The Age of Violence

“An important and iconoclastic intervention into the ongoing debate on the planetary mutation in the forms of collective action. Bertho surveys, with an anthropologist’s eye, the myriad phenomena of political violence criss-crossing our world on fire—from mass riots to transnational jihadism—to diagnose an irreversible divorce between peoples and powers. Age of Violence challenges us to imagine what future shapes radicalism will take outside the classical nexus of state and revolution.”
—Alberto Toscano, author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea

“Inspired by the tragic events of 2015 in Paris, this insightful philosophical and anthropological enquiry locates them within the French and global continuums to which they belong, assessing the combined effect of neoliberal globalisation and the crisis of left-wing politics on the ‘children of chaos.’”
—Gilbert Achcar

“Alain Bertho doesn’t only ask disturbing questions; he also seeks to answer them. In The Age of Violence, he turns a steely gaze to the rise of collective civil violence across the world. His insights into matrices of un/belonging, crises of truth, and radicalism are essential reading for those of us attempting to make sense of the contemporary world.”
—Joanna Bourke

“This is a book that has long been necessary. Where most accounts of jihadist violence emphasise its supposed theological or ideological bases, Alain Bertho’s Age of Violence is a powerful, profound, beautiful investigation of, and meditation on, the repressed connections between forms of increasingly nihilistic global violence, from ISIS to urban riots to communal murder, and a wider collapse of life chances, political legitimacy and personal meaning visited by the death-hurtle late capitalism. Bertho’s book confronts what most accounts will not—the destructive appeal of chances for meaningfully murderous action for the ‘lost children’ of globalisation. This is absolutely essential reading for anyone alarmed by these terrifying symptoms.”
—Richard Seymour