genocide as transgression

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Genocide as Transgression

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Genocide as Transgression

Dan StoneROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, UK

AbstractThe origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas ofhuman experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography,ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way togetting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, asBerel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap betweenthe idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towardsbridging that gap by adding a human dimension to the existing expla-nations. Building on Roger Caillois’s anthropological analysis of ‘war asfestival’, Georges Bataille’s concept of society’s ‘excess energy’, and EmileDurkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’, and connecting these terms tothose used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra(‘scapegoating’ and the ‘carnivalesque’) and Saul Friedländer (‘Rausch’ or‘ecstasy’), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occursa heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic senseof belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of trans-gression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated‘threatening’ group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed atstimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacresand the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empiricalresearch is needed to illustrate this concept of ‘genocide as transgression’.

Key words■ ecstasy ■ genocide ■ modernity ■ transgression ■ violence

The dread of losing the self and of abrogating together with the self the barrier betweenoneself and other life, the fear of death and destruction, is intimately associated witha promise of happiness which threatened civilization at every moment. (TheodorAdorno and Max Horkheimer, 1986)

Instancing irrationality as proof of primitiveness is such a strange procedure to thetwentieth-century mind that I do not think it necessary to refute it. (Franz Steiner,1967)

European Journal of Social Theory 7(1): 45–65

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Transgressive Violence

A mainstay of scholarly literature on the Holocaust has for some time been theclaim that what sets the mass murder of the Jews apart from other genocides –making ‘Holocaust’ a separate category from ‘genocide’ – is the fact that themurderers of the Jews were disinterested. The murders, it is said, were carried outin the way in which Max Weber said activities are typically carried out by bureau-cracies: sine ira ac studio, according to ‘calculable rules’ and without anger oremotion. Frequently, we have tried to conceal from view the unnerving similarityof the perpetrators to ourselves. Hence the attempts of the Israeli court in 1961to do all in its power to portray Adolf Eichmann as a psychopath, and hence thestorm over Hannah Arendt’s insistence on Eichmann being not an embodimentof radical evil but of the ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt, 1977).1 Hence also theattempts of popular versions of the Holocaust, such as Steven Spielberg’s film,Schindler’s List (1993), to exemplify the killers in its portrayal of Płaszów campcommandant Amon Goeth, a weak-willed sadist. Academics believe that theyhave seen through this Hollywood misrepresentation, and know that, in reality,the horror of the Holocaust consists not in the fact that the murderers were so‘mad’, so bestial, driven by blood lust, but in the fact that the murderers werefrighteningly like ourselves. The machinery of destruction meant that peoplecould be ‘disposed of ’ by ‘desk-killers’ like Eichmann, in a calm, industrial,production-line system of death.2

This argument has much to recommend it. Attempts by, for example, the USHolocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, or the Yad Vashem Holo-caust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, to imbue themurders with redemptive qualities – by stressing the liberation by US troops, therebirth of the Jewish community in the USA, or the founding of the state of Israel– surely owe much to the need – understandable if uncourageous in the face ofthe truth – to turn away from the darkest depths, to seek out some sort ofcomfort. The same can be said of the best-selling Holocaust book of recent years,Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), whose success wasin large measure a result of the fact that Goldhagen portrayed the killers as drivenby an ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ which made them commit unspeakablybarbaric acts, and which, luckily for us, sets them apart from our rational, liberal,post-war societies.

Nonetheless, the argument is flawed. The problem is not that scholars arewrong to talk about production-line death at Treblinka and Auschwitz; rather,they are wrong to divide societies into ‘pre-modern’ and ‘modern’, in which theformer still has the capacity to allow brutality on a widespread level, possibly evenat the level of the state, and in which the latter is even more terrifying since itpermits mass murder to occur with the aim of transforming society, and killspeople for the sake of realizing such a project, not because those who are killedare intrinsically threatening to the state. Violence in the former is barbaric andbrutal, and in the latter, bureaucratically and paradoxically non-violent: mass

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murder is committed (the passive voice is important) without anyone getting hotunder the collar about it; no hatred is involved.

The fact is that scholars have all too often mistakenly equated the mere use oftechnology with the absence of passion. Actually, no reason exists why the factthat Jews were murdered with gas chambers, and not by machete, means that theJews were murdered emotionlessly. Their murders were still part of a grandproject to which the perpetrators had to subscribe not just with their heads, butprimarily with their hearts. The theorists from Arendt onwards – whom I willlabel for convenience the ‘modernity’ theorists – who have written in this veinhave done the study of the Holocaust a great service by demonstrating the false-hood of the assertion that Nazism was a unique aberration in an as yet in-sufficiently enlightened world. At the same time, however, and despite Arendt’sinsistence on the links between ‘colonial genocide’ (Palmer, 2001) and thegenocide of the Jews (Arendt, 1951), they have unwittingly reintroducedthe ‘otherness’ of the Nazi perpetrators by distinguishing the perpetrators of theHolocaust from the perpetrators of other, ‘traditional’ genocides in whichpassions ran high and blood flowed freely. Indeed, to achieve this effect othergenocides are often misrepresented. Rwanda, for example, is often cited as anexample of such horror (which it was) because in the space of three months some-where between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis died at the hands of the majorityHutus, hacked to pieces by machete. In fact, most of the murdered were slain bybeing shot, machetes being used to ‘finish off ’ already dying victims, or towardthe end of the genocide, when the numbers to be killed were smaller. It suits ourwestern stereotype of savage natives, their minds addled by the tropical heat,bestially murdering one another for unfathomable primordial reasons, to placemore emphasis on the machete.

In this article I argue that although in the case of the genocide of the Jews theuse of technology was important, it is not what makes the Holocaust stand apartfrom the other cases of this century’s genocides. One problem with much ofHolocaust Studies is that it is undertaken in ignorance of other genocides. I donot mean to say that there is nothing that differentiates the Holocaust from othergenocides; rather, I argue that those scholars who proclaim the uniqueness of theHolocaust often do so without actually knowing a great deal about those othergenocides, or without considering (or openly admitting) the basis for theirresearch, which owes more to metaphysics than history. When one undertakesgenuinely comparative genocide studies – and not just work which lists othergenocides only to dismiss them in the face of the Holocaust – it quickly becomesapparent that the murder of the Jews shares many features with many other ofthis century’s most gruesome events.3

One feature in particular, what I have called ‘genocide as transgression’, isespecially noteworthy in all examples of genocide. Actually, not all the examplesgiven in this article can be labelled genocide, whether according to the 1948 UNGenocide Convention or any other definition. Yet I refer to the so-called Rapeof Nanjing and the massacre at My Lai because they both illustrate with

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particularly grisly suitability the theory of transgressive human behaviour that Iexpound. Nevertheless, the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda are moreobvious points of comparison. Yehuda Bauer may or may not be correct to notethat religious massacres, for example, cannot be considered genocide, because hedefines genocide as ‘the elimination of a nationality or an ethnic unit’ (1991: 39);but my aim is not to expand the definition of genocide to include all forms ofmass murder, but to inquire into the anthropological circumstances in whichboth genocides and massacres occur. Besides, Bauer’s definition comes uncom-fortably close to assuming the existence of stable and definable biological popu-lation groups. More helpful is Scott Straus’s definition – ‘an organised attempt toannihilate a group that a perpetrator constitutes as an organic collectivity’ (Straus,2001: 367) – which leaves room for specificities, but also allows one to considergenocide as one type of ‘mass killing’ along with massacre, rather than having todefine all forms of mass killing as subsets of genocide, a problem both in termsof scholarly accuracy and international law. My agenda in this article, then, is notto confuse or broaden definitions of genocide, but to inquire into a dimensionthat is shared by genocides and massacres.4

Thinkers have sought to explain genocide using all the scholarly methodolo-gies at their disposal, from economic, political, and social, to historical, cultural,and psychological explanations. There are studies of demography, studies of foodsupply, studies of ethnicity, and studies of human behaviour in wartime. Eachcase differs from the next in its particular circumstances and in its historical back-ground. Nonetheless, I will argue here that all of the events I examine have some-thing in common: transgressive violence. Although this shared characteristic couldbe felt to be too broad an interpretive tool, too axiomatic, to be of use to theperson seeking to understand what leads to genocide as a form of human behav-iour, I argue that violence is, quite simply, the norm in society, a natural urge ofhuman beings that can be mobilized by certain ideologies under certainconditions, and that what we call ‘civilization’ is the exception, though one noless worth striving for. I argue that people kill one another when they have beengranted leave to do so or otherwise feel that they are safe to do so, for the mainreason that they can, and because they enjoy doing so. ‘Violence’, as Ian Jamesputs it, ‘is the very bedrock of human reality’ (2001: 59).5

By ‘violence’ I mean not only brutality in the sense of individuals committingacts of bodily harm on other individuals; this violence of course exists, whetheron a relatively confined scale, as in the case of the My Lai massacre, or it may bestate policy, as in the cases of murders of Armenians in Turkey and murders ofTutsis in Rwanda. Sometimes it is not clear what role the state, as opposed to,say, the army, has played in the decision to encourage atrocities, as in the case ofthe Rape of Nanjing (Fogel, 2000) or the genocide of the Hereros in GermanSouth-West Africa (Stone, 2001a). But in each example we see, as well as theunspeakable sufferings of the victims, what can only be called the ‘high’ of theperpetrators. Massacres, genocides, and the perpetration of atrocities create whatin this article I call ‘ecstatic communities’, that is, communities of perpetratorswho experience a heightened sense of belonging to their own group by virtue of


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the fact that they have transgressed together. This apocalyptic, orgiastic experi-ence of participation – which refers not only to the actual moment of killing –has been termed ‘Rausch’ (‘ecstasy’ or ‘high’) by Saul Friedländer, and I will adoptthis term.

What I am trying to say is that when one considers the twentieth century asa whole, one is struck by the pervasiveness of mass murder. When Gil Elliotpublished the Twentieth Century Book of the Dead (Elliot, 1972) this fact wasalready apparent; now, however, the statistics in Elliot’s book, the remainingquarter of the century later, must be adjusted substantially upwards. The sad factof our world civilization is that mass murder is the norm. Recently, with theexception of ex-Yugoslavia, mass murder has been largely a fact of political andethnic struggle in the east and the south of the globe (Scherrer, 1999: 13); takenas a whole, however, this century sees genocidal actions across the globe. As thehistorian of genocide Mark Levene notes, genocide is the mainstream (1999a:20–4). This is because modern genocide is the outcome of state-building and‘development’; it occurs, Levene writes,

where a state, perceiving the integrity of its agenda for change to be threatened by anaggregate population – defined by the state in collective or communal terms – seeksto remedy the situation by the systematic, en masse, physical elimination of thataggregate, in toto, or until such a time as it is no longer perceived to represent a threat.(1994: 10)

Similarly, Larry Ray, stressing the importance of ideologies and political inter-ests, argues that violent nationalism can easily be mobilized in times of crisis, andthat as a result

‘ethnic cleansing’ is not an exceptional event occurring only rarely in places likeYugoslavia and the Third Reich, but is part of the usual (though not universal) processthrough which nations are formed and territorial national-state power consolidated.(1999: 1.2)

I do not intend to whitewash differences between genocides, or between geno-cides and massacres, though the line between them is blurred. True comparativeresearch is important – despite the irrelevance to those who died in any particu-lar case – in understanding specific causes, and in drawing sociological and inter-pretive differences between the events concerned. But after examining thenumerous acts of mass murder or genocide that have occurred in this century (ofwhich my examples are but a selection), it is the similarities that are striking justas much as the differences, similarities which are surely also important to articu-late. I do so not with the intention of universalizing genocide, in the sense eitherof making ontological or biologically determinist claims about human nature orof making a humanist statement about ‘man’s inhumanity to man’, thereby over-looking the specificities – particularly ethnic ones – which fuel genocidal actions.Such claims have often in the past occluded more about genocide than they haverevealed, the case of the communist commemoration of the ‘victims of Hitleritebarbarism’ being the best example; this form of commemoration ignored thespecificities of the victims, in particular the suffering of the Jews.6 Rather, I want


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to show that, even given all these differences, there is a level at which these geno-cides and massacres can be seen to stem from something in common: the creationof ‘ecstatic communities’ based on a radical form of exclusion that occurs undersociologically and anthropologically explicable circumstances. This exclusionusually takes the form of racial or religious hatred or extreme nationalism (or acombination of these, as in the Armenian genocide), and drives the feeling that,however distasteful the murder is, the perpetrating community needs its victimsdead in order to purify the state or return to a putative prelapsarian condition.As Philip Gourevitch puts it:

For those who set about systematically exterminating an entire people . . . blood lustsurely helps. But the engineers and perpetrators of a genocide . . . need not enjoykilling, and they may even find it unpleasant. What is required above all is that theywant their victims dead. They have to want it so badly that they consider it a necessity.(1999: 17)

This description is not incompatible with Jacques Semelin’s view of the politicalor economic causes of massacres, what he calls their ‘strategic rationality’ (2001:381), nor with Mark Levene’s view of genocide as a tool of modern state-creationin the context of global capitalism.7 Similarly, Levene’s view of the rationaldecision-making processes that precede genocide (even if the end result is‘useless’) is not incompatible with an understanding of genocide, such as that ofPeter Du Preez, that stresses its ‘unprofitable’ or ‘transcendental’ aspects (DuPreez, 1994: 3, 28), or that of Ronald Aronson that talks of genocide as ‘socialmadness’ that ‘comes from the depths of a society’ (Aronson, 1984: 139, 142).8

My description does not overlook the importance of ‘modernity’; rather, therational aspects of modernity are themselves the conditions which necessitateoutbursts of violence such as genocide, since there are no structures in modernsocieties for otherwise permitting such outbursts (such as festivals). Indeed, whatis remarkable is that the very process of violence is ascribed rational ends by mostscholars and other commentators (news media, etc.), thus confirming the extentto which modern society is blinded to the recognition of the transgressive.

Transgression

Here we come to the notion of transgression. What is it that is being transgressed,and why does this form of excessive behaviour seem to take place with suchalarming regularity in the modern world? Although I have criticized the distinc-tion between ‘pre-modern’ and ‘modern’ societies, I do so because of the falsedistinction that is usually made between societies based on feelings, rituals, andcharismatic attachments to a leader and societies based on means–ends ration-ality and purposive, goal-oriented action. The fact is that especially in the latter(‘modern societies’) massacres and genocides take place, not because of the‘dialectic of enlightenment’, in which the domination over nature ends in thedomination over human beings (though Foucault’s and Agamben’s work on


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‘bio-power’ must be given due recognition9), but because the refusal to recognizethe need for non-purposive activity ends in outbursts of affect on a grand scale,dressed up as ideology or raison d’état these may be. In other words, the modernage, contrary to the expectations of sociologists of modernity, is an age of great,if disguised, passions. Modern ‘hyper-rationality’ can end in ultra-violence justas ‘primitive barbarism’ can, a fact implied almost a century ago by William Jameswhen he argued, as Weber and Collingwood would also do, that ‘our esteem forfacts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Ourscientific temper is devout’ (James, 1995: 5–6).

One of the few historians to take these claims seriously is Gunnar Heinsohn.He has argued on a number of occasions that what makes the Holocaust a‘uniquely unique genocide’ (let us overlook for a moment the thorny issue of‘uniqueness’) is its attempt to overturn the fundamental bedrock of westernJudaeo-Christian civilization, the prohibition against murder, by committinggenocide against the people who introduced monotheism and the law to thatcivilization in the first place. For Heinsohn it is less the murder of the actual livingJews that constitutes the horror of the Holocaust; rather, the ‘extermination ofthe Jews as a means of re-establishing the right to genocide in the form of un-restricted “cleansing” of lebensraum is what made Hitler’s persecution of the Jewsnovel’ (Heinsohn, 1998: 65).10 This focus on the law of the Jews rather than onthe Jews themselves provides both the theory’s novelty and its shortcomings. ForHeinsohn, the Holocaust is less a question of ideologically motivated, state-sponsored genocide than an attempt to do away with the ‘carriers’ of westerncivilization and therefore permit a ‘return’ to an age in which virile societies ruledthrough martial prowess, including committing mass murder.

Similarly, Stephen Eric Bronner, in a provocative article, notes the fact thatgenocide is usually divorced from instrumental thinking, and stresses that theHolocaust was the Hitlerian attempt to remake humanity. He argues that:

No other regime has ever employed genocide in order to empty the world and beginit anew. The Nazi project was subsequently more grandiose than other more traditionalforms of genocide. . . . Never before or since has genocide been launched againsthumanity itself. The holocaust is made unique by its genocidal dynamic. (Bronner,1999: 323)

Berel Lang reminds us that the claim that the Nazis did not regard the Jews ashuman beings is called into question by the fact that they ‘were often aware inquite conventional terms that their actions were open both to serious moral andto scientific question’; further, he notes that the way in which the Nazis de-humanized their victims before murdering them itself implies a knowledge thatwhat they were doing ‘required a conscious affirmation of the wrong involved init’ (Lang, 1984–5: 13). Nevertheless, Heinsohn’s and Bronner’s point isapplicable to some Nazis (the SS in particular), the ‘true believers’ in what SaulFriedländer describes as ‘redemptive antisemitism’ (1997: 73–112). And eventhose who were unable entirely to break free from conventional morality never-theless went some way to doing so (Haas, 1988).


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For Dominick LaCapra, the transgressive nature of the Holocaust is firmlytied to the actual killings themselves, not just to what they stand for. In particu-lar, he borrows a term from the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin thathas become common currency among students of literary theory: the ‘car-nivalesque’. For LaCapra the Holocaust is so shocking because of the combi-nation of factors that characterize it:

the conjunction of a technological framework and all that is associated with it in theNazi context (including racial ‘science’, eugenics, and medicalization based on purityof blood) with the return of a repressed – seemingly out of place or unheimlich – sacri-ficialism in the attempt to cleanse (or purify) the Volksgemeinschaft and fulfil theleader’s will by getting rid of Jews as polluting, dangerous, phobic (or ritually impure)objects. Perhaps only this disconcerting conjunction helps to explain the incredibleexcesses of brutality, cruelty, and at times carnivalesque or ‘sublime’ elation in Nazibehaviour toward Jews. (LaCapra, 1997: 268–9, n. 4)

And on ‘sacrificialism’:

What I’ve been trying to insist upon is that the dimension they [‘intentionalist’ and‘functionalist’ historians] don’t look carefully at is a certain aspect of Nazi ideology andpractice. This I tend to see in terms of a somewhat crazed sacrificialism and scape-goating, which seems especially uncanny and out of place because it happens withina modernized context, where indeed you do have phenomena such as extensive bureau-cratization, industrialization of mass murder, functional imperatives, and so forth.One can see these phenomena and how important they are. But I think there is alsoscapegoating in a specific sense within contingent historical circumstances, scapegoat-ing related to a horror, an almost ritual and phobic horror, over contamination by ‘theother’. Within a certain Nazi framework, the Jew was a pollutant or a contaminantliterally or figuratively in the Volksgemeinschaft that had to be eliminated for the Aryanpeople to reach its purity and wholeness. (LaCapra, 2001: 165)

What LaCapra does is shift the focus of historiography firmly away from the fasci-nation with ‘industrial killing’ that has long characterized scholarly work on theHolocaust, to turn instead to the non-rational, violent aspects of the genocide.Similarly, Saul Friedländer has discussed the historian’s difficulty in providing arational explanation for the feeling of Rausch that pervades Nazi texts, speeches,and behaviour (Friedländer, 1993: 109–10). LaCapra, in particular, highlightsaspects of the murders that require further elaboration: contamination, sacrifi-cialism, the carnivalesque, scapegoating. All of these suggest ways of thinkingderived from anthropology, in particular from the study of the rituals that marksocieties at moments of extreme joy (festival) or crisis (war). There is of course,in terms of content, no comparison between festivities and warfare, but formally,in terms of the place they occupy in society, they are remarkably similar.

LaCapra’s highly theorized attitude to genocide is given more concreteness byRoger Caillois, although as he (and his translator) accepted, his theory is alsomore of an ideal-type than an empirically-based survey. Caillois’s description ofthe festival is nevertheless highly instructive when considering the place ofgenocide in modern society. Contemporary societies do not, as a rule, permit theuseless squandering of energy and goods, since they are goal-oriented and


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profit-seeking (the question of environmental destruction is included here, sincethis takes place in a broader framework of capitalist profit-seeking). In primitivesocieties, such squandering was, according to Caillois, built into the calendar inthe form of the festival. His descriptions reveal his fear of and his attraction tothe festival, and his implicit criticism of the drabness of modern life, which lackssuch an outlet. But what he describes sounds very much like a description ofgenocide, especially of the frenzy of the massacre.

In an analysis shared with his colleague (and fellow member of the influentialCollège de sociologie) Georges Bataille, who wrote about the need for societies tosquander their ‘excess energy’ and the inability of modern societies to recognizethis need, with the result that such energies risk being expended ‘catastrophically’(Bataille, 1991: 21),11 Caillois wrote, in Man and the Sacred (1939, and in theappendices added in the 1950 edition) that all societies require periods of ‘collec-tive effervescence’ in order to break free from the monotony of everyday life. Inmodern societies, the vacation does not fill this role, since it is devoted to relax-ation, quite the opposite of intoxicated exudation. The closest analogy in themodern world that he could find to the primitive society’s festival was war.

How does Caillois understand the festival to function in primitive societies?In the chapter on ‘The Sacred as Transgression: Theory of the Festival’, it isdescribed as a time of intensity, of intoxication, of the useless and excessivedestruction and squandering of energies, possessions, and wealth. It turns estab-lished social, moral, and sexual relations on their heads, breaking all taboos (forexample, incest or hierarchical relationships). It is a time in which the ‘massedgatherings eminently favour the creation and contagion of an exalted state thatexhausts itself in cries and movement and that is incited to uncontrollablyabandon itself to the most irrational impulses’ (Caillois, 2001: 97).12 It amountsto an antidote to the quotidian, for festivals ‘oppose an intermittent explosion toa dull continuity, an exalting frenzy to the daily repetition of the same materialpreoccupations . . . the fever of climactic moments to the tranquil labour of thedebilitating phases of existence’ (2001: 99).

What function does the festival have? Apart from reinvigorating a societycommitted on a daily basis to the routine tasks of labour and domesticity, itrenews the society as a whole, for through it the community rediscovers itsorigins. Caillois argues that the festival constitutes ‘a re-enactment of the first daysof the universe, the Urzeit, the eminently creative era that saw all objects, crea-tures, and institutions become fixed in their traditional and definitive form’(2001: 103). It thus serves to remind the community of these primordial andfundamental structures, so that it is ‘celebrated in the context of the myth andassumes the function of regenerating the real world’ (2001: 108). For the societyas a whole, then, this is a time of renewal, and a time when the basis of thecommunity is highlighted.

No less important is the sense of ecstatic participation in the festival enjoyedby individual participants. With licence to indulge in frenzied transgression ofnorms and laws, this is a time for personal release just as much as it is a time ofsocial revivification. Importantly, Caillois makes the following remarks about the


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involvement of the individual in the activities of the festival: ‘It is understoodthat the festival, being such a paroxysm of life and cutting so violently into theanxious routine of everyday life, seems to the individual like another world inwhich he feels sustained and transformed by powers that are beyond him’ (2001:98). Many participants would therefore be shocked by what they had done whenrecalling it later in calm reflection.

Yet festivals do not take place in complex civilizations such as modern indus-trial societies; their functioning simply does not permit such a shutting down ofinstitutions and a destruction of the infrastructure. For Caillois, then, only oneaspect of modern societies comes close to emulating such a period of intensity:war. In the second edition of Man and the Sacred, Caillois expanded on his claimthat war in modern societies fulfils the same role as festivals in primitive societies,though of course with a totally different content:

War represents a unique moment of concentration and intense absorption in the groupof everything that ordinarily tends to maintain a certain area of independence in thisregard. That is why in preference to vacations and holidays, it calls for comparisonwith the ancient season of collective effervescence. (2001: 166)13

Wars, like festivals, are a total break with the normal functioning of society;furthermore, the amount of energy and wealth squandered on weapons, material,and generally prosecuting a war is, in modern, total warfare, truly preposterousand, though it may be legitimized in terms of the interests of the state or thenation, formally represents a similar kind of useless destruction to the ancientpotlatch or the festival (the new ‘Missile Defence System’ fits this analysisperfectly, as did the earlier development of the atom bomb14). Caillois notes inastonishment – no doubt thinking of the events of the Second World War – that‘The cost of several hours hostilities represents such a considerable sum that onecould believe it possible to put an end to the misery of the whole world with it’(2001: 170). War, then, is truly the modern equivalent of the festival, for it is a‘monstrous societal brew and climax of existence, a time of sacrifice but also ofviolation of every rule, a time of mortal peril but yet sanctifying, a time of abne-gation and also of licence’ (2001: 177).

As with the festival, it is important to note the effects of participating inwarfare on the individual. Caillois talks about ‘the long-inhibited joy of destruc-tion’, of ‘liberating violence’, and notes that ‘A furore seizes the warrior in whichhe believes himself possessed by a primary instinct buried deep in his heart by alying civilization’ (2001: 168). War then, like the festival, connects man to thesacred:

It introduces man to an intoxicating world in which the presence of death makes himshiver and confers a superior value upon his various actions. He believes that he willacquire a psychic vigour – just as through the descent to the inferno in ancient initi-ations – out of proportion to mundane experiences. [2001: 173]

This momentary participation in legitimized killing takes place in heightenedemotional conditions, akin to sustained orgasm, which recall the sexual licenceof the festival (and which in turn are recalled by the mass rapes that occurred


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during the Bosnian war and the ferocious sexual mutilations that characterizedthe Rwandan genocide).15 Furthermore, it is a sacred participation, a divinetransgression, since it is carried out in the name of the community, purifying it,returning it to its myth.16

Collective Effervescence

This anthropological theory of Caillois’s, broad and untenable though it may beon close scrutiny, is highly suggestive for understanding the use of such terms inthe literature of the Holocaust like ‘carnivalesque’, ‘contamination’, or ‘sacrifi-cialism’ by LaCapra, or Rausch by Friedländer. Indeed, although Caillois confinedhis analysis to war (he was of course writing only shortly after the term ‘genocide’had been coined by jurist Raphaël Lemkin and modified in the UN’s 1948Genocide Convention), it has obvious application to genocide in general.Genocide, in contrast to the massacre, is rarely thought of in the terms proposedby Durkheim, Bataille, and Caillois. When dealing with massacres, it makes moreimmediate sense to talk in terms of bloodlust, of a rush of violence, or of frenziedviolence. With genocide, one is more accustomed to think in terms of a ‘utili-tarian calculus’ (Levene, 1999d: 6).

Consider, for example, the cases of the so-called Rape of Nanjing or the MyLai massacre. Both exhibit clearly the characteristics of masculine orgiasticviolence, inebriated, lust-driven transport. The latter, in particular, is marked alsoby the trauma of those men who participated, as they have returned to the worldof the law. Neither is empirically comparable to the Holocaust, but in terms ofunderstanding the ‘deep psychology’ of the modern phenomenon of violence,they provide ‘metaphors for humanity’s history of suffering and atrocity’ (Tauber,1988: 94).

What applies to massacres is less obviously the case for genocide. Explainingthe origins of genocide solely with Caillois’s theory of transgression is clearly fartoo reductive. Yet if one thinks of genocide as a grand project, undertaken for(ill-perceived) reasons of state, it becomes clear that if leaders wish to involve theirpeople in participating in acts of mass murder, such a project has to be presentedas being beneficial to the well-being of the community that is ostensibly underthreat and that requires purifying. Such participation – under conditions of war,or in a highly-charged ideological atmosphere – may itself be said to represent alegitimate transgression of the law for the sake of the community; the actualkilling-process makes this sense of ‘ecstatic belonging’ quite plain. For example,in the case of Reserve Police Battalion 101 described by Christopher Browning(1992), one can trace the social circumstances in which a group of ‘ordinary men’ended by routinely participating in transgressive behaviour, a case study thatsuggests there is no contradiction between the theory of ‘transgression’ andinquiring into the sociological foundations of extreme violence.

Rwanda offers many examples of such ‘collective effervescence’. Hutu Power’sinfamous ‘ten commandments’ reveal a vicious and paranoid sexual and social


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transgression at work aimed at ‘purifying’ the Hutu community from the ‘pollu-tion’ of Tutsis. So too were the broadcasts of Radio Télévision Libre de MilleCollines and the explicitly violent cartoons of Kangura and other magazines (thetools, notably, of a modern state). And the involvement of whole communitiesin carrying out the killing is further indicative of the fact that the participantsunderstood the murders to be necessary for the common good. As one humanrights report noted, ‘No one escapes . . . not even new-born babies . . . the victimsare pursued to their very last refuge and killed there’ (cited in Melvern, 2000:227). The fatal combination of state-building and phobic fantasy is clearly inevidence here; Christopher Taylor notes that the ‘genocide aimed at reassertingthe cosmic order of the Hutu state as this was imagined through an idealized,nostalgic image of the 1959 Hutu revolution which brought an end to the Tutsimonarchy and to Tutsi dominance’ (1999: 154). But the state-building or prag-matic aspect alone cannot, as Taylor says, ‘explain the depth of passion that clearlylay behind the Rwandan violence’ (1999: 144).

Similarly, the murder of the Jews permitted a heightened sense of belongingamong the perpetrators, just as the absence of Jews from Germany and other partsof Europe was key to the formation of the racially pure Volksgemeinschaft, acommunity to which the Volksgenossen were to be bound by affective ties derivingfrom an awareness of shared biology. This is clear in famous speeches such as the‘Commissar Order’ of 6 June 1941 or Himmler’s SS speech in Posen of 4 October1943, just as it is in the reports of the Einsatzgruppen and the letters of Einsatz-gruppen and Wehrmacht men (Klee et al., 1991; Stone, 1999a). In the case ofthe Holocaust, the absence of any longer-term conflict (as the history ofHutu–Tutsi relations, for example, both in Rwanda and Burundi, or Christ-ian–Muslim relations in Ottoman Anatolia [Bloxham, 2002]) makes the trans-gressive aspect of the genocide even more marked, with the murders being carriedout in the name of an ideology designed to cleanse the community, ensuring theperpetuation of the Aryan race. Not every individual killer can be seen as an‘ecstatic’ or ‘intoxicated’ participant, especially the ‘desk-killers’, those whobureaucratically facilitated the killing process, but also many of those engaged inface-to-face shootings, for whom the task was unpleasant. Even so, just as Cailloisdescribes war as the formal equivalent of the festival, so we might also seegenocide as the formal equivalent of war. In this sense, not its content is import-ant but its role in the functioning of society. As Mark Levene has noted in acomment on Victor Klemperer, ‘after centuries of psychological repression, thevast majority of Germans had found a conduit for a sustained outburst ofemotional release, through the personal medium of Adolf Hitler’ (Levene, 2002:278).17

Just as war involves the massive squandering of resources with no commen-surate utilitarian gain, and just as it legitimizes the furore of killing, so genocideconcentrates all of its resources solely on mass murder. It is also a time of sacrifice,of ‘psychic vigour’, of the ‘joy of destruction’. It too takes the perpetrators (in thecases of Cambodia, Rwanda or the Holocaust, whole societies) out of the realmof the everyday and enjoins them to participate in the holy task of renewing the


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community. Whether this explosion should be regarded as the using up of excessenergy is debatable; that it is a time of ‘collective effervescence’ (a term thatactually seems rather coy to define genocide) seems clear. As Aurel Kolnai, oneof the finest of the contemporary interpreters of Nazism, put it in a talk he gaveto the Left Book Club’s summer school in 1939:

there is an experience of freedom present in the fascist system and in the mental stateof its subjects: though it be the extreme opposite of what we are accustomed to under-stand by freedom. It is the sense of an unlimited Power in which the subject issupposed to ‘participate’ in a mystical way, as it were: through patriotic loyalty, kinshipof ‘kind’ as contrasted to ‘alien kind’, through the very fact of his absolute, total subjec-tion. (Kolnai, 1939: 1)18

We may object to the ends to which this mystical eruption of power is put, butthat must not prevent us from recognizing that genocide does involve just sucha sense of liberation from the taboos of the ‘normal’ world.

This aspect of collective, orgiastic participation in no way ignores the questionof individual violence. But it does recognize that, unlike the exceptionalpsychopaths who commit violent crimes in society, in time of psychic stress inwar and genocide, ‘ordinary people’ are able to take part in collective acts ofextreme violence of which they would otherwise never have suspected themselvescapable. This is why the perpetrators of massacres and genocide can – though weare unlikely to accord them the same sympathy as their victims – also suffer frompost-traumatic stress disorder. Indeed, according to Judith Herman, such people‘seem to suffer the most severe and intractable disturbances’ (cited in Minow,1998: 13). Some of the men who took part in the My Lai massacre, for example,are notoriously now shivering wrecks.19

How can this notion of genocide as transgression be understood? One way isetymologically, through an examination of the word ‘ecstasy’. Durkheim andCaillois talk of the ‘transport’ of collective rituals such as festivals and war asthough they are states of ecstasy. Something of this sense is captured too inFriedländer’s term ‘Rausch’, the ecstatic aspect of which also connotes frenzy,rapture, intoxication, inebriation, and euphoria. Ecstasy comes from the Greekekstasis, which derives from ekteinein, meaning to stretch out (ek = ex/teinein =stretch). The moment of transgression is a moment of stretching out the experi-ence of the sacred by pushing at the limits of behaviour. Hence, even when indi-viduals were unwilling to take part in ‘transgressive behaviour’ (the Third Reich’sleaders, for example, found it notoriously difficult to induce people to indulge inviolence within the borders of the Altreich – the Kristallnacht was a far from spon-taneous outburst of passion), the stretching out of the norms and values ofGerman society allowed people to accept the occurrence of genocide, as long asthe actual killing took place in a region outside ‘the law’ such as occupied easternEurope. This phenomenon was even more marked in Ion Antonescu’s Romania,where Jews deported to Transnistria – outside the rule of law – were subjected tothe most horrific treatment (to the extent that the Germans complained aboutit), while much was made of the fact that Jews within the Regat (the Old


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Kingdom of Moldavia and Wallachia) were protected (Ioanid, 2000; Lobont andStone, 2002).

It is this ‘stretching out’, this attempt to burst out of the limits of ordinarytime and ordinary rules of behaviour that characterizes genocide, as it functionsin modern societies the way in which war or the festival functioned in pre-modern ones. Importantly, such transgressions serve ultimately to reinforce thelaw (this is the frisson of transgression). It is quite plain, for example, that criticsof Bataille who see in him an advocate of ‘the extreme’, miss the point: excess, asone of Bataille’s exegetes explains, ‘has meaning only in relation to restraint’(Richardson, 1994: 27 n. 28). Hence the lines of Himmler’s famous speech inPosen to his senior SS officers where he praises the men for what they have done,but nevertheless insists on its remaining a secret: ‘This is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history.’ Hence also Hitler’s banning of allreference to the ‘Final Solution’ in public, even though he considered it hisgreatest achievement (Arad et al., 1981: 344–5, 342). Here we see the truth ofBataille’s claim that ‘the most constant characteristic of the impulse I have calledtransgression is to make order out of what is essentially chaos. By introducingtranscendence into an organized world, transgression becomes a principle of anordered disorder’ (1987: 119). Transgression should not be seen as synonymouswith ‘rage’, but as a generalized, even rationally organized social phenomenon.

Conclusion

None of what I have said is intended to suggest that genocide is just somethingthat randomly ‘happens’ when enough ‘excess energy’ has accumulated, nor is itmeant to suggest that the choice of victim (that is to say, the role of ideology, ofrace-theory, of state-building, of ethnic tensions) is random. It is precisely becauseit is not random that the aims of genocide can be embraced by so many partici-pants. Furthermore, it is clear that Caillois’s anthropology is itself outdated,romanticized, and in need of careful empirical revision. His unspoken assump-tions about gender also need questioning: does his theory of war as festival (andmy extension of it to include genocide) apply only to men? Victor Turner’s theoryof communitas, a liminal state that can be created ideologically as well as spon-taneously, could contribute to an updating of Caillois’s ideas; communitas onlyhas meaning in relation to structure, and modernity could be seen as an exampleof ‘exaggeration of structure’ which ‘may well lead to pathological manifestationsof communitas outside or against “the law” ’ (Turner, 1974: 116). So too couldJack Goody’s notion of religion-driven violence (Goody, 2002) or MichaelGilsenan’s example of the social construction of violence through story-telling(Gilsenan, 1996). But I put forward the notion of genocide as transgression,inspired by Durkheim, Caillois, and Bataille, as an addition to the other, moremeasurable factors, as a way of explaining how it is that these tensions – whichmust be understood first of all in political, economic, cultural, and social terms– do explode at certain moments and not others, and how it is that individuals


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who lead otherwise normal lives can turn on their neighbours, throwing aside allnorms of civilized behaviour, and engage in massive acts of transgression.Genocide is a phenomenon that explodes the myth that there are either good orbad people.20 Bataille noted that despite the desire to separate the world into thecivilized (‘us’) and the barbarians (‘them’), ‘observation shows that the samepeoples are alternately barbarous and civilized in their attitudes. . . . all civilizedmen are capable of savagery’ (1987: 186). If we are to understand how bothcharacteristics can exist at the same time in the same person, then we mustconfront not only problems of politics or economics, but questions of rituals,group belonging, the notion of ‘the human’, the apparently innate desire to trans-gress the law (thereby reinforcing it), and the equally innate capacity to kill. It iscorrect that, as Primo Levi noted, even if everyone has the potential to be a killer,in any specific case this is not interesting; Levi was quite correctly insistent thathe knew very well who had been responsible for killing whom in the Holocaust.But the knowledge of such murderous potential, were it truly accepted, mightjust help in combating it.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the participants in the Understanding Violence workshop at the EuropeanUniversity Institute, Florence, June 2002, organized by Heidrun Friese and Peter Wagner,and sponsored by the EUI and the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen. I am alsograteful to the two readers for EJST for their very helpful comments.

Notes

1 For a stimulating discussion of the way in which the Eichmann trial produced a new,victim-centric narrative of the Holocaust, see Felman (2001). Her argument does,however, need to be tempered by the view of Eichmann as an ideologue; see Lozowick,(1999).

2 For this line of argument, see Cole (1999), passim. The locus classicus of the argumentis Bauman (1989). For discussions of the issues raised by the concept of modernityin several places, see Stone (1999a; 1999b; 2000).

3 Cf. Rosenfeld (1999); Simon (2000); Moses (2002). The most prominent defendersof the theory of the Holocaust’s ‘uniqueness’ are Steven Katz (1994) and Yehuda Bauer(1991; 2001). It should be noted that my criticism of the ‘modernity’ theorists appliesequally to the opposite perspective; that is, those who argue that the Holocaust hasnothing to do with ‘modernity’ because of its clearly ‘barbaric’ nature are guilty ofmissing the point just as much as those who believe that only a narrowly defined‘modernity’ explains the Holocaust. See, for a typical statement, Burleigh and Wipper-mann (1991: 1–2).

4 For important starts to the process of thinking about massacres in a scholarly way, seeLevene (1999d), Semelin (2001).

5 Cf. Kearney (1995).6 See, for example, Fox (1999), Gitelman (1997), Bergman (1992).


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7 See Semelin, ‘In Consideration’, p. 381. Mark Levene, in a number of influentialarticles, has argued that genocide is caused by the modernizing state-creating activi-ties of developing states who perceive (rightly or wrongly) minority groups to bepreventing this aim from being achieved, and by the way in which such processes takeplace in a global, west-oriented capitalist system which supplies arms to Third Worldregimes and perpetuates the genocidal instability of those regimes. This article ismeant to complement Levene’s work, with which I am in agreement, by adding amore anthropological element, that which allows genocide to be perceived not just asa world-systemic inevitability, but something which – in the gap between idea andact – helps people to mobilize against their chosen target group. See, apart from thearticles cited above, Levene (1998; 1999b; 1999c; 2000).

8 See also Aronson (1983).9 See especially Foucault (1984; 1997), Agamben (1998). There is not the space here

to discuss these ideas, but my aim here is to accept them as vitally important withoutaccepting them as fully satisfactory explanations. As Dominick LaCapra notes (2001:128, n. 14) with regard to the Holocaust, the ‘biopower’ explanation ‘does notaccount for Nazi quasi-ritual horror at contamination, elation in victimization,regeneration or redemption through violence, fascination with extreme transgression,and equivocation or at times ambivalence with respect to the Jew (who was seen asabject – even as a germ or vermin – but to whom erotic energies and incredible powersof world conspiracy were also imputed)’. See also Lobont and Stone (2002) for adiscussion.

10 See also Heinsohn (1995; 1996; 2000).11 See Stone (2001b).12 Originally published as L’homme et le sacré (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1939); 2nd

edition (Gallimard) with new appendices 1950; 3rd edition (Gallimard) 1988.13 ‘Collective effervescence’ is a term introduced by Emile Durkheim in Formes élémen-

taires de la vie religieuse (1912), a book that greatly influenced Caillois and Bataille.See Durkheim (1995), e.g. p. 218:

The effervescence often becomes so intense that it leads to outlandish behaviour;the passions unleashed are so torrential that nothing can hold them. People are sofar outside the ordinary conditions of life, and so conscious of the fact, that theyfeel a certain need to set themselves above and beyond ordinary morality.

14 See Jungk (1960), Jaspers (1961).15 For an excellent explanation of the sexual aspects of the Rwandan genocide, see Taylor

(1999), especially pp. 151–79. On rape in Bosnia, see, for example, Udovic̆ki andŠtitkovac (2000: 189), Stiglmayer (1994), Lindsey (2002). On genocide and rape, seeLentin (1999). Compare also Harris (1993) for an example from the First World War.

16 For the victims too the traumatic event can become the site of the sacred, as manycommentators have noted with regard to the Holocaust. See, for example, Moses(2002), Alexander (2002).

17 As Levene also notes in this article, ‘this is exactly the sort of thesis from which mosthistorians are likely to run a mile’ (2002: 278) because most historians share a reluc-tance to deal with these ‘affective’ aspects to genocide, because they are so hard toquantify or to examine empirically.

18 Cited by courtesy of Dr Francis Dunlop.


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19 By comparison, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were largely filled with self-pity, a difference that needs explanation (Browning, 1992).

20 See Reemtsma (1999).

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Tauber, Zvi (1988) ‘Herbert Marcuse: Auschwitz und My Lai?’, in Dan Diner (ed.) Zivil-isationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz, pp. 88–98. Frankfurt am Main: FischerTaschenbuch Verlag.

Taylor, Christopher C. (1999) Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Oxford:Berg.

Turner, Victor W. (1974) The Ritual Process. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Udovički, Jasminka and Š̆titkovac, Ejub (2000) ‘Bosnia and Hercegovina: The Second

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■ Dan Stone is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century European History at RoyalHolloway, University of London. He is the editor of Theoretical Interpretations ofthe Holocaust (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), and author of Breeding Superman:Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool:Liverpool University Press, 2002), Constructing the Holocaust: A Study inHistoriography (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003) and Responses to Nazism inBritain 1933–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). Address: Department of History,Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK. [email:[email protected]]


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