Victimhood between separation and communion

This is an article published in Depictions, a special issue dedicated to victimhood.

In this paper, I explore the possibility of refusing the separation between victims and perpetrators even when evil actions take place. To do so, I discuss Socrates’ claim that a good man cannot be harmed and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Alyosha Karamazov. I argue that one of the features of people who do not consider themselves victims is that they do not understand the world in a mechanistic way, governed primarily by cause and effect. They are free in a world that does not fail to insist they are not.

https://parisinstitute.org/socrates-and-alyosha-karamazov/