The Implicated Subject Beyond Victims and Perpetrators by Michael Rothberg.
From Victims and Perpetrators to Implicated Subjects
"This book emerges from a belief that our understanding of power, privilege, violence, and injustice suffers from an underdeveloped vocabulary. In particular, we lack adequate concepts for describing what Hannah Arendt called “this vicarious responsibility for things we have not done”: that is, for the manifold indirect, structural, and collective forms of agency that enable injury, exploitation, and domination but that frequently remain in the shadows. As a contribution to such understanding, I offer here the category of the “implicated subject” and the related notion of “implication.” Derived from the Latin stem implicare, meaning to entangle, involve, or connect closely, “implication,” like the proximate but not identical term “complicity,” draws attention to how we are “folded into” (im-pli-cated in) events that at first seem beyond our agency as individual subjects."
"An approach based on implication and implicated subjects can help illuminate a wide range of social and political struggles, as this book will attempt to illustrate, but such an approach has a particular affinity to questions of race and racism, as many of the case studies below will also attest. Forms of violence and inequality premised on racial hierarchy take shape in small-scale encounters and large-scale structures; they are also instantiated repetitively in the present yet burdened with active historical resonances. Focusing on the position of the implicated subject allows us to address these different scales and temporalities of injustice".
We have been thinking with Michael Rothberg's 'implicated subject' idea.
Hannah Arendt: “this vicarious responsibility for things we have not done” - what have you not done in relation to "the manifold indirect, structural, and collective forms of agency that enable injury, exploitation, and domination but that frequently remain in the shadows"?
What have you not studied? practiced? taken account of and acted upon?
When you consider yourself as "implicated subject" what happens? How open to this notion are you? How do you close to it? Refuse it? Let it in?
"Forms of violence and inequality premised on racial hierarchy take shape in small-scale encounters and large-scale structures; they are also instantiated repetitively in the present yet burdened with active historical resonances. Focusing on the position of the implicated subject allows us to address these different scales and temporalities of injustice".
How do these repetitive resonances show up in our practice and field?