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Timár Abstract Chapter 14. Andrea Timár engages with literary representations of the experience of perpetrators of dehumanization. Her chapter focuses on perpetrators of dehumanization who do not violate laws of their society (i.e., they are not criminals) but exemplify what Simona Forti, inspired by Hannah Arendt, calls "the normality of evil." Through the parallel examples of Dezső Kosztolányi's Anna Édes (1926) and Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing (1950), Timár first explores a possible clash between criminals and perpetrators of dehumanization, showing literature's exceptional ability to reveal the gap between ethics and law. Second, she examines novels focalized through perpetrators and the difficult narrative empathy they provoke, arguing that only the critical reading of these novels can make one engage with the potential perpetrator in oneself. As case studies, Timár examines Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), which may potentially turn its reader into an accomplice in the process of dehumanization, and J.M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), which puts on critical display the dehumanizing potentials of both aesthetic representation and sympathy as imaginative violence. Third, she reads Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones [Les Bienveillantes, 2006], which can make the reader question, through the polyphony of the voice of its protagonist, the notions of narrative voice and readerly empathy, only to reveal that the difficulty involved in empathizing with perpetrator characters lies not so much in the characters' being perpetrators, but rather in their being literary characters. Eventually, Timár briefly touches upon the problem of the aesthetic and the comic via Nabokov's Lolita (1955) to ask whether one can avoid some necessarily dehumanizing aspects of humor.

Az esszé kritikai vizsgálat tárgyává tesz két politikai immunitáselméletet, és megvizsgálja milyen kapcsolatot állíthatunk fel a politikai test és a biológiai test között, amikor a 21. század koronavírus járványával szembesülünk. Míg az esszé első része Derrida terrorral és autoimmunitással kapcsolatos írásait vázolja fel röviden, a második rész Roberto Esposito immunitáselméletét fejti ki, az immunitas/communitas kettősének espositói paradigmáját, amelyet a filozófus 2020 márciusában a Covid19 járványra is kiterjesztett. Végül ebben kontextusban elemzi Henry James Daisy Miller című kisregényét, amelynek ártatlanul szabados főhősnője a „római láz”, a malária (mal-aria – „rossz levegő”) áldozata lesz. Az esszé jelentősebb része a koronavírus járvány első hullámának lecsengő szakaszában született, a három hónapos karantén után.