Logics of Genocide

The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World

Anne O'Byrne, Martin Shuster, Anne O'Byrne, Martin Shuster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367511005
• eBook ISBN: 9781000096194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

This book is concerned with the connection between the formal structure of agency and the formal structure of genocide. The contributors employ philosophical approaches to explore the idea of genocidal violence as a structural element in the world.

Do mechanisms or structures in nation-states produce types of national citizens that are more susceptible to genocidal projects? There are powerful arguments within philosophy that in order to be the subjects of our own lives, we must constitute ourselves specifically as national subjects and organize ourselves into nation states. Additionally, there are other genocidal structures of human society that spill beyond historically limited episodes. The chapters in this volume address the significance—moral, ethical, political—of the fact that our very form of agency suggests or requires these structures. The contributors touch on topics including birthright citizenship, contemporary mass incarceration, anti-black racism, and late capitalism.

Logics of Genocide will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, critical theory, genocide studies, Holocaust and Jewish studies, history, and anthropology.

Part I
Agency and Institutions

1
Hegel and State Homogenization

Martin Shuster

From Hegel’s earliest critics like Rudolf Haym,¹ to more contemporary critics like Theodor W. Adorno and Karl Popper,² it has been common to see Hegel as glorifying the (Prussian) state. While this interpretation has rightly been shown to be problematic,³ there are still instructive insights to be gleaned from elements of a Hegelian conception of the state,⁴ especially as the former relates to the study of genocide. To see how that might be the case, let me quote two contemporary scholars on what they see as a problem about the state structure and its role in the genocides of the 20th century and beyond:

Genocide is … a systemic dysfunction and cannot be simply or solely dismissed as the aberrant or deviant behavior of rogue, revolutionary or “totalitarian” regimes or for that matter ones with particular types of political culture or social and ethnic configuration.⁵

[It is in] the twentieth century, as the state system has spread across the globe and there are fewer safe exists for targeted minority groups, that genocide and politicide have become a “standard technique.”⁶

Note that “the problem” of genocide here amounts to a sort of problem of organization: it somehow occurs because of the ways that we have organized ourselves, namely it has something to do with the very structure of “the state system” and its leading to what international relations theorist Heather Rae terms a “pathological homogenization.”⁷ My suggestion in this essay will be that Hegel’s conception of the state allows us to understand the mechanics of the process that these scholars are diagnosing. That is, it is Hegel’s conception of the state and its attendant logic(s) that gives philosophical sense to the sort of “pathological homogenization” that seems to be a fact of our present world. To be clear, my argument is not that Hegel is somehow responsible for the ills of the last century, or that his ideas brought them to life or actualized them, or in any way played that sort of role.⁸ Instead, my claim—which I actually take to be Hegelian in nature—is that from Hegel’s writings we can elaborate the logic of a state system that came onto the scene prior to his writing;⁹ and that he might be recruited for doing exactly what he set out to do: aiming to understand the rationality animating the concrete structures that make up his world (the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and so forth).

Putting the positive elements of what I am suggesting forward, my claim is that Hegel’s account of the state allows us to answer two important questions that I believe the aforementioned accounts leave unanswered:

1. What makes states undertake such homogenization?
2. How and why does such homogenization become pathological?

It is important also to understand the “level” at which these questions are pitched. On one hand, the answers are of course apparent in the two accounts in question: it is particular European events, oriented as they are around the rise of capitalism and the collapse of imperialism, and the concomitant instabilities and problems that each of these multi-faceted, highly mediated phenomena raise.¹⁰ On the other hand, such an account—at best—reveals the concrete causal circumstances that allow us to see how history moved from one event to another, but it doesn’t thereby capture the reasons why this event led to that event; after all, at any particular point in time, things could have shaken out a different way (and I don’t mean here simply that, say, the peasant overthrow of Machecoul—a key event in what’s been termed the Vendée genocide—might have been stopped due to the spread of an illness, but rather that, say, in capturing Machecoul, the peasants may have decided not to massacre anyone).¹¹ In short, there is a particular logic to how the state structure works and the sorts of things it demands and requires of itself and its citizens that make certain actions, and thereby certain events, more likely (exactly due—as I will shortly elaborate—to the fact that such a structure socializes subjects in particular ways).

Hegel’s suggestion for the necessity of the state is interestingly tied to the alleged constitution of human subjectivity.¹² To see this, note the opening of the Philosophy of Right,¹³ where Hegel appears to pursue a dialectic that has strong resonances to the way in which the master/slave dialectic proceeded in the Phenomenology. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel opens his account by noting that a subject finds herself with particular natural “drives, desires, and inclinations.”¹⁴ This should be compared exactly to the way in which Hegel introduces both the master/slave dialectic and (thereby) self-consciousness in the Phenomenology, as hinging on “desire itself.”¹⁵ Hegel’s idea here is roughly that our concrete “drives, desires, and inclinations”—those things that constitute the most fundamental basis of human life—are also what first make possible a relation that might be termed self- conscious. Hegel notes in the Phenomenology that it is such desire that pushes us to become estranged from ourselves.¹⁶ One can easily see how this might be the case when one thinks about how any particular desire may fail to be satisfied, and thereby explicitly raise the status of this desire and thereby of ourselves in relation to it. As Hegel notes in the addition to §11 of the Philosophy of Right, the “human being, as wholly indeterminate, stands above his drives and can determine and posit them as his own.” In the master/slave dialectic, Hegel traced how the relation that one can take to one’s desires presents a wholly normative problem when the subject of such a relation encounters another subject like it. One is subject to one’s desires and must take a particular relation to them; and this is true for any human being.

Something particular happens, however, when two such beings encounter one another; namely, Hegel realizes that there is no way—at this stage in the account—to adjudicate who between the two of them is authoritative (in Hegel’s language, all this idea amounts to at the present stage of the dialectic is the notion of being “self-certain”). To understand the significance of this point, note that—in Hegel’s terminology—one’s desires are “negated” by their being satisfied (so, I may have a desire for this apple and I “negate” it by eating that apple), and in their being so satisfied, the subject achieved a sort of “self-certainty” (I may—seeing that the apple is covered by fungus—decide not to eat the apple, or I may decide that the risk of the fungus is not strong enough given my hunger). When another self-consciousness is encountered, though, such simple negation may be met with disapproval, indeed, violence—violence going as far as death. In other words, the opposing self-consciousness and I may stake our self-certainty to the point of death: we might be willing to die for what we claim to be certain about. When such an encounter between two subjects occurs, Hegel notes that something distinct happens: it is not only that the opposing subject may resist the subject, but rather that such a subject may refuse to even acknowledge the other’s self-certainty (i.e., I may deny whatever relation to your own desires and the world you have achieved).¹⁷ At this step in the dialectic, Hegel notes that a struggle to the death emerges as the means by which such a “problem” is solved: in failing to acknowledge each other, the two subjects fight to determine who is correct; only in being willing to risk their lives—in other words, to risk everything for this (self-)certainty—are subjects able to achieve the sort of self-certain satisfaction that they managed to achieve prior to encountering another self-consciousness. (And, at a very high level of altitude, the rest of the account in the Phenomenology aims to show how there emerge, consequently, other, less bloody ways to solve this fundamental problem of certainty and satisfaction.)

I have wanted to stress this account from the Phenomenology—an account that can be seen as normative in nature (at stake is normative grounding and authority, here couched in terms of “satisfaction” and “self-certainty”)—in order to note that in the Philosophy of Right, an entirely analogous account unfolds. If one follows Hegel’s account closely, the same language of self-consciousness is used throughout, culminating in the emergence of contract as a solution to the “problem of right.” Contract just is the actualization of a struggle for recognition, albeit now considered in a political register. And Hegel himself draws this analogy when he notes that when property is viewed as an extension of a subject’s will, then it might also be opposed by another will (i.e., the exact same dialectic between two subjects).¹⁸ Thus, Hegel notes in the Encyclopedia that:

[T]he fight for recognition in the extreme form … can only occur in the state of nature, where men live only as individuals; by contrast it is absent from civil society and the political state because what constitutes the result of this combat, namely recognition, is already present there.¹⁹

Hegel stresses in the remainder of the Philosophy of Right that the sphere of right cannot flourish by itself. The sort of relations of recognition that emerge within it cannot be consistently actualized unless they are embedded in another sphere of human life, namely morality (here denoting the ability of a subject to bind herself to a norm that might be both universalized and understood by the subject as universal). Just having these spheres is not enough. There must be a way for subjects to be so formed that they are liable to acknowledge the sphere of morality and to incorporate its perspective into their activities. In other words, Hegel believes that certain institutions are essential for the actualization of morality. Roughly, this is Hegel’s solution to a problem of motivation that plagued Kant. Kant claims that one cannot have an obligation that cannot be carried out.²⁰ Yet, Kant also acknowledges that not only are certain obligations sometimes impossible, but that in fact carrying them out sometimes produces immoral effects; thus, Kant introduces the necessity of the postulates and especially the highest good.²¹ In this way, when someone does the moral good, but things turn out poorly, God serves as the guarantor of future happiness and justice, and the postulate of human immortality makes it so that the agent has access to this future happiness and justice. Hegel, however, rejects the highest good in the metaphysical and religious register as Kant presents it,²² and instead presents an alternative solution to this problem of motivation: namely, that it is necessary to have institutions that both socialize agents into society and a moral perspective, and that allow for the concrete existence of the spheres—and thereby the possibilities—of right and morality. The moniker by which Hegel captures these broader sets and types of institutions is “Sittlichkei”’ or “ethical life.”²³ Such an “ethical life” is really a sort of form of life, or in He...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Agency and Institutions
• PART II Bodies and Beyond
• PART III Time and Violence
• PART IV Ethos and Violence
• Epilogue: Theses on Our Only Possible Future
• List of Contributors
• Index