Abstract

General social theory has hardly been concerned with violence. The closest to constituting an exception to this rule are Weber and Foucault. But they largely pass over the symbolic, order-generating significance of violence and leave it open whether and in what way violence, including physical and deadly violence, plays a general role in the formation of order. In this article I argue that the general significance of violence for order formation can only be grasped if sociation is conceptualized starting from embodied actors and systematically takes the figure of the third into account. Doing so leads to the following hypotheses about violence: violence is an antagonistic bodily interaction that communicates moral claims in a symbolically generalized way in reference to a third party.