camps and the problem of moral (or legal) judgment, if not explanation, is brought to the fore through recourse to the language of religion (Lazarus). These links are critical: totalitarianism, through its vision of technologically perfected and socially dis-embedded modernity (camps), opens up a space in which men can finally realize their Enlightened potential (anything and everything)—only to find that this transgression of previous limits is in fact a species of nihilism which erodes even the categories of understanding. Hence, the recourse to the language of the miraculous, and in particular, to the image of Lazarus, a man who moves across the space of life and death. The image of Lazarus is key to Arendt’s argument in more ways than one: not only is he something miraculous in the sense that he cannot be understood according to traditional categories (if at all), but insofar as he can be understood, it is in the sense that his resurrection marks the boundaries between life and death that Arendt’s Nazis disregarded: namely, in ways which require a transcendental policing ironically missing in the modern and disenchanted world. Arendt is not unique here in linking violence and late modernity with the language of religion and miracle, or in linking this package of features to a claim that totalitarian violence challenges our power to understand and describe. Arendt is less clear, however, on whether it is actually in the nature of violence that it confounds such categories, or whether this is an optical illusion of sorts—that is, that extreme violence only appears to be incapable of description or cognition.
Arendt’s claim that totalitarian violence challenges our categories of understanding did not emerge from a vacuum. It is part of a larger conversation on the nature of reason and enlightenment that played out over the course of the mid-twentieth century among thinkers as diverse as Heidegger (Arendt’s teacher) and those of the Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School of critical theory). In many respects our current discourse on (and discomfort with) violence is linked to this discussion as much as it is to our legal categories, albeit in the former case perhaps more tangentially. The basic claim—shared by Heidegger and the Frankfurt school—was that the instrumental, scientific reason prized by the Enlightenment had become fundamentally dehumanizing. It is this dehumanization that is productive of violence,33 and not just particular acts of violence against particular individuals, but, because the violence perpetrated on the vulnerable is actually a species of self-hatred,34 this instrumentally rationalized system promotes a violence which pollutes all participants in it. As Adorno and Horkheimer put in it in the section of Dialectic of Enlightenment dealing with anti-Semitism:
The enlightened self-control with which adapted Jews effaced within themselves the painful scars of domination by others, a second kind of circumcision, made them forsake their own dilapidated community and wholeheartedly embrace the life of the modern bourgeoisie, which was already advancing ineluctably towards a reversion to pure oppression and reorganization into an exclusively racial entity. Race is not, as the racial nationalists claim, an immediate, natural peculiarity. Rather, it is a regression to nature as mere violence, to the hidebound particularism which, in the existing order, constitutes precisely the universal. Race today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual, integrated into the barbaric collective. The harmonious society to which the liberal Jews declared their allegiance has finally been granted to them in the form of national community. They believed only that anti-Semitism disfigured this order, which in reality cannot exist without disfiguring human beings. The persecution of the Jews, like any persecution, cannot be separated from that order. Its essence, however it may hide itself at times, is the violence which today is openly revealed.35
Reason—true reason, not coldly instrumental reason—can critique this system, but fundamentally, in its modern, technological instantiation, “Enlightenment is totalitarian.”36
There are two important moves here: first, the extension of the violence of totalitarianism from death camps to the entirety of late modernity meant the opening up of a vast territory in which one could locate, expose, and critique the violence that was now revealed to structure everyday life and practice. And the experience of the twentieth century meant that this could be extended beyond the boundaries of Europe proper to include the European colonial experience writ large (and the thorough nastiness of the violence of nineteenth-century colonization and twentieth-century decolonization made this task both easier and more timely).37 Additionally, the sense that the demise of Nazism in World War II did not in fact end the progress of modern totalitarianism, but simply allowed it to appear in newer and seemingly more benign clothes, necessitated turning critical attention to modern society and exposing its violence through an analogous process of critique.38 A sense that violence lurked in every corner and was a central social ordering principle (and a morally questionable one, in contrast to Weber, who was only pessimistic) resulted in the profusion of the use of the term today, in which we find, to draw from the table of contents of one recent collected volume, that there is, at the very least, state violence, structural violence, everyday violence, symbolic violence, interpersonal violence, and gendered violence.39 In its specific manifestations, violence can be anything from punching another individual in the nose to anything generally coercive or even unpleasant (and here we can include all forms of social ordering), on the assumption that order is possible either because (a) it ultimately rests upon the eventual likelihood of violence, regardless of whether such violence is ever actually employed; or (b) because ordering proceeds from power, and power in itself is reducible to acts of violence.40 In this process of marking things as violent and exposing them to the critical gaze there was never any need to produce a method by which types of violence could be disassociated from one another: since all forms of violence could be equally traumatizing (and therefore equally valid opportunities to expose the dynamics of power), a system of distinguishing which forms of violence might be more important than others would have been fundamentally an imposition of power, and hence of violence, and hence culpable. The downside to this critical move, however, is obvious: history quickly comes to look very much like Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, in which:
Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.41
To continue in this vein rapidly exposes one of two problems, depending on how one approaches the analysis: at one level, if all is violence and violence is everywhere, then violence is also nowhere and nothing particularly remarkable—it’s just turtles all the way down. In this sense, the concept becomes sociologically useless; it has the additional disadvantage of making the writing of the history of violence along these lines excruciatingly boring.
The other way that these moves have changed historical discourse on violence is perhaps more important, as well as being both philosophically and methodologically dangerous. To return to Arendt’s move in bringing the language of religion to bear on questions of totalitarian violence, we could say that, if violence is both everywhere and nowhere, then it is not sociologically empty, but instead paradoxical in the Kierkegaardian sense: that is, it implies or induces a critical stance in which violence can only be beheld with a horror religiosus, observed with awe but not understood, because, like the sacrifice of Isaac, it suspends the ethical and as such touches on the sublime or the indescribable.42 This is the second legacy of critical theory, namely, the involvement of the language of religion and mystified awe in the study of violence. While initially proposing to expose the violence of the Enlightenment by marking it as mythical, it is no small irony that subsequent critical projects often have come to echo their own objects, returning to the language of religion in a sort of inversion in which acts, images, or descriptions
