Suffering and sovereignty

The murder of the Reverend Jacques Hamel

On Tuesday, 26 July 2016, the assistant priest of the parish of the Église St.-Étienne was administering the sacrament of Mass. His name was Jacques Hamel. He was 85 years old, and had been serving as an ordained priest of the Catholic Church for nearly 60 years. The parish he served was located in a suburb of Rouen, a city which features prominently in the history of Christian martyrdom: it was there that Joan of Arc was executed.

Yet nothing in this heritage gave any indication of the violence that would occur at the Église St.-Étienne that morning. Just as the celebration of the Mass was concluding, two men entered the church armed with knives and a very real looking fake gun. The men forced a video camera into the hands of an 87-year-old parishioner and forced him to film as they advanced on the priest. Hamel resisted the men, shouting ‘Get out, Satan!’ as they seized him. As the parishioner filmed them, the men stabbed Hamel in the throat in what was likely an attempted beheading.

During the commotion that followed, a nun escaped and managed to alert the police. The attackers turned on the elderly parishioner who had been forced to film the events after he told them that their parents would die of shame. The parishioner was stabbed several times but survived after pretending to be dead. Before departing the church, the men engaged in a brief theological debate with a nun. Then, as they fled the church, both men were shot and killed by the police.

This traumatic event quickly became world news. Stories of the event proliferated across the world, and many of these focused on the concept of martyrdom. Less than two months after his murder, Pope Francis delivered a homily in which he formally declared Hamel a martyr. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that the process for beatification had been initiated. Yet, as with all things, the interpretation of Jacques Hamel’s murder was subject to intense contention. A range of competing narratives emerged, each telling a unique story of sacrifice. These narratives offer competing, often incommensurable accounts of the sacrifice formed out of violence. Was he a martyr for the Catholic faith, or the French nation, or Western civilization? Was he a victim of absurd barbarism, of culture clash, or perhaps of multiculturalism? It is worth studying these varied efforts at commemoration, not only to understand the range of opinions that follow violent terrorism, but also in the attempt to discern the underlying social realities which determine and are reflected by stories of sacrifice.

But before doing so, it is necessary to consider the propagandistic efforts of the attackers and their sympathizers. It is, of course, unsavory to reflect on any celebration of murder. Yet for some small but vocal and violent fraction of the population, the attackers were themselves martyrs. Given that so much of the commemorative work in the wake of the attacks tended to focus on the cultural chasm exposed by the violence, it is worthwhile to briefly reflect on the other side of violence and commemoration in order to evaluate claims of civilizational difference and antagonism.

Martyrdom and the Islamic state

To what extent can a modern movement be called ‘political’ if its primary associations are religious? Alternatively, how can a movement be defined as ‘religious’ if its goals are entirely focused on the nation? These taxonomic questions become particularly convoluted in the Islamic context given the historical conditions which gave rise to the operative categories (i.e. in light of the fact that the categories of social life called ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are shaped by the particular contours of Western history; see Asad, 1993).

But what might have once seemed a polite debate to be held amongst postmodern anthropologists has now intruded upon policy and public life. This is due almost entirely to the violence of contemporary terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and, more recently, the Islamic State, who claimed responsibility for the murder of Jacques Hamel. Defining these terrorists as either political or religious has wide-reaching consequences, shaping policy and public opinion. Yet opinions amongst specialists are divided.

On the one hand, there are those who view these groups as fundamentally Islamic. These analysts will tend to label groups like Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State as ‘Islamists’, ‘Islamic radicals’, ‘fundamentalists’, ‘religious extremists’, or ‘jihadists’. In Western policy circles, this position has gained significant traction amongst ethnic nationalist parties, but the scholarship is politically eclectic in its conclusions. There are the Orientalists, like Bernard Lewis, who have argued that modern fundamentalism has a legitimate historical and theological connection to earlier traditions in Islam (Lewis, 2003).

But this argument is not limited to Orientalists: the scholar of Islamism Mohammed Ayoob has argued that contemporary terrorist groups may account for a small fraction of Islamist movements, but that their concerns and identity are nevertheless rooted in an essentially religious worldview (though Ayoob (2008) takes pains to illustrate that this is an essentially heretical and anomalous form of Islamism).

Against this view is an equally disparate group of theorists who view contemporary terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State as fundamentally political. Again, these analysts approach their shared topic from different perspectives and draw a range of conclusions, but they are united in viewing the ‘religious’ dimensions of contemporary terrorism as a thin veneer or callous manipulation. Patricia Crone, a student of Bernard Lewis, has written that modern terrorist groups don’t seem to have any substantive knowledge of Islamic history or theology (Crone, 2007). John Esposito has similarly suggested that the theological incoherence of contemporary terrorist groups should preclude them from membership in the ummah (Esposito, 2003).

At times these perspectives veer toward one another. Bernard Lewis and Patricia Crone are not particularly different in their overall perspective – both are ‘Orientalists’, Western scholars who spy some stable cultural identity across the horizon of civilization. Lewis discerns obvious heresies in contemporary terrorism, and Crone connects contemporary terrorists with particular strands of Islamic tradition, particularly the Kharijites. Even so, the two reach polarized conclusions: contemporary terrorism is either fundamentally Islamic, or it is not at all. So too with Ayoob and Esposito: both approach contemporary terrorist groups like Al Qaeda as a byproduct of modern political Islam, but reach disparate conclusions.

Cutting through this theoretical tumult requires some reference to the empirical world. The collective commemoration of martyrs provides a particularly useful insight into the cultural world of terrorists. In creating a story of ultimate sacrifice, communities distill some set of higher goods, and reaffirm the sanctity of those goods through contrast with some force of violent desecration. When members of the Islamic State celebrate the sacrifice of one of their brood, they are doing so within the context of a particular cultural universe; the figure of the martyr crystalizes the essential features of that universe, and allows the community to distinguish that which is the most good from its opposite.

One of the most striking features of contemporary publications like Dabiq and Rafidah, the official English language magazines of the Islamic State, is how saturated they are in the imagery and language of martyrdom (or shahid – despite Western panic over the ‘glossy’ and ‘seductive’ nature of IS propaganda, the group’s literature is devoid of editorial consistency, interchanging traditional Islamic concepts and their English equivalents with amateurish frequency). Every issue of Dabiq, the group’s first periodical, was prefaced with an extended quote from the hadith Sahih Muslim, which forecasts the coming of apocalyptic war between Romans and Muslims, in which one-third of the faithful die and ‘become the best martyrs of Allah’. ¹

Each issue of Dabiq, as well as its successor Rafidah, proceeds to report on the efforts of the Islamic State to confront the ‘Roman’ enemy and create a state from which to defend righteousness. Episodes of violence are typically reported on in a section of the magazine titled ‘Operations’. These attacks involve a wide range of targets: Western civilians, infrastructure in African states, soldiers in the Philippines, and any number of religious ‘deviants’, from those who are identified as apostates, to Coptic Christians in Northern Africa and Yezidis.

The breadth and diversity of these attacks are boiled into a general enemy: the ‘kufr’, those who deny the truth as revealed by Allah through his messenger. How is it that such a diverse group of enemies, including a seeming majority of the world’s Muslim population, are all reduced to a state of willful ignorance? Throughout the Islamic State’s literature there is a tendency to identify a single agent, almost wholly responsible for the corruption in the world. That enemy is the vague force of ‘modernity’. The fifteenth issue of Dabiq offers a list of the reasons why the Islamic State hates the West. These include: its lack of respect for the one true God, its liberalism, its secularity, its occasional atheism, its military engagements in the Middle East, and the ‘ridiculous amount of money’ spent on ‘lattes’, ‘Timberlands’, and military engagements.

Though these criticisms seem directed solely at Western decadence, they are in fact generalized to encompass the majority of the world’s population. In the words of the first edition of Dabiq, ‘the world has been divided into two camps…the camp of Islam…and the camp of kafr’. The modern West is the most obviously corrupt representative of the kafr, but Saudi Arabia is similarly infected, as is the Philippines, as are all other known societies. The violent sacrifice of martyrdom is produced in conflict with the forces of global modernity. In this respect, the commemoration of martyrs allows the Islamic State to reduce the complexity and difference of their victims into a single enemy in the apocalyptic struggle fought on behalf of a righteous truth.

But the sacrifice of martyrdom must also be made on behalf of some higher good, and in this respect the propaganda of the Islamic State is less intelligible. It is clear that the Islamic State believes its martyrs have sacrificed life for a transcendent God. It is also obvious that devotion to this God requires a rejection of this world: the apocalyptic violence of IS propaganda requires both the complete renunciation of the modern world and, if necessary, a violent renunciation of the self. But, as with all world-rejecting faiths, the apocalyptic imagination of IS demands some degree of commitment to working within the world in devotion to the divine.

What sort of outward signs might validate earthly sacrifice on behalf of the Islamic State’s otherworldly God? What sort of ethic, what earthly behavior, is demanded from this world-rejecting commitment? In other words, how might an earnest member of the Islamic State discern the valid and righteous sacrifice of their peers from the unworthy sacrifice of their victims? For followers of the Islamic State, the answer is contained in the successes of the restored caliphate, in the victories of Dabiq, the city which is prophesied to be the last defense of the faithful during the end times. Yet here the propagandists encounter something of a barrier: how to construct an ideal state in the contemporary world that is entirely insulated from the threat of the kufr?

The publications of the Islamic State reveal a group fundamentally confounded by the challenge of creating an Islamic homeland that exists entirely outside of the domain of modernity. The workings of the state, at least as described in the organization’s official periodicals, are both absurdly utopic and entirely modern. The ‘Islamic State’ is essentially depicted as an ultra-efficient welfare state: it administers ‘millions of dollars’ to local needy populations, engages in massive infrastructure projects, and establishes a new legal system to ‘reduce crime’.

Even the more fundamental workings and identity of the Islamic State are wrought in contradiction and fantasy. On the one hand, the group’s propaganda denounces all forms of modern identity as forms of idolatry. Yet much of the literature is devoted to celebrating the diversity of the caliphate, a diversity defined in terms of race and nationality. Thus, modern nationality is corrupting and heretical, until it migrates to the Islamic State, whereupon it is celebrated, surprisingly, as the means by which to engage in a sort of diversity and tolerance (admittedly, the grounds for this diversity are established by complete submission to God and his state on earth). So too with modernity’s political forms; every critique of modernity offered by the group contains a denunciation of democracy as a corrupt form of government. Yet every celebration of the Islamic State references the supposed equality and participatory nature of the new caliphate.

This general inability to forge a consistent and meaningful social ethic, let alone translate that ethic into a coherent vision of statecraft, may account for a seeming contradiction in the IS propaganda. On the one hand, publications like Dabiq reference martyrdom in every single issue. On the other hand, the ‘reports’ of specific martyrdom operations are extremely enunciated, and focus almost all of their attention on the enemy and the victims of violence. The Islamic State has been able to use martyrdom to absorb a wide range of enemies into a story of apocalyptic violence. However, they have struggled to articulate the ‘affirmative’ aspect of a martyr’s sacrifice.

The attack on the church in Normandy and the murder of Jacques Hamel is suggestive. The issue of Dabiq which followed the attack was ostensibly devoted to the topic of ‘breaking the cross’, and contained an extended critique of Pope Francis, as well as an attempt to expose the alleged heresies of Trinitarian monotheism. That same issue contained a single reference to the murder of Jacques Hamel. Looking beyond the Islamic State’s attempts at print propaganda, the group’s ostensible press agency, Amaq, provided only a brief, cryptic confirmation that the attackers had worked on behalf of the Islamic State.

Why, at a moment when the Islamic State was desperate to contradict Pope Francis’s dismissal of the ‘meaningless violence’ of terrorism, would the organization expend such little effort in forging an affirmative narrative of a recent attack on a Catholic church? This quite noticeable silence results from an incapacity to articulate anything amounting to a meaningful social ethic that exists outside of the influence of modernity. It is impossible to create a full narrative of sacrifice without connecting that sacrifice to some outward good which is perceptible to the commemorative community. This requirement holds even for world-rejecting and apocalyptic faiths: if the true believer is going to reject the world without succumbing to idle fatalism or nihilism, they must have some meaningful ethical orientation while on earth. The immature apocalyptic imaginary of the Islamic State seems wholly incapable of this affirmative dimension of sacrifice.

Indeed, one of the most sustained efforts to assess martyrdom in an affirmative and meaningful sense only further confirms the Islamic State’s more general failure to imagine a world-rejecting social ethic beyond the confines of modernity. In an extended advice column in the pages of Rafidah, an author addresses women whose husbands have recently been martyred. Ministering to the bereaved is a necessary component of the collective commemoration of martyrs: the grieving must be assured that the loss of life was a worthwhile sacrifice. But the advice columnist of Rafidah can only produce an extended list of behavioral laws: what widows should and should not wear, when and to what extent perfume might be worn, what sort of errands can excuse leaving the house. Faced with a grieving widow, the official organ of the Islamic State descends into the banality of a totalitarian managerialism, incapable of offering a meaningful narrative of sacrifice and wholly content to dictate a politics of grief.

Many have been shocked by the degree of violence contained in the propaganda of the Islamic State. To some this is an obvious confirmation of the deeply religious imagination of the group. They are a sect of apocalyptic Islamists, bent on restoring some ancient imaginary caliphate. This belief system encourages violence. For others, this violence is uniquely modern: a nihilistic spectacle that results from the group’s utter lack of substantive ideas, a craven and materialist politics.

This brief review of martyrdom in Islamic State propaganda suggests the ultimate harmony of these two perspectives. The martyrs of the Islamic State emerge from an apocalyptic imagination which posits an entire world reduced to the role of enemy, the enemy of modernity. But the poverty of any meaningful and affirmative sacrifice suggests an inability to forge a stable cultural system outside of modernity. Indeed, where attempts at affirmation are made, the martyr’s sacrifice inevitably reveals an anaesthetized apocalyptic state that most closely resembles something not dissimilar from a modern, Western welfare state. In effect, the sacrifice of the Islamic State’s martyrs reveals a complete inability to imagine a social ethic outside of the limits of modern sovereignty. Every attack becomes an opportunity to revel in the slaughter of victims, sanctifying the violence of the Islamic State’s sovereignty, but never managing to transcend that sovereignty. It may not be, as Pope Francis suggests, entirely meaningless, but it is certainly not meaningful.

Martyrdom and the Western imagination

While Western observers often point to the ‘martyrdom operations’ of groups like the Islamic State as evidence of their ruthless nihilism, terrorist violence inevitably produces a secondary cast of martyrs, those formed in the commemoration of the departed innocents. These are obviously quite distinct types of martyrdom. The moral difference between the victims of terrorism and their murderers may make this comparison unpalatable. Yet in the wake of terrorist violence, mourners form their own interpretations of the carnage, crafting meaning from brutality.

It is in these commemorative processes that a second distinction emerges, further distancing the attackers and their victims. The apparent motivation of a terrorist, however insensate, renders their sacrifice at least partially intelligible. The commemorative community which crafts a story of martyrdom out of the terrorist’s destruction does not have to sort through questions of motive, or debate the ethical implications of their crimes – the messier aspects of commemoration are already resolved in a group’s motivating ideology. Their martyr’s sacrifice merely reinforces that ideology.

For those who commemorate the victims of terrorism, the task is infinitely more complicated. The motives, biographies, and personalities of victims are not transparent, and do not lend to a simple commemorative process. Where the story of a terrorist’s sacrifice is already pregnant in their motivating ideology, the sacrifice of a victim must be conceived by onlookers, a diverse crowd united mostly by the fright of recent violence. This dilemma appears exacerbated under the conditions of the late modern West. The supposedly fractured nature of modern social life, in which social experience is individualized and subjective reality reigns over objective truth, only complicates attempts to form an enduring, meaningful, and collective story of sacrifice.

The murder of Jacques Hamel renders these observations plain. Jacques Hamel was a martyr. This was a fact no less obvious to his commemorative community than the martyrdom of his attackers had been to the Islamic State and their sympathizers. But what sort of martyr was Hamel? The Islamic State may lack an affirmative sacrificial narrative, but the murderers of Jacques Hamel were still celebrated as martyrs on account of their violence alone. Those who mourned the fallen priest lacked any similar degree of consensus on the cultural content of his sacrifice.

Perhaps the most immediate interpretation framed the attack in terms of the seemingly relentless assaults on the French nation. Most initial reports of Hamel’s murder recounted some of the preceding episodes of terrorism, often referencing the attack on the editorial offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the November 2015 attacks that occurred across Paris, and an attack in Nice just days earlier (e.g. Nossiter and Olivennes, 2016). This initial interpretation, offered in the accounts of global media, described Hamel’s murder as part of an ongoing attack on the French nation.

Adding to this generic narrative was the work of a specifically French commemorative community. Foremost in terms of influence were the country’s leading mainstream politicians. The French President François Hollande described the attack as a ‘desecration of democracy’, and stated that ‘when a priest is attacked, it is the whole of France that is harmed’ (qtd. in Nossiter et al., 2016). The Prime Minister Manuel Valls described the attack as part of a larger and longer conflict between the French people and barbarism (Willsher and Borger, 2016). An editorial on a British news site suggested that in attacking a church, the terrorists had struck at an ‘emotional bond’ which ‘courses through and defines French history and culture’ (Hussey, 2016). Similar calls came from unexpected corners: the editor of La Croix, a Catholic-interest daily newspaper, argued that ‘The history of France is very associated with Catholics, and to strike a church is to strike one of those elements that constitutes the identity of France’. From secular politicians to one of the country’s largest lay-Catholic dailies, the martyrdom of Jacques Hamel was strongly associated with French national identity.

But even as the process of collective mourning and commemoration commenced, scuffles began to break out over the proper terms of commemoration. Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right Front National, chided her political opponents for their alleged opportunism. In the wake of terror attacks, Le Pen has tended to invoke the imagery of civilizational conflict. In the case of the attack on the Église St.-Étienne, it was Le Pen’s niece, the parliamentarian Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, who most emphatically voiced the civilizational line, claiming that that attack amounted to the first shot in a global religious war (Hussey, 2016).

It is frequently observed that the political fortunes of the Le Pen clan have tended to rise following terror attacks. It might be supposed that this is because Marine Le Pen and her party are more competent at imbuing the violent events with meanings that are commensurate to the horror of the violence. By this reasoning, the utter depravity involved in murdering a priest demands a near-messianic form of commemoration. The Front National is unafraid to engage in the more impolite features of commemoration, and thus their public speech resonates with a wider range of French society than the vague niceties of mainstream politicians.

Yet the extreme stance assumed in the commemorative rhetoric of the Front National is surprisingly derivative. Though the Le Pens may invoke the language of Western civilization and religious war with a greater frequency, their use of these concepts is inevitably contained within the language of French national identity. Indeed, in a party statement the Front National echoed the sentiments of mainstream politicians, declaring that ‘It is now the heart of the cultural identity of our nation that is intentionally touched’ (Worley, 2016). It is perhaps not surprising that a nationalist party should ultimately ground its commemorative work in national identity.

Yet this observation is noteworthy: despite shallow partisan bickering, the political elite is essentially united in its commemorative work. From socialists to far-right nationalists, French politicians responded to the murder of Jacques Hamel as principally an attack on the nation. The commemoration of the attack drew on a diverse landscape of imagery: civilizational war, besieged democracy, religious conflict. But these concepts are in the end mere ciphers for the sovereignty of the nation-state. Though each political party criticizes its opponents for inadequate or exploitative commemorations, all articulate essentially the same story. This rhetoric was meant to evoke a fundamental reality of the nation, in which Catholicism, Christianity, Western values, and decency are all byproducts of French sovereignty.

Contrasted with the commemorative work of a terrorist group like the Islamic State, Western efforts to mourn the victims of unexpected violence often appear frayed, different interest groups crafting unique stories of sacrifice to suit their own tastes and agendas. Yet these differences in commemorative strategy are shallow (indeed they are frequently interchanged) and proceed from a shared social reality in which the sovereignty of the nation-state instantiates all that is good and valued in social life. Even something as substantial as Christianity is subordinated to the sacral reality of the sovereign state, relegated to the role of identity. The threat is similarly polyphonic – sometimes a generalized Islam, sometimes a particular Islamism, sometimes barbarism, sometimes the legacy of a colonial past – but all of these are in the end articulated as a particular threat to the wellbeing of the nation.

This fundamental unity in commemorative practice is perhaps clearer if one looks beyond France and considers those isolated voices who, speaking from within the canopy of Western modernity, refused to recognize Jacques Hamel as a martyr. Consider an article that appeared in a popular American conservative online magazine. On 4 August 2016, The Federalist published an essay under the headline ‘Was Jacques Hamel a Martyr to His Faith or to Illusions About Islam?’ In effect, the author suggests that Hamel was complicit in his own murder. By associating with his Muslim neighbors, Hamel was acquiescing to an alleged violence inherent in Islam. In the author’s words, Hamel paid the price for the ‘fanaticism of profligate mercy’ (Mullarkey, 2016).

Compare this with an opinion piece in The New York Times. The headline in this case was ‘Leave “Martyrdom” to the Jihadists’. The author, Paul Vallely, argues that declaring Hamel a martyr would be dangerous because it would place the priest in the same category as his murderers. Violent sacrifice is something performed by the ruthless and uncivilized. By contrast, when Jacques Hamel died he was going about his everyday life, doing his job. Martyrdom is senseless, foreign, nihilistic. Jacques Hamel was, by contrast, domesticated: comprehensible, rational, stable (Vallely, 2016).

These two articles represent dramatically opposed perspectives on contemporary terrorist violence. The first renounces the martyrdom of Jacques Hamel because he was insufficiently rigorous in his prosecution of religious war. The second renounces martyrdom because it succumbs to the language of religious war. The first emerges from the more rabidly paranoid corners of reactionary thinking, the second is representative of a perfectly respectable moderate liberalism. But as with the seemingly opposed French politicians, the two articles share an underlying logic. Each is, in its own way, ‘totalizing’: all that is good (whether moderate, reasonable rationalism, or an unspoiled Western civilization) is contained within ‘us’, all that is rotten and infectious is confined to ‘them’.

All of the seemingly opposed forms of commemoration are united insofar as they are entirely contained within the logic of sovereignty. They can envision a form of the common good, of belonging, of value, only in terms of the dominant political paradigm. This is perhaps clearest when one considers the place of religion in these otherwise disparate commemorative processes. Some of the commemorations reviewed have declared Hamel a martyr whose sacrifice was offered in a global religious war. Others have denied his martyrdom on similar grounds. Still others have suggested that the sacrifice of this Catholic priest was an attack on a unique French identity. Yet in all of these cases, ‘religion’ is reduced to a category of identity, of belonging. If one defines religion in terms of some transcendent good or power or God, then there was nothing particularly religious about any of these forms of commemoration. If one takes the Durkheimian view – that religion is a sort of sacred reflection of ourselves – then the commemoration of Jacques Hamel’s martyrdom was indeed a deeply religious event.

The slackened sovereignty of cosmopolitan commemoration

One of the most debilitating aspects of terrorist violence is its speed. In an instant, calm becomes chaos. Globalization, particularly as it relates to the rapid proliferation of people and media, exposes the inherent fragility of the modern state, the imperceptible passage of people and unrelenting flow of violent imagery contributing to an ever-present sense of risk. However, commemoration and mourning are also increasingly taking place along those same vectors of globalization which mediate terror.

This is particularly true in the case of digital or online commemoration. A flock of commemorative hashtags and other digital regalia seem to follow contemporary terror attacks like a kettle of vultures. In these instances, the spectacular nature of violence induces a spectacular bereavement.

After the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo editorial staff in Paris on 7 January 2015, the hashtag ‘#jesuischarlie’ began to circulate on various social media platforms. The use of a hash symbol (#) allows users of an online social network to attach a post to a searchable topic. In the case of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, ‘#jesuischarlie’ allowed users on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to express their grief over the attacks in a collective fashion.

The circulation of commemorative hashtags produces a sort of cosmopolitan solidarity: users from around the world are able to grieve together, across borders and languages. But what sort of meaning is contained within this mourning? What is the cultural substance of this solidarity? In an immediate sense, hashtag commemoration lacks any substantive social or cultural content. Commemoration that is detached from any social space and occurs between strangers cannot possibly build substantive and enduring meaning. This is perhaps most clear in the mass online commemoration of Jacques Hamel. With the news of his death, the hashtag ‘#jesuispretre’ (‘I am priest’) began to circulate across social media platforms. In the most legitimate instances of its use, as when used by a priest of the Catholic Church, the hashtag was merely redundant. In every other case, the hashtag couldn’t help but reduce the vocation of priesthood, a sacrament of Catholicism, to a chosen identity. In either case, the hashtag couldn’t manage to transcend the frivolity of its medium.

Yet the circulation of ‘jesuispretre’ on social media was not mindless. The use of the formulaic phrase ‘Je suis…’ allows individuals to place sudden, terrifying violence within a familiar story. This is the story of France’s struggle with terrorism. When an English speaker uses a ‘Je suis…’ hashtag, they are engaging in a gesture of sympathy toward a generalized French citizen. But they are also placing a particular moment of violence – the murder of satirists, concertgoers, a priest – within the framework of a national struggle.

The nation-state remains the primary referent for commiserative solidarity, even in the case of digital cosmopolitan commemoration. Even so, the form and style of this solidarity is an obvious contrast to the expressions of political elites or chauvinist essayists. The ‘traditional’ forms of commemoration displayed in speeches and in the press reflect a ‘strong’ or ‘thick’ notion of national identity and belonging. Here, the sovereignty of the nation-state, the spirit or essence of the republic, is awakened by the violent intrusion of some desecrating foreign foe. In contrast, the global, cosmopolitan mourning that occurs on social networks posits an inherently messy and ‘thin’ notion of French identity, in which an infinitely diverse community can assume French identity with little effort or commitment.

The distinction between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ forms of solidarity, as articulated by different forms of commemoration, are principally moral and political in nature. On the one hand, the traditional forms of commemoration peddled by elites have definite policy implications, lending themselves to a wide range of security-related reforms. The ‘thin’ solidarity produced by online commemoration lacks any definite policy implications. Yet, from the perspective of modern, globalized liberalism, the ‘thick’ solidarity of traditional commemoration is morally dangerous: its tendency to induce sharp social divisions, in which all that is good and pure is associated with the nation, and all that is dangerous and desecrating is associated with an external enemy, almost inevitably escalates conflict. From this perspective, the ‘thin’ solidarity of online cosmopolitan commemoration is morally superior, lending itself to a global fraternity that reaches beyond borders.

Even so, this cosmopolitan commemoration is not without weakness and not beyond reproach. First, the inability of this mode of commemoration to forge a meaningful story of sacrifice, even out of cases that would lend themselves to such a narrative, suggests a fundamental weakness in cosmopolitan mourning. Absent the ability to forge relatively stable, widely-shared goods or values, it is doubtful that this form of commemoration will be able to forge a meaningful resistance to the violence of terrorism.

There is also always a dormant threat in this cosmopolitan commemoration. Various critics have suggested that the public commemorations of violence contain a germ, however microscopic, of xenophobia, that the well-intended expression of national grief and solidarity can be easily manipulated into blind intolerance (e.g. Todd, 2015). Might this not also be the case for the looser, thinner, easier forms of commemoration that take place online? In interpreting the death of Jacques Hamel through a framework of national identity and French struggle (‘#jesuispretre’), might not the well-meaning netizen be contributing to the globalization of national struggle? Suddenly the oppositions contained in traditional commemoration, in which everything good within French society is subsumed to the vitality of the French state, are generalized. Everything good and pleasant and nice around the world – freedom, tolerance, comedy, spirituality – is a proxy to the French state. A paranoid assessment to be sure, but the medium seems to consistently validate paranoia.

A sacrifice beyond sovereignty

The callow martyrdom of contemporary commemoration succumbs all too easily to contemporary sovereignty, seemingly incapable of imagining collective goods that transcend the order of the nation-state. This is obvious in the commemorative practices of a group like the Islamic State: their apocalyptic imagination has crafted powerful and seductive narratives which vilify the majority of the earth’s population. But these same stories of martyrdom cannot articulate any affirmative vision of social life beyond the delusions of a fundamentalist welfare state, some fictional bureaucratic paradise that looks more like a rabid managerialism than anything from Islamic history.

Commemorative practices by victims and their allies are, in every respect, more commendable. Even so, the martyrdom produced around the innocent victims of terrorism often succumbs to the cultural logic of state sovereignty. This is an undoubtedly nicer sovereignty than that on offer by the terrorists: liberal, democratic, individualist. But again, these higher goods for which a victim-martyr dies are confined within the domain of the nation-state. This does not make them bad. However, it does make them inadequate to the task of commemoration (that of offering an enduring, meaningful, and sustaining account of suffering). On the one hand, the national commemoration of martyrs consecrates supposedly inviolable principles which are enshrined by the nation, even though the martyr’s own death reveals the inherent fragility of any ‘inviolate’ principle which is man-made. On the other hand, and perhaps as a consequence, the commemoration of contemporary martyrs can succumb easily to the more unpleasant features of modern sovereignty: surveillance, exclusion, total war.

This conundrum of commemoration faced by the Western public is a historical aberration. There are earlier forms of martyrdom and sacrifice, potential resources, which commemorate and mourn an act of violence without perpetuating it. Consider the first great innovators of the concept of martyrdom, the early Christians (e.g. Castelli, 2004). Whatever else might be said of the deeply controversial subject of early Christian martyrdom, it must be admitted that it was grounded in an apocalyptic vision. Yet this was hardly the apocalypse imagined by the Islamic state. Early Christian communities were millenarian; the stories they told about martyrdom were a part of this vision, in which the sacrifice offered by a Christian martyr was part of a larger struggle by the forces of God against the agents of a fallen world. But the sort of rejection of the world that was embodied by the early Christian martyr did not demand violent recourse or the creation of some new earthly sovereignty. Rather, it encouraged the commemorative community to view the suffering inherent in creaturely life as a potential pathway to a transcendent and other-worldly sovereign.

One might also look to the martyrs of medieval Christendom. Martyrs like Thomas Becket and Joan of Arc were forged from disparate conflicts, and their relationships to earthly powers were diverse (e.g. Barlow, 1993; Pernoud, 1955). But across these cases, the martyr’s sacrifice forged a sacral connection between the commemorative community and the transcendent power of God. This sacrifice did not, as in the case of the early Christians, confirm an apocalyptic rejection of the world. Rather, it reasserted the fundamentally sacral bond which united the body politic. The sacrifice of Thomas Becket in Canterbury or Joan of Arc in Rouen did not demand some violent recourse on the part of a monarch or earthly sovereign. It reestablished the fundamental supremacy of a transcendent God over the society, and in doing so reaffirmed the limits, normative and juridical, of earthly sovereignty.

But one needn’t go so far back as pre-modern Europe to find exemplars of a meaningful form of commemoration capable of articulating a sustaining story of sacrifice. Such instances of commemoration, in which a community looks beyond the violence of earthly life and catches a glimpse of some higher good, are rare and fleeting under the conditions of Western modernity. But possibilities for a meaningful, even transcendent commemoration are visible, if only faintly, in some of the responses to contemporary terrorism. When Jacques Hamel was murdered, he was declared a martyr to many things: the French nation, Western values, multiculturalism. But amongst the clamor, a humbler and altogether more profound story of sacrifice was being commemorated. In the words of the Archbishop of Rouen it was a sacrifice on behalf of a community that ‘had no other arms than prayer and fraternity among men’. It was a sacrifice on behalf of a ‘civilization of love’ (Henley, 2016).

This story of martyrdom, in which a sacrifice is made on behalf of a love that defies the cultural logic of modern sovereignty, was crafted by Hamel’s fellow clergymen. It was also stirred in the interfaith commemorations that followed the murder, when an imam remembered Jacques Hamel as a friend eager to establish dialogue capable of bridging the fractured communities of Rouen. It was a sacrifice made clear by Hamel’s sister, who reminded the attendees of her brother’s funeral that he was a man of uncompromising peace who had refused an officer’s commission in the French military because he could not imagine any circumstance in which he could order the death of a human being. To recycle the words of one of his critics, this was a martyrdom of profligate mercy. Faced with horrifying violence and haunted by the inevitable existential questions that followed, this commemorative community forged a story of ultimate sacrifice that demanded a thick social solidarity even as it looked beyond the confines of social life to locate a higher good. In the process of mourning this sacrifice it was possible to glimpse, however briefly, a forgotten sacred canopy, capable of insulating the community from raw suffering and offering redemption from sovereign violence.