### Ruptures

# Ruptures

### *Anthropologies of Discontinuity in Times of Turmoil*

Edited by Martin Holbraad, Bruce Kapferer and Julia F. Sauma

First published in 2019 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT

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Holbraad, M., Kapferer, B. and Sauma, J.F. (eds). 2019. *Ruptures: Anthropologies of Discontinuity in Times of Turmoil.* London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.14324/111.9781787356184

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### Contents

### List of figures

### List of contributors

**Tobia Farnetti** is Honorary Research Associate at University College London, where he completed his PhD. His main areas of research are Japan and the intersection of religion, politics and aesthetics.

**Stephan Feuchtwang** is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. His publications include *After the Event: The Transmission of Grievous Loss in Germany, China and Taiwan* (Berghahn Books, 2011); and *The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts: Chinese Lessons for Adequate Theory* (De Gruyter, 2010).

**Carol J. Greenhouse** is Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her publications include *The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States* (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); *A Moment's Notice: Time Politics across Cultures* (Cornell University Press, 1996); and *Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town* (Cornell University Press, 1994).

**Martin Holbraad** is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. His publications include *The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition* (Cambridge University Press, 2016, co-authored); *Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination* (University of Chicago Press, 2012); and *Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically* (Routledge, 2007, co-edited).

**Caroline Humphrey** is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include *The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism* (Cornell University Press, 2002, Heldt Prize); *Marx Went Away, but Karl Stayed Behind* (University of Michigan Press, 1998); and *Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm* (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

**Bruce Kapferer** is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen (Norway). His publications include *2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche and Anthropology* (University of Chicago Press, 2014); *Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia* (Berghahn, 2011; Smithsonian, 1998); *The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power* (Chicago, 1997); *A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka* (University of Indiana Press, 1987 and 1991); and *Strategy and Transaction in an African Factory* (Manchester University Press, 1972).

**Stine Krøijer** is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Her publications include *Figurations of the Future: Forms and Temporalities of Left Radical Politics in Europe* (Berghahn, 2015).

**Anja Kublitz** is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aalborg. Her publications include 'Escalations: Theorizing Sudden Accelerating Change' (*Anthropological Theory*, 2018, co-authored) and 'From Revolutionaries to Muslims: Liminal Becomings across Palestinian Generations in Denmark' (*International Journal of Middle East Studies*, 2016). She is currently working on a monograph entitled *Life of Catastrophes: Mutable Conflicts among Palestinians in Denmark*.

**Morten Axel Pedersen** is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. His publications include *Urban Hunters: Dealing and Dreaming in Times of Transition* (Yale University Press, 2019, co-authored); *The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition* (Cambridge University Press, 2016, co-authored); and *Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia* (Cornell University Press, 2011).

**Joel Robbins** is Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. His research interests include the study of religion, cultural change, values and ethics. Among numerous other books and articles, he is author of *Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society* (University of California Press, 2004), and 'Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity' (*Current Anthropology*, 2007).

**Michael Rowlands** is Emeritus Professor of Material Culture at University College London. His publications include a chapter in *De la Mascarade au Film Video: transmettre le diaboloque en Afrique de l'Ouest* (Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2012); *Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative*  *Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa* (Left Coast Press, 2007, co-edited); and *Social Transformations in Archaeology: Global and Local Perspectives* (Routledge, 1998).

**Ramon Sarró** is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His publications include *The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone* (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

**Julia F. Sauma** is Senior Researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Her publications include 'Carnal Words: On Re-Membering and Re-Forgetting, Being and Not Being, among the Children of the Erepecuru' (*Revista de Antropologia*, 2016); and 'Mutual Engagements, an Afroindigenous Ethnographic Reflection' (*Cadernos de Campo*, 2014). She is currently preparing a monograph entitled *Collective: A Maroon Sociology*.

**Michele Serafini** is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His research areas are Nepal and the anthropology of politics and play.

**Edward Simpson** is a Professor of Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His publications include *The Political Biography of an Earthquake: Aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat, India* (Hurst, 2013); and *Muslim Society and the Western Indian Ocean: The Seafarers of Kachchh* (Routledge, 2006).

**Lisheng Zhang** is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, whose main areas of research are China and Heritage.

### Acknowledgements

This book is the result of the sustained interaction between the research teams of two projects funded by the European Research Council: *Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons*, led by Bruce Kapferer (ERC-2013-ADG, 340673), and *Making Selves, Making Revolutions: Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics*, led by Martin Holbraad (ERC-2013-CoG, 617970, CARP). Most of the chapters of the volume were presented at our event *Rupture*, which was held at University College London in February 2017 and co-sponsored by the research project *Escalations: A Comparative Ethnographic Study of Accelerating Change*, led by Lars Højer and funded by the Danish Research Council. We thank all of the participants in that event for their contributions. We are also grateful to Chris Penfold for chaperoning the book through to publication so skilfully.

### Introduction: Critical Ruptures

Martin Holbraad, Bruce Kapferer and Julia F. Sauma

The unsettling effects of rupture, understood as a radical and often forceful form of discontinuity, are central to current perceptions of a world in turmoil. How far might a sense of rupture – of a world that is serially breaking with itself – be an occasion to transform conceptions of social and political transformation? And how might the ruptures and fissures that lie at the heart of such experiences of turmoil instigate a break in the way we think about them? This volume casts a sharp focus on rupture as the active ingredient in some of the most defining experiences of our time, including the rise of populist politics, the corollary impulse towards protest and even revolutionary change, as well as moves towards violence and terror, and the responses that these moves elicit. The volume's central contention is that a concern with different experiences of rupture lies at the heart of these diverse phenomena. Gaining a handle on the ways the world around us is changing, therefore, demands paying attention to how burgeoning forms of rupture, some of them familiar (e.g. populism, protest, revolution), others apparently new (e.g. global/virtual spectacles of terror, natural disasters, responses to environmental catastrophe) are constituted, experienced, and even desired for their own sake.

One of this volume's prime concerns is therefore to expose what, after Spinoza, we call the 'dual aspect' of rupture: while rupture operates as an inherently negative moment – a critical cut or 'switch-point' (Weber 1930)1 that instigates a significant break with existing conditions – by the same token it can act as a positive or dynamic impulse towards escape, redirection, reconstitution and sometimes renewal. In our conceptualization, then, ruptures are moments at which value emerges through a break with something. Focusing on the co-implication of emergence and negation in times of rupture, we suggest, allows us to break away from conventional functionalist orientations (e.g. that link continuity with change) or those of a dialectical or transformational kind that beg questions as to the values of what is to come. It also allows us to steer in a new direction analyses that tend to view change as a piecemeal affair undergirded by continuities of structure and process (e.g. Sahlins 1985; Latour 1999), as well as a more recent inclination to celebrate discontinuity as the moment in which the new might emerge (e.g. Badiou 2003; Robbins 2004, 2007, 2010; cf. Humphrey 2008).

By thematizing rupture as a radical, sometimes violent and even brutal form of discontinuity, the volume lends a harder edge to contemporary discourses, both in social theory and public debate and policy, couched in terms of novelty, collaborative creativity and emergence. At the same time, sharpening the analytical focus onto questions of rupture serves to counter the politically freighted tendency to view contemporary upheavals through the prism of 'crisis' (see also Roitman 2013). Taking a longer view, the volume's emphasis on the dual aspect of rupture resonates with Victor Turner's focal concern with the mutual relationship between disruption and reconstitution in the phenomena he treated as 'liminal' (Turner 1969; 1975) – a notion that continues to hold a spell over generations of anthropologists, albeit sometimes as something of a conceptual catch-all. Furthermore, attention to the mutual constitution of discontinuity and renewal in specific ethnographic settings allows us to offer alternatives to the revival of Joseph Schumpeter's notion of 'creative destruction' (1994) in sometimes wide-eyed contemporary debates about 'disruptive innovation' (e.g. Christensen et al. 2015). Indeed, our orientation towards the concept of rupture implies no judgement as to its value, suggesting neither a pessimistic nor an optimistic assessment of its impact. How ruptures are evaluated by the people caught up in them, and how these evaluations emerge and interact with one another, are for us open ethnographic questions.

In the rest of this introduction we make two moves towards substantiating the volume's perspective on rupture as a concept and concern peculiarly attuned – indeed pressing and necessary – for the contemporary juncture. First, we place the idea of rupture in the intellectual landscape not only of the development of anthropology – the discipline from which the chapters of this volume speak – but also of broader social and political theoretical trends in recent decades. Most crucially, we address the apparent aversion towards the negative moment of rupture in a lot of the writing that has been associated with the late twentieth-century shift away from the certainties of 'modernity'. Following on from that, our second move will be to explore how an anthropological multiplication and reformulation of rupture as a variable object of ethnographic inquiry could serve to rescue the harder edge of rupture that, we feel, is so needed to make sense of the tumultuous transformations of the contemporary world. Is it possible to take seriously the criticisms that have been made of standard 'modern' conceptions of rupture – for example, its association with the violence of revolutionary politics, or the closure of dialectical progressions – without losing the analytical power of the very concept of rupture? To make an argument that such a move is not only possible but necessary, we draw substantially on the chapters in this volume, which, taken together, demonstrate the critical power of rupture as a concept of and for our times.

### Old and new ruptures

Anthropology itself, as a discipline, saw its beginnings in a moment of profound rupture, making some of its greatest contributions by witnessing and recording the violent emergence and global expansion of European and North American power. Shifts in anthropological focus and thought throughout the discipline's development have been no less conditioned in the rupture of what some might describe as the decline of the West. While anthropology is in many ways the discipline of rupturing moments, however, its traditional point of departure has been normative in orientation, examining societies as more or less completed systems, often presented as closed, self-reproducing orders. The forces of rupture connected to Western expansion were therefore viewed as principally disruptive and destructive of a static unchanging traditional order that was brought in from out of the cold, as it were.

Attempts were made by some to make change more central to anthropological analysis, and Gluckman (e.g. 1955; 1963) and the Manchester School were arguably at the forefront of this reorientation (Evens and Handelman 2006; Meinert and Kapferer 2015). For them change was the condition of existence, normative consistency was the exception. Gluckman and his colleagues therefore made process the centre of their methodological innovations, developing around the concept of situational analysis, which concentrated on events or moments of rupture, disruption and disturbance in the ongoing activities of everyday and not so everyday life. Events in this approach exhibited what Gluckman and his colleagues discussed to be the logics of practice relative to the situations in which they were provoked. They were windows on the continually emerging structures of existence that were highly variant – dependent on the problem at hand – in their situated practice, rather than being consistent or normative in the ideal typical sense apparent in many ethnographies to this day. Anthropological description as abstracted empiricism (Mills 2000) was what characterized the bulk of ethnography at the time: the event not as a dynamic or process of the continual construction and reconstruction of value – in which the diverse and differentiating potential of value in practice was revealed – but as an illustration of overarching value of a normative sort. In this perspective, events were generally treated as moments of conflict, and breaks and disruptions in the ongoing flow of life – ruptures, in effect – were integral to the continuity of existence.

The Manchester group conceived of rupturing moments as integral to what had been conceived as stasis, as well as to transformations in the orders of sociocultural existence. The dichotomy between the modern and the traditional – an ideologically legitimating move for Western dominance, consequent of the irruption of its emergence to power, and these days much thrown into question – was problematized. Furthermore, the tendency at that time for anthropologists to regard the societies they studied as closed systems was criticized as a limited analytical strategy. Rupturing events were reconceived as born of the structural contradictions in idea, structure and practice, as always in some way or another produced by their entanglement with historical forces in larger global realities.

However, in more recent decades it feels as if the concept of rupture has somehow fallen by the wayside for some, outmoded by a putative shift from the age of extremes of the twentieth century to a twenty-first century of multitudes and assemblies, to take Hobsbawm's (1995) and Hardt and Negri's (2004) books' titles as somehow representative. Rupture, to be sure, connotes radical change, and the desire for sundry forms of transformation, including truly radical ones, has hardly gone away. Yet rupture also connotes negativity – breaking away from things as well as changing them, tearing things apart as well as encouraging them to flourish in new directions, brutally razing things to the ground as well as sowing the seeds for their emergent flourishing. If the hegemony of what, for the purposes of this broad exposition, we will be tagging as a contemporary ethos of the 'life-affirmative' is anything to go by, however, it would seem that these kinds of investments in the moment of the negative have been out for a good while in social theory at large. Process is preferable to essence (Braidotti 2006; Stengers 2014); relations go before entities (Barad 2007; Latour 2005); assemblages obviate social groups (DeLanda 2006); difference trumps identity (cf. Laruelle 2010); exceptions rule over rules (Agamben 2005); the multiple trumps the negative (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).

Particularly towards the end of the twentieth century, when these choices were most hotly debated, the shift from the negativity of rupture to the affirmation of life was glossed as a transition from modernity to postmodernity. It is significant for our purposes here to note how close to the surface of those debates the concept of rupture lay. For example, one of the concerns that rode on these critiques of modernity was the apparent demise of 'grand narratives' (Lyotard 1984). Certainly, the very idea of rupture seems 'grand' in just that sense. Imagined as momentous, oneoff events that change the course of history, ruptures are, as Reinhardt Koselleck (2005) wrote in relation to the modern concept of revolution in particular, 'metahistorical': they provide the definitive temporal structure of the open, forward-moving thrust of chronological time that the grand narratives of modernity take as their premise. Indeed, if ruptures also connote a moment of temporal evacuation – the void that the hiatus of their break opens up – they rehearse also the definitive ontological structure of what is perhaps the grandest narrative of all, namely the Judaeo-Christian conception of creation *ex nihilo* (Rubenstein 2012).

Plenty of anthropologists have taken these critiques of the grand narratives of modernity to heart, contributing substantially to them or, often, adopting them as a diffuse theoretical aesthetic. The logical priority of relations over entities, for example, has been developed systematically out of first structuralist principles into a powerful post-structural analytical paradigm for both feminist (Strathern 1988; 1995) and postcolonial purposes (Viveiros de Castro 2003; 2013), giving rise to what today is discussed in the discipline as a 'relational' approach (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). Similarly, the conceptual ammunition provided by the emphasis in social theory on the contingency and porousness of all identities, giving logical priority to becoming over being (e.g. Ingold 2011), has for some time now been deployed by anthropologists against the threat of essentialism, which, it is felt, dogged earlier generations' accounts of social and cultural diversity (e.g. Herzfeld 1997). Still, partly owing to the analytical traction of these approaches, no doubt, and partly owing to the general philosophical atmosphere connoted by the prefix 'post-', which still holds so much sway, an aversion to entities, essences, fixity, permanence and any hard and fast way of distinguishing one thing from another seems to have become normative in anthropology today. The logic of both/and, to put it figuratively, is now simply *better* than that of either/or.

Critical assessments of the effects these developments in contemporary anthropology (and social theory more broadly) have been growing in recent years, exploring ways in which this life-affirmative theoretical aesthetic stands in the way of getting an analytical handle on such phenomena as individual subjectivity (e.g. Humphrey 2008; Laidlaw et al. 2018), forms of 'detachment' (Candea et al. 2015) and other phenomena that in one way or another could be described as 'non-relational' (cf. Venkatesan et al. 2012). At the same time, the 'endurance' (Stoler 2016) and therefore relational dimensions of the negative – structures of racial exclusion and 'zones of non-being' (Fanon 2007) established through violent and undesired instances of rupture, such as the transatlantic slave trade (Sojoyner 2017; Alves 2018) and the European colonization of Native American lands (Simpson 2014) – have been brought to the fore of anthropological thinking. Powerfully describing how the ideals that emerged from modern instances of 'rupture' – such as freedom, the individual and democracy – are entwined with the violent breaches created and maintained by an ongoing, fundamentally racist Euro-American colonial project, these texts push us to consider how the practices of refusal and escape that emerge as a result of such breaches can reorient anthropology's analysis of structures of power, of strategies of resistance and instances of radical autonomy. Crucially, it is from their dual capacity to both theoretically unmask 'the field of racial annihilation we call civil society' (Alves 2018, 13) and consider forms of black and indigenous agency that often appear as contradictory – such as black youths' involvement with crime in Brazil or Native American claims to 'nested sovereignty' (Simpson 2014) – that these authors take the impetus to question the unexamined, often heroically charged deployment of the concept of resistance, and invite further ethnographic research.

Building on this work, in relation to the conceptualization of rupture in particular, we make two critical comments about the broader implications of the hegemony of the life-affirmative – one political, the other theoretical. On the politics, it is important to note that the normative rise of life-affirmation in anthropology and elsewhere has been something of a double-edged sword. On one side, it has been fuelled by a desire to break down the certainties upon which structures of power and domination are built. If colonialism, nationalism or the patriarchy, say, are social constructs, then resisting them must involve deconstructing their claims to essences that hold sway over time, critically exposing their fluidity and contingency, rendering them more fragile and reversible in the process. In such a context, any insistence on essence or attempt to fix an identity smacks of violence – a power-move to be resisted (even when that power-move is itself framed as a form of resistance to the life-affirming hegemony of what the populist far-Right in the USA, for example, deride as 'the liberal establishment').

The other side of the sword, however, cuts in the opposite direction. If all that is solid melts into air in this particular way (Berman 1988), then experiences of exclusion and alternative political projects or proposals are also subject to de-essentializing deconstruction. Indeed, one way to think of the passage from an age of extremes to one of multitudes and assemblies is as a transition from a politics of clashing proposals for the good life (e.g. free market versus state socialism) to a politics of difference, in which keeping the horizon for such proposals open becomes the prime political objective (e.g. Holbraad et al. 2014). While potentially welcome, positive assertions in favour of an alternative political order must be themselves founded on essentializing assumptions that close down the scope for multiplying diversities. Affirming just that scope, then, by turning the process of an open politics into a political project in its own right, is the point at which otherwise contrasting hues of liberalism, libertarianism and Left radicalism meet in the cause of autonomy, freedom, diversity, inclusion, creativity and so on. What is lost in this (or overcome, depending on the view one takes) is what David Scott (2004, 96) calls the 'heroic figuration' of a politics centred on overthrowing one political order in favour of another. Such a view of politics, Scott suggests, following Hannah Arendt (1965) as well as Koselleck (2005), is distinctly modern, and bound up with a post-Enlightenment conception of revolution in particular, seen as 'a form of change that looks forward into an unknown and novel future' (Scott 2004, 89). What is lost or overcome, in other words, is a politics of opposition, antagonism, clash and mutual exclusion, including the mutual negation of opposites – a politics of either/or, of down with this and up with that; in short, a politics of rupture.

In fact, ongoing Left-radical debates regarding the relevance – indeed the possibility – of revolutionary action (as distinct, say, from political activism) are telling of the apparent demise of rupture as a political option. Invested in violence and heroic class struggle, revolution is now often seen as a cipher of failure, the failure of modernity's failure as it were; an outmoded aspiration wedded to outmoded grand narratives about wholesale social and historical transformation. As in the much-cited adage, pronounced with mournful irony by Marxist critics of postmodern images of life-affirmative emancipation, in the post-Fordist, post-Soviet era it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Jameson 2003). Indeed, while icons of the contemporary Left such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou may proclaim the virtues of a revolutionary action that '"resignif[ies]" terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice' (Žižek 2000, 326), the deliberately rearguard character of such provocations (invoking Lenin, Stalin and Mao over and again) bears out the notion that debates about emancipatory politics on the Left have left grandstanding rhetoric of 'historical rupture' behind. As the German environmental protesters discussed in Stine Krøijer's chapter (this volume) also testify, Leftradical calls to emancipation in the era of multitudes (as opposed to the era, say, of class struggle) are much more likely to take the form of prefiguring assemblies (Juris 2008), temporary autonomous zones (Bey 1991), deterritorialized nomads and migrants (Hardt and Negri 2000), and other such forms of decentred insurrection performed contingently and on a local scale (see also Graeber 2018). Revolutions, on this kind of view, are to be celebrated not as violent overthrows of existing orders of power, but rather as festivals of carnivalesque expressions of desire. Gilles Deleuze's link between his philosophy of difference and affirmation with the repudiation of the politics of revolutionary rupture in the final pages of *Difference and Repetition* delivers the point pithily:

History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences.  Only the shadows of history live by negation: the good enter into it with all the power of a posited differential or a difference affirmed … That is why real revolutions have the atmosphere of fêtes. (1994, 268)

This leads us to our second point, which concerns the deeper philosophical roots of the bracketing of rupture in favour of life-affirming processes of differentiation and creativity. At issue here is the philosophical fate of negation in particular, understood as a constitutive feature of the either/or logic that seems to have fallen out of philosophical favour, being seen now as a cipher of a peculiarly modern tendency to treat change as a matter of dialectics. Marxist social theorists John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros and Sergio Tischle (2009) see this as a general characteristic of post-structuralist philosophy in the wake of the experience of state socialist 'dialectical materialism' in the USSR and elsewhere, which they see as rooted in Hegel's 'apologetic' dialectics (as opposed to Theodore Adorno's 'critical' negative dialectics – Bonnet 2009: 42; cf. Adorno 1990). To state the charge they cite Michael Hardt and *Colectivo Situaciones* (in a somewhat rough translation):

The dialectical operation consists of putting an end to that which has none, giving a defined orientation to that which has no finality, taking (overcoming) the previous moments by rescuing what is useful (preserving) in the service of a new affirmation, prohibiting every consciousness of an irreducible diversity, of an excess that is not retaken. (2007, cited in Holloway et al. 2009, 4)

The problem with dialectics, then, is that it impoverishes difference, turning it into contradiction, replacing the openness of affirmation with the closure of negation. On such a view, Holloway et al. suggest:

Life becomes a positive concept rather than the struggle against the negation of life. There is in general a positivization of thought. Struggles are seen as struggles for, rather than being principally struggles against. The centrality of crisis (a negative concept) is lost and replaced by an emphasis on restructuring (a positive concept) ... This has not only theoretical but also political consequences: it can lead to a blurring of the distinction between negation and synthesis, between refusal and reconciliation, between an uprising and the reconciling government that follows the uprising. (2009, 6)

From their trenchantly critical theoretical perspective, Holloway et al. lament the loss of critical potential that negation affords. They write:

What we need is not to reject dialectics as such, but only the synthetic understanding of it: to insist, in other words, on a negative dialectics, a restless movement of negation that does not lead necessarily to a happy ending. History is seen not as a series of stages, but as the movement of endless revolt. (2009, 7)

It is not our intention here to take sides on these controversies – neither the political question of whether revolution is still possible or desirable, nor the related philosophical question of whether negation and the dialectical view of history that it supports ought to be rescued or abandoned. Instead, distinctively anthropological, our purpose is to unhook the concept of rupture from these debates by multiplying it in line with the variety of contingent ethnographic situations in which, as the chapters of the book show, rupture features as a matter of concern.

To be sure, this is in part the standard anthropological response to any normative controversy: take a concept that in a given debate features as normative premise, stand back from it critically and then multiply it ethnographically to show that other ways of conceiving it and experiencing it are possible – anthropology as the vantage of the 'otherwise' (Povinelli 2012). Indeed, our interest in making such a move on rupture is expressed in the plural of our title: *ruptures*. In this connection, a book in political philosophy by literary and cultural theorists Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan (2012), titled *Rupture* in the singular, serves as useful foil by the contrast it presents. Having defined rupture as 'the occurrence of the impossible, when the very ground under our feet shifts in order to transform the point from which we see' (2012, 4), the authors go on to scope the remit of a new political philosophy that, rather than concerning itself with the 'distribution of power' (2012, 3), takes rupture as its starting point:

The fundamental question of politics is in not how to assume or contest power but how one relates to rupture ... Within the logic of rupture, all subjects are irreducibly singular and free. The rupture frees individuals from the despotic rule or nature or tradition, and it constitutes them as singular subjects. But it also introduces a principle of equality that binds subjects to one another in an experience of human solidarity. Belief, universality, solidarity, equality, freedom, singularity, and humanity are neither natural values nor the achievements of culture. They are the product of the rupture that causes culture to arise out of nature or the rupture that causes a new social order to emerge from an older one. Rupture marks the creation of value out of nothing, and the paradigm for this creation is the emergence of signification itself. (2012, 11)

From our anthropological point of view, the problem with this way of approaching rupture is not just how it enshrines within it so many of the cardinal principles of an emblematically modern conception – culture rising out of nature, freedom from the despotism of tradition, and the emergence of new social orders as a matter of breaking with old ones. The issue is rather how the concept of rupture here is pressed to the service of a normatively conceived political programme, based now not just on cardinal principles but also on cardinal virtues, expressing an image of the good life consisting of solidarity, equality, freedom and so forth. Our anthropological tack here, by contrast, is to place such normative points of departure between brackets in order to explore how far conceptions and experiences of rupture can be multiplied ethnographically, rendered contingent in a way that might display alternative sets of possibilities for thinking, including for thinking politically.

Still, our desire for ethnographic multiplication also has a more pointed critical purpose, namely that of disentangling the concept of rupture from its putative modernity, to render it capacious enough to address the contemporary circumstance of turmoil. As we have seen, one reason why the notion of rupture is sidelined in much contemporary social and political writing is that it is seen as bound up with both political and philosophical projects that now seem outmoded – revolution and dialectics being prime examples of projects that, with the advent of the 'post' era of the late twentieth century seemed exactly the kinds of things one ought to be 'post' about. Regardless of whether it is fair, the idea that rupture is somehow stuck in the twentieth century raises the question of whether it could yet be unstuck from it, for use in the twenty-first. Can the baby of rupture (if such it is) be rescued from the bathwater of modernity (ditto)? Can one maintain one's interest in rupture as a constitutive element of social reality – indeed a potent political force – without thereby also committing to the baggage of the grand narratives it has so typically carried in the past? Can one think rupture *without* the heroic politics or revolution, the closed *telos* of self-transcending dialectics, the monotheistic mould of *ex nihilo* creation, and all the *Sturm und Drang* of the forward thrust of history?

To bring rupture back into the fray in this way, we suggest, is necessary when confronted with a world experienced as turmoil. We may remain agnostic as to whether something called modernity has indeed been surpassed. What seems patently obvious to us, however, is that any notion that negativity, contradiction, fissure and violence have somehow been on the wane, and that the world around us is now better understood in terms of the affirmation of life in and as difference, is just wrong. If there is something in the common sense, not only of commentators but also of ordinary people as well as protagonists across the globe, that new forms of terror, authoritarianism and populism, not to mention rising inequality and pending environmental catastrophe, are all encroaching, then a place for rupture must be found in our thinking about these circumstances. We can indeed sidestep the grand narratives that earlier versions of rupture-thinking supported, and open ourselves up to the shifts in attention that writings thinking after (if not post) modernity have produced – new 'arts of noticing', as Anna Tsing calls them (2015). Yet in doing so we need to retain the capacity for thinking with a harder edge – forms of understanding and analysis that can countenance the brutality of what is going on, and the perhaps irreducible conflicts and fissures that seem to be erupting in so many registers of life today.

The point, we should be clear, is not to use the concept of rupture as a lever for erecting new grand narratives of history, politics or human life in the round. Nor is our aim to use rupture in order to articulate a new political theory, fit for our times, as Slavoj Žižek (e.g. 2010) and Alain Badiou (2007) have sought to do in recent years – indeed, the traction their attempts to do so have gained in broader debates is itself telling of the renewed relevance of rupture in the contemporary setting. In fact, even philosophical projects that deploy notions of radical rupture to undo attempts to found politics on prior principles (God, Nature, Reason, Justice or indeed Conflict), tend to capitulate to the basic expectation that a political philosophy, as such, must provide some kind of normative criterion about what counts as 'political' in the first place (e.g. Marchart 2007). As anthropologists, we are more interested in political cosmologies of rupture than we are in its political philosophy – if by 'cosmologies' we designate the long-standing anthropological concern with charting the entities and relations that compose people's conception of the worlds they inhabit (Kapferer 2010; Abramson and Holbraad 2014; Sauma 2016). Ethnographic scrutiny of how ruptures of different kinds and in different senses are constituted and lived in varying social (as well as political) settings, we suggest, may provide the resources for exploring what alternatives to modern conceptions of rupture might look like. With reference to the chapters that follow, in the next section we set out some programmatic thoughts on how this might be done.

### On ethnographic ruptures

Given the dangers involved in reintroducing the negative into anthropological analysis, and the significant shifts in attention brought with postmodernist vitalism, how can we proceed? Our answer is to treat ruptures as a way of doing and describing, rather than as an explanatory lens, as offering a method of cutting through rather than resisting grand narratives, since resistance itself can so easily become yet another 'grand' axiom. This shift can be delineated by looking at the effects that thinking with rupture can have on the very different materials presented by the contributors to this volume, effects that we would distinguish into a series of possible forms of interference in the production of grand narratives. The first of these effects reveals the multiple dynamics that lie underneath the surface gloss of heroic, emblematic events or contexts of rupture: the ethnographies and/or anthropological analyses contained here therefore pluralize singular moments of rupture, looking to the breaks within them. By describing what is produced at the moment of revolution, of populist electoral upheaval, of spiritual awakening as rupture rather than transformation, the authors can therefore point to the unexpected consequences of these significant moments for those who bear witness to them. Through this multiplying dynamic we therefore find heroism's more qualitative foundations: the radical uncertainty upon which its varying, impressive structures are built.

There are probably no grander instances of this than the great revolutions that open our volume, in Caroline Humphrey's analysis of the different scales of the rupture caused by the Terror during the French Revolution, and in Michael Rowlands, Stephan Feuchtwang and Lisheng Zhang's description of the cyclical relation between radical rupture and necessary repair in relation to the Chinese Communist Revolution and New Era. In the first of these meditations on the underside of heroic transformation, Humphrey's significant distinction between revolution and rupture is guided by the guillotine itself, and the temporal cut that it makes in our capacity to look at the French Revolution as a linear process. This emblematic killing machine produces something very different, not the replacement of one political whole with another – monarchy with republic – but the dismemberment of something previously considered whole, the body politic: a cut that contains not just a before and after but also the singular moment in which it happens. Witnesses to Louis XVI's decapitation and the ensuing period of the Terror are therefore seen to carry within them not only revolutionary fervour and national vitalism but 'new sensations, excitements, fears and strangely productive pathologies' (Humphrey, this volume) caused by the physical cut and gush of blood produced by the guillotine. Blood that repulses and royal blood that is collected and kept as keepsake, undoing the revolutionary neutralization of the royal body, producing numerous breaks within the revolutionary self, the revolution itself and the retelling of it: ruptures between those who were present and became energized by blood, and those who fell apart in witnessing the decapitations; between those who defended and those who criticized the violence. The 'we' of the Terror contains a rupture that is 'a shifting, temporary and multiple entity', that places the radical nature of the revolution in question by 'that spectral "thing" which had been cut off' (Humphrey, this volume) and in doing so also produces a break in the heroic 'we' of the most primordial of Euro-American revolutions.

While in the French case rupture and revolution are made distinct by the guillotine, in the Chinese case Rowlands, Feuchtwang and Zhang point in this volume to how revolutionary objects can also enact rupture – a break with the humiliation and repression of the past – not as a cleavage, not as a cut, but as a repair of the human: the re-establishment of some form of continuity with the potential of the people, something that is both new and ancient. Rupture, in this case, is not multiple but cyclical, not spectral but practised. The private museum collection analysed by the authors conveys this ethnographic instance of rupture, with its artful simultaneous claim to both a commitment to historical restoration and to support Xin Jinping's New Era. Adeptly negotiating potential accusations of 'historical nihilism' and therefore censorship – aimed at those who would deny the Party's revolutionary accomplishments, 'the historical inevitability of China's socialist path', through claims to historical objectivity – Fan Jianchuan's controversial and celebrated private collection of everyday objects, the waste of the Cultural Revolution, conjures the correct balance between facticity, patriotism and personal remembrance of revolutionary suffering. In doing so, these discarded, broken objects ensure that an obsolete past – and the people of that past – are given new life within Xi Jinping's drive to project a new global China. Rupture as repair can be seen as the non-narrative exposition of a revolutionary past – and loss – in a fast-paced, consumer-driven present that breaks with it: rupture as cyclical – it has happened before and will happen again but not in the same way – rather than as linear or singular, conjures an ambivalent history 'more fractured and open [to the] coincidence of norms and histories ... in which realities can be questioned and alternative futures can be seen enacted and propagated' (Rowlands, Feuchtwang and Zhang, this volume).

In both of these reflections about the multiple ruptures that lie beneath the veneer of singular revolutionary moments, we find the motile play between the different spatio-temporal scales of the events witnessed, experienced, portrayed and enacted, the play between rupture as past, present and future, as personal, national and universal phenomenon. This conforms to the suggestion made by Daniel Knight and Charles Stewart in a comparative study of recent experiences of 'economic crisis' in Southern Europe, that 'in moments of extreme crisis, time becomes elastic', and 'crises turn ordinary daily routine inside out and expose the seams of temporality to view' (2016, 3). Drawing on works in the philosophy and anthropology of time (e.g. Deleuze 1991; Serres and Latour 1995; Hirsch and Stewart 2005; Hodges 2010), Knight and Stewart explore how moments of crisis put the very notions of time and history in crisis. Familiar distinctions between past, present and future are compressed, collapsed or suspended in different ways, and people's historicity – their 'sense of the historical continuity grounding the present' (Knight and Stewart 2016) – becomes connected with scales of experience that may in ordinary times feel removed. Such temporal torsions, along with spatial and scalar ones with which they are often related, are certainly characteristic of the situations of rupture we examine in this book. Treating rupture as an object of ethnographic inquiry therefore implies also treating the constitution of time and history in each case as an ethnographic variable, much as Knight and Stewart do in their study of crisis.

To the extent that the concept of crisis is itself constitutive to the 'grand narrative' of modern historical reckoning, however, and has become a prominent ingredient of ideological formations of contemporary global capitalism (Roitman 2013; Masco 2017), we prefer to parse these temporal dimensions in terms of the concept of rupture, which carries less of this political and economic baggage. As an analytical concept, we suggest, crisis connotes the very grand narratives it diagnoses as unstable, while rupture has the potential to cut through them. Our emphasis on the cut here also allows us to relate to important bodies of work on memory, in anthropology and beyond that pre-date current emphases on crises and that have long reflected on the ways in which experiences of traumatic collective loss or breach (whether historical or not) inform everyday practice. Through numerous descriptions of the ways in which collective memory is maintained by repetition – that which allows regeneration and also 'continually "cuts" back to the start' (Snead, cited in Hartman 1997) – and takes place even when there is an 'inability to occupy an imagined prior condition or to bridge the divide of the split subject' (Hartman 1997, 75), such works push us to consider the different ways in which the temporal 'elasticity' of rupture is related to specific experiences of reconstitution, of re-encountering something previously known, and perhaps purposefully forgotten or taken away.

Nowhere is this more anthropologically and politically poignant in this volume, perhaps, than in Carol Greenhouse's description and analysis of Donald Trump's electoral victory in 2016 and its immediate aftermath: the way in which it 'unsettles habits of time, place, scale and standpoint'. Using the metaphor of temporal heat to characterize the sudden realizations and encounters, the sparks that occur at the moment of political rupture and of its unforeseeable consequences – such as the realization of having knowledge that one was not aware of before – Greenhouse challenges us to acknowledge the untenable continuity of relativism's 'cool indifference'. The destabilization of the political field and of anthropology's social distance is thus conjoined. In the gaps produced by this fissure, the author reveals the production of a different temporality and relativity, one more suited to the heat of this moment, so that 'ethnographic knowledge is inseparable from self-knowledge, knowledge of others in the world, others in oneself' (Greenhouse, this volume). In this context, Greenhouse experiments with other ways of knowing power, with identifying political agency through the signs constituted by people's experience of power and of powerlessness, with the personal, subjective dimensions of political rupture. In doing so hers is a call for anthropology to understand 'the diversity of people's practical experience of democracy (or lack of it) in their own lives' (Greenhouse, this volume). This is a call for full ethnographic relativity – a commitment to the multiple directions that rupture takes – widening a parallel space and time for the anthropologist's personal convictions as a visible source of insight.

The subjective or personal scale of political agency in the face of rupture is also a concern for Morten Pedersen's interlocutors in his chapter on the significant political influence of the Danish Protestant movement, but in a directly opposing way – usefully highlighting the multiplying effects of rupture at an ethnographic and analytical level. Pedersen's ethnography of a Lutheran movement in Denmark, in conjunction with his analysis of the ideas of key figures within it – such as the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard – reflects specifically on the significance of the experience of subjective rupture. However, in this case it is not political but existential rupture that is at stake: 'leaps' that arise from 'genuine faith' and, significantly, oppose all forms of political and societal upheaval. This is subjective rupture not as a future and outward-oriented break with the past, but as the inward re-entrance into the kingdom of God. As it is individualized, rupture is a conscious or indeed desired change, a transformation premised in everyday actions that, taken together, intone one's leap of faith, one's relation to God and therefore one's freedom. Rupture as leap, rupture as action rather than as historical event, transforms this notion spatio-temporally: rupture not in hindsight or as future promise, but as a constant present, as the condition of humans as detached or fallen parts of the kingdom of God. In this view, the attempt to 'change or improve this primordial fall or rupture in the form of progressive reforms, let alone political revolutions, are … evil and ungodly', for '[s]ince God is not of this world, you are in this world *not* supposed to relate to society and politics in a god-like and absolute way' (Krarup, 1987). In the Lutheran movement in Tidehverv, as described by Pedersen, we therefore find an explicit preoccupation with the different scales of rupture, with its multiplying capacity and as such a concern with how to keep it within a 'radically introspective' individual: apprehensions that have had a direct impact on the modern Danish nation state.

The individual, internalized rupture that defines the Danish Lutheran movement is probably something that the priest in Tobia Farnetti's chapter in this volume on conversion in Japanese Catholicism would repudiate to a certain degree; the life of his church is after all in its community activities. However, it is also the case that his flock, in converting to Catholicism, must struggle with rupture on a daily basis; as a result of internal and external impositions – from the priest himself and from Japanese society – they are being made to break with previous cultural forms and therefore with previous relations, past and present. In response to this demand for rupture, which also figures so prominently in anthropology's treatment of Christian conversion (Robbins 2004; 2007), Farnetti's interlocutors practise the blurring of the clear distinctions set from within and without, between previous and current lives. In personal histories Christian conversion figures as 'a flavour or an afterthought', as a gradual process lacking any sense of crisis and calling. In their apparently transgressive weekly drinking sessions particularly, there is no sense in which they are flouting Christian values, but instead seem to mark, as Farnetti notes, 'a particular affective way of engaging rupture' (Farnetti, this volume), by blurring the distinct lines that it draws. The result is that for a few fleeting hours, during evenings of drinking that are in a continuum with church life – since drunken conversations are dominated by church activities and people – the clear distinction between Christian and Japanese life, drawn by priest and by society, is collapsed, so that it seems that each encompasses the other simultaneously, without 'a definite direction or outcome' aside from establishing the indispensability between the two. Rupture in this sense can not only be multiple, but is also temporarily erasable; it can somehow also be refused.

If the erasability of rupture is particularly vivid in Farnetti's ethnography, it would be incorrect to say that this is the first time we encounter it in this volume, or indeed the last. From the very first two chapters we see, in relation to the French Revolution and to cyclical socialist reinventions in China, how the invention of powerful collective narratives is premised on the erasure of rupture, the erasure of terror and suffering. It also emerges, in a very different way, in Ramon Sarró's contribution to this volume, with the double rupture required for prophetic invention in West and Central Africa. If, in the Japanese case described by Farnetti, rupture is deliberately blurred, here putative ruptures are created through careful works of erasure. What emerges is an 'as if' rupture, which is very important for the inventor's claim to be an instrument of God, a prophet, but which is actually founded on a much more piecemeal and combinative basis, which needs to be 'erased' for invention to be recognized as such. So in Sarró's description of the creation of the language and 'graphemes' of Mandombe by Wabeladio Payi we encounter with tremendous precision the double aspect of rupture: destruction as tantamount to creation. In the case described by the author, double rupture occurs through the decontextualization of geometric elements from their tangible foundations, and then the disconnection of the final product from traditional influences – such as the inventor's conversations with Kinshasa artists, mathematicians, linguists and theologians. Invention is therefore the pragmatic use and breaking with material and immaterial origins, which must be erased or forgotten to denote originality: a process of synthesis, the capacity to 'connect the seemingly unconnectable', which allows Wabeladio to 'simultaneously introduce the new and revalue the old' (Sarró, this volume).

The interference involved in this creative process, and the effect that it can have on dominant narratives, leads us to focus on another way in which rupture emerges as an effective ethnographic device: not only does it render emblematic, unifying events multiple or invisible, by shifting the spatio-temporal coordinates and scales at stake, it can also create fissures in the concepts commonly used to oppose Euro-American grand narratives. We are thinking here specifically of notions such as resistance, which as other authors have noted (for example, Abu-Lhugod 1990; Kapferer and Taylor 2012; Mitchell 1990; Ortner 1995; Mbembe 2001) has the potential to be a stultifying grand narrative of subaltern/ minority political agency. Rupture, we believe, can act instead to reveal instances in which interference in dominant narratives is more strategic than resistance. In this way, the concept of rupture indicates the voids or gaps produced by acts that we might superficially identify as those of resistance, and the unexpected strategies of interference that fill those gaps. In thinking about her own work in this way, one of the volume's editors, Julia Sauma, suggests that perhaps the most powerful interference for us (the editors) to think with here comes not from prominent political events or religious practice but from apparently more peripheral examples: from what is generally considered to be the collateral damage of contemporary capitalist societies, as yet to be resolved by liberal practices of 'social justice'. Looking to her previous work with street children in Brazilian metropolises, for example, she argues that it is such non-axiomatic contexts that the plentiful gaps produced by thinking with ruptures are most explicit.

Sauma notes that there is a reflex reach for the apparently self-evident idea of socio-economic failure and the need for protective liberal framings when anthropologists are faced with such contexts. Childhood can do this to us. It is a powerful construct, sedimented in our minds and actions by law and everyday collective practice. So what does the ethnographer do when street children themselves persistently break with and escape from the notion that childhood is a spatially and temporally delimited, and therefore subordinate, condition – that the best place for children is under an adult gaze, and that childhood will inevitably end? The enduring return of children to violent streets even when other options are made available, and their practised escape from the end of childhood – such as by dissimulating their ages or forgetting birthdays (Sauma 2007) – are powerful examples of how rupture can be persistently enacted: as recurrent escape from and interference in dominant anti-Black contemporary ideals in Brazil, such as the virtues of security, labour and individual responsibility. Among the street children that she worked with for almost a decade, this interference took the form of performative play, through which they oscillated constantly between the position of dangerous criminal, lost child and responsible workers, to name a few. The interfering rupture that they sought, and that they sought to fill with questions, was thus not with the notion that being a street child was a dangerous condition – none of them could doubt that – but that being an adult and participating in an adult world was a solution: that that world, a world in which their blackness is persistently used as a marker for limiting presents and futures and yet is ideologically denied, was necessarily as coherent, as non-violent as the adults around them tried to make out.

Interference in the coherence of dominant anti-black narratives and ideals does not push against them with an opposing force, as the notion of revolutionary resistance suggests, but rather cuts through them, refusing their logic, their mode of operation, and this can occur in many different ways – as a growing body of literature on indigenous and Black political and cultural expression can attest (e.g. Alves 2018; Hartman 1997, 2007; Moten 2008; Simpson 2014; Sojoyner 2017; Sauma, in preparation). In the case of the street children, rupture with the adult world opens up a prohibited space *in* that world – the street – from where they can identify, observe, experience and manipulate the oscillation that occurs alongside coherence in a 'normal' anti-Black world.

In a similar way, the environmental activists described by Stine Krøijer in her contribution to this volume seek to create internal breaks within a totalizing capitalist system by enacting a slowing down of life and a reconnection with the non-human, a building of alternative structures and practices in the very centre of that system: the 'carbon bombs', the mines, the often unseen and brutally extractive spaces that support capitalist speed and growth. This anti-heroic form of activism, as Krøijer notes, has grown as a response to the perceived failure of approaches historically favoured by the radical Left: the inability of effecting change through protest. In place of the 'spectacular confrontations and clashes with the police and the heroic narratives about it' (Krøijer, this volume), the activists with whom she works see the need to change strategies, to produce a rupture with capitalist structure of domination by doing exactly that which capitalism (and revolution) will not do: by slowing down, by sneaking, dwelling in trees and becoming animal. By doing so her interlocutors seek to create a radical break *within* capitalism, a rupture within the rupture of resistance. This form of rupture is premised on the idea that mundane acts can scale up, potentially creating 'largescale or delayed systemic effects', reminding us of the potential heat of the moment raised by Carol Greenhouse in her contribution (Krøijer, this volume). The subjective scale of this form of political agency also brings with it uncertainties about what lies ahead, about the ability to endure in this form of rupture, in the internal gaps that this type of activism creates within the system that it is attempting to implode. Once again, we see how thinking with rupture changes the scale and spatio-temporal dimensions of political agency, shifting the focus of activism from grand scale, macho and aggressive political events premised on unwavering certainty to the construction of 'new more-than-human political subjectivities' that abandon male and human vanguardism, enabling avoidance and hesitation rather than resistance, and in doing so awakening 'the brutal realization that something must change' (Krøijer, this volume).

This form of rupture, one in which parallel spatio-temporal coordinates are revealed, can also be identified in Anja Kublitz's description, in this volume, of what happens in the process of becoming a Danish jihadist. In this case, however, it is not oscillation but underlying divine harmony that becomes apparent to the young men who answer the call to fight against a fractured, violent existence of recurrent rupture. Her description therefore shows how the montage of jihadi anasheed (militant Islamist hymns) YouTube videos that her interlocutors watch, which pointedly display the repetitive nature of Muslim suffering and inspire them to travel to Syria, appears to open a portal to them: access to an underlying world of harmony that they can tap into in their daily lives, through which they might be able to transform a history of suffering on repeat, and at the same time experience what their parents and grandparents might have felt once before. This portal is built on the powerful affects produced by the recursive ruptures that are 'always new again', of the everyday lives of peoples profoundly marked by changes such as forced migration and racial discrimination: broken continuities that 'make [the past] reappear, reflecting and intensifying the present' (Kublitz, this volume). In this way, Kublitz argues against a traditional Christian view of rupture as a singular break in a linear continuity, to show how the radical transformative events upon which rupture is based can take various forms and, in the case of her interlocutors, as 'intersecting rhythms' between past, present and future: 'as a continuous repetition of extraordinary transformative events' (Kublitz, this volume). These rhythms are powerful in that they are able not to resist but cut through an 'existing spatio-temporal colonial order', offering a glimpse to an underlying world of harmony 'perfectly made' and ready to be joined, ready to be enacted in the everyday.

The gaps produced by such actions require new descriptive forms, that is clear: if not resistance, for example, then what might be our means to describe the instances of turning away from, breaking with, refusing that we are raising here. As we have seen, the spatio-temporal coordinates and scales evoked to describe these very different moments of rupture are motile, but rupture also has an effect on the metaphors that we might use to describe these instances of interference, multiplication and/or cutting through. The contributors to this volume provide us with a range of new images with which to consider rupture, and this is part of the ethnographic premise of our proposal. We therefore have rupture as the gush of blood, the need for repair, the heat of the moment, leaping, blurring, sneaking and rhythm. In relation to the most cataclysmic events described in this volume, in Edward Simpson and Michele Serafini's analysis of the aftermaths of earthquakes in India and Nepal, rupture is therefore used by the authors to identify the different levels – the physical and emotional, familial and material, political and religious – of the shock caused by these disasters, and how they establish the condition for new possibilities. The breaking apart of land might appear as one of the most powerful images that we can conjure, but in its stead it is rupture that the authors use to identify the different levels – the physical and emotional, familial and material, political and religious – of the shock caused by these disasters, and how they establish the condition for new possibilities.

Significantly it is the aftermath of rupture that concerns the authors, who can therefore directly answer any doubts that we might have over the unforeseeable consequences of the cataclysmic events described by some of our other contributors: that in the long term rupture not only leads to new forms of cooperation but also to conflict and to the restoration of older patterns; destruction does not wipe the slate clean. In describing moments in which there is a 'general sense ... that history had imploded into a rumbling moment and meaning had collapsed' (Simpson and Serafini, this volume), it is therefore notable that the authors describe how – much as in the aftermath of ritual liminal moments of *communitas* (Turner 1969) – in the aftermath of earthquakes relations are renewed between people and the state, leading to a renegotiation of these relations, to the appearance of new vocabularies and solutions. However, it is also interesting to note how the tools for this renegotiation do not just emerge from the places and peoples at stake, but the way disaster marks the influx of intervention of various kinds, the bureaucratic, financial, infrastructural and divine, which are sought out to impose some form of control over what these chaotic moments are able to produce.

### Fissures and openings

Taken alongside the preceding chapters, then, Simpson and Serafini bear out our emphasis throughout this volume on conceptualizing rupture as a creative/destructive dynamic, which operates in many ways as what is currently being discussed as a 'singularity' (see Stengers 2000). Seen in the light of the chapters of this volume, rupture can be understood as a moment of differentiating and generating intensity, creatively emergent from the destructive force either of a natural sort (earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions) or of human manufacture, though always specifically as a dynamic of sociocultural formation. If destruction is a vital dimension of rupture, such destruction has immanent *within it* a creative and regenerative potential that is never the reproduction of the same but always of difference. As Deleuze might have said (1994), it is a dynamic energy of repetition or the continuity of the existential terms of human life – always a sociocultural phenomenon – through creative regenerative (re)construction. It is in rupturing moments and in the reverberations of rupturing effect (their aftershocks as it were) in which the social and cultural nature of human being as constant unfolding potential is revealed, in multilinear and multidirectional ways. In a sense, the nature of human being can never be known in any causally originating sense – a particular essentialism in anthropology that has largely been discarded – but only through the way in which human beings create the terms (or objectifications) of their existence and action (Kapferer 2014).

Such an emphasis on the capacity of rupture to reformulate the coordinates of people's existence raises the broader methodological question of how such a forcefully regenerative potential can be described without fear of reducing it to the very terms with which it seeks by its nature to break, this being a feature that our conception of rupture as a singularity shares with Alain Badiou's conception of the 'event' (2007). Indeed, the question of how anthropological language is affected by the kinds of ruptures we present in this volume is central to our proposition. The ruptures presented here do not only point to previously unseen fissures in the emblematic images of rupture we inherit from the grand narratives of modernity, interfering with and cutting into the putative heroism of rupture as grand Event (a heroism that Badiou's theorization, incidentally, ratifies entirely – see also Humphrey 2008; Laidlaw et al. 2018 – and from which we seek to find ethnographically driven routes of escape in the present volume). The chapters also explore new descriptive forms that can get to grips with the kinds of situations ruptures engender, and the forms of life they format, doing justice to the character of rupture as at once destructive and generative – its dual aspect, as we call it, which makes it irreducible to standard social scientific dilemmas between, for example, continuity and change.

The question we are left with, then, is whether, as anthropologists working in the current historical juncture, we are ready to break with the legitimating controls of the discipline, which demand that we always end our analyses with the aplomb of certainty as the signature of analytical success – of our job well done. Perhaps a test of this lies in how we might conclude this brief introduction to the chapters that follow. Our sense is that breaking with the academic compulsion toward producing grand narratives must involve breaking also with the linearity of such arguments and forms of thinking. This feels particularly important at this present moment of turmoil and rupture – one that, as so many of the chapters show explicitly, defies any sense of linearity (e.g. Humphrey, Greenhouse, Sarró) or indeed clarity and consistency of scale (e.g. Krøjer; Kublitz; Simpson and Serafini). Such a focus, we suggest, necessarily stands against any ultimate kind of unifying narrative about the forcefulness of rupture. Instead, what we have here are also a series of attempts to trace in the narrative form of ethnographic engagement how what we have to say about rupture can break with itself at every turn, demonstrating its violently incisive power in its very action.

#### Note

1. Max Weber was consciously using a railway metaphor to indicate a radical change of direction. Weber was interested in those moments in history that were new directions and ultimately irreducible to the past with which they are continuous. Thus, he was interested in what are referred to as axial moments, for example the advent of Christianity and of Islam that have related but different and major implications for history. It is noteworthy that Weber used a railway metaphor, appropriate to the technological era of modernity with which his sociology was largely concerned, and which focused on the redirections and turning points in the heterogeneous 'tracks' along which history unfolds.

### References

Adorno, Theodor W. 1990. *Negative Dialectics*. London: Routledge.

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. *State of Exception*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hirsch, Eric, and Charles Stewart. 2005. 'Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity'. *History and Anthropology* 16 (3): 261–74.

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1995. *Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991*. London: Abacus.

Jameson, Fredric. 2003. 'Future City'. *New Left Review* 21: 65–79.

Masco, Joseph. 2017. 'The Crisis in Crisis'. *Current Anthropology* 58 (S15): S65–S76.

Moten, Fred. 2008. 'The Case of Blackness'. *Criticism* 50 (2): 177–218.

## 1 The Guillotine: Reflections on Violent Revolutionary Rupture

Caroline Humphrey

### Introduction

The guillotine is routinely associated with the French Revolution, but I shall suggest that one value of thinking about the killing machine itself is that it forces us to realize that 'rupture' is not the same as 'revolution' and requires its own analysis. Crucially, the two have a different relation to time, or more exactly they have different 'time-forms'. While most revolutions begin, or their actors imagine they begin, with rupture, this is but the initiatory moment in their onward process of transforming politics and society (Holbraad 2018). Along the way they face opposition, confusion and internal divisions, and the need to work out on the go what the new arrangements are to be. Hence revolutions occur in stages, a sequence of bursts and retreats, and it is often difficult to tell when they begin and when they end (Herrmann 2011). Rupture, as I use the word, has a different shape: by definition it is a splitting apart of something that was previously joined or a whole, and it is conceived as a singular moment. It will be argued here that a moment of political rupture has to be bidirectional, in that actors inhabiting that point in time have to face the past as well as the future. In other words, rupture is a radical cut that is at the same time a 'break from' and a 'break towards'. There is nothing simple about this idea. Since the event of rupture includes not only the time of the severance itself but also the visions by which both the before and the after are imagined, it contains a notional internal trifurcation. There is a further complexity, namely that it is only amid political strife and with imaginative strain that something vividly present now can be turned into a thing of the past, while elaborate efforts are simultaneously

made to call into being the things of the future. The split is in practice convoluted, since each of the elements as they are understood on the spot affects the character of the others. This chapter will suggest that the trifurcation and convolution of rupture are evident not only in political events but also appears in the subjectivities of the actors in diverse ways. The guillotining of Louis XVI in January 1793 is a moment of rupture that exemplifies these points.

Studies of French politics at that time suggest that the past as then conceived was coloured as tyranny precisely by the ways in which it contravened the virtues of the new society being initiated. The glowing 'future coming into being' was relational too – it was bringing into existence institutions that glimmered not only with a forward but also with a vengeful backward-looking light. The time now starting was still coloured to a great extent negatively, by the dark features of the betrayals, insults and injustices that must immediately be punished. Yet at the same time, this future also shone with the pure light from a deeper past, since the break was conceived by many revolutionary leaders as a return to once existing 'natural rights' – the rights to life, liberty and property that Rousseau had claimed natural to humanity before it was deformed by the evolution of society. This was a world view (though not the only one) through which the existential break at the juncture of these complicated and mutually influenced pasts and futures – the execution of the king – was conceived to be fertile. Starkly, the killing cut itself was politically 'life-giving': the display of the king's severed head was followed by silence, then the cries 'Long live the Republic! Long live the nation!'  As this chapter will show, however, this idea of 'national life' was far from the only way in which execution by guillotine was imagined by the population to produce vitality. Indeed, over a wider compass of time, it was prolific with new sensations, excitements, fears and strangely productive pathologies.

There is a question that should be addressed first: can the guillotining of the king be said to be *the* rupture of the French Revolution? Historians, the populace and the state have named other revolutionary events as the moment of rupture. In particular, 14 July 1789, the date of the storming of the Bastille prison, was a day that became The Day. It came to signify the founding moment of the Revolution and therefore a historical rupture. Already a grand public festival on its first anniversary, in 1794 it became the *Fête de l'Etre Suprême* at which Robespierre declaimed: 'Nature, how sublime, how delightful thy power! How the tyrants must turn pale at the thought of this Festival' – though Christopher Prendergast commenting on this declaration remarks that the tyrants 'were more likely to turn pale at the thought of the guillotine, which for the duration of the festival has been discreetly moved from view to – of all places – the site of the now demolished Bastille' (Prendergast 2008, 17).

It was 14 July that was taken up by the French state as the cardinal national holiday, a point I will return to later, but meanwhile it should be noted that several other events have been claimed by historians as just as significant, even more truly ruptural in a political sense. For as it was happening the attack on the Bastille was not conceived as a project of ending monarchy (it was mainly a rush to acquire arms from the prison's store for self-protection against royal troops). The achievements claimed for it – the capitulation of the king, its designation as an act of the people's sovereign will that would transform the political system, the invention of a new concept of revolution – were all conferred on the event after it had happened (Sewell 1996); whereas the meeting of the Estates General in May 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in August that year, the reinvention of dates itself and declaration of a new calendar in November 1793, the official end of the monarchy on 21 September 1793, and the founding of the Republic on the 22nd, were all regime changers in themselves. I can see no problem with acknowledging that a revolution might contain within itself several crucial breaks that might metaphorically be called ruptures. But the beheading of the king in January 1793, and more broadly the Terror, the period between September 1793 and July 1794 when thousands were guillotined, was rupture in the most direct sense. It was understood to be a rending apart *in itself*, as it happened and not by virtue of some subsequent designation. It combined – uneasily – the three elements of how 'rupture' can be thought: the biological-material, the ideational-symbolic and the political. Further, as a devastating experience for participants and onlookers, it had an unexpected psychic afterlife, a bizarre and diverse existence in subsequent decades that has something important to say about the ongoing social implications of violence.

### Matters at stake

It is very difficult to discuss the Terror as a point of rupture without a brief preliminary survey of the turbulent intellectual debates about what the Terror *was* as a political event. The beheading of the king curdled radically opposed political philosophies and thus it represented, and still to some extent represents, rifts in social and moral judgement. I provide a short outline – indeed outrageously brief in view of the mass of writing on this subject – in order to acquaint readers with what at least some of the stakes are. Even for contemporaries in the eighteenth century, the guillotine stood for several sharply conflicting positions. For radical Republicans, it was the just and efficient instrument that demonstrated *égalité* and the will of the people (kings and workmen, they all die in exactly the same way); indeed, the clean cut of the guillotine was regarded as humanitarian, in comparison to earlier frantic mob carnage. For conservatives, the guillotine represented the barbaric bloody violence that destroyed the 'natural bonds' of society and religion; while for moderate Republicans it stood for an impending tyranny that threatened progressive ideals of democracy and liberty.

Later interpretations that influenced the way the Revolution is understood today have been set out by one of the most renowned historians of the Revolution, Francois Furet. As he explains (1998), most nineteenth-century historians were champions of the Revolution and adhered to Rousseau's theory of the general will; that is, the idea that politics is largely about the process of discovering the will of the nation. This later solidified into a Marxist orthodoxy according to which the Revolution was not just a battle to overcome evil (absolute monarchy) and replace it with good (republican democracy), but was also a deeper transformation through class conflict, in which feudalism gave way to capitalism. After the overthrow of the monarchy, the conflict shifted to pit the capitalist bourgeoisie against the urban political movement led by the sans-culottes with their vision of a truly social revolution. With this overall positive view historians could nevertheless understand the Terror in different ways. The Revolution was divided into phases. For loyalists of the Revolution, the Terror had to be separated off as a temporary aberration in the general trajectory. It was the consequence of 'the intentional villainy of historical actors', or alternatively it was elevated to the cosmological-theological, being understood as the outcome of the design of Providence (Furet 1998, 55). For some writers, far from being consubstantial with the Revolution, the Terror manifested, on the contrary, 'the emergence of its antithesis, its anti-principle, the resurrection of the [despotic] Ancien Régime and the corruption of the new by the old' (1998, 56).

Radical Jacobin republicans, on the other hand, did not reject the Terror. They explained it as necessary, since the revolutionaries faced both internal and external enemies. In their view, according to Furet, the Terror was nevertheless separable from the Revolution, being not intrinsic but merely one of its risks, and if the killing phase was particularly 'heroic' this was because it achieved victory, not because of the means it used to do so. Furet himself attacked the 'Marxist catechism' of the class struggle reading, and returned to political theory and intellectual-cultural history; he refused to separate the Terror from the Revolution, seeing it as the logical result of the reconceptualization of politics, which was now based on popular sovereignty. The Terror was the Revolution's culmination, quite plainly an abuse of power, achieved through demagoguery in the name of the people.

The American historian Arno Mayer (2001) has developed Furet's argument to discuss terror comparatively in the French and Russian revolutions. He argues, in summary, that there is no true revolution without violence and terror; that terror takes several forms, both 'wild' and 'would-be legitimate'; that its initiation stems from the radical breakdown of political authority; that terror is driven by a dialectical interaction between revolution and counter-revolution; and that a key element in this interaction is religious confrontation (in the case of France between secular millenarianism and the fanaticism of folk Catholicism). However, Mayer, unlike Furet, downplays the importance of revolutionary ideology. He argues that terror directly emerges out of the revolutionary process itself, from the confrontation with the real threat of counter-revolution.1 This conclusion is supported by Timothy Tackett (2001, 570–2), who emphasizes more than Mayer the stimulant of fear among the revolutionaries and the emergence among them of an obsession with conspiracy and hidden counterplots. This is splendidly illustrated by a revolutionary poster in which the aristocracy is depicted as a Janus-like figure: a demonic, knife-wielding priest and a simpering lady are bound together by a serpent, while a cloven hoof and a claw appear from under their gowns. The legend reads: 'The aristocracy unmasked. Beware of its caresses, its thousand arms are ready to strike you' (Tackett 2000, 690).

Most germane to this chapter, however, is the work of Sophie Wahnich (2003; 2009; 2012), a writer of the Left who nevertheless eschews a directly Marxist account. She argues that the Terror can only be understood, and its political import comprehended, by thinking about the emotions that compelled it and which it generated. For her, the Terror was not a rational recourse of government, the only way to maintain order (i.e. through imposing fear) when all civic institutions had been overturned, as the revolutionary Saint-Just had argued (Sonenscher 2008, 404). Rather, it came about as an emotional reaction to insult, the aristocracy's refusal to accord sovereign right to the new Republic, surging first as frenzied vengeance for the assassination of the revolutionary hero Marat in July 1793. This vengeance was not that of an individual psychological kind, nor the expression of primitive animal instinct, nor was it a displacement of religious ideas into politics; rather this vengeance was a *foundational violence*, one that gave a new possibility for bringing men together, and it is best understood in the light of the dismantling and remaking of social relations, and of sacrificial ritual and sacred violence (Wahnich 2003, 21–2). Other writers, such as William Sewell in his magisterial study of the Bastille, reserve the notion of foundational violence for the glorious 14 July (Sewell 1996, 859); but Wahnich refuses to dissociate 1789 from 1793, and thus in effect she defends the Terror, characterizing it as a *response* to the counter-revolutionaries' threat to terrorize the people. This idea of relational responses is why she advances the idea of an economy of emotions – in which initiatory actions were imagined as 'paybacks' in return for the anger of an enemy. What is important, she writes, is to understand which political sacra were the foundation of the circulation of emotions that led to the Terror (2003, 24–6). They were justice, honour and the masses' identity as 'the people' and as the victors. Thus, the Terror in Wahnich's account appears as a form of constitutive justice corresponding to a new social configuration, that of the sovereign people (2003, 43–4).

Wahnich's works contain important discussions of how her interpretation relates to the argument that the Terror was the precedent for twentieth-century totalitarianism, to Agamben's theory of *Homo sacer* and the sovereign exception, and above all to contemporary terrorism (Wahnich 2009). But for now I will leave these questions aside in order to focus on the anthropology and ethnography of the Terror as rupture.

### Anthropologizing a historical event

Given these conflicting understandings of what the Terror and the Revolution were (ontologically), it seems to me that anthropologists could best approach them as 'matters of concern' (Latour 2004). Latour advocated against deconstructing swirling debate, facts, opinions and emotion to get at the truth. Rather he was aiming at a new realism concerned with 'things', in which 'a thing is in one sense an object out there and, in another sense, an *issue* very much *in* there', in a gathering of participants (2004, 233, emphasis in original). 'The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers participants arenas in which to gather' (Tafarella 2012).

In our case, the contents of any 'arena' offered by anthropologists will be filled in – short of becoming a historian oneself – by the materials supplied by social historians, with their accumulation of painstaking research on places, dates, persons and eyewitness accounts. Some of their work also raises what we can readily see as anthropological issues – that is, interpretations, using concepts developed by the authors that would be alien to eighteenth-century participants but make sense in terms of the intellectual history of their discipline. An example is Lynn Hunt's Freudian influenced argument (2013) that the French Revolution was imagined through a new conceptualization of patriarchy and the familial order. And as Thomassen points out (2012), there are many classical theories developed in anthropology that could be turned to analysing revolution, such as Van Gennep on ritual, Simmel on crowd behaviour, Turner on liminality and Bateson on schismogenesis. However potentially productive these ideas might be, I do not propose to return to them in this chapter, which is concerned specifically with rupture. Instead I turn to the newer anthropology focused on the event, ontology and experience, hoping in this way to offer an 'arena' for gathering that is indeed composed as far as possible of contemporary participants, rather than retrospective analysts. Such anthropology, I am convinced, is needed to deal with the singular *physical and conceptual* moment of rupture that the guillotine brings so vividly before us.

Admittedly, the guillotine is a grim object around which to enable a gathering. But it is a brilliantly 'contrary' kind of case if we are thinking about the co-presence of the physical and conceptual that I am arguing for; the point may appear glib, or even obvious, but it is worth pointing out that arguing for it goes against the grain – runs contrary to countless descriptions, narratives and rhetorical statements from the time of the Terror that separated body from mind. For the cut effected by the guillotine was not the splitting of an object into two similar parts, like slicing an apple in half. It was the separation of a person's *head*, with all of its connotations of mind and personality, from their *body*, with its implied merely physical nature. The decapitation of Louis XVI was a particular point of concentration that brought into focus and then threw up and multiplied many antimonies: on top of mind and body there tottered an edifice of sacred king versus mere man, monarchy versus republic, tyranny versus freedom, abstract reason versus history and indeed life versus death. 'Rupture' is a capacious idea that can accommodate the splitting that took place on so many 'levels', or rather within so many kinds of discourse. Yet it is a properly anthropological task to *query* this capaciousness, to inquire about the grounds for the proliferation of conceptual bifurcations, and in particular to investigate the idea that politically conceived oppositions might be placed in relational tension by physical/mental combinations thrown up in the actual experience of beheading. Actually, if we consider the philosophy, political and social history, psychology and psychoanalysis, art history and indeed subsequent revolutionary activist theory that has been devoted to the French Revolution, I do not think that anthropology can provide anything more than a partial view of the event of rupture. Still, it is worth trying to think about what that might be.

### The historical 'we' of the Terror

That being said, I hope readers will forgive me for preparing the ground by starting with Hegel and Kant. Although of different generations, they were contemporaries of the Terror and both had interesting things to say about the Revolution that can orient an anthropological view of rupture, in particular if the aim is not just to write another anthropologically inflected social history but also to 'gather in' the philosophical ruminations that gave meaning to such a brutal happening. Hegel in *The Philosophy of Spirit* is concerned to understand how a finite event, the French Revolution, could take on a universal, transcendental character ('spirit'), such that it could be conceived as having in some sense happened to us all. His critique of the Terror was that in their efforts to institute a new conception of human freedom – absolute ahistorical human freedom – the Republicans were forced to turn on themselves and to destroy the very institutions of freedom they had created. As David Ciavatta argues, this meant that for Hegel the Revolution was a failed attempt to efface its own character as a *historical* event, its actual contingency and spatio-temporal contingency. As the voice of timeless reason, the Revolution was inherently incapable of owning up to its own historicity (Ciavatta 2014, 579).2 This argument is crucial for Hegel because it reveals the impossibility of a rationality that is wholly detached from history. The event of the Terror, by which the Revolution annihilated itself, thus becomes for Hegel a decisive revelation of the historical nature of reason itself. The Terror cannot be understood as the vehicle of a rationality that exists independently or prior to these events, but must be understood as having its own thought process that gives efficacy and compelling authority to a rationality that could not exist at any other moment (Ciavatta 2014, 580).

Kant, older by a generation, makes a not dissimilar argument, though in a completely different way. In his work on enlightenment and revolution, as described by Foucault, Kant's question is: what is this 'now', which we all inhabit and which defines the moment in which I am writing? What is there in this present that can have contemporary meaning for philosophical reflection? Kant's response is that this meaningful element manifests itself in the bearer of a process of thought, someone who forms part of this same process, figuring in it. To be a philosopher is not a question of adherence to an ideology, nor belonging to the human community in general, but of membership in a particular 'we', corresponding to a cultural ensemble characteristic of his own contemporaneity. The French Revolution, like the Enlightenment, was an event in the history of thought that created such a 'we'. It does not consist of its successes or failures, its overturning of institutions or its crimes. Rather, its meaning lies in its operation as a spectacle and in its re-memorable, demonstrative and diagnostic character as an event. In effect, the bearers of this meaning are all the people who may not have taken part in it but allow themselves to be swept away by it. According to Kant such approbation emerges from a moral disposition of humanity: to provide a government for itself that seems good to itself, virtuous and renouncing external war. This is why the Revolution, which reveals this thought, can never be forgotten, even if the actual result was to slump back into something like the old rut (Foucault 1986, 92–4).

Hegel and Kant both suggest, at least to my mind, that understanding the Terror requires placing the philosopher *in the middle of it*, as a necessarily historical actor experiencing its particular reasoning and enthusiasm. So what could this have meant in an event as ghastly as rupture effected specifically by the use of the guillotine? Perhaps the best way to think about this is to consider the similarities and differences between the so-called 'September massacres' of 1792 and the Terror proper initiated by the guillotining of the king in January 1793. In September crowds had attacked virtually the entire prison population of Paris, in the fear that the inmates would break out and join the enemies then invading France. The subsequent decision to employ the guillotine by the revolutionary regime, in public and surrounded by thousands of soldiers, was rationalized as the terrible but orderly justice of the state. The contrast between the two episodes of violence can be seen in the killing of the Princess de Lamballe, whose ghastly end also has some interesting things to say to us.3

On 3 September 1792, the princess was extracted from prison, and 'gasping for breath, held at arm's length, almost unconscious' she was led before a hurriedly improvised Tribune of the People.4 She was sentenced to death, to be 'sent away' (*élargie*) in the euphemistic language of the Tribune. Two men carried her into the street; she was struck with sabres on her head and neck, stabbed in the eye. She tried to fall down to die, but the crowd forced her onto her feet.   A procession then set off dragging the macabre trophies, pulling a rope attached to the princess's feet. It visited her family's Paris residence, then the place of imprisonment of the royal family. The head, people said, was brought to make a bow to Marie-Antoinette, before parading both head and body in the streets of Paris. In the words of an observer:

We heard tumultuous and prolonged shouts: they were here! Two individuals dragged a naked body by its legs, headless, its back on the ground and its abdomen laid open to the chest. The cortege halts. On a shaky platform, the corpse is ceremoniously spread out, and the limbs arranged with a kind of art, and, above all, a *sang froid*, which leaves a vast field to the meditations of the wise. To my right, at the end of a lance, was a head that often brushed against my face because of the movements the bearer made when he gesticulated. To my left, another one, more horrible, held in one hand the intestines of the victim against his chest, and in the other a large knife. Behind them, a large collier hung from a lance, above my forehead, a scrap of camisole soaked with blood and mire. (De Baecque 2003, 62)5

The crowd demanded the presence of the royal family at the window to witness the body and hear the shouts demanding the head of Marie-Antoinette; the corpse was then taken to be presented to the Duc d'Orléans, the princess's brother-in-law, amid constant tumult, oaths and roars of triumph. The crowd disposed of the body at a construction site near Chatelet, where it was left naked all night, and next day taken to be buried at the Foundlings' Cemetery.

What is common to the execution of the king and that of Lamballe is that the dismembered physical parts were not ignored as embodiments of the rejected past, but instead became a matter of extraordinary attention. The revolutionary future and the abhorred past were both kept in full view. In fact, it is not just that the 'revealed, paraded, exhibited, tortured body is like the support of the judiciary procedure … that must become readable for everyone' (Foucault 1977, 47–8), the corpse also became an object of hatred and wild phantasmagoric visions released during or immediately after the killing.

The death of the princess, like that of the king, can be seen as a 'thing' in the Latourian sense, in which participants gather to maintain its existence by their conflicting accounts (Latour 2004, 246). De Baecque underlines the probable embroidery of the popular narratives, pointing out that official reports did not support the eyewitness accounts cited above: the body was left clothed; trinkets in the pockets were preserved; the corpse was probably carried in a wagon, not dragged through the streets at the end of a rope; decapitation did occur, but the head was not damaged. No mention was made in these sober reports of mutilation or the sexual outrages that appeared almost obsessively in outraged Royalist narratives, such as cutting off the genitals or plucking the pubic hair to be worn by a soldier as a mocking moustache. It is clear, however, that the public needed to project backwards some kind of imagined past. It had been animated by rumours about the despicable and depraved life the princess had led: she was a courtesan, rumoured to be an intriguer at court; and through her the crowd took aim not only at a friend of hated Marie-Antoinette but also at her as a woman and her alleged homosexuality (De Baecque 2003, 71).

Whatever the truth of the treatment of this particular body, it is evident that the corpse, representing all that was rejected by the Revolution, was at the very least an equal in the imagination of the crowd to the vision of a socially just future. In this respect, the same was true of the guillotining of the king, as I shall show. Yet the crucial difference is that there was no contemporary 'we' of the September massacres. In the following months, citizens advised one another to 'cover with a veil' this terrible event (Tackett 2015, 217). No public body took responsibility for those killings, unlike in the case of the king, when the Convention, which argued for days, took several close-run votes to arrive at the sentence for the monarch. The decision that prevailed emerged through reasoned arguments: the king had committed treason by earlier attempting to flee France, and his inviolability accorded by the Constitution of 1791 was subordinate to the principle of equality embodied in the revolutionary Rights of Man and the Citizen. Almost all social groups followed the debates in the Convention closely. The participants themselves took collective responsibility for the decision to kill the king, and even an anxious member had no doubt that the story of the execution 'would reverberate to the far corners of the earth and through the end of time' (Tackett 2015, 239–42). Thus, unlike the case of the princess, the execution of the king became a political-social rupture as I have defined it; that is, as a conscious making of a momentous historical break.

The decision was based not only on new political principles but also on its own distinctive idea of virtue. It was in its light that members of the Assembly solemnly voted to execute Louis XVI and later to enable the Terror. Virtue was now defined, especially by Robespierre, as unshakeable and selfless devotion to the public good. Furthermore, 'being virtuous' had to be demonstrated by action, for fear of accusations of hypocrisy (Linton 2013). Thus, it had become 'necessary to be inhuman', to wound sensibility by offering violence to the body of the enemy, 'a violence that was infinite, exceptional and legitimate, since it was offered through the sentiment of doing good' (Wahnich 2003, 20).6

### The fertile blood of rupture

The 'we' of the execution of the king was, however, a shifting, temporary and multiple entity, as I attempt to describe in the following sections. The shape of a political rupture that takes place in history can be notionally divided into a before, now and an after. Yet in this case, the trifurcation is more like a constantly moving immaterial coupling that has a recursive form, in that the attempt to make a radical rift is constantly placed under question by the unpredicted reattachment to the present of that spectral 'thing' which had been cut off – yet this is a rejoining that is given a new, productive meaning by the actors as it happens. Revolutionary rupture in such a 'social form' may be mobile in the sense that it becomes a new part of a culture (Robbins, this volume) to which people can have recourse, and may re-enact in different places and periods. But I would like to differentiate the 're-memorative' revolutionary fervour extolled by Kant, which reappeared for example in the Paris Commune of 1870 and the Russian Revolution in 1917 (adumbrated also by Rowlands et al. for the Chinese case in this volume), from the imaginative shape surrounding a subject 'in the middle' of rupture, the subjectivity of the one who takes part if only in his or her mind. In the abstract, the guillotine seems to bring about a simple relation – that of a whole entity that becomes two separate parts. But it did more than that. The very instant of severance brought before a viewer's eyes a third active element. Mechanically more efficient than other methods of execution it may have been, but beheading by the guillotine caused a gush of blood; this was something ambiguous and unearthly, a messy flow that was neither 'the head' nor 'the body' and that somehow had to be conceptualized with the cultural means of the time. As I shall now explain, the spilling of blood became an element, at once tangible and symbolic, in the creation of social identities (the various 'us') attached to revolutionary events.

Let us turn to the execution of Louis XVI, or Louis Capet as he was then known. At this point, in January 1793, the political breaks had already happened: the monarchy was over and the Republic had been founded. So the decision to guillotine the former ruler shows that something not purely political had come to the fore: the issue of *physically* ending the threat posed by the continued life of the heir of the Bourbons. Blood-metaphor was the language of the day, and now real blood was to become its physical instantiation. As he stood on the scaffold, Louis's last words were, 'People, I die an innocent man. I pardon those who have decided my death. I pray God that my blood will not come down on France' (Tackett 2015, 241). And during the subsequent Terror, Louis-Marie Prudhomme repeated like a litany, 'They [enemies of the Revolution] want our blood. Well then, since it's blood they want, let the blood flow' (Tackett 2015, 278–9).

The killing of the king on 21 January 1793 was the first and most important act of the Terror and everyone realized its symbolic significance. The platform of the guillotine was surrounded by around 20,000 spectators and 80,000 armed guards. The tension in the air was extraordinary, for the king was seen by all to have been the apex of an entire social order. Even though he had by now become Louis Capet and thus his body was in principle no longer held sacred, at his trial the 'sacred body' of the king was invoked, since, as de Baecque argues, the person of the king had to be 'excepted' from ordinary humanity as the body and soul of the monarchy, the better to turn it into a monstrosity 'outside the nation' (De Baecque 2003, 90).7 The Divine Right of the Kings of France had rested greatly on the rites of internment whereby the sacred power was transmitted to a successor-descendant (Kantorowicz 1997). In 1793 the elaborate rites and constantly reiterated masses, designed to proclaim that the kingship never dies, were abruptly cut short and the royal mausoleum of Saint-Denis was desecrated along with the other repositories of royal remains. This was the context in which Louis's execution was designed to draw attention to a void – his blanked-out royal ancestry. The revolutionaries deliberately moved the platform of the guillotine so that it faced the empty pedestal that had earlier supported a statue of the previous king, Louis XV. The whole religious funerary hand-over scenario was now abolished by the 'rational' decapitation of the king.8 The revolutionaries insisted on the ordinariness of the body, on the sober demeanour of the crowd. There was to be no sacralization of the corpse, no insult, no desecration. 'Let them take his body where they like! What does it matter to us?' exclaimed *Le Républicain* (De Baecque 2003, 98). *Révolutions de Paris* wrote: 'The head of a king, in falling, must not make more noise than that of any other scoundrel' (2003, 99). In other words, once it had happened the execution was to be a non-event, a true annihilation.

But meanwhile there was the blood, and this, it seems, turned people to a frenzy. Again, the official reports denied or downplayed any such happening.

De Baecque writes:

The properties of royal blood are rich, as we know, and by a very strange spatiotemporal phenomenon, seem to stretch out in time and dilate in space the Republican representation of the death of the king: the blood flows out from the royal corpse, spreads out, and Republican narratives soon begin to swell, making the ordinariness and silence at first associated with the description of the execution implode. (2003, 102)

Eyewitness accounts of the execution appeared in the same month. The people wanted the king's hair, others rushed to soak their handkerchiefs in the blood, dip their lances and bayonets in it, taste it; there was crying with joy. According to Prudhomme, one man climbed up onto the guillotine, plunged his bare arm into Capet's blood, filled his hand with it and three times showered the crowd of attendants who pressed up to the foot of the scaffold to receive drops on their foreheads (quoted in de Baecque 2003, 107). People were reported to have paid to get hold of traces of blood, and pieces of bloodied cloth, hair, and fragments of the king's clothing were sold. The impression is inescapable that the blood of the king was not just plain blood; rhetorically impure as it might be, but had become somehow vitalizing, like an injection of a dangerous drug, giving a burst of energy to the popular spirit of the Revolution itself.9 Blood-soaked, tiny scraps of material had become magic charms.10 Indeed, among such a (perhaps formerly, but still…) Christian people as the French in the eighteenth century, it would not be surprising if *being anointed* by the king's blood was experienced by many participants as a new subjectivity, something like a baptism – perhaps a kind of transformation of the self, via the overcoming of revulsion.

The 'we' thus created by acquiring blood relics, or participating in the enthusiasm for them, was replicated in similar form a few months later, following the assassination of the 'Friend of the People', Jean-Paul Marat in July 1793. What is interesting about this is first that it was the exceptionality/sacredness of the blood that seems to have mattered most, rather than judgement of its character (that of a traitor king in one case, of a revolutionary hero in the other), and second that the liquid, absorbable nature of blood enabled the creation of a immediate 'we' of a socially dispersed kind.  According to eye-witness accounts, people fainted at the ghastly sight. Men turned away to look at the orators, but women gazed firmly at the bier, threw flowers on it, and in great numbers gathered the blood that seemed to flow from the corpse. The body remained more or less entire, but the blood was disseminated – into Marat's shirt, his gown, the pages of the journal he had been holding, and onto those who were attending him (Guilhaumou 1986, 71). This powerful blood took on a biologically life-giving, or hero-creating, vitality. Women were anointed with it to the cry, 'Let the blood of Marat become the seed of intrepid republicans'. They replied, swearing to 'people the earth with as many Marats as they could' (Guilhaumou 1986, 71; Hunt 2013, 76).

However, the antinomy intrinsic to rupture, that of the discarded, the horrible, the impure, being re-attached as a vitalization of the future good life, is most starkly seen in the case of the king. In later generations, the 'we' of the Revolution found this difficult to bear. Indeed, the contradiction turned the king's blood into an archetypal Latourean 'thing' of contention. One issue was about impurity.  'Scarcely had he emerged from infancy when the germ of that ferocious perversity that characterizes a despot was seen to develop in him. His first games were games of blood, and his brutality increasing with age, he took delight in satisfying it on all the animals that he encountered', wrote the *Comité des Secours Publics* (De Baecque 2003, 103). In the poster, the king's blood drips directly onto the caption ('May an impure blood water our furrows'), a visual statement that the 'impure blood' is that of the king, with the understanding that it is impure because he was a vicious enemy. However, this caption is a line from the refrain of an army song, the *Marseillaise*, which shortly became the republican, and then the French national, anthem. National sentiment changes over time, and later on the idea of glorifying in the blood of the defeated enemy began to evoke alarmed responses. Could such a bloodthirsty sentiment represent France, and anyway, was this interpretation not ignorantly anachronistic? Latter-day observers pointed out that in eighteenth-century agrarian France the sans-culottes were of lowly, often peasant, origin, that the king's blood was pure by definition, and therefore that it must be *our* blood, the honest impure blood of ordinary people, that would fructify the furrows. Thus, it is concluded, the caption refers symbolically to our sacrifice, that of republicans proud to give their blood on the field of honour (Peretti 2012). Something of a sleight of hand perhaps, yet it is only in such ways that jarring antinomies can be circumvented and the 'we' of the Terror morphed into the glorious 'we' of the Revolution taken as a whole.

This revised interpretation of the placard reflects, of course, the political and moral ambivalence that simmered beneath the surface among many of those who had publicly acclaimed the Terror. It was only a year later, in July 1794, that the radical Committee of Public Safety was ousted in the coup of 9 Thermidor (in the new dating system), and in 1795 Robespierre was arrested and guillotined. A poster of Robespierre's cut-off head now appeared. Visually, this undoubtedly referenced the one of Louis XVI, but the caption was changed to reflect the new sentiment of revulsion: '"I've played the French and divinity … I die on the scaffold, [which] I have well merited.'"

People who had earlier fervently supported the guillotining of the king and queen as a necessary part of the Revolution, now turned against the Terror, many afraid for their own lives. If there can be no Revolution without its Thermidorian reaction, more germane to this chapter is the thought that rupture may contain its own inner rupture, the splitting apart, or transmutation, of the formerly seemingly implacable 'we' (or even 'I') that had formed around it. The placard has Robespierre himself abjuring his acts, and while this was an external imputation, it is clear that there were many advocates of the Terror who soon disowned it in person – abdicating from its 'we'. One such was Prudhomme, who had first called for bloodletting but from 1794–5 devoted himself obsessively to collecting and disseminating the names of all the victims and then to publishing an 'impartial' multi-volume history of the faults and crimes committed during the Revolution (Prudhomme 1796).

The widespread recantation is a main reason why, in my view, it would be mistaken to approach the killing of Louis XVI, in terms of sacrifice. This observation does not apply to revolution as a whole. Indeed, the language of sacrifice was used widely, in many different circumstances, during the French Revolution, usually in the sense of self-denying sacrifice of property and even one's own life for the sake of the *patrie*, using the idiom of virtue. Membership of the community of the faithful was to a

**Figure 1.1** Placard of the head of Robespierre. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE QB-370 (48)-FT4).

great extent defined by evidence of this kind of sacrifice. Analytical works have drawn on a different notion of sacrifice – as expiatory violence, the revolutionary 'transfer of the sacred' from monarch to nation – an example somewhat hazily drawn is Wahnich (2003) (for a thoughtful and extensive survey of this literature, see Zizek 2016). Nevertheless, I would argue that the rupture of the killing of Louis XVI was not a sacrifice in the classical anthropological sense (Hocart 1954; Hubert and Mauss 1964; Hertz 1960). As theorized by Maurice Bloch (1991), for example, the ritual of sacrifice is an attempt to bring about the very opposite of rupture – the continuity of a transcendent social-cosmological vision. The executors of a killing that is sacrifice in this sense desire to sustain, by this means, the continuation of the immortal social and political subjecthood of all those who had carried out this sacrifice in previous generations. This was not the case with the guillotining of Louis XVI. In that killing the aim was radical change, of both the object (now *not* a king) and the actor-subject (an entirely new body, the Jacobin republicans). Although the act could be subsumed as an episode in the overall revolutionary process, for which the overarching idea of 'revolutionary sacrifice' may well be appropriate, I would submit that it was *in itself* not a sacrifice, if only because the executants cut themselves off from their cosmological past, and were riven in the way that rupture itself is riven.

This was a deeply ambivalent position and its fragility (prone to factions and disintegration) is one reason why I suggest, contra Wahnich, that the historical descendants in France of the 'we' of the guillotining of the king could not be the same as for the French Revolution. It would be interesting, though I cannot take the point further here, to compare this situation with the ferocious factionalism inside the Soviet Communist Party at the initiating of the 1930s purges, which indeed appropriated some of the language of the French Terror.11 But politically this was a different situation and a dissimilar, more long-drawn-out rupture. In the French case, the latter-day inheritors of the Terror were mostly the victims; far removed from the state, they appeared in strange, displaced and shattered forms.

### The afterlife of rupture

Early in the Revolution, in 1790, the physician Philippe Pinel observed the 'salutary effects of the progress of liberty'. The national mind was flooded with vigour 'as though by some electric virtue, the system of nerves and muscles of a new life'. Earnestly committed to the Revolution, he gave up his Christian faith and decided to become a doctor. By 1793, however, the massacres appalled him, and the execution of Louis XVI provided the occasion for him to draw up his own judgement:

As a physician and philosopher accustomed to meditating on governments, ancient and modern, and on human nature, I can foresee only anarchy, factions, and wars that will be disastrous even for the victors, now that I truly know [Paris] and the full value of the pygmies making so much noise. (quoted in Murat 2014, 42–3)

In August 1793 Citizen Pinel was appointed to the post of physician at Bicêtre, a combined prison, hospital and hospice of appalling squalor that housed some 4,000 people of all kinds, some 200 of them insane, along with vagabonds, epileptics, criminals, the senile and the venereal. Pinel drew up a chart of the 200 under his care, noting the large number of cases, some 33 per cent, whose mental distress was not caused by economic or domestic misfortune, nor by love, nor by religious fanaticism (his other categories), but by 'events connected by the Revolution' (2014, 49–50). For him, 'madness' was a 'disease of human sensitivity, whose causes are to be found in the torments of life – mourning, despair, jealousy, desire for fame, excessive bookishness or religion' (2014, 43). Pinel thus understood his patients to be in a common pool with the rest of humanity and to be curable. He wrote:

The idea of madness should by no means imply a total abolition of the mental faculties. On the contrary, the disorder usually attacks only one partial faculty, such as the perception of ideas or judgement, reasoning, imagination, memory or psychological sensitivity. A madman who died this year and who thought he was Louis XVI was a living example of the nonconformity of ideas with the objects that occasioned them, since he saw all persons who entered the hospice as so many Pages or Guardsmen come to receive his orders. (quoted in Murat 2014, 44)

Pinel thought that there was a substrate of reason that the doctor should try to reawaken, and that this should be done first by protecting patients, earning their trust, and then shocking them into an unambiguous break with their delusions – this last to be done by a 'formidable show of terror'.

How could Pinel, who despaired of revolutionary excesses, have used such an expression? As Murat observes, it was not a coincidence. The semantic spread of the word 'terror' – the arbitrariness of violence as a policy of necessary virtue, that is to say as 'all at once attribute, method and system of government – was in fact perfectly suited to the ambivalence of the birth of psychiatry, its structure and ideological options' (2014, 45). The point I would like to make is that Pinel, by using both sympathy and terror, was *entering into* the mental world of the people affected by 'events connected to the Revolution'.

According to Pinel's accounts, what prisoners awaiting their execution by guillotine dreaded most was not death but the public dismemberment, the end to the integrity of the body in a gush of blood. Many people had this same dread even if they had not been sentenced. One was a tailor who had one day freely expressed his opinion about the beheading of Louis XVI, and thereafter lived in perpetual fear of arrest and execution. In 'trembling and dark consternation' he lost the ability to eat and sleep, until he lost his mind. Sent to the Hotel-Dieu, he failed to improve from the usual treatment (blood-letting) and was then transferred to Bicêtre. The idea of his death haunted him day and night. Pinel applied his usual sympathetic treatment, encouraging the man to take up his usual trade of tailoring inside the asylum. But after some months of improvement, the patient had a relapse. Then Pinel applied the terror. This consisted of a mock trial set up by the doctors, at which after a serious questioning of the 'accused', the 'prosecutor' in a loud voice, so as to make a deep impression on his imagination, pronounced the citizen duly examined according to law and found him to be a true patriot and not guilty. The stratagem worked for a while; the tailor went back to work, though he relapsed into depression when someone told him that the trial had been a jest (Murat 2014, 58–60).

If this case shows the thoughtful doctor as well as the patient taking subjective positions in relation to the threat posed by the guillotine, another case is more direct evidence of a subjectivity of rupture. A watchmaker patient believed he had lost his head on the scaffold; that it had been thrown in the basket indiscriminately among the heads of other victims; that the judges, repenting their cruel sentences, ordered these heads to be restored to the owners and placed on their shoulders; but that in consequence of an unfortunate mistake the head of a different victim had been placed on his own shoulders. The idea of this change of head occupied his thoughts night and day, which caused his relatives to consign him to Hotel-Dieu and thence to Bicêtre. The watchmaker had an outrageous and jovial humour. 'Look at these teeth', he would cry; 'mine were exceedingly handsome, but these are rotten. What a difference between this hair and mine before my head was changed!' (from Pinel, quoted by Murat 2014, 61).

Here the political rupture is transmuted into personal mental-physical experience, but something has gone terribly wrong with the clean split: instead of dismembered death on one side and a completely new being on the other, this imaginary saw only a jumble, a mistake, a loss of the person's true identity. This case is different from the public preoccupation with blood discussed earlier, for that was always blood that was in some way symbolic, which because it represented an idea could then appear as an external agent with efficacious powers. Here, the watchmaker can only have been one among countless other witnesses whose imagination fixed on the real bodily separation: my body, my head, and on the unthinkable of existence after decapitation. The rupture of the body politic was transmuted into the rupture of me as a whole and continuous human being, someone who now hosts 'the wrong head'.

### Conclusion

Extracting the pivotal moment of 'rupture' from the revolutionary process, as I have tried to do here, is a theoretical exercise. It has left aside consideration of many themes usually regarded as essential to understanding the French Revolution: the great changes of structures of government and the new language of political legitimacy (Sewell 1996), the strategic manoeuvring of leaders, and the occupation of the space of power, which Furet saw as filled up with democratic rhetoric but other writers such as Jean-Clément Martin and Lynn Hunt have described as sucking in gender, religious, social, economic and regional differences, allowing these strands to combine, disaggregate, and then recombine in explosive fashion.12 A more comprehensive understanding would have to incorporate the new 'practical filiations' to which both Martin and Wahnich draw attention, the new social groupings and sensibilities that suddenly appeared (from the aesthetic taste for ruins, the fashion for mesmerism, changes in familial relations, new perception of bodily smells, the vogue for pornography, to the appreciation of the horrific 'sublime'). Still, in support of advancing a skeletal picture of rupture in order better to delineate it, there is the key argument made by Wahnich, which is relevant both to the Terror and to the political violence of our own time. Addressing anyone who might think to draw a parallel between the Terror and 9/11, she states: 'Revolutionary violence is not terrorism. To make a moral equivalence between the Revolution's year II and September 2001 is historical and philosophical nonsense … The violence exercised in September 2001 aimed neither at equality nor liberty.'13