[...]ble people targeted for discrimination, injury and death, in a continuing wave of violent economic, psychic, social, political, medical and juridical assaults


Keenan on the possibility that justice might not be simply possible

deconstruction's ethico-political pertinence:
•reference to its thematic or referential considerations of issues (ethics, race, feminism, etc.)
•its formal homologies with political interventions --> deconstruction of authority as liberating ideology-critique
•ruin the categories on which political discourse and reliable knowledge found itself
}==> axiom: ethics and politics are matters of choice : determinations and acts of a subject with an identity (whether strong or weak) held to be [*]free: capable of understanding and integrating that knowledge with a response to the demand to act
[*]subject: name of the time and place in which knowledge can be articulated, *the right to the passage from knowing to doing*

undecidability --> Derrida
unreadability --> de Man

-what is more radically unsettling than criticism? (...reading)
@Sina

“the subject who reads is the subject who choose” ==> responsibility

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Eichmann --> faced a legal forum
Mengele's skull --> faced a scientific forum
}--Keenan--> (two different discursive operations) each *inaugurates* a fundamental concept and practice within the politics and epistemology of war crimes investigations

*cultural turn towards testimony* --> the speech of the witness

[?we are in the] era of the witness --> legitimized and validated victims

dramatic and emotional
trial: form of historical and political pedagogy
not merely to convict the accused but to “reach the hearts of men”

political agency of witnesses (survivors)

narrative in war crime investigations --> document ~= witness --> forensic approach

human remains are the kind of objects from which the trace of the subject cannot be fully removed

exhumation
examination

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Mona is actually concerned with the separation of the spheres of ethics and knowledge
strength <--> “Gewalt” <--> valere <--> Vale <--> value*

vergüenza, a collective sentiment, of one's own dignity and self-esteem, shame
vergüenza ajena --> fremdschämen --> (one of the essential features of aidos/aidôs [αἰδώς]) the Greek personification of modesty
“bashfulness,” “diffidence,”
“respectful,” “reserved,” “revered,” --> vereor (or vereri): in religion, “to fear,” “to revere,” حرمت “to have respect or scruple for.” Vereor belongs to a family of words that derive from the Indo-European root ᵒswer-, meaning “pay attention,” like the Greek horan [ὁϱᾶν] (to look, pay attention, see)

one must take the path in exactly the opposite direction

(let's not be) persons con vergüenza : persons of honor, persons of their word. It is not so much that they keep their promises, but that they are bound by the word that they have given --> they commit to cumplire: “to carry out,” “to accomplish a mission,” [=/= “leaving your post,” Kafka]

vergüenza =/= to attack the community }-->? khashm خشم indignation: rupture of an implicit contract based on norms and conventions

the sentiment (and performance of Tarof in a weird way, and) of verguenza construct relations of social solidarity, the tie --> to give structure to the relationship to the gods (as well as that between persons) --> *aidos* becomes constitutive of shame civilization (that continues to mutate)

shame, sham, to “cover up” shameful parts
aischune[=/= *aidos* (==> *kleos* “fame”) defines the Homeric hero, aidos precisely identifies the definitive requirement of the hero, his “regard” for his philoi (φίλοι  royal friend/advisor of the king) and his genos (γένος, social group claiming common descent)]: to dishonor [=/= beauty, in Plato] }--> to disfigure; tied to the body, and in the case of the female body --> blush, as in the sensitive plant

aidos (~= moderation [provoked by the regard and expectations of the other]) =/= *excess* [--> in my lectures i usually don't respect/regard the expectations of the other]-->? that which separates me from the Homeric hero

(these are all about the regulation of the world)--> in a way also that which Mona demands
Mona need to analyse her question of (caused) violence and calamity:
•disposal the Promethean technai [τέχναι] (when she asks “who gave them the tool to kill?”)
•the logos [λόγος] of the arts and discursivity (when she demands conscience and justice [~ dike, another greek tool])

for Aristotle: aidos ==> clean ethics: pathos (an affection that involves the body)
*the form of fear proper to free men* --> properties proper to truth

from aidos [linked to the Latin videre (to see)], to vergüenza [linked to the Greek horan (to see)], we remain in the space of the *gaze*

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Veena on *how knowledge is secreted in relation to catastrophic events*

‘inordinate knowledge’ --> beyond the act of merely knowing
=/= pale intellectualized distracted archived knowledge --> it is the subject who has
to discover which aspects of knowledge matter to her and where her attachments lie

--Veena--> (with pale or excessive, it is not the form of knowledge, rather) it is the way in which knowledge enters the realms of the social

those who have to endure what they cannot ignore
pale --> bare --> dark --> filled with plenitude

different modes of knowing as means of navigating the catastrophic (=/= simply knowledge about an object)

*reality does not have that frontal character*, (it is rather) like atmosphere, deeply embedded within context
[*]context: the weaver's loom that is discerned within the cloth it weaves

Donatelli --destruction--> small, recurring, repetitive crises that define everyday life itself or are grown within the everyday
*event of traumatic loss functions as:
•an event
•a figure of thought

20th century as the century of genocides : the story of collective violence from the point of view of victims and survivors <-- we must contest this story

•(Kleinman & Kleinman, Mookherjee:) victim stories ==> voyeurism
•(Fassin & Rechtman:) ubiquity of a trauma narrative substitutes critical engagement with the structural forces of inequality (or discrimination by a psychologizing of experience and of subjectivity)
•
•

category of the victim is not transparent =/= bureaucratic legal forms through which the victim status is produced aligns with very different kinds of knowledge (shamanic, ritual, genealogical) to generate different kinds of affects

1947 Partition of India (marked by massive intercommunal killing, rape, and abduction of women) ==/==> victim
==> refugees, evacuee property, abducted persons

his fictionalized account of my responses to his questions inspired me to think
(your fictionalized account of my response to your question inspires me to think)

[to] rake the fallen leaves of language and literature to recreate experiences...

(usually) “treason” ==> massacres and violation of human rights by governmental forces

(one is forced to see events in other countiries in the light of issues pertaining to)  transitional justice and the global form of truth

unknown dead imagined as hungry and thirsty ghosts
*the living cannot offer the dead solace because the unknown dead cannot be placed within the grid of genealogical knowledge necessary to make them into benign ancestors*
-the difference between kin and strangers, ancestors and ghosts

**hospitality being offered to the stranger could also become a way of reincorporating the estranged kin**(? -iranian hospitality?)

the intertwined nature of bureaucratic power and ritual action

the dead are haphazardly buried that have to be then contained or transformed through shamanic knowledge and ritual manipulations? -Veena

modern bureaucratic procedures ==> tear apart the continuity of generational connections <-~ the work of ritual to restore connections is engaged

the different ways we come to know something =/= the e[...]