By Norman Ajari

“The universal is not the negation of the particular, because one goes to the universal by the deepening of the particular,”[1] Aimé Césaire once remarked. Carlos Alberto Sánchez’ book A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy after Narco-Culture offers one of the best proofs of the validity of Césaire’s point to date. Through a careful analysis of the most salient traits of narcotraffickers’ mode of life, values, and tastes, Sánchez patiently elaborates a philosophical revaluation of the very concept of culture in its relation to extreme violence.

The tension is this: narco-culture gifts humanity the spectacle of unprecedented death and unspeakable violence, on the one hand, and on the other, it lends humanity cultural artifacts of lasting significance. It is simultaneously a culture of both creation and destruction. As a creative culture, narco-culture contributes to music, fashion, film, and religion; as a destructive culture, it gives us the practice of mass killings for the sake of economic objectives internal to its business.[2]

Despite its irreducible singularity, narco-culture contains generalizable elements apt to enrich contemporary philosophies of culture considerably.

One of the most inventive and convincing aspects of Sánchez’ book lies in his redefinition of brutality as both in excess of and intrinsic to cultural formations. Violence always terms the imposition by force of the passage from one state to another to a being that intended to persist in the previous state. The parent who forces a flaccid kid to get ready for school, the cop who puts a suspect in handcuffs, and the robber who kills a victim hence fall into the same ontological category. According to Sánchez’ phenomenological perspective, all amount to an interruption. Violence transgresses the expectations of someone’s daily life, troubling the continuity of consciousness. It is a break experienced as a challenging infraction of exteriority into the immanence of a life-world. Nevertheless, if violence transgresses the quotidian, brutality transgresses expectations regarding violence itself; it amounts to violence squared. Brutality transgresses not only ordinary life, but violence itself.

People decapitated, dismembered, eyes gouged out, and corpses dissolved in acid baths are only a few examples of the excessive overkill of violence Sánchez labels as brutality. Even convinced pacifists and irenic thinkers would probably fail to imagine a society completely free of any resorting to violence. On the other hand, most people cannot reconcile modernity and its history as founded upon brutality itself. That is why every discovery of a serial killer’s track record, any mass murderer labelled as terrorist, and any other gruesome display of ferocity is described by commentators as antithetical to the basic principles of civilization. Social violence functions under an unspoken assumption, which Sánchez names instrumental, where violence is “any force that causes harm that also has some utility or lends itself to some end”[3] and brutality names any exercise of violence that does not aim at realizing such an end but instead becomes a goal of its own.

Paradoxically, this transgression of transgression that is brutality is also, according to Sánchez, what constitutes narco-culture’s normalcy.

What seems like-chaos – for instance corpses piled in front of ordinary homes, limbless bodies hanging from bridges, the spectacle of mass executions, and countless other acts of incomprehensible human destruction broadcast through various media – is in reality a way of life, a normal course of events, the rational unfolding of everyday life.[4]

To the extreme, Sánchez’ investigation of narco-culture forces us to rethink the notion of culture itself. The brutality he describes is not sublimated or metaphorical as in Baudelaire’s poetry or Poe’s short stories. It involves physical destruction and disfigurement of actual lives. From Aristotle’s Poetics to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure’s Principle, Western thought operates under the assumption that the psychic work of culture consists in catharsis or sublimation, which converts society’s inescapable, underlying fantasies of violence into socially acceptable expressions.[5] According to this civilizational schema, brutality only occurs when the cultural machine of sublimation goes out of order. The classic interpretation is that culture only tends to birth barbarity when it becomes unable to convert or to contain, that is to say to educate, its unconscious component of negativity.[6] In other words, brutality is said to be akin to savage drives instead of being produced by culture. But Sánchez’ analysis bears a completely different hypothesis, built upon the idea that narco-culture contains a reversed schema. In brutality, the underlying imagination and refinement of culture find a useful and collectively acceptable expression in ghastly murders, tortures, and post-mortem mutilations. The unique gratuity of those crimes comes from the civilizational fantasy invested in them.

Brutalism, in its extremity, is not as capriciously performed as it may at first seem. Brutality is not marked by spontaneity, but rather requires an unusual capacity to stoically endure contact with the atrocities of suffering and disfigurement. Sánchez describes it borrowing Judith Butler’s concept of derealization. “Derealized, the person is no longer human but an abstraction of an idea, and their lives do not count as lives; as abstractions, therefore, they cannot feel, bleed, die, and so on.”[7] Following philosophers such as David Livingstone Smith or Tommy J. Curry, I would speak of dehumanization rather than derealization.[8] Where derealization implies insensitivity via abstraction to the fact of degraded people’s death and dying or their treatment as unimportant and beyond concern, dehumanization figures such groups as supernumerary pests or predators and thus is a gateway to active participation in the elimination of groups. “We dehumanize others when we conceive them as subhuman creatures. These creatures might be nonhuman animals such as lice, rats, snakes, or wolves, or they might be fictional or supernatural beings such as demons and monsters.”[9] Dehumanization implies more than insensitivity to their demise: it mobilizes this distorted pestilent image of the other into a call to fight them as threat or nuisance.

Describing the musical genre known as narco-corridos as a vector of the imaginary of brutality that contributes to shaping the killers’ worldview, Sánchez reminds us how the exercise of dehumanization operates as a cultural device. The capacity to dehumanize, demean, and terminate others could be considered the product of what Foucault called techniques or technologies of the self.[10] Dehumanization requires molding human perception. Cultural production, via the arts, media, religion, and often the sciences, is weaponized in service of making credible the idea that a specific human group is actually constituted by inhuman beings in disguise. Said otherwise dehumanization, which is a prelude to brutality, is a technology of culture. Cultural artefacts such as printed texts, recorded music and so on, which always already mediate perception in contemporary circumstances, are privileged vehicles through which dehumanizing images and conceptions circulate and gain purchase. And, as Walter Benjamin famously writes in his seventh thesis On the Philosophy of History, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”[11] Sánchez’ theory allows readers to consider this well-known idea under a new light. Civilization, as a dissimulative technology produced as culture, is what allows for the training of consciousness, perception, and imagination necessary to the emergence of brutality. It is only through the work of culture that murder is no longer an unpleasant necessity but can become a privileged place of human creativity through which one group sends subtle messages to another. Corpses become surfaces of writing, raw materials for crafts that express the fundamental values of a given society.

Sánchez’ redefinition of what unites culture and brutality could help us reread other historical moments. The notion of “narco-culture” he develops throughout the book echoes the late cultural theorist Vincent Woodard’s description of what he called the antebellum South’s “slave culture.” His book, The Delectable Negro, is another testimony of the intertwining of culture and extreme violence.[12] In Woodard, the phrase “slave culture” does not only designate the habits and customs of enslaved Africans in the Americas, but the nexus of ideas and practices that circulated between them and white people. He shows how both metaphorical and literal instances of cannibalism defined white imagination at the time. Fantasies of mincing Black bodies and consuming Black flesh were integral to white plantation culture, fueling a disturbing negrophobic and negrophilic eroticism. Sánchez’ narco-culture and Woodard’s slave culture are examples of the reasons why we should not analyze the cohabitation of culture and brutality as a paradox: brutality comes from the same creative detachment from immediate necessities as high culture does.

Jim Crow lynching and the colonial massacres and mutilations that occurred in the Free State of Congo are other staggering examples of recourses to violence that are so distressing that they seem to transgress the unspoken legislation that rules over the use of violence itself. However, it is critical to recognize, as shocking as it may seem, that brutality is transgressive insofar as modern and contemporary art is as well. According to Achille Mbembe, brutalist architecture, which emerges massively and brutalizes its surroundings with its angular and cyclopean forms of raw concrete is akin to the contemporary functioning of “power as a geomorphic force … now constituted, expressed, reconfigured, acted upon and reproduced through fracturing and fissuring.”[13] Both transgressive art and brutality exist in reference to an audience’s moral or aesthetic standards, which are familiar and clearly delineated. They are based on the idea that the group shares a certain set of rules and beliefs that the transgressive brutal act self-consciously and forcefully breaks. Whether abstract or concrete, the thirst for transgression must be defined as a civilizational trait animated by a playful disregard for widely held sensibility. In fields of cultural production such as literature, performance, architecture, or the plastic arts, such an orientation is seen as birthing progress or innovation in the symbolic register. In the field of material violence, such desire pushes the boundaries of the abominable and digs deeper mass graves. 

These remarks lead to another interesting dialogue present in the book. According to Sánchez, narco-culture amounts to what Giorgio Agamben names a form of life: “a manner of living formed by rules and customs, scaffolded by restrictions and social sanctions, and recognized by a particular ethos, which, in this case, is a violent or brutal ethos.”[14] According to Agamben, a ‘form of life’ is the harmonious conjunction of one’s existence with a set of rules. For Agamben, rules are what makes one life’s fulfilment possible, guiding it in the right direction; conversely law coerces life, capturing it from birth and exposing it to state-sanctioned violence.

Benjamin discusses this in Toward the Critique of Violence: the great criminal is often perceived by the state itself as its most dangerous and credible rival.[15] The reprobate’s resort to violence parallels the state’s and threatens to supersede it, rendering the monopoly on legitimate violence null and void. Agamben’s models to theorize forms of life – conceived as a remedy against the overexposure to violence that represents bare life – are either Franciscan imitation of Christ and monastic self-isolation, or Situationist International’s communal and inventive life at the margins of society.[16] In other words, the underlying assumption of his theorizing is that such collective experiences may exist and maintain themselves pacifically in the interstices of society. By contrast, Sánchez shows how a form-of-life can very well be deeply rooted in the infliction of unbridled violence, i.e. brutality. He turns our most irenic concepts, such as culture or form-of-life, against themselves, demonstrating how they produce and reproduce excessive violence and dehumanization.

In sum, brutality is not an infringement upon culture and civilization but a paradoxical form of its fulfilment. Agamben’s concept of form of life cannot be unilaterally described as an escape from violence and brutality. As Sánchez demonstrates, the concept’s most prevalent and lasting examples of escaping the grip of the state are exemplified by communities such as narco-culture that gather the means to rival with the sovereign in terms of violence, influence, and capital. Tiny, ephemeral avant-garde or monastic communities are nothing compared to narcotraffickers’ capacity to live outside the purview of legality, following no other rules than those dictated by their very own code of honor. Either under the guise of enlightenment and civilizational refinement or the aegis of communal exile from society, violence and brutality appear as unescapable. We need a critical theory that dismisses our misplaced dreams of social harmony and does not treat violence as contingent or evanescent, but is rather concerned with the physics, hydraulics, and effects of violence and brutality. Every politics is first a politics of violence.

Norman Ajari is Lecturer in Francophone Black Studies and associated faculty in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Darkening Blackness: Race, Class, Gender, and Pessimism in 21st Century Black Thought (Polity, 2024) and Dignity or Death: Politics and Ethics of Race (Polity, 2023).

[1] Philippe Decreane, “Aimé Césaire: nègre rebelle”, Le Monde, December 7, 1981.

[2] Carlos Alberto Sánchez, A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy after Narco-Culture (Amherst: Amherst College Press, 2020), 39-40.

[3] Sánchez, A Sense of Brutality, 75.

[4] Sánchez, A Sense of Brutality, 93.

[5] Lacoue-Labarthe, Poétique de l’histoire (Paris, Galillée, 2002) 87.

[6] Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

[7] Sánchez, A Sense of Brutality, 143.

[8] David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (St. Martins Press, 2011); David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford University Press, 2020); Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, class, genre, and the dilemmas of Black manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017).

[9] David Livingstone Smith, Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 9.

[10] Michel Foucault, “L’écriture de soi”, Dits et Ecrits t. IV (Paris, Gallimard, 1994).

[11] Michael Lowy, Fire alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ’On the concept of history’ (London: Verso Books, 2005), 47.

[12] Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

[13] Achille Mbembe, Brutalisme (Paris: La Découverte, 2020), 9-10.

[14] Sánchez, A Sense of Brutality, 30.

[15] Walter Benjamin, Toward the Critique of Violence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021).

[16] Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).