Martin Shuster: “Genocide and the State: the Coldest of Cold Monsters.”

Martin Shuster comes to Duke to discuss his current book project, "Genocide and the State: the Coldest of Cold Monsters." Martin Shuster is Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research interests are in ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, critical theory, and philosophy of religion. He works across a range of traditions and time periods, oftentimes engaging fields like genocide studies, film theory, television studies, psychoanalysis, and various kinds of critical theory. In 2019, Shuster was Visiting Professor at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2019). His work has been supported by Project Pericles, the Templeton Foundation, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he was a scholar in residence in 2007-2008. For years, he has also been involved with teaching in prisons.

His latest book is Critical Theory: The Basics in Routledge's The Basics series (it is presently in press and should appear early in 2024). He is currently completing two books. The first is Genocide and the State: An Alternative History of Modern Political Philosophy. Ranging across several disciplines-most notably philosophy, Holocaust and genocide studies, ethnic thought, political and critical theory of various stripes-the book argues that conceptually embedded in the innermost core of the Western concept of the state from Hobbes to Hegel is a homogenizing imperative that makes genocide a perpetual byproduct of the global state order. The second, with Henry Pickford, is the Oxford Handbook of Theodor W. Adorno, under contract with Oxford University Press.