Dystopia, Genocide, and Anarchy: Some notes on The Purge franchise

This “review” has spoilers for:

• The Purge franchise
• Threads (1984)
• Death Note
• The Last of Us

Dystopian fiction and the law

Uncovering or making apparent the political dimensions of allegedly apolitical art remains fruitful for its own reasons. But there is something even more stark and foundational about the artistic works, motifs, and concepts that a given culture recognises as undisguisedly political. Along these lines, The Purge franchise is notable for its sheer honesty. It is not just that The Purge is brazen with its own authorial political perspective. The point is more that its world captures a pure, if nightmarish, distillation of the intersection between political governance and raw biological death in the contemporary American imagination. That is, the biopolitical bedrock of American culture.

The Purge itself, which is obviously central to all five of the presently released films, refers to an annual event where “any and all crime (including murder) will be legal for twelve continuous hours.” The conspicuous singling out of murder—far from the only heinous crime authorised by such broad terms—is important as both a matter of genre and politics. In a manner comparable to Chekhov’s famous dictum that any rifles shown in theatre must later be fired, the mention of murder is a specific promise that murders will occur: This functions as an advertisement of the films’ expected violence, which naturally compels interest from fans of slasher and splatter horror movies. It should come as no surprise that the specific phrasing of “all crime (including murder)” has served as a marketing catchphrase for the franchise.

But the promise for a straightforward depiction of death also carries over into the political motifs and thematic construction of the Purge movies. This is the foundation for their famous bluntness and didacticism. They imagine the possibilities for a contemporary world where murder could and would be legal; their interest in all other subjects remains filtered through this central fixation. This means that the readily apparent tendency for Purge films to insert themselves into surrounding political discourses is always specifically in the mode of the politics of life and death. Put another way, as the fictional embodiment of the question “what if murder were legal?” the Purge franchise approaches all political institutions and concepts through the lens of their capacity to conduct murder.

In some instances, this results in highly specific representations of current political disputes. For example, 2021’s The Forever Purge speaks to the same mood of mass chaos that characterised the general civil unrest of the year 2020 and its subsequent climax in the reactionary riot of January 6^th, 2021. The plot, where the controlled anarchy of the Purge breaks ‘free’ and spirals into a continuous nation-wide riot of genocidal energies, becomes something like the symbolic institutionalisation of the latent promise of January 6^th. Yet, in the main case, the potency of the Purge films actually lies in their transcendent simplicity. That is, the purity and broadness of the messages that come from stripping all complex political phenomena down to the realm of raw violence.

We must further distinguish The Purge from other instances of dystopian fiction; in contradistinction to such peers as Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell or Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Purge does not present an automatic connection between social control and the formal institutions of the law. At least since the legal theories of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin, the role of the state in the Western intellectual tradition has been tied up with the anti-anarchic role of the law. The Hobbesian model of sovereignty presents the law as the force that tames the violence of nature and constructs an ordered regime of peace. According to Hobbes, “it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is a war of every man against every man.”¹ As a representative early-modern English conservative, Hobbes believed that the chief quality of good government was building the supreme political authority necessary to quell the otherwise natural anarchy of humanity.

However, the liberal political tradition, which has been ascendant since the 18^th century, is instinctively suspicious of authority when it is asserted for any purpose apart from liberty; “the liberal writer … [has the] conviction that all power corrupts and that the constancy of progress requires constant loss of power, no matter what its origin may be.”² And yet, the liberal tradition was not an anarchist one. It needed to articulate its own basis for government—one that was rooted in the same principle of liberty that such liberals deployed to undermine the absolute monarchical sovereign authority championed by the likes of Hobbes. The result was an alternative theory of law, where the state existed to secure the inherent right of citizens to liberty.

Despite these important distinctions, both the liberal and conservative traditions remain firmly within the mainstream intellectual conventions of the West. The major writers of the early liberal tradition, such as Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, even used the same state of nature metaphor as Hobbes to justify their theories of government. One crucial consequence of this parallelism has been the tendency to understand political divisions through the lens of an asserted dichotomy between liberty and authority—or as they are respectively called by their critics, anarchy and authoritarianism. Therefore, the self-conception of the modern liberal national republic takes the form of a balance between these forces through the juridico-political structure of ordered liberty.

Such tensions also manifested in developments across the history of modern art and literature. The representative case is dystopian fiction. Dystopias most often speak to the anxieties of authoritarianism, which appears all the more immediate in an age where the scale of the state has grown far beyond the pre-modern imagination. Therefore, dystopias depict the pathological intensification of the law that is made possible by modern industrial society. The authoritarian and totalitarian regimes they show subsume all human action—not just outright anarchy, but freedom itself—under the umbrella of the law as dictated by the party or the supreme ruler. The Purge does feature authoritarian party rule by the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) regime, but their absolute control is not related, narratively, to an intensification of the law. The concept of the Purge inverts the expected subject of dystopia by making its central event a twelve-hour spree of anarchy.

Dystopian fiction has always had its opposites. Most commonly, the fear of anarchy has taken the form of the disaster story or of post-apocalyptic science-fiction. In the 1984 film, Threads, nuclear war obliterates all meaningful social organisation across Britain. By the end of the story, the children born after the war are depicted as apathetic towards the deaths of their loved ones, and when they inevitably must resort to thievery to survive, it is openly answered with unregulated murder. In short, society and ethics both return to an anarchic free-for-all.

The long-term political implications of a reversion to anarchy remains a staple interest across the post-apocalypse genre in its popular manifestations, such as in Mad Max (1979) and the video game Fallout (1997). Another notable variation is the zombie apocalypse, which builds on the conventions established by Richard Matheson in his 1954 novel I Am Legend, to respond to the imagined fear of what would happen if all other human beings became mindless murderers—that is, lawless.

The unrestrained violence and disintegration of the law inherent to the concept of the Purge mirrors these post-apocalyptic horror stories. But diegetically speaking, the NFFA regime also transforms America into a recognisably authoritarian dystopia. Reconciling this paradox of the Purge films, as depictions of a kind of dystopian anarchy, is the central challenge to their political interpretation. By carrying through on this effort, we will see that, rather than being a contradiction, the unification of legal and anti-legal concepts reflects a crucial alternative understanding of the regulation of death.

A politically salient feature of the Purge is that, despite all conduct becoming nominally legal, the actual range of permitted behaviour is also structurally delimited. In The First Purge, the NFFA implements a limited Purge on a trial basis within the bounds of the Staten Island borough of New York City. Residents are compensated with five-thousand dollars for remaining within the borough, and are granted additional bonuses in proportion to how enthusiastically they participate in the desired anarchic slaughter. However, contrary to the hopes of the NFFA, the trial is initially highly peaceful. With few exceptions, people generally constrain their participation to recreational petty crimes such as minor theft, drug use, and public sex. There is no indication of a Hobbesian reversion to a state of natural war. The dark turn of the film only comes when the NFFA government intervenes in this peaceful outcome and deploys various right-wing mercenaries and militia groups to incite mass violence.

The net result of this sequence of events is that murder is not merely legalised by the NFFA over the course of Purge night—murder is effectively compelled by them. The Purge is both a juridical licence for violence as well as, perhaps more importantly, an extra-juridical state interdiction against peace. In distinction to Hobbes, the state and its absolute sovereign transforms into the force that fills the naturally peaceful configuration of human organisation with the potential for violence.

This is far from the first anti-Hobbesian framework in the history of legal and political thought. Rousseau’s own deployment of the state of nature concept was in many ways a conscious rejection of Hobbes. For Rousseau, humanity’s natural compassion reflects an inherent goodness which is only corrupted by the anti-cooperative forces of mass social existence. However, despite their similar criticality, a Rousseauian social ontology is by no means identical to the reality presented by the Purge films. Rousseau’s vision of the world is a fundamentally liberal one in the sense that the inherent goodness of humanity is equated to the principle of liberty; “man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”³ Therefore, the correspondingly Rousseauian-liberal interpretation of The Purge would ascribe its origins to the liberals’ loss of political power over the law—which, in the hands of authoritarians, becomes the only tool capable of dominating the natural virtue of human liberty. But the actual structure of The Purge diverges from this interpretation in a number of suggestive ways.

The most significant point to be made against a liberal understanding of The Purge concerns the place of the law in the structuring of its violence. While liberalism is cognisant of the possibility of violence beyond the strict reach of the law, the law is nonetheless seen as the principle proxy for the power of a political regime. If state power is not legitimated as being within the bounds of the law, this seems necessarily symptomatic of a fragile political regime. Put another way, the supreme power of a regime is the power to name itself as legal. Liberal government is therefore justified, in opposition to the anarchist insistence on the abolition of all government, by its capacity to maximise human liberty through the rule of law.

This also means that the form of the Purge, which surrenders the privilege of the law, appears somewhere between paradoxical and self-defeating. In liberal readings, none of its horror comes across as inherent to the nature of power—it is as though the root catastrophe of the fiction of the Purge universe is simply that a liberal regime was not allowed to maintain its control over the law. The NFFA becomes nothing more than a reactionary undoing of the end of history. But far from being an anomalous fixation or a weakness of the NFFA, the Purge is the cornerstone of their political power. As they themselves confess in The First Purge, “the NFFA put a lot of faith into this evening. If it’s deemed ineffective, the entire regime could be judged as a failure.” Any comprehensive analysis of the Purge as a phenomenon must therefore assess its political importance as it actually appears—not as an exercise of legal power per se, but as an exercise of power that depends on forces beyond the boundaries of the law.

For Jean Bodin, who was an antecedent of Hobbes, it was obvious that the sovereign rules through the law. He saw this as definitional to their position, after all: “we thus see that the main point of sovereign majesty and absolute power consists of giving the law to subjects in general without their consent.”⁴ But the connection between sovereignty and the law is also presented as a chiefly prudential concern. If the law is not advantageous to the realm, the sovereign is “not obligated by the common law of peoples any more than by his own edicts, and if the common law of peoples is unjust, the prince can depart from it.”⁵ Yet, this transcendent position is not the same as complete detachment from, and supremacy over, the law: The sovereign is bound by just laws so long as their justness is advantageous to the realm by this same prudential standard; “if a sovereign prince has made a contract in his capacity as sovereign on a matter that concerns the state and brings it profit, the successors are bound by it.”⁶ This means that absolute sovereign power is characterised both by unique responsibilities under the contract of law and by the exclusive power to defy that same contract.

For the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, this ambiguity was transformed into his famous definition that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”⁷ Giorgio Agamben further relates this concept of a sovereign exception to a broader “point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence.”⁸ What both of these articulations point to is the paradoxical structure of sovereign power, where the law comes into being only through those who stand both “outside and inside the juridical order” and command the “power of proclaiming a state of exception and, therefore, of suspending the order’s own validity.”⁹

It is only through this understanding of sovereignty that we can hope to grasp the true character of the dystopian anarchy sought by the NFFA. The Purge suspends all rule of law, but this is not to say that it circumscribes an outer limit on the regime’s political capacity to constitute legitimated legal power. Quite the opposite: the NFFA’s ability to produce a state of exception which is immune from legal constraint is the originary basis of their political power. This is why the Purge, despite taking place only once a year, is posited as the cornerstone of the legitimacy of “the entire regime.”

The Purge and political violence

While this distinction—between the models of social contract and sovereign exception—may seem overly abstract, the dystopian logic of the Purge operates as a symbolic demonstration of the concrete consequences of their divergence. As we have established, The Purge’s suspension of the law is a cloak for the NFFA’s use of violent militias and mercenaries to directly regulate the population in a space beyond the rule of law. This is the institutionalisation of a state of exception for extra-legal government action. But what is remarkable is that this is not done for the sake of constituting a legal hierarchy of submission to the sovereign, as in the manner of Hobbes’ social contract theory. The NFFA already enjoys unchallenged power over the legal regime of the United States’ government prior to the first experimental Purge; they begin the story from the supreme position of Hobbes’ Leviathan. What then, is the political structure that the Purge is attempting to constitute? The object of the NFFA’s experiment is not the legal architecture of the state, but a state of exception beyond this architecture, where they can directly act upon the biopolitical substratum of the modern democratic state in the form of its citizenry.

The term ‘biopolitics’ relates to the thought of the French theorist Michel Foucault. For Foucault, the characteristic feature of modernity was the enlargement of political governance to include the management of life and death—that is, the control of naked biological existence. In his own words, “for millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”¹⁰ He further attributed the development of this biopolitical mode to “the economic—and primarily agricultural—development of the eighteenth century, and an increase in productivity and resources,” which in turn allowed for the development of “methods of power and knowledge [that] assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them.”¹¹ This is to be distinguished from the pre-modern right to manage life, which in Foucault’s telling was localised within the body of the Hobbesian sovereign: “for a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death.”¹² However, if we follow the example of our previous analysis and identify this “characteristic privilege” with the sovereign exception, one cannot avoid noticing that Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in fact corresponds to a massive propagation of this sovereign exception into the realms of existence that were previously beyond the reach of state action.

The biopolitical perspective implicates one especially challenging feature of Schmitt’s assertion of a sovereign exception: the fact that it implies the corresponding impossibility of the complete rule of law. Even if we were to suppose the existence of a realm governed by total political equality, and if we further asserted that all behaviour within this realm was under the universal jurisdiction of legal rights and regulations, the law would still be ‘incomplete’ in the sense that it could not sufficiently prejudge the validity of its own transgression. That is, if some contradiction was later discovered within the law, or if the state circumvented the enforcement of the rule of law in the context of an emergency, the law would lack the power to automatically cognise and assess the violation of its boundaries. Some reference to “the sources of authority from which positive laws [receive] their ultimate legitimation”¹³ remains necessary to respond to the imperfectability of the law in such cases. These sources of authority then take on the role of the “imperative forces”¹⁴ that decide on the validity of the exception. This is to say that the law implies the existence of a sovereign exception as a feature of its own negative determination.

But the problem of sovereignty does not stop at the mere fact that its structure designates a space beyond the protection of the law. The specific crisis that arose over the course of the 20^th century was that of a biopoliticised regime of sovereignty, where arguments over the use of the powers of the citizen—that is, the reigning political unit, the dêmos, of the nation-state—necessarily came to implicate the lives of those citizens as the source of that power. Put another way, since disputes over political ideas in the modern state refer back to the constitutive political power of the citizenry, the capacity to manage this population of citizens carries a perverse ability to ‘hack’ the modern forms of political power. And therefore, popular sovereignty can self-referentially determine its own composition when it unleashes the exceptional powers of exile and extermination.

This self-referentiality proves decisive because it suggests the possibility of a perfect coincidence between the means and ends of political violence. Theories of violence have traditionally been “ruled by the means-end category.”¹⁵ More specifically, they coalesce around the view that “violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not in the realm of ends.”¹⁶ Violence is therefore readily conceptualised as a mere instrument; a tool that is operated on behalf of subterranean root causes: “Whether it is Clausewitz calling war ‘the continuation of politics by other means’, or Engels defining violence as the accelerator of economic development, the emphasis is on political or economic continuity, on the continuity of a process that remains determined by what preceded violent action. … Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything.”¹⁷ Moreover, when such violence appears as an instrument in support of an external political goal, its violent character may itself come to seem peculiarly coincidental. Obedience can be achieved at the point of a sword, but authority gained through peaceful means serves more or less the same purpose. Even the most cynical adherents of the principle that ‘might makes right’ are firstly aiming at the promise of power over rightness, rather than might for might’s sake.

However, this orientation radically breaks down in the era of modern biopolitics. In a context where sovereignty travels through the bodies of the citizenry, political violence demonstrates two highly relevant new tendencies: Firstly, the enacters of political violence are always bringing the “characteristic [privilege] of sovereign power … to decide life and death”¹⁸ into appearance, no matter how distant they are from the formal organs of political power. And secondly, the victims of political violence are also always acting as royal, sovereign bodies. Or more exactly, murder can now be said to destroy these units of sovereignty at a biological level and thereby reconfigure the basis of modern political power; all murder has become assassination, and in that capacity makes direct contact with its political purpose.

Let us briefly jump to a very different example. Death Note is a manga that was published from 2003 to 2006, featuring a story by Tsugumi Ōba and art by Takeshi Obata. Its premise is simple enough: a teenager named Light Yagami, who lives in Tokyo at the turn of the century, comes into possession of a notebook which has the magical property that “the human whose name is written in this notebook shall die.” With this awe-inspiring power, Light sets off on a project to cleanse the globe of all crime and misbehaviour. But if we wish to assess his motives more honestly, we should focus on Light’s claim that he intends to “make this a world inhabited only by people I decade are good,” and that he will therefore “reign as god over a new world.”

It is obvious from Light’s immediate turn to illusions of grandeur that he equates the notebook’s power over life and death with the zenith of social, legal, and even religious might. Yet, throughout the series, there is a conspicuous lack of any directly political applications of the Death Note’s power. Beyond a relatively minor appearance by the president of the United States during Volumes 7 and 8, Death Note does not bring much attention to the law-making institutions of government. And Light, for that matter, does not use the Death Note to demand obedience or authority in any sense legible in the terms of traditional political theory. Instead, Light behaves as if exercising the sheer power to kill on its own entails a sufficient basis to “reign as god over a new world.”

This form of power nicely distills the problem of violence in the biopolitical age. It is certainly true that politics has always been recognised as parallel to the problem of violence, and that “if no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated.”¹⁹ But in this line of thinking, the end of political violence should be simple obedience. To instead continuously exercise violence, without any mechanism to integrate the objects of violence into the political community through obedience, is to move entirely beyond the kind of violence that is implied by the truism that all politics is power and all power is violence. In pre-modern political arrangements, prior to the nation-state, the imperative over life and death represented by the Death Note would not be especially dangerous for the vast majority of common people—at least, as long as its user desired political power. The ones at risk would be monarchs and other members of the ruling classes. But in modern society, the Death Note has no coherent political purpose as a means towards another form of power; there is no end for the Death Note other than filling its pages up with the names of the masses of democratic society in order to determine the composition of its constitutive political population.

According to Giorgio Agamben, this link between popular sovereignty and exterminationism is hardly coincidental—and it has its own history. An important icon of this history can be found in the Roman legal notion of homo sacer (“sacred man”). In Roman law, homo sacer refers to a person who: on the one hand, is immune from ritual sacrifice and other formalised punishments that follow from violations of Roman law: but on the other hand, can freely be killed without consequence. In essence, to be homo sacer is to be ritually stripped of one’s assimilability within the political community. Once this assimilability is taken away, all that remains is a state of juridical ambivalence which Agamben describes as “bare life.”

Agamben convincingly traces this concept of bare life as the foundation of the logic of sovereignty itself. Sovereignty is the right to decide on the exception, as in the power to distinguish between those whose lives are mediated by the juridical structures of the political community, and those designated as homo sacer—who may be freely killed outside the law but never properly within it. This is an absolutely crucial connection, since “at the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.”²⁰ In other words, sovereignty is the power to exceed the law by deciding on bare life and death.

The problem is that, in the modern age, these two correlative structures have overlapped completely. The subject and object of sovereignty are now identical, as the same concept of popular sovereignty that justifies democracy and the nation-state also brings the bare life of homo sacer into appearance as a universal element of political life. Hence, the self-referentiality of modern political violence. Agamben takes this history to imply a deadly connection between democracy and totalitarian extermination. As he puts it:

The anxiety that powers The Purge comes exactly from this “contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states:” The horror of the film lies in the possibility that a state of exception such as the night of the Purge would uncover the toolbox of totalitarian extermination as lurking within the biopolitical underbelly of current democratic existence—all without disrupting the core American values of individual liberty and legal neutrality.

The “zombie apocalypse” vs. dystopia

It is notable that, despite forming the bedrock of the NFFA regime, the Purge is specifically limited to a scheduled ritual rather than constituting a continuous and general principle of political life. This means that the institution of the Purge takes the shape of a specified zone of exceptionality, which excludes the otherwise existent force of the law. In terms of the phantasmagoria of cultural anxiety, this inside–outside juridical structure is distinct from the simpler fear that raw liberty and democracy might disguise a grotesque biopolitical core.

To clarify this point, we can point to post-apocalyptic narratives that deal with the phenomenon of naked and continuous anarchy. For example, in the 2013 zombie apocalypse action video game The Last of Us, there are a variety of state and pseudo-state actors who take up the mantle of sovereignty across the zombified ruins of the United States. Most memorably, there are the nominal remnants of the U.S. government in the form of the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA) as well as the strictly anti-government rebel organisation of the Fireflies. And beyond both of these, smaller community-level organisations, such as the residents of Jackson, Wyoming, are depicted as occupying state-like positions. Each of these organisations could be subjected to a biopolitical critique in a manner broadly similar to how we have discussed the Purge films up until now. FEDRA manages a network of Quarantine Zones (QZs) across the country, wherein residents’ bare biological life is tightly regulated and also where FEDRA exercises the sovereign exception to constitute nearly absolute political authority.

However, the structures of sovereignty and violence in these QZs are markedly different from the kind of power that the NFFA wields through the Purge. The true state of exception in the world of The Last of Us is not a human phenomenon under the domain of political sovereignty, but super-human zombie creatures that are infected with the cordyceps fungus. While the immediate object of the drama shown in the game is generally oriented towards the human action that takes place within these politiciseable contexts, the absolute outside, in the form of a zombified apocalyptic anarchy, morphs and shapes every one of these apparently human phenomena.

The salience of this outside position comes about because these creatures are ever-present and are always threatening to reconfigure the apparent constitutive basis for any given arrangement of sovereignty. That is, the state of exception as presented in The Last of Us is, in fact, not exceptional insomuch as it remains unconstrained to any particular formal structure—such as the one-day event of the Purge. Moreover, these pseudo-governments who claim the right of sovereignty in conditions of such anarchy do not truly possess a Schmittian capacity to decide on the exception. This tension becomes fully manifest at the climax of the game, where the main protagonist, Joel, takes it upon himself to slaughter the nominally sympathetic Fireflies organisation. His motivation is the biopolitically fraught decision to save one person he cares about, even when doing so may hinder progress towards a vaccine that would perhaps save the world. It is exactly because of the anarchic, apocalyptic features of his constitutive political context that Joel is placed in the position of exercising his own sovereign power, and of deciding on the biopolitical management of life and death from his position as an individual.

The transmission point between the logic of anarcho-apocalyptic politics and the institution of the Purge only materialises in the most recent film of the franchise—The Forever Purge. By breaking out of its temporal boundary, this Purge supersedes the inside–outside juridical structure of the NFFA regime and transforms into the generalised exception of anarchy—that is, an exception so universal that it loses all of its exceptional character. By the finale of the story, the entire country becomes engulfed in a civil war that destabilises any notion that the sovereign exception remains within the exclusive grasp of the NFFA. In this sense, the Purge is depicted as a force beyond control that will eventually turn apocalyptic and suicidal. In other words, the Purge inevitably coincides with the general orientation of the zombie apocalypse film and the disaster film. This is, however, the final end-point of the institution, not its original nature. The NFFA’s intended use of the Purge as a biopolitical instrument can best be seen in The First Purge and its pure use of the inside–outside juridical structure.

Friend–enemy, insider–outsider

The circumscription of time that is typical of the Purge in general is doubled by the limitation of space in The First Purge. Since the film specifically depicts an experimental purge within the boundaries of Staten Island, the state of exception is literalised and objectified into a concrete space of exclusion from the continuing legal operation of state power. This form of juridical architecture cleaves off a zone of indistinction between the law and anarchy; the space beyond the law is ritualised in a manner that implies the contrary wholeness of law in the regular interior of society. The clean separation of inside and outside implied by this structure is something of an anachronism in the history of sovereign power. For Agamben, the historical root of the sovereign exception can be located in the capacity to exile or “ban” something—even conceptually—from the identity of a political unity: “The originary political relation is marked by this zone of indistinction in which the life of the exile or the aqua et igni interdictus²¹ borders on the life of homo sacer, who may be killed but not sacrificed.”²²

The space beyond the given—as in, that which is unassimilable into the community’s self-understanding—forms a very special category in the social ontology of Georges Bataille. As a thinker, Bataille is highly concerned with the transgression of seemingly self-contained systems. In particular, he emphasises the totalising capacity of such systems to bound themselves—to disaggregate their excess and render it as beyond recognition. Bataille categorises this fundamental difference in recognition by using the labels of ‘homogeneity’ and ‘heterogeneity’. The homogeneous world is composed of the accumulation of all phenomena that are able to be situated by their interrelated purposefulness from within the logic of the reigning social system: “homogeneous society is productive society, namely useful society.”²³ Whereas the excluded exterior, which practically manifests in phenomena such as the taboo, cannot register as a concrete existence from the perspective of the system; “heterogeneous reality is that of a force or shock. It presents itself as a charge, as a value, passing from one object to another in a more or less abstract fashion, almost as if the change were taking place not in the world of objects but only in the judgments of the subject.”²⁴

Conceptual translations of this same distinction recur throughout Bataille’s thought: There is the gap between the General Economy and the Classical Economy; between the excessive and the productive; between the sacred and the profane. That last division has a particular affinity which we must note for our present discussion. When Agamben traced the anthropology of bare life as the absolute unit of the biopolitical, he also noted its etymological grounding in the Roman figure of homo sacer—”sacred man”—as a constitutive element of the history of the sacred: Bare life is also sacred life. However, Agamben does draw a sharp distinction between his own conceptual map of sacredness and the Bataillian ontology of the transgressive; “if our analysis of homo sacer is correct, and the Bataillian definition of sovereignty with reference to transgression is inadequate with respect to the life in the sovereign ban that may be killed, then the concept of the ‘unsacrificeable’ too must be seen as insufficient to grasp the violence at issue in modern biopolitics.”²⁵ We therefore cannot mirror Bataille’s heterogenous exterior as the precise twin of the exile or ban—the space of the sovereign exception.

Yet, as a strictly structural matter, we must admit their combined importance in explaining the form of totalitarian horror that is captured in The Purge. According to Bataille, “the fascist leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence. … Considered not with regard to its external action but with regard to its source, the force of a leader is analogous to that exerted in hypnosis. The affective flow that unites him with his followers—which takes the form of a moral identification of the latter with the one they follow (and reciprocally)—is a function of the common consciousness of increasingly violent and excessive energies and powers that accumulate in the person of the leader and through him become widely available.”²⁶ This “affective flow” is remarkably similar in function to the sovereign exception. The rule of law, as the procedural equalisation of all citizens, is the homogenising force par excellence. Therefore, to stand outside of the law—to utterly defy juridical equalisation—is itself a supremely heterogeneous gesture. Importantly, just like the sacredness of bare life, this heterogenisation carries a certain ambiguity concerning the direction of power. It is true that “the simple fact of dominating one’s fellows implies the heterogeneity of the master, insofar as he is the master.”²⁷ Nonetheless, “in a quite different sense, the lowest strata of society can equally be described as heterogeneous, those who generally provoke repulsion and can in no case be assimilated by the whole of mankind.”²⁸

In the realm of modern politics, the major achievement of this description lies in how it develops the tools to understand the, paradoxically radical, efforts at the conservation of traditional power that define fascism. Fascism—which is, of course, a famously slippery concept—can at the least be said to only truly appear in times of crisis. It is the characteristic political reaction of those eras in modern history where the regulative procedures of homogeneous society prove insufficient to resist the danger posed by the mere concept of an outside. Fascism, like all states of exception, must itself begin in the unassimilable excess beyond the boundaries of homogeneous society. In dictatorial and authoritarian forms of government, the right to decide on the exception is of course embodied in a literally supreme ruler, who stands above and outside the general principles of political society. However, fascism corresponds to the biopolitics of the modern era, where the powers of sovereignty have become ‘democraticised’, as it were, by the nation-state and its concept of popular sovereignty:

It is in light of this historical context that we should read Bataille’s interpretation of fascism, as a particular mode of traversal from the outside to the inside of political society. In Bataille’s schema, the exceptional nature of sovereignty coincides with “imperative forces,”²⁹ which are characterised by their capacity to act upon the relatively inert world of homogeneous society. As mentioned, the representative historical form of such power is the dictatorship of monarchs and royalty. But in fascist conditions, the diffuse biopolitical energies that agglomerate as the excess of mass democratic capitalist society further reveal a reactionary charge that can flow back into contact with the body politic, and therein take on the “tendency toward concentration”³⁰ which also marked older forms of sovereign rule. In essence:

On this basis, Bataille is able to also say that fascism “reappropriated and reconstituted from the bottom up—starting, as it were, with nothing—the very process … for the establishment of power.”³¹ The inside–outside juridical structure in fact sits at the foundation of all totalitarian power in the age of a massified, diffused, biopoliticised concept of sovereignty. The exceptional right to control life and death in modernity has its roots in a state of biopolitical emergency—which might also be called an exile, or heterogenisation—of the citizenry whose literal physical bodies now “constitute the sources of authority from which positive laws received their ultimate legitimation”³² in the democratic state. When this exteriorised crisis of mass bourgeois democracy transgresses the distinction between a juridical inside and outside, and thereby affirms the royal “tendency toward concentration”³³ as the necessary instrument to ‘cleanse’ the exterior and restore political order, it takes on the structural features that Bataille diagnoses as fascism.

This is why, rather than signalling weakness, the NFFA’s capacity to delineate a highly formalised space beyond the law in The Purge is a constitutive feature of their identity as a totalitarian, fascist regime. The experimental Purge of Staten Island, as shown in The First Purge, implicates the ability of the regime to decide which ‘biopolitical material’—that is, absolutely crucially, human beings—will be protected over the course of the NFFA’s occupation of the state, and secondly to instead decide on who will be exiled or banned, and thereby placed within a circumscribed state of exception. The film suggestively hints, with an ironic tone, that the location for this first Purge was chosen “because [of] its demographic[s]”—which is quickly revealed to be a euphemism for the large number of African-Americans that the NFFA pushes to participate. And once a spasm of violence is fully ignited by the NFFA, the film rapidly partitions itself between its entirely non-white cast of protagonists and the conspicuously white militias and mercenary groups that are used by the state to fuel the Purge. The resultant metaphor of white-America enclosing black-America within a special zone beyond the rights and privileges of the law, but nonetheless subject to the politicisation of their very lives, is the central image of The Purge. This zone also has the remarkable feature of transfiguring the virtues of American democracy—individualism, liberty, and the spirit of the frontier—into a mirror of the same inside–outside juridical structure that governed the totalitarian logic of the death camps.

The displacement of European hegemony in favour of American frontierism is a major story in and of itself. After all, the emergence of a global American Empire constituted (at least half of, in combination with Leninism) the dominant political and cultural context for the second half of the 20^th century. However, this is different from saying that the contemporary political imagination is exclusively the product of its recently ‘Americanised’ history. And even more specifically, the figure of death that we have sketched thus far is distinct from a general American history of imagining death.

For all of its latent biopolitical implications, the conquest and colonisation of the Americas by Europeans did not yet include the deliberate politicisation and management of exteriorised populations in the manner that is characteristic of fascism—as well as the other totalitarian answers to the so-called ‘social question’ of the 19^th century. Properly speaking, this was not because colonial life was the slightest bit free of the biological concerns that structure modern biopolitics. On the contrary, the colonies were materially poor and life there was defined by biological necessity. The point is that the outside of the colonial community was a true outside, and therefore unassimilable to its interior politics. Modern biopolitics depends on the assimilation of its exterior, that is, “the economic—and primarily agricultural—development”³⁴ that facilitates the capture and enclosure of the ‘other’ within the modern organs of policing and population management.

Therefore, the significant changes in the American cultural landscape are not contained to its frontier character—which was present throughout American history—but instead encompass the shifting meaning of that frontier character such that its reappearance in the guise of a fascist regime in The Purge remains aesthetically congruent. Another way of looking at this is to say that we are not just interested in the American aesthetic of liberty on its own terms, but strictly in the context of a historical configuration that led to the integration of that aesthetic within the contemporary image of the fascist death cult.

As a narrative concept, The Purge poses the question of how and why the state would surrender its own monopoly on the law via the legalisation of murder. The answer it provides takes the form of a government that turns cities into extermination camps, but cloaked in the aesthetics of vigilantism and the American action hero. That is, a point of contact between the dark sides of the authoritarian and the anarchist imaginations; a synthesis between the sadistic, controlling gaze of the SS officer, and the state of nature embodied by the all-American gun-slinger cowboy who ‘righteously’ settles all political questions with violence. When death is aestheticised in the current American context, it does not register as a system of prison guards and fenced-in cages, as in our historical understanding of the camp states of Europe. Rather, the sovereign exception is embodied by the diffuse and everyday person of the “Purger,” who freely lynches the biopolitical excess of American society—gun in hand, and in a stylised recreation of the Hollywood vision of heroism. This ritual is the constitutive moment in the NFFA regime’s power, which depends on the system of inclusion and exclusion implied by the designation of “Purger” and “Purged.” In The Purge, an American vision of fascism is of the people, by the people, for the people—precisely because it exiles and exterminates everyone ‘else’.

Notes/reference list

1. Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes) ↩︎
2. What is Authority? (Hannah Arendt) ↩︎
3. The Social Contract (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) ↩︎
4. The Six Books of the Republic, Book 1 (Jean Bodin) ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7. Political Theology (Carl Schmitt) ↩︎
8. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Giorgio Agamben) ↩︎
9. Ibid. ↩︎
10. The History of Sexuality (Michel Foucault) ↩︎
11. Ibid. ↩︎
12. Ibid. ↩︎
13. The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt) ↩︎
14. The Psychological Structure of Fascism (Georges Bataille) ↩︎
15. On Violence (Hannah Arendt) ↩︎
16. Critique of Violence (Walter Benjamin) ↩︎
17. On Violence (Hannah Arendt) ↩︎
18. The History of Sexuality (Michel Foucault) ↩︎
19. Politics as a Vocation (Max Weber) ↩︎
20. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Giorgio Agamben) ↩︎
21. “Interdiction of water and fire.” One Roman name for the punishment of exile. According to the Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, “the Roman term for exclusion from the common use of fire and water, which were the symbols of the community.” ↩︎
22. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Giorgio Agamben) ↩︎
23. The Psychological Structure of Fascism (Georges Bataille) ↩︎
24. Ibid. ↩︎
25. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Giorgio Agamben) ↩︎
26. The Psychological Structure of Fascism (Georges Bataille) ↩︎
27. Ibid. ↩︎
28. Ibid. ↩︎
29. Ibid. ↩︎
30. Ibid. ↩︎
31. Ibid. ↩︎
32. The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt) ↩︎
33. The Psychological Structure of Fascism (Georges Bataille) ↩︎
34. The History of Sexuality (Michel Foucault) ↩︎