The issue of violence now occupies a central place in French public debate, to the point of becoming an almost automatic rhetorical device in political decision-making. Whether it concerns isolated incidents, radicalization, juvenile delinquency, or social unrest, violence is invoked as an obvious explanation. It is never considered as a concept. This proliferation is accompanied by a troubling paradox: the more violence is denounced, the less it is defined. Thus, in the contemporary debate surrounding social media and video games, violence is often equated with frustration, excitement, or the intensity of emotions, justifying proposals for a blanket ban put forward not by families, but by the State itself. However, such an equation rests on a profound conceptual confusion. To confuse violence and frustration is to ignore a major philosophical distinction, already present in Aristotle, between what pertains to educable emotions and what constitutes a rupture in the order of meaning and language. Frustration, far from being violent in itself, is a constitutive experience of human subjectivity; it only becomes violent when it ceases to be mediated by language, education, and symbolic inscription within a shared world. Violence, on the other hand, is defined neither by intensity nor by anger, but by an act that suspends all possibility of discourse.
This distinction is crucial. For if violence begins where speech ends, as classical analyses of political and moral philosophy converge to suggest, then cultural mechanisms that involve frustration, failure, repetition, and rules (such as video games) cannot be held responsible for violence without a rigorous analysis of their relationship to language and education. On the contrary, they may appear as spaces for symbolizing and learning about loss, whereas true violence is characterized by a progressive disengagement from discourse and from addressing others.
The temptation for the state to replace parents and educators by prohibiting, in the name of violence prevention, cultural practices deemed frustrating or stimulating, poses a major philosophical problem. By claiming to eliminate the supposed conditions of violence through coercion, the state risks misunderstanding the very nature of what it is fighting against, and transforming an educational and symbolic issue into one of order and constraint. This drift is reminiscent of Max Weber's analyses of the monopoly on legitimate violence, as well as Friedrich Engels' criticisms of a state that confuses social regulation with domination. Video games must be defended: not to deny the existence of violence, but to reject the flawed diagnosis imposed upon us. I want to argue, against contemporary simplifications, that violence cannot be thought of as an excess of frustration, and that its prevention cannot come from blind prohibition or from the suppression of formative experiences of failure, but from education in language, symbolization and non-violent conflict.
To what extent does the confusion between frustration and violence lead the contemporary state to respond with coercion to what is actually a matter of education, and how does a philosophical analysis of violence as a rupture of language allow us to rethink the role of cultural practices such as video games in the formation of subjects and the prevention of political and social violence?
Violence and speech: a conceptual antithesis
I will begin with a simple, philosophically complex thesis: violence is not an excess of speech, it is its negation. This thesis is anything but intuitive in contemporary public debate, where violence is always conceived as an overflow, a saturation, or an extreme of emotions. This is to forget Aristotle rather quickly. For Aristotle, violence (bia) is defined as a movement whose principle is external to the being that undergoes it:
We call violent that whose principle is external, without the person who is moved contributing to it in any way.[1].
This clear definition must be applied to humankind: violence is not an inner intensity, but a rupture of rational self-determination. Where a person speaks, deliberates, and argues, they remain the author of their actions; where they are violent, they cease to act in order to silence others. Violence does not argue, it imposes. This opposition is already at the heart of Plato's thought, for whom the city is defined first and foremost as a space of logos. In the gorgiasViolence arises precisely when words fail and coercion replaces persuasion:
Coercion is not the same as persuasion.[2].
We seriously need to reread Plato! Violence isn't simply excessive force, but the absolute, irrevocable end of all communication. It begins when the other is no longer recognized as a possible interlocutor. It is always, always a descent into silence, even when accompanied by shouts, slogans, or after-the-fact justifications. These noises are not language in the philosophical sense: they no longer seek a response; they announce a decision already made.
Frustration: an experience that can be learned, non-violent in itself
It is precisely this distinction that allows us to dispel a major confusion: frustration is not violence. Frustration is an affective experience; violence is a symbolic rupture. To confuse them is to erase any possibility of education. Aristotle, once again, provides a conceptual framework that allows us to integrate this as a self-evident educational principle. In the'Nicomachean Ethics'He insists that passions are neither good nor bad in themselves, but that they must be educated by habit and reason:
Virtues are not born within us by nature, but through habit.[3]
Frustration (failure, waiting, loss…) is an integral part of this emotional education. It is not a danger; it is a condition of moral development. A person who never experienced frustration would be incapable of self-governance. Frustration only breeds violence when it is no longer symbolized, when it no longer finds linguistic or educational mediation. In this respect, video games are a textbook case (and how true that is). They stage repetition, failure, arbitrary rules, and temporary loss. But they do so within an explicit symbolic framework, where frustration is shaped, ritualized, and understood as such. The frustrated player still communicates, whether to themselves, to others, or to the game, as long as they remain within this regulated space. Violence, however, begins when this symbolic framework is abandoned. One can box for twenty hours a day and be a lamb. One can miss a putt in golf and explode with anger. Violence is not frustration.
Education, language and violence prevention
If violence begins where speech ends, then true violence prevention can only be linguistic and educational, never purely coercive. Preventing violence does not consist of eliminating opportunities for frustration, but of learning not to abandon language under the influence of frustration. This idea is central to any philosophy of education. It presupposes that we accept failure, conflict, and tension as normal moments in the development of the child and the subject within them. This is where the confusion becomes dangerous: by trying to eliminate all potentially frustrating experiences, we deprive the individual of the symbolic tools necessary to confront reality. Here again, experience shows that true violence is not preceded by an escalation of verbal outbursts, but by a gradual withdrawal of speech. When language ceases to be a space of mediation, the violent decision has already been made. It is not the intensity of the emotion that is decisive, but the disengagement from discourse. When I had the opportunity to work with Martin Lamotte and his Center for the Study of Radicalization and Terrorism, particularly on the Merah cases, we observed that the act of carrying out the attack was accompanied—contrary to what one might have thought—by a gradual decline in activity on social media, which is a sign of radical decision-making. QED.
The reference to maieutics is fundamental. Essential. The Socratic method rests on a test of lack, ignorance, and intellectual frustration. It is designed to confront the interlocutor with the inadequacy of their certainties. This test can be painful, but it is entirely verbal. Vital and necessary for intelligence. Even video games, without being philosophical, sometimes function as imperfect maieutic devices: they pose problems, impose rules, and demand perseverance. Banning them in the name of fighting violence amounts to rejecting the idea of education through trial and error, and to confusing protection with the infantilization of the citizen. It is a slippery slope, one that a weak, perverse, and impotent power does not hesitate to take.
The State, Legitimate Violence, and the Tyrannical Temptation
This is where political criticism becomes inevitable. When the state attempts to replace parents and educators by prohibiting cultural practices in the name of violence prevention, it crosses a dangerous conceptual threshold. Max Weber reminded us that the state is defined by its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.
The state is that human community which successfully claims the monopoly on legitimate physical violence[4].
But this monopoly cannot extend to the moral and symbolic formation of individuals without transforming into domination. This is what Friedrich Engels denounced when he showed that the State tends to naturalize its own coercion by presenting it as necessary:
The state is not imposed on society from the outside; it is a product of society at a certain stage of development.[5]
A state that prohibits instead of educating admits its inability to conceive of violence as anything other than a problem of order. It replaces the long, uncertain, and conflictual work of education with the immediate solution of coercion. In doing so, it reproduces precisely what it claims to combat: the substitution of force for language. This is precisely the definition of perversion.
Conclusion
Ultimately, what the temptation to ban video games and social media in the name of violence reveals is not a policy of protection, but an educational abandonment. By replacing parents, the state doesn't help them: it absolves them of responsibility. It reinforces an already advanced infantilization, where one can continue to play, consume, and be entertained while the children watch, but not to learn; no, no, no… but to mimic an abdication of responsibility. Yet, to educate is to accept conflict, frustration, effort, and the sometimes painful words that accompany failure. To prohibit, on the other hand, is to refuse this work. It is to eliminate the question rather than answer it. In this sense, the state that prohibits instead of educating does not combat violence: it renounces language, just as the violence it claims to prevent does.
There is something deeply perverse about this.
A state that presents itself as a protector while treating parents like incapable minors and children like subjects to be removed from reality, builds a society where no one is accountable for the transmission of values. Responsibility dissolves into the norm, and the norm into prohibition. The result is not a peaceful society, but a desymbolized one, where frustration is no longer addressed, but avoided… until it resurfaces, precisely, in the form of violence.
This state narcissism is all the more worrying because it presents itself as moral. It claims to know better than families what should be eliminated, but proves incapable of considering what we should learn to do: lose, wait, start again, talk. By trying to eradicate all rough edges from human experience, we create individuals without language when faced with difficulty, and therefore, potentially, with no other resource than acting out. Defending video games, in this context, is not defending a pastime. It is defending a demanding idea of education: an education that does not protect against reality, but teaches us to face it without abandoning language. Where the state prohibits, we should provide support. Where it moralizes, we should transmit knowledge. And where it remains silent while imposing, we should, on the contrary, relearn how to speak.
