Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death

Winner, 2002 French Translation Prize for Nonfiction

Murderous Consent 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. 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.

Author: Marc Crépon
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 05/07/2019
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.78lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.54d
ISBN: 9780823283743

About the Author
Marc Crépon (Author)
Marc Crépon is Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and Research Director of the Husserl Archives. He is one of France's leading voices in contemporary political and moral philosophy and is the author of The Thought of Death and the Memory of War (Minnesota) and The Vocation of Writing: Literature and Philosophy in the Test of Violence (SUNY).

James Martel (Foreword By)
James Martel is Professor and Chair of Political Science at San Francisco State University. His most recent book is The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke).

Michael Loriaux (Translator)
Michael Loriaux is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. He is the author of European Union and the Deconstruction of the Rhineland Frontier (Cambridge) and Europe Anti-Power (Routledge).

Jacob Levi (Translator)
Jacob Levi is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Thought and Literature at the Johns Hopkins University.