Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

“[A]nd each day hundreds of new orphans, Arabs and French, awakened in every corner of Algeria, sons and daughters without fathers who would now have to learn to live without guidance and without heritage” – Albert Camus, ‘ The First Man ’. In the early months of 1958, Hneri Alleg’s La Question was published in France and caused an immediate scandal for its first-hand description of torture by the French military in Algeria. For Alleg, the scourge of institutionalized torture not only afflicted the native Algerians, but functioned as “a school of perversion for young Frenchman”. In the long course of the war (1954-1962), dehumanization of the enemy led to increasingly brutal manifestations of violence. Albert Camus bemoaned the war for its extreme tactics and for severing two interconnected communities. However, these two communities, the indigenous and the European, had never constituted an organic whole. Part of the strategic logic of Nationalist terrorism was to provoke a...

“When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.” - Charles Darwin (1). Darwin of course was unjustified in his belief; fear seems to be the most universal of emotions both for human beings and the greater animal kingdom. This emotion though is not simply reserved in human life in the struggle for existence; we feel fear and anxiety when we make choices about the direction of our lives. This is our struggle for meaning. The current piece will focus on discourses of and relevant to that struggle and concepts surrounding it. Linking discourses diverse as logic and the Abrahamic religions to find the structure of this struggle. In ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ Wittgenstein argued that: “Propositions cannot represent the logical form: this mirrors itself in the propositions” (2).T...