4 - Chains of Solidarity

Summary

Solidarity is founded in violence and bears the signs of violence, and revolt. The beginning/creation of community in innumerable foundational myths is a terrible killing. According to whether this killing is of the father or the brother, the chapter suggests that solidarity is either hierarchical, and geared towards those strictly understood as children of the father, or fraternal, in the sense of geared towards the stranger, the non-brother. These solidarities sometimes exist in combined forms within the same foundational myth. In the socio-political imaginary concatenation that Europe is right now, different types of solidarity constantly co-exist and sometimes clash with each other. Revolt is violence-in-solidarity and it reconciles different sorts of debt, different conceptions of time, that is, it allows for simultaneity of the event (or suspension of time, which happens in the area of the sacred, the religious, the Durkheimian mechanic) and the historical, continuous flow of time (which happens in the area of the reasonable, the Durkheimian organic).