ABSTRACT
This work attempts to understand how we, as humans, consciously or unconsciously accommodate and consent to violence against the other while addressing our desire for ownership or belongingness. This desire, which is always a desire for the self operative both individually and collectively, is often, if not always, unaware of the potential harm that it carries within unless it is kept under constant vigil by the one who bears it—to bear also means “to carry, to put up with, to stomach, to suffer, to tolerate, to accept, to contain, to hold, to wear, and to expect” it (Menike 2020, 250). It may hurt or injure another. Therefore, before questioning the other's desires, every human should question his/her desire to realize whether it could harm another. In such an effort to be sincerely made going by one's conscience, one singularly ruminates how to define violence in an impartial or unbiased manner. This deliberation enables one to understand how he/she intentionally or unintentionally participates, contributes, and consents to violence. Insisting on the urgency of understanding our hypocrisy in the act of defining what violence is, French philosopher Marc Crépon opens his latest work, Murderous Consent: On Accommodation of Violent Death, with the following introductory paragraph.
No critique of violence, no denunciation of cruelty, to the extent that both the one and the other are partial [partiel] and partisan [partial], can elude the risk of consenting, actively or passively, implicitly or explicitly, to the very violence it critiques and cruelty it denounces. It suffices that the critique apply only to violence and the denunciation only to cruelty that take place elsewhere and otherwise. This is the paradox of every protest and every expression of indignation, whether moral or political. No matter how legitimate our protestations may be, the silence, the incomprehension, the small and not-so-small concessions regarding the various forms of violent death that they imply or tolerate, which weave the fabric of our history, compromise death's meaning and their import. As 2soon as such protestation accept or even draw a line of (political, ideological, economic, military, or individual) separation between people whose wounds are judged unacceptable and people whose sufferings might be seen as tenable, they expose their lack of coherence with the principles they espouse. As soon as such protestations find “good” reasons here for the destructions that they condemn elsewhere, they lose their essential credibility, unless we conclude that violence is natural and has primacy over considerations of ethics. We cannot, in other words, claim for some what we refuse to others. Our awareness of violence and its effects cannot depend on the affiliation of those who suffer, no matter how that affiliation is defined, whether geographically, “ethnically”, “factionally”, “culturally”, politically, or religiously.
(Crépon 2019, 1–2)