The Epoch of Annihilation: On the Formal Violence of Capital

In the first volume of *Capital*, Marx famously describes the historical advent of capitalism as a kind of horror story. Nourished by colonial wars, enslavement, and the massacre of indigenous populations, capital constitutes and sustains itself through a near-limitless exercise of violence, conceivable in both physical and ideological terms. This paper investigates another modality of violence proper to capital, namely, formal violence: the diffuse, but titanic power by which human and non-human entities are constrained to appear as species of value. I develop this concept through the juxtaposition of two related, but distinct treatments of formal violence in the respective work of contemporary philosopher Jean Vioulac and Karl Marx. For Vioulac, formal violence constitutes a quasi-ontological subreption of humans’ essential purposive activity. Re-reading Marx, however, we come to see that formal violence operates on two levels, naming both a structure of phenomenality and the ruse of its false critique.