Global Complicity and Consent to Violence

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will welcome Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha for a presentation of his ongoing research on contemporary forms of violence and the collective mechanisms of consent. Drawing on critical philosophy and twentieth-century French thought, he questions the passivity in the face of systemic violence and explores the possibilities for ethical and political renewal in a world marked by the crisis of the humanities.

Presentation of the project

With the overall “eclipse of reason” or with the persistent ideologization and “instrumentalization of reason” in modern societies, the category of consent has been (mis)used with overt or covert murderous intents (Crepon, 2019). This project investigates our collective complicity in approving or consenting to the deployment of violence as means of governmentality, sovereign power and also for supposedly revolutionary objectives as used in terror attacks and political mobilizations. Philosophical metanarratives and abstruse conceptual grandstanding have so far proved to be ineffective in countering contemporary normalization of violence, prompting an inquiry on whether we need reformulated epistemic shifts to understand existing axiomatics of violence. In recent times or even during the atrocities of the Holocaust, the roles of the “bystanders” have come under renewed scrutiny and in today`s context of state sponsored war machine, ethno-nationalist or revolutionary terror and economic or ecological brutality, this larger trend of passivity towards or tacit indifference to systemic or ideological violence have encouraged state actors or political despots to thrive. As all these disturbing trends point to the deepening crisis of the humanities and social sciences, what role can philosophy enforce in times of contemporary violence and collective complicity? This project looks into the works of Critical Theorists and Twentieth century French philosophers to analyse new nomadologies or reterritorializing vision for change.

Speaker

Prof. Dr. Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha, currently with the Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR), Kolkata has been professor of English at Kazi Nazrul University, India. He has been awarded the 2025 Cambridge University Visiting Fellowship for Scholars from the Global South for his research stay at Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge.