The Genocide Principle

This book explores how and why genocide is a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon, reflects the unconscious processes that drive human nature, and draws broadly on psychoanalytic theory, as well as on social science and philosophical perspectives. Using Bass's own research on genocide and his considerable clinical psychoanalytic experience, the book examines what it is within us that leads us to see some people or groups as "other," what we project onto these groups, how we can come to dehumanize them, and how mass murder can become a purportedly ethical imperative. Using real- life examples, it explores the question of what genocide says about us individually and collectively, how apparently "normal" people can take part in genocide. Tackling one of the most important topics of our time, this is key reading for all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, and for philosophers, social scientists, and psychologists.

Alan Bass, PhD, is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City and is on the graduate philosophy faculty at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros; Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care; and Fetishism, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy , many articles, and the translator of four books by Jacques Derrida.

Introduction Chapter 1: Kiernan on History Chapter 2: Bauman on the Holocaust Chapter 3: Foucault on State Racism Chapter 4: Weisband on the "Macabresque" Chapter 5: Waller on Group Phenomena Chapter 6: Charny on the Cancer Metaphor Chapter 7: Moses on Permanent Security Chapter 8: Semelin on Purification and Destruction Chapter 9: Derrida on Sovereignty, Cruelty, and Oneness References