Tributes paying homage to victims of the Bataclan concert hall. Demotix/ Slavish Hosseini. All right reserved. ‘You who killed them. Tell yourself that your violent stupidity will not lead me towards the stupidity of violence.” “I don’t want the love that you destroyed to turn into hate and war. That would give you too much satisfaction”: Bataclan samizdat papers in homage to the victims of Päris, November 13
The political sociology of conflict teaches us that the first element of reflexivity necessary to commence an analysis beyond an emotional reaction, is to perceive how adversaries who incessantly swear to their radical difference, pushing the Other into inhumanity and promising his total and definitive eradication, mimic each other. Despite any differences in terms of community representativeness, electoral processes, or normative systems, the practises of the actors who engage in extreme violence end up homogenizing themselves bit by bit through their struggles, by engaging in a reciprocity of violent acts. The monotony and stupidity of these acts are their most obvious feature.
Bombings follow bombs, or is it the other way around? Bombings follow bombs, or is it the other way around? As in Edward Albee’s famous play “Who‘s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”(Albee 1966), each adversary tends to justify his or her violence with a childlike: “they started it”, in an effort to attribute the blame for the original act of violence to the opposing group. This process of accusation was explored by François Tricaut many years ago. It rests on an almost magical element whereby the location of the origin of the violence on the side of the adversary serves not only to accuse them of being a trouble-maker who must be destroyed, but also provokes, above all, a ‘purification’ of the so-called ‘answer’ in reciprocal violence – that which is used for vengeance, and to which we apply the law of an eye for an eye (lex talionis). This vengeance is no longer seen as violence, as it has been turned into ‘security’ (Tricaut 1977).
