ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors consider two texts that will help to frame their reflections. The first is Jean-Paul Sartre's discussion of violence in his Notebooks for an Ethics; the second is Emmanuel Levinas' account of the origin of religiosity in his 1974 Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Drawing from Levinas, the authors outline a possible way to frame the argument that religion and violence are mutually constitutive; whereas from Sartre they draw a set of descriptions of violence that are essential for its clarification. Responsibility and destruction are bound together in Levinas' thought, to the extent that the election to the former comes out of radical passivity, or from a past that has never been present. For responsibility is not chosen, it takes the form of a being that suffers its own responsibility, and that first experiences it at all only by being exposed to it through its passive being.
