Wednesday, November 13, 2024, 7 pm Palestine time
Prof. Didier Fassin (Collège de France and Institute for Advanced Study)
Title: Moral Abdication. On the Consent to the Destruction of the Palestinians of Gaza
Abstract: Consent to the destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza has created an enormous gulf in the global moral order. History will record how Western governments and large parts of their elites have supported the war waged by Israel following Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and have silenced voices calling for a ceasefire, a just peace, and the respect of international law. Not only have buildings been devastated and civilians massacred, but language and thought have also been damaged. The webinar will discuss how the history of the occupation of Palestine and the oppression of Palestinians has been negated, how a specific vocabulary and grammar of facts have been imposed, how accusations of antisemitism have produced censorship and self-censorship, how mainstream media have contributed to rendering the brutalization invisible, and how the unequal worth of lives and the differential treatment of deaths have been normalized. Elements of interpretation of this moral abdication will be proposed.
Bio: Didier Fassin is an anthropologist, sociologist, and physician. He is a Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Professor at the Collège de France, holding the Chair in Moral Questions and Social Issues. He also holds a research directorship at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
At the crossroads of two disciplines, he initially conducted studies in medical anthropology, focusing on issues of power and inequality in Senegal, Ecuador, and France. His research on the politics and experiences of AIDS in South Africa led him to develop the conceptual framework of the embodiment of history to explain the reproduction of social disparities and the emergence of heterodox interpretations of the epidemic. A former vice-president of Médecins Sans Frontières, he launched a scientific program on humanitarianism in various international contexts of conflict and disaster, analyzing the implications of framing injustice as suffering, violence as trauma, and resistance as resilience. He also investigated immigration and asylum policies as part of the French collective project on borders and boundaries (Comede).
He was elected to the Academy of Europe in 2021 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. A recipient of the Gold Medal for Anthropology from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2016, he became the first social science researcher to receive the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award in 2018. He received the insignia of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Liège in 2021 and from the Free University of Brussels in 2023.
He has authored over twenty books, translated into seven languages, notably “When Bodies Remember: Experience and Politics of AIDS in South Africa” (University of California Press, 2007), “Prison Worlds: An Anthropology of the Carceral Condition” (Polity Press, 2016), and “A Strange Defeat: On Consent to the Crushing of Gaza” (in French: Une étrange défaite, Sur le consentement à l’écrasement de Gaza, La Découverte, 2024).
Moral Abdication:How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Published by Verso Books
