In the wake of the Paris attacks on November 13, international media highlighted how it was the deadliest attack since the Second World War, which was quickly rebutted when it was pointed out that up to 200 Algerians had been massacred in Paris in 1961 after protesting the colonial war in Algeria.
By Nayeli Urquiza Haas
‘…we said ourselves in an outburst of anger ‘They will pay’. And our
anger seemed to promise a joy so heavy that we could scarcely believe
ourselves able to bear it. They have paid. They are going to pay. They pay each
day. And the joy has not risen up in our hearts’.1
Image Attribute: Paris in Barricade, Source: Getty Images/Wikipedia
In the wake of the Paris attacks on November 13, international media
highlighted how it was the deadliest attack since the Second World War, which was
quickly rebutted when it was pointed out that up to 200
Algerians had been massacred in Paris in 1961 after protesting the
colonial war in Algeria. Even if we believed every life mattered, the unequal
mourning shown after the bombing in Beirut at day before the multiple attacks
in Paris show how lives which are lost to violence appear or dis-appear in the
public realm.
While there has been criticism
in the media and elsewhere about the history and politics that frames
how lives matter and how all should matter (for instance Judith Butler’s Precarious
Life) and how the law plays a key role by creating distinctions
between worthy and unworthy lives to mourned (victim/criminal,
combatant/civilian, terrorist/freedom fighter), the absence of Simone de
Beauvoir’s voice in France’s contemporary challenges should not be
a reason to forget her invitation to think critically about how we react
when we are injured.
As a prolific feminist author whose influence is well recognized,
Beauvoir would seem for many to be an unlikely interlocutor to think through
the current military response to the attacks: bombing Raqqa to the ground and
the militaristic policing in Paris this week. However, it might be worth
recalling that Beauvoir was a critic of the torture methods used by the
French government in the French-Algerian war 1954 – 1962.2 Her
approach to historical events and philosophy is grounded through phenomenology.
Beauvoir states that her intention is ‘to merely translate […] a situation
that is showing itself to be historical precisely in that it is in the process
of changing’ without colonizing the experience of marginalized others.3
The leitmotif of ambiguity, which traverses most of her body of work,
provides the gravitas shaping, problematizing and marking the limits of her
thoughts and judgements on the political transformations she faced with others: WWII,
the war in Algeria, women’s oppression, etc. More importantly, her critique of
post-war punishment and liberal moral philosophy is a helpful guide to
resisting the impulse of revenge.
Ambiguity
Recent engagements with Beauvoir’s work on ambiguity demonstrate the
breadth of her method, encompassing themes that are not limited to gender and
sexuality studies but also extend to questions of politics, moral philosophy,
and ethics.4 For
Beauvoir, the human condition is marked by the ‘tragedy of ambiguity,’ because
it is an isolated subjective experience that nevertheless coexists ‘at the
heart of the world with other men’.5 Ambiguity
is the frame that helps her understand the tensions arising from our
relationship with others and the desire for freedom. Ambiguity evinces an
impossible struggle between ethics and politics, where Beauvoir’s political
subject moves through the world to impose a meaning while the ethical
‘acknowledges the mark of the other’. 6
One of the most interesting implications of her emphasis on ambiguity is
how it unsettles the values ascribed to the theory and practice of punishment.
Crime and punishment as much as war and peace, delineate the borders of this
intersubjective dilemma. They represent ways in which the intersubjective world
is denied by imposing one meaning over another. In the essay ‘Eye for an Eye’
(1946), Beauvoir seeks to make sense of the trial and execution of Robert
Brasillach — a French intellectual who collaborated with the Germans by
publishing a fascist newspaper. More than just an occasion piece, this
essay is a pillar in Beauvoir’s work as she alludes to ambiguity for the
first time. 7
Embracing
revenge and resisting revenge: Two different Parises
The State’s penal machinery set in motion after the Paris attacks bears
all the characteristics of revenge, pure and simple. By November 18, France
struck back with airstrikes in Raqqa, ISIL’s de facto base.
A week before, the city had been also pounded by Russian bombs which
destroyed the national hospital.
Revenge, whilst denounced as barbaric — as something that criminal courts
and scholarship in post-Enlightenment Europe abandoned through its sublimation
into ‘retributive justice’ — it reserves a strong place in the
philosophical imaginary of criminal legal doctrine and in international law.
Even though retributive justice holds on to the belief that proportionality
delivers a relative equivalence, Beauvoir shows how punishment is always
asymmetrical because it is justified on something other than the crime itself.
In ‘Eye for an Eye,’ she argues that revenge appeals since it is
something that ‘retains a whiff of magic’ that ‘strives to satisfy some
unknown dark god of symmetry’.8 But
revenge cannot bring the satisfaction one would hope for, even in the case of
the most horrible crimes where perpetrators objectify others by reducing them
into ‘mere panting flesh’. 9 ‘True’
revenge emerges spontaneously. It is a ‘metaphysical’ demand which has ‘no goal
outside of itself’. 10 For
example, where a victim can reverse the master-bondsman relationship.11 But
even there, revenge could devolve into torture since punishment can never
restore what was lost. Revenge achieves only a temporal reversal by
forcing others to see their own tragic ambiguity, rather than appealing to
their freedom. Beauvoir does not suggest punishment can be avoided, especially
if the offender threatens to cause more harm in a community. The problem
with revenge is that it is deeply contradictory, pursuing an impossible
equation that can only be satisfied in fiction books. The failure of punishment
is best exemplified by the ‘elaborate forms’ created by society to envelope the
spontaneity required for revenge, including the law and criminal justice
institutions.
Legal punishment retains the ‘whiff of magic’ of revenge because it is
a metaphysical aspiration that always aims at something beyond itself,
such as the abstract morality of a formalistic law or the political ends
that characterize utilitarianism. As such, it is bound to fail.For example, she
likens criminal courts to vigilantes avenging an injury of an anonymous
universal ‘other’, while at the same time acting like a sovereign
consciousness with the authority to make others pay for a crime. When the
offenders appears in court, they are no longer the sovereign consciousness that
acted regardless of the harm to others. Instead, they are fragile individuals
whose punishment is justified through something other than the crime itself.
Punishment devolves into the state’s will to punish while the offender’s
subjectivity becomes an ‘abstract symbol’ of the values rejected by society.
Since the spontaneity of revenge faded down, trials legitimize the authority of
the law through ‘a comedy of words’ whereby the whole process is ‘designed to
endow the sentence with the greatest expressive power possible’.12 In
other words, criminal justice is an empty performance lacking a body and
cut off from the brief temporality of the offence. To understand her critique,
we need to situate her analysis of revenge within the framework of embodiment.
Embodiment is situated in an ever-changing temporality, which in the case of
crime, essentially creates a distance between the offender and the
offence. Punishment can only grasp a ‘mirage of exteriority’.13 What
is left is an abstract justice haunted by failure because it ceased to link the
crime to the punishment.
This failure is not due to a lack of ideas. The failure is not
realizing how the justification of punishment through a perfect
equivalence has been always impossible. Yet, the ambiguity of punishment is
masked in order to legitimize it. The ethical and political struggle is
a constant. Beauvoir’s lesson is in her method of critique: By staging the
impossibility of equivalence at every stage of the analysis, she is also resisting the
compelling passion of revenge and the alluring purity of abstract legal
processes. Her reading compels us to abandon and constantly question facile
equivalences in penal discourses that offer the ‘serene recovery of a reasonable
and just order’.14
The penal equation cannot achieve that goal, as the Paris attacks and the
responses to attacks themselves demonstrate: Mosques vandalized in Canada and
the US, multinational war coalitions bombing Iraq and Syria, and President
Hollande’s vow to ‘destroy’ IS, and ISIL’s equal vow to terrorize
France and everyone else.
While the political protagonists (ISIL and elected leaders) get
absorbed in the old-age cycle of revenge, allegedly cleansed by metaphysical
reasons (the aspiration for something beyond the crime itself), people
in 11tharrondisment and even those directly affected seem
to understand better the core of Beauvoir’s reflection about post-war Paris.
That is, their interdependence and the need to undercut and deflate what Judith
Butler calls ‘the
terrible satisfactions of war’, best represented by a statement which
is going viral in social media made by a man whose wife was killed at the
Bataclan:‘Vous n’aurez pas ma haine’ (‘I will not grant you the gift of my
hatred’). Perhaps even stronger than the metaphysical need for revenge, there
is a more earthly concern at play. Echoing the tragic ambiguity of
co-existence in Beauvoir’s essay on punishment, Judith Butler articulates more
clearly what is at stake. Drawing on Melanie Klein, Butler argues that if
‘individuation is never complete, and dependency never really overcome,
a broader ethical dilemma emerges: how not to destroy the other or others
whom I need in order to live’.15
About The Author:
Nayeli Urquiza Haas’ work analyses the role of vulnerability in legal
theory, particularly in criminal law, and the effects and exclusions that occur
when vulnerability is uttered in the spaces dominated by concerns about
security and protection against injury. She has recently obtained her PhD at
Kent Law School. Her thesis offers a critique of criminal law, explored
through the case study of women sentenced in England for drug mule work.
References:
- Simone de Beauvoir, “Eye for an Eye: Introduction by Kristiana Arp,” inSimone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, edited by Margaret Simmons, Marybeth Timmerman, and Mary Beth Mader (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 246.
- Melissa M. Ptacek, “Simone de Beauvoir’s Algerian War: Torture and the Rejection of Ethics,” Theory and Society, November 4 (2015): 1 – 37.
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. Edited by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (London and New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), 750.
- See: Anne Morgan, “Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Freedom and Absolute Evil,” Hypatia 23, no. 4 (2008): 75 – 89.
- Simone de Beauvoir, “Eye for an Eye,” 258
- Debra Bergoffen, “Between the Ethical and the Political: The Difference of Ambiguity,” In The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Wendy O’Brien and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Springer Science& Business Media, 2001), 188.
- Kristiana Arp, “Eye for an Eye: Introduction by Kristiana Arp,” In Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, edited by Margaret Simmons, Marybeth Timmerman, and Mary Beth Mader (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 237 –260.
- Simone de Beauvoir, “Eye for an Eye,” 247.
- De Beauvoir reflected on this through the experience of the rape of Djamila Boupacha in the Algerian War. See: Sonia Kruks, Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 162.
- Simone de Beauvoir, “Eye for an Eye,” 248.
- Sonia Kruks, Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- Simone de Beauvoir, “Eye for an Eye,” 252.
- Ibid., 255.
- Ibid., 259.
- Judith Butler, “‘The Death Penalty’ by Jacques Derrida, Translated by
Peggy Kamuf,” London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No. 14 • 17 July 2014, 32.
Accessible also at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n14/judith-butler/on-cruelty. Source: Critical Legal Thinking
