The Syntax of Violence. Between Hegel and Marx

Abstract

Th is article aims to show that the theory of violence in Marx and Engels is driven by a conceptual syntax which can be found in two important chapters of Hegel's Science of Logic ('Actuality' and 'Teleology'). Th ese categories are the timeless schemata of the appearance of historical violence in Hegel's Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. However it is possible to fi nd in Marx's writing on violence a sort of counter-movement that cannot be inscribed in the process of the becomingsubject of substance.

Portrait of René Girard as a Post-Hegelian: Masters, Slaves, and Monstrous Doubles

“…In short: 1) violence is necessary; 2) violence is not real, it is not wirklich, not only because it is not violence that acts, wirken, and produces an effect, Wirkung, i.e., it is not the motor of the process; but also because its occurrence is the effect of an optical illusion produced by the final level of the binary logic of the metaphysical categories [Wirkung und Gegenwirkung], the illusion of a duality that will be resolved in the unity of the Idea. 67 On the one hand, violence is necessary because, as Tinland observes 68 , it occasions the emergence of oppositions and dynamics on which dialectical reasoning will be able to work. On the other hand, violence is not real because the self-sufficiency of the Hegelian Reason bypasses the contingent and inessential elements of the dialectical process.…”

Debating violence on the desert island: Engels, Dühring and Robinson Crusoe

“…As violence cannot be isolated from these historically variable economic factors, it makes little sense to conceive of it as an ahistorical force or to regard it as an anthropological constant. At issue here is not only the theory of violence but the underlying concept of history (Morfino, 2009). Engels attacks Dühring for naïvely relying on a view according to which 'history' consists of the political and military actions of states.…”