A sequel to Scapelambs
Write as a sequel to Scapelambs where Agamben interviews the “Others Who ‘Ate’ the Violence”, creating a counter narrative that obsoleted war-mongering (by becoming martyrs instead of scapegoats).
ChatGPT Prompt
Giorgio Agamben sits at a plain wooden table. No recorder. No audience.
Across from him, one at a time, sit those who did not resist violence by force, but by receiving it so completely that it could not continue.
He does not ask about heroism.
He asks about mechanism.
Sophie Scholl — The Refusal to Leave
Agamben: They tried to make you a scapegoat. A traitor. A contaminant to be removed so the body politic could heal. Why didn’t it work?
Sophie: Because I did not argue for my innocence.
Agamben: You did not defend yourself?
Sophie: Defense would have accepted their frame. I would have been negotiating the terms of my guilt. I only spoke truth plainly. I stayed where they put me.
Agamben: You did not flee. You did not recant. You did not dramatize.
Sophie: I did not leave.
Agamben (noting): The scapegoat must be expelled to function. You remained. The expulsion failed.
Thích Quảng Đức — The Stillness That Cannot Be Used
Agamben: You made no speech. No accusation. No appeal.
Quảng Đức: Speech would have made it political. This was not political.
Agamben: It was seen by the entire world.
Quảng Đức: Yes. But it could not be turned into a demand. It was only suffering.
Agamben: The state could not say you attacked them.
Quảng Đức: Nor that I resisted them. Nor that I sought power. Nor that I blamed anyone.
Agamben (quietly): You denied the system the ability to interpret you.
Jan Palach — The Indictment of Apathy
Agamben: Your act was not against a tyrant but against indifference.
Palach: Violence had already succeeded. Not in domination — in numbing.
Agamben: So you attacked the numbness?
Palach: I removed the possibility of looking away.
Agamben: They could not call you violent.
Palach: They could only decide whether to feel.
Agamben: You made apathy morally unstable.
Maximilian Kolbe — Substitution Without Accusation
Agamben: You volunteered for death. Why?
Kolbe: Because they had turned death into a tool of fear.
Agamben: And you broke the tool?
Kolbe: I made death a gift instead of a threat.
Agamben: You did not resist the system. You altered the meaning of what it was doing.
Kolbe: I made their punishment unable to punish.
Agamben’s Realization
Agamben writes in his notebook:
These are not scapegoats.
They were not selected to restore order.
They did not unify the crowd.
They did not justify the system.
They did something far more dangerous.
They took the violence in such a way that it could not be converted into narrative, justification, or further force.
They became what he had tried to describe as bare life — but now he sees:
This life is not merely exposed to power.
It exposes power.
The Counter-Narrative to Warmongering
Warmongering says:
Violence must be answered with greater violence to stop it.
War mangers demonstrate:
Violence can be stopped by being received in a way that denies it continuation.
Not morally. Mechanically.
The chain breaks because there is no reaction to copy.
The Common Thread
Agamben underlines a final sentence:
- They did not seek martyrdom.
- They did not seek meaning.
- They did not seek victory.
They simply refused to let violence pass through them into the world.
And in doing so, they rendered the logic of war obsolete — not by defeating it, but by making it unable to operate.
Closing Note from Agamben’s Journal
The warmonger spreads war outward.
The war manger draws it inward and ends it.
History remembers the latter only because the cost was unbearable to witness.
Appendix I — Who Were They
Brief lives. Precise contexts. The concrete history behind the pattern.
Sophie Scholl (1921–1943)
- German university student; core member of the White Rose non-violent resistance
- Distributed leaflets in Munich calling citizens to moral awakening against the regime
- Arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated, and tried by the People’s Court
- Refused to recant or implicate others
- Executed by guillotine at age 21
Her action was small, visible, and irretractable. The state’s response revealed its fear of words.
Thích Quảng Đức (1897–1963)
- Vietnamese Mahayana monk protesting persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese regime
- Publicly self-immolated at a busy Saigon intersection
- Remained motionless in meditation as he burned
- The photograph circled the globe within days
No accusation. No speech. The image alone indicted the system.
Jan Palach (1948–1969)
- Czech philosophy student after the Soviet invasion ended the Prague Spring
- Self-immolated in Wenceslas Square to protest growing public apathy
- Left letters asking the nation not to sink into resignation
- His funeral became a mass act of conscience
He targeted not rulers, but numbness.
Maximilian Kolbe (1894–1941)
- Polish Franciscan friar imprisoned in Auschwitz
- After a prisoner escaped, ten men were selected to die by starvation
- Kolbe volunteered to take the place of a stranger with a family
- Led prayers and hymns in the bunker until his death
He converted a punishment into a gift, breaking the camp’s logic of terror.
What They Shared
- No retaliation
- No attempt to escape the frame
- Suffering made public and undeniable
- Violence that stopped with them instead of spreading beyond them
They were not remembered because they fought.
They are remembered because they did not pass the violence on.
Appendix II — Who Is He
Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942)
Italian philosopher of law, politics, and theology whose work circles a single question:
What kind of human life can be harmed without the harm counting as a crime or a sacrifice?
He is best known for the Homo Sacer project — a multi-volume inquiry into sovereignty, exclusion, and what he calls bare life.
The Core Idea: Homo Sacer (“Sacred Man”)
In ancient Roman law, a homo sacer was:
- a person banned from the community
- who could be killed without it being considered murder
- but could not be offered as a religious sacrifice
This paradox fascinated Agamben.
It revealed a form of life that is:
- inside the power of the state
- outside the protection of the law
- killable, but meaningless to kill
He argued that modern politics quietly produces this condition everywhere.
Why This Matters for “War Mangers”
Agamben shows the existence of a person who:
- cannot be cleanly turned into a scapegoat
- cannot be used to restore order
- cannot be made meaningful by the system that harms them
This is the philosophical description of the one who absorbs violence without allowing it to function.
The war manger is bare life that, instead of being erased by power, reveals power.
The Question That Drives His Work
Agamben keeps returning to:
- concentration camps
- states of exception
- refugees
- detainees
- those stripped of political identity
He asks:
What happens when a human being is reduced to mere existence?
His unsettling answer:
That is where the truth of political power becomes visible.
Major Works
- Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
- State of Exception
- Remnants of Auschwitz
- The Kingdom and the Glory
Across them all is the same thread: how systems define who counts — and who does not.
Why He Is the Interlocutor Here
Agamben provides the vocabulary for understanding people who:
- are harmed without becoming symbols
- are killed without becoming martyrs for a cause
- remain human in a way the system cannot metabolize
He names the category of life that the war manger inhabits:
life that cannot be used.
Appendix III — War “Manger” vs Scapelamb
These are not synonyms. They describe the same phenomenon from different angles.
The Scapelamb
From the earlier essay: the one who is selected to carry collective guilt but refuses to cooperate with the mechanism.
- Emphasis on innocence
- Emphasis on victimhood transformed
- Emphasis on exposing the scapegoat ritual
The scapelamb reveals that the victim was never guilty.
The system’s violence is shown to be arbitrary.
The frame is theological and anthropological: Girard, Leviticus, sacrifice, atonement.
The War Manger
The same person, but seen through a different question:
What happens to violence when it reaches them?
- Emphasis on containment
- Emphasis on stopping propagation
- Emphasis on breaking the chain
The war manger is not primarily about innocence.
It’s about what they do with the violence.
They receive it.
They do not pass it on.
The frame is mechanical and strategic: the spread of conflict, mimetic contagion, the logic of retaliation.
The Etymology: “Manger”
From Old French mangeoire, “feeding trough” — a container that holds and contains.
Biblical resonance: the infant Christ laid in a manger.
Vulnerable life held in a simple receptacle.
The container of what cannot defend itself.
Here: the war manger is the vessel that receives violence and holds it so it cannot spread.
Not a weapon. A container.
Not a shield. A termination point.
Why Two Terms?
Because the phenomenon operates on two levels:
Religious/Moral level (scapelamb):
- They expose false accusation
- They reveal the innocence of the victim
- They interrupt sacrifice
Political/Kinetic level (war manger):
- They stop violence mechanically
- They prevent escalation
- They break the mimetic cycle
The scapelamb shows the system is wrong.
The war manger shows the system cannot continue.
The Relationship
The scapelamb is what they are.
The war manger is what they do.
Or:
The scapelamb is the diagnosis.
The war manger is the function.
Both are necessary.
One reveals injustice.
The other stops war.
Appendix IV — War Mangers vs War Mongers
This is not a moral condemnation.
This is an analysis of two responses to the same unbearable perception.
What They Both See
Both the warmonger and the war manger recognize:
- Existential evil is present
- Most people are asleep to it
- Complacency enables catastrophe
- Quietism is complicity
- Something must be done to wake people up
They are not opposites in perception.
They are opposites in method.
The Warmonger’s Logic
The warmonger sees clearly and concludes:
“If I do not escalate, nothing will change.”
- Evil spreads while the comfortable look away
- Polite discourse has failed
- Warnings have been ignored
- Only crisis forces action
- Sometimes violence is the only language power understands
This is not irrational. This is often correct.
Examples:
- Churchill against appeasement
- Abolitionists who rejected compromise with slavery
- Resistance fighters against fascism
- Those who broke windows to win the vote
The warmonger is not confused.
The warmonger has seen that passive goodness allows evil to win.
The Problem With Warmongering
Not that it’s immoral.
That it creates more of what it fights.
Warmongering:
- Requires enemies to remain enemies
- Produces mimetic escalation
- Justifies the opponent’s violence
- Creates conditions for endless war
- Spreads the very mechanism it opposes
The warmonger fights fire with fire and is surprised when the world burns.
It works—until it doesn’t.
It stops threats—and creates new ones.
It protects—and endangers.
The War Manger’s Alternative
The war manger sees the same evil.
Feels the same urgency.
Refuses the same complacency.
But chooses a different method:
“I will make the violence so visible, so undeniable, that no one can look away—but I will not add to it.”
- Sophie Scholl saw Nazi Germany clearly
- Thích Quảng Đức saw persecution clearly
- Jan Palach saw resignation clearly
- Maximilian Kolbe saw death camps clearly
They were not pacifists waiting for others to act.
They acted with extreme urgency.
But they broke complacency through exposure, not escalation.
Why This Matters: The Question of Obsolescence
The essay’s title is not:
“War Mongers Are Bad”
It is:
“War Mangers”
Meaning: there is now a proven alternative method for breaking complacency that does not require adding to violence.
Not because warmongering is immoral.
Because warmongering has become mechanically obsolete for the problems it claims to solve.
The Test Case
When is warmongering necessary?
Traditional answer:
When evil spreads because people won’t see it, and only force will make them act.
The war manger demonstrates:
There is another way to force sight—through suffering that cannot be converted into justification for more violence.
This doesn’t work in all cases.
It doesn’t stop all wars.
It doesn’t replace military defense.
But it breaks the mimetic cycle at the point where it begins: the moment when violence seems like the only way to be heard.
What the Warmonger Fears
That non-retaliation will:
- Enable evil
- Reward aggression
- Sacrifice the innocent
- Encourage further violence
These are legitimate fears.
The war manger does not deny them.
The war manger demonstrates that there is a form of action that:
- Confronts evil directly
- Does not reward it
- Protects by exposing, not by escalating
- Stops violence by making it impossible to continue
The Grief Both Share
Both the warmonger and the war manger know:
The cost of seeing clearly is unbearable.
The warmonger pays it by becoming what they fight.
The war manger pays it by absorbing what they resist.
Neither position is comfortable.
Neither position is safe.
Neither position is chosen lightly.
The Central Claim
Warmongering was necessary when it was the only way to stop complacency about evil.
War mangers make warmongering obsolete—not by being more moral, but by being more effective at breaking denial without spreading violence.
The question is no longer:
“How do I force people to see?”
The question is:
“Will I force them to see by becoming part of the war, or by ending it in myself?”
Appendix V — Why This Matters Now
We live in a time when violence rarely begins with weapons.
Jan Palach’s self-immolation did not prevent the Soviet occupation.
Thích Quảng Đức’s sacrifice did not end the persecution immediately.
The cost was unbearable. The outcomes were uncertain.
So why ever choose this path?
What Makes Warmongering Obsolete
Not its immorality. Its mechanism.
Warmongering depends on:
- Clear enemies
- Containable violence
- Winnable conflicts
- Proportional response staying proportional
But modern conflict increasingly lacks all four:
- Enemies are not states but networks, ideologies, and viral narratives
- You cannot defeat an idea with force
- Violence is no longer containable
- Retaliation spreads through imitation, not territory
- Symbolic strikes trigger global outrage cycles
- Conflicts are not winnable
- There is no surrender, only endless escalation
- Proportionality fails
- Every response is photographed, memed, weaponized
- Every strike becomes recruitment material
In this environment, warmongering doesn’t work the way it used to.
It no longer protects. It replicates.
The Shift
The war manger becomes relevant not because warmongering is evil, but because warmongering is increasingly ineffective at the thing it was designed to do: stop threats.
When:
- conflicts are mimetic (driven by imitation and contagion)
- violence is symbolic (images, narratives, humiliation)
- enemies are everyone and no one (decentralized, ideological, viral)
Then the one who breaks the chain of imitation does more to stop violence than the one who retaliates.
Not because retaliation is wrong.
Because retaliation feeds the system.
The Grief of the Choice
This does not make the choice easier.
The war manger:
- may die
- may fail
- may watch others suffer
- may be called a coward
- may enable short-term harm in hope of long-term change
There is no certainty here. No guarantee.
Only the terrible possibility that absorbing violence without passing it on might be the only way to stop it in systems where retaliation has become the fuel.
Not Condemnation
We do not condemn the warmonger.
We understand:
- the weight they carry
- the calculus they make
- the lives they protect
- the necessity they face
We only observe:
In a world where violence spreads by imitation, the logic that once protected now propagates.
The war manger is not morally superior.
The war manger is structurally necessary in a new kind of war.
The Contemporary Context
We live in a time when violence rarely begins with weapons.
It begins with:
- imitation
- outrage
- humiliation
- the hunt for someone to blame
The old machinery Girard described runs at network speed.
The conditions Agamben analyzed are now ambient.
1. Mimetic Escalation Is Instant
Social systems amplify rivalry:
- insult → pile-on → cancellation → retaliation
- tribe → counter-tribe → narrative war
- symbolic violence that prepares the ground for real violence
War no longer requires borders. It requires mirrors.
2. Scapegoating Is Continuous
Someone is always being:
- singled out
- blamed for systemic anxiety
- expelled from the moral community
- turned into the reason “we” are justified
This is the scapegoat mechanism without pause.
3. Bare Life Is Increasing
More people live in conditions where they are:
- visible but not protected
- counted but not represented
- exposed to power without recourse
Refugees. Prisoners. The socially disposable. The digitally exiled.
Agamben’s category is no longer exceptional. It is common.
4. Why “War Mangers” Become Relevant
In such a climate, the person who:
- refuses to retaliate
- refuses to amplify outrage
- refuses to pass on humiliation
- absorbs hostility without echo
does something structurally radical.
They interrupt the mimetic chain at the smallest scale.
They make escalation fail locally.
5. The Obsolescence of Warmongering
Warmongering depends on:
- reflex
- imitation
- emotional contagion
- narratives that justify retaliation
War mangers make those mechanisms stall.
Not by argument.
By non-participation in the reflex.
6. The Hidden Frontier
The next wars are not only military.
They are:
- informational
- psychological
- social
- mimetic
And they spread through ordinary people copying each other’s reactions.
The war manger is the one who breaks the copy loop.
7. The Uncomfortable Implication
This is not a role for heroes.
It is a role that can appear anywhere:
- in families
- online
- in institutions
- in politics
- in moments of insult and escalation
It is costly. Often invisible. Sometimes misunderstood.
But it is the only posture that stops violence without feeding it.
8. The Present Tense
This matters now because the mechanisms that once led to wars between nations now operate continuously between persons.
The choice is no longer only:
fight or submit
There is a third posture:
receive, and do not pass on.
Appendix VI — The Pattern
What follows is not biography or philosophy, but the recurring structure visible across the lives you’ve gathered.
A sequence. Almost an anatomy.
1. The Situation
- A system under stress
- Rising tension, rivalry, humiliation, fear
- A need for release, unity, or distraction
- The search for someone to carry the weight
This is the precondition for scapegoating and for war.
2. The Usual Outcome (Girard’s Mechanism)
- Someone is blamed
- They are expelled or destroyed
- The group regains cohesion
- Violence is justified as necessary
- The cycle resets, ready to repeat
The victim is made meaningful.
The violence is made righteous.
This is mimetic theory’s central insight.
3. The Interruption
The war manger / scapelamb does something anomalous:
- does not flee
- does not accuse
- does not retaliate
- does not justify themselves
- does not seek to become a symbol
They remain present and undefended.
This is the break in the script.
4. What the System Expects vs. What Happens
The system expects:
- fear
- resistance
- confession
- counter-violence
- narrative
What it gets:
- stillness
- clarity
- innocence without defense
- suffering without retaliation
The mechanism has nothing to grab onto.
5. The Moment of Exposure
Because the person does not cooperate with the script:
- the violence cannot be explained
- the punishment cannot be justified
- the crowd cannot unify comfortably
- observers are forced into moral awareness
The act of violence becomes visible as violence.
6. The Threshold
This only works when:
- the innocence is clear
- the suffering is undeniable
- the refusal to retaliate is unmistakable
- the cost is high enough that it cannot be ignored
Below this threshold, the system absorbs the anomaly and continues.
Above it, the system is exposed.
7. The Aftermath
What follows is not immediate change, but:
- a crack in the narrative
- a lingering discomfort
- a memory that cannot be reconciled
- a story that refuses to support future violence cleanly
The person is remembered not as a scapegoat, but as a witness.
8. Why This Pattern Is So Rare
Because it requires someone willing to:
- lose reputation
- lose safety
- lose control
- possibly lose life
without trying to control the outcome.
It is a posture almost impossible to choose deliberately.
9. The Quiet Conclusion
War spreads when violence is answered.
War ends where violence is received and goes no further.
That is the pattern.
Radically Happy 
Leave a comment