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.
Table of Contents
Preface
Donald Bloxham
Introduction
Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster
Part I Agency and Institutions
1. Hegel and State Homogenization
Martin Shuster
2. The Friends of War and Genocide
Jacqueline Stevens
3. The ‘Criminal’ and the Crime of Genocide
Lissa Skitolsky
4. Genocide and Agency in the Americas: Methodological Considerations
Rocío Zambrana
Part II Bodies and Beyond
5. Generational Being
Anne O’Byrne
6. Epigenetics and Existential Reflections on Trauma
Ada S. Jaarsma
7. "We Charge Genocide": Anti-Black Racism in the United States as Genocidal Structural Violence
Lisa Guenther
8. Pornographic Ways of Looking and the Logic of Disposability
Kelly Oliver
Part III Time and Violence
9. Totalitarianism as Structural Violence: Towards New Grammars of Listening
María del Rosario Acosta López
10. Gendercide, Rwanda, and Post-Genocidal Violence
Al Frankowski
11. Law and Oral History: Hearing the Claims of Indigenous Peoples
Jill Stauffer
Part IV Ethos and Violence
12. Violence, Right, and Righteousness: Thinking the Political with and Against Lévinas
Carly Lane
13. Structure and Fantasy: Holocaust Perpetrators and Genocide Studies
Dan Stone
14. Reasonable Religion, Reasonable States, and Invisible Violence
Heather Rae
Epilogue: Theses on Our Only Possible Future
James R. Watson
