Intellectuals and Power by Fran & ccedil;ois Laruelle

Author:Fran & ccedil;ois Laruelle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745681917
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

The Victim and the Understanding of Crime

PP: In Future Christ you write: “Heresy does not know the ‘memorially correct’ or its contrary, without which it is a question of denying the watchful pitched against one another. Under whatever perspective it is, as long as it is not that of scientific or ethical corruption and racist ulterior motives, we have never been interested in minimizing crime or suffering, in dissolving them in the always too vast geo- and historico-political ‘considerations’, to say nothing of the philosophical generalizations […] that challenge the subject’s range of suffering and misfortune.”1 I suggest that you move on now to this central theme of the Victim, in relation with philosophy. Then we will see what the Victim is in non-philosophy. What can philosophy say about the Victim?

FL: There is a philosophical paradox regarding the Victim. On the one hand, philosophy has almost nothing to say about her. We could say at the very least that the Victim is not one of philosophy’s favorite themes. Sometimes an allusion is made on the basis of other themes, justice in particular or war, but the Victim is a kind of zero point or blind spot for philosophy. In contrast, which is the other side of the paradox, it is possible to project a philosophical image of the Victim and that is what I am going to attempt. Structural or conceptual projections are possible. In a general way, within an ontological representation of the Victim, she is only originally present with some distance, a distance I will call victomological distance. A victim can necessarily only show herself under every form of representation from somewhere else, media-friendly ones as well as conceptual ones, with a certain objectified distance. Even when she seems given in some very immediate way as in the case of television images, the Victim is, in reality, given across a distance, that of the image. This distance is the mark of philosophy and the cause of a certain disinterest regarding the Victim. The image alludes to everything by creating the impression of giving the Victim in flesh and blood.

PP: In the Discourse on Inequality, when Rousseau speaks about pity as spontaneous action, one is within the language of the heart, of the immediate. Rousseauian compassion is absolutely without distance from the point of view of the sensible. Isn’t the distance that you are talking about uniquely a sensible distance?

FL: Even in the most immediately apparent pity there is still some distance. The Victim has to show herself under the form of another person, even if it is another person with whom we have some sensible contact and who is immediately affective. Affectivity clashes with rationality or rationalization, but it does not clash with victimological distance. The Victim is given in ekstasis, albeit one that is sometimes forgotten.

PP: But what then is the structure of victimological distance?

FL: It is not a simple distance, able to be measured empirically or geometrically. It has a double dimension, two kinds of ekstasis and not a single one.

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