In our special new issue on violence, Geoff Shullenberger draws attention to a little-known series of exchanges in the 1970s among René Girard, Michel Foucault, and the French left, and asks what they can teach us today about the role religion and violence play in times of social instability.
Want to discuss the questions raised in the essay? On September 28th, Interintellect will host a salon in New York with Geoff about his contribution to the violence symposium—click here for details
To read this essay in print—and the rest of issue 35—subscribe now.
In February of 1972, Michel Foucault sat down with a group of young Maoist militants to discuss the subject of “popular justice.” The occasion for the dialogue was an ongoing effort by some on the radical French left to convene “popular tribunals” that would put the ruling class and its representatives on trial for crimes against the people that went unprosecuted. In 1970, Jean-Paul Sartre himself had presided over one such tribunal in the town of Lens, where the owners of a mine were symbolically tried in absentia for the death of sixteen workers.
Left-wing terrorism was on the rise in Europe, and the arguments for “people’s justice” then in vogue had started to alarm some in the militant milieu. The prospect that the same logic might be used to justify the tactics embraced by groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Italian Red Brigades hovered in the background of the dialogue with Foucault. The most radical subset of Maoists was led by Benny Lévy, who then went by the nom de guerre Pierre Victor. A firebrand leader of the 1968 revolt who later became Sartre’s personal secretary, Lévy was perhaps the most fervent advocate of violent direct action in the group. Some of his increasingly uneasy compatriots, such as André Glucksmann, seemed to regard the dialogue with Foucault as an opportunity to scrutinize the arguments being marshaled to justify such tactics. This proved to be the case, but not quite in the way they expected.
In the conversation, a transcript of which was published later the same year in Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes, Foucault and Lévy faced off over how best to pursue “popular justice.” But contrary to the expectations of the organizers, it was Foucault who staked out the more radical position. He argued that “the form of the court” must be rejected entirely in favor of spontaneous collective action—in effect endorsing extrajudicial lynchings as a legitimate revolutionary tactic. Rather than walk his younger comrades back from the precipice of terrorist violence, the philosopher seemed to be inviting them to take the plunge with him.
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