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Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death

Online ISBN:
9780823286171
Print ISBN:
9780823283750
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death

Marc Crépon
Marc Crépon
Ecole Normale Superieure
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Published online:
23 January 2020
Published in print:
7 May 2019
Online ISBN:
9780823286171
Print ISBN:
9780823283750
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

This book details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it's classically understood. It insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, as expressed by the appeal—by peoples across the world—for the care and attention that their vulnerability enjoins. But the book argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and it searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, it engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburō Ōe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables the book to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics—an ethicosmopolitics to come. Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, the book calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it's lived, the book works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean.

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