Abstract

Are massive violence and destruction a manifestation of ‘modernity’, even its very essence, or rather its total opposite: ‘a breakdown of civilization’? Although ostensibly Norbert Elias mainly occupied himself with the civilizing process, he was always, though mostly implicitly so, preoccupied with its complement and counterpart: violence, regression and anomie. In recent years, a number of his students have returned to these themes. Whether they wanted to or not, they were drawn into a debate that never subsided for long in the last century. I shall argue a position that transcends this opposition between ‘modernization’ and ‘regression’: at the core of the civilizing process, another contrary current may manifest itself, allowing extreme violence on a mass scale to be perpetrated towards specific categories of people, while civilized relations and modes of expression are maintained in other sections of society. The concepts of identification, disidentification and compartmentalization should help to describe and explain these ‘dyscivilizing’ processes in their complex relations to processes of civilization.