Customer Reviews

Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Law, Meaning, and Violence)

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This book is a philosophical look at violence and sovereignty, and the relationship that violence plays in limiting and expanding sovereignty. This book is certainly not for the casual reader. The author's assertions are profound and cogent, but they require a lot from the reader. A good base in philosophy is a must.

An argument put forth by the author I found very interesting is his assertion that torture is much more about expanding power and eliminating threats to the sovereign not by necessarily killing or breaking the physical threat of the human being, but is instead designed to eliminate the existential threat represented by the idea carried by the individual. Torture is designed to elicit a confession which repudiates the idea. Torture is used to make an individual reaffirm the sovereigns domain. Once the individual confesses he/she is a broken person, no longer capable of threatening the sovereigns power. The victim has been forced to confess that theirs was a "false god" and that the sovereign still reigns. This limits the threat that others will take up the mantle of the now false idea and threaten the existing power structure.

Of course this only holds true if the individual is forced to confess. In the case of refusal to bend to the will of the sovereign then the individual becomes a martyr which can be even more of an existential threat to the sovereign.

What I found interesting and somewhat disturbing is that the sovereign doesn't need actual threats to its power. Instead a display can simply be put on where any victim can be displayed in a public confession. This has played out throughout history in the Spanish Inquisition and the witch trials in Europe and America. I really found this argument interesting because I had recently read Karen Armstrong and she posited a very similar idea about the Spanish Inquisition in that she said that the violence eminating from the power structure or the sovereign was being used to organize the state into a more modern nation state. Her assertion that violence and torture were used to organize and expand the power of the sovereign reads right into this author's on claims. I found these ideas to be quite fascinating.

His critique of the liberal state and the attempt to expand the rule of law into more domains left me a little chapped. I derive a lot of hope out of the future expansion of the rule of law, but his thoughts leave me with more than a little doubt as to whether or not law can ever replace or become a sovereign power itself. While these institutions may have a lot of power, they have no sovereign power because they cannot ask the ultimate sacrifice of people.

This is an amazing book that is guaranteed to make the reader think. The author has a very interesting critique of Plato's Apology. Socrates' death is seen in a new light that was very interesting.

I could continue on but will digress now and come to an end. I found this book gave back everything I put into it and more. Even in some of the areas where I found myself skeptical I was hard pressed not to at least admit the author has very strong points well argued. This book has changed the way I look at power, sovereignty and violence used for and against both. If not exactly changed my outlook on a lot things, then this book has certainly challenged some of the notions I had coming into it. Who could ask for more?