Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death

by Marc Crépon, James Martel (Foreword), Michael Loriaux (Translator)

Winner, 2002 French Translation Prize for NonfictionMurderous Consent details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it’s classically understood. Marc Crépon 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 Crépon argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and the book searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, he engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburo Oe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables Crépon to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics—an ethicosmopolitics to come.Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, Crépon calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it’s lived, Murderous Consent works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 7, 2019

Reviews

[Kieran Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting concept that Mark Crepon develops. I do feel like the chapter order is somewhat odd, and the way it is laid out is a little awkward. The notion of individuality/singularity as the basis for the ethicosmopolitics he is developing is likely something that should come in the first chapter instead of later on. Other than that I think much of the work done is thought provoking and inciteful while giving a good set of terminology to explore the relationship between violence, the state and others. Well worth a read.