Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death

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 ButlerThere 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 NonfictionMurderous 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.