Throughout history, resistance to violence, sadism and cruelty has comparatively rarely taken the form of open rebellion. Whether in the transatlantic slave trade or in the Nazi concentration camps, in the face of a lack of options for action, fear of death and disenfranchisement, the only way out was often to escape from the grip of the perpetrators of violence through flight, sabotage, but also through abortion, infanticide, hunger strikes, self-mutilation and suicide. Iris Därmann outlines the history of violence of human servitude and enslavement and intertwines it with body politics and forms of resistance of unserviceability. In particular, she illuminates the role of European political philosophy as a procurer of legitimacy for transatlantic enslavement and the extermination of European Jews. The result is not only a bloody counter-history to the other master narratives of Western thought, but also a panorama of horror that even in moments of attempted self-liberation touches the limits of the endurable, but which we must keep in mind if we want to understand the foundations on which our civilization is also based.

Iris Därmann, born in Witten in 1963, is Professor of Cultural Theory and Cultural Aesthetics at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her publications include Fremde Monde der Vernunft. The Ethnological Challenge of Philosophy (2005) as well as Figures of the Political (2009) and Cultural Theories for Introduction (3rd ed. 2017).

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