Abstract

My article proposes that complicity is one of the most consequential political concepts for our time. It begins by evaluating its wide usage in contemporary public discourse and its treatment in recent scholarship in legal, literary and philosophical studies. It then offers a historical perspective on the evolution of the concept in intellectual and literary history since 1945, paying particular attention to the pathbreaking theorizations of complicity by Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt in the post-World War Two period. My argument ultimately lands on a critical view of prevalent contemporary understandings of complicity, and I make the case for the need to reassess the concept's political limits, and to view it critically from the outside. Only in this way, I argue, can we transcend complicity and transform moral dilemmas into political action.