Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins

By Moira Fradinger

Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat—that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other—violence—especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake.
The book shares the philosophical interest in rethinking politics that has recently surfaced at the crossroads of literary criticism, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. Fradinger takes seriously the responsibility to think through and give names to the political uses of violence and to provoke useful reflection on the problem of violence as it relates to politics and on literature as it relates to its times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jun 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9780804774659

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Binding Violence

Literary Visions of Political Origins

Moira Fradinger

This book has been published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund, Yale University.

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Soldiers’ Rest from Poems by Roque Dalton ©1984 by Roque Dalton.

Reprinted with permission of Curbstone Press.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fradinger, Moira

Binding violence : literary visions of political origins / Moira Fradinger.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804774659

1. Violence in literature. 2. Politics in literature. 3. Politics and literature. 4. Literature, Comparative. I. Title.

PN56.V53F73 2010

809’.933552—dc22

2009029231

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/14 Minion.

A Anamaría Lascano y Raúl Fradinger

A Erich y Sonia

A John

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Literature, Violence, and Politics

PART I - Sophocles’ Antigone or The Invention of Politics: We the City

Antigone and the Polis

The Most Modern of Tragedies: The Politics of Burial

Creon’s Edict: The Barbarians at Home

Dying Democratically: Antigone’s Ritual

INTERLUDE

Modern Tempo—Democratic Overture, State Finale

PART II - D. A. F. de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom or The Reinvention of Politics: We the People

Sade’s Text and Sade’s Times

The Libertine Alliance: No Ordinary Pact in Times of War

Necrophiliac Cannibals: Dismembering Nonpeople, Membering The People

Domestic Consistency: Not Laws, but Order

Frame within the Frame: Riveting Voices and Gazes

INTERLUDE

Modern Sovereignty: Perversion of Democracy?

PART III - Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat or Sovereign Politics: We the Nation-State

Vargas Llosa’s Appeal to History: Within and Beyond Latin America

Necropolitics I: From an African Horde to a Modern Country - Trujillo’s Body Politic and the Haitian Enemy

Necropolitics II: Rebonding the Nation - Trujillo’s Body Natural and the Specularity of Enmity

EPILOGUE

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

In a world such as ours, where three-quarters of the population live in poverty or in the midst of war, writing about literature and violence—let alone writing —is a privilege. I am indebted to many people and institutions for having granted me that privilege, and to my parents, Anamaría and Raúl, above all for the efforts they made to grant their children the advantage of an education.

The ideas suggested in this book are the result of so many partnerships that it is as difficult to do justice to them as it is to account for the times that led to their crystallization.

Early work for this book was done under the auspices of Yale University’s intellectual community and with Yale’s financial support, for which I am most grateful. The book took its current shape partly during a postdoctoral Mellon fellowship at the Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania; it was completed during a sabbatical year granted to me by a Morse Fellowship at Yale University. I wish to express sincere gratitude to the editorial board of Stanford University Press: special thanks to Emily-Jane Cohen and Norris Pope for their warmth, support, and professionalism; to Sarah Crane Newman, John Feneron, and Martin Hanft for their extraordinary efficiency, kindness, and help in the production process. I am also most grateful to Marcel Hénaff and an anonymous reader who so generously offered comments on the manuscript. A Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund grant from Yale helped with publication costs; thanks, too, to Jon Butler and Emily Bakemeier, whose support at Yale has been vital throughout.

I benefited from invaluable comments made by many readers at different stages of work. For their advice on my early work, I am grateful to Shoshana Felman, whose lessons in reading have been invaluable, and to Roberto González Echeverría, Michael Holquist, and Rolena Adorno. I must also express immense gratitude to Rosi Braidotti, who, in spite of not having been directly involved with this book, long ago and far away gave me a clearer idea of the kind of scholar I wanted to become. I am short of words to thank Laura Wexler for all these years of reading, support, friendship, and intellectual conversation, which made so many things possible. To have Carol Jacobs as a close reader, mentor, and friend is a privilege and a joy I could not have imagined: I cannot thank her enough for her comments on this manuscript, her unmatched intellectual generosity, her friendship, and her readiness to help, even at the last minute.

I could not have been more fortunate to have for an intellectual home Yale University’s inexhaustible intellectual community, and especially the Department of Comparative Literature, where collegiality makes all the difference. Thanks to David Quint, Dudley and Stephanie Andrew, Katie Trumpener, and Richard Maxwell for the intellectual conversation, support, and wonderful spirit of giving, to Ala Alryyes for the friendship but also for so many rides back home when I had too many books to carry on foot; to Peter Brooks, Francesco Casetti, Rainer Nägele, Barry McCrea, Alex Beecroft, Katerina Clark, Pericles Lewis, Henry Sussman, Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, and Haun Saussy, and to Victor Bers in the Classics Department for his wonderful seminar on Greek tragedy. Michael Denning, Nigel Alderman, Geetanjali Chanda, Maurice Samuels, Hazel Carby, Jean-Jacques Poucel, and Dale Martin have been inspiring intellectual companions and supportive friends throughout. Without Mary Jane Stevens’s assistance and friendship it would be hard for me to imagine Yale; thanks also for Angie Schrieber’s kindness and help. Geoffrey and Renée Hartman’s humorous and persistent message that I should sometimes look at the good side of things always made life so much easier; they, as well as Ben Kiernan and Dori Laub, have helped shape my thinking about genocide and representation.

Many lines in this book stem from passionate discussions about politics, culture, and justice with three cherished friends at the Yale Law School whom I cannot thank enough; they made their homes a home for me. Owen Fiss and George Priest are the best of interlocutors, since they also inhabit my Argentine home; Paul Kahn, who always helps me think through the problem of violence, also invited me to his summer seminar in Germany on law and violence, an experience that had an impact on this book.

I am short of words to acknowledge the intellectual inspiration and friendship of newer interlocutors: Fred Jameson’s questions made me reconsider several passages and several other problems for a future inquiry on violence: his intellectual vision, critical passion, and generosity of heart and mind are unparalleled. John Beverley encouraged me to publish this book after reading a summary of it. Thanks for Susan Willis’s wonderful insights and generosity; and to Ariel Dorfman, whose spirit of giving, political and literary writing, and limitless enthusiasm for life inspire me constantly. Special thanks to Gerry Prince for encouraging me to publish an earlier part of my work on Sade in French Forum (Riveted by the Voice: The Sadean City at Silling, French Forum 30.2 [Spring 2005]: 49–66); thanks also to Shane Herron and Sol Peláez for publishing an earlier version of my thoughts on Antigone in Theory@Buffalo (Violent Boundaries: Antigone’s Political Imagination, Theory@Buffalo, Issue: Democracy and Violence [Spring 2006]).

It is true that one always writes in a foreign language: our mother tongue is at first alien to us, and then one struggles with written language as something alien to the native oral idiom. Nonetheless, writing in a language that is not one’s mother’s tongue has entailed more hours of mourning for me: one mourns metaphors that have the sound of music in one’s mother tongue but do not make the least sense in English; one mourns those fictions that made reality livable while growing up and that one cannot imagine in a language other than that of one’s childhood; one misses tones, emphases, concepts, and ways of perceiving that have no translation. It would all have been impossible without the support of friends here, at home, or scattered all over the world. My biggest thanks to sisters in the United States—Nadia Altschul, Kamari Clarke, Sara Nadal-Melsió, and Ana Puga—who not only read my work critically but with whom I also share the travails of uprootedness within and beyond the academy; special thanks to Leo Lisi and Olivier Reid, who read the entire manuscript with incredible patience, critical insight, and eye for detail. Thanks for the friendship of Joel Tolman, Cecilia Enjuto-Ranjel, and Pedro García Caro, who also offered invaluable help for last minute problems; thanks for Erik Butler’s wicked sense of humor and expertise in classics; and to Elizabeth Tulis, Catherine Flynn, Sonya Collins, and Tobias Hetch for help at different stages with editing. Thanks to Marta Rivas and Jorge Santiago, and Julie and Krimo Bokreta for so many meals in Philadelphia, and to fellow travelers María Willstedt, Masha Salazkina, Luca Caminati, Fernando Rosenberg, Amy Chazkel, Pepe Cárdenas, Kate Holland, Duncan Chesney, John Charles, Patricia Gherovici, Gustavo Klurfan, and Marc Caplan.

Having lived in seven different countries means that home is mainly created by the friends one meets along the way. Shared nomadisms with friends of friends have been vital throughout: enormous gratitude goes to Seema Kazi, Elizabeth Janz Mayer-Rieckh, Marcos Mariño, Araceli Varela, Ariel and Adriana Méndez, Sylvia Pópoli, Sylvia Mitraud, Vladimir Flórez, Miguel Rojas, and Philippe Skolle; and a debt is owed to an old friend, Gustavo Guerrero, who long ago, in Caracas, showed me a different entrance to poetry through the modern Greeks. Buenos Aires, though, is still the city where the unfailing loyalty of old friends anchors and revivifies me. Thanks to Kuky Coria and Mariano Plotkin for insisting that I take the plane to come to Yale; to Elena Alloé, Andrea Tolchinsky, Mirta Clara, Miriam Wlosko, and Debora Yanco for their constant help and wisdom; to Jorge Myers for always going out of his way to share his boundless knowledge; to Francisco Naishtat for his insightful reading of a chapter; to Pablo Kreimer and Gabriel Guralnik for their unbeatable sense of humor in the face of catastrophe; to Laura Klein, Silvia Chejter, Gerardo Gutman, Mercedes Etchemendi and Marcelo Ferrante, Eduardo Abbate, July Cháneton, Viviana Matta, Anahí Valent, Miguel Wald, Itatí Acuña, Judith Filc, and Peter Kahn for being there at crucial moments; and then there is my old debt to Pablo Pavesi, for helping me long ago to find my roots in literature.

My family is inscribed in every single line written, book read, tear dropped, smile given, and scintilla of happiness or misery felt throughout this process. No words suffice to express my debt to this special circle that sustains, simply put, life itself. I am who I am thanks to them. I owe many of my intellectual and political passions to my parents, both of whom are also the most loyal supply of books, films, articles, and acid humor. I rely on my brother Erich and my sister Sonia as I do on no one else: they, along with Cecilia, Luis, Iván and Vera, Camila, and Agustín, make every last minute of every trip home precious. In Canada, it is Liz and Jack, Pamela, Peter, Stephanie, and Aidan, Ian, Addison, Nick, and Alex who make all the difference. And if John, who read, edited, and (rigorously) criticized all that I wrote, had not entered my life (and cooked so many meals), I would not be able to imagine how to look at life again. For my gratitude to his love, I could always try to find metaphors and metonymies, but this gratitude, like poetry, has no translation: haces añicos los miedos; luego me muestras los remolinos de mar donde esparcirlos para iniciar la ceremonia de la alquimia.

INTRODUCTION

[H]umans are political animals because they are literary animals: not only in the Aristotelian sense of using language in order to discuss questions of justice, but also because we are confounded by the excess of words in relation to things.

—Jacques Rancière¹

The question poses itself whether there are no other than violent means for regulating conflicting human interests.

—Walter Benjamin²

Literature, Violence, and Politics

Binding violence: at once a name for a violence that sutures frayed political borders, and a crisp formulation of the premise of this book.

The literary visions under review here represent violence as binding a political community together when its borders are in crisis; violence, rather than political reason, is woven into and bound to the fragile determinations of political membership. The texts I examine offer us insights into the violent fabric of autonomous political life and its inextricable relation to the travails of imagination; imagination, in its turn, bears the imprint of violence. Benjamin’s concern about the possibility of a nonviolent regulation of conflict in his 1921 Critique of Violence challenges us to ask whether we can summon the power of imagination for the task of reducing violence in human social interaction. The ways in which violence is inter-tissued into society speak to how we envision its possibility; any configuration of society depends on the successful avoidance of absolute violence—that is, the violence of extermination. Politics is one form of praxis that binds and is bound by violence; the literary imagination is another. I do not wish to make a metaphysical claim about violence as a constant of that elusive entity human nature—an entity that nonetheless underlies most intellectual efforts to imagine the possibility of human change.³ Rather, my reflections in this book are prompted by literary visions of the centrality of violence for determining the texture of politics and literature. As we inhabit a world permanently threatened by self-destruction, my interpretations are guided by the imperative of expanding our capacity to conceptualize the problem of violence, and to read politically not only literary texts but also the fictions that give meaning to violence in social life. I examine literary works as both embedded within and struggling against the political imagination of their times—a political imagination that both shapes and is shaped by political action.

Literary imagination, violence, and political life are the three axes that organize my readings of Sophocles’ Antigone (ca. 442 B.C.E.), D. A. F. de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (Cent vingt journées de Sodome, 1785), and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo, 2000). The readings in this book propose that the political imagination of these texts grants violence the role of instantiating a new political membership when the borders of a given political constituency have been thrown into crisis. Thus I call these texts fictions of political origins: they do not effect critiques of existing societies, as, for instance, the genre of political satire would do, but rather offer literary imaginings of the inauguration of political worlds out of a background of civic dissolution. In the texts I review, membership, which is probably the most properly political question for an autonomous polity, is not represented as predicated upon figures of reason, agreement, contract, or kinship. Nor is it predicated, in accord with the Freudian model, upon the task of mourning the murder of an all-powerful father, a mourning that would establish the law that binds a new community of brothers by prohibiting violence. Rather, a specific kind of violence, which I have chosen to name binding violence, clarifies the new borders of the autonomous collective. This violence does not subdue an enemy but exterminates it. It targets not the external invader or the enemy that belongs to a social category—a group already defined along the lines of gender, class, race, or ethnicity, for instance. It is a violence that targets an internal enemy carved out of a previous community of friends: it transforms the brother, the citizen, the daughter, the ancestor, into an enemy. As such, this enemy signifies a crisis of limits: as the figure of an interior transformed into an exterior, it preserves its interiority at the same time that it becomes foreign, assuming a liminal position that comes to define the outside and the inside. The creation and elimination of this enemy figures the temporary fantasy of a binding of the community.

This book argues that the particular representation of the link between violence and membership in these fictions of political origins is a literary symptom of a formal foundational problem constitutive of an autonomous sphere of the political. Implicit in this argument is the notion that such literary symptoms may appear when political autonomy becomes the dominant imagination of a given era. In an autonomous political sphere, membership is not given, but it must be defined. If we give ourselves our own rules, who are we? While any given resolution of this question occurs within a specific historical situation, its internal formal paradox remains an enigma: if we govern, who would want to be excluded from this we on the basis of consensus? In democratic theory, a democratic solution for the definition of the demos has yet to be found. In the texts under review, violence determines membership at the hour of political refoundation. I have read this representation of violence as an invitation to take seriously the call for a democratic imagination so as to face the paradoxes involved in all attempts to fix the limits of the autonomous demos.

I argue that this literary knowledge can expand the range of names we use to account for violence. To a certain extent, my interpretative gesture methodologically hinges upon a political allegory. Nonetheless, I see the link between violence and membership as echoing the conflict that drives allegorical representation as such. If allegory is the tension between a desire for the closure of the gap between sign and reality and the realization that this gap is impossible to close, binding violence represents the desire for, and failure of, a similar closure in terms of the system we identify as an autonomous political community, which we can rephrase as the desire and impossibility to close the gap between the universal abstract ideal of equality (universal political membership) and its concrete determinations. Ultimately, these questions are bound to lead us to yet another problem, which will be directly raised in my reading of Antigone’s politics: if the borders of the demos were to be eliminated, and universal equality realized, would this mean the end of politics? Without claiming that these questions entirely account for the texts’ construction, this book argues that they speak to our political life and its ways of thinking through violence.

Politics

The political life to which I refer is primarily a theoretical sphere, whose basic meaning is a vision of the collective; it stands in contrast to images of isolated human existence—for instance, hermetic life, or what at several stages in modern political theory is envisioned as a state of nature. Whether the collective is considered to be a fact of human existence or a relational fiction, it is determined, though not exhausted, by the imaginative articulation of the contingency of human interaction and its violent forms. All communal life entails such imaginative articulations; political life is a specific configuration of a collective’s relation to violence, to the most extreme expression of power.

My readings in this book concern a historically bound imagining, widely shared in the modern West, of what political life should aim to achieve, or should rely on, in order to cope with the contingency of human interaction: autonomy. The normative space of politics for the modern West—if not its definition proper—is a self-governed collective, whose members control their destiny in communal processes of negotiation. This ideal of an autonomous society—one of the meanings of modern sovereignty—is to be contrasted with that of a heteronomous society, in which communal decisions are imagined as being made by external or extrahuman agents, such as divine entities.⁴ I thus relate the texts that I examine in this book to a tradition whose ideal is popular sovereignty. This involves both popular decision-making and the setting of limits to the ever questioning self-instituting activity resulting from universal participation, a participation that radicalizes the contingency of political life. Modernity’s critics have shown us, however, how the setting of limits relates to a competing image of modern political sovereignty—namely, autonomy’s ghostly other, domination: both control over others and the setting of limits upon the influence of others.

I wish to clarify my reference to the West, since I do not aim to establish any factual specificity of its geohistorical limits, so much as the operational extent of its fiction, strictly linked to the image of political autonomy and its dual conceptions of sovereignty. To identify the actual borders of the West is futile after five hundred years of European colonialism and amid the current globalizing phenomena. The West has always had porous borders, though culturally construed as having an identity on the basis of establishing its other—a Eurocentrism that has been thoroughly deconstructed throughout the twentieth century. I use the term West throughout the book for its practical convenience as it situates the texts under review in a political tradition of thought that became dominant within the geopolitical space of the European capitalist colonial powers born after the fall of feudalism. Within this tradition, the tension between autonomy and domination was displayed on a global scale, as the West was exported in response to capitalism’s increasing need for a universalism that could facilitate its expansion.⁵ Especially relevant for my overview is the fact that after the Renaissance, and particularly after 1789, this tradition constructs its ancestry by recovering what it can and what it wants of ancient Greek democracy (the period between the eighth and fifth centuries B.C.E.), as the cornerstone of Western modernity’s political self-understanding. In this book, ancient democracy, particularly as discussed in my reading of Antigone , appears as the birth of politics according to the Western fiction. While I strongly agree with the argument that the fabrication of ancient Greece as ancestor to the West served European cultural and economic interests,⁶ I do not engage in discussion about whether democracy actually started in Greece or whether the West comes indeed from Greece. Instead, I use this fictional political ancestry as a generative grammar that yields the images of autonomy and domination that articulate modernity’s political action, violence, and literary representation.

In terms of its vision of community, the political imagination of autonomy most radically entails the principle of equality (whether in its ancient, or modern liberal and radical formulations) as the basis of a new political binding, and thus, of society’s unlimited capacity to judge its own foundational premises critically. Once bloodlines, kinship, or religious and aristocratic privilege cease to be legitimate binding principles, establishing differential participation in decision-making, the crucial question of how to articulate difference must be radically reimagined in a society of equal and free rivals, as the members of the newly inaugurated Greek democracy in ancient times considered themselves. One can say that the fundamental gesture of the Greek invention of politics was a movement of inclusion: an expansion of the sphere of public decision-making to all propertied male members of the demes.⁷ I follow Christoph Menke in identifying the signature of political modernity in the appropriation of the idea of equality.⁸ This meant then, as it does now, "the dissolution of all markers of certainty [generating] a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and [. . .] of relations between self and other," as Claude Lefort puts it (Democracy and Political Theory: 19). For lack of a natural order, this kind of politics deals with contingency by way of structuring conflict. The violence of such structuring conflict is often seen as the struggle between constituted and constituting powers; its famous modern theoretical formulations range from the classic Marxist class-conflict to Walter Benjamin’s law-making and law-preserving violence, to Laclau’s and Mouffe’s political antagonism, to Rancière’s disagreement, to name but a few.⁹ Underlying all formulations lies the concept of a society that has granted itself the capacity to undo its institutions; thus some famous pronouncements about the suicidal nature of democracy, ranging from John Quincy Adams’s there was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide, to Jacques Derrida’s democracy has always been suicidal.¹⁰ A tragic predicament, one could say: to protect democracy against its others is to suspend its self-questioning, so that in preventing its suicide, we may assassinate it.

The principle of equality inaugurates a particular anxiety in this type of political sphere: one of its central activities—if not the central one—is the resolution of its own definition of membership. This entails articulating equality and difference, rendering members equivalent to one another, not identical. Ideally, democracy’s inclusive principle posits that political virtue is human: no social determination, such as class, gender, or race, can limit participation. Logically speaking, the political space that opened up in ancient Greece would seemingly entail the dissolution of its own borders: the closure that signals the birth of the polis entails an exclusion that collides with democratic inclusiveness. Simply put, the binding together of the city as a distinct city goes against the principle of equality. However, popular sovereignty must have a people. The question that follows is: if the constitution of the demos cannot be consensual, then how are its decisions democratic? In Ian Shapiro’s words, [Q]uestions relating to membership seem [. . .] prior to democratic decision-making, yet paradoxically they cry out for democratic resolution (Democracy’s Edges: 1); Alan Keenan fully expands this paradox into several formulations: to name but one, the conditions of autonomy’s permanent uncertainty rule out the possibility of full political autonomy, given that the definition of who and what the community is, can only be nonautonomous (Democracy in Question: 33). An originary violence, or at least arbitrariness, insinuates itself here as establishing the demos, whose borders need not be only cleared but also defended at all times. We might summon here Michael Mann’s controversial thesis about modernity and a dark side of democracy.¹¹

Another way to phrase this problem is to recall what Menke refers to as the dialectics of equality (Reflections of Equality: 2–48). Modernity’s political imagination can be read in terms of the vicissitudes and questioning of the concept of equality. Equality’s internal mandate is equal treatment to every individual, but that depends on the existence of different individuals, and implies a limiting description of an equal individual. Insofar as it cannot be abstract, equality produces inequality: it depends on its other. In ancient times, social equality was not at stake, so the determinations of the only existing form of equality—political equality—were supported by social categories. The modern radicalization of equality, which began in the Renaissance but exploded in 1789, brought the universalization of political equality (and set the conditions for the political demand for social equality), basing its support on the new category of humanity. This universalization made any of its concrete determinations necessarily a problem. Menke extracts from this modern experience two dominant versions of the politics of equality, phrasing them in terms of the opposition between Babeuf and Marx: the utopian, striving toward perfect equality, and the subversive, demanding that existing social inequalities be addressed (ibid.: 154–76). If I am allowed to modify Kant’s famous phrase, modernity finds in the dialectics of equality a limit of political reason alone, taking political reason to mean the deliberation with which democracy is usually associated.¹² This is a limit that compels us to ponder whether there are specific forms of violence that emerge as a symptom of the failure of political reason to arbitrate what, from the point of view of equality, of a political reason alone, constitutes the arbitrary limits of equality. For lack of a democratic solution for membership, the political articulation of equality and difference might generate specific economies of violence in any given era.

The dark side of an originary violence defines, in the fictions of political origins under review, the borders of the polis of Sophocles’ Creon and Antigone, of the society of equals of Sade’s libertines, and of the new nation of Vargas Llosa’s dictator. The chronological sequence of these texts follows a well-known Western narrative about the history of political autonomy. While most of Western history has not been democratic, these texts were written in times dominated by the democratic imagination. The Sophoclean tragedy belongs to the ancient Athenian experiment usually identified as the invention of politics, haunted nonetheless by the limitations it placed upon citizenship since Cleisthenes uncoupled it from kinship to link it to territorial residence. Athens experienced sequential crises in defining political membership: in Peter Riesenberg’s words, the definition of citizenship became the central institution of the Athenian constitution (Citizenship in the Western Tradition: 22). Some six years before Antigone was staged, for instance, Pericles passed a law in 451–50 B.C.E. restricting citizenship to the offspring of Athenian parents; after the Peloponnesian War, oligarchs proposed restricting citizenship to three thousand on one occasion, and to those who fought for this democracy on another.¹³

The Sadean friends in crime, in turn, emerge during a time that has been called the reinvention of politics, and Vargas Llosa’s dictatorial nation is imagined in our times, labeled the third wave in the experiment of democracy. ¹⁴ The second birth of democracy entailed the 1789 universalization of equality based on the doctrine of human rights and the category of humanity. The third wave is the most recent of the vicissitudes of the universalization of equality, marked by the imperative democratization both of the European communist bloc and the globe: the last two decades of the twentieth century alone saw eighty-one countries across the five continents move from different forms of authoritarianism to democratic forms of government.¹⁵ The paradox here is that the global rhetoric of universal democratization accompanies the increasing homogenization of culture and politics, resulting from the needs of capitalist development in our age of mediatization. On the one hand, democratic multiplicity is seen as the remedy to the twentieth century’s legacy of totalitarianism; on the other, the demise of the socialist alternative has resulted in the imperative of a global economic homogenization that equals democracy with liberalism and market economy, and labels all forms of opposition to the latter as nondemocratic.

The spirit in the air can be found in formulations such as Shapiro’s the democratic idea is close to non-negotiable in today’s world (State of Democratic Theory: 1), an ironic expression of our predicament, since negotiation is the lowest common denominator of democracy. To use Ignacio Ramonet’s felicitous phrase, we seem to inhabit an era of pensée unique.¹⁶ Paradoxical as this era is, I see this third wave as a re-invention of democracy, which debates the meaning of democracy after several failed incarnations in the last two centuries. While these three phases concern democratization, the first two open a public space in opposition to its absence in aristocratic regimes. In contrast, the absence in the third moment is different: a loss in meaning of certain forms of democratic participation within the confines of modern states. Contrary to the previous moments, the problem is not the absence of the political space of democracy but rather a distance between democratic ideals and their real manifestations (both in their social and liberal versions) in modern nation-state formations, and more recently, in processes of high control of participation related to the overpowering mediatization of society. This entails asking, for instance, if the articulation of social with political equality is unfinished business, still achievable within our (state) institutions—to recall Sade’s famous expression to his contemporaries, yet another effort if you would become republican—or if these institutions are inherently inadequate for that task. This is the loss of meaning that in my view propels contemporary thinkers to reread the democrats of the past, ranging from the ancient Greeks to philosophers such as Spinoza, and that contributes to the current evaluations of the limits and internal contradictions of both liberalism and Marxism, being carried out in an array of disciplines. At stake is perhaps not the true meaning of democracy but rather the meaning of our loss, which guides our need to reinvent democracy.

Advancing some of the theoretical assumptions that I treat later on in this introduction, I wish to clarify that I read the texts studied here as symptoms emerging from times when democracy is reconfigured without claiming any historiographic unity. My study claims to be neither an empirically based historiography nor a philosophy of history. It does not argue that these three waves of democracy are identical or on any teleological continuum, or that these texts mean the same in the context of each of these historical waves. It argues that these texts share symptoms of political anxieties produced by explosions of the democratic imagination. The historical contextualization that I embark upon in each chapter has the methodological purpose of enabling me to read texts as symptoms of their times. Summoning historical context, which is inescapably a construction from the perspective of the present, in order to perform a symptomatic reading instead of a historiographic construction, is a way of avoiding the dilemma of being caught between a history that is either inaccessible or merely a projection of our contemporary situation. I emphasize the relation between the texts’ political imagination and a set of formal questions surrounding political autonomy brought about by democratization, though embodied in historically specific regimes of power and concrete forms of human interaction. Traces of a democratic imagination, and its anxieties about the relation between democracy and violence, appear in these texts almost as an ideologeme,¹⁷ which leads me to ask: how could these three explosions of democratic imagination not have left traces on any cultural production of these times? This hypothetical assumption might be, for an ideology upholding the autonomy of aesthetics, one of the sacrileges of political allegory; to become a materialist historical analysis proper, another volume of thorough archival research into the changing cultural and economic practices of these times would be needed. In this respect, one would even have to revise the standard periodization I have followed by alluding to the three phases above, a periodization that, like all periodizations, both enables and occludes historical analysis. For example, I believe that the hopes and some of the realities of the fleeting first half of the year 1917 in revolutionary Russia could be included as one of these phases. The present book works more along the lines of what Cornelius Castoriadis named the imaginary institution of society, to be contrasted with its historical specificity at any given time.¹⁸ Texts produced in periods of high democratization can be read as symptoms of democracy’s anxieties about its relation to violence, democracy’s ghostly other.

Violence

Violence in this book is considered in relation to an autonomous political life and the latter’s articulations of the demos’s abstract equality and its concrete limits. Autonomous political life sheds a tragic light onto its own violence; in my view, the birth of tragedy in ancient democratic Attica represents a particular shift in the interpretation of violence that corresponds to autonomous communities. A self-ruled collective cannot successfully figure violence only as an interruption of political life coming from its outside. I suspect that no society can embrace directly the knowledge of its own violence, other than in suicidal forms. Nonetheless, autonomous communities have less capacity to veil their own violence than heteronomous ones do. This relative lack of means for representing violence as external to society makes violence a starting point, much in the way that the notion of radical evil was the precondition of individual autonomy for Kant.¹⁹ Figurations of external violence as the cause of communal conflict are fictions too weak to help autonomous communities regulate internal conflict more than on a temporary basis—especially conflicts brought about by the demand for equality. If I start my reflection with an ancient Greek tragedy it is because I view its structuring conflict as a symbolic operation that accounts for the way in which autonomous political life assumes violence as part of its internal dynamics. Tragedy’s inscription of the failure of the polis is a ritualized symbolization of its violence.

Whereas violence is a starting point for autonomous political life, modern societies most commonly imagine violence as a violation of life by or onto an other—that is, a rupturing of the self or of the other, both considered as already whole units. Another variation of this formulation is to consider violence as a rupture of language, that which interrupts communication with the other, or as a violation of reason, as an irrational or meaningless act.²⁰ In turn, the whole units that are thus ruptured, if they do not refer to an individual, tend to be symbolized (and encapsulated) through the code of social reason (the concepts of class, race, and gender—ethnicity being the latest accretion). The term intersectionality accounts for the inseparability of these social categories in socio-political analyses of violence, as well as for their interlocking with institutional structures of power (going from macrostructures such as state, empire, colony, to micropolitical processes such as self-discipline and governability). Studies of internal political violence tend to center either on a social reason or on its relation to the state; our nuclear age has factored in technology, suggesting an increase in the threshold of violence that we so much want to diminish.²¹

The above are well-established categories of social analysis that pinpoint mediated forms of violence, subsumed in the dialectics of the power and counterpower of sociopolitical domination. The literary texts in this study could also be read as representing violence through the lens of social reasons or the managerial form of the state. Consider Sade’s 1785 libertine society as allegorical of a class alliance (the nobility, the church, and capital) extracting surplus value from its victims—in spite of the fact that they squander it more than invest it; or Vargas Llosa’s turn-of-the-twenty-first-century representation of dictatorship as a patriarchal pact among men.

Nonetheless, my readings of the representations of violence in this book belong to a different tradition of thought, which does not take for granted the already formed unit of the self or of the social group. To borrow from Benjamin’s distinction in his Critique of Violence between a law-preserving and a law-making violence, one could say that while the violence understood as a rupture of the other helps preserve the (supremacy of) social formations that already exist, the violence represented in the texts under review points at its formative character. Violence here both ruptures and cements; it does not only break language but also re-creates it. This conceptual shift is akin to Freud’s famous formulation that the bonding of hate precedes that of love.²² Perhaps another way to express this conceptual shift is to recall Michel Foucault’s famous inversion of Carl von Clausewitz’s 1832 dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. For Foucault, politics is the continuation of war by other means.²³ Clausewitz had in mind clashing symmetrical forces established prior to the event of their war—two nation states—that located the agency of violence if not fully outside, at least in the space between communities. In this conception violence ruptures an order. For Foucault, war precedes this order: it founds it. Foucault’s inversion transfers the agency of violence to the interstices that constitute and sustain communal life. Foucault’s archaeologies gave historical perspective to the philosophical tradition of unveiling the inextricable relation between violence and politics—of which modernity, always suspicious of its own dynamic, has long been aware.²⁴ In this tradition, violence has its own reasons: to borrow from Hent de Vries, it is the means through which the self, whether individual or collective, is constituted and maintained (Violence, Identity and Self-Determination: 2).

In the texts studied here, binding violence, even if at first sight related to already constituted social categories, is, upon closer scrutiny, a violence of borders: it occurs at the point where the two otherwise opposed forms of modern sovereignty—autonomy and domination—collapse. This is a radical violence, in that it lies at the roots of political cohesiveness. Constitutive of political membership, it seals off the boundaries otherwise opened infinitely to the demands of equality.

Political, radical, foundational violence tends either to be thought of as mediated by the terms of socioeconomic reason, or not thought of at all: I refer here to the opposition between the two dominant modern Western traditions of Marxism and liberalism. Marxism thinks of communal formation in terms of socioeconomic exclusions, hesitating to grant any autonomy to the political. Even when speculating about origins, in the progression from naturally bonded communities, like tribes, to politically bonded ones, there is an inevitable form of illegal appropriation of an excess of production, or of the means of production (that is, land), mostly through war, that gives a group its capacity to organize community—these are the histories of primitive accumulation of capital. Pierre Clastres famously asked whether we could judge the history of humanity according to the categories produced by the emergence of capitalism. The politics of equality that derive from the Marxist tradition, which Menke calls subversive equality, identify the socioeconomic groups harmed and excluded by domination, and advocate for their economic, political, legal, and cultural inclusion in (and subversion of) the modern political scene.

The liberal tradition, in turn, seems to suffer from an incapacity to conceptualize the frontier, to use Chantal Mouffe’s expression.²⁵ Conceptualizing the communal bond as a contract under rational consensus and deliberation, it obliterates violence from its imaginings of the formation of a community of equals. Especially when it invokes a historical construction of a contract, the liberal tradition takes for granted a pre-existing equality among members. Consider John Brenkman’s recent reminder of