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

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.

Anne O’Byrne is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. She is author of Natality and Finitude (2010), co-editor of Subjects and Simulations: Between Baudrillard and Lacoue-Labarthe (2014), translator of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural and Corpus II, and author of numerous articles on politics, ontology, biology, and generational being.

Martin Shuster is associate professor of philosophy at Goucher College, where he also directs the Center for Geographies of Justice and where he is jointly appointed in the Humanities Center. In addition to many articles and book chapters, he is the author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno German Idealism and Modernity (2014), New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (2017), and How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism (2021).