The logic of hatred and its social and historical expressions: From the great witch-hunt to terror and present-day djiha
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The logic of hatred and its social and historical expressions: From the great witch‑hunt to terror and present‑day djihadism Jean Greisch1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In two important books, the French philosopher Jacob Rogozinski analyses the logic of hatred underlying the great witch-hunt at the beginning of modern times, the period of terror following the French and the Russian Revolution and present-day djihadism. According to his analysis, the same logic of hatred is at work in these historical phenomena. The confrontation with the martyrs-murderers of djihadism, challenges the self-understanding of the defenders of democracy. Just as, on the level of religion, one must give up the dream of a reformation that would make Islam more « moderate », and help the Islamic believers become more radical, but otherwise than more fanatical, by rediscovering their forgotten treasures, on a political level, democracy too needs to be radicalized. Keywords Witch-hunt · Terror · Djihad · Hatred · Sacrifice Jacob Rogozinski, Ils m’ont haï sans raison. De la chasse aux sorcières à la Terreur, Paris: Cerf, 2015. ISBN: 978-2204105132 (Softcover), € 22,82 Jacob Rogozinski, Djihadisme: le retour du sacrifice, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2017. ISBN: 978-2220088143 (Softcover), € 14,65 “The heart has its reasons, that reason ignores; we know this from a thousand things,”1 states one of the most famous Thoughts of Blaise Pascal, underlying his definition of faith: “It is the heart and not reason which feels God. This is faith: God sensible to the heart, not to reason.”2 1
Pascal (1972: Pensée 277). Ibid., Pensée 278.
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* Jean Greisch [email protected] 1
Institut Catholique de Paris, Paris, France
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J. Greisch
Among the “thousand things” that Pascal refers to, one of the most disturbing is the irrational hatred which leads some humans to commit the worst of atrocities, apparently without feeling any remorse. “They hate me without a cause,” sighs the Psalmist three times in Psalm 35: “without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit, which without cause they have digged for my soul.” (v.7). Who are these people who surround the Psalmist, gnashing upon him with their teeth (v.16) and winking with the eye that hate him without a cause (v.19)? They are not aggressors coming from outside, but his former friends! The same complaint directed against a “hatred without cause” is repeated in Psalm 69 and echoed in the Gospel of John (Jn 15, 25). In choosing this biblical topic for the title of his study of the great witch-hunt at the beginning of modern times, a process of persecution that caused around ten thousand victims between the middle of the fifteenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries, the Strasbourg philosopher Jacob Rogozinski makes a fundamental hermeneutic option that highlights also his interpretation of djihadism in his later book: Djihadisme. Le retour du sacrifice.3 Should one leave the analysis of these phenomena to professional historians, sociologists and political scientists,
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