Violence pursued for security reliably produces more of the insecurity it targets.

Evidence

The securing of distinction is sought, then, by holding at bay or disrupting those forces seen to threaten the grounds – the culture – of judgment’s possibility. Distinction and the forms of judgment it enables are thus extended by delimiting or destroying the sources of its insecurity, its challenges, its vulnerabilities. And yet all forms of violence for the sake – the sacralization – of security ultimately exacerbate insecurity. The production and exaggeration of non-belonging over neighborliness, of strangers over interlocutors, of enemies over conceivable collaborators inevitably materialize (into) the objects most feared. Born of insecurity, purification invariably prompts its intensification. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1835

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the sacrificial-security logic in the reader’s own article on sacrifice and to Arendt’s idea that purification feeds off its own anxiety. — connects to: Security-seeking purification inevitably intensifies the very insecurity it targets — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1835