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Analyses of suicides in the workplace, the most enigmatic characteristic of which is the intense guilt of those who commit this “crime against oneself,” do not give sufficient consideration to the socio-historical determinants relating to the current damaged representations of the human person and contempt for others. This paper explores the hypothesis of an essential mutation induced by the Great War, insofar as it was the first industrial war, which has acquired the significance of a primal scene of our modernity and serves as a model for portraying the sacrifice of the neighbor. According to this hypothesis, the denied traumatism of this inaugural horror of the 20th century is likely to manifest itself today in the form of a profound disintegration of social ties. Free reign is supposedly given to a form of destructive imagination that finds particularly favorable grounds for expression in the current global “economic war.” Certain aesthetic forms and educative institutions are questioned insofar as they act as vectors of the transmission of this violence.