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published on August 5, 2021
Noëlle Vahanian
On the Repeatable Human Victim and Perpetrator in Genocide
This article is concerned with how we meet the victim of genocide in the middle of experience. François Laruelle, in Théorie générale des victimes (2012), suggests that to think the victim is a work of resurrection rather than remembrance. To think the victim should allow us to recognize that the victim, especially the victim for who they are as such, is always human in the last instance—a repeatable victim. With this thesis, the article begins with the definition of the crime of genocide adopted by the United Nations to examine how knowledge production is involved in cyclical violence. The second part of the essay thinks the victim of genocide through a subversion of Jean-Luc Marion’s limit concept of the saturated phenomenon, sans transcendence. The essay concludes that in this lived realization, weakness and compassion seize to return the victim to their suffering and instead, hope to change the world.