In February of 1972, Michel Foucault sat down with a group of young Maoist militants to discuss the subject of “popular justice.” The occasion for the dialogue was an ongoing effort by some on the radical French left to convene “popular tribunals” that would put the ruling class and its representatives on trial for crimes against the people that went unprosecuted. In 1970, Jean-Paul Sartre himself had presided over one such tribunal in the town of Lens, where the owners of a mine were symbolically tried in absentia for the death of sixteen workers.
Left-wing terrorism was on the rise in Europe, and the arguments for “people’s justice” then in vogue had started to alarm some in the militant milieu. The prospect that the same logic might be used to justify the tactics embraced by groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Italian Red Brigades hovered in the background of the dialogue with Foucault. The most radical subset of Maoists was led by Benny Lévy, who then went by the nom de guerre Pierre Victor. A firebrand leader of the 1968 revolt who later became Sartre’s personal secretary, Lévy was perhaps the most fervent advocate of violent direct action in the group. Some of his increasingly uneasy compatriots, such as André Glucksmann, seemed to regard the dialogue with Foucault as an opportunity to scrutinize the arguments being marshaled to justify such tactics. This proved to be the case, but not quite in the way they expected.
In the conversation, a transcript of which was published later the same year in Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes, Foucault and Lévy faced off over how best to pursue “popular justice.” But contrary to the expectations of the organizers, it was Foucault who staked out the more radical position. He argued that “the form of the court” must be rejected entirely in favor of spontaneous collective action—in effect endorsing extrajudicial lynchings as a legitimate revolutionary tactic. Rather than walk his younger comrades back from the precipice of terrorist violence, the philosopher seemed to be inviting them to take the plunge with him.
Over the coming months and years, both Foucault and Lévy would, in different ways, step back from that precipice, and the radical French left would avoid the downward spiral into violence that consumed similar movements elsewhere over the course of the 1970s. Of particular importance for many of them—and especially those of Jewish descent—was the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. That was the case for Glucksmann, who just three years later launched what would be a long career as a critic of radical excess with The Cook and the Cannibal, a ferocious polemic against the revolutionary left.
Lévy’s path, on the other hand, would involve an embrace of Orthodox Judaism under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas—like Sartre, a philosopher working in the tradition of phenomenology initiated by Edmund Husserl and continued by Martin Heidegger. The religious or theological “turn” of the late 1970s—which encompassed Lévy and other Jewish intellectuals, but also several Christian thinkers with similar political backgrounds—has been the subject of a great deal of commentary, much of it focused on the evolution of phenomenology away from Sartre’s materialist atheism and toward Levinas’s openness to the divine. Relatively little, however, has linked this resurgence of theological concerns with the question of political violence, which had so consumed the intellectual left in the years prior to the “turn.”
There was at least one contemporaneous intellectual, however, whose work pointed to just this connection. A few months after the “popular justice” dialogue, René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred was published in Paris to considerable acclaim. Girard, a U.S.-based French Catholic literary scholar and social theorist, offered a fundamental reconsideration of the origins of religious ritual and myth, which he traced to society’s need to keep in check the possibility of its own apocalyptic breakdown into spirals of reciprocal violence. Although focused primarily on evidence from ancient and non-Western societies, Girard’s book was also an implicit commentary on the impending collapse of the postwar Western political order in the 1970s, threatened from without by anti-colonial wars and from within by left-wing revolutionaries. In Girard’s account, religion is, at its root, a response to the threat of violent social breakdown—although one that can also become a source of new cycles of violence. In periods when the institutions that comprise the modern world’s alternative means of containing conflict cease to enjoy credibility, both violence and religion are likely to come to the fore.
Around the same time Foucault was engaged in the public dialogue with the Maoists, his private correspondence with Girard, revealed in Benoît Chantre’s monumental 2023 biography of the latter, revolved around similar themes. Beyond its value for intellectual historians, that dialogue, and the intellectual debates that surrounded it, merits revisiting today. In the wake of the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel and over the course of the subsequent Israeli bombardment of Gaza, left-wing justifications for terrorist violence—often drawn from sources, such as the work of Frantz Fanon, also cited by French radicals in the early 1970s—have seen a dramatic resurgence. The concerns of Lévy and Foucault’s debate—in particular, a conviction that “bourgeois justice” was a mere façade—also animated the wave of progressive protest that culminated around 2020, which included demands for the elimination of the criminal justice system and other liberal, supposedly neutral, institutions.
It is possible to read Violence and the Sacred as an indictment of the Western left’s flirtation with violence as a means of forging a new society, in which figures like Foucault, Lévy and Sartre were all caught up in the early Seventies. The problem, from the perspective Girard offers, is not that this idea is exactly wrong. In his account, the social compact is indeed forged through collective violence, with societies periodically renewing themselves through violent self-immolation. What was ironic, from Girard’s perspective, was that figures like Foucault believed this regression to archaic social norms could be a means of liberation.
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It is customary to remember Foucault as a man of the far left, and his intervention in the Maoist dialogue as a passionate advocate of the most savage forms of “popular justice” would seem to support this conclusion. His main objection to Lévy and his allies was that, insofar as their people’s tribunals replicated “the form of a court,” these aspiring revolutionaries would betray the spirit of popular justice. This was, he said, because the court’s “historical function is to ensnare it, to control it and to strangle it, by reinscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus.” He illustrated this assertion with reference to the September Massacres of 1792, in which mobs stormed prisons in and around Paris, summarily executing accused class traitors and anti-revolutionary conspirators en masse. This is not usually recalled as one of the prouder moments of the French Revolution, but Foucault attempted to vindicate it as “a response to oppression, strategically effective and politically necessary.”
What did Foucault see as the alternative to a “people’s court”? Freed of institutional constraints, he claimed, popular justice could take on a different form: “A certain number of ancient rites which were features of ‘pre-judicial’ justice, have been preserved in the practises of popular justice: for example, it was an old Germanic custom to put the head of an enemy on a stake, for public viewing.” Similarly, he noted, “the head of [the governor] Delaunay was paraded around the captured Bastille.” Such instances of spontaneous revolts, he argued, revealed that “in the case of popular justice you do not have three elements”—in other words, the tripartite legal structure of two conflicting parties and neutral judge—“you have the masses and their enemies.”
Lévy, in response, turned to more recent French history to rearticulate his case for some sort of institutional mediation. He cited the so-called épuration sauvage that occurred during the liberation of France in 1944, when women accused of consorting with Nazis were publicly humiliated: after having their heads shaved or being branded with hot irons, some were marched around and taunted. This was an “ambiguous example of popular justice,” Lévy argued, because “while the people were being entertained by shaving the heads of these women, the real collaborators—the real traitors—remained untouched.” The lesson, as he saw it, was that “if the mass movement is not given proletarian unity and direction it can disintegrate from within and be exploited by the class enemy.” Foucault remained impervious to this objection.
Despite their differences, a few weeks later Foucault joined the Maoists to protest a fatal shooting at a Renault auto plant in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. The victim was Pierre Overney, a laid-off worker and Maoist militant. He was killed by a security guard in a violent altercation with him and several other militants who were distributing literature at the plant. Overney’s funeral drew around two hundred thousand attendees, including Foucault and Sartre. The subsequent protest at the plant quickly turned violent, with Foucault and his Maoist comrades relishing the confrontation. (Witnesses reported seeing the philosopher beaten by police with a truncheon.)
If there was an occasion for an act of “popular justice” of the sort the Maoists had been calling for, Overney’s death seemed to be it. And sure enough, on March 8th, a group calling itself the New Popular Resistance kidnapped a Renault executive, Robert Nogrette, whom they held responsible for Overney’s killing as he was in charge of security personnel. They demanded the release of several comrades from prison, and the reinstatement of a number of organizers who had been fired along with Overney. But although they issued threats of a campaign of terror and industrial sabotage if their demands were not met, the kidnappers ultimately balked at crossing over into murder and released Nogrette unharmed after two days. It was at this point that the most radical faction of the French left diverged from the trajectories of its German and Italian counterparts, which were drawn ever more deeply into violent direct action in the ensuing years.
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In May 1972, two months after the abortive Nogrette kidnapping, Foucault’s advocacy for the extrajudicial elimination of class enemies was again put to the test by events in the town of Bruay-en-Artois, where a working-class teenage girl had been murdered. A prominent local attorney was initially charged with the murder, but the charges were then dropped. The Maoists seized on the case, as they had with the Overney killing before it, as an instance where “popular justice” was necessitated by the failure of the state to prosecute a crime, with Lévy leading the charge. “It is difficult,” he wrote, echoing Foucault’s excursus on the people’s reversion to ancient rites, “to attack the authority of a class without a few heads belonging to members of this class being paraded on the end of a stake.” Faced with the opportunity to put his arguments into practice, Foucault visited Bruay to meet with Lévy and the other militants clamoring for a lynching, but he declined to make any public statement about the affair, and wavered in private as to the guilt of the accused man. His silence suggests he had begun to question his pronouncements from a few months prior.
May 1972 was also the month Grasset published Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. The book, which offered a sweeping theory of the origins of religion in ritualized violence, made Girard’s name as a social theorist and anthropologist. Focused on ancient myth and literature and ethnological accounts of primitive societies, it is written at a considerable remove from its immediate contemporary political context. However, as Chantre, Girard’s biographer, makes clear, its composition was partially motivated by the escalating violence of the era through which the author was living—the time of the Vietnam War and anti-colonial liberation struggles, of bloody riots and terrorism on both sides of the Atlantic, and of the unraveling of the social order erected in the wake of World War II.
Though less interested in the tactical questions that occupied Foucault and Lévy, Girard covers much of the same ground explored in the “popular justice” debate. Lévy told Foucault, for instance, that there must be an institutional third party to guarantee that the pursuit of popular justice doesn’t collapse into mere private vendettas. Girard draws an almost identical distinction:
Once the concept of interminable revenge has been formally rejected, it is referred to as private vengeance. The term implies the existence of a public vengeance, a counterpart never made explicit. By definition, primitive societies have only private vengeance. Thus, public vengeance is the exclusive property of well-policed societies, and our society calls it the judicial system.
The Maoists, despite their enthusiasm for popular justice, were concerned about its potential devolution into “egotistical revenge.” Their ostensible reason for this worry was that private pursuits threatened to derail the political aims of the movement. But a reading of Girard would suggest their unease also expressed a more primal anxiety: the fear of vengeance as an “interminable, infinitely repetitive process” that threatens to consume the entire social body. (As it happens, something like this happened in their model nation, China, in the 1970s.) As Girard writes, unwittingly echoing the concerns Lévy voiced to Foucault: “As long as there exists no sovereign and independent body capable of taking the place of the injured party and taking upon itself the responsibility for revenge, the danger of interminable escalation remains.”
Foucault, as we have seen, was unfazed by this sort of objection. His chief concern was not with the collapse of neutral arbitration mechanisms into private vengeance but with something like the opposite: the reemergence, amid a process of “popular justice,” of something resembling the judicial system. What Foucault regarded as most important in the execution of authentic popular justice were the traces of “old Germanic custom” and “ancient ancestral rites.” That is, he regarded the most potent alternative to court-mediated “people’s justice” as necessarily emerging out of and reflecting a sort of collective memory of archaic societies. The evidence presented by Girard in Violence and the Sacred provided ample support for this assumption, albeit not in a way that would offer much encouragement for Foucault’s political enthusiasms. For Girard, “ancient ancestral rites” are, simply, the ritualized form of the many-on-one violence carried out by mobs.
Thanks to Chantre, we now know that Foucault read Violence and the Sacred in the exact period the Bruay affair was underway, since in early July Girard received a letter in which Foucault praised his book effusively. We can only speculate, but it is hard to imagine that Foucault could have read Girard’s book, as he said in that letter, “slowly, meticulously, sentence by sentence” without occasionally feeling alluded to or detecting an indirect rebuke.
We also know that Girard and Foucault had coincided during the latter’s stint at the University at Buffalo in 1970 (the year the former, who was teaching there, started writing Violence and the Sacred). At one seminar of which no transcript survives, they discussed Euripides’s The Bacchae, a key text for both given their shared interest in the figure of Dionysus. So when we read, in Violence and the Sacred, that “only the quixotic masochism of our own age, the result of a long immunity to the violence that threatens primitive societies, allows us to see anything attractive in the Dionysus of The Bacchae,” we should ask whether Girard might have had this recent interlocutor in mind, as well as whether Foucault might have asked himself this same question as he read this line in early 1972.
On a similar note, Girard says the following about Georges Bataille, a key point of reference for him and Foucault alike: “Bataille is primarily inclined to treat violence in terms of some rare and precious condiment, the only spice still capable of stimulating the jaded appetite of modern man.” The description might well allude to the woozy militantism on display in Foucault’s dialogue with Lévy—and indeed, more broadly on the Western left throughout the same era. “This irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself,” Sartre had written, referring to the brutality of the Algerian independence struggle, in his famous preface to The Wretched of the Earth. “The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self.” The implication was clear: Europeans, too, might also pursue self-recreation through violent direct action.
We will never know what might have come of a public dialogue between Girard and Foucault on Nietzsche, Dionysus and political violence. We are left, instead, with an indirect debate in the form of Girard’s polemic against Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose work of gonzo philosophy Anti-Oedipus appeared the same year as Violence and the Sacred (and came out in English translation with a celebratory preface from Foucault). Despite differences in style and approach, the two books covered related ground, with both offering critiques of Freud’s Oedipus complex and elaborating novel theories of desire that aimed to supplant the Freudian one. By tapping into the militant, revolutionary mood that persisted post-’68, Anti-Oedipus made the bigger splash. Perhaps this contributed to Girard’s decision to launch a grenade a few years later in an essay entitled “Delirium as System,” against what he called “the dubious audacities of the Deleuzian delirium.”
There, he argued that Anti-Oedipus was a document not of revolutionary vitality but of decadence and exhaustion. “The dying man,” he writes toward the end of the essay, “can only appeal to the last signs of his own life, that is, the convulsions still belying death, but whose violence quickens its arrival.” As with the critique of Bataille and other modern adepts of Dionysus, Girard’s argument echoes Nietzsche’s account of enervated modern man’s quest for stimulants strong enough to awaken him from his stupefaction. But whereas Nietzsche held out the possibility that some such substances might ultimately be found, a prospect that entranced Foucault and Deleuze, for Girard the pursuit was merely a distraction from the real crisis of modernity, namely: “How to survive without prohibitions, without sacrificial misrecognition, without scapegoat victims?” In imagining that gestures of transgression, or perhaps the “decisive mob action” of political militants, might shatter the stasis of a stalled-out modernity, radicals like Deleuze and Foucault were merely reenacting a conventional script of modern life. It was only because violence was so effectively repressed in modernity, Girard argued, that its resurrection could seem enticing to modern intellectuals.
Foucault was put off by Girard’s attack on his friend Deleuze, but remained open to further dialogue in their subsequent encounters. In the meantime, he grew more distant from the radical left as the 1970s wore on. Regardless of whether Girard’s critiques of Dionysian politics played any role in this shift, Foucault’s History of Sexuality can be read as an extended answer to Girard’s question of how society can “survive without prohibitions,” while Discipline and Punish takes up his question about how it survives without scapegoats or human sacrifice. That book’s celebrated opening chapter, “The body of the condemned,” recounts the gruesome public execution of the regicide Damiens in 1757 as a late manifestation of a mode of punishment that subsequently fell into disrepute: the public torture and execution of criminals. Such practices, Girard’s work would suggest, have their roots in universal sacrificial rites—the same “ancient rites” to which Foucault also alluded when recalling the mob that stormed the Bastille.
In the decades after Damiens was executed, under the influence of “innumerable projects for reform,” such practices came to be regarded as a barbaric relic—a phase in the gradual discrediting of sacrifice Girard traces back to the biblical scriptures. But as Foucault shows, the abandonment of these brutal spectacles of violence gave rise to a different “penal style” that concealed the workings of punishment in rationally planned prisons and focused on reforming the soul rather than torturing and killing the body. This is Foucault’s answer to how we “survive without scapegoat victims”: we don’t. There are always victims, even if they are no longer subjected to public immolation, but secreted away into the diffuse, clandestine operations of power.
It was this insight that Girard later praised in When These Things Begin, published in 1996. There, Girard explicitly refers to what he regards as “the value of Foucault’s work”: his “having shown” that “if you stamp [sacrificial mechanisms] out here, they pop up again over there.” “Foucault understood the very thing that optimistic rationalism didn’t foresee,” he continues; “new forms of ‘victimization’ are constantly emerging from the instruments that were intended to do away with them.” In this regard, Foucault’s work also shows how we “survive without sacrificial misrecognition”: by way, in part, of new forms of misrecognition.
Yet this common discovery did not lead Foucault and Girard to come to the same conclusion about violence in modern societies. If the neutrality of the “third party” or the judge is a mask for the arbitrary violence of the ruling class against its enemies, as Foucault had argued in his dialogue with the Maoists, then perhaps it would be better to revive the “sacrificial misrecognition” of “ancient rites.” This was where the two philosophers differed most profoundly. Girard did not deny Foucault’s insight that our modern institutions bear traces of their archaic predecessors. But this did not lead him to conclude that the effects of replacing blood sacrifice with a judicial system were merely superficial.
Indeed, unless we see such substitutions, however flawed and incomplete, as part of humanity’s broader historical attempt to renounce its own violence, we are likely to share Foucault’s perspective. Recent progressives, when calling for abolition of various aspects of the criminal justice system or echoing Fanon’s celebrations of anti-colonial violence, have made this continued tendency clear enough. The Girardian response accepts a basic premise of the radical critiques of existing institutions, whether from Foucault or his recent successors: it is true that such institutions contain violence, but they do so in two senses of the word. They enact violence themselves, often in insidious ways. But they also constrain its most destabilizing effects.
Girard once described his worldview as Nietzsche “in reverse.” What he meant was that he shared with Nietzsche the conclusion that the Jewish and Christian revolution in values, which elevated the moral claims of victims over those of perpetrators, was the irreversible pivot point of history. At the same time, he saw Nietzsche’s fantasy of overcoming this moral revolution through the elevation of the overman as both monstrous and futile, as the Nazis’ horrifying travesty of the philosopher had made clear. “The attempt by Nietzsche and Hitler to make humankind forget the concern for victims,” Girard wrote in his 1999 book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, “has ended in a failure that seems definitive.” After all, the atrocities of World War II only “accelerated the concern for victims”—leading, for instance, to the codification of human rights. And yet, Girard warned, there persisted an “other totalitarianism” that “takes over and ‘radicalizes’ the concern for victims in order to paganize it,” thus seeking to “outflank [Christianity] on its left wing.” It isn’t difficult to imagine that he might have had in mind his sometime interlocutor Foucault—a modern acolyte of Dionysus who sought to expose victimization in all manner of ostensibly humane institutions and practices.
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A reader informed by Girard can’t help but recognize that Foucault has often played the role of the scapegoat in contemporary right-wing mythology—or demonology. Foucault’s death from AIDS—and the unverified allegations that he deliberately infected sexual partners—have offered the perfect metaphor for his mythical status on the right as a vector of intellectual plague. In such accounts, Foucault becomes an Oedipus figure, a brilliant but malevolent foreign “superspreader” who must be purged for civilization to be purified. By attaching himself to the Dionysian outsiders of modern life, Foucault in a sense invited this fate.
It is noteworthy that despite the chasm that separated them and despite his frequent criticisms of the poststructuralist theories that took hold of the U.S. academy in the late twentieth century, Girard did not join the crowd that denounced his onetime colleague. Instead, as we have seen, he commented appreciatively on Foucault’s documentation of the victimization embedded in institutions that posit themselves as the humane successors of the old sacrificial order, acknowledging that they differed mostly in how they interpreted such revelations. “It’s [Foucault’s] pessimism that separates us,” Girard explained. “Unlike him, I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this, or else face utter despair.” Girard further noted that “after the end of ideologies, the only way to embrace this meaning is to rediscover religion.”
An unexpected confirmation of his point comes from the remarkable trajectory of Lévy and his friend and interlocutor Sartre. As noted before, in the course of renouncing the radical left over the course of the 1970s, Lévy embraced Orthodox Judaism, traversing a path often described as “from Mao to Moses.” In 1997, Lévy made aliyah to Israel. There, in collaboration with two other Jewish ex-leftists, Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy (no relation), he established an institute dedicated to the work of Levinas, who had prompted his return to Jewish thought and practice.
Throughout the period of this return, however, Lévy remained close to Sartre, who was going blind, often reading to him from Jewish religious texts. In 1980, just before Sartre’s death, his younger friend published a series of interviews with him in Le Nouvel Observateur. These provoked considerable scandal because of the extent to which the elderly philosopher seemed to distance himself from his revolutionary credo while expressing sympathy for Lévy’s nascent religious worldview. In those interviews, later published in English under the title Hope Now, Lévy doesn’t cite Girard. But he does pose a very Girardian question to Sartre: “Can humanity be engendered through violence? … Can violence really have the redemptive role, the constituent function, you attributed to it?” After some hesitation, the philosopher replies: “I’m no longer of that opinion.”
Alongside this discussion, Lévy addresses his renunciation of his own earlier politics, which he connects with his rediscovery of Judaism. “Maybe the Jew,” he says, “feels that the revolutionary mob can become the pogrom mob” and “knows that he is threatened when a crowd of people starts to think of itself as a mystical body.” Notably, these remarks echo Girard’s interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, which—for the first time in history, he asserts—tell the story of scapegoating from the perspective of its victims, rather than that of the community renewed by sacrificial expulsion. And yet, Lévy argues, Jewish messianism is also a key source of revolutionary inspiration. By his account, Judaism enables a pursuit of this impulse that avoids its political “perversions”; this is the logic he offers to account for his evolution “from Mao to Moses.” Sartre, to many readers’ surprise, seemed to accept all of this.
One of the examples Lévy cites of the continued temptations of politicized messianism is that of his former comrade in arms Foucault, who had recently declared, while reporting on the 1979 Iranian revolution, that he had seen “collective will” in the streets of Tehran. This was Foucault’s final and most notorious political enthusiasm, which reprised many of the themes of his earlier flirtations with militancy. However, although he didn’t undergo a conversion like Lévy’s, there was also a partial convergence between them: foolishly or not, Foucault saw the promise of Islamic revolution in its grounding in religious faith and traditions. As his biographer James Miller explains, Foucault “believed that the professed goal of establishing a new ‘Islamic government’ held out the promise of a welcome new form of ‘political spirituality.’” His short-lived hope that a Shi’ite revolutionary politics might avoid the pitfalls of its Marxist predecessors was rooted in the notion of a “collective will” that could transcend the modern state and its institutions. The spiritual discipline of Islamic tradition, he argued, might act as a restraint against the excesses of revolutionary violence that had spiraled out of control elsewhere.
To this extent, Foucault also took part, peripherally, in the “religious turn.” But his brief infatuation, which he later regretted, is a useful reminder that a turn to religion isn’t the panacea that a superficial reading of Girard or the later Lévy might encourage. As atheistic revolutionary movements lost much of their traction in the later twentieth century, overtly religious movements filled the vacuum. But rather than forging a new path, as Foucault briefly imagined Iranian Islamism might, these movements largely fell back into what Lévy called the “perversions” of their secular predecessors. This is true not just of the Islamic Republic or Hamas, but of the forms of politicized messianism that now exercise increasing power in Lévy’s adopted homeland, which regard the Jewish state as a vehicle for apocalyptic redemption.
The 1970s—the era in which the revolutionary fervor shared by Foucault, Lévy and Sartre reached its peak and then receded—marked the breakdown of the social order built up after the end of the cataclysm of World War II and the emergence of a new one. We are living through a comparable transition today, as the credibility of our institutions comes under attack not only from the old left but also from a newly anti-establishment right. As Girard shows, the critique of institutional violence has deep roots in the evolution of our civilization away from sacrificial killing. But whether we are able to construct a durable new order may depend in part on our capacity to move beyond critique and to recognize the role that our institutions still play, flawed though they may be, in constraining the all-too-human propensity to spirals of reciprocal violence.
Art credit: Steffen Kern, Guillotine, 2022. Colored pencil on paper, 25 × 20 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
In February of 1972, Michel Foucault sat down with a group of young Maoist militants to discuss the subject of “popular justice.” The occasion for the dialogue was an ongoing effort by some on the radical French left to convene “popular tribunals” that would put the ruling class and its representatives on trial for crimes against the people that went unprosecuted. In 1970, Jean-Paul Sartre himself had presided over one such tribunal in the town of Lens, where the owners of a mine were symbolically tried in absentia for the death of sixteen workers.
Left-wing terrorism was on the rise in Europe, and the arguments for “people’s justice” then in vogue had started to alarm some in the militant milieu. The prospect that the same logic might be used to justify the tactics embraced by groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Italian Red Brigades hovered in the background of the dialogue with Foucault. The most radical subset of Maoists was led by Benny Lévy, who then went by the nom de guerre Pierre Victor. A firebrand leader of the 1968 revolt who later became Sartre’s personal secretary, Lévy was perhaps the most fervent advocate of violent direct action in the group. Some of his increasingly uneasy compatriots, such as André Glucksmann, seemed to regard the dialogue with Foucault as an opportunity to scrutinize the arguments being marshaled to justify such tactics. This proved to be the case, but not quite in the way they expected.
In the conversation, a transcript of which was published later the same year in Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes, Foucault and Lévy faced off over how best to pursue “popular justice.” But contrary to the expectations of the organizers, it was Foucault who staked out the more radical position. He argued that “the form of the court” must be rejected entirely in favor of spontaneous collective action—in effect endorsing extrajudicial lynchings as a legitimate revolutionary tactic. Rather than walk his younger comrades back from the precipice of terrorist violence, the philosopher seemed to be inviting them to take the plunge with him.
Over the coming months and years, both Foucault and Lévy would, in different ways, step back from that precipice, and the radical French left would avoid the downward spiral into violence that consumed similar movements elsewhere over the course of the 1970s. Of particular importance for many of them—and especially those of Jewish descent—was the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. That was the case for Glucksmann, who just three years later launched what would be a long career as a critic of radical excess with The Cook and the Cannibal, a ferocious polemic against the revolutionary left.
Lévy’s path, on the other hand, would involve an embrace of Orthodox Judaism under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas—like Sartre, a philosopher working in the tradition of phenomenology initiated by Edmund Husserl and continued by Martin Heidegger. The religious or theological “turn” of the late 1970s—which encompassed Lévy and other Jewish intellectuals, but also several Christian thinkers with similar political backgrounds—has been the subject of a great deal of commentary, much of it focused on the evolution of phenomenology away from Sartre’s materialist atheism and toward Levinas’s openness to the divine. Relatively little, however, has linked this resurgence of theological concerns with the question of political violence, which had so consumed the intellectual left in the years prior to the “turn.”
There was at least one contemporaneous intellectual, however, whose work pointed to just this connection. A few months after the “popular justice” dialogue, René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred was published in Paris to considerable acclaim. Girard, a U.S.-based French Catholic literary scholar and social theorist, offered a fundamental reconsideration of the origins of religious ritual and myth, which he traced to society’s need to keep in check the possibility of its own apocalyptic breakdown into spirals of reciprocal violence. Although focused primarily on evidence from ancient and non-Western societies, Girard’s book was also an implicit commentary on the impending collapse of the postwar Western political order in the 1970s, threatened from without by anti-colonial wars and from within by left-wing revolutionaries. In Girard’s account, religion is, at its root, a response to the threat of violent social breakdown—although one that can also become a source of new cycles of violence. In periods when the institutions that comprise the modern world’s alternative means of containing conflict cease to enjoy credibility, both violence and religion are likely to come to the fore.
Around the same time Foucault was engaged in the public dialogue with the Maoists, his private correspondence with Girard, revealed in Benoît Chantre’s monumental 2023 biography of the latter, revolved around similar themes. Beyond its value for intellectual historians, that dialogue, and the intellectual debates that surrounded it, merits revisiting today. In the wake of the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel and over the course of the subsequent Israeli bombardment of Gaza, left-wing justifications for terrorist violence—often drawn from sources, such as the work of Frantz Fanon, also cited by French radicals in the early 1970s—have seen a dramatic resurgence. The concerns of Lévy and Foucault’s debate—in particular, a conviction that “bourgeois justice” was a mere façade—also animated the wave of progressive protest that culminated around 2020, which included demands for the elimination of the criminal justice system and other liberal, supposedly neutral, institutions.
It is possible to read Violence and the Sacred as an indictment of the Western left’s flirtation with violence as a means of forging a new society, in which figures like Foucault, Lévy and Sartre were all caught up in the early Seventies. The problem, from the perspective Girard offers, is not that this idea is exactly wrong. In his account, the social compact is indeed forged through collective violence, with societies periodically renewing themselves through violent self-immolation. What was ironic, from Girard’s perspective, was that figures like Foucault believed this regression to archaic social norms could be a means of liberation.
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It is customary to remember Foucault as a man of the far left, and his intervention in the Maoist dialogue as a passionate advocate of the most savage forms of “popular justice” would seem to support this conclusion. His main objection to Lévy and his allies was that, insofar as their people’s tribunals replicated “the form of a court,” these aspiring revolutionaries would betray the spirit of popular justice. This was, he said, because the court’s “historical function is to ensnare it, to control it and to strangle it, by reinscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus.” He illustrated this assertion with reference to the September Massacres of 1792, in which mobs stormed prisons in and around Paris, summarily executing accused class traitors and anti-revolutionary conspirators en masse. This is not usually recalled as one of the prouder moments of the French Revolution, but Foucault attempted to vindicate it as “a response to oppression, strategically effective and politically necessary.”
What did Foucault see as the alternative to a “people’s court”? Freed of institutional constraints, he claimed, popular justice could take on a different form: “A certain number of ancient rites which were features of ‘pre-judicial’ justice, have been preserved in the practises of popular justice: for example, it was an old Germanic custom to put the head of an enemy on a stake, for public viewing.” Similarly, he noted, “the head of [the governor] Delaunay was paraded around the captured Bastille.” Such instances of spontaneous revolts, he argued, revealed that “in the case of popular justice you do not have three elements”—in other words, the tripartite legal structure of two conflicting parties and neutral judge—“you have the masses and their enemies.”
Lévy, in response, turned to more recent French history to rearticulate his case for some sort of institutional mediation. He cited the so-called épuration sauvage that occurred during the liberation of France in 1944, when women accused of consorting with Nazis were publicly humiliated: after having their heads shaved or being branded with hot irons, some were marched around and taunted. This was an “ambiguous example of popular justice,” Lévy argued, because “while the people were being entertained by shaving the heads of these women, the real collaborators—the real traitors—remained untouched.” The lesson, as he saw it, was that “if the mass movement is not given proletarian unity and direction it can disintegrate from within and be exploited by the class enemy.” Foucault remained impervious to this objection.
Despite their differences, a few weeks later Foucault joined the Maoists to protest a fatal shooting at a Renault auto plant in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. The victim was Pierre Overney, a laid-off worker and Maoist militant. He was killed by a security guard in a violent altercation with him and several other militants who were distributing literature at the plant. Overney’s funeral drew around two hundred thousand attendees, including Foucault and Sartre. The subsequent protest at the plant quickly turned violent, with Foucault and his Maoist comrades relishing the confrontation. (Witnesses reported seeing the philosopher beaten by police with a truncheon.)
If there was an occasion for an act of “popular justice” of the sort the Maoists had been calling for, Overney’s death seemed to be it. And sure enough, on March 8th, a group calling itself the New Popular Resistance kidnapped a Renault executive, Robert Nogrette, whom they held responsible for Overney’s killing as he was in charge of security personnel. They demanded the release of several comrades from prison, and the reinstatement of a number of organizers who had been fired along with Overney. But although they issued threats of a campaign of terror and industrial sabotage if their demands were not met, the kidnappers ultimately balked at crossing over into murder and released Nogrette unharmed after two days. It was at this point that the most radical faction of the French left diverged from the trajectories of its German and Italian counterparts, which were drawn ever more deeply into violent direct action in the ensuing years.
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In May 1972, two months after the abortive Nogrette kidnapping, Foucault’s advocacy for the extrajudicial elimination of class enemies was again put to the test by events in the town of Bruay-en-Artois, where a working-class teenage girl had been murdered. A prominent local attorney was initially charged with the murder, but the charges were then dropped. The Maoists seized on the case, as they had with the Overney killing before it, as an instance where “popular justice” was necessitated by the failure of the state to prosecute a crime, with Lévy leading the charge. “It is difficult,” he wrote, echoing Foucault’s excursus on the people’s reversion to ancient rites, “to attack the authority of a class without a few heads belonging to members of this class being paraded on the end of a stake.” Faced with the opportunity to put his arguments into practice, Foucault visited Bruay to meet with Lévy and the other militants clamoring for a lynching, but he declined to make any public statement about the affair, and wavered in private as to the guilt of the accused man. His silence suggests he had begun to question his pronouncements from a few months prior.
May 1972 was also the month Grasset published Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. The book, which offered a sweeping theory of the origins of religion in ritualized violence, made Girard’s name as a social theorist and anthropologist. Focused on ancient myth and literature and ethnological accounts of primitive societies, it is written at a considerable remove from its immediate contemporary political context. However, as Chantre, Girard’s biographer, makes clear, its composition was partially motivated by the escalating violence of the era through which the author was living—the time of the Vietnam War and anti-colonial liberation struggles, of bloody riots and terrorism on both sides of the Atlantic, and of the unraveling of the social order erected in the wake of World War II.
Though less interested in the tactical questions that occupied Foucault and Lévy, Girard covers much of the same ground explored in the “popular justice” debate. Lévy told Foucault, for instance, that there must be an institutional third party to guarantee that the pursuit of popular justice doesn’t collapse into mere private vendettas. Girard draws an almost identical distinction:
The Maoists, despite their enthusiasm for popular justice, were concerned about its potential devolution into “egotistical revenge.” Their ostensible reason for this worry was that private pursuits threatened to derail the political aims of the movement. But a reading of Girard would suggest their unease also expressed a more primal anxiety: the fear of vengeance as an “interminable, infinitely repetitive process” that threatens to consume the entire social body. (As it happens, something like this happened in their model nation, China, in the 1970s.) As Girard writes, unwittingly echoing the concerns Lévy voiced to Foucault: “As long as there exists no sovereign and independent body capable of taking the place of the injured party and taking upon itself the responsibility for revenge, the danger of interminable escalation remains.”
Foucault, as we have seen, was unfazed by this sort of objection. His chief concern was not with the collapse of neutral arbitration mechanisms into private vengeance but with something like the opposite: the reemergence, amid a process of “popular justice,” of something resembling the judicial system. What Foucault regarded as most important in the execution of authentic popular justice were the traces of “old Germanic custom” and “ancient ancestral rites.” That is, he regarded the most potent alternative to court-mediated “people’s justice” as necessarily emerging out of and reflecting a sort of collective memory of archaic societies. The evidence presented by Girard in Violence and the Sacred provided ample support for this assumption, albeit not in a way that would offer much encouragement for Foucault’s political enthusiasms. For Girard, “ancient ancestral rites” are, simply, the ritualized form of the many-on-one violence carried out by mobs.
Thanks to Chantre, we now know that Foucault read Violence and the Sacred in the exact period the Bruay affair was underway, since in early July Girard received a letter in which Foucault praised his book effusively. We can only speculate, but it is hard to imagine that Foucault could have read Girard’s book, as he said in that letter, “slowly, meticulously, sentence by sentence” without occasionally feeling alluded to or detecting an indirect rebuke.
We also know that Girard and Foucault had coincided during the latter’s stint at the University at Buffalo in 1970 (the year the former, who was teaching there, started writing Violence and the Sacred). At one seminar of which no transcript survives, they discussed Euripides’s The Bacchae, a key text for both given their shared interest in the figure of Dionysus. So when we read, in Violence and the Sacred, that “only the quixotic masochism of our own age, the result of a long immunity to the violence that threatens primitive societies, allows us to see anything attractive in the Dionysus of The Bacchae,” we should ask whether Girard might have had this recent interlocutor in mind, as well as whether Foucault might have asked himself this same question as he read this line in early 1972.
On a similar note, Girard says the following about Georges Bataille, a key point of reference for him and Foucault alike: “Bataille is primarily inclined to treat violence in terms of some rare and precious condiment, the only spice still capable of stimulating the jaded appetite of modern man.” The description might well allude to the woozy militantism on display in Foucault’s dialogue with Lévy—and indeed, more broadly on the Western left throughout the same era. “This irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself,” Sartre had written, referring to the brutality of the Algerian independence struggle, in his famous preface to The Wretched of the Earth. “The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self.” The implication was clear: Europeans, too, might also pursue self-recreation through violent direct action.
We will never know what might have come of a public dialogue between Girard and Foucault on Nietzsche, Dionysus and political violence. We are left, instead, with an indirect debate in the form of Girard’s polemic against Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose work of gonzo philosophy Anti-Oedipus appeared the same year as Violence and the Sacred (and came out in English translation with a celebratory preface from Foucault). Despite differences in style and approach, the two books covered related ground, with both offering critiques of Freud’s Oedipus complex and elaborating novel theories of desire that aimed to supplant the Freudian one. By tapping into the militant, revolutionary mood that persisted post-’68, Anti-Oedipus made the bigger splash. Perhaps this contributed to Girard’s decision to launch a grenade a few years later in an essay entitled “Delirium as System,” against what he called “the dubious audacities of the Deleuzian delirium.”
There, he argued that Anti-Oedipus was a document not of revolutionary vitality but of decadence and exhaustion. “The dying man,” he writes toward the end of the essay, “can only appeal to the last signs of his own life, that is, the convulsions still belying death, but whose violence quickens its arrival.” As with the critique of Bataille and other modern adepts of Dionysus, Girard’s argument echoes Nietzsche’s account of enervated modern man’s quest for stimulants strong enough to awaken him from his stupefaction. But whereas Nietzsche held out the possibility that some such substances might ultimately be found, a prospect that entranced Foucault and Deleuze, for Girard the pursuit was merely a distraction from the real crisis of modernity, namely: “How to survive without prohibitions, without sacrificial misrecognition, without scapegoat victims?” In imagining that gestures of transgression, or perhaps the “decisive mob action” of political militants, might shatter the stasis of a stalled-out modernity, radicals like Deleuze and Foucault were merely reenacting a conventional script of modern life. It was only because violence was so effectively repressed in modernity, Girard argued, that its resurrection could seem enticing to modern intellectuals.
Foucault was put off by Girard’s attack on his friend Deleuze, but remained open to further dialogue in their subsequent encounters. In the meantime, he grew more distant from the radical left as the 1970s wore on. Regardless of whether Girard’s critiques of Dionysian politics played any role in this shift, Foucault’s History of Sexuality can be read as an extended answer to Girard’s question of how society can “survive without prohibitions,” while Discipline and Punish takes up his question about how it survives without scapegoats or human sacrifice. That book’s celebrated opening chapter, “The body of the condemned,” recounts the gruesome public execution of the regicide Damiens in 1757 as a late manifestation of a mode of punishment that subsequently fell into disrepute: the public torture and execution of criminals. Such practices, Girard’s work would suggest, have their roots in universal sacrificial rites—the same “ancient rites” to which Foucault also alluded when recalling the mob that stormed the Bastille.
In the decades after Damiens was executed, under the influence of “innumerable projects for reform,” such practices came to be regarded as a barbaric relic—a phase in the gradual discrediting of sacrifice Girard traces back to the biblical scriptures. But as Foucault shows, the abandonment of these brutal spectacles of violence gave rise to a different “penal style” that concealed the workings of punishment in rationally planned prisons and focused on reforming the soul rather than torturing and killing the body. This is Foucault’s answer to how we “survive without scapegoat victims”: we don’t. There are always victims, even if they are no longer subjected to public immolation, but secreted away into the diffuse, clandestine operations of power.
It was this insight that Girard later praised in When These Things Begin, published in 1996. There, Girard explicitly refers to what he regards as “the value of Foucault’s work”: his “having shown” that “if you stamp [sacrificial mechanisms] out here, they pop up again over there.” “Foucault understood the very thing that optimistic rationalism didn’t foresee,” he continues; “new forms of ‘victimization’ are constantly emerging from the instruments that were intended to do away with them.” In this regard, Foucault’s work also shows how we “survive without sacrificial misrecognition”: by way, in part, of new forms of misrecognition.
Yet this common discovery did not lead Foucault and Girard to come to the same conclusion about violence in modern societies. If the neutrality of the “third party” or the judge is a mask for the arbitrary violence of the ruling class against its enemies, as Foucault had argued in his dialogue with the Maoists, then perhaps it would be better to revive the “sacrificial misrecognition” of “ancient rites.” This was where the two philosophers differed most profoundly. Girard did not deny Foucault’s insight that our modern institutions bear traces of their archaic predecessors. But this did not lead him to conclude that the effects of replacing blood sacrifice with a judicial system were merely superficial.
Indeed, unless we see such substitutions, however flawed and incomplete, as part of humanity’s broader historical attempt to renounce its own violence, we are likely to share Foucault’s perspective. Recent progressives, when calling for abolition of various aspects of the criminal justice system or echoing Fanon’s celebrations of anti-colonial violence, have made this continued tendency clear enough. The Girardian response accepts a basic premise of the radical critiques of existing institutions, whether from Foucault or his recent successors: it is true that such institutions contain violence, but they do so in two senses of the word. They enact violence themselves, often in insidious ways. But they also constrain its most destabilizing effects.
Girard once described his worldview as Nietzsche “in reverse.” What he meant was that he shared with Nietzsche the conclusion that the Jewish and Christian revolution in values, which elevated the moral claims of victims over those of perpetrators, was the irreversible pivot point of history. At the same time, he saw Nietzsche’s fantasy of overcoming this moral revolution through the elevation of the overman as both monstrous and futile, as the Nazis’ horrifying travesty of the philosopher had made clear. “The attempt by Nietzsche and Hitler to make humankind forget the concern for victims,” Girard wrote in his 1999 book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, “has ended in a failure that seems definitive.” After all, the atrocities of World War II only “accelerated the concern for victims”—leading, for instance, to the codification of human rights. And yet, Girard warned, there persisted an “other totalitarianism” that “takes over and ‘radicalizes’ the concern for victims in order to paganize it,” thus seeking to “outflank [Christianity] on its left wing.” It isn’t difficult to imagine that he might have had in mind his sometime interlocutor Foucault—a modern acolyte of Dionysus who sought to expose victimization in all manner of ostensibly humane institutions and practices.
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A reader informed by Girard can’t help but recognize that Foucault has often played the role of the scapegoat in contemporary right-wing mythology—or demonology. Foucault’s death from AIDS—and the unverified allegations that he deliberately infected sexual partners—have offered the perfect metaphor for his mythical status on the right as a vector of intellectual plague. In such accounts, Foucault becomes an Oedipus figure, a brilliant but malevolent foreign “superspreader” who must be purged for civilization to be purified. By attaching himself to the Dionysian outsiders of modern life, Foucault in a sense invited this fate.
It is noteworthy that despite the chasm that separated them and despite his frequent criticisms of the poststructuralist theories that took hold of the U.S. academy in the late twentieth century, Girard did not join the crowd that denounced his onetime colleague. Instead, as we have seen, he commented appreciatively on Foucault’s documentation of the victimization embedded in institutions that posit themselves as the humane successors of the old sacrificial order, acknowledging that they differed mostly in how they interpreted such revelations. “It’s [Foucault’s] pessimism that separates us,” Girard explained. “Unlike him, I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this, or else face utter despair.” Girard further noted that “after the end of ideologies, the only way to embrace this meaning is to rediscover religion.”
An unexpected confirmation of his point comes from the remarkable trajectory of Lévy and his friend and interlocutor Sartre. As noted before, in the course of renouncing the radical left over the course of the 1970s, Lévy embraced Orthodox Judaism, traversing a path often described as “from Mao to Moses.” In 1997, Lévy made aliyah to Israel. There, in collaboration with two other Jewish ex-leftists, Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy (no relation), he established an institute dedicated to the work of Levinas, who had prompted his return to Jewish thought and practice.
Throughout the period of this return, however, Lévy remained close to Sartre, who was going blind, often reading to him from Jewish religious texts. In 1980, just before Sartre’s death, his younger friend published a series of interviews with him in Le Nouvel Observateur. These provoked considerable scandal because of the extent to which the elderly philosopher seemed to distance himself from his revolutionary credo while expressing sympathy for Lévy’s nascent religious worldview. In those interviews, later published in English under the title Hope Now, Lévy doesn’t cite Girard. But he does pose a very Girardian question to Sartre: “Can humanity be engendered through violence? … Can violence really have the redemptive role, the constituent function, you attributed to it?” After some hesitation, the philosopher replies: “I’m no longer of that opinion.”
Alongside this discussion, Lévy addresses his renunciation of his own earlier politics, which he connects with his rediscovery of Judaism. “Maybe the Jew,” he says, “feels that the revolutionary mob can become the pogrom mob” and “knows that he is threatened when a crowd of people starts to think of itself as a mystical body.” Notably, these remarks echo Girard’s interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, which—for the first time in history, he asserts—tell the story of scapegoating from the perspective of its victims, rather than that of the community renewed by sacrificial expulsion. And yet, Lévy argues, Jewish messianism is also a key source of revolutionary inspiration. By his account, Judaism enables a pursuit of this impulse that avoids its political “perversions”; this is the logic he offers to account for his evolution “from Mao to Moses.” Sartre, to many readers’ surprise, seemed to accept all of this.
One of the examples Lévy cites of the continued temptations of politicized messianism is that of his former comrade in arms Foucault, who had recently declared, while reporting on the 1979 Iranian revolution, that he had seen “collective will” in the streets of Tehran. This was Foucault’s final and most notorious political enthusiasm, which reprised many of the themes of his earlier flirtations with militancy. However, although he didn’t undergo a conversion like Lévy’s, there was also a partial convergence between them: foolishly or not, Foucault saw the promise of Islamic revolution in its grounding in religious faith and traditions. As his biographer James Miller explains, Foucault “believed that the professed goal of establishing a new ‘Islamic government’ held out the promise of a welcome new form of ‘political spirituality.’” His short-lived hope that a Shi’ite revolutionary politics might avoid the pitfalls of its Marxist predecessors was rooted in the notion of a “collective will” that could transcend the modern state and its institutions. The spiritual discipline of Islamic tradition, he argued, might act as a restraint against the excesses of revolutionary violence that had spiraled out of control elsewhere.
To this extent, Foucault also took part, peripherally, in the “religious turn.” But his brief infatuation, which he later regretted, is a useful reminder that a turn to religion isn’t the panacea that a superficial reading of Girard or the later Lévy might encourage. As atheistic revolutionary movements lost much of their traction in the later twentieth century, overtly religious movements filled the vacuum. But rather than forging a new path, as Foucault briefly imagined Iranian Islamism might, these movements largely fell back into what Lévy called the “perversions” of their secular predecessors. This is true not just of the Islamic Republic or Hamas, but of the forms of politicized messianism that now exercise increasing power in Lévy’s adopted homeland, which regard the Jewish state as a vehicle for apocalyptic redemption.
The 1970s—the era in which the revolutionary fervor shared by Foucault, Lévy and Sartre reached its peak and then receded—marked the breakdown of the social order built up after the end of the cataclysm of World War II and the emergence of a new one. We are living through a comparable transition today, as the credibility of our institutions comes under attack not only from the old left but also from a newly anti-establishment right. As Girard shows, the critique of institutional violence has deep roots in the evolution of our civilization away from sacrificial killing. But whether we are able to construct a durable new order may depend in part on our capacity to move beyond critique and to recognize the role that our institutions still play, flawed though they may be, in constraining the all-too-human propensity to spirals of reciprocal violence.
Art credit: Steffen Kern, Guillotine, 2022. Colored pencil on paper, 25 × 20 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
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