La problématique de la violence trouve une particulière acuité au sein de l’institution militaire. Elle est au cœur du métier des armes, lequel véhicule une transgression, celle d’un interdit fondamental fondant l’organisation de notre société, l’interdit du meurtre. Le soldat occupe une position d’exception par cette possibilité de donner la mort, laquelle trouve sa légitimité dans un usage régulé de la force, en répondant à des conditions d’emploi des armes très précises. Mais violence qui trouve aussi des issues inattendues, hors cadre, en venant rendre compte d’une perte de maîtrise et de contrôle de la force. Elle est alors l’expression d’un point d’impasse dans le fonctionnement du sujet tout comme dans son lien au groupe, par cette rupture du pacte qui en unit les différents membres, en portant atteinte à sa sécurité comme à la mission confiée, notamment en contexte opérationnel. Ces coordonnées spécifiques d’émergence de la violence sont ici détaillées, pour en préciser les ressorts et le retentissement, au-delà de considérations contextuelles.

This work consists in a study of the links between the concept of violence and military environment where its problematic is particularly acute. Violence is at the heart of the profession of arms, which conveys a transgression, the prohibition of murder, which itself is at the foundation of the organization of our society.

The soldier occupies a position of exception by this possibility of giving death, which finds its legitimacy in a regulated use of the force, while responding to very precise conditions of use of the weapons. The power granted to the soldier is none the less marked up, presupposing a regulated use of the armed force, which implies its control, but commits jointly the possible overflow of these conditions of employment; sometimes there is an insidious sliding, much more obvious elsewhere, towards a deregulated violence, attesting a loss of control of the force. These specific coordinates of emergence of violence are here detailed, to specify the springs and the repercussions, beyond contextual considerations.

Two expressions in mirror of violence have been pinpointed in order to be clarified. The one which refers to a controlled and framed violence, then lever and driving force of the war action, and the other consisting of a out of frame violence, in connection with a use against the use of force; we did the hypothesis that this deregulated violence is the expression of a point of impossibility for the subject, a form of impasse both in his own psychic functioning and in his relationship to the group.

The military environment, which is itself violence holder, is structured in such a way that it can frame and control the intrinsic violence to warlike action. But as soon as the violence comes to express itself out of frame, it is outside the precise and regulated context of the use of the armed force, it becomes destructive, hindering the work of symbolization of the psyche, to lead to breaking the links of the subject with himself and with his group.