Complicity 4 Our Time
Nitzan Lebovic
One buoyant image I’ll remember from the Gaza protests of last spring is the photograph of students at Sciences Po in Paris flashing victory signs over a placard that read “Sciences Po Complice” (Sciences Po is accomplice). The sign hung, alongside a number of Palestinian flags, from the rail outside a university room they had occupied. The protest in Paris followed similar protests, and signs, carried by students in the encampment movement, or activists in the Black Lives Matter protest. Like them, it constituted a rebellion against institutional complicity. The image from Paris was burnt into my memory not only because France has often been identified with the starting point of revolutionary movements, but because it captured a cultural and a discursive shift regarding complicity, a rejection of the politicized opposition between perpetrator and victim, active and passive, action and inaction. But before we discuss the present investment in complicity, what is it, exactly?
The Word
The term complicity was first used by Thomas Blount, a reader of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), in his Glossographia, which appeared in 1656. Blount wrote: “Complices: from complex, icis: companions, or partners in evil.”[i] Blount reached back to the 1400s, when the term complicare was current, applying it to the mechanism that enabled the sovereign to overcome the danger of stasis, or civil strife. For Blount, and his friend Hobbes, civil war (1642-1651) and complicity with tyranny were not abstract threats.
The word did not catch on immediately, but resurfaced in North America, during the early nineteenth century, to describe the accountability of the individual before the law. After 1945 complicity felt different: if for Blount complicity was related to a new understanding of sovereignty and “a complicit multitude for good or/and evil,” after 1945 the word was privatized: In the “subsequent Nuremberg proceedings” against Nazi industrialists and legalists, the military tribunals insisted on linking complicity in genocide to named perpetrators, rather than hosts of complicit actors, or corporations. It was a surprising but wise idea to include “complicity in Genocide” as article IIIe of the Genocide Convention (1948), but the meaning of “complicity” was not explained. Two years later, the US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee conditioned its agreement to ratify the Genocide Convention by asking “the words ‘complicity in genocide’ to mean participation before and after the fact…in the commission of the crime of genocide,” so it is clear that the US, or its ally the West German government, cannot be accused of complicity. The Cold War made it necessary to separate the world into good and evil, right and wrong, Americans and Russians. Complicity changed its meaning yet again.
Once it enters the language of modern power-relations, complicity grows like a fungus, its etymological mycelia entwining (πλέκω, plékō: weave, tangle) social solidarity, cultural symbols, and political legitimacy. Within each of these elements complicity focuses on a short-term, present-oriented benefit. In other words, the political semantics of complicity follow its historical form as a passive-active entanglement that is always partial, and always hiding in the lowlands dominated by striking peaks. Digging it out means excavating a political mechanism buried deep underground. Complicity thrives where knowledge is suppressed. It spreads in hierarchical systems but is hard to explain if one looks for simple good vs. evil sort of rhetoric.
Complicit Entanglement
Complicity is a form of entanglement. It is impossible to understand complicity without knowing something about its context, the before and after of what one is complicit with. The writers who suffered the consequences of World War II knew that. They noticed that complicity proposes a better explanatory framework for atrocities than the usual focus on perpetrators and victims, leaders and the masses, generals and soldiers. The deeply traumatizing experiences the Jewish-Italian author Primo Levi analyzed in his writing, the dark coercive atmosphere the German author Hans Fallada portrayed in his novels, and the “perpetual state” the German-Jewish political thinker Hannah Arendt warned about were not the result of spontaneous acts of violence but the result of a carefully crafted system that made violence a condition. The Nazis made a systematic effort to blind followers to the act, while blaming its victims for it. As Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved, while gesturing towards T. S. Eliot, “most Germans behaved in the twelve years of Hitler, in the illusion that not seeing was not knowing, and that not knowing relieved them of their own share of complicity or connivance.” As for the victims, they “bind them with guilt, cover them with blood, compromise them as much as possible. A bond of complicity is thus forged between them and their masters, and there is no turning back.” Indeed, the Nazis made both their subjects and their victims accomplices to the crimes they designed planned and executed. Recent studies show that there were more Ukrainian, Romanian, and Baltic guards, Jewish capos, and simple German soldiers managing the killing than Hitlers, Himmlers, and SS sadists with whips. Said differently, though eruptions of evil tend to be associated with a single person, a single party, a single country, those who endure these crises know they can only happen when countless individuals—with and without jackboots—take on countless different chores. Complicity is moving on a spectrum, not a single static disposition. One can be actively complicit by aiding the criminal action, or passive as a bystander who ignores it and denies any knowledge of it. As Arendt explained, without complicity both totalitarian and liberal systems would break down, their terrorist or consumerist logic sapped of vigor.
The most famous accounts of the Holocaust are taught as exceptional representations, the experiences of individuals. (We all know the name of Anne Frank.) Levi warned against this when he depicted the concentration camp as a “Grey Zone,” where victims were coerced into committing inhumane acts, with the implication that they shared responsibility with their torturers for what happened in the camps. Fallada’s protagonists experienced an emotional “state of emptiness” that made it possible for them to aid enthusiastic perpetrators, with or without agreeing with their ideology. And Arendt noted, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), the different forms of “banality” with which Eichmann (who we now know was not just powerful but deeply committed anti-Semite)—and the Jewish councils he beat into docility—carried out the orders to transport Europe’s Jews to the death camps. But despite the efforts of some to insist on the uniqueness of their experiences, Levi, Fallada, and Arendt were not alone. Other postwar writers underlined the place of complicity in new forms of politics. In 1959 Eugène Ionesco, the French playwright of Romanian descent, nicknamed complicit behavior “rhinoceritis.” A few years later, Rolf Hochhuth accused Pope Pius XII of collusion with the Nazis (The Deputy, 1963). Shortly thereafter, Peter Weiss’s play The Investigation (1965) presented the accused in the Auschwitz trials as complicit with the Holocaust’s “industrial killing.” Ironically, it is precisely because complicity requires a context and a spectrum of, often conflicting, positions, that literature was quicker to realize its explanatory power.
The Legacy of Complicity
The lesson had not been learned. Since 1945, complicity did not just spread but it became the condition of our political lives. During the Cold War, intelligence services offered Nazi criminals impunity and prosperity. Later apartheid in South Africa (1948–94) and the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land (1948-present) met with self-serving justifications, and sometimes open approval, by the international community. By 1989, the anticolonial theorist Mihaela Mihai writes, complicity had turned into a social norm, “interstitial and anchored in a series of practices, relationships, attitudes, and institutions.” That same year, in South Africa the Durban Democratic Association declared, in a pamphlet titled “The State of Emergency Is beyond the Rule of Law,” complicity so evident and its attendent political condition, emergency, so normalized that the very purpose of emergency laws was to encourage complicity. And the Truth and Reconciliation report admitted the failure of the Commission “to spread wide enough its examination of civil society’s complicity in the crimes and misdeeds of the past.”
One of the outstanding moments of the past year was Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Oscars. By loitering in the walkway, potting shed, and bedrooms of the Höss family home beside Auschwitz, Glazer’s movie, The Zone of Interest (2023), spotlit the complicity of German civilians—even children—with all that happened on the far side of the garden wall. Philippe Sand’s The Ratline (2021) is dedicated to the family and friends of the Nazi criminal Otto Wächter. Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize–winning novel, Prophet Song (2023), focused on Eilish, a wife and a mother who’s doing her best to ignore a coming civil war, and whose father tells her, “You are lying to me, you are always lying, I knew you would be complicit in this.” All she wants is to close her eyes and nod off, so naturally she is told, “All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.” Those who see complicity for what it is understand that change cannot occur without a complete shakeup of structures, without removing the agents of complicity from positions of power.
And let us not neglect the academic discussion of complicity. After a recent wave of headline-grabbing resignations, the leverage elected officials and rich donors wield over university policies can’t be denied, the flipside of which is the presumption that deans, presidents, professors will wordlessly adopt the official line. Recent journal articles attest to the history of academic complicity, a given since neoliberalism brought university accountants to heel. For the political sociologist Thomas Docherty, intellectuals and academic institutions became complicit with power when they abandoned the vocabulary of dissent, adopting instead the lexicon of petty politics, social norms, and economic dictates. As Alice Gast, the president of London’s Imperial College (2014-2021) and a board member of Chevron, put it, professors are expected to behave like “small business owners.” Rather than offer a measured critique, business owners are expected to sell their products to customers.
Michael Rothberg, an American professor of comparative literature, explains that implication, originated in complicare, forms “a realm where people are entangled in injustices that fall outside the purview of the law and where the categories into which we like to sort the innocent and the guilty become troubled.” John Hamilton, a professor of German and expert in classics at Harvard explains that “The complacent” [from the Latin verb placere “to be pleasing or satisfying”] are too “inappropriately pleased with [themselves] or with a situation to the point where any change, reconsideration, or improvement is dismissed as unnecessary.” He means his fellow academics.
The historians of the Holocaust Robert Ericksen, Doris Bergen, and more recently Mary Fulbrook, updated the discussion of complicity and “bystanders” by applying it to those within academia who collaborated with the Nazi regime while “considering themselves respectable scholars.” The celebrated philosopher Susan Neiman argued, in recent articles to the New York Review of Books (October 23, November 3, 2023), that German institutions replaced their former complicity with historical anti-Semitism, with the Israeli apartheid. In a recent book, Maya Wind points to the deep and consistent complicity of Israeli universities with the security services and the occupation. Will universities learn the lesson its own faculty is warning them about? Probably not—there’s too much money at stake, as the baffling attacks on its own student bodies, in the different encampments and protest, proves.
If change will not come from the academic institutions, where could it come from? The legal sociologist Francine Banner explained, “After decades of treating risks to society as stemming from individual bad choices, systems are being called to account for the risks created through processes of disenfranchise[ment]. . . . Complicity is at the forefront of these conversations.”
The imprint of complicity is too visible to be ignored. After all, article IIIe of the Genocide Convention (1948) denounced “complicity in genocide,” and among those tried at Nuremberg were industrialists and judges deemed complicit in crimes against humanity. But the Genocide Convention did not trigger action against those complicit in genocides, and the big corporations that financed and armed Nazi Germany were acquitted or released with a slap on the wrist. A new branch of international law attempted—and failed—to figure out the right relationship between criminal law and complicity, but as the German legal theorist Helmut Aust explained, a “community-oriented law fails to provide convincing reasons why complicity is no longer to be tolerated in international law,” recommending instead a comprehensive international reform addressing state complicity. In contrast, Francine Banner’s freshly published book recommends a more cautious approach to complicity within the limits Aust identified as “community-oriented,” but also pointed out the failure of the justice system to take on complicity. She acknowledges that recent appointments to and rulings by the United States Supreme Court had led many interpreters to speak of “‘complicit bias,’ a recognition that institutions like courts are not neutral but play a significant role in sustaining inequalities.” So again, who will take complicity by its horns?
Complicity 4 Our Time
Complicity, complacency, and bystander are important categories because, as the historian Victoria Barnett observed already two decades ago, “they helped create a world in which genocide was possible.” Discussing “complicity” is not an easy task, and not only because we are not used to thinking of it as a historical category. Complicity adds another layer of institutional complication to an already dark story about the destructive character of humanity. More specifically, the question of complicity is relevant not only to the genocidal violence the US and the EU are currently supporting in the Middle East but to the planetary struggle against climate change. After all, lucrative weapon deals will not help fighting the massive process of desertification large swamps of the world is experiencing, at the moment. Not knowing complicity from dissent will not relieve us of our share of complicity or connivance with more and greater forms of destruction. The students in the encampments have shown us a different path.
Nitzan Lebovic is Professor of History and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. Nitzan published books about the history of life-philosophy and biopolitics, the history of melancholy, nihilism and catastrophe. His forthcoming book is titled Homo Temporalis: German-Jewish Thinkers on Time (Cornell University Press, 2025). For other essays of his about the history of complicity see Comparative Literature and Culture (2019), History & Theory (2021), and the forthcoming “Forms of Complicity: History and Law in the Kastner Affair” (Journal of the History of Ideas, 2025).
[i] T. Blount, Glossographia; or a Dictionary Interpreting the Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, now used in our refined English Tongue (London, Tho. Newcomb, 1681 [1656]), 148.