Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

Rothberg argues that the categories of perpetrator, bystander and victim, do not sufficiently account for people’s complex involvement in historical violence and contemporary inequality. He thus introduces a new category, that of the implicated subject, to fill the gaps left by the traditional categories. He argues that everyone is in some way implicated in and responsible for present inequalities. Rothberg states that the category of the implicated subject can supplement the categories of perpetrators and victims, which “can lead not only to a rethinking of the dynamics of violence and injustice, but also to new ways of thinking about political solidarity” (12). The term, according to Rothberg, can bring significant change to how forms of indirect participation are described. Rothberg conceptualizes implication along synchronic and diachronic lines: injustices often have historical dimension as well as a contemporary structure.

Ultimately, Rothberg argues, this new category can both draw “attention to responsibilities for violence and injustice greater than most of us want to embrace” and it “shifts questions of accountability from a discourse of guilty to a less legally and emotionally charged terrain of historical and political responsibility” (20). The Implicated Subject is significant for perpetrator studies as it provides a more nuanced theoretical vocabulary to describe and think of involvement in structures of violence, and it builds on other well-established books from the field, such as Simona Forti’s New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil and Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, to make a case for further exploration of the gaps left between the perpetrator and victim binary.

The book consists of six chapters divided into three parts. In Part I, “Long-Distance Legacies,” Rothberg reflects on the works and thinkers that helped him shape the category of the implicated subject. In the first chapter, “The Transmission Belt of Domination,” Rothberg draws on Hannah Arendt, Simona Forti, Karl Jaspers, and Primo Levi as well as black feminist theories of intersectionality. In chapter 2, “On (Not) Being a Descendant,” Rothberg introduces genealogical and structural implication. In doing so, he focuses on transatlantic slavery and its still present implications in modern-day society.

Part II, “Complex Implication,” focuses on what Rothberg refers to as “the coexistence of different relations to past and present injustices” (8). In chapter three, “Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge’s Implicated Aesthetic,” Rothberg studies the “provocative visual connections that emerge between slavery, apartheid, and the Holocaust in the work of the South African artist William Kentridge” (24). In the fourth chapter, “From Gaza to Warsaw: Multidirectional Memory and the Perpetrator,” Rothberg argues that the category of the implicated subject creates a “productive framework for thinking especially about the relation of diasporic Jewish communities to the Israeli occupation of Palestine” (25).

In Part III, “Long-Distance Solidarity,” Rothberg explores “the possibilities for internationalist allegiance forged through activist aesthetics” (26). Chapter five, “Under the Sign of Suitcase: The Holocaust Internationalism of Marceline Loridan-Ivens,” focusses on socialist and anti-imperialist internationalisim and the human rights discourse and multidirectional memory, taking Loridan-Ivens’ testimony in Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch & Morin, 1961) as a case study. In the last chapter, “Germany Is in Kurdistan: Hito Steyerl’s Images of Implication,” Rothberg studies the long term multimedia project by Hito Steyerl, in relation to the conflict between the Turkish Army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey, particularly focusing on Andrea Wolf’s role and performance.

Rothberg concludes his book by providing eleven summarizing theses that have emerged from his case studies. Here, he states (among other things) that it is essential that we recognize that systems of oppression produce implicated subjects as well as victims and perpetrators, that we move beyond the figures of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, and that the way forward is for both activists and scholars to interpret and transfigure implication further (203). With his book, Rothberg has provided a clear introduction of his term and suggests varying ways in which it can be employed effectively in the future, in relation to social and political injustices.

Further Reading

Arendt, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn. Schocken, 2003.

Forti, Simona. New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today. Stanford U.P., 2014.

Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Summit Books, 1988.

Mandel, Naomi. Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America. Virginia U.P., 2007.

Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. Fordham U.P., 2015.

Schiff, Jade Larissa. Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness. Cambridge U.P., 2014.

Young, Iris Marion. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford U.P., 2011.

Author of this entry: Alyssa Vreeken.

Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford U.P., 2019.