Mediating murder

How does one do justice to parents who have lost their child in street violence? Can the crimes of the Oklahoma bomber or the 9/11“terrorists” be really avenged? How does one respond ethically to murder? What kind of calculation principle is applicable here? These are the sorts of questions I investigate in my essay, devoted to the exploration of the issue of “mediated murder” in contemporary late capitalist societies. Taking as my starting point the idea of the sacrifice as developed in the Kantian sublime, I evaluate social responses to a number of “traumatic media events” which involve singular or mass murder, and the following calls for justice. The sublime has undergone something of a renaissance in contemporary debates on culture and the media—indeed, I argue that it is an extremely useful concept for thinking about issues of trauma, delight, repetition compulsion and moral panic which are frequently associated with the “media age”. The problems raised in this essay not only concern how to repay ethically for the crimes that leave us speechless but also what we can learn from, what kind of (perhaps undesirable, abject or offensive) gift can we accept from Timothy McVeigh, Thompson and Venables or “Osama bin Laden”

Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Economic Justice · Literature · Moral panic · Offensive · Pity · Political science · Sociology · Sublime · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Torture, Ethics, and Law · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

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