Murderous Consent - (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) by Marc Crépon (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"Murderous Consent is a bold and principled argument against the strategic rationality that governs violence in our times. 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. 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

"There are many forms of opposing violence but few take the injunction against murder as seriously and thoroughly as Marc Crépon. . . .Crépon is subverting the entire political apparatus of the liberal (or neoliberal) state which is built precisely on the simultaneous denial and use of murder as its ultimate political tool."--James Martel, from the Foreword

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. 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 enjoin.

Crépon calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility, an ethicosmopolitics to come. In rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame, Crépon outlines a range of resources with which we can respond to murderous consent. 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.

Marc Crépon is Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He is the author of The Thought of Death and the Memory of War and The Vocation of Writing: Literature and Philosophy in the Test of Violence.

Michael Loriaux is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Jacob Levi is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Thought and Literature at the Johns Hopkins University.

James Martel is Chair of Political Science at San Francisco State University.

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

There are many forms of opposing violence but few take the injunction against murder as seriously and thoroughly as Marc Crépon. . . .Crépon is subverting the entire political apparatus of the liberal (or neoliberal) state which is built precisely on the simultaneous denial and use of murder as its ultimate political tool.---James Martel, from the Foreword

What is refreshing about this approach is that Crépon, in demanding so much of us, does not demand our perfectibility.---James Martel, from the Foreword

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.