Violence and Accusation

An accusation is at first sight a triadic relation. Accusing relates three poles: the accuser, the accused, and what he or she is accused of—which is also often referred to simply as the “accusation,” as if that accusation, the fault or the crime that is reproached in the person, were enough to define what it is to accuse. A person accuses another one of something, which is then three terms. This is both a social and a mundane relation: social because it relates two agents, and mundane, because the person accused is not what he or she is accused of, which pertains to the world—to what is—and in that sense is an object. The object of the accusation, the fault or crime, the accused's action that is condemned by the accusation is something that is different from the accused him or herself. Though this action is in some way a “nonmaterial” object, it is certainly not immaterial. The accusation remains in the world, which it has changed by declaring someone guilty of something. It is therefore a mundane object, something that can be accessed and talked about by different people. “He robbed his father!” or “She set the house on fire.”The apparent simplicity of the accusation as a triadic relation is, however, misleading, because an accusation is, by definition, not addressed primarily, or partially, nor even at all to the accused. The accusation is always addressed to one or more others, to third parties who are neither the accuser nor the accused. This is unlike a curse, which is (or at least can be) a relation of pure sociality, that is, a relation that remains confined to the limited domain defined by the person who curses and the other who is cursed.1 An accusation, to the contrary, is always open to the public, a public to which it is addressed. Through his accusation the accuser solicits the support and help of others, of third parties to whom it is addressed. Further, the accusation only succeeds when third parties agree with the accuser and accept to condemn the accused, or at least to hear the accuser. The success of an accusation therefore is not in the hands of the accuser, nor of course of the accused, but in the hands of those to whom it is addressed.That is why accusations always play a role in collective violence. The whole point of the accuser in formulating the accusation is to get others to join in his conflict with the accused. Accusers seek allies. They are asking for the force and violence, or at least for the “moral” support of others. That is why collective violence can only be understood if we take into account the role of third parties in relations with the accusations made against the victims.An accusation is already in itself a form of violence, precisely because, unlike a reproach, it is not really addressed to the person whom it targets. It is not a form of dialogue between the accuser and the accused, but an action that indicates that “there is no point talking,” that what is needed or desired to put an end to the conflict is the force that others can bring or for the accused to recognize his or her fault. Because it does not imply any dialogue with the accused, as a gesture an accusation can be extremely simple. Accusing can even be done without using language, simply by pointing at someone. In many circumstances that gesture is enough to designate a culprit, a victim, someone who should not be there, or not there at that time. Pointing can provide a sufficient answer to many questions like “who did this?” or “how did this happen?,” but also to unformulated questions, for example, a general sense of unease. Pointing is enough to indicate the person who has done something that should not have been done. Accusing is also a form of violence because, especially in the absence of culturally or legally well-defined contexts, the consequences to which the accusation may lead for the accused are to the accuser often unknown, difficult to determine, and not easily limited by him. In such cases, willingly or not, the accuser opens the gate of indefinite violence against the accused.Even when the accusation is formulated in the silent and brutal way of pointing towards someone, it necessarily alludes to something like a norm. It draws the crowd's attention to something that the accused should not have done or to where he or she should not be. The accused has done something wrong. Nonmoral animals cannot accuse each other of anything. François Tricaud in his book on accusation appropriately defines it as a form of ethical aggression.2 An accusation always gives itself, or rather gives the object, the fault or failure of the accused, as justification of the violence that the accusation calls upon him or her. There is an inescapable, if often minimal, normative dimension to any accusation.In fact, this normative dimension and the public aspect of accusations can also be seen in domestic disputes where accusations fly back and forth and seem to be addressed by the accuser to the accused, both constantly changing sides. In such cases, what one is accused of by the other is always to have transgressed some rule, either a received social norm or just an implicit rule of their common living agreement. The norm is present, for the accuser wants the accused to recognize that he or she failed to respect it, has done something wrong, and through the norm, the third parties are present. They are present either because the norm is public or because the accuser claims that others—sometimes referred to as any rational person, or any fool or any idiot—know that what the accused is accused to have done is incorrect and would agree that the accusation is justified. Private accusations always have a public and normative dimension; otherwise, they are not accusations but pure violence.The presence of third parties as the norm and of the norm as the expression of the third parties is explicit when the accusation is addressed to the legal system. Here a judge, backed by the power of the public, is asked to decide, following the law. That is, a third party to whom the accusation is addressed is asked to state the public opinion of all those who are neither the accuser nor the accused as it is codified in an explicit norm, the law. Both the normative and the public characters of the accusation are evident, as is the fact that the two are closely related. What is less evident, though never far from the surface, is the violent aspect of accusations.The form of an accusation, whether it is a legal accusation, a domestic accusation between partners, or what may be defined as the “wild accusations” that we find in the media, on social media, or in everyday life, is always the same. The accuser addresses to third parties an accusation that targets an accused, that is different from either, and he or she is accused because of his or her “action.” “Action” in this context should be understood in a very wide sense as any state of affair that is linked to the accused. “Wild accusations,” it should be noted, are not “wild” because they necessarily are irrational, implausible, or unfounded—which they may or may not be—but because they take place outside of an institutional framework that can “tame” the accusation. In consequence, wild accusations easily lead to explicit violence.The normative dimension of the accusation is a necessary consequence of the fact that it is addressed to third parties, to others who are neither the accuser nor the accused. The accuser needs something like a reason or a motive to win these third parties over to his cause. Actually, the very act of pointing makes it physically clear that the accuser, the accused, and the third parties are distinct persons who entertain different relationships with each other and with the object, that of which the accused is accused. Therefore, rather than a simple triadic relation, an accusation is a complex quadratic relation that assembles an accuser, an accused, and third parties around an object, a fault, to which all three are related differently, and the accusation necessarily alludes to a norm.This said, there is something paradoxical in the act of accusing. Even though the accuser recognizes the third parties as different from himself and solicits their help, given that even the simple act of pointing ascertains the distance that separates the accuser from both the accused and the third parties to whom it is addressed, what the accuser actually seeks is to abolish the distance that separates him from the third parties. The accuser wants them to adopt toward the accused the same relation of conflict that he has. What the accuser aims at through his accusation is for him and the third parties to become the same, to become doubles in their opposition to the accused. Thus, an accusation is a strange relation that succeeds when the third parties erase it as a complex quadratic relation and reduce it to a simple dyadic relation of conflict against the accused. The complex social and mundane relation that is an accusation aims, so to speak, at its own annihilation and at being replaced by a simple dyadic relation of pure sociality.This shows once again—if that were necessary—that an accusation is a form of violence. Violence in its most extreme and paradigmatic form of physical violence is a dyadic relation of pure sociality, a relation that for each of the adversaries has no external object but is entirely determined by the violence of the other. It has no object, both in the sense that it requires none and in the sense that it is to itself its own object, purpose, and reason. The violence of each is motivated and justified by that of the other. Such is violence in its purest form, and violence in its pure form constitutes the attractor, the fixed point of all accusations—the attractor or fixed point, not in the sense that this is the conscious or unconscious objective of all accusers, but in the sense that this is how accusations tend to develop when they are left to themselves, in the absence of institutional or cultural means to curtail their development and sometimes to lead them in a different direction.The relation between collective violence and accusation is rather straightforward, to the extent that an accusation addresses itself to third parties soliciting their help in the conflict that opposes the accuser to the accused. Any accusation is to some extent a call to collective violence. The accuser is asking the third parties to join in, to do with him or her what he or she cannot, or for some reason does not want to, do alone. Accusations thus are highly mimetic; they reflect the fact that people do not like to act alone, especially in circumstances where doing so may lead to danger, but also because they desire the support of others. The accuser is often both hedging his bets and building up courage, seeking from others the confirmation that he is right.In what follows, I focus on a special type of collective violence, one where there is a clear power imbalance between the attackers and their victims, where the violence is more like a “killing game” than like conflict between equals. Rather than war as it sometimes presents itself as a conflict between violent opponents, by collective violence I understand administrative massacres, genocides, ethnic riots, and many, but not all,3 forms of popular violence. I do not deal here with conflicts where the strength of the opponents is more equal, because in them the role of accusations is not fundamental, unlike what is the case in less balanced or, as the now received term calls them, asymmetric conflicts. It is important that in such cases of collective violence, strength rests with the accuser, who is more powerful than the accused. Why then does the accuser seek the support of third parties? The answer is that it is not always because the accuser needs help to exert violence against the victims, but because the accuser wants to exploit to their own advantage the mimetic dimension of violence and create unanimity against the victims. There is another reason why I limit my inquiry to such unbalanced forms of collective violence, because that is the way the expression “collective violence” is usually understood, even if that usage is not descriptively perfectly adequate.According to Arne Vetlesen in Evil and Human Agency,4 collective violence is a triadic and not simply a dyadic relation. Collective violence cannot be reduced to the sole relationship between the victims and those who attack them. Stanley Tambiah had already convincingly demonstrated in Levelling Crowds. Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia5 that collective violences are never spontaneous events, never outbursts perpetrated by angry crowds. The riots and other incidents that are commonly presented as explosions of popular resentment always have leaders, specialists of violence who organize and orchestrate them. These specialists of violence can be viewed as accusers who give their own violence as the justification of their accusation: an accusation for which the goal is to convince members of the crowd to join in and where their own violence constitutes the means of conviction. The violence of the leaders is given as the proof that their accusation is justified. Collective violences always imply at least three distinct agents: perpetrators of violence, their victims, and third parties, spectators who look on from outside and may properly be called bystanders.Contrary to private violence committed by individuals, which is often committed secretly and where criminals try to hide the consequences of their acts, collective violence always takes place in plain sight, under the gaze of others. It is always public. It does not hide. To the contrary, it wants to be seen or at least it wants its results to be known. It always seeks to establish a relationship with others who are neither the victims nor perpetrators, third parties who either encourage it, oppose and reject it, or simply let it happen.6 Collective violence always has or aims at a public. According to Vetlesen, if we want to understand the dynamics of collective violence we need to take into account the role of the third parties. The importance of their role does not come from the fact that “without them” the events would have been different, but rather from the fact that there is no “without them.” The third parties may be located close by or far away and the violence may or may not directly aim at influencing all of them, but in all cases the way in which third parties react or fail to react is not without consequences. Even though perpetrators may be unaware of the “presence” of some among the third parties, either because they believe them to be too distant or unconcerned, the reaction of these distant others, just like that of those closer, can influence how the violence will unfold. Third parties, bystanders, are never as exterior to the violence as they like to believe.Vetlesen's privileged examples of collective violences and of the role of third parties come from the violences that took place in Bosnia during the civil war in ex-Yugoslavia, in particular during the years 1992–1995. He analyzes how the indifference, that is, the lack of reaction, of the international community to the massacres committed by Serbian nationalists, as well as the false balance that it wanted to keep between those forces that were committing ethnic cleansing, and the defense of their outgunned and mostly victims, both and the violences that were This to the to the violence of the of a that it had defined as a To this of the role of third parties we can another very the the general in of the forces among other to as a third party between the and the the of his to that had been secretly by the as he had to believe that they were to be that to have been justified. Even though such an action well his and by the of he not to he done the would have like an institutional third like the to whom a has given a to a once the had already asked for to be to put an end to the The of the to reduce the of his by the for this may have its consequence to to the perpetrators of the violence and the that to be at that one of the members of the clear that the international community not in what in and to look took both Bosnia and the victims of the violence were the of many of them and it is that in the or most these accusations or them well in both cases, the violence had already been on for a and it clear that only more violence would if the accusers were left to their own however, that any accusation, no how and constitutes the accused as an with whom the accuser has to The accusation its targets with It them, for example, into that need to be in The in the shows that a in a is what he calls he and in if any consequences for the in fact, it necessarily is third parties, those who are neither perpetrators nor victims, that provide It from the that but that from doing or the public opinion that remains silent or the perpetrators rather than their violence. There are different third parties that or the violence, and others that simply it by their lack of in what shows that such violence is that it is that it is not wrong. thus is an action of the third parties, and without it, the of collective violences that to the would not The reaction of third parties, their or or their a role in the course of the violence. It is to them, in fact, that the accusation that the violence of perpetrators constitutes is addressed, and their reaction is to either or those whom the violence is as Vetlesen that third parties form a highly from members of the international community to the of the victims, to the of the perpetrators, to the in international or parties, and of these and others can at play the role of third parties. 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Such a would imply that if the accusations were well and the of the more the violence would be justified. it is in fact to find examples where the accusations are not and where to violence is in no way an or at least not an in of the It remains That violence in such cases a is an implicit consequence of the of violence. That implicit consequence indicates where the in cases of collective violence in the that the accusation violence.The of accusation indicates that there is a sense in which the perpetrators are not about the violence and their victims. They that they are not animals or but It is precisely because they are that they are them. An accusation requires between the accuser and the accused a form of in that the accused is a That is what the accusation wants to and to It to the accused a form of a that the violence that is against the accused victims and that makes the violence they own the violence as and in a sense

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