By Basit Kareem Iqbal

Detail of "Crucified Child" (2006) by Syrian formalist Mouteea Murad, held by the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts; from a photograph taken during the author's fieldwork in 2018.

I am grateful to Carlos Alberto Sánchez for giving us “brutality” as a theoretically sophisticated term for analysis. In the years since I received it the book has accompanied me on conference and camping trips and the term has entered my vocabulary: to think the brutality constitutive of our world, and our sense of world, in the precise argument developed over the book’s four chapters.

The first chapter elaborates narco-culture as indeed a culture itself: not a model of human perfection (Arnold) but a common inheritance, a complex whole (Tylor), a framework of rules and exceptions. Narco-culture is incorporative: even if one does not directly participate in killing or the sale, production, or traffic of drugs, one must still live with its violence (45). Narco-culture is, even, a form of life (Agamben): “the narco must live according to the rules of the game and play the game so as to fulfill the rules” (47). Narco-culture is “both a space of commonality shared by many (a habitus) and the commitment to participate in it (inhabiting)” (48). And it turns out that this common space reflects and violently inverts the conditions of “late capitalist neoliberal postmodernity” writ large: optimism, consumption, and enjoyment, whose every cultural expression is essentially contingent on the violent transformation of human bodies into commodities like any other.

The second chapter considers philosophical literature on violence in order to describe narco-violence as excessive: violence may be subjective, objective, or divine (Žižek); it may be law-making or law-preserving (Benjamin); it may be revelatory if still instrumental (Sorel); it may be emancipatory if irreversible (Fanon); and constructive if insufficient (Sartre). Importantly for Sánchez, phenomenological approaches emphasize violence not as force or implement but the “originary experience of violence as interruption, interference, suspension,” violence as “radical discontinuity” (75). And, when it is excessive, it becomes brutality. Here is the distinction: “violence is internal to the permanent field of being, while brutality is an emergence” (79). The former is fundamental to human sociality, as Levinas and Butler help us understand. But narco-culture is “underdetermined by its phenomenality” (85): there, violence is unthinkable. Narco-culture, Sánchez writes later, “shows that our concepts fail us…we must have the courage to invent new ones or rethink our old ones” (91n4).

The third chapter moves toward such a philosophy of unspeakable violence. Brutality “sublates” and “overflows” concepts of violence. It is “that surplus of violence that transgresses the limits of violence,” and so gives a name to “that which is unspeakable, unimaginable, or irrepressible in our experiences of the others’ suffering, ruin, and destruction” (91). (Our experiences of others’ suffering, Sánchez writes—but the difference is less easy to maintain because of the incorporating work of culture, as already shown.) It is clear from chapter one that what appears to be chaos—“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…the rational unfolding of everyday life” (93). But narco-culture presents a kind of excessive violence that is disarticulated from a political agenda (as in terror) and does not require subjective passion (as in cruelty—against Balibar). To make the latter distinction, Sánchez draws on Max Scheler’s 1913 The Nature of Sympathy to describe cruelty and brutality as two destructive modes of being in common with others. The former takes pleasure in suffering, while the latter disregards that pleasure. Brutality is “selfless,” “external.” In narco-culture individuals may be cruel, but their cruelty “folds itself or disappears into the brutality” that lies “outside the scope of subjective desire and in the realm of intersubjective labor” (108-109). And it has a reiterative quality: its objectification of others reproduces itself into a routine. Focusing on the cruelty of specific acts “isolates the perpetrators in their cruelty, in their subjective pathologies,” while Sánchez points us toward a “generalized brutality” (117).

The fourth chapter examines the ontologization of brutality in narco-culture: how it produces the “absolute derealization of the other” through liquidation of human bodies. This excess, surplus violence works to “undo the entirety of a person’s presence” (122)—destroying hundreds of people, for example, through dismemberment, dissolution, burning, and (finally) burial. Importantly, this effort at absolute erasure is not bound to a logic of spectacle (Debord). It is directed elsewhere: toward the utter annihilation of the person as a being in the world, foreclosing even the possibility of their vulnerable embodiment (Butler). It does not essentially seek to manipulate or memorialize the meaning of violence, however much terror or horror (Cavarero) are its consequence. “Brutality is not restricted to spectacle” (138). Instead it bears a “hidden intentionality” (139) which leads outside the field of vision. Brutality is the “operational ontology of a contemporary, civilized society” (136).

***

And not only the contemporary, civilized society of Mexican narco-culture. As Sánchez notes over the course of the book, this is not an ethnographic account of a bounded site. Brutality is instead “a function of our global culture and the economic and political scaffolding supporting most contemporary neoliberal states” (12); this book is a philosophical response to inhabiting a world of brutality. We are called to respond, Sánchez writes, because we live in that world, whether we recognize it or not. “The historic event and the social fact of narco-culture…force us to reconsider some of our most basic and entrenched philosophical concepts” (2). Similar phrases recur across the book, as when “these horrific acts…also call us into question” (115). We belong to the world of brutality, which is why he persuasively insists that focusing on the cruelty of individual acts becomes a distraction and an alibi against admitting the generalization of brutality. It is this generalization (evident most clearly in what I would call the impersonality of violence, what Sánchez calls its externality) that helps account for the relay between cruelty and brutality, the oscillation between terror and horror. (Cruelty provokes discussion while “brutality leaves us speechless,” 115; “terror moves bodies through fear and trembling, horror paralyzes them in repugnance and surprise,” 137.)

But this generalization also complicates the scene of call and response. If we belong to the world of brutality, we are not unscathed by the “brutality paradox” and its “denial of suffering.” The sensibilities of the phenomenological subject have variously been formed by that world, which makes the first-person plural more difficult. Sánchez writes, for example, that “although these scenes unfold in places and contexts that are usually unfamiliar to us, we are all witnesses. (…) [We are] drawn in, unable to look away. We become witnesses. As witnesses, the violence that we encounter itself demands our response—we are asked by the things themselves to respond somehow—specifically, to respond in understanding” (6). (A similar language of witness/ing pervades activist circles and social media today, during Israel’s long campaign to obliterate Palestine. But, as Robert Meister sharply asks of another, not unrelated context, “what is being witnessed? The victim’s suffering? The victim’s innocence? The uselessness of human sacrifice?”[1]) An alternative response to excessive violence, one that does not require the witness of a transformed bystander but reflects the generalization of brutality, was already given in the book: “It is just normal now,” says a Sinaloa Cartel foot soldier about seeing dead bodies and feeling nothing (111).

A philosophical account of generalization is offered by Simona Forti, who tracks the question of evil (a term absent from Sánchez’s book) through the biopolitical transformation of structures of power. Evil today, she writes, cannot merely be understood through the “dark, transgressive face of a subjectivity that is avid for destruction,” read from Kant through Levinas.[2] In fact that “demonological vision of power” obscures precisely the production of absolute victims in modern politics, interrupted as it is by the inclusion of life. She insists that the new “era of the witness” marks an inflection within (not a departure from) that dualistic vision. In this phenomenology of evil, from Agamben to Esposito, evil is no longer understood as “the dark side of the subject’s power” but as “a total lack of freedom.”[3] But when the surplus (as writes Sánchez about brutality’s attack on personhood) of radical evil in the extermination camps lay in its “organized attempt” to “eradicate the concept of the human being,” Forti quotes Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, this was not a simple dehumanization. Rather, as also for Arendt and Foucault, the “uncontrollable drive toward nothingness” was met by “an insatiable need for life.”[4] Not the emptying of meaning from the body of the victim but its “saturation.”[5] From this perspective, thanatopolitics and the production of absolute victims offer a retrenchment of the metaphysics of good and evil, not its absence. What remains unexamined by this perspective on radical evil is a precise account of its normalization in what Forti calls “the gray zone.” She offers a philosophical complement to what anthropologists have described as the social production of indifference: the form of life nurtured by contemporary mass societies is defined finally by a desire for the maximalization of life, the obsessive desire to live at any cost. If their cultures can sanction the brutality of our world, we can read Forti with Sánchez to say, it is because the absolutization of death can be perfectly integrated with the absolutization of life.[6]

This is another reason why the way out of the brutality paradox, whose logic encompasses us as well, cannot simply be recognition of the personhood of the victim. (The humanization of the other, ad nauseum.) Instead it may lie in relinquishing what Forti identifies as the need to live at any cost. That is to say, the normalization of evil and the generalization of brutality call us to become not witnesses but martyrs.

***

Sánchez’s work is helpful for revisiting another land of martyrs, another narco-state. Syria appears twice in A Sense of Brutality, both times as a point of comparison. In the first citation, the brutality of narco-culture verges on the degree of violence found in Syria: “By mid-2017, narco-culture’s irrepressible violence had created the ‘second deadliest conflict zone in the world after Syria’” (92). In the second citation, quoted from a newspaper story about the degradation of human bodies in acid, the brutality of narco-culture exceeds the violence found in Syria: “The world was shocked with the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Women and children dead. But in Veracruz, as well as in the rest of the country, there are worse things…” (122). Better or worse (and however futile that international shock at the regime sarin attacks on Ghouta, Khan Shaykhun, Douma, and beyond), recent developments in Syria have made the comparison all the more apt: the massive production and international trafficking of the “poor man’s cocaine” has become the regime’s “financial lifeline,” giving the Syrian regime and its allies direct control over US$7.3 billion of captagon revenues (well above any other single source of revenue). The scale of these operations is incredible, with infrastructure involving Hezbollah in Lebanon, over 160 drug gangs inside Syria, and the government army all the way to Maher al-Assad’s Fourth Armoured Division.[7] The sites of my fieldwork in the Syria-Jordan borderland are filled with stories of nighttime smuggling and drone drops. Six weeks ago, Jordanian customs officers discovered some 800,000 captagon pills hidden in merchandise, but this is only a more dramatic moment from the constant traffic across the internal fronts of the war.

Brutality in Syria is enabled and facilitated not only by its expanding narco-culture but also the state’s entire juridico-political infrastructure, from Hafez al-Assad’s proclamation of a state of emergency in 1963 through Bashar al-Assad’s monopoly of domination in the 2012 constitution. The security services are legally exempted from the law, for they, as representatives of the president himself, are tasked with the preservation of the state in the ongoing battle against the internal enemy. And this front is unending, writes Yara Bader: “arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, torture and ill-treatment, unfair trials, extrajudicial executions, security oversight, prevention of individual and intellectual freedoms, and the abolition of political life—all were legal acts by the power of exception.”[8] For decades the regime’s discourse has explicitly proclaimed the absolute permanence of the regime (al-Assad ila al-abad).[9] The Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh remarks the common etymology between eternity (al-abad) and extermination (al-ibada) in order to note that the former cannot be achieved without the latter. “Killing here is not punitive, nor even retributive; it is destructive and extirpative, aimed at enslaving those not yet killed and immortalizing the killers.”[10] Another inflection of brutality, another sense of the thanatocratic regime’s obsessive desire to reproduce itself into infinity. This is another way the prison camp is paradigmatic of Syria writ large: it figures Syria as a carceral archipelago constituted by specific sites, namely “outer jails,” which boasted visiting hours and regular detention, and “inner jails,” which were entirely separated from the outside world and given over to the extermination machine (as seen in Caesar’s “archives of death”[11]). Since the revolution, in the extimate dialectics of brutality, the inner jails have absorbed the outer ones. Meanwhile Syria itself was one giant prison even before the revolution and continues so afterward. Jail is not an exception, writes al-Haj Saleh; “it became the rule, the general law under which the entire population lived.”[12] The prison camp as paradigm totalizes space (through this recursivity of the prison, across multiple scales) and time (through convening an eternalized present).

One of my interlocutors from Maarat al-Numan, then a young teenager, was sent by his family to check whether his uncle was wanted by the security services. At the office they told him he was not on their list—and so his uncle presented himself to renew his identification papers, whereupon he was immediately disappeared for eight years. Recalling this to me in Canada in 2019, my interlocutor looked away in shame. His uncle had never blamed him for his role in his detention and torture—he had been a child, after all, and deceived—but even so he found it difficult to speak to him over WhatsApp across ten thousand kilometres and this greater gulf.

Another interlocutor survived fifteen years in Tadmor prison. Sitting against the whitewashed wall in the orphanage complex in Jordan where we met in summer 2023, he pulled up his shalwar to show me where the security forces had welcomed him in 1980 by stubbing out their cigarettes on his ankles. My friend offered him tea and the baklawa I had brought, but he demurred since he was fasting (it was a Thursday). He described the daily schedule in Tadmor dormitories—twelve hours of “sitting” and twelve hours of “sleeping,” with each element of the daily routine subject to the cables, batons, and boots of the military police. He was released in 1995, disorientated. He got off the bus returning to his village and did not recognize it. “They had sown fear in his mind and everywhere he looks it bears fruit,” my friend commented about him later.

These two brief anecdotes illustrate what Salwa Ismail calls the regime’s production of “exposed subjects” marked by abjection and precarity. She tracks how the prison camp and the massacre became apparatuses of rule in Syria, paradigmatic well beyond the walls of the regime’s proliferating jail complexes and mass killings. Ismail draws on Cavarero’s account of representational horror in analyzing the Assad regime’s techniques of rule—but, in distinguishing brutality from horror, Sánchez insists that the former is not restricted to the logic of spectacle. As he writes about the disintegration of the human body, “the repugnance it creates comes after” (139). In much the same way, the prototypical instances of the prison camp and the massacre, namely Tadmor and the events of Hama, did not “seek vision.” In both cases, concealment and erasure were long a part of the regime’s practice of government. Reading Ismail on the regime’s rule of violence, we can add that it nonetheless maintains a “spectral quality.”[13] For example, “While many Syrians who were not residents of Hama at the time remained uncertain about the actual scale of death and devastation the city experienced, they nonetheless lived with the knowledge that unspeakable horror had taken place.” By virtue of this spectral quality, concealed or erased violence transforms both the known and the unknown into an uncanny domain always threatening possible violence—especially since the regime otherwise relies on such exorbitant displays of spectacle, and since the space within the prison camp deploys theatricality and performance of violence as part of its repertoire of horror.[14] The regime’s pedagogy of fear is equivocal about the field of vision.[15]

Finally, Sánchez’s argument that brutality is foundational to the narco form of life raises the question of the relationship between violence and form, and also the possible (possibly infinite) range in forms of life marked by brutality. Al-Haj Saleh has recently examined this problematic under the heading of “The Atrocious and Its Representation”—writing that the atrocity (al-fazi‘) is precisely that which undoes forms, or which mechanically reproduces the formless, through its exceeding of measure (again recalling Sánchez’s elaboration of surplus violence). He writes that “the loss of form (fiqdan al-shakl)—suffered by bodies, the living environment, and Syria itself—is an invitation for us, the people of the atrocity, to undertake a re-formation.”[16] But he is well aware that the old forms are undone and that other forms are not simply available, since he frames the book itself as a reflection on “our ruined form” (shaklina al-mukharrab). Rather al-Haj Saleh outlines four pathways (masalik) of response to the experience of the atrocity: outrage and indignation; silence and retreat; creativity; and violence. Each of these routes bears its own risks and limitations, as seen in Syria—key among them that the atrocious has remained unscathed (al-fiza‘a baqiyat salima).[17] Syria names “the story of a total carnage, which changes bodies and buildings in a manner that is disturbing, repugnant, abominable. More than that, the repugnance of this disturbing change leaves those afflicted by the atrocious, whether objects or living beings, unrecognizable; such that beings hit by the atrocious seem foreclosed, impossible—examples from a parallel and hellish world (mithalat min ‘alam mawaz jahimi).”[18] Sánchez reminds us, as al-Haj Saleh does, that such a doubled world, the hellish one, is ours.

Basit Kareem Iqbal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University. Based on fieldwork with refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars in Jordan and Canada, his forthcoming book is titled The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham University Press, 2025).

[1] Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 169.

[2] Simona Forti, New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 5.

[3] Ibid., 127.

[4] Ibid., 134.

[5] Ibid., 150.

[6] Ibid., 315.

[7] See Caroline Rose and Alexander Söderholm, “The Captagon Threat: A Profile of Illicit Trade, Consumption, and Regional Realities” (New Lines Institute, April 2022), https://newlinesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/20220404-Captagon_Report-NLISAP-final-.pdf; Elijah Glantz and George Hancock, “Syria, Captagon, and Geopolitics: From Magic Bullet to Placebo” (Royal United Services Institute, June 14, 2024), https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/syria-captagon-and-geopolitics-magic-bullet-placebo.

[8] Yara Bader, “Legitimising State Violence in Syria,” The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art, April 19, 2024, https://www.cjlpa.org/post/legitimising-state-violence-in-syria.

[9] Eylaf Bader Eddin, “Al-Abad: On the Ongoing,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 15 (2022): 367-376.

[10] Yassin al-Haj Saleh, “State Extermination, Not a ‘Dictatorial Regime,’” trans. Alex Rowell, Aljumhuriya, April 30, 2018, https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2018/04/30/state-extermination-not-a-dictatorial-regime/.

[11] Garance Le Caisne, Operation Caesar: At the Heart of the Syrian Death Machine, trans. David Watson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). For further details, see Jaber Baker and Ugur Ümit Üngör, Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System (London: IB Tauris, 2023).

[12] Yassin al-Haj Saleh, “The Greater Jail: The Politics of Prison in Syria,” Aljumhuriya, February 19, 2021, https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2021/02/19/greater-jail-politics-prison-syria/.

[13] Salwa Ismail, The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3.

[14] See Ismail, The Rule of Violence, 43-51; and Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

[15] See also Enrico De Angelis, “The Controversial Archive: Negotiating Horror Images in Syria,” in The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, ed. Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2020), 69-88; and Andreas Bandak, Christine Crone, and Nina Grønlykke Mollerup, eds., “Re-Collections: Syrian Images Beyond Archive,” special issue of Visual Anthropology 37, no. 1 (2024): 1-97.

[16] Yassin al-Haj Saleh, al-Fazi ‘ wa tamthilih: mudawalat fi shakl suriya al-mukharrab wa tashakkuliha al-‘asir (Beirut: Dar al-Jadid, 2021), 9. See a translation of the introduction available at https://yassinhs.com/?p=1172.

[17] Ibid., 133.

[18] Ibid., 9.