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book: Living in Death
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Living in Death

Genocide and Its Functionaries
  • Translated by: and
  • Preface by: and
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2021

About this book

Winner, Prix Littéraire Paris-Liège 2021
Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation

When we speak of mass killers, we may speak of radicalized ideologues, mediocrities who only obey orders, or bloodthirsty monsters. Who are these men who kill on a mass scale? What is their consciousness? Do they not feel horror or compassion?

Richard Rechtman’s Living in Death offers new answers to a question that has haunted us at least since the Holocaust. For Rechtman, it is not ideologies that kill, but people. This book descends into the ordinary life of people who execute hundreds every day, the same way others go to the office. Bringing philosophical sophistication to the ordinary, the book constitutes an anthropology of mass killers.

Turning away from existing psychological and philosophical accounts of genocide’s perpetrators, Rechtman instead explores the conditions under which administering death becomes a job like any other. Considering Cambodia, Rwanda, and other mass killings, Living in Death draws on a vast array of archival research, psychological theory, and anecdotes from the author’s clinical work with refugees and former participants in genocide. Rechtman mounts a compelling case for reframing and refocusing our attempts to explain—and preempt—acts of mass torture, rape, killing, and extermination.

What we must see, Rechtman argues, is that for genocidaires (those who carry out acts that are or approach genocide), there is nothing extraordinary, unusual, or world-historical about their actions. On the contrary, they are preoccupied with the same mundane things that characterize any other job: interactions with colleagues, living conditions, a drink and a laugh at the end of the day. To understand this is to understand how things came to be the way they are—and how they might be different.

A new approach to the question of why mass violence happens.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Richard Rechtman Richard Rechtman is an anthropologist and psychiatrist and director of studies at EHESS in Paris. Since 1990, he has directed a transcultural outpatient clinic for refugees in central Paris. He is the author of several books in French and coauthor, with Didier Fassin, of The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (2009), which won the William A. Douglass Book Prize. --- Contributor: Lindsay Turner Lindsay Turner is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of two collections of poetry and has translated books by Stéphane Bouquet, Éric Baratay, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Richard Rechtman, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. --- Contributor: Veena Das Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

“A work that is both passionate and subtle, written with inexhaustible tact and compassion.”---Veena Das, from the Foreword --- “Marked by extensive and deep knowledge, care, and clarity, this book masterfully examines the epistemology of genocide. Rechtman draws a finely traced map of the human that inheres in the theories about why and how one becomes a perpetrator. The book is striking in Rechtman’s capacity to present the most gruesome acts of killing we can imagine without ever exploiting, dismissing, or bypassing insights that have been available to us all along.”---Ann Laura Stoler, The New School for Social Research

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    CONTENTS

    v
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    FOREWORD

    vii
    Veena Das
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    INTRODUCTION

    1
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    1. THOSE WHO KILL

    13
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    2. MONSTERS: Cruelty and Jouissance

    29
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    3. ORDINARY MAN AND HIS PATHOLOGIES

    51
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    4. THE ADMINISTRATION OF DEATH

    92
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    5. THE ORDINARY LIFE OF GENOCIDAIRES

    130
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    CONCLUSION

    173
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    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    193
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    NOTES

    195
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 3, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9780823297887
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823297887
eBook ISBN: 9780823297887
Keywords for this book
anthropology; genocide; mass violence; ordinary life; psychology
Audience(s) for this book
For a non-specialist adult audience
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