Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence

With this pretentious title, I want to continue investigating a nexus of problems, both theoretical and philosophical, which I already touched upon several times – particularly in my Wellek Lectures at Irvine in 1996.1 The term “cruelty” is chosen by convention (but with some literary references in mind) to indicate those forms of extreme violence, either intentional or systemic, physical or moral – although such distinctions become questionable precisely when we cross the lines of extremity – that, so to speak, appear to us to be “worse than death.” It is my hypothesis, generally speaking, that the actual or virtual looming of cruelty represents for politics, and particularly for today’s politics in the framework of socalled globalization, a crucial experiment in which the very possibility of politics is at stake. For the speculative idea of a politics of politics, or a politics in the second degree, which aims at creating, recreating, and conserving the set of conditions within which politics as a collective participation in public affairs is possible or is not made absolutely impossible, I borrow the term “civility” – which indeed has many other uses. It is certainly an ambiguous term, but I think that its connotations are preferable to those of, say, civilization, socialization, police and policing, politeness, etc. In particular, “civility” does not necessarily involve the idea of a suppression of “conflicts” and “antagonisms” in society, as if they were always the harbingers of violence and not the opposite. Much, if not most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss is the result of a blind political preference for “consensus” and “peace,” not to speak of the implementation of law and order policies on a global scale. This, among other reasons, is what leads me to discuss these issues in terms of “topography,” by which I understand at the same time a concrete, spatial, geographical, or geopolitical perspective – for instance taking into account such shifting distinctions as “North and South,” “center and periphery,” “this side of the border or across the border,” “global and local,” etc. – and an abstract, speculative perspective, meaning that the causes and effects of extreme violence are not produced on one and the same stage, but on different “scenes” or “stages,” which can be pictured as “real” and “virtual” or “imaginary” – but the imaginary and the virtual are probably no less material, no less determining than the real. This paper is based on a talk which I was asked to deliver in November 1999 for the opening of the Graduate Course in Humanitarian Action at the University of Geneva.2 This will explain why the issues of citizenship and segregation,