Apocalypse Deferred: Girard and Japan - Hardcover

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Jeremiah L. Alberg is professor of philosophy and religion at International Christian University, Tokyo. He is the author of a number of books, including Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses: Reading Scandalous Texts.

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Even though there was a peace agreement signed between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on September 26, 2016, there is not yet a clear path to implement it; also there are still several illegal armed actors present in the country, among them the National Liberation Army (ELN), new paramilitary groups, and drug-trafficking bands. In the conclusion, we examine those cases inscribed in the horizon of silence proposed by René Girard in Battling to the End (2010). Our use of the word “we” here is not rhetorical in that this essay is a dual-authored consideration written out of our proximity to the conflict (we are university professors in Colombia). The object of our consideration is the relationship between conflict resolution theory and mimetic theory as regards to Colombia’s situation. At the same time, it also aims toward a level of generality appropriate to thinking about the Apocalypse and the way it affects every human being.

We come from Colombia, a country where violence seems to have no end, to Japan, where an extreme violence, an atomic bomb, ended a terrible war. In both cases, the immediate evidence of violence exposes a sort of reality we call “apocalyptic,” the imminence of the violent destruction of existence. “Hiroshima” is the expression of the execution of the worst fears of a total war, as seen by Carl von Clausewitz and studied by Girard in Battling to the End. It inaugurates the nuclear era that corresponds to an apocalyptic consciousness. The apocalypse is the last threat of an image represented by violence moving toward the universal due to the fact that he who might destroy my life, my enemy, is potentially anyone, since in the apocalypse, violence escalates to an extreme in which humans can destroy each other because there are no institutions that can contain it. Further, due to the secularization of the world, we no longer count on any barrier to protect us from the imminence of violence. Thus, globalization is the oncoming of an era of violent reciprocity among antagonists, which reminds one of Schmitt’s views on politics: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” In the face of this apocalyptic universe in which we imagine a destructive chaos has been imposed, it becomes possible to choose to pressure the apocalyptic imagination to produce victims among “enemies” or to recognize the enemy as nothing more than a symmetric other, other like me, upon whom the exercise of violence does not make sense.

Within this apocalyptic horizon, however, the Colombian case may very well be understood under the category of “states of violence” proposed by Paul Dumouchel in his essay “Inside Out: Political Violence in the Age of Globalization.” What happens in places like Colombia is neither a war against another state nor a civil war, but violence that has become the state of existence in entire regions of the country. The states of violence do not affect the entire society but are confined to parts of the nation’s territory; outside those zones of violence, life is relatively normal. Dumouchel claims that in countries such as Colombia, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Democratic Republic of Congo,

These enclaves of violence sometimes have an important economic role or strategic value, and many different types of agents may participate in the hostile relations that characterize them: government troops (and more or less official paramilitary units), rebel forces, private security companies, local warlords, tribal combatants, troops from neighboring countries, and members of international peacekeeping forces. This incomplete list brings out two important features of states of violence. First, there is their internationalization: very rarely are the participants, the parties in the conflict, limited to citizens of one state only. Most of the time foreigners are involved. Second, there is the presence of non-state actors, rebel troops of course, but also private security companies, the corporations that hire them, and organized crime. In fact, it is often difficult to distinguish between political conflict and large-scale criminal activities, as insurgents turn to various illegal activities to fund their operations. When that happens, winning often stops being the goal. The struggle itself becomes a form of economic enterprise. . . . The conflict thus gets integrated into the world economy. Simultaneously, this localized fighting, as long as it does not get out of hand, can serve the purpose of certain groups within the state and help them maintain their hold in power.

The fact of violence discloses the decreasing capacity of the state to keep its monopoly of force and apply the empire of law democratically; globalization, as the most recent moment of secularization, has undermined that capacity of the states. This can be appreciated in the traffic of psychoactive substances, which is transnational. The criminal organizations, the insurgent groups, and the corrupt elites are interested in maintaining a fragile state in order to be able to cover their illegal activities and negotiate their position in the international system. Hence, the links between illegal economies, corruption, and the fragility of the state have become a vicious circle, in which a permanent state of violence makes society even more vulnerable due to the links between public relations, insurgent groups, and organized crime.

excerpted from chapter 13