By Carlos Alberto Sánchez

What motivates my work in A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy After Narco-Culture is a worry over a kind of violence that, in light of its excessiveness, renders us speechless and renders itself invisible. The book is thus not just about narco-culture, narco-violence, or the failure of the Mexican State to mitigate the harms of neo-liberal economic ambitions; the book is an interrogation. It seeks to interrogate a phenomenon that, I believe, forces us to question some very basic philosophical notions about personhood, culture, and the extent to which we allow ourselves to accept what happens to one another.

A Sense of Brutality is primarily a phenomenology of violence. As I understand it and deploy it, phenomenology is a philosophical methodology that privileges immediate experience as a source of knowledge and justification. I think that this method revolves around what Husserl called “The Principle of All Principles” in Ideas I, but which we can also call the “Principle of Proximity,” since what matters is what is closest to one’s lived experience. In the book, I assume that the violence of narco-culture is proximal to my experience, and so it makes sense to approach it in this way.

But such proximity should be qualified: by “proximal” I mean that narco-violence impacts me in some way, namely, as a constant cultural presence. It is here, in the culture that defines me as a Mexican American; it is in the music, in the fashion, in cinema, on television, and mixed-in with the worries that my parents have over relatives “back home,” over their own plans for a future return, over the future of their descendants, and over the fate of Mexico itself as a nation and as an idea. Narco-violence is thus part of my lived experience; it is proximal to my concerns and, ultimately, to my projects. Such proximity, I believe, entails a certain responsibility that I, as a writer and a philosopher, must assume. This responsibility is written onto the privilege to philosophize itself; it is the responsibility to think about it, write about it, and make sense of it for the sake of others. It is a responsibility spelled out in the very concept of responsibility: as an ability to respond. In this way, A Sense of Brutality is personal and tied to my biography; in this sense, this book is my response to something I see as requiring one. Now, this could be a moral imperative, but I see it more as a philosophical duty. My obligation is to the truth, and sometimes the truth demands a concrete commitment that, for me, means writing and thinking about things that others (namely, other philosophers) have avoided.  Following the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea, who says that “[c]ommitting ourselves to the universal and the eternal, without making a single concrete commitment, does not commit us to anything,” I like to think that in A Sense of Brutality I’ve committed myself to something concrete.

Before I get to the brilliant interventions by my generous readers, a quick note on what I mean by “brutality.” Brutality, as I define it here, is perhaps not encompassing enough to capture the phenomenon that I seek to capture, namely, a violence that overflows the very concept of “violence.” The phenomenon that I have in mind, the “violence of narco-culture,” may be in the end too much for words—an excess that neither “violence,” “cruelty,” “horror,” nor “terror” properly capture. It is not just that the spectacle of narco-violence is overly spectacular; while this is often the case, the problem is that the phenomenon—a violence too much for words—tricks the spectator into thinking that what she sees is normal, commonplace, or just. Through what I call “the logic of brutality,” the spectator confuses rituals of dehumanization for acceptable social practices, ways of life, or forms of justice. In this way, excessive violence (of all sorts), in showing itself, hides its real (brutal) nature. There is in the phenomenal givenness a truth that no concept can properly capture. Despite these difficulties, my aim in A Sense of Brutality is clear: to call attention to the phenomenon in a way that gets us looking, and maybe, just maybe, we can get it out in the open.

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It is with great humility that I respond, as far as I can, to the illustrious group of readers gathered here on the occasion of A Sense of Brutality. These readers come from a variety of backgrounds: anthropology, political theory, Black studies, and philosophy. What began as a worry about the innumerable dead, victims of a “form of life” that is both a reflection and a transgression of capitalist modernity, has in their reflections, interrogations, and criticisms become a gift, something that goes beyond my specific philosophical agenda.

This brings me first to the intervention. Alberto Toscano takes me to task on several fronts. I cannot fully respond to each of Toscano’s points here (there are three); that will have to wait for another occasion. Here, I will only focus on the first, where Toscano asks “what is at stake in the differentiation between cruelty and brutality?” Toscano rightly observes that the “imperative to name” is a central motivation of my book. This, he also suggests, may also be its limitation. In my view, cruelty and brutality are not the same. We find the former in the realm of the subject and the latter in the realm of the world; one is subjective, the other is sunk into the objective state of things. Only the latter, I claim, can account for the manner in which excessive violence is socially codified. Toscano, however, sees a missed opportunity, suggesting a dialectical relationship between cruelty and brutality where these are “mutually implicated polarities or possibilities of experience.” According to Toscano following Balibar, both cruelty and brutality are subjective experiences making my distinction avoidable and, ultimately, unnecessary. It is here, he continues, that I make a category mistake, and my “phenomenological” investigation reveals its limitations.  

My response to this is straightforward: at stake in the distinction I make between cruelty and brutality is the possibility of exposing a phenomenon that hides behind conceptual obscurities, obscurities that in practice allow the dehumanization and objectification of real persons. Such “de-realization” ultimately culminates in the “unspeakable” violence that I call “brutality.” Moreover, a premise of my book is that it is “imperative to name” those things that worry us or impact us if only for the sake of reminding ourselves of where our power lies…and where it doesn’t. In the case of narco-violence, it is imperative to name an excessive violence that clearly renders us speechless (and blind) so as to not lose sight of it. The point is that if we don’t do this, moral discernment gets lost in the clamor of human beheadings, murders, and assassinations. If this happens, then we are left only with silence, or at best, a muted outrage that is only felt but not spoken. Behind Toscano’s question about stakes, however, is the suggestion that there is more to the violence of narco-culture than meets the eye. That it is not simply a function of capitalism; that capitalism on its own does not account for the excess. He tells us that we have to understand narco-culture as a “system of power and not simply of killing,” which means, if I understand him right, that it is its own thing, its own complicated “system.” And I agree. At no point do I suggest that the answer as to “why” such brutality has become routine is “capitalism.” There are many sources, including, yes, capitalism, but also cultural instruction, tradition, history, and a perverse sense of the good life. Excessive violence is not just a function of the times, although it is in the times that we find it most insidious.

Darren Byler’s contribution, “Cruelty by Scale, Brutality by Duration: On Anti-Muslim State Violence in Northwest China,” considers the manner in which cruelty eventually becomes brutality (as I define it in the book). Considering the treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Northwest Chinese prisons, Byler reflects on a violence that has become mundane and even amusing to Chinese prison guards. Byler’s is not a critique of my work. Rather, he seeks to “think in dialogue” with it and consider how everyday cruelty can “move into a broader life world and become a part of cultured thought.” Cruelty, Byler suggests, and I agree, has a way to “harden into a durative brutality” when it is normalized. Indeed, the persistent repetition or performance of a violation—whatever that violation may be—will “harden” through that repetition into a permanent fixture of the social. Cruelty hardens into brutality when the cruel act becomes routine, habitual, and its excess no longer recognized as excess, as vice, but as “normal.” Byler says that cruelty “is associated with the thrill of the new.” Because cruelty is located at the level of the subject, we can then say that cruel acts by that subject will be “new.” Brutality, then, is of the old. It is part of the objective field. Cruelty, because it originates in the subject, is always new. Ultimately, Byler gives me an opportunity to emphasize what’s at stake with the distinction between cruelty and brutality, namely, that if cruelty can become normalized and disappear into the “old” or into the objective field, what’s at stake in this distinction is the awareness or consciousness of this process, giving us perhaps a way to re-think it or even nip it in the bud. 

Jorge Núñez’s “Beyond the spectacle of violence: Ecuadorian prison massacres and the brutality paradox” likewise offers an extremely charitable reading of A Sense of Brutality. Núñez considers a prison massacre which took place in Ecuador in 2019 through what, in the book, I call “the brutality paradox.” According to this paradox, brutality—as excessive, unspeakable violence—dehumanizes persons in order to inflict maximum and excessive violence upon them; the dehumanization, in turn, keeps us (onlookers, witnesses, spectators) from noticing the human suffering, thereby discouraging any possible moral condemnation on the basis of inflicted human pain. In the case of the Ecuadorian prison massacre, in the aftermath of a riot prisoners could be seen on cell phone video playing soccer with a decapitated head. The court trials that followed focused not so much on the dead inmates, on the decapitations, on the violence, but on the penal structures that allowed the riot to happen. At no point were the dead named as “their lives dissolved into the anonymity of extreme visual violence.” This, according to Núñez illustrates the prevalence of the brutality paradox and the way in which brutality can hide behind its normalization. According to Núñez, this also illustrates another point of the book, namely, that “a Debordian critique of spectacle is a rather predictable approach to think of these ultraviolent images” we often confront. Núñez concludes by doubling down on a claim that I hesitate in making in the book: “Sánchez’s sobering depiction of narco-culture pushes us to think ourselves as part of a moral environment premised on mutual extermination and destruction.” The reason why, at the time, I hesitated in making this claim was because I wanted to avoid prescriptive moral claims of any sort. Now, however, I think that my methodological commitments obligate me into taking a stance of some sort; thinking of ourselves as implicated in the catastrophe of the Mexican drug war naturally leads to taking responsibility for our role and suggesting that we ought to do something about it. I now regret my hesitation. 

The highest compliment my work can receive comes from Norman Ajari, who hears in A Sense of Brutality a response to Aimé Césaire, who writes: “The universal is not the negation of the particular, because one goes to the universal by the deepening of the particular.” According to Ajari, A Sense of Brutality “offers one of the best proofs of” what Césaire meant.

Appropriately titled, “Brutality as a Civilization Trait,” Ajari’s intervention situates my book in the context of critical theory, or at least it reminds him of that tradition. Like Byler, Ajari also highlights the value of thinking about the sedimentation process that leaves us with brutality as a remainder. The main focus of Ajari’s analysis, however, is the idea that brutality is an artifact of “civilized” peoples, of modern society. “Civilization,” he reminds us, paraphrasing Benjamin, “is what allows for the enhancement of consciousness, perception, and imagination necessary to the emergence of brutality.” This leads Ajari to place A Sense of Brutality in (for me) unexpected company: namely, next to works in Black critical theory, such as Tommy J. Curry and Vincent Woodward. In both, we have the “intertwining of culture and extreme violence.” Ajari’s point, however, is not simply to applaud my efforts, but to insist that critical theory must rid itself of its idealisms and confront reality for what it is: “Every politics,” he concludes, “is first a politics of violence.”

Lisa Stevenson’s response, “The Violence of King-Time: A Commentary,” from the get-go, hits at the core of my thesis—namely, the notion that the violence that I’m talking about is the sort of violence that calls us into question, that renders us speechless, that makes us forget. The story of my uncle Manuel with which Stevenson begins is one that weaves itself in and out of my memory; it is stuck in my past that is both history and present, something that happened both out of necessity and needlessly; but more than anything, it is part of a past that we (my family) acknowledge but lack the words to talk about. This leads Stevenson to (correctly) suggest that what I’m doing in the book is more than a phenomenology of excessive violence, but also a “phenomenology of speechlessness.” From there she wonders as to how exactly this “speechlessness” is made possible, especially the speechlessness of the actors, the brutalizers of narco-culture. Like other readers in this symposium, Stevenson is reminded of Frantz Fanon’s notion of “dehumanization,” and the manner in which an entire people (for Fanon, Algerians) can be dehumanized under conditions of colonialism. On this basis, she challenges me on one particular point, asking “are the perpetrators themselves actually objectifying, derealizing their victims or is something else going on?” Why, she continues, is it necessary that they be dehumanized? After all, it seems “it is possible to kill and not dehumanize.” So Stevenson wonders if it is “us,” the secular, neo-liberal “we,” that, as consumers of narcoviolence, are doing most of the dehumanizing work. The idea being that our secular, neo-liberal, conception of personhood is already objective and dehumanizing, so that what it means to be a person fits a secular and commercial worldview. Her suggestion is that ethnography can help us here and suspects that (given my own account of narco-corridos and the famous narco cemetery, Jardines de Humaya) what we will find when we interrogate narco-culture on this point is a non-secular conception of personhood whereby “the time of personhood” is “not limited to the physical body”—personhood itself is something that our secular, neo-liberal, concept of “person” does not capture. Stevenson suggests (in line with the “Mexican philosophy of death” that I allude to in the book’s introduction) that “narcos have eschewed the neoliberal/biopolitical version of the self” leading to the view that my “life” can go on after my physical death in my reputation, in the legends that I create through my actions, in stories about the violence I inflict. The real problem, she concludes, is that “we”—secular, neo-liberals— cannot let go of this objectified view of the self, making it so that for us dehumanization and killing must go hand-in-hand.

In general, I tend to agree with Stevenson. I do think there is a conception of life and death at work that the neo-liberal, secular “we” is not quite understanding and which lends the spectacle of narcoviolence its horrifying appearance; and, it is this same thing which renders this “we” speechless. And who is this “we”? It is the universal "we." The “we” for whom everything is spectacle and profit (or loss). However, the “we” of A Sense of Brutality is not the universal “we.” My own speechlessness is not a secular, neo-liberal speechlessness. As I say at the start, the proximity of this phenomenon—to myself, my culture, my family—has placed me somewhere within the spectacle and rendered me philosophically responsible. This is not to deny that I am likewise a consumer of narco-culture and its corresponding violent spectacle; I am merely affirming my place in the order of the abstract “we,” asserting my concreteness and my duty to say what renders that “we” speechless.

Finally, Basit Kareem Iqbal’s “On the Generalization of Brutality” interrogates the notion of brutality while considering it a concept generalizable to other scenes of violent upheaval and destruction. Iqbal has Syria in mind (a country I mention in the book as a point of contrast). For Iqbal, Syria becomes a locus of reflection, just as Mexico was for me. Iqbal’s suggestion is that the concepts and implications of A Sense of Brutality can be taken further; he places me in dialogue with thinkers who take Syria as a starting point, where besides brutality, cruelty, and de-realization, we can think “atrocity” and “deformation.” Such a dialogue is precisely what I hoped would happen when writing this book. Implicit in that act was my wish that such reflections would be transposed into other spaces and other crises where “the social production of indifference” is well underway.

But Iqbal does have some reservations. Perhaps as a function of my methodological starting point, Iqbal picks up on a shortcoming to which Toscano and Stevenson had already alluded—namely, the notion that the authorial witness to the brutality of narco-culture, and to brutality more generally, tends to stand outside the zone of conflict, so that the real impact of the testimony is not at all clear. In other words, the “we” that stands as witness to the “atrocities” is, ultimately, a detached, and impersonal, “we.” And that such detachment helps no one. The implication is that the work of witnessing (such as my “phenomenological intervention”) must be attached to a commitment, to a pledge, or to a sacrifice. Iqbal writes: “the normalization of evil and the generalization of brutality call us to become not witnesses but martyrs.” I take this to be a challenge, not only to me, but to the neo-liberal, secular “witness” in general, to the writer who in scholarly zeal reports but does not participate, does not contribute. The question becomes, then, how? What is the call to action attached to the generalization of brutality, especially in cases where hopelessness is all we have? I am unable to offer an answer to this challenge, one that echoes the challenge posed long ago by Marx in the last of his famed Feuerbachian theses.

So I offer only the opportunity think about violent excess, death, and derealization as situated phenomena impacting our world. My reflections into Mexican narco-culture bring me to consider the possibility that such excess becomes invisible through repetition and reproduction; that when it’s every-day and everywhere, we can no longer see it. The interventions brought together in this symposium take my work in wholly different directions in profound and decisive ways. They also point toward horizons of possible investigation. One obvious direction is comparative approaches that bring together ethnography, cultural anthropology, sociology, and philosophy in a more robust way. I do not do this in A Sense of Brutality for the simple reason that my goal was to think through the phenomenon without arriving at a normative conclusion. However, if impact is what is required, then philosophizing about violence (brutality, horror, cruelty, and so on) is not enough—this must be a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort, originating in those spaces of conflict and involving, as much as possible, the victims and the martyrs.

I am humbled by the attention my book has received and for the responses it has evoked. I thank the editors of Milestones as well as Alberto Toscano, Darren Byler, Jorge Nuñez, Norman Ajari, Lisa Stevenson, and Basit Iqbal for their generous readings. While I may not agree with every criticism levelled here, or every reading, I am indebted to each contributor for thinking with me about something that I find so alarming and yet so timely.