Imge Oranli

Bedross Der Matossian's edited volume is an irreplaceable resource for scholars and students interested in the changing governmental tactics of genocide denialism that span the globe today. This edited volume orients readers toward understanding current historical realities of genocide denialism by evaluating new manifestations of this phenomenon. In today's global political context, the varying discourses, sites, intensities, and practices of genocide denialism are not exceptional, but rather appear as “culturally valid” forms of perpetrator mentality or, to borrow from Michel Foucault, governmentality. As a philosopher who works on genocide denialism, I read Denial of Genocides in relation to Foucault's three-pronged definition of governmentality. Foucault discusses governmentality as an “ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses, reflections, calculations, and tactics.” Accordingly, in Der Matossian's edited volume, genocide perpetrators’ denialist tactics, strategies, discourses, and subjectivities are conditioning factors of their governmentality. For example, Marc Mamigonian's discussion of the legal practices of the Turkish Coalition of America (ch. 3) shows how denialist practices require agents with motivated cognitions who reproduce old forms of Turkish genocide denialism alongside new attacks on US recognition of the Armenian genocide.

This book develops an interdisciplinary framework rooted in philosophy for addressing the political evils experienced around the world. Drawing on resources mainly from Continental philosophy and historical studies, it argues for the relationality and continuity between political evils, using the Armenian Genocide and the Shoah as main examples. The book begins by unpacking a series of limiting assumptions that define the philosophical study of evil. These assumptions crystallize in the idea that evil is an inscrutable phenomenon, what the author calls the paradigm of evil’s inscrutability. Tracing this paradigm through the legacies of five key philosophers—Plato, Augustine, Kant, Arendt, and Levinas—the author shows that by the time we arrive at 20th century, the framing of political evils like the Shoah as inscrutable and exceptional is profoundly constraining; it erases their continuity and connection with other atrocities, including the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The book next turns to practices and ideologies that connect the Armenian Genocide to the Shoah to propose an alternative paradigm for thinking about evil: a paradigm of the continuity of evils. Offering this paradigm to readers in philosophy and adjacent disciplines, the author explores the relationality between the Armenian Genocide and the Shoah, but also between Turkish genocide denialism and a contemporary case of racist evildoing against Armenians in Turkey, shifting the discussion of political evil in a direction that aims to turn overlooked evils around the world into objects of philosophical thinking.

The racist killing of Georg Floyd in the Summer of 2020 created waves of protests not only in the U.S. but all over the globe. In Turkey, my home country, there were also street demonstrations that demanded justice for Floyd, but “Twitter activism” was more popular. Turkish-speaking-twitter became a hotbed for condemnations. Amidst an array of tweets condemning Floyd’s racist killing, one stood out and made it to the headlines of alternative media outlets. A former official of the authoritarian Turkish government, Yusuf Yerkel, wrote the following tweet in Turkish on June 5, 2020, in response to Floyd’s racist killing; here, I provide an English translation of his infamous tweet (the Turkish original of which is still available on Yerkel’s account on Twitter): “The reason that protests grew to this extent in the U.S. seems to be based on a phenomenon, in H. Arendt’s terms, ‘banality of evil,’ which has become evident in the face of Floyd’s murder. An ordinary White cop’s atrocity as an “everyday job” was the tipping point.”

This essay suggests that Continental Studies of Evil need a more global approach in thinking about political evils of today. Highlighting the need for a more comparative and global perspective, I explore two proposals: first, the in-between space of the geographical binaries of East/West and Global South/Global North cultivates many political evils. Second, taking issue with the conviction in Continental philosophy that the Holocaust caused a rupture in the thinking of evil, I argue for the continuity of evils and characterize the insistence on the unprecedented character of the Holocaust as an example of Eurocentrism.

The scholarship on Frantz Fanon’s theorization of violence is crowded with interpretations that follow the Arendtian paradigm of violence. These interpretations often discuss whether violence is instrumental or non-instrumental in Fanon’s work. This reading, I believe, is the result of approaching Fanon through Hannah Arendt’s framing of violence, i.e. through a binary paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. Even some Fanon scholars who question Arendt’s reading of Fanon, do so by employing a similar binary logic, hence repeating the same either/or paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. I aim to challenge such interpretations of Fanon by demonstrating that in the context of anticolonial armed struggle in which Fanon writes, the either/or framework of the instrumental/non-instrumental binary of violence cannot fully capture his perspective. Violence can indeed be conceived as having both constructive and instrumental aspects. My argument is supported by Fanon’s corpus, including his 1960 Accra speech, “Why We Use Violence” in Alienation and Freedom. This piece, I suggest, together with Fanon’s other writings, poses a direct challenge to the Arendtian binary of violence. My analysis resists positioning the difference between Arendt and Fanon through the instrumental/non-instrumental binary. By using Judith Butler’s notion of “frame” I complicate their difference and argue Arendt’s framing of violence prevents her from apprehending Fanon and – more importantly – interpretations of Fanon based on this Arendtian frame of violence inevitably lead to misinterpretations.

Genocide denialism is an understudied topic in the epistemic injustice scholarship; so are epistemic relations outside of the Euro-American context. This article proposes to bring the literature into contact with an underexplored topic in a ‘distant’ setting: Turkey. Here, I explore the ethical and epistemological implications of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide as a pervasive and systematic epistemic harm. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I argue that a philosophical exploration of genocide denialism requires examining the role of institutions and ideology in relation to the epistemic harm done by individual perpetrators. More specifically, I suggest that the individual, ideological, and institutional roots of genocide denialism constitute a regime of epistemic injustice in Turkey.

Since 2001, Continental philosophical studies of evil suggest that we are forced to rethink the category of evil as we face acts of terrorism on a global scale. In light of this suggestion, this article traces the idea of the “inscrutability of evil” as a common lens through which we associate the category of evil with the phenomena we identify as evil. This idea finds its first modern formulation in Kant’s theory of radical evil. I argue that Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas follow Kant in identifying evil as an inscrutable phenomenon. While they all agree that evil cannot be rationalized, integrated into reason, or understood within the framework of theodicy, for Kant, evil is inscrutable because it is grounded in freedom; for Arendt, evil is inscrutable because it is “banal;” and for Levinas, evil is inscrutable because it is “excessive” and “useless.” My analysis demonstrates that inscrutability is an essential marker of the concept of evil since it is found in all three accounts as a feature of evil, even though in each account a different type of evil is at stake (moral, political, and existential).

In Nicomachean Ethics VII Aristotle describes akrasia as a disposition. Taking into account that it is a disposition, I argue that akrasia cannot be understood on an epistemological basis alone, i.e., it is not merely a problem of knowledge that the akratic person acts the ways he does, but rather one is akratic due to a certain kind of habituation, where the person is not able to activate the potential knowledge s/he possesses. To stress this point, I focus on the gap between potential knowledge and its activation, whereby I argue that the distinction between potential and actual knowledge is at the center of the problem of akrasia. I suggest that to elaborate on this gap, we must go beyond the limits of Nicomachean Ethics to Metaphysics IX, where we find Aristotle’s discussion of the distinction between potentiality and actuality. I further analyze the gap between potential and actual knowledge by means of Aristotle’s discussion of practical syllogism, where I argue that akrasia is a result of a conflict in practical reasoning. I conclude my paper by stressing that for the akratic person the action is determined with respect to the conclusion of the practical syllogism, where the conclusion is produced by means of a ‘conflict’ between the universal opinion which is potential and the particular opinion which is appetitive.