Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007

WIEL EGGEN

Revolting vulnerability

Returning from the Conference on tolerance and vulnerability I found two books which I was asked to review for various journals. Both of them deal with religion and violence, and how to view this quandary. H. Vroom has edited a collection of philosophical reflections, only one of which is discussing Girard’s mimetic theory (by the Amsterdam professor W. Stoker). Its title is Wrestling with God and Evil (Amsterdam 2007). But it is the second book that suggested to me this ambiguous title ‘Revolting vulnerability’, and which allowed me to reflect on some of the outstanding issues of the Conference. The book is written by an African anthropologist teaching in Switzerland , Mondher Kilani, who considers the sacrificial theory of Girard in a specific manner. 

His book Guerre et Sacrifice. La violence extreme (Paris 2006) analyses the rising levels of violence and it made me reflect again on what I have called at the Conference the clash between a religion of violence-without-vulnerability and the one of vulnerability-without-tolerance. The intolerance of many a religious activist we find revolting; but are we aware that it is often a matter of vulnerability revolting against a system of power that preaches tolerance while hiding behind a screen of invulnerability?

Kilani is clearly a militant who is most critical of the American style of global imperialism, of which the Muslim world is the prime victim. He does not buy Huntington ’s notion of the “clash of civilisations”. Rather, he builds on the theories of von Clausewitz and Carl Schmitt on war, modified by such Girardian anthropologists as Dumouchel, Dupuy and Scubla. But in the end he rejects one basic Girardian thesis, namely the basic difference between the logics of war and of sacrifice. The following is not my review of the book but here are some seeds for thought; and my brief summary obviously falls short of its detailed analysis.

Schmitt has noted that the notion of war in our post-statal world has changed fundamentally, because the rivalry between states in terms of friend and foe has taken on a totally new aspect, which started with the revolutionary (Napoleontic) wars, when war became an absolute and total conflict of Good against Evil, which (in the words of von Clausewitz) became politics by other means. Dumouchel has pointed out that we need also to include the pre-statal phase of warfare if we want to understand this development, because in that phase the protagonists were equals that respected each other and allowed sacredness and the sacrificial approaches to intervene in the settlement of the disputes. Schmitt deplores the disappearance of that aspect from modern thought, but Kilani is adamant that it is still too much alive and that what he calls the ‘sacrificial tonality’ permeates the entire setting on both sides: both pretend to be the absolute defenders of Good, who have the right to sacrifice huge chunks of mankind for the good cause (e.g. free trade and democracy) and also to ask sacrifices on their own side, either by suicide bombers, or by killing millions of animals to stop epidemics and to boost the Mekkan version of monotheism by massive sacrifices.

Basically, what Kilani depicts is a transformation of war, turning it from horizontal rivalry into a vertical civil strife within one global system, in which the imperial machinery boosts its invulnerability by writing off enormous ‘collateral damages’ (both in military and industrial sense), while the vulnerable seek to find a way to revolt and to strike out at what they see as a system of Evil. This makes me reflect on the case of a multi-million dollar earning Beckam and his wife complaining about the new gangs of paparazzi, to wit the homeless beggars who have received a camera to chase the super rich. Two parties at war who need each other! For, the stars live by the images that appear in the media.

This example does not appear in Kilani’s book, but he insists that an all-out rivalry permeates the global setting in which sacrificial logic has lost its difference with the logic of war. His final conclusion, criticising the Girardian approach does not convince me very much, because he pleads for a political type of ‘social contract’ along the lines of Hobbes, forgetting that it was precisely that type of ‘rationality’ that started this form of the absolute fight of Good against Evil Reason against Darkness, Progress against Backwardness. Basically it is a call for reasonable tolerance by the invulnerable powerful in the face of a revolt by vulnerable victims who cannot afford the luxury of tolerance. I cannot help thinking, that the phenomenal rise of newcomers in the global economy this picture painted by Kilani is rapidly worsening, and that any form of ‘social contract’ can only be built on a form of logic in which the other is not just a neighbour who deserves some Samaritan consideration, but the foe that constitutes my very raison d’être. The face of the other as the primal reality that calls me into being needs to be accepted as the one who I would wish to stone, but who has become the cornerstone of my existence.

Kilani has forced me to think that only a radical (apocalyptic) inversion of the sacrificial logic (as René Girard advocates) can get us any further and that the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas can be read and applied in that sense, so that the revolt of the vulnerable can be honoured for its true meaning.