is, the natural satisfaction of all the needs of individuals in terms of quality, quantity, or duration (Chap. II, Section 2 of Critique of Pure Reason) but the relationship with the law, the certainty of the law. The passage from the state of nature to the civil state is not therefore the passage from lawlessness to law but from private law, which is provisional because it is without public force, to public law, under which the claims of individuals are guaranteed by the legal form of their coexistence. The state of nature is a state of violence because it is a violence wreaked upon the concept of law. The state of nature is therefore not impolitical but apolitical.

12Accordingly, the purportedly natural or artificial nature of politics does not change anything as far as its relationship with violence is concerned. Violence is antithetical to the political because authority is in all cases subordinated to justice and law. Although the state-of-nature hypothesis allocates a place to violence, it does not change anything as regards its relationship with the political. What distinguishes a political society is the removal of the right to use force from individuals and partial groupings. Violence is an act that contrasts with the political nature of man, whatever the primary or secondary character of that nature may be. In that sense, the individual or grouping that carries out violence therefore jeopardizes society because it undermines the sense of belonging together, without which the human community cannot endure.

13Whether we place violence outside of the city or prior to association, violence continues to be the reverse of the political. Whether it involves the criterion of legitimacy or that of the naturalness of power, violence is always regarded as being outlawed by the formulation of the political order. From this perspective, the principles of aggregation and finalization of classical natural law relegate violence to the realm of pure, unthought phenomena, and the principles of individualization and mediation of modern natural law declare it to be inherent to the state of nature, that is, the pre-political state, or the state of ignorance of human co-belonging.

The Recognition of Violence as the Foundation of Interaction

14The concept of natural law is clearly powerless to clarify the nature of violence as it tells us nothing about violence itself or about its possible continuation in the political state. Violence is never a founding violence, and residual violence is unthinkable given a definition of the political as the implementation of natural law, that is, law conforming to nature. We must therefore leave political philosophy and turn to other disciplines if we are to apprehend the reality of violence and envisage the possibility of its contribution to the definition of a human order.

15We know that the etymology of the word “violence” harks back to the Latin vis latus, or “to carry force.” The Indo-European root that has been perpetuated by the term “violence” does not connote the idea of destruction, hatred, aggression, or death but the idea of life. As has been shown in psychoanalysis, it is the origin, the constituent element of mankind’s very humanity. Violence is first and foremost not reactive but primary, the founder of human life in the world, and it plays a constructive role in establishing reality by placing destructiveness outside of the subject. The normal destiny of violence thus understood is that of gradually integrating itself into the libidinal current in order to give rise to the potential for creativity and love for each individual.

16For Freud, there is a fundamental form of violence. However, its entry into the culture owes nothing to Hobbes's social contract, in which reason is employed in order to leave the state of nature. On the contrary, the birth of a culture is a product of the unconscious, and morality is derived from the feeling of guilt that comes from that aggression being introjected and turned back on one’s own ego. Thus, moral conscience is the consequence, not the cause of a renunciation of impulses, and law appears as a reaction against the foundational act, as a commitment not to repeat the murder of the Father.

17Referring to the exploration of instinctual springs of violence, analytical theory reminds us that the fundamental issue is on the one hand that of the relationship with the origin of violence and on the other, of its vectoring.

18As regards the relationship with its origin, because violence in its primary manifestation, it amounts to a manner of dealing with the question of outsiders. In the libidinal concept of violence that is also said to be foundational, its force is derived from the relationship between "it's him or us" and "it's me or them," and in both cases involves the exclusion of the founding outsider. The outsider having been excluded, we have resort to violence: the one or the other, nothing in-between. Thus violence is, if not in its origin at least in relation to its origin, a source of the identification process as well as a restart of that process.

19Next is the vectoring of violence, which deals with the challenge of deciding between the one and the other and with finding the decisive dividing line between the one and the other, between subject and object, but first of all between the subject and the other. Violence can lead to the fusion and destruction of the subject or, on the contrary, to its differentiation and its construction. This identification of the uniqueness of the subject can only be conceptualized as the ordering of a violence whose human birth can be the primary figure, that is, a wrenching away from symbiosis and acquiescence to separation. Undoubtedly, this tension toward partition between the one and the other and the preeminence of the decision necessary for its recognition makes clear one of the sources of Schmitt's conception of the political as a relationship and not as an instance and as a relation necessarily putting into play the vital distinction between friend and foe.

20Unlike traditional political philosophy, psychoanalysis teaches us that there is indeed such a thing as foundational violence. It is foundational in the sense that the subject passes through linguistic and social castration and because it consists of that wrenching away from differentiation, that acquiescence to the in-between, and that recognition of the outsider. Analytical thinking therefore allows us to approach the relationship between sociality and violence by raising our awareness of the very nature of violence that is first and foremost found in its ambivalence and then in its relation to differentiation and the place of outsiders. Destructive violence is distinguished by the negation of the in-between that is the locus of the outsider. Foundational violence is therefore defined by the vectoring of the relationship to the other such that the individual is placed in a kind of harmonization between intra-psychic motions and interpersonal relations.

21Similarly, the teachings of anthropology have raised our awareness of the inevitability of violence in the constitution of part-whole groups. These teachings remind us that primitive societies provide a link between acceptance of and submission to violence, on the one hand, and the establishment of social order, on the other. In most mythic tales, which describe the formation of society, we find the idea of a necessary conjuration by a damned mankind and the generalized violence of chaos. Power itself is bound together by force, and this force is always marked by ambivalence: that is, it is a tool of command but also a tool of domination by whoever wields it. Indeed, theories of royalty in Uganda, those of the Nyoro studied by J. H. M. Beattie, those of the Alur studied by A. W. Southall, or those of the Mossi of Upper Volta studied by E. P. Skinner, as reported by G. Balandier, are based on a conceptualization of a power that is simultaneously beneficial and evil and that the figure of the Chief must be capable of mastering such that agreement is ultimately either secured or restored through the essence of creation. However, if power is thus always associated with the ambivalence of force, the coercion it imposes is justified only insofar as this force is finally subjected to the world order established by the gods and to the society set up by the ancestors. It is by these means that solidarity between the sacred and the political is established such that any attack on power seems sacrilegious. The force of power is thus the very force inherent in this primordial struggle against the destructiveness that is inherent in human relationships, with the order of things and the social order resulting from the simultaneous separation and union of two series of elements or groups: nature and the seasons on the one hand, the sexes and generations on the other. Moreover, both this ordo rerum and this ordo hominum are always threatened by entropy, by the forces of destruction they bear within them and by the wearing down of the mechanisms that maintain them. Every society is consequently obsessed by its vulnerability and calls for the intersession of the sacred in times of rehabilitation and outbreaks of chaos. These methods of restoration may take different forms, including the staging of ritual rebellions and a mimed reversal of order, but their purpose is always to ensure a return to order through the knowledge derived from the devastating effects of desocialization. Thus we have at the same time a recognition of the violence inherent in every human order and the implementation of ritual mechanisms intended to direct this violence, to make it fruitful, not by denying it or repressing it but, on the contrary, by allowing it to express itself.

22On the basis of the teachings of psychoanalysis and anthropology, we can return to the distinction made earlier between scope and limits. Violence may be conceived as the limit to the political in the naturalistic, both Ancient and Modern, conceptualization in as much as it appears as the condition of its thought and its implementation in a relationship of exclusion and mutual determination. The social and then the political may be understood as the scope of violence in both is grounded upon a vectoring of individual violence for the purpose of creating a culture, which is conceived as the victory of life and fertility over death and destruction. Here, the social advances as violence recedes or rather trends in the direction of a fruitful relationship with otherness.

The Nature of the Political between the Assumption and Rejection of Violence

23At this point, we should try to rethink the relationships between violence and the political and, by means of a return to political science, envisage the possibility of conceiving of an entirely political violence. However, will this be a faithful mirror of the political or a distorting mirror? Violence is a mirror in both contemporary versions: one that makes violence a necessary attribute of power, and another that disassociates the two and makes violence the opposite of the political.

24We do not propose to dwell on the first option, which following Max Weber, associates the political with the legitimate use of physical violence. The proposal has in its favor the strength of evidence: since power is domination, it cannot be reduced to free and concerted action. In other words, because it is a will being exerted upon other wills, it must be able to break down resistance.

25More intriguing is the second version, which is defended by philosophers who, following Greek thought, have insisted upon the majesty of the political and the principles of friendship and equality that characterize it. In this version, violence can destroy power, and it is powerless to create it. It is when power begins to be lost that the reign of violence takes over and establishes itself. In other words, it is when order prevails that it is obliterated. In this sense, violence clearly reveals the nature of power, but hollowed out and in a negative way, like a mask that conceals its profound significance. Having joined the political, men effectively act in agreement and contribute by their association to the affirmation of the common good. In no way are they violent beings and prey to tendencies that are poorly controlled by the civilization described by ethology. In this regard, Clastres was opposed to Leroi-Gourhan, who saw war as a simple extension, a duplication, a redeployment of the hunt, a manhunt. For her part, Arendt did not understand that rats are used in experiments so that we may learn that overcrowding gives rise to phenomena of aggression. Man, in short, is not an animal. Yet this is what is realized by politics, understood as a process of de-animalization. What man encounters and resists is above all the negation of humanity, the “inhuman,” as Éric Weil calls it. Violence is what threatens the community, the free city, and what prevents the fulfillment of the human being.

26Wherever we look, modern readings of violence have not managed to avoid making reference to ethology, either by deferring to its teachings or, on the contrary, by distancing themselves from them. If man gives free rein to his aggressiveness in all circumstances and in all places, he is seen as being in the image of the beast. If on the contrary, he is characterized by the kindness of his nature and his ability to govern his instincts, he becomes representative of philia rather than of eris. In brief, his nature is irreducible to that of a beast.

27Beyond the differences between the two sides of contemporary political science, we may be tempted to stress what, deep down, draws them closer together. While stressing the phenomenon of the monopolization of violence, Max Weber makes this the exception to the political since it grants to power what it takes away from other members of society. No one is allowed to resort to violence, and in a society based on order and the regulation of mores, the political has no need to resort to violence. In the end, the political does not monopolize violence in order to better exclude it. What makes Weber's position distinct from Arendt's is that he gathers together, where she strives to distinguish, and that for him, democracy is in essence based upon upon the same principles as authoritarian regimes. However, it is also the fact that, with certain reservations, violence always remains available for those for whom its use is reserved, freely if it is not constrained by law, or regulated if it is rational and legal. Within the framework of liberal democracy, Weber and Arendt’s readings join together well in practice since in both interpretations, the political means the exclusion of violence, which is constrained by law, even if the political remains in some ways, as Ricoeur puts it, a ”residual autocracy.” In non-democratic states, by contrast, these readings drift apart. Though they are authoritarian, they are no less political, according to Weber, whereas according to Arendt, being authoritarian, they break with what characterizes the political.

28Yet it is not enough to compare violence and the political. We must also appreciate the role these two contradictory readings leave for domination in order to understand the nature of their relationship.

29Linked to domination, the first option draws in three different forms a triangular figure associating violence, domination, and power, with numerous manifestations. Violence can be, first and foremost, the establisher of order. This is the position of Freud, who much like Hobbes, made the mutual renunciation of violence and the establishment of equality within the group the condition for social life. Violence may also be the repairer of order. This is the revolutionary option, which, paradoxically, makes violence the condition for a society without violence. Violence is ultimately the guarantor of order in all positions that make violence the source of power.

30Conversely, stripped of any reference to domination, the second option may have developed a perfectly egalitarian reading of the political. This is the position of Arendt, who, referring to both Pericles and Solon as well as to Madison’s conception of government, sees in domination a false and disturbing misinterpretation of power. By their very exception, workers' councils but also the Budapest and Prague insurrections reconnect, she argues, with the spirit of the political. The idea has the disadvantage of developing a normative viewpoint that is quite unrealistic and ill-suited to contemporary disruptions. However, it raises in an important way the question of the exception, of those moments when the political must face dissidence and decree, if necessary by force, behaviors and opinions. And on this point at least, our two readings of violence come close, brought together as they are from an antinomy of the exceptional. The modern political, which is defined by violence, is in fact characterized by the exceptional nature of the recourse to violence. That is, the political shorn of violence can only be based on exceptional cases.

31Should we then take sides? Raymond Aron correctly raises the question: can action in history avoid deteriorating into violence from the moment it is solely determined in relation to the alternative of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dominators and the dominated, without even knowing whether every society implies, to a degree at least, such a dichotomy or whether the effective power of mankind does not come to bear solely on the degree of and manner of domination or oppression. It is true that the affirmation of the political may be understood as a progressive civilization of mores, as a gamble on the peaceful settlement of conflicts through reasoning, discussion, and deliberation. But it is also possible that violence, or the threat of violence, will always remain an option, albeit one of last resort, since even if violence has a ritual character, it is always present as an option, which is wielded but which everyone knows is formal.

32Order rules, order compresses, order excludes. Sofsky has written powerful pages on this issue. Because it does not tolerate the marginal and the deviant and mistrusts the foreigner, it levels differences. Above all, it aims at conformity and homogeneity by molding and indoctrinating men. Unable to manage without uniformity, it sees what contravenes it as transgression and imposes sanctions upon it. Order classifies, sorts, assigns identities, and tolerates nothing outside of itself. It ranks: those who farm, those who bear arms, those who pray. At the heart of power, it puts men at arms because arms are more important than property since they make property respected. However, when needed, arms are also authorized to violate that property. Is violence being expressed in every case? Order seeks to understand violence, and when needed, to excuse it. When no explanation is offered, order is helpless. Order educates, it civilizes. It creates citizens who exist in and through the city. Plainly, the question of violence and order is posed in different terms, depending on whether the citizen is integrated into the city, in which case the political clearly means the exclusion of violence, or whether it represents a danger to the city, in which case the political means the monopolization of legitimate violence.

33Where does this leave the majority? What is its consent worth? And what meaning should we give to education, which ensures the integration of the individual into the city and, as Durkheim argues, guards against the risk of lawlessness? Because this integration cannot be achieved without the imposition of rules, it is of course tempting to see a form of symbolic and devious violence, of which only sociologists, armed with their expertise, can reveal the features. It is tempting to consider that this is particularly serious in that is is not perceived as violence by the victim and sometimes not even by the perpetrator. However, in addition to the fact that it is always problematic to characterize a situation or relationship as violent without any regard for the perception the protagonists may have of it or any meaning they may attribute to it, the interpretation of critical sociology can be perverse in that it equates pedagogy and propaganda, and ultimately, blurs the scale of regulatory modes of social and political organization. Clearly, from this perspective, an openly repressive regime, which does not hide its violence, can be more clearly fought than oft domination, which lulls the consciousness and disarms the body.

34How can education present itself as the opposite of violence? Because it presupposes consent, argues Durkheim. In doing so, it conserves what is best in us, what is truly human, and it turns us into successful men, fully integrated into society. And because education does not impose knowledge, argues Ricoeur. Rather, it transmits a feeling of relativity of the senses and teaches citizens that they cannot indulge in violence. The paradox of violence is that its very access to speech subjects it to reason. No one can argue in favor of violence without being self-contradictory since by advocating it, one enters the realm of discussion and bids farewell to arms.

35Yet it is not enough to argue that language and violence do not concur in solving the issue. This is because this opposition is not exactly that of language and violence, but rather as Éric Weil argues, that of speech and violence, and especially coherent speech and violence. However, this coherent speech is not uttered, nor does anyone own it: if someone were to claim that they own it, it would be violent again. Uttered speech cannot be free of the temptation of violence if it presents itself as completed and closed.

36There is in this option a gamble on the state of law, perhaps on the rule of law that alone can protect the individual from the temptation of violence through the example it gives in restricting itself and limiting its own certainties – as the Founding Fathers of republican government knew full well. This takes place through the transmission of knowledge and values based on the principle of the recognition of the other through the school, which protects us from the temptation of racism and xenophobia, as has been convincingly demonstrated by research on political socialization. Finally, it takes place through only the education of citizens as regards the principle of equality, a notion that, as we have known since Tocqueville, freed us from feelings of frustration even as it trained minds to discuss and compromise.

37Though discussed only briefly, these questions have illuminated the complexity of the relationship between two terms that are at the same time both complementary and poorly harmonized. There lies the puzzle of the place of violence in modernity and, simultaneously, of the role it leaves to the normative point of view as well as its relation to time.

38We owe it to Norbert Elias to have clarified the first point. Starting from the 16th century, a change took hold in the social norms defining behaviors and sensitivities in the highest socioeconomic groups. That is, the norms became more stringent, more differentiated, and more pervasive but also more equal and more moderate since they banished the excesses of self-punishment as well as self-complacency. Linked to the process of the creation of the State, particularly through the subjugation of the warrior class and the tighter control by the curialization of the nobility, this change marked the decline of violence, which is nowadays perceived as such. Whether legitimate or illegitimate, violence assumes an instrumental character since it is no longer an end into itself, and recourse to it no longer leads by itself to satisfaction. Moreover, commerce not only soften mores but is itself the product of this pacification.

39The second element of the puzzle is that because it is associated with evil, violence cannot be otherwise or totally escape the normative viewpoint. Violence is the natural order, it is the reign of war, and for this reason, the monopoly that is granted to the State passes for decisive and civilizing progress. Freud said nothing more when he considered that immoral acts committed by the State could not be justified except in exceptional circumstances, namely in the defense of the nation. If institutions are not moralizing, how could the superego work, and how could the individual be moral?

40In the last resort, combat and hostility aim in effect at absolute symmetry, at the destruction of the other. They are based on a refusal to understand otherness, both one’s own and that of the other, in that they do not allow for the possibility of another’s viewpoint. If one sees a continuation of the social in the political, nothing precludes it from being assimilated to violence. But if one insists on a radical difference, there is no longer any space for violence because it presupposes within it another, who should be eliminated because it is radically other. Clearly, it took a long time for something more than tribe, village, or common language to be seen in mankind.

41The third element of the puzzle is the relationship of violence with time. Violence has a sudden character, which by definition does not seek consent. The political is expressed as a continuous process and cannot do without legitimacy. No government, Arendt reminds us, can rely exclusively on the use of violence as even totalitarian regimes call adhesion voluntary and should be able to procure the support of the masses without violence. Legitimacy cannot be based solely on violence, nor can it be granted without limits in the present in the name of promises that justify violence. A price must always be paid, in the short or long term, for violence, where we see that it is exceptional, in those special moments that alone can remind us of what is unique – of what is exceptional – of the foundation, and where we see that we have always been seeking to restore the foundations under the banner of violence: yesterday, Robespierre, Lenin, Hitler; today, Islamic terrorism, tribal violence.

42Violence is expressed in the short term. It erupts. As a result, it clearly distinguishes itself from politics, which is expressed as a continuous process unfolding over time. Yet this constitutes a point upon which the political and violence can come closer since they both express a refusal of the provisional and the perishable. This is evident if we consider the sense ascribed by the Greeks to the political activity in which they found their best assurance of immortality, but also if we understand violence as being in an inverse relation with death. Like politics, violence is a struggle against death: he who slaughters the other escapes death. Éric Weil and Wolfgang Sofsky agree on this point: he who knows himself to be mortal acts against violence; he who is violent seeks to overcome his own death in death. Is there a secret link that therefore ties together violence and the political? Or should we rather see in this odd couple two conflicting readings of the same gamble? The political tells men that together, they can build something that transcends them all and will survive them as long as nothing material and perishable is interposed between them. That is, violence leaves everyone with the illusion of their survival, of a life that leaves them alone, of a provisional but always renewable assurance of immortality. Yet while the political speaks of the whole, of the survival of the individual by means of the whole, violence makes the individual – or the social, as the case may be – the whole. Violence causes man to revert to his animal nature, while the political attempts to tear him away from it. That strange link that binds them together is maintained, loose or tight, depending on whether it is harmony or conflict, equality or domination, plurality or unity that prevails.