Genocide as Ordinary Life: On Richard Rechtman’s «Living in Death»

This article examines Richard Rechtman’s Living in Death and its challenge to the idea that genocide is an incomprehensible rupture with ordinary human life. Rechtman’s work reveals the genocidal scene as a form of life shaped by work, routine, and social organization, rather than by monstrous psychology, archaic impulses, or ideological conviction. Mass killing appears instead as a normalized occupation, carried out by ordinary people whose lives are exhausted by the labor of extermination. The article explores this account through Wittgenstein’s and Cavell’s concept of form of life, and through Veena Das’s anthropology of the ordinary. It concludes by reflecting on the mysterious and unsettling confrontation Rechtman establishes between those who refuse to enter this genocidal ordinary and those who participate in a form of life that is itself a form of death.