In a previous essay on melodrama that the organizers were kind enough to cite in the prospectus for the conference from which this book derives, I make a number of claims which, by way of an introduction, I would like briefly to summarize:

• 1) Victimhood: the subject position and self-ascription of victimhood has become a powerfully universalizing category in Western societies. This is in line with a number of broader political changes that have affected the social contract and our notion of personhood, including ideas of subjectivity and gender. The most important among these changes is probably the shift from competing ideologies (Marxism/Communism vs. Liberalism/ Capitalism) to competing post-Enlightenment universals such as “human rights” vs. “multi-cultural diversity,” or “humanitarian interventions” vs. “sovereignty” or “religious self-determination.” At the same time, we have witnessed a shift from “politics” as dissensual decision-making and collective action to politics as crisis management and security operations (the “police”), as well as from an understanding of “ethics” as “living the good, i.e. justified life,” to ethics as “surviving in the shadow of death and disaster.” Along with “trauma” and “bare life,” victim status constitutes part of a very contemporary condition, which might be called (as the editors phrase it) “a powerful ontological category,” but which is also “a powerful ideological category,” and a rather militant way, for instance, of claiming rights and entitlements – some of which used to come as part of being a citizen, an active participant in one's society and a valued member of the community, others reflecting the changing role of women in modern societies or the relative scarcity of children in the developed world and a corresponding sense of their vulnerability, preciousness and precariousness.

• 2) Righteousness: the combination of melodrama and righteousness used to be a complex process of gaining recognition and attaining a voice through suffering made visible and public. In the nineteenth century, the virtuous were considered victims because evil and the wicked ruled the world. From this it was easy to move to a particular reciprocity of attributes: namely, the notion that victimhood automatically confers righteousness and virtue.