Jacques Ellul’s analysis of biblical violence is resolutely Christocentric
Papers on violence and conflict in Ellul
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By Jacob Marques Rollison
Ellul on Biblical Violence
Christian Bassac
Abstract: Jacques Ellul’s analysis of biblical violence is resolutely Christocentric: all manifestations of violence must be seen in the perspective of the Revelation in Christ. There are no subtypes of violence, and all manifestations of violence are expressions of necessity. In turn, violence, which stands in stark contrast with language, leads to servitude and this circle can be broken only by the freedom brought by the violence of God’s unconditional love. This love is both the ultimate spiritual violence, as it is a victory over the necessity of death, and the promise of universal salvation.
The Unlovable Violence of Technique: George Grant’s Reception of Jacques Ellul
BWD Heystee
Abstract: This paper discusses George Grant’s analysis of the Vietnam War in “Canadian Fate and Imperialism” and how that analysis depends on the thought of Jacques Ellul. On the basis of Ellul’s The Technological Society, Grant argues that technique tends toward violence and that the Vietnam War is ultimately an expression of technique. Because the basic structure of Western society tends toward violence, it has become unlovable. In Grant’s view, this represents a crisis because human well-being depends on “love of one’s own,” including love of one’s own society.
Violence Today: A Comparative Reading of Jacques Ellul and René Girard
Julien Lysenko
Abstract: This article explores the differences and intellectual affinities between Jacques Ellul and René Girard on the question of violence in today’s world. In this respect, both thinkers share the conviction that violence has changed form because of material and spiritual factors. The presentation of these factors will enable us to show the differences, but above all the complementarities, between Girard and Ellul. Finally, based on these two authors, the article sketches out an attempt to describe the future of violence.
Mass Movements, the Sacred, and Personhood in Ellul and Bataille: Parallel Sociological Analyses of Liberalism, Fascism, and Communism
Christian Roy
Abstract: An instructive comparison can be drawn between Jacques Ellul’s 1936 Esprit article portraying “Fascism as Liberalism’s Child” and Georges Bataille’s 1938 lecture on “The Sacred Sociology of Today’s World”. Both rely on Durkheim’s sociology in assuming modernity’s amorphousness, leaving passive masses of atomized individuals susceptible to mobilization into totalized entities by charismatic leadership. Bataille welcomes the postwar intensification of social aggregates but criticizes their militant, militaristic regimentation as not violent and sacred enough, whereas for Ellul, the resurgent social sacred (whether orgiastic or dictatorial), as the active mass, is the enemy of the free person as the sole meaningful whole.
After Babel, the Horizontal War: City and Technique in Jacques Ellul
Benjamin Gaskin
Abstract: Jacques Ellul is best known for his The Technological Society (1954), which outlines a sociological treatment of Technique; that is, the total technical phenomenon including but extending far beyond machines. Lesser known are Ellul’s theological works, though these relate plainly to the sociological. Of particular relevance to Technique is his theological treatment of civilisation in The Meaning of the City (1970). These two texts stand alone and yet, read together, are mutually illuminating. The present paper will follow this light from the ancient City to the Technique of modernity. This will entail first a focus on four Scriptural cities: Enoch, Resen, Babel, Nineveh. The way will then proceed via a literary route, through Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, in which the abstractions here discussed are rendered palpable as flesh and blood. This detour will attend to those aspects of war and scalp-hunting which are central to McCarthy’s text, especially in light of the epistemic enterprise of one of modern literature’s most memorable characters: Judge Holden. The relation between the City and Technique will be followed by tracing the metaphysics of inscription which is a corollary to the project of epistemic legibility that underpins the movement of Technique. This enterprise will be understood as a confluence of Babel and Nineveh, a spiritual war that seeks to exclude God by enfolding the totality of existence into a humanly-determined order. The relation between the city, this process of inscription, and the nature of Technique will then be discussed.
The Limits of the Ideology of Efficiency in the Field of Education: Jacques Ellul and Simone Weil
Cristina Coccimiglio
Abstract: This article investigates the topic of “violence” determined by technical ideology, dwelling on Jacques Ellul’s reflection on schools and universities. Ellul’s condemnation seems to foreshadow the knowledge crisis and the perversion requiring that educational systems be permeated by the assertion of the logic of efficiency, which results in sacrificing content and the ability to select, to verify sources, to elaborate divergent visions, asserting a self-referential reasoning that swallows differences and cancels “multiplicity” for the benefit of dogmatic interpretations. It may be that Simone Weil’s ethics of attention could help counter this shift.
Birds of the Air and Winged Creatures: An Ironic Critique of Surveillance in Ecclesiastes and an Ellulian Ethic of Language, Love, Fear, and Freedom
Michael Morelli
Abstract: First, this article introduces the person and work of Jacques Ellul and highlights important aspects of his writing on surveillance, power, and violence. It shows that Ellul’s critique of surveillance predates the work of other critics of surveillance such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben. This provides a conceptual sociological frame for the more philosophical, theological, and ethical work provided in the conclusion. Second, this essay engages Ellul’s reading of Ecclesiastes, as provisionally demonstrated here, to uncover the wisdom of this curious scriptural text that can help individuals and groups to think and live well in surveillant environments.
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