Murderous Consent: On The Accommodation Of Violent Death

237 Pages·2019·1.89 MB·English

by  Marc Crépon

Murderous Consent
Series Board
James Bernauer
Drucilla Cornell
Thomas R. Flynn
Kevin Hart
Richard Kearney
Jean- Luc Marion
Adriaan Peperzak
Thomas Sheehan
Hent de Vries
Merold Westphal
Michael Zimmerman
John D. Caputo, series editor

MARC CRÉPON
Murderous Consent
On the Accommodation
of Violent Death
Translated by Michael Loriaux and Jacob Levi
Foreword by James Martel
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York ■ 2019
Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press
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This book was first published in French as Le consentement meurtrier, by Marc Crépon
© Les Éditions du Cerf, 2012.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935377
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
Contents
Foreword by James Martel ix
Introduction 1
1 Justice 17
2 Life 46
3 Freedom 75
4 Truth 109
5 The World 140
Conclusion 173
Appendix. Friendship: A Trial by History 181
Notes 195
Index 213

Foreword
James Martel
There are many forms of opposing vio lence but few take the injunction
against murder as seriously and thoroughly as Marc Crépon. In this book,
which has been newly translated into En glish by Michael Loriaux and
Jacob Levi, Crépon offers us a vision of what it looks like to forbid murder
absolutely. To do so, Crépon refuses the vari ous categories of identity that
help us to rationalize and justify killing. Th ese distinctions include those
between the innocent and the guilty, legitimate and illegitimate targets,
just and unjust wars, and the entire panoply of discourses that in the end
only allow nations, communities, and individuals to be the arbiters (in
their own minds anyway) of whom they may kill and whom they may not.
In refusing such distinctions, Crépon is undermining the idea of con-
sent as an implicit marker of who may or may not be killed. Scholars d on’t
usually think of consent and murder in the same breath, but Crépon is
very persuasive that the one leads to the other. The notion of consent im-
plies a world of perfect information where the consequences and purposes
of a decision are all guaranteed, allowing fully informed persons to align
themselves with some group or other. It is therefore the basis on which we
tend to consider p eople’s affiliations as chosen rather than required or en-
forced. Crépon is fundamentally uninterested in the question of whether
people r eally and genuinely choose to be in this or that community pre-
cisely because, as he sees it, this question calls forth a deeper question:
“May I kill this person? Is this person—by his or her own choice— a
member of a group that is an enemy to me?”
ix