Violence and the Sacred Revisited

Abstract

In this article, I seek to contribute to the recent philosophical interest in the phenomenon of narco-culture. I build on the intervention initiated by Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy after Narco-Culture (2020) by articulating the spiritually “generative” aspects of violence. For this endeavor, I turn to the French philosopher René Girard, whose work audaciously understands community-building and the maintenance of social order as a violent process of sacralization. This conception of violence then permits me to challenge some of Sánchez’s interpretations of the violence and brutality of narco-culture. My argument is that any comprehensive analysis of the narco-world, just as any other existential option, must consider the spiritual component that, in Girard’s terms, can be expressed as a search for the sacred.