Symbolic violence describes a type of non-physical violence manifested in the power differential between social groups. It is often unconsciously agreed upon by both parties and is manifested in an imposition of the norms of the group possessing greater social power on those of the subordinate group.
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To have "intentions" in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others. So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself. This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong.
So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal" it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.
Her view at once aggrandised the place and role of philosophy in the adjudication of genocide and called for a new mode of political and legal reflection that she believed would safeguard both thinking and the rights of an open-ended plural global population to protection against destruction.
What had become banal – and astonishingly so – was the failure to think. Indeed, at one point the failure to think is precisely the name of the crime that Eichmann commits. We might think at first that this is a scandalous way to describe his horrendous crime, but for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be.
Of course, the first reaction to such an apparently naive claim may be that Arendt overestimated the power of thinking or that she held on to a highly normative account of thinking that does not correspond to the various modes of reflection, self-muttering, and silent chatter that goes by that name.
Indeed, her indictment of Eichmann reached beyond the man to the historical world in which true thinking was vanishing and, as a result, crimes against humanity became increasingly "thinkable". The degradation of thinking worked hand in hand with the systematic destruction of populations.
Indeed, that for which she faulted Eichmann was his failure to be critical of positive law, that is, a failure to take distance from the requirements that law and policy imposed upon him; in other words, she faults him for his obedience, his lack of critical distance, or his failure to think.
But more than this, she faults him as well for failing to realise that thinking implicates the subject in a sociality or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims. In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide. Of course, they can have such thoughts, formulate and implement genocidal policy, as Eichmann clearly did, but such calculations cannot be called thinking, in her view. How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself.
Many questions abound: is thinking to be understood as a psychological process or, indeed, something that can be properly described, or is thinking in Arendt's sense always an exercise of judgment of some kind, and so implicated in a normative practice. If the "I" who thinks is part of a "we" and if the "I" who thinks is committed to sustaining that "we", how do we understand the relation between "I" and "we" and what specific implications does thinking imply for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law?
Arendt's book on Eichmann is highly quarrelsome. But it is probably worth remarking that she is not only taking issue with the Israeli courts and with the way in which they arrived at the decision to punish Eichmann to death. She is also critical of Eichmann himself for formulating and obeying a noxious set of laws.
One rhetorical feature of her book on Eichmann is that she is, time and again, breaking out into a quarrel with the man himself. For the most part, she reports on the trial and the man in the third person, but there are moments in which she addresses him directly, not on the trial, but in her text. One such moment occurred when Eichmann claimed that in implementing the final solution, he was acting from obedience, and that he had derived this particular moral precept from his reading of Kant.
We can imagine how doubly scandalous such a moment was for Arendt. It was surely bad enough that he formulated and executed orders for the final solution, but to say, as he did, that his whole life was lived according to Kantian precepts, including his obedience to Nazi authority, was too much. He invoked "duty" in an effort to explain his own version of Kantianism. Arendt writes: "This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant's moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience."
Eichmann contradicts himself as he explains his Kantian commitments. On the one hand, he clarifies: "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws." And yet, he also acknowledges that once he was charged with the task of carrying out the final solution, he ceased to live by Kantian principles. Arendt relays his self-description: "he no longer 'was master of his own deeds,' and … he 'was unable to change anything'."
When in the midst of his muddled explanation, Eichmann reformulates the categorical imperative such that one ought to act in such a way that the Führer would approve, or would himself so act, Arendt offers a swift rejoinder, as if she were delivering a direct vocal challenge to him: "Kant, to be sure, had never intended to say anything of the sort; on the contrary, to him every man was a legislator the moment he started to act; by using his 'practical reason' man found the principles that could and should be the principles of law."
Judith Butler
"At two key junctures in his 1975 lectures Abnormal, Foucault turns his attention to the way in which the figure of the abnormal gives way, in the last years of the nineteenth century, to “the problem of heredity, racial purification, and the correction of the human instinctual system by purification of the race.” (Abnormal, p. 133; see also pp. 316-318). In those passages, Foucault begins to develop the hypothesis that psychiatry gave birth to a new form of racism, different than traditional ethnic racism, that he refers to as “racism against the abnormal.” (Abnormal, p. 316). Foucault proposes, provocatively, that this new form of racism ultimately would be combined with the more traditional form of racism to trigger some of the worst excesses of the twentieth century: “this neoracism as the internal means of defense of a society against its abnormal individuals, is the child of psychiatry, and Nazism did no more than graft this new racism onto the ethnic racism that was endemic in the nineteenth century,” he states (Abnormal, p. 317). These passages from Abnormal combine Foucault’s renewed interest in heredity and degeneration, and in racism, with his long-time fascination for theories of social defense and civil war.
It is to these exact themes that Foucault turns in 1976 in perhaps his most famous and well known lectures, “Society Must Be Defended.” Most well known because they were the first to be published in French, and also because, very early, they were (at least the first two lectures) translated into English and published in 1980 in Knowledge/Power. In fact, their integral publication in French in 1997 would inaugurate the series that we are studying this year in Foucault 13/13.
“Society Must Be Defended” announces key themes in Foucault’s work. Several of them would be published just a few months later, with the release on 17 November 1976 of his History of Sexuality—Volume 1 (La Volonté de savoir): the notions of biopolitics and security, of population, of race wars and racism. It is in these lectures and La Volonté de savoir that Foucault famously compared sovereign power to biopolitics through the lens of those two now-famous epigraphs, respectively, « faire mourir ou laisser vivre » (to cause death or let live) and « faire vivre et laisser mourir » (to make live and to let die).
Three key concepts structure the central argument of Society Must Be Defended: (1) race war; (2) biopolitics; and (3) modern racism. Together these three concepts lead to an analysis of what Foucault calls “State racism” that is best exemplified by colonization (p. 65, 103, and 257), Nazism (p. 259), and Soviet State racism (P. 83)
(1) The first concept, race war, Foucault identifies with the emergence of a new historiography in the 16th and 17th centuries that highlights the struggle between peoples, between races (p. 57-61). In contrast to an earlier political paradigm associated with Roman history, Foucault argues, there emerges during the late Middle Ages an understanding of politics as riven by race conflict–the struggles between the Frankish, Goths, Gauls, Celts, Saxons, etc. (p. 75) Politics becomes understood, during this period, as tribal clash. This new political history moves away from a universalist understanding, privileging a certain decentering of truth: the basis for truth becomes partiality, partisanship, interest, race interests. The birth of this historical-political discourse serves as a truth-weapon, where truth turns on local interests.
(2) At the same time that the discourse of race wars gets masked by a return to universalism during the time of the Revolution and, soon, the development of a discourse of perpetual peace (p. 239), biopower emerges in the second half of the 18th century as a counterpoint to disciplinary power. We witness here another way of governing, one that focuses not on correcting the individual, but on managing the population: on achieving optimal outcomes for the population as a whole, on reaching equilibrium for the nation. The target of governing becomes birth rates and mortality rates, the fertility of the population, reproduction (p. 243). We witness a shift from “man-as-body” to “man-as-species,” as power relations focus on “living man, man-as-living-being.” (p. 242)
(3) During the 19th century, there emerges as well what Foucault refers to as “modern racism”: a form of racism that, Foucault argues, is associated with the elimination of the abnormal, the cleansing of defectives. Racism, in this technical sense, is the racism against the abnormal, the strategy of cleansing a race of its inferior or defective instantiations. Modern racism becomes “primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die.” (p. 254)
Putting these three concepts in conversation, Foucault argues that it is the linking of politics as race war (as between races) with modern racism against the abnormal (within races) that produces the worst excesses of the 19th and 20th centuries: the brutal, genocidal forms of colonization that seek to eliminate others and cleanses one’s own, as well as Nazism with its race war and internal cleansing as well. Foucault explains that “Racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger.” (p.258). The extreme murderousness of these regimes is a combination of all three of these concepts–race war, biopower, and modern racism''.
Bernard E. Harcourt
