In this urgently needed book, Marc Crepon addresses the nature of hatred and its manifestations in international and domestic terrorism, racism, war and other forms of violence. Looking at the evidence of violence motivated by hatred, including US racial segregation, South African apartheid and the terrorist attacks in New York City in 2001 and in Paris in 2015, Crepon makes a compelling case for why hatred is the burden of our times.With inspiration from the non-violence resistance movements of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., Crepon reveals how philosophy and literature, using courage and a new language, can overcome the many forms of hatred and violence present in our lives today.

Winner, 2002 French Translation Prize for Nonfiction Murderous 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, and war, as it's classically understood. Marc Crepon 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 enjoins. But Crepon argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and the book searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, he engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburo Oe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables Crepon to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics-an ethicosmopolitics to come. Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, Crepon calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. 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.

Winner, 2002 French Translation Prize for Nonfiction Murderous 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, and war, as it's classically understood. Marc Crepon 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 enjoins. But Crepon argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and the book searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, he engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburo Oe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables Crepon to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics-an ethicosmopolitics to come. Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, Crepon calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. 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.

War lays bare death and our relation to it. And in the wars--or more precisely the memories of war--of the twentieth century, images of the deaths of countless faceless or nameless others eclipse the singularity of each victim's death as well as the end of the world as such that each death signifies.

Marc Crepon's "The Thought of Death and the Memory of War" is a call to resist such images in which death is no longer actual death since it happens to anonymous others, and to seek instead a world in which mourning the other whose mortality we always already share points us toward a cosmopolitics. Crepon pursues this path toward a cosmopolitics of mourning through readings of works by Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, Patocka, Levinas, Derrida, and Ricoeur, and others. The movement among these writers, Crepon shows, marks a way through--and against--twentieth-century interpretation to argue that no war, genocide, or neglect of people is possible without suspending how one relates to the death of another human being.

A history of a critical strain in contemporary thought, this book is, as Rodolphe Gasche says in the Foreword, "a profound meditation on what constitutes evil and a rigorous and illuminating reflection on death, community, and world."

The translation of this work received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.