Description: Murderous Consent details our implication in violence that we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit. Marc Crépon invites the reader to resist that implication by arguing for an ethicosmopolitics grounded in our receptivity to the pleas for assistance that the vulnerability and mortality of the other enjoin everywhere.
Brief description: James Martel is professor of political science at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (Routledge, 2011), The One and Only Law: Walter Benjamin and the Second Commandment (University of Michigan Press, 2014), and The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke University Press, 2017).
Review Quotes: Marc Crépon's Murderous Consent is a bold and principled argument against the strategic rationality that governs the infliction of violence in our times. Recovering Camus for the present, reorienting Levinas for political thought, Crépon asks us to consider the myriad ways that consent and complicity sustain murderous acts and policies, arguing that we cannot understand violence without taking into account the consent to violence. The debates of Les Temps Modernes turn out to have contemporary salience as Crépon considers the various ways in which a principled opposition to violence is undermined by forms of unacknowledged consent to commit violence. In dialogue with the thought of Kenzaburo Oe, Freud, and Günther Anders, he illuminates what the prohibition against violence means, the meaning of violence itself, and the expanse of life and living beings to which it applies. This book provocatively helps us to rethink settled forms of ethical reasoning that directly or indirectly license violence and lets us imagine a world in which complicit realism gives way to much needed affirmation of non-violence. An all too timely meeting of ethics and politics.---Judith Butler