On Sacredness and Transgression: Understanding Social Antagonism

Abstract

This chapter explores the nature of violence. In particular, and mostly through the reading of Durkheim (1965, 1984), Schmitt (1994, 1996), and Lacan (1977, 1978), I argue that social antagonism and its violent expression cannot be understood if social theory does not conceptualize radical otherness as the pre-condition of society. Moreover, I argue that only by adding the category of enjoyment (pleasure derived from transgression), can we begin to grasp what collective violence – at least in modern societies – is about. Though they had different arguments and purposes, these authors were capable of not only seeing the negative (the excluded) element within every social identity, but also the foundational character of it (exclusion as a precondition for the identity to exist). Although much of current social and political theory is preoccupied with the other in general, this other is one that accounts for difference and calls for recognition. In contrast to those accounts, this paper explores how a ‘radical other’ – with whom there is a relation of antagonism – is constituted.