The aim of the section is to explore the models of victimization that are in play today - the topic that implies some ancient as well as present-day motives, forms, techniques and consequences of the linguistic, cultural, social and political exclusion and annihilation.
We will refer to the language of victimization that particularly in our contemporariness bears the weight of victimization itself, and to the ideologies that write literature, dictate media, and produce crimes, and even continue and multiply them through fashioning a vicious reversal of the victimized/victimizer position etc.
As a symbolic edifice, so already a testimony of its own formation, language also assumes the crisis in the function of representation and limits to representation as much as it assumes the representational function itself. Precisely at these points of crisis and limits to representation (consequently the victims’ numbness) the rhetorical constructs of victims can play out the way they often do in the dominant public imaginary. The rhetorical/political manipulations with sacrifices or committed atrocities step in at points of victims’ alienation not only from their own experiences, but also from their rights, possibilities and conditions to produce their own testimonial narratives, these already being produced "in-the-name-of-victims" for the sake of creating or maintaining the producers’ own discursive, sexual, gender, cultural, political or academic positions. Whether in Benjamin or Girard, MacKinnon or Said (to suggest just a few who from different perspectives wrote about this topic) we read the same: every victim is always the grounding function of the cultural establishment of its victimizer.
We will try to identify the repetitive patterns in the processes of victimization in contemporary cultures and developments as well as reasons for their symptomatic recurrence and what appears as innovative with each of them. We will try to suggest a comparative approach that would link different experiences of victimization, possibly enabling them for a cognitive exchange.
Presenters are invited to submit the abstracts of their papers that will discuss one or several aspects of this topic through literature, philosophy, media analysis etc.
