Crime as Language II – Hyperviolence and Georges Bataille's Concept of the Sovereign

Abstract

In political philosophy, trust, legality and violence are interdependent, with different weights, connecting and excluding. Trust structures suffer most from an anticipation of violence or violence itself. Violence systematically takes place in three stages, according to the german sociologist Jan-Philipp Reemtsma: expulsive, abusive, and homicidal violence, all of which have their distinctive and recurring verbal and nonverbal equivalents. The hyperviolence phenomenon goes beyond this, however, and even mutilates the dead body, whether actually physically, or through massive propaganda that declares the enemy a killable non-human. The goal of hyperviolence is a demonstration of absolute power over victim and bystander by means of a traumatizing violation of trust, reason, and individuality. At the same time, hyperviolence is an atavism in modernity (a historical regression); therefore the practitioner of hyperviolence is the anti-modern type par excellence. The french philosopher Georges Bataille introduces here the concept of "sovereignty" and the "sovereign" as the perpetrator also of hyperviolence. The sovereign's sovereignty is the immediate experience of the moment, free of any responsibility, with a rhetoric of mock justification of each of the three types of violence including hyperviolence. With the ahistorical view of escalating violence and the denial of any rational legitimation by the sovereign as the actor of hyperviolence, the structure of trust and the contract system of democracy itself is also endangered. So the question is, how does one unmask the "sovereign" on his way to undermine legal relations already in his linguistic patterns, in his non-linguistic codes, and how can escalation be prevented by early detection? Keywords: violence, hyperviolence, criminal linguistics, Georges Bataille, sovereign