Event overview
Marc Crépon (École Normale Supérieure, Paris) is joined by 5 panelists in discussion of his newly translated work on the violence in which we are structurally complicit.
“Murderous consent” is the name given by Marc Crépon (ENS, Paris) to the violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil strife, political oppression in other places, war. Within the rationality on which the liberal or neoliberal state is built, this sort of complicity goes unaccounted for. Yet when we distinguish ethics from politics as two separate spheres, Crépon argues, we, too, are perpetrators of violence—as seen, for instance, when we resist the call to respond with care to the vulnerabilities of peoples in distant parts of the world.
Against the myriad ways in which even our opposition to violence may be undermined by unacknowledged consent to commit violence, we must therefore rethink the very concepts of violence, the prohibition against violence, and the living beings to which violence applies. Reorienting the resources found in literature and philosophy to the question of how current forms of ethical reasoning license violence, Crépon asks whether a more radical manner of interpersonal responsibility might be conceivable.
This symposium will begin with Marc Crépon’s presentation of the political consequences of his argument. It then brings together five scholars from the fields of political theory, Jewish philosophy, literary theory, social and critical theory, and critical legal studies to each respond to a chapter in Crépon’s argument, which deal, respectively, with Camus, Freud, Levinas, Kraus and Anders, amongst others. Marc Crépon will be joined by James Martel (SFSU), the author of the foreword to the English edition of his book, as well as Agata Bielik-Robson (Nottingham), Josh Cohen (Goldsmiths), Başak Ertür (Birkbeck), and Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths). In conclusion, Professor Crépon will give a response to the papers.
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).
Co-sponsored by the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London.
For the schedule and full list of participants please visit cpct.uk.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 25 Oct 2019 | 3:00pm - 7:00pm |
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