Detail of stone rubbing showing Jing Ke’s assassination attempt on Qin Shi Huang. Wu Family Shrine, Chamber 2, South Wall, second century BCE.
On the eve of his mission to assassinate the King of Qin in 227 BCE, the would-be tyrannicide Jing Ke (荊軻) is said to have sung: “The wind howls, and the water of the Yi River is cold; a brave man once departed will never return.” Jing Ke was a swordsman dispatched by Prince Dan of Yan to assassinate the King of Qin, later Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇). According to Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), before undertaking his mission, Jing Ke recited the “Song of the Yi River” as a farewell at the riverbank. The poem suggests his awareness of the inevitability of failure: though duty compelled him to proceed, he anticipated that the attempt would end in his own death.
This farewell song, remembered in Chinese cultural memory, captures both the tragic nobility and futility of his act. Jing Ke departed not only to kill a king but to strike at what he and his supporters imagined as tyranny itself. His mission failed, and his death only hastened the unification of China under Qin rule. Yet the endurance of his story shows how assassination is persistently imagined as a heroic solution to despotism.
Plato, centuries earlier, had already warned against this illusion. In his dialogues, assassination is never treated as the cure for tyranny but as its symptom. Tyranny, he argues in The Republic, arises from unrestrained appetite (epithymia) that overwhelms the city. The tyrant gains power through murder (phonos) and rules by fear, but this very reliance on violence makes him constantly vulnerable to assassination. Therefore, assassination reflects tyranny upon itself: the ruler who lives by killing inevitably dies by it. Violence is not an external interruption but the tyrant’s own truth, mirrored in the act of his assassin.
Assassination has often been imagined as a heroic gesture against tyranny, the decisive act that restores freedom to the people. In civic traditions such as that of Athens, tyrannicide was even celebrated as the birth of democracy. Yet Plato resists this glorification of killing in anger. Across his dialogues, he presents assassination not as liberation but as the symptom of tyranny itself. Plato’s suspicion of assassination reveals the insight that assassination is not an interruption of tyranny but its truth returned against itself.
Lacan insists that the symptom always has a double valence. It brings excess suffering for the subject, but the subject is attached to it for the satisfaction it provides. The tyrant exemplifies this paradox. He suffers under the perpetual threat of assassination, anxiety, paranoia, and the constant shadow of murder, yet he also derives satisfaction from the very violence that sustains his regime. The assassin, too, far from being outside this cycle, becomes part of it. Their dagger is not the negation of tyranny but the form through which tyranny manifests its own symptom: the endless repetition of blood and revenge.
Lacan’s discourse theory in Seminar XVII illuminates this dynamic further. The tyrant embodies the discourse of the Master: he commands as if sovereign, but his authority depends upon the labor and recognition of others. Assassination discloses the impotence of this discourse, exposing its reliance on violence that returns against him. Yet assassination can also be seen as the hysterical discourse, the revolt against the Master that challenges his legitimacy. Like the hysteric in Lacan’s model, the assassin confronts the Master’s failure by striking at his body. But this revolt remains caught within the Master’s structure: it negates him while depending on his position for its meaning. Tyrannicide, then, is the hysterical repetition of tyranny, not its overcoming.
Assassination, in this sense, is the tyrant’s sinthome: the paradoxical knot that both wounds and sustains him. Plato makes this distinction explicit in The Laws, where he argues that only nomos (law) can rightly decide matters of life and death. Assassination bypasses law, collapsing justice (dikaiosyne) into stasis (civil strife). Jing Ke’s farewell song, with its tragic acceptance of death, can be read as testimony to this very collapse. His bravery is undeniable, but the structure that produces both tyrant and assassin is the same: a world in which law has failed and only violence seems meaningful.
Athens, too, cultivated its own tyrannicide myth. Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who assassinated Hipparchus in 514 BCE, were celebrated as founders of democracy, their statues erected in the agora and their deed immortalized in civic song. In contrast to Jing Ke’s tragic failure, the Athenians turned assassination into a triumphant symbol of liberation. Yet Plato resists this civic mythology. In The Republic, Plato describes how the “champion of the people” turns into a tyrant. Once the mob has been won over, he no longer hesitates to shed even the blood of his kin.
He brings false accusations, drives enemies into exile, murders others, and promises debt cancellation and land redistribution to secure support. At this point, only two outcomes remain: he is either destroyed by his enemies, or he becomes a tyrant, transformed, as Plato puts it, “from man into wolf.” If exile fails, his enemies plot to assassinate him. In response, the would-be tyrant asks the people for a personal bodyguard, which they grant, worried more about his safety than their own. Thus, the people’s champion becomes the tyrant, sustained by violence and fear, his power secured against assassination only by surrounding himself with armed guards.
For Plato, the glorification of assassins as liberators places violence at the very core of the polis. The tyrant, having destroyed his rivals, lives encircled by guards, mistrusting every citizen and haunted by the threat of assassination. A rule founded on blood ensures that he will one day fall by the same means. In this manner, the Athenian cult of tyrannicide enacts a revolt against the Master that never escapes his grip; it merely reenacts the logic of tyranny. The assassin is the tyrant’s double, his reflection in the imaginary duel of aggression, both bound to the same jouissance of violence.
Plato’s rejection of assassination anticipates a Lacanian truth: assassination is the tyrant’s symptom, not his cure. It expresses both his suffering and his enjoyment, sustaining the very structure it appears to destroy. In Lacan’s language, assassination is the hysteric’s revolt against the Master, but one that reproduces the Master’s discourse rather than escaping it. Against this circuit, Plato and Socrates propose an alternative approach: affirming law and reason, rejecting symptomatic satisfaction, and envisioning the possibility of justice without recourse to murder. To kill the tyrant is not to end tyranny, but to remain trapped within its structure. To overcome tyranny requires breaking with the enjoyment of assassination itself, affirming instead the fragile primacy of philosophy over the blade.
In the Crito, Socrates refuses to repay adikia (injustice) with injustice, even at the cost of his life. By submitting to law rather than retaliation, he resists both the tyrant’s enjoyment and the hysterical satisfaction of revenge. In this way, Socrates refuses to satisfy the symptom, orienting himself toward the symbolic order (nomos and logos) rather than the imaginary circuit of aggression. His silence before death, unlike Jing Ke’s tragic song or Athens’s celebratory hymns to tyrannicide, points beyond the enjoyment of violence to a fragile but necessary justice without murder.
Jing Ke’s lament and Athens’s cult of the tyrannoktonoi testify to the enduring allure of assassination as a heroic answer to tyranny. Yet in both cases, it functions not as liberation but as a symptom, the sign of a political order already consumed by violence. Plato, read through Lacan, exposes the truth beneath these myths: the assassin’s blade does not free the people but reproduces the tyrant’s violence within the community. Killing the tyrant does not abolish tyranny; it sustains its logic.
On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was struck down by a sniper’s bullet while addressing a university audience in Utah. Within hours, the governor condemned it as a “political assassination,” and the nation plunged into bitter debate over the rising tide of political violence. Yet Kirk’s death is more than a personal annihilation; it has taken on the weight of a symbol, echoing the ancient dramas of political violence from Athens to Jing Ke’s doomed mission on the banks of the Yi River. Like those episodes, it lays bare not simply the fall of one man but the deeper fracture of a polity undone by its own divisions. The US’s crisis is written, stark and unflinching, in the flash of the assassin’s rifle: the tragic return of violence as the language of politics.
The killing of Kirk, whether cast as a political assassination, an atrocity, or the tragic endpoint of polarization, belongs to a long historical pattern. From Jing Ke’s doomed thrust at the King of Qin to Athens’s hymns to the tyrant-killer, assassination has rarely functioned as rupture; rather, it condenses the violence already embedded in the political system. Far from curing the malady, the assassin’s act confirms it. The tyrant who rules through fear is sustained by the very violence that renders him vulnerable to death. The event is quickly instrumentalized, folded back into the political system as symbolic capital. Kirk’s death becomes an emblem to be brandished, not an occasion for reckoning with the conditions that produced it. What matters is not why the act occurred, and the political culture it belongs to, but how the tragedy can be mobilized for partisan ends.
What strikes me more than the speculations over Kirk’s motives are the remarks of the Utah governor. In his attempt to shield the community from the recognition that “one of us” could commit such violence, he exposed the obscene underside of the MAGA ethos: racism disguised as the language of community. His statement dramatizes an ideological unconscious: the desire to locate violence outside the community, the pain of discovering it within, and the swift rhetorical turn to reaffirm virtue. This is the national fantasy of exceptionalism: a structure of disavowal that substitutes the consolations of innocence for the confrontation with systemic violence. His tears mark the precise moment when this fantasy falters, when the Real intrudes and the truth of “one of us” becomes undeniable.
Assassination, then, is not a disruption of politics but part of its spectacle. It dramatizes violence, is consumed as a symbol, and is repurposed for ideological reassurance. Its political significance lies precisely here: it furnishes the material for myth-making, for the reaffirmation of fantasies that sustain the order of power. The tragedy of Kirk’s death lies not only in the act itself but in the manner in which it is seized to falsely unify and reinscribe exceptionalism, rather than to unsettle the structures of violence that made it possible.
In Lacanian terms, assassination is the symptom that both torments and gratifies the political body, delivering a perverse satisfaction even as it magnifies the suffering it claims to end. It exposes the impasse of politics itself: the cycle in which violence sustains power and power invites violence. Whether in the guise of populist authoritarianism, polarized discourse, or cultures of vengeance, modern politics shows how easily justice becomes indistinguishable from retribution. The fantasy that one death might redeem the many persists, yet each assassination only repeats the wound it sought to close. Plato saw this clearly: the knife that kills the tyrant does not cure tyranny, but uncovers it in its most unvarnished form.
