2016 - 2017

0662-2099-01
  The Philosophical Structure of Genocide                                                              
FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
Aim Deuelle LuskiGilman-humanities326Mon1600-1800 Sem  2
 
 
University credit hours:  2.0

Course description

In order to understand the phenomenon of genocide, we will think together about the question of the political creation of racial difference: Do people kill others because of their belonging to a national, ethnic group, race or religion (regardless of individual guilt)? We wish to refer to the two sides of the phenomenon: one aspect is the historical aspect – trying to understand the various histories within the twentieth-century events, that enabled the proliferation of genocide. We will build a comparative discussion about the political, economic and social standing behind the events of “murder”, which is the inner meaning of every genocide: the possibility of looking in the face of somebody else, of the “other”, and committing the crime (of murder). How is it at all possible in our age? The second aspect is the philosophical one, the search after the meaning of the special conditions, mental, moral and aesthetic that created the situation in which genocide is possible at all. For example, the relationships between the modern nation State and the growth of the phenomenon of genocide, the set of emergency laws, which created the situation of denial, muting, blindness, which enable the standing in front of the genocide, that created the possibility of being able to "ignore" and to continue daily life as if nothing was happening. Examines the psychological, cultural, and societal roots of human cruelty, mass violence, that enables individuals collectively and individually to perpetrate mass violence and genocide.

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