Roman Kurkiewicz talks with Lech Nijakowski
The Delight of Revenge, the Image of Manslaughter, the Feast of War
The starting point of the conversation between Roman Kurkiewicz and sociologist and national conflict researcher Lech Nijakowski is the showcased work by a Mexican artist Teresa Margolles titled „127 bodies (127 cuerpos).”
Margolles’s work is an over 33-meter long rope woven of 127 stitches previously used to stitch wounds after performing an autopsy on anonymous bodies of people fallen victim to street violence in Mexico. In her work, the artist tackles the issue of “violence and circulation of images of death in Latin American media.”
During the conversation, Roman Kurkiewicz will inquire about cultural and media fascination with crime and murder; about manslaughter and the rationalization of ethnic, class and political violence. He will also attempt to comprehend presumably the greatest mystery of humankind – the unrestrained and hateful aggression present in virtually all human cultures. Kurkiewicz will seek to learn about the phenomenon of the inter-species murder as a method to attain and confirm one’s identity as well as an instrument to maintain social bonds and communal memory.
The interlocutors will also deal with a form of a narrative about genocide, a narrative whose subject is human-murderer and humans-murderers.
Lech Nijakowski
Ph.D. in Sociology. Lecturer at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Warsaw. He deals with, among other issues, the sociology of ethnicity and national identity; theory of aggression, violence and war; the problem of ethnic cleansing, genocide and massacres. Author of the recently published book The Delight of Revenge. Historical Sociology of Genocidal Mobilization.