Living in Death

Winner, Prix Litt¿ire Paris-Li¿ 2021
Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation
When we speak of mass killers, we may speak of radicalized ideologues, mediocrities who only obey orders, or bloodthirsty monsters. Who are these men who kill on a mass scale? What is their consciousness? Do they not feel horror or compassion?
Richard Rechtman¿s Living in Death offers new answers to a question that has haunted us at least since the Holocaust. For Rechtman, it is not ideologies that kill, but people. This book descends into the ordinary life of people who execute hundreds every day, the same way others go to the office. Bringing philosophical sophistication to the ordinary, the book constitutes an anthropology of mass killers.
Turning away from existing psychological and philosophical accounts of genocide¿s perpetrators, Rechtman instead explores the conditions under which administering death becomes a job like any o