Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World

Description

This book is concerned with the connection between the formal structure of agency and the formal structure of genocide. The contributors employ philosophical approaches to explore the idea of genocidal violence as a structural element in the world. Do mechanisms or structures in nation-states produce types of national citizens that are more susceptible to genocidal projects? There are powerful arguments within philosophy that in order to be the subjects of our own lives, we must constitute ourselves specifically as national subjects and organize ourselves into nation states. Additionally, there are other genocidal structures of human society that spill beyond historically limited episodes. The chapters in this volume address the significance-moral, ethical, political-of the fact that our very form of agency suggests or requires these structures. The contributors touch on topics including birthright citizenship, contemporary mass incarceration, anti-black racism, and late capitalism. Logics of Genocide will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, critical theory, genocide studies, Holocaust and Jewish studies, history, and anthropology. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgement Preface Introduction PART I Agency and Institutions 1 Hegel and State Homogenization 2 The Friends of War and Genocide 3 The “Criminal” and the Crime of Genocide 4 Genocide and Agency in the Americas: Methodological Considerations PART II Bodies and Beyond 5 Generational Being 6 Epigenetics and the Molecular Memory of Genocide 7 “We Charge Genocide”: Anti-Black Racism in the United States as Genocidal Structural Violence 8 Pornographic Ways of Looking and the Logic of Disposability PART III Time and Violence 9 Totalitarianism as Structural Violence: Toward New Grammars of Listening 10 Gendercide, Rwanda, and Post-Genocidal Violence 11 Law and Oral History: Hearing the Claims of Indigenous Peoples PART IV Ethos and Violence 12 Violence, Right, and Righteousness: Thinking the Political With and Against Lévinas 13 Structure and Fantasy: Holocaust Perpetrators and Genocide Studies 14 Reasonable Religion, Reasonable States, and Invisible Violence Epilogue: Theses on Our Only Possible Future List of Contributors Index