Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World 0367511002, 9780367511005

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgement
Preface
Introduction
PART I Agency and Institutions
1 Hegel and State Homogenization
2 The Friends of War and Genocide
3 The “Criminal” and the Crime of Genocide
4 Genocide and Agency in the Americas: Methodological Considerations
PART II Bodies and Beyond
5 Generational Being
6 Epigenetics and the Molecular Memory of Genocide
7 “We Charge Genocide”: Anti-Black Racism in the United States as Genocidal Structural Violence
8 Pornographic Ways of Looking and the Logic of Disposability
PART III Time and Violence
9 Totalitarianism as Structural Violence: Toward New Grammars of Listening
10 Gendercide, Rwanda, and Post-Genocidal Violence
11 Law and Oral History: Hearing the Claims of Indigenous Peoples
PART IV Ethos and Violence
12 Violence, Right, and Righteousness: Thinking the Political With and Against Lévinas
13 Structure and Fantasy: Holocaust Perpetrators and Genocide Studies
14 Reasonable Religion, Reasonable States, and Invisible Violence
Epilogue: Theses on Our Only Possible Future
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Logics of Genocide

This book is concerned with the connection between the formal structure of agency and the formal structure of genocide. The contributors employ philosophical approaches to explore the idea of genocidal violence as a structural element in the world. Do mechanisms or structures in nation-states produce types of national citizens that are more susceptible to genocidal projects? There are powerful arguments within philosophy that in order to be the subjects of our own lives, we must constitute ourselves specifically as national subjects and organize ourselves into nation-states. Additionally, there are other genocidal structures of human society that spill beyond historically limited episodes. The chapters in this volume address the significance—moral, ethical, political—of the fact that our very form of agency suggests or requires these structures. The contributors touch on topics including birthright citizenship, contemporary mass incarceration, anti-black racism, and late capitalism. Logics of Genocide will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, critical theory, genocide studies, Holocaust and Jewish studies, history, and anthropology. Anne O’Byrne is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. She is author of Natality and Finitude (2010), co-editor of Subjects and Simulations: Between Baudrillard and Lacoue-Labarthe (2014), co-translator of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural and Corpus II, and author of numerous articles on politics, ontology, biology, and generational being. Martin Shuster is associate professor of philosophy at Goucher College, where he also directs the Center for Geographies of Justice and where he is jointly appointed in the Humanities Center. In addition to many articles and book chapters, he is the author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno German Idealism and Modernity (2014), New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (2017), and How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism (2021).

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland Edited by Clara Fischer and Áine Mahon Inference and Consciousness Edited by Anders Nes with Timothy Chan The Complex Reality of Pain Jennifer Corns Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell Corijn van Mazijk Social Functions in Philosophy Metaphysical, Normative, and Methodological Perspectives Edited by Rebekka Hufendiek, Daniel James, and Raphael van Riel Microaggressions and Philosophy Edited by Lauren Freeman and Jeanine Weekes Schroer Cross-Tradition Engagement in Philosophy A Constructive-Engagement Account Bo Mou Perception and the Inhuman Gaze Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Sciences Edited by Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, and Dermot Moran Logics of Genocide The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World Edited by Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/ SE0720

Logics of Genocide The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World

Edited by Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: O’Byrne, Anne E. (Anne Elizabeth), 1966– editor. | Shuster, Martin, editor. Title: Logics of genocide : the structures of violence and the contemporary world / edited by Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020015621 (print) | LCCN 2020015622 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367511005 (hbk) | ISBN 9781003056614 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Genocide—Philosophy. Classification: LCC HV6322.7 .L64 2019 (print) | LCC HV6322.7 (ebook) | DDC 304.6/6301—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015621 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015622 ISBN: 978-0-367-51100-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-05661-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgement Preface

viii ix

D O N A L D B L OXH AM

Introduction

1

A N N E O ’ B Y RN E A N D MA RTIN SH USTE R

PART I

Agency and Institutions 1 Hegel and State Homogenization

17 19

M A RTI N S H U STE R

2 The Friends of War and Genocide

36

J AC QU E L I N E STE VE N S

3 The “Criminal” and the Crime of Genocide

58

L I S SA S K I TO L SKY

4 Genocide and Agency in the Americas: Methodological Considerations

78

RO C Í O Z A M B RA N A

PART II

Bodies and Beyond 5 Generational Being A N N E O ’ B Y RN E

93 95

vi

Contents

6 Epigenetics and the Molecular Memory of Genocide

112

A DA S . J A A RS MA

7 “We Charge Genocide”: Anti-Black Racism in the United States as Genocidal Structural Violence

134

L I SA G U E N TH E R

8 Pornographic Ways of Looking and the Logic of Disposability

152

K E L LY O L I V E R

PART III

Time and Violence 9 Totalitarianism as Structural Violence: Toward New Grammars of Listening

171

173

M A R Í A D E L RO SA RIO ACO STA L Ó P E Z

10 Gendercide, Rwanda, and Post-Genocidal Violence

187

A L F R E D F R AN KOWSKI

11 Law and Oral History: Hearing the Claims of Indigenous Peoples

208

J I L L S TAU F F ER

PART IV

Ethos and Violence

227

12 Violence, Right, and Righteousness: Thinking the Political With and Against Lévinas

229

CA R LY L A N E

13 Structure and Fantasy: Holocaust Perpetrators and Genocide Studies

246

DA N S TO N E

14 Reasonable Religion, Reasonable States, and Invisible Violence H E ATH E R R AE

264

Contents Epilogue: Theses on Our Only Possible Future

vii 283

J A M E S R . WATSO N

List of Contributors Index

295 299

Acknowledgement

We owe thanks to the individuals and institutions that made this volume possible. Above all, we must thank the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which sponsored the workshop around which these ideas were first developed (“Genocide, Agency, and the Nation State after Auschwitz,” summer 2015). We also owe thanks to our respective institutions: to Stony Brook University, which provided funding for editorial assistance; and to Goucher College, which supported elements of the research. We are particularly grateful to Krista Hegburg and Kristen Walker for their help convening the workshop, Erik Bormanis for his help preparing the manuscript, and to our editors Dee Mortensen and Andrew Weckenmann. We are each also grateful to various anonymous referees, interlocutors, colleagues, students, and friends who have explored the ideas in this volume with us, and who have certainly made the volume stronger. Anne O’Byrne Stony Brook, NY Martin Shuster Baltimore, MD

Preface Donald Bloxham

About 30 years ago, Zygmunt Bauman published Modernity and the Holocaust to critical acclaim. Bauman sought inter alia to encourage his fellow sociologists to take up the study of genocide. Their failure to do so up to that point was especially noteworthy given the first of Bauman’s titular keywords; if any discipline can lay primary claim to the study of modernity, sociology is it. The Holocaust was, in Bauman’s words, “a legitimate resident in the house of modernity,” not some pre-modern hangover or developmental aberration. It told us something profound about modernity, where modernity meant something more like mindset than the more obvious machinery of destruction—the death factories that accounted for so many, but by no means all, Jewish victims of Nazism. Logics of Genocide has some of the intellectual qualities and hortatory character of Modernity and the Holocaust. While existing scholarship in the area means that the philosophical landscape is not as barren as the sociological landscape was for Bauman, there is nonetheless a sense of philosophical mission-statement about the present book, which extends implicitly to criticism of some of the most prominent philosophical contributions thus far. Moreover, this is philosophy of a particular sort. It is not the search-for-universal-truths type of philosophy, but reflection on the contemporary world, which gives it common ground with critical social theory and Baumanian sociology. Nonetheless, it is unmistakably philosophy, and thereby pitched primarily in a theoretical register. Logics of Genocide differs from Modernity and the Holocaust in two key respects. Firstly, on the whole, the contributors to this book are concerned less with modernity as a general and not always satisfactorily defined cultural condition than with the more concrete evolving political, economic, and legal structures shaping the contemporary world. By no means are all these structures products of modernity (some, like capitalism and settler colonialism, well pre-date it), even if some have developed most fully under/during it. By focusing on what the authors call the developmental “logic” of these structural forms, they helpfully draw attention away from the rather static “state of being” that can be conjured up by the idea of modernity, and toward dynamic processes that can in principle be resisted. Here, as in other elements of the book,

x

Preface

the intellectual paradigm is that of Marx rather than the classical Weberian or Durkheimian sociology that Bauman drew on while giving it his particular twist. At the same time, many of the contributors go further than Bauman in their pessimism. Bauman thought that the Holocaust was a legitimate resident in modernity’s house, but he stressed that that did not mean Holocaust-like events were inevitable in modernity. They might happen or they might not. Some of the analyses in this book sit somewhere between “possible” and “inevitable” in their prognoses: they see genocidal outcomes as thoroughly predictable and frequent products of the tendencies in question. The second key difference between Logics of Genocide and Modernity and the Holocaust is the focus on genocide generically rather than the Holocaust as a particular genocide. This shift in interest reflects a more general tendency across the humanities and social sciences, and is a function of the editors’ ambitions to think systemically. The study of the Holocaust and the study of genocide have enjoyed an ambivalent relationship. The former helped catalyze the latter, but the latter was also in the shadow of the former for a while, with tensions caused by the claims of the Holocaust’s uniqueness and the establishment of the Holocaust as a sort of “ideal-type” genocide. The present volume continues recent developments in genocide studies, partly in the direction of studying nonHolocaust genocides in their own right, and partly in considering the Holocaust as one example of genocide among many—each with their own unique characteristics, but also sharing some characteristics. Logics of Genocide challenges mainstream trends in Holocaust and genocide scholarship by contesting the customary limits of the genocide concept, especially in the configuration of intent and by foregrounding violence of a less visible, more structural sort. Ideologies abound in the book, and while sometimes they are Nazi- or Khmer Rouge-like ideologies in the sense of radically present-changing manifestos, more often they appear in the guise of “given,” “common-sensical,” and thoroughly normalized ways of consolidating and extending existing patterns of life, domination, exploitation, and attrition. Hitler- and Pol Pot-like figures are also generally notable for their absence, because the emphasis is less on individual ideologues and decision-makers and more on impersonal, mediating structures of power, value, and outcomes that, while predictable, are not necessarily desired by the individuals and groups that we may still reasonably call perpetrators. In accordance with the logic of these structures, some peoples may be targeted for destruction out of concern for purity or security, but others are quite simply “disposable,” and others eminently eligible for exposure to high levels of harm. When it comes to the environmental impact of our economic activities, from degradation to resource scarcity to climate change, the human species itself is under threat, but as is the way with structures of inequality, not all subsets of humanity will be equally vulnerable.

Introduction Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster

The basic claim animating this volume is that the study of the perpetration of genocide will benefit from a comprehensive, philosophical development and prioritization of the notion of the “genocidal” versus the notion of “genocide.”1 Registering this shift brings into focus events that are often marginalized—legally,2 socially, and politically—in discussions of genocide, most notably, for example, cases of settler colonial genocide3 and gendered and/or racialized patterns of genocidal violence across space and time.4 In effecting such a shift, we are pushed away from seeing genocidal violence as containing a discrete beginning, middle, and end, and toward seeing genocidal violence as a process realized by means of dynamic structural elements. To be clear, our assertion is not that a focus on such events has been entirely absent from the burgeoning field of genocide studies; instead, our claim is that while present, such events have had an undertheorized existence there. To properly account for them requires shifting the entire paradigm of what we look for when we look at the genocide record. Genocidal violence spills beyond historically limited episodes and emerges in structural forms. Instead of aiming to reveal genocide as arising out of the pairing of intention and action, or perhaps aiming to examine the ways in which these two might be connected (by means of an analysis of, say, nationalism, antisemitism, racism, or whatever other ideological basis one might insert here), we propose an analysis of the structures—or what we are here terming logics—that undergird how genocidal events and instances unfold along a genocidal continuum.5 Where dominant theoretical approaches to genocide prioritize the couplet of intention-action (or, again, elements that might connect them), we suggest first examining the form of action, so that the way to assess a particular action is to locate it amidst and with reference to other actions.6 We contend that the history of specific acts of genocide (say, for example, the Trail of Tears) does not adequately reveal the persistent structures (in this case, the structures of settler colonialism) within which those episodes occurred, and continue to occur, as genocidal violence. With such a view, it becomes possible to extend the spatial and temporal reach of

2 Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster a genocidal occurrence in order to make salient events that otherwise might seem disconnected. For example, note the opening lines of the 1951 document We Charge Genocide, where the Civil Rights Congress writes: Out of the inhuman black ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease. Note furthermore the way that these thinkers connect slavery, the black ghetto, lynching as a policy of terror, and Jim Crow laws (and to which we can now easily add the “new Jim Crow”: mass incarceration).7 The idea is that one can draw a clear line between all of these events in order to unify them under one formal structure: genocidal activity. In this view, the way in which actions become genocidal is not through the presence of some shared intention or purpose among the perpetrators,8 but rather through the form of action,9 the way they ft into our shared world, that is, a broader discursive whole that may not be obvious to any particular actor at any particular moment. Similarly, it is not that genocide then occurs because of any particular initiative, but rather that it emerges from the ways in which the various initiatives—parts—hang together and become embedded in a greater whole. (We mention this to stress that what orients this volume is not some sort of repetition of, say, functionalist explanations, which are common in discussions of the Nazi genocide, and this is the case whether we have in mind extreme interpretations of that functionalism or more moderate ones.)10 This is what makes the endeavor philosophical and interdisciplinary. Philosophers sometimes regard definition as the essential first and last stage of their investigation into genocide. Yet, such an approach strikes us as improper, failing to acknowledge that any particular genocide—as an object of investigation—is not itself immediately a settled matter, and that we therefore “shouldn’t aim to state definitively the essential features of genocide,” since potentially “the actual phenomenon overflows, to some conceptually ungraspable extent, our powers of conceptualization.”11 Our position is that philosophy is exceptionally well-equipped to study structures of existence—in this case, structures that make genocidal violence possible—and does its best work when it uses definition as a heuristic rather than a goal, acknowledging that any given attempt at definition is open to being complicated and exceeded by experience. Philosophy is most capable of revealing how the various structures form a meaningful whole when it proceeds modestly, approaching from a variety of perspectives, and allowing for what otherwise remains or may remain concealed. Thus, the contributors here study the phenomenon of genocide in ways that are philosophical and also owe much to methods in anthropology, history, biology, and political science.

Introduction

3

The aims of this volume are to advance such an approach across a range of contexts in order to reveal a variety of structures or logics— formal qualities—that we might call genocidal. Genocidal events are not self-contained in terms of time. Most explicitly, after the killing ends, the survivors must begin the work of surviving, but as Al Frankowski shows, genocidal elements persist and present distinct problems. Similarly, what might it mean to see the overall state structure as itself genocidal, or to envision genocide and war as categorically inseparable, as Martin Shuster and Jacqueline Stevens do in their respective ways? What if, as Lissa Skitolsky and Kelly Oliver ask respectively, the categories of the “criminal” or the “refugee” already stand on a genocide continuum themselves? There are, after all, other ways of organizing ourselves, other ways of envisioning transgression against law, and other ways of understanding the familiar and the strange (and this is not yet even to mention the potential connections between all these). Implied by any such inquiry is also a demand on our imaginative capacities, in order to both allow ourselves to see these concepts as contingent and to prod ourselves to imagine different ones. By teasing out the formal structures that animate the state or that link the nation-state and war on one hand, and war and genocide on the other, or, indeed, by sketching the very notion of “institutional agency,” as Rocío Zambrana does in her chapter, this volume invites such imaginative exercises. To return to the American example cited previously, note how highly mediated all the activities mentioned are. Whether we are talking about chattel slavery, post-Reconstruction brutality and backlash, Jim Crow, or contemporary New Jim Crow (and, given the ferocious racialization and radicalization of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is happening as we write, we may be witnessing a subsequent development in this genocidal trajectory), we can note that all of these initiatives require complex institutions, material conditions, and ideologies, each supported and vivified by concrete practices and structures, i.e., by an entire form of life.12 Lissa Skitolsky argues the point powerfully: the category of the “criminal”—long a key element in supporting and justifying genocidal practices—is the primary product of a contemporary system consisting of patterns of policing, prosecution, and incarceration, intersecting with profit-maximization; the privatization of prisons; and the politics of law and order. In the face of this very system, “We Charge Genocide” (1951) had an afterlife in Chicago from 2014 to 2016 as people mobilized against police violence. As in 1951, the Chicago activists of 2014 implicitly identified genocidal structures, according to Lisa Guenther’s analysis, and struggled against them by “refusing to be killed, refusing to be abandoned, rendered disposable, or exposed to premature death.” In each case, agents are embedded in a large array of institutions— socially, materially, politically, historically, etc.—and that their entire world and horizon—past, present, and future—is governed by them.

4 Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster It remains astonishing how easily we allow genocidal practices to disappear from view under the heading of natural, evolutionary, or putatively legal processes. In Australia, as Heather Rae argues, settler history could include massacres on the frontier, starvation, displacement, and cultural destruction of Indigenous populations, as well as the forced removal of children from their families, and these could be known and acknowledged by the settler population but simultaneously understood as part of a natural process for which Europeans take no responsibility. Or, as Anne O’Byrne points out, institutions that are regarded as natural and moral for us—e.g., family and kinship—might instead be seen as natural and pathological for them. Across the disciplines, struggles between the poles of nature and nurture, essentialism and social constructivism, biology and culture quickly get stuck in a logic of either/or, whereas an approach like Ada Jaarsma’s thought of biocultural phenomena and an epigenetics that resists the reductionist aims of policymakers and social scientists relies instead on a logic of both/and that is accompanied always by questions that acknowledge both nature and history.13 To be clear, we don’t suppose that structures and persons exist separately, or that a person’s inner state is separate from her world. As Dan Stone argues on the basis of his research on perpetrators of the Nazi genocide, fantasies of superiority, the perception of the threat of annihilation by the other group, and the desire for revenge for historical wrongs are not discovered in a sphere of human experience that is distinct from the rational, structural factors that make genocide operational; rather they reveal a distinct equipoise between both, being constituted by and constituting those very structures. In insisting on a focus on structures rather than persons, we run the risk of seeming to exculpate those who did wrong; yet, with an insistence on motives and emotions, we risk reverting to notions of bloodlust and “deep-seated ethnic differences.” A consequence of approaching the phenomenon using either the one paradigm or the other has been the prioritization of only certain sorts of genocidal violence (chiefly here the Nazi genocide as the rationalized genocide), while other episodes of genocidal violence, for example, in India and Pakistan, have been minimized or discussed chiefly in terms communal violence, recalling colonial references to the “restless natives.” The result (as, for example, in Australia), has been an inability to see the role of the various structural elements that made up the European imperial enterprise. Bringing the “genocidal” into focus in these ways also allows us to distinguish our approach in another way. As noted, philosophers writing about genocide have generally been concerned with analytic questions surrounding the definition of the word “genocide” or with how to understand membership in a group.14 Our approach here does not dismiss these efforts, but it does attempt to frame them in a particular way, to put them in a particular context. Such approaches share a commitment

Introduction

5

to the idea that we might “get clear” about, say, the nature of group membership or the nature of genocide by acquiring or presenting evidence for a particular view of these issues. All such approaches put a distinct and implicit view of language into play: they trade on the idea that we will develop a proper understanding of what “genocide” means or what “victim group” or “perpetrator group” means exactly when we are able to compile enough empirical evidence to justify using these words in particular ways. Such an approach thereby suggests that these are somehow things we can give an account of: they are determinable phenomena that are already “out there.” When we claim something (about, say, genocide or a victim group), we are then stating something for which we need merely to acquire evidence. But, and this is a general point about the function of language, these terms—indeed, words—simply do not function in this way. Rather, each such term, like all the moves within a language, already admits of and requires complex patterns of mediation and interpretation. When we make a claim about “genocide” or about “victim group” we are not simply presenting or rejecting evidence; every time we are tendering—implicitly or explicitly—a claim about how these terms must be used, i.e., we are inviting our interlocutor to see something that we see, to use these terms in the way in which we use them, exactly in order to come to a shared vision of the world and thereby of what is in it, of what matters, and of what counts as evidence and how. We discover again and again that the group, whether the victim group or the perpetrator group, the genos that performs or suffers genocide, refuses to be a thing, a given. Furthermore, we also discover who agrees with us and who doesn’t, and thereby with whom we stand in community and with whom we do not. There is more to be said on this general approach to language,15 but we feel the need to stress this in order to suggest that this entire book is intended as an invitation to orient our vision to the usefulness and function of the term “genocidal” in making sense of our world. As Stanley Cavell puts it, you ask yourself what you should say, “when you have more facts than you know what to make of, or when you do not know what new facts would show. When, that is, you need a clear view of what you already know.”16 Somehow, our sense in this case is that we know all the facts: we know who is getting killed, raped, mutilated, starved, expelled, and when . . . with modern mass media, we know only all too well—but we do not put this knowledge in the proper frame; it does not register for us in a significant sense or within a broader whole, and so a pressing question becomes: why do we fail to acknowledge these facts?17 Might there be some way to contextualize these facts so as to make it more likely that we might acknowledge them? Existentially speaking, making sense is something we have to do on the run. We are thrown into the world without anyone asking our permission, surrounded from the start by situations we did not create and

6 Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster people we did not choose; whatever we do is a response to a state of affairs that arrived on the scene before us. When the French poet René Char notes that our inheritance is left to us by no testament (notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament), he is pointing to the fact that we are not entitled to the world, though neither is anyone else, and that we have to write our own testament and rules for living—along with everyone else. We choose our friends and the people we love; with them, we create the intimate relationships that necessarily exclude others and the domestic spaces we call home. Yet those spaces exist within the wider world, and while we choose those with whom we share our beds and our homes, we may not choose who we encounter outside. In her extensive writing on the Nazi genocide, this is as close as Hannah Arendt came to offering a definition of genocide: the Nazis acted as though they had the right to determine who should and should not inhabit the world.18 While we note the difficulties presented by and for any definition of genocide, it is also important to acknowledge how much actual nuance and even flexibility exists in the original definition developed by Raphael Lemkin, and even in the relatively more narrow legal definition adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.19 Note that the adopted convention itself allows for the fact that “not only killing can achieve [the end of genocide] .  .  . but also inflicting serious bodily or mental harm.”20 Such a fact—embedded at the heart of the genocide convention (most clearly in Article 2.b)—allows for compelling connections to analytic concepts that have emerged in other areas of human inquiry and life, most notably the concept of social death.21 For Orlando Patterson, the idea highlights the extent to and way in which a particular group might be excluded from—indeed, entirely dead to—society, occupying a place where despite existing, the group simply does not register socially. Essential to such a task is “natal alienation,” the idea that one’s social and cultural bonds to the past and future are severed, creating a case where one might be alive, but alive without the possibility of the sort of social vitality that characterizes a group as a group, thereby making the existence of an individual as an individual with a distinct worldly, human history impossible (so, for example, a slave might, too, have a history and a world—in the phenomenological sense sketched here—but the slave’s world will by and large be the world and history of the enslaver; the slave has been robbed of his or her distinct world and history). A strong case might be made that “social death is utterly central to the evil of genocide.”22 Regardless of where one stands on this issue, our suggestion is that the possibility of drawing these connections allows us to see the thickness and range of even the legal definition of genocide.23 Doing so brings us back to the 1951 document “We Charge Genocide,” a document to which Raphael Lemkin himself felt it necessary to respond. In a letter to the editor in The New York Times published on June 14, 1953, Lemkin writes that:

Introduction

7

Fear alone cannot be considered as serious mental harm as meant by the authors of the convention; the act is not directed against the Negro population of the country and by no stretch of imagination can one discover in the United States an intent or plan to exterminate the Negro population, which is increasing in conditions of evident prosperity and progress.24 This is a striking response that impresses contemporary readers as, at worst, racist, or, at best, deeply insensitive. Historically, it is obvious that Lemkin was concerned to appease opponents of the convention, both domestically and abroad (thus his opening the previously quoted paragraph with the odious question that, “The opponents of the Genocide Convention have been asking, literally, can one be guilty of genocide when one frightens a Negro?”). In addition to this, there is also the fact of Lemkin’s opposition to Communism (and his own desire to see Soviet genocide acknowledged) determined how he estimated the Civil Rights Congress, whose membership was in large part Communist.25 We have no desire to assess Lemkin as an individual, but we do want to note that Lemkin is clearly committed to a legal framework that prioritizes intention. An alternative view of things, however, might not share Lemkin’s legalistic framework and concerns, and might therefore not be concerned to focus on intentionality as the most salient marker, thereby making it irrelevant whether one can discover an intent or plan.26 We might instead take up the vision that the trajectory and history of the Civil Rights Congress suggests (now heightened by another half century of anti-black effects in the United States). Such a move would allow us to make sense of the world around us (both its present, but also thereby its past and potentially its future), unifying data points that might otherwise appear disconnected, so that when they are put into the proper frame they simply “make sense.”27 Lest the reader think that this issue is somehow settled or belongs to the past, as we write this, the genocide scholar and lawyer William Schabas is slated to argue at the International Court of Justice on behalf of the Myanmar government that its actions against the Rohingya minority do not qualify as genocide, thereby highlighting again a long history within genocide studies of advocating for an understanding of genocide in (analytically) too narrow terms. Such narrowness, in fact (as Schabas’s testimony only too easily reveals), produces distortions in possible assessments of genocidal violence, and in potential responses to the same. Here it is worthwhile to return to our former suggestions about language, and we might quote the ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin in this context, when he notes that: When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or

8 Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster ‘meanings’, whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena.28 In suggesting that we might unify a range of phenomena under this rubric—of the genocidal, implying, albeit in a pliable way, a connection to genocide—we are inviting others to see what we (and others) see, to acknowledge what we register (and thereby what others register and acknowledge). It may allow us to hear the testimony of those that have oftentimes been marginalized or ignored. In doing so, we alter the phenomena that appear before us, and this, in turn, offers up new avenues for how we might talk about and understand that phenomena, and vice versa, continuously. An orientation in ordinary language philosophy of this sort requires us to understand that words—what we say—do not merely exist in a vacuum, but acquire their force and their truth content in light of the reason for someone using them. As Stanley Cavell puts it: “Because it is true” is not a reason or basis for saying anything, it does not constitute the point of your saying something .  .  . there must, in grammar, be reasons for what you say, or be point in your saying something, if what you say is to be comprehensible.29 The point of alleging that, say, the state structure itself is genocidal, or that American history has been a genocidal one that has unfolded slowly over time, or that certain conceptions of the law or kinship are genocidal, is, in the words of Theodor W. Adorno, to make good on “the need to give voice to suffering.”30 These are claims lodged for distinctly moral reasons. When we assess the reasons for them and gauge whether we agree with them, two sets of issues emerge as salient. First, an array of questions emerge about epistemic justice and standpoint.31 Second, there is the fact that a moral claim—unlike, say, a claim about a preference for sashimi over nigiri—carries with it a demand for agreement from the person to whom the claims are addressed. One way to understand the force of this demand is to note that while possessed of a subjective origin (these are someone’s claims), such claims are understood by those who lodge them as claims that demand acknowledgment in a way that “merely” subjective preferences do not. When these claims are opposed, rebuked, avoided, or misunderstood, the person lodging them feels impugned or morally wronged; feels that their being as an agent—indeed their entire being—is questioned.32 People crammed onto boats adrift in the Mediterranean thumb numbers into their cell phones, calling relatives in Europe, the Italian Coast Guard, the UNHCR, anyone who might help. As the signal fails and the voicemail box turns out to be full, their transformation from Syrian

Introduction

9

businesswoman, Eritrean farmer, or Sudanese student—in each case a person who possesses a fully fledged existence and the inhabitant of a robust, albeit now destroyed world—is completed. They are subsumed into the “wave of refugees,” and become part of the refugee crisis. If they survive the sea crossing—3,700 died in these circumstances in 2015— and make their claim again once they are on land, they are in danger of being subsumed again, this time into the calculus of cost and benefit and what Kelly Oliver identifies as the genocidal logic of disposability. Such logics are often left unexamined because they are not framed in the context of genocide. Thus, to give another example, when we learn that, in the United States, the median wealth of white households is projected to hit $137,000 by 2053, while the projected median wealth of black households is projected to hit $0,33 we ask: what can we conclude from such a fact except that a genocidal structure or structures animates the form of life in which this is possible? What is distinctive about such a way of understanding moral claims is that there is no appeal to a transcendent law that is recognized by all. Instead, the claims rely on our capacity to both speak and hear the testimony of suffering, here, now, among ourselves. Giving voice requires finding the words and also, as Maria Acosta reminds us, developing the grammars that will allow the demand to be heard.34 This is what Arendt did in describing the camps in terms of a totalitarian structure, offering a description of a hideous historical novelty and at the same time providing a way of understanding the world in which it became—and remains—possible. We should not underestimate what is at stake and what is required of us in hearing. It may be an openness to what Carly Lane describes here, following James Baldwin and George Yancy, as a certain sort of difficult love (Lane’s chapter thereby considers violence at a very high level of altitude, exploring, we might say, the phenomenological terrain that allows any genocide to begin to take root). A response to genocidal violence and to genocide will certainly involve more than tolerance, benign curiosity, or generalized humanitarian goodwill (although these are not thereby to be rejected). When the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en peoples in what is now British Columbia claimed title for their traditional lands before the Canadian courts, the judge, whose ruling Jill Stauffer examines here, was ready to acknowledge oral history but balked at granting what he saw exclusively as myth its due and, moreover, proved incapable—at the same time—of grasping the mythical elements animating his own thinking and the legal system that structured the encounter. The need to give voice to suffering makes the critique of any of our structures possible, since no structures are guaranteed, merely in virtue of existing, to be free from implication in violence and suffering. If there is an ungrounded ground here, it is the commitment to the communicability of experience, and its justification is the fact that we share the world. Moreover, genocidal violence happens between and

10 Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster among groups. As Lemkin remarks: “The genos is both the unit against which the crime is directed and the unit from which it originates.”35 The place where such groups exist in relation to one another, and where their members may be able to communicate suffering and self-understanding beyond the shared presumptions of their own communities, and where interests are shared and contested, is necessarily a public, political space, that is, a space where contestation can happen without violence.36 Creating these spaces and holding them open is a struggle. Indeed, as James Watson puts it in the theses that serve as this volume’s epilogue, we now live in a world where creativity often emerges as a struggle. Work and workers are degraded; public spaces and public lands are increasingly privatized. Value is understood almost exclusively in terms of capital, so that our creative capacity to return more to the world than we draw from it is immediately translated solely into a surplus available for expropriation. Watson names this metacide,37 the premeditated annihilation of spontaneous, free, and unpredictable creative activity—a metacide that found its expression in 500 years of mass slaughter, slavery, imperialism, and genocide, all of them best understood through an examination of the structures that made them possible. What animates Watson’s conclusion— and this volume—is the sense that if we allow human plurality to vanish into these structures without examination, then we sacrifice the very equality that makes all of us matter. In conclusion, it is impossible to close this introduction without a reflection on a more prominent daily possibility for the world: its complete destruction, whether through war or simply through our capacity to make it uninhabitable. If we take the idea that this is the Anthropocene epoch seriously—an epoch where humanity as such has become an actor upon the planetary stage38—then there emerges the possibility of what might be termed omnicide,39 the destruction of all life on Earth. Taking such a structure seriously requires us to acknowledge that all of us, but especially those of us in the so-called “first world,” are contributing to—if not outright perpetrating—genocide. The reader is invited, then, to consider, as all of the essays in this volume invite one to do in various ways, how they will respond—morally, politically, socially, spiritually, legally, analytically, and not least, philosophically—to any such involvement with and within genocidal logics and structures.

Notes 1. Our sense is that we are not alone in our intuitions here—see notably the introduction of a “genocidal moment” or moments in A. Dirk Moses, “An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colonization of Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000). 2. This category is the most salient here since one objection to our approach might be that it renders the legal context of genocide as muddle, after all, if we are interested in something like the genocidal, then we are beginning to move away from something that might have a discrete beginning, middle, and

Introduction

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

11

end, and thereby—it seems—weakening the legal possibilities for responding to—and one might think, curbing—genocide. Here, we have to note that the aims of genocide persecution are themselves quite muddled, largely ineffectual, and—even apart from these serious issues—should not necessarily set the agenda for academic inquiry into genocide. On the former point, about the deep confusions and inefficacies—indeed often geopolitical and thereby instrumental aims—of genocide prosecution, see Donald Bloxham and Devin O. Pendas, “Punishment as Prevention? The Politics of Punishing Génocidaires,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For an exploration, see A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (London: Berghahn Books, 2008). On the former, see Adam Jones, Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004). On the latter, see the classic document We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations For relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People, presented by the Civil Rights Congress in 1951. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Genocidal Continuum: Peace-Time Crimes,” in Power and the Self, ed. Jeannette Mageo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 29–47. In a different context, our approach here is influenced very much by the strategy that G.E.M. Anscombe undertakes in thinking about action in response to Donald Davidson and others. For her classic statement of such a reorientation, see G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1969). See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012). On this point about the varieties of perpetrator motivations, see especially Donald Bloxham, “Organized Mass Murder: Structure, Participation, and Motivation in Comparative Perspective,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22, no. 2 (2008). Cf. Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others before the Court at Frankfurt (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966). Again, cf. Anscombe, §26. Of course, the analogy to Anscombe is not perfect. Anscombe is aiming to assess individual action, and so the way in which she embeds the form is always within a single consciousness. Nonetheless, we are convinced that the basic—well, form—of her argument also applies here: there are ways in which actions might be said to fit into a common form, even if—and this is where the analogy breaks down—such a form may not be apparent to any particular agent at any particular moment. For a nod toward how this might also be prudent in the case of individual agency, see Martin Shuster, Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 87ff. For the former more extreme version, see Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). For a more moderate version, see Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Bruce Wilshire, Get’em All! Kill’em!: Genocide, Terrorism, Righteous Communities (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 133. This is a point that we take to be implicit in the recent contemporary Anglophone uptick in discussions of ideology, as in, for example Tommie Shelby, “Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory,” The Philosophical Forum 34,

12 Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

no. 2 (2003); Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Making explicit the forms that animate the contents of ideologies of various stripes strikes us as a desideratum. Writing in a related context, Stefan Palmié writes: “The question thus can be reframed: it is not what is a hybrid (or, alternatively, a language, ethnic group, man, woman, Norwegian Lundehund, or Xoloitzcuintli), but when? Under what socially and historically specifiable conditions do any of them emerge, become ratified or contested, eventually normalized, suppressed, or transformed, with all the potential violence any of these options may imply?” See Stephan Palmié, “Mixed Blessings and Sorrowful Mysteries: Second Thoughts about ‘Hybridity’,” Current Anthropology 54, no. 4 (2013). The literature surrounding these two issues is now almost too vast to cite compactly, but one can get a sense of these approaches and how they might be brought together and exemplified in Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). There is also a related strand in contemporary philosophical approaches to genocide that attempts to spell out that distinct nature of the “harms” involved in genocide. For the trajectory of this approach, see most recently John K. Roth, The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). The guide for us here is a certain brand of ordinary language philosophy, above all, Stanley Cavell. In this vein, see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). For a recent overview of the parameters of the ordinary language philosophy we have in mind, see Andrew Norris, Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 15–49. Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 21. This question is intimately related to, but not equivalent to, the question of who is able to be mourned, as in Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006). As Arendt famously concludes her book, by envisioning what the Israeli court should have said to Eichmann: “And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world— we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 279. For the background to Lemkin and the adoption, see John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2008); Nehemiah Robinson, The Genocide Convention: A Commentary (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1960). This is from Lemkin himself, who was intimately involved in the drafting and codification of the Raphael Lemkin, “The Nature of Genocide: Confusion with Discrimination against Individuals Seen,” The New York Times, June 14, 1953. Developed in Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). One of the first instances where this comparison is developed, albeit in order to distinguish American slavery and the Nazi genocide, is Laurence Thomas, Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).

Introduction

13

22. Powerfully developed in Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia 18, no. 1 (2003); Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 237–66. 23. This is a point that Lissa Skitolsky has made most salient to us in conversation and in her work. 24. Lemkin. 25. For an overview, see John Docker, “Raphaël Lemkin, Creator of the Concept of Genocide: A World History Perspective1,” Humanities Research 16, no. 2 (2010). In this context, see also A. Dirk Moses, “Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 26. Highly relevant here is Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). In this context, note especially Mills’ response to Jorge Garcia, when he rhetorically asks whether Garcia really thought that Mills was claiming that “all the white people in the world had gathered around a big table—a really big table—and signed a contract to subordinate people of color?” See “The Racial Contract as Methodology (Not Hypothesis),” Philosophia Africana 5, no. 1 (2002). If what’s in question in a sort of social agreement, then of course there is no actual social contract; it is instead a necessary projection that we—those of us doing some sort of political inquiry—make in order to understand the world around us. 27. A standpoint not at all prohibited—indeed, quite the contrary—by Lemkin’s own sustained inquiry into the topic in Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Division of International Law, 1944). 28. J.L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 182. 29. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 206. For a recent elaboration of the deep stakes of such a view of language and truth, see Avner Baz, When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 30. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1973), 17–18. Translation modified. 31. For the range of these issues, see Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 32. For more on the deep connection between this point and the need to “give voice to suffering,” especially in the work of Cavell and Adorno, see Martin Shuster, “Nothing to Know: The Epistemology of Moral Perfectionism in Adorno and Cavell,” Idealistic Studies 44, no. 1 (2015). 33. See the September 2017 report put out by Institute for Policy Studies, an independent and major think tank operating out of Washington, DC since 1963: “The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class.” www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ The-Road-to-Zero-Wealth_FINAL.pdf For additional reflections on such statistics and related points, see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From# Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 34. For an elaboration of the problem of grammars that is also an eloquent performance of a new grammar, see Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987).

14 Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster 35. Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 182. 36. See Richard J. Bernstein, Violence: Thinking without Banisters (London: Polity Press, 2013). 37. James R. Watson, ed. Metacide: In the Pursuit of Excellence (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 38. Although, it is important to understand that the invocation of ‘the Anthropocene’ produces its own distortion, and that more accurate here is really “the Capitalocene,” where it is understood that it is a distinct human form of life (as opposed to a distinct human form of life) that produces the possibility we consider in this paragraph. On this point, see J.W. Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 594–630 and J.W. Moore, “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45, no. 2 (2018): 237–79. 39. Mark Levene has forcefully explored and introduced this possibility in his work, see notably Mark Levene, “From Past to Future: Prospects for Genocide and Its Avoidance in the 21st Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Mark Levene and Daniele Conversi, “Subsistence Societies, Globalisation, Climate Change and Genocide: Discourses of Vulnerability and Resilience,” The International Journal of Human Rights 18, no. 3 (2014).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1973. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012. Aly, Gotz, and Susanne Heim. Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Anscombe, G.E.M. Intention. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1969. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press, 1963. Austin, J.L. “A Plea for Excuses.” In Philosophical Papers, 175–204. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Baz, Avner. When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Bernstein, Richard J. Violence: Thinking without Banisters. London: Polity Press, 2013. Bloxham, Donald. “Organized Mass Murder: Structure, Participation, and Motivation in Comparative Perspective.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22, no. 2 (2008): 203–45. Bloxham, Donald, and Devin O. Pendas. “Punishment as Prevention? The Politics of Punishing Génocidaires.” In The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 617–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Browning, Christopher R. The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2006.

Introduction

15

Card, Claudia. Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. “Genocide and Social Death.” Hypatia 18, no. 1 (2003): 63–79. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. ———. “Must We Mean What We Say?” In Must We Mean What We Say?, 1–43. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Cooper, John. Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008. Docker, John. “Raphaël Lemkin, Creator of the Concept of Genocide: A World History Perspective1.” Humanities Research 16, no. 2 (2010): 49–75. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Jones, Adam. Gendercide and Genocide. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Division of International Law, 1944. ———. “The Nature of Genocide: Confusion with Discrimination against Individuals Seen.” The New York Times, June 14, 1953. ———. Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Levene, Mark. “From Past to Future: Prospects for Genocide and Its Avoidance in the 21st Century.” In The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 638–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Levene, Mark, and Daniele Conversi. “Subsistence Societies, Globalisation, Climate Change and Genocide: Discourses of Vulnerability and Resilience.” The International Journal of Human Rights 18, no. 3 (2014): 281–97. May, Larry. Genocide: A Normative Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. ———. “The Racial Contract as Methodology (Not Hypothesis).” Philosophia Africana 5, no. 1 (2002): 75–99. Moore, J.W. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 594–630. ———. “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45, no. 2 (2018): 237–79. Moses, A. Dirk. “An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colonization of Australia.” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 89–106. ———, ed. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. London: Berghahn Books, 2008. ———. “Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide.” In The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 19–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

16 Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster Naumann, Bernd. Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others before the Court at Frankfurt. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966. Norris, Andrew. Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Palmié, Stephan. “Mixed Blessings and Sorrowful Mysteries: Second Thoughts about ‘Hybridity’.” Current Anthropology 54, no. 4 (2013): 463–82. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Robinson, Nehemiah. The Genocide Convention: A Commentary. New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1960. Roth, John K. The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Shelby, Tommie. “Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory.” The Philosophical Forum 34, no. 2 (2003): 153–88. Shuster, Martin. Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. ———. “Nothing to Know: The Epistemology of Moral Perfectionism in Adorno and Cavell.” Idealistic Studies 44, no. 1 (2015): 1–29. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. Stanley, Jason. How Propaganda Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From# Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. Thomas, Laurence. Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Watson, James R., ed. Metacide: In the Pursuit of Excellence. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Wilshire, Bruce. Get’em All! Kill’em!: Genocide, Terrorism, Righteous Communities. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005.

Part I

Agency and Institutions

1

Hegel and State Homogenization Martin Shuster

From Hegel’s earliest critics like Rudolf Haym,1 to more contemporary critics like Theodor W. Adorno and Karl Popper,2 it has been common to see Hegel as glorifying the (Prussian) state. While this interpretation has rightly been shown to be problematic,3 there are still instructive insights to be gleaned from elements of a Hegelian conception of the state,4 especially as the former relates to the study of genocide. To see how that might be the case, let me quote two contemporary scholars on what they see as a problem about the state structure and its role in the genocides of the 20th century and beyond: Genocide is . . . a systemic dysfunction and cannot be simply or solely dismissed as the aberrant or deviant behavior of rogue, revolutionary or “totalitarian” regimes or for that matter ones with particular types of political culture or social and ethnic configuration.5 [It is in] the twentieth century, as the state system has spread across the globe and there are fewer safe exists for targeted minority groups, that genocide and politicide have become a “standard technique.”6 Note that “the problem” of genocide here amounts to a sort of problem of organization: it somehow occurs because of the ways that we have organized ourselves, namely it has something to do with the very structure of “the state system” and its leading to what international relations theorist Heather Rae terms a “pathological homogenization.”7 My suggestion in this essay will be that Hegel’s conception of the state allows us to understand the mechanics of the process that these scholars are diagnosing. That is, it is Hegel’s conception of the state and its attendant logic(s) that gives philosophical sense to the sort of “pathological homogenization” that seems to be a fact of our present world. To be clear, my argument is not that Hegel is somehow responsible for the ills of the last century, or that his ideas brought them to life or actualized them, or in any way played that sort of role.8 Instead, my claim—which I actually take to be Hegelian in nature—is that from Hegel’s writings we can elaborate the logic of a state system that came onto the scene prior to his writing;9 and

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that he might be recruited for doing exactly what he set out to do: aiming to understand the rationality animating the concrete structures that make up his world (the owl of Minerva fies at dusk, and so forth). Putting the positive elements of what I am suggesting forward, my claim is that Hegel’s account of the state allows us to answer two important questions that I believe the aforementioned accounts leave unanswered: 1. What makes states undertake such homogenization? 2. How and why does such homogenization become pathological? It is important also to understand the “level” at which these questions are pitched. On one hand, the answers are of course apparent in the two accounts in question: it is particular European events, oriented as they are around the rise of capitalism and the collapse of imperialism, and the concomitant instabilities and problems that each of these multifaceted, highly mediated phenomena raise.10 On the other hand, such an account—at best—reveals the concrete causal circumstances that allow us to see how history moved from one event to another, but it doesn’t thereby capture the reasons why this event led to that event; after all, at any particular point in time, things could have shaken out a different way (and I don’t mean here simply that, say, the peasant overthrow of Machecoul—a key event in what’s been termed the Vendée genocide— might have been stopped due to the spread of an illness, but rather that, say, in capturing Machecoul, the peasants may have decided not to massacre anyone).11 In short, there is a particular logic to how the state structure works and the sorts of things it demands and requires of itself and its citizens that make certain actions, and thereby certain events, more likely (exactly due—as I will shortly elaborate—to the fact that such a structure socializes subjects in particular ways). Hegel’s suggestion for the necessity of the state is interestingly tied to the alleged constitution of human subjectivity.12 To see this, note the opening of the Philosophy of Right,13 where Hegel appears to pursue a dialectic that has strong resonances to the way in which the master/ slave dialectic proceeded in the Phenomenology. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel opens his account by noting that a subject finds herself with particular natural “drives, desires, and inclinations.”14 This should be compared exactly to the way in which Hegel introduces both the master/ slave dialectic and (thereby) self-consciousness in the Phenomenology, as hinging on “desire itself.”15 Hegel’s idea here is roughly that our concrete “drives, desires, and inclinations”—those things that constitute the most fundamental basis of human life—are also what first make possible a relation that might be termed self-conscious. Hegel notes in the Phenomenology that it is such desire that pushes us to become estranged from ourselves.16 One can easily see how this might be the case when one thinks about how any particular desire may fail to be satisfied, and

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thereby explicitly raise the status of this desire and thereby of ourselves in relation to it. As Hegel notes in the addition to §11 of the Philosophy of Right, the “human being, as wholly indeterminate, stands above his drives and can determine and posit them as his own.” In the master/slave dialectic, Hegel traced how the relation that one can take to one’s desires presents a wholly normative problem when the subject of such a relation encounters another subject like it. One is subject to one’s desires and must take a particular relation to them; and this is true for any human being. Something particular happens, however, when two such beings encounter one another; namely, Hegel realizes that there is no way—at this stage in the account—to adjudicate who between the two of them is authoritative (in Hegel’s language, all this idea amounts to at the present stage of the dialectic is the notion of being “self-certain”). To understand the significance of this point, note that—in Hegel’s terminology—one’s desires are “negated” by their being satisfied (so, I may have a desire for this apple and I “negate” it by eating that apple), and in their being so satisfied, the subject achieved a sort of “self-certainty” (I may—seeing that the apple is covered by fungus—decide not to eat the apple, or I may decide that the risk of the fungus is not strong enough given my hunger). When another self-consciousness is encountered, though, such simple negation may be met with disapproval, indeed, violence—violence going as far as death. In other words, the opposing self-consciousness and I may stake our self-certainty to the point of death: we might be willing to die for what we claim to be certain about. When such an encounter between two subjects occurs, Hegel notes that something distinct happens: it is not only that the opposing subject may resist the subject, but rather that such a subject may refuse to even acknowledge the other’s self-certainty (i.e., I may deny whatever relation to your own desires and the world you have achieved).17 At this step in the dialectic, Hegel notes that a struggle to the death emerges as the means by which such a “problem” is solved: in failing to acknowledge each other, the two subjects fight to determine who is correct; only in being willing to risk their lives—in other words, to risk everything for this (self-)certainty—are subjects able to achieve the sort of self-certain satisfaction that they managed to achieve prior to encountering another self-consciousness. (And, at a very high level of altitude, the rest of the account in the Phenomenology aims to show how there emerge, consequently, other, less bloody ways to solve this fundamental problem of certainty and satisfaction.) I have wanted to stress this account from the Phenomenology—an account that can be seen as normative in nature (at stake is normative grounding and authority, here couched in terms of “satisfaction” and “self-certainty”)—in order to note that in the Philosophy of Right, an entirely analogous account unfolds. If one follows Hegel’s account closely, the same language of self-consciousness is used throughout, culminating in the emergence of contract as a solution to the “problem of

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right.” Contract just is the actualization of a struggle for recognition, albeit now considered in a political register. And Hegel himself draws this analogy when he notes that when property is viewed as an extension of a subject’s will, then it might also be opposed by another will (i.e., the exact same dialectic between two subjects).18 Thus, Hegel notes in the Encyclopedia that: [T]he fight for recognition in the extreme form . . . can only occur in the state of nature, where men live only as individuals; by contrast it is absent from civil society and the political state because what constitutes the result of this combat, namely recognition, is already present there.19 Hegel stresses in the remainder of the Philosophy of Right that the sphere of right cannot flourish by itself. The sort of relations of recognition that emerge within it cannot be consistently actualized unless they are embedded in another sphere of human life, namely morality (here denoting the ability of a subject to bind herself to a norm that might be both universalized and understood by the subject as universal). Just having these spheres is not enough. There must be a way for subjects to be so formed that they are liable to acknowledge the sphere of morality and to incorporate its perspective into their activities. In other words, Hegel believes that certain institutions are essential for the actualization of morality. Roughly, this is Hegel’s solution to a problem of motivation that plagued Kant. Kant claims that one cannot have an obligation that cannot be carried out.20 Yet, Kant also acknowledges that not only are certain obligations sometimes impossible, but that in fact carrying them out sometimes produces immoral effects; thus, Kant introduces the necessity of the postulates and especially the highest good.21 In this way, when someone does the moral good, but things turn out poorly, God serves as the guarantor of future happiness and justice, and the postulate of human immortality makes it so that the agent has access to this future happiness and justice. Hegel, however, rejects the highest good in the metaphysical and religious register as Kant presents it,22 and instead presents an alternative solution to this problem of motivation: namely, that it is necessary to have institutions that both socialize agents into society and a moral perspective, and that allow for the concrete existence of the spheres—and thereby the possibilities—of right and morality. The moniker by which Hegel captures these broader sets and types of institutions is “Sittlichkei”’ or “ethical life.”23 Such an “ethical life” is really a sort of form of life, or in Hegel’s terms, a “shape of spirit.”24 The reason that this solution “works” is that ethical life is a term of art for the entire formation of an individual, the habituation of her wants and desires, the forming of her vision, and the creation of her horizon of possibility.25 In short, such “ethical life” denotes a sort of attunement, whereby subjects

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have arrived not at mere agreements about judgments, but rather what might be termed agreements in judgment, i.e., about the very ways in which one judges.26 Importantly, but also controversially, according to Hegel, “ethical life” in this sense is composed of three elements: the family, civil society, and the state; each is required. I note that this is controversial to highlight that—as I will shortly argue—the parameters of each likely could be quite different than what Hegel thought. Before getting to that point, let me give a bit more substance to each of these. Familial life is what, according to Hegel, initially draws individual subjects toward non-individual interests—so that it is here that a subject first acquires a perspective that points beyond herself to concerns that affect those of her family and to possibilities that emerge from the relations of familial life—relations which have a distinct intersubjective cast.27 Civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft)—all of the modern social and economic configurations associated with a capitalist market economy (which, for Hegel, also includes the police)28—functions as a “system of needs,”29 where subjects pursue their individual (social and economic) needs; in doing so, subjects realize that their needs can only be satisfied through interaction and relations with others. In this way, in civil society, “each individual is his own end, and all else means nothing to him,”30 and yet in “furthering” that end, the individual also “further[s] the universal, and this is turn furthers . . . [her] end.”31 The state allegedly makes the existence of civil society possible; as Hegel notes, civil society “presupposes the state, which it must have before it as self-sufficient entity in order to subsist [bestehen] itself.”32 Essential to Hegel’s account is to note that civil society, in virtue of being “a system of atomism,”33 tends toward its own self-destruction, toward pulling itself apart in such a way that “the ethical is lost in its extreme.”34 This is so much the case that Hegel explicitly, with an allusion to Hobbes, compares it to the state of nature, where civil society is “the field of conflict in which the private interest of each individual comes up against that of everyone else.”35 One way to understand the state, then, might be to see it as a sort of check on the atomism that civil society produces; the state curbs civil society when it threatens to tear itself apart. In such a view, the state—the perspective of the state— is something that must be available to agents lest civil society simply become the state of nature. Notably, though, this is a view that Hegel rejects, frequently opposing any such instrumental conception of the state.36 Instead, according to Hegel, it is not that the state merely arises instrumentally for the satisfaction of something else, but rather that the state is itself the “actuality of concrete freedom.”37 As Hegel stresses: “It is not contingent that men have entered into the state, [since] it is only in the state that the concept of freedom comes to its self-sufficient existence [selbständigen Dasein].”38

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What might such a conception of the state amount to? The basic point— which requires some philosophical ingenuity and vigor to defend39—hinges on a basic fact: in civil society, the universal is achieved merely by accident through the pursuit of individual ends. In Hegel’s view, however, this robs subjects of an element of freedom, namely the possibility of achieving the universal intentionally (and, again, one might profitably compare the status of things here to the way in which the Phenomenology unfolds, where self-consciousness achieves a “spiritual” existence in the first half of the book only to have it be filled in with “content” in the second, historical half).40 To feel the force of Hegel’s intuition here, one must imagine that achieving the universal in this way opens the possibility of certain kinds of experience to subjects, say, for example, the experience of justice as justice, i.e., as a qualitatively distinct experience, where one’s universal point of view is acknowledged—by others, by the state—exactly as universal. Those skeptical about the seriousness of this distinction might imagine the experience of black people within the United States following the Civil War, where Reconstruction and its concomitant laws became the “law” of the land, but where such law was often ignored or maligned by agents; simply put, it mattered to such subjects that their fellow citizens had qualitatively distinct intentions when they affirmed the law.41 Only in the state can one experience particular goods; indeed, the good of freedom, where that is understood as an affirmation of both the freedom(s) associated with rights (namely property and so forth) and the freedom(s) associated with morality (namely the possibility of, say, a respect for property rights, the value and thereby affirmation of individuality as a necessary input to right). One might say then that “citizenship . . . is the same as my autonomy; the polis is the field within which I work out my personal identity and it is the creation of (political) freedom,”42 where the latter is understood as something distinct from the “mere” freedom that one finds in the exchange of the market, that is, in achieving a universal standpoint accidentally. My sense is that Hegel’s views here are Kantian in an important respect: the sort of freedom that one actualizes in maximizing one’s happiness (or utility) is qualitatively distinct from the sort of freedom one actualizes in willing one’s freedom (of course, with the important caveat that “willing” means two quite different things in Kant and Hegel). The latter admits a force—explanatory, normative, justificatory—that is neither bound to nor hinges on any particular desire or drive, while the former depends entirely on them (so, I may very well decide to give you aid in a time of need, but only because I might gain something from it, materially or otherwise). Hegel’s alternative conception of the state is to see the subject as explicitly willing institutions—the state and everything it requires—that actualize the sort of mutual recognition that is implicitly constitutive of any civil society (and thereby of abstract right, i.e., of being a subject at all). Such a perspective allows for

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particular desires and drives, but also wills instead a universal perspective that does not begin with those desires, but rather sees everything from a view that sees such desires as part of a whole.43 In this way, there is in Hegel an answer to the homogenization question: in modernity, it seems to be the case that the fact of human freedom drives the state toward homogenization. There just must be certain stable institutions that allow agents to actualize their freedom. The form of thought is important here (the aforementioned “universal” perspective), but with the caveat that this form of thought is only possible through particular institutions. As Hegel notes: In actuality, therefore, the state in general is in fact the primary factor . . . in the development of civil society, the ethical substance takes on its infinite form .  .  . the form of thought whereby .  .  . spirit is objective and actual to itself as an organic totality in laws and institutions, i.e., in its own will as thought.44 Notably, though, while subjects achieve freedom through the state, the institutions of the state also achieve something resembling freedom, namely a sort of self-sufficient existence, one that—potentially— threatens to undermine the existence of the state itself. As Hegel notes, it is not improper to speak of these institutions having their own agency: “Whether the individual exists or not is a matter of indifference to objective ethical life [Hegel’s shorthand for Sittlichkeit], which alone has permanence and is the power by which the lives of individuals are governed.”45 The various worries that animate the Frankfurt School and other critics of Hegel’s statist tendencies appear to re-materialize in this context. Related to this issue, but compounding it significantly, is the simple fact that the institutions that Hegel envisioned as essential to ethical life seem to be anything but essential (indeed, Hegel himself notes that one of them was abolished prior to the composition of the Philosophy of Right).46 And this should come as no surprise, since if the state is really understood as the site where human freedom is worked out, then its content—the content of its institutions—must, in many ways, remain open, for freedom is itself a project, and not something achieved once and for all. Indeed, this point reaches so deep into the entire project of statehood, that who belongs to a state and why is itself something that likely must stay open. Hegel recognizes something like this problem when he notes that: The constitution of a specific nation will in general depend on the nature and development (Bildung) of its self-consciousness . . . the wish to give a nation a constitution a priori, even if its content were

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But it seems that Hegel is stacking the deck here: after all, if the constitution is what gives the state its distinct normative character and thereby determines its people and institutions, then it is odd that this distinct character is also what issues a constitution. A regress problem is emerging here. And something like this issue animates any sort of thinking about revolution, an insight that Hannah Arendt notes in On Revolution48 when she locates a tension between the spirit of revolution and the spirit of constitution, noting that all revolutions present a fundamental problem: to achieve something, they must push toward closing off the attitude of revolution, but it is exactly this attitude that vivifes the revolution in the frst place. The tension is not fatal, but it is one that requires more analysis than Hegel appears to present in the Philosophy of Right. But this isn’t the only issue. Hegel’s global theory puts a lot of weight on war as a solution to the “content” of the state, to the understanding of a people as a people: The higher significance of war is that, through its agency, “the ethical health of nations” is preserved . . . the ideality which makes its appearance in war . . . is the same as the ideality whereby the internal powers of the state are organic moments of the whole.49 Here, there is another tension arising, this time around the parameters of what it means to be a subject. Hegel’s gambit in the Philosophy of Right is that human freedom—being a human subject—is best understood and actualized by the structure outlined in the Philosophy of Right: that humans fourish and achieve a robust sense of freedom when embedded in a state structure of the sort Hegel outlines (I say “outline” to countenance the possibility that the actual details of it might turn out to be different; what’s essential are the dialectical moves and relations that Hegel is describing). Yet, if war emerges as a necessity for the functioning of any such state, then there is an explicit valuation between the individual (and especially individuals in other states) and the state (and especially other states) built into this conception of subjectivity; indeed, there is a sort of indifference to the individual here.50 Perhaps this just is Hegel’s ultimate understanding of subjectivity, and we ought to take a lesson in humility here. But even if that is the case—which I am not sure that it is—we might ask what this ultimately says about the good of human freedom altogether, which is something Hegel and we implicitly assume. Note that at a higher level of abstraction, there are two distinct, but related, problems here. First, there is the tension between what might be understood as the necessity of the state to have institutions that allow

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for concrete and actual freedom, and the simple fact that these institutions take on a life of their own and thereby tend to live on after they are needed. Second, there is the more fundamental issue that if the state is truly where human freedom is actualized, its institutions must remain open. A face of this problem is exactly the problem of “peoplehood”; the problem that the friction between these two issues gives rise to a regress problem about the constitution of the state itself. War is able to solve these issues practically, by homogenizing and unifying state populations that otherwise might not be homogenous, but it breeds an entire system that merely re-creates Hobbes’s state of nature at the international level, something both Hegel and the contemporary theorists I cited at the beginning of this article realize.51 This is one way in which homogenization becomes pathological, but there are also others—namely white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy—all of which take on an international cast within the state structure.52 The issues that are now beginning to emerge are too large and numerous to develop further here. Instead, I conclude only by suggesting a few possible ways in which we might respond to these issues. Above all, one might aim to sever the link between war and genocide, but my sense of the empirical details is that war emerges as a symptom of the fundamental instability, inequity, and belligerence of the state structure itself (something Hegel’s account, as I’ve sketched it here, also asserts, albeit in a different register, seeing it as the global instantiation of Hobbes “war of all against all”). Genocide perpetually remains a possible option in a range of options available for dealing with the issues that arise around such instability and belligerency.53 I’m not sure how—apart from envisioning an alternative to the state structure—we might be able to sever this connection, although perhaps it may be possible to minimize its frequency and scope; this then seems like, at best, a stop-gap. Are there, however, bolder theoretical moves one might undertake here to reorient ourselves and to reveal other practical possibilities? First, one might try to question the value of freedom—at least the sort of Rousseau/Kant-inspired freedom as autonomy—that one finds at the heart of the Hegelian project. This is a path that one might understand a range of later European thinkers pursuing, from Heidegger to Foucault to Deleuze. From these names and their own projects, one can see that there are dangers here, whether philosophical (as in how to make sense of these projects) or practical (as in what sort of alternatives they propose). Philosophically, the dangers might, at best, be presented as a repetition of options that Kant and the German Idealists had already discarded, or, at worst, as the establishment of a pernicious and nihilistic negativity.54 Practically, the dangers are forms of conservatism or radicalism that devalue human life to a far greater extent than Hegel’s international state of nature.

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Second, one might aspire to find a way of organizing ourselves beyond the state structure. The conceptual problem here is that, as Arendt writes, “it is by no means certain whether this is possible.”55 At the very least, we do not yet have clear proposals for what this might look like, and we have a few possibilities that look worse than what we have now (e.g., the forms of corporate rule that are imagined in dystopian cyberpunk novels). Furthermore, there is the practical issue of how such a transition might be effected. Third, one might imagine alternative institutional means of organizing ourselves within the state structure.56 Here, one might imagine smaller ways of organizing ourselves within the state (as in communes, “nested” communities,57 and so forth), and larger ways of doing so, as in international organizations that might mitigate the perils of the state. The conceptual danger here, as previously, is that our imagination seems presently unsuited to this task. Practically, there is also the issue that this leaves the state structure—with all of its ills—generally intact, and that both our large and small alternatives have proved generally ineffective at reducing human suffering.58 Of course, the bleakness of these three options should not be taken to suggest that a return to some sort of pre-state structure offers better prospects of a reduction in human suffering—unfortunately not. What I hope to have suggested is that once it is understood that the last century of genocide is largely driven by the state structure,59 Hegel remains a suggestive conceptual starting point. Perhaps he also remains necessary for working out a way forward, but that is a task I leave for the future.

Notes 1. Rudolf Haym, Hegel Und Seine Zeit: Vorlesungen Über Entstehung Und Entwicklung, Wesen Und Werth Der Hegel’schen Philosophie (Berlin: Verlag von Rudolph Gaertner, 1857). 2. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1973), 300–61; Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 2006), 2:278–335. Adorno’s relationship to Hegel is significantly more complex and ambivalent, since in many respects, Adorno himself is a Hegelian. What Adorno opposes is Hegel’s alleged understanding of history (as redemptive). I am not sure that Hegel is committed to such a version of history, and have argued as much in the fourth chapter of Martin Shuster, Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). For more on Adorno’s conception of Hegel, see Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). 3. On this point, see Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 4. I say “Hegelian” here to preface this entire essay with a sort of cautionary note. What follows is best understood as “Hegelian” in the sense that it glosses over certain historico-philosophical points in Hegel’s broader system.

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5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

29

These points lead to a different, significantly more nuanced—but also incredibly more elaborate and thereby lengthier—reading of Hegel than I will be able to present here. I pursue this longer reading in a forthcoming monograph; my aim in this chapter is instead to tease out some more “Hegelian” themes in order to think about the workings of the state in the context of genocide; this chapter is not thereby intended primarily as a bit of Hegel exegesis and glosses over some important details of proper Hegel scholarship. Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, 4 vols., vol. 1: The Meaning of Genocide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 205. Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 38. Emphasis added. Compare the sentiment to Adorno’s suggestion that “Genocide is the absolute integration.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362. I should also note that these two accounts do evince a tension in how broadly they push their contextualization. On this point, see Anton Weiss-Wendt, “The State and Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 88. For these sort of extremist claims, see Hubert Kiesewetter, Von Hegel Zu Hitler Die Politische Verwirklichung Einer Totalitaren Machtstaatstheorie in Deutschland, 1815–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1974); David Patterson, “The Complicity of Modern Philosophy in the Extermination of the Jews,” in The Genocidal Mind: Selected Papers from the 32nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, ed. Dennis B. Klein et al. (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2005). For a conceptual genealogy of the state, see Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 162, 2009, 325–370. This story is incredibly complex and is its own set of several book-length topics, but for a sense of the sort of account I have in mind, I might cite Arendt’s work on imperialism, Mark Levene’s recent work on genocide and the nation-state, Michael Mann’s recent work on the “dark side of democracy,” and also Irving Horowitz earlier work. For an overview of many of these approaches, see Weiss-Wendt. I mention this event especially since it likely forms the basis for one of Hegel’s most robust discussions of violence—the French terror and his famous quip about how “the coldest, shallowest of deaths . . . [has] no more significance than cleaving a cabbage head or swallowing a gulp of water.” See G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), ¶590. Cited henceforth as PS in the body of the text, followed by paragraph number. For this connection, see James Schmidt, “Cabbage Heads and Gulps of Water: Hegel on the Terror,” Political Theory 26, no. 1 (1998). I should note, too, that there is ample controversy in terming the Vendée massacres a genocide, and I don’t have much invested in the term, but I am firmly committed to seeing the Vendée massacre as an essential piece in the rise of genocide as a solution (this is roughly the story that Mark Levene tells in the previously referenced volumes, that regardless of whether this is itself termed a genocide, it certainly forms a genealogical piece in the rise of genocide as a solution to political problems). This point was most explicitly suggested to me, and forms the basis for my analogy between the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right, by the second chapter of Jean-François Kervégan, The Actual and the Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit, trans. Daniela Ginsburg and Martin Shuster (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2018).

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13. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Cited henceforth as PR, followed by section number. 14. PR §11. 15. Hegel’s claim is that “self-consciousness is desire itself” (PS ¶167). The most elaborate discussion of what this amounts to is Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). There is here a strong path backward to Fichte’s procedure and—surprisingly—forwards to Levinas’s procedure. I pursue this point in more detail in Martin Shuster, “Levinas and German Idealism: Fichte and Hegel,” in The Oxford Handbook of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Michael Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 195–215. 16. The word Hegel uses is “entzweien,” as in when he notes that by means of such desire, the subject “estranges [entzweit] itself into the opposition between self-consciousness and life” (PS ¶168, translation modified). 17. This is one significance of Hegel’s famous line that “self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness” (PS ¶175). The sole way one can garner self-certain satisfaction is now only by means of a mutual recognition of each other. 18. “As the existence of the will, [property’s] existence for another can only be for the will of another person . . . this mediation whereby I no longer own property merely by means of a thing and my subjective will, but also by means of another will, and hence within the context of a common will, constitutes the sphere of contract” (PR §71). 19. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), §432 Zusatz. 20. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A548 = B76. 21. I pursue this story in depth in the second chapter of Shuster, Autonomy after Auschwitz. 22. On this point and the general context, see Terry Pinkard, “Virtues, Morality and Sittlichkeit: From Maxims to Practices,” European Journal of Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999): 220ff. Pinkard notes how Hegel takes up Kant’s problem of motivation, but gives it a different solution because he takes the problem to be not centered around “the union of virtue and happiness but as the union of morality and ‘particularity’” (224). 23. I translate it here as “ethical life” simply to keep with convention, although “ethical life” misses that Hegel also speaks of the possibility of an “ethical life” (das sittliche Leben) in contrast to Sittlichkeit. For more on this point, see the 12th chapter of Kervégan. 24. See Terry Pinkard, “What Is a Shape of Spirit?,” in The Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, ed. Dean Moyar and Michael Quante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 25. In the Encyclopedia, Hegel stresses that “every educated (gebildete) human being has a host of general points of view and principles immediately present in his knowing, which have only emerged from his meditation on many things, and from the life experience of many years . . . we have this knowhow, these ways of handling things, immediately in our consciousness, and even in our outwardly directed activity and in the limbs of our body.” See G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris (Indianoplis: Hackett, 1991), §66. 26. And, importantly, such “agreements” are not to be understood merely on some contractual model (as if subjects somehow contract to agree with each

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27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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other), but rather as an agreement as much somatic as conceptual, thereby agreeing on what counts and can count, what’s salient and what’s not, how best to settle disagreement, and so forth. For the Wittgenstein inspired picture I have in mind, see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 94ff; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Upper Sadle: Prentice Hall, 1958), §242. There is a lot more to be said about Hegel’s conception of family. See David V. Ciavatta, Spirit, the Family, and the Unconscious in Hegel’s Philosophy (Buffalo: SUNY, 2010); Joan B. Landes, “Hegel’s Conception of the Family,” Polity 14, no. 1 (1981). The police (re-)appears as an element in the state, too, where it is linked with the judiciary (PR §287). PR §208. PR §182, Addition. §184, Addition. PR §182, Addition. PS ¶524. PR §184. PR §289, Remark. Elaborations of this claim are essential to Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Alan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). PR §260. G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 4 vols. (Suttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1974), 1:222. For a concise and powerful reconstruction, see chapter 6 of Patten. For more on this point, see Shuster, Autonomy after Auschwitz, 141–53. Relatedly, as W.E.B. Du Bois notes, where one falls out on this question determines what one sees: say, success or failure with respect to the Reconstruction project. Cavell, 24. The clearest example of this in contemporary Anglophone literature is the Rawlsian idea of a veil that prohibits me from knowing who I will end up being in this whole. This is analogous (there are important metaphysical differences) to the perspective that Kant details in the last section of the Groundwork. In turn, that perspective is formally analogous to the perspective that Hegel is describing. (And, to be more precise, such a view—in formal terms—likely originates with Rousseau. On this point, see Neuhouser.) For an excellent elaboration of this transition from the particularity of the Bürger to the universality of the Citoyen in Hegel, see Terry Pinkard, “Ethical Form in the External State: Bourgeois, Citizens and Capital,” Crisis and Critique 4, no. 1 (2017). PR §256, Remark. PR §145, emphasis added. I am speaking here of what Hegel terms “corporations” (but which are actually closer to what we normally term “guilds”). On this point, see §255, Addition and Pinkard, “Ethical Form in the External State,” 325. PR §274. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 224. PR §324, Remark. PR §145.

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51. See notes 4 and 5. 52. Each of these requires some more discussion. I have elaborated my claim that they represent a sort of pathology of homogenization in Martin Shuster, “The Language of Closure: Homogeneity, Exclusion, and the State,” in Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson, ed. Andrew Pitts and Mark Westmoreland (Buffalo: SUNY, 2019), 37–56. 53. I am here compressing an immense amount of historical research that stresses both the link between the state order and war and between the sort of instability that war produces and genocide, but see notably Donald Bloxham, Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe (Middlesex: Mitchell Vallentine & Company, 2008); The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, 4 vols. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005); The Crisis of Genocide, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). One might suggest a stronger legal framework for combatting genocide as an option in such times, but the prospects for this are also questionable. On this point, see Donald Bloxham, “Beyond ‘Realism’ and Legalism: A Historical Perspective on the Limits of International Humanitarian Law,” European Review 14, no. 4 (2006); Donald Bloxham and Devin O. Pendas, “Punishment as Prevention? The Politics of Punishing Génocidaires,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 54. On this point, see Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfaction of European High Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 55. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: André Deutsch, 1986), 298. 56. Here’s Adorno on something like this option: “So today, the task is not simply to conserve the concrete essence of human relations in the transitory form of the different nations—which incidentally has long since been unmasked as fraudulent—but to bring about this concrete state of human community on a higher plane. And by a superior state, I do not mean a mechanical union of superpowers joined together in even more gigantic blocs. This would, if anything, just worsen the disaster. What I have in mind is something that would change the form of society itself and put an end to the abstract organization that acts so repressively towards its members. This is by no means as utopian as it sounds on first hearing, if only because modern technology already opens up the possibility of decentralization that actually makes it unnecessary to bring societies together in gigantic hierarchical entities . . . it would already be possible to organize societies far more rationally in much smaller units that could collaborate peaceably with one another and from which all those aggressive and destructive tendencies would have been banished” See Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 111. In a similar vein, see also André Gorz, “The Exit from Capitalism Has Already Begun,” Cultural Politics 6, no. 1 (2010). 57. See the next footnote for this notion. 58. One can see the sort of issues I have in mind in a book like Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Simpson powerfully presents the sort of “nested sovereignty” that the Mohawks represents when it comes to Canada

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and the United States, but upon finishing the book, one is struck by both the paucity of the sort of sovereignty that’s left for the Mohawk nation and also the ways in which their national conceptions—of what’s possible presently and in the future—is everywhere beset and warped by the workings of the states within which they are embedded. 59. Again, see footnote 39.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Hegel: Three Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. ———. History and Freedom. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. ———. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1973. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. London: Penguin, 1990. ———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: André Deutsch, 1986. Avineri, Shlomo. Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Bloxham, Donald. “Beyond ‘Realism’ and Legalism: A Historical Perspective on the Limits of International Humanitarian Law.” European Review 14, no. 4 (2006): 457–70. ———. The Final Solution: A Genocide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe. Middlesex: Mitchell Vallentine & Company, 2008. Bloxham, Donald, and Devin O. Pendas. “Punishment as Prevention? The Politics of Punishing Génocidaires.” In The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 617–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Ciavatta, David V. Spirit, the Family, and the Unconscious in Hegel’s Philosophy. Buffalo: SUNY, 2010. Gorz, André. “The Exit from Capitalism Has Already Begun.” Cultural Politics 6, no. 1 (2010): 5–14. Haym, Rudolf. Hegel Und Seine Zeit: Vorlesungen Über Entstehung Und Entwicklung, Wesen Und Werth Der Hegel’schen Philosophie. Berlin: Verlag von Rudolph Gaertner, 1857. Hegel, G.W.F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. The Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris. Indianoplis: Hackett, 1991. ———. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. ———. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Translated by William Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Vorlesungen Über Rechtsphilosophie, 4 vols. Suttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1974. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Kervégan, Jean-François. The Actual and the Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit. Translated by Daniela Ginsburg and Martin Shuster. Chicago: University of Chicago, forthcoming. Kiesewetter, Hubert. Von Hegel Zu Hitler Die Politische Verwirklichung Einer Totalitaren Machtstaatstheorie in Deutschland, 1815–1945. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1974. Landes, Joan B. “Hegel’s Conception of the Family.” Polity 14, no. 1 (1981): 5–28. Levene, Mark. The Crisis of Genocide, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. ———. Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, 4 vols. Vol. 1: The Meaning of Genocide. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Neuhouser, Frederick. Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Patten, Alan. Hegel’s Idea of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Patterson, David. “The Complicity of Modern Philosophy in the Extermination of the Jews.” In The Genocidal Mind: Selected Papers from the 32nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, edited by Dennis B. Klein, Richard Libowitz, Marcia Sachs Littell, and Sharon B. Steeley. St. Paul: Paragon House, 2005. Pinkard, Terry. “Ethical Form in the External State: Bourgeois, Citizens and Capital.” Crisis and Critique 4, no. 1 (2017): 293–330. ———. “Virtues, Morality and Sittlichkeit: From Maxims to Practices.” European Journal of Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999): 217–39. ———. “What Is a Shape of Spirit?” In The Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, edited by Dean Moyar and Michael Quante, 112–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pippin, Robert B. Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. ———. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfaction of European High Culture, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge, 2006. Rae, Heather. State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Schmidt, James. “Cabbage Heads and Gulps of Water: Hegel on the Terror.” Political Theory 26, no. 1 (1998): 4–32. Shuster, Martin. Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. ———. “The Language of Closure: Homogeneity, Exclusion, and the State.” In Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson, edited by Andrew Pitts and Mark Westmoreland, 37–56. Buffalo: SUNY, 2019. ———. “Levinas and German Idealism: Fichte and Hegel.” In The Oxford Handbook of Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Michael Morgan, 195–215. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

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Skinner, Quentin. “A Genealogy of the Modern State.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 162 (2009): 325–70. Weiss-Wendt, Anton. “The State and Genocide.” In The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 81–102. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Upper Sadle: Prentice Hall, 1958. Wood, Allen W. Hegel’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

2

The Friends of War and Genocide Jacqueline Stevens

This essay reviews the resigned acceptance and even full-throated embrace of war throughout European political thought, before lingering in the time and work of Hannah Arendt. The purpose is to explore the responsibility of political theorists who embrace the nation and see genocide, but not war, as evil. Can we continue to dignify the categorical distinction Arendt and others make between war and genocide— explicitly purposed to excuse the perpetrators of the former from judicial judgment—as a matter of polite disagreement? Is it possible that Arendt and her allies, by supporting the nativists in embracing the nation-state and rationalizing war but not genocide, have made it too easy for our contemporaries to choose the easy solace of her beguiling writing on behalf of commonplace fantasies about the “authentic” nation? Is it possible that they ignore how Arendt’s beliefs—cast as truisms about nationality and diversity—are enemies of humanity, thinking, and imagination? The first section highlights tensions in Plato’s views on war and reviews portions of the Politeia that sustain a very different distinction between friends and enemies than the one on which Arendt and most political scientists, including contemporary political theorists, rely. Books I and VIII, in particular, invite revisiting the use of friends-enemies to reference alliances based on one’s nationality. In Book I, Socrates proposes instead that friends are those who pursue truth and justice, and suggests that any existential commitments only be made on their behalf, while condemning enmities based on differences of ancestry or sovereignty. The second section of this chapter makes use of Plato’s heuristics to pose questions about the distinction between supposedly new and old wars that arise throughout Arendt’s oeuvre. After reviewing Arendt’s naturalization of the nation and its violence, I propose in section III that it is just these efforts, mostly implied and not as explicit as in Arendt’s work, that fuel the inherently unconstrained fantasies of conquest and destruction that Hitler shared with Athens’ mid-fifth century BC First Citizen (and General) Pericles as much as with the Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortez, who shared with Don Quixote inspiration from Amadis de Gaul, a fictional knight whose chivalrous code of honor Arendt invokes

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as a rationale for warfare or polémos (the Greek term that refers to war and also the god of war). The chapter concludes by reflecting on the responsibility of intellectuals for the misshapen ideas that rationalize war today, including by attempting to distinguish its evils from those of genocide. If, as Arendt states, in war those who plan the deaths of others and thus are the furthest removed from killing are the ones who are the most responsible, should we not be considering the complicity of her and most intellectuals who aggrandize the nation and its fables and who thus ensure war’s persistence?

I. Friends and Enemies in Plato’s Politeia Going back to Homer’s Iliad, we see war epitomized as the apex of tragic and therefore necessary stupidity, a fact of nature (physis). Choruses have shared this view with substantial majorities of the common folk throughout history. The works of antiquity—mythical and historical—are populated by ancient kings and leaders who dangle before gullible men promises of war’s bounty: riches, sexual conquest, and, especially sought for, honor and its remembrance. Even (especially?) Socrates, before the Athenian jury, asserts proof of his virtue in his brave military service on behalf of Athenian colonialism.1 The logic of many of the famous massacres, from the Iliad through Xenophon’s Anabasis, were not attributed to the calculations or miscalculations by the individual generals issuing orders, but to the gods whispering in their ears, exhorting them, acting behind the scenes, or failing to intervene, any one of which could itself be attributed to a motive for the god that was benign or to a petty grievance or simply a distraction. There was no responsibility, only luck, and that could change as quickly as the wind. But what happens after the gods have slumbered and the democratic chorus controls war’s destiny? On what grounds would they, the citizens running their own governments, fight? By what standards would the war decisions of their political and military leaders be assessed? As people today continue to find themselves fleeing from war’s threat and ruins, not among the millions but among their loved ones, friends, and strangers made newly familiar, the unsolved and often poorly asked question of war’s meaning remains. It is not until the Politeia that we first encounter a philosopher more or less systematically questioning war’s conventional foundations and legitimacy.2 Tensions in the Politeia on the topic of friends, enemies, and war have received scant attention thus far, perhaps because they reflect the unexamined nature of contradictory views of war that are still prevalent.3 These tensions between the disinterested pursuit of truth and justice and the partisan pursuit of victory in conflicts decided by brute force warrant explication here because they crystallize the problem with Hannah Arendt’s illiberal and even anti-liberal defense of the nation, and because

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these rather glaring tensions continue to be largely ignored, raising questions about why, with rare exceptions, political theorists have been shunting aside Plato’s challenges to their complacency with war.4 This is not to imply that Plato’s views on war are more denotative and self-evident than his thoughts on the other fraught political topics the text explores. Books 5 and 8 contain passages suggesting Plato saw war the same way Thucydides saw it—as an enterprise that might bring out the best in Athenian democracy and its citizens.5 Book 8 opens with Socrates stating: We are agreed then, Glaucon, that the state which is to achieve the height of good government must have community of wives and children and all education, and also that . . . the rulers or kings over them are to be those who have approved themselves the best in both war [polemos] and philosophy.6 Not only is expertise in war elevated to the stature of philosophy, but here it is given a priority, at least in being referenced frst.7 The philosopher kings in Book 8, as opposed to those in Book I, delineate their alliances and adversaries along the lines of the “authentic” friends and enemies that Arendt, following G.W.F. Hegel and Carl Schmitt, will defend in her attack on Karl Jaspers and other critics of the nation. These passages concern how one treats those who are Athenians’ “enemies by nature” (non-Greeks, or barbarians) and those who “are still by nature the friends of Greeks” even at war, but whom fight among themselves when “Greece is sick .  .  . and divided by faction.”8 In the case of the former, “the Greeks being lovers of Greeks,” war should be avoided. The motive is a natural-seeming, if arbitrary, kinship.9 Indeed, Plato appears to indulge xenophobia. Socrates observes that the Greeks are treating “the barbarians as Greeks now treat Greeks.”10 Instead of treating foreigners as inferiors, the Greeks, alas, Plato complains, are treating those who are by nature different as though they are (as good as) Greeks.11 These passages seem to suggest Plato’s endorsement of the conventional view that war is acceptable, as long as the cleavages oppose Greeks and non-Greeks, thus falling along fault lines of ancestry and sovereignty, not unlike the logic of friends and enemies that resonates today for, say, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and those outside it.12 And yet, the Politeia offers other views on war, friends, and enemies that will also sound familiar to contemporary readers, and that stand in direct contradiction with those reviewed previously. From its opening lines, Book I’s main purpose seems to be questioning the conventions of patriotism, militarism, and friendship informed by the texts and conventions of his that era, and indeed our own. In the second sentence, Socrates observes of a new Athenian festival, “I thought the procession of the citizens very fine, but it was no better than the show made by the marching of the Thracian contingent.”13 Either as a device to ridicule or simply note

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the ubiquity of patriotism, the comment deflates the story of Athenian greatness before it has even begun. Imagine opening a narrative portending to elevate the United States to even more lofty heights with a comment comparing the portion of a military parade staged by US citizens with a unit of legal residents from Canada that was just as fine. And then imagine beginning the actual instruction of one’s compatriots by taking down one’s country’s chief weapons manufacturer, and in his own home at that—as does Socrates by first noting Cephalus seemed “much aged” and then saying to his face that he seemed “very aged,” and then mocking his—the first—definition of justice: “not remaining in debt.”14 In short, the Politeia opens by disparaging a self-serving framework for retributive justice as a scheme for the creditor class that is so clueless about justice that it arms people and goes to war indiscriminately.15 In Book I, after minimizing Athenian displays of patriotism, and suggesting the rich guy who made money from war looks old, Socrates goes on to attack the presence of weapons in the hands of mad men and thus to assail the values of the oligarchic arms merchant: if one took over weapons from a friend who was in his right mind and then the lender should go mad and demand them back, that we ought not return them in that case and that he who did so return them would not be acting justly—nor yet would he who chose to speak nothing but the truth to one who was in that state?16 Cephalus departs, but the Athenian national pastime of war-mongering suffers another attack when Polemarchus, Cephalus’s son, proposes the second definition of justice: “that which renders benefits and harms to friends and enemies,” or, as Socrates paraphrases, “To do good to friends and evil to enemies.”17 The dichotomy of friends and enemies immediately evokes the context of war and thus a syllogism that, Socrates explains, would require that the just man be that individual “making war as an ally,” i.e., as a friend.18 And yet, war, Socrates points out, is inherently episodic and thus its antagonists are ephemeral. Therefore, they are inconsistent with the characteristic demand of justice, that its qualities persist across contexts, including those of peace.19 When Polemarchus, a warlord’s son, persists in saying “justice benefits friends and harms enemies,” Socrates presses him on the conventional meaning of these alliances.20 Here are the three problems with these passages for the sort of war that Socrates prepares the guardians for in Book V: (1) One’s apparent friends, perhaps Greeks, are bad and deserve to be harmed, not defended. (“It will work out, then, for many, Polemarchus, who have misjudged men that it is just to harm their friends, for they have got bad ones, and to benefit their enemies, for they are good.”)21 (2) The criteria for friends and enemies are the good and the bad, not national allegiances: “the friend will be the good man and the bad the enemy.”22 (3) Therefore, the use of force on behalf of friends is as likely to thwart injustice as to

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ensure it rapidly seeds and propagates. (“We then said it was just to do good to a friend and evil to an enemy, but now we are to add that it is just to benefit the friend if he is good and harm the enemy if he is bad?”)23 Moreover, consistent with the initial metaphor of the physician as the just guardian, Socrates concludes Book I with a categorical rejection of, if not all violence, at least that of the largest part of Athenian wars: If, then, anyone affirms that it is just to render to each his due and he means by this that injury and harm is what is due to his enemies from the just man and benefits to his friends, he was no truly wise man who said it. For what he meant was not true. For it has been made clear to us that in no case is it just to harm anyone.24 Socrates is not categorically condemning all violence. Perhaps violence to deter future individual conduct that is unjust might beneft the person punished. But this is not about criminal punishment of individual actions. Nor is Socrates anticipating any Augustinian rationale of using force to save souls. War as conveyed in the Politeia conforms with the context of Greek antiquity. War instrumentalizes foreign countries to obtain property and slaves, not to ennoble anyone, especially those who would out of necessity suffer physical injury or death for reasons that had nothing to do with their own character or, for the most part, that of the regimes of which they were a part. Socrates attributes to “Periander or Perdiccas or Xerxes or Ismenias the Theban or some other rich man who had great power in his own conceit” the view that it is “just to beneft friends and harm enemies,” and thus proposes that the normal battle lines of ancient Greece are drawn by the power lust of oligarchs, and are not based on any principle of justice.25 These tensions are perplexing. If there is an axiomatic identity politics shot through our political societies, such that Athenians are always our friends, and ideally, all Greeks as well (470a-471a, discussed previously), and if combatants fighting on this basis deserve honors (e.g., Book 5), then why does Plato hold out as an exception the leader who is an enemy because he is bad, not Persian, for instance, and war that is harmful and not ennobling? Why does he fail to tackle this question head on, similar to Socrates in “The Apology,” or not resolve these tensions along the lines taken up later, as we shall see, by G.W.F. Hegel or Carl Schmitt, who traces his own views on friends and enemies to Book V of Plato’s Politeia?26

II. Immanuel Kant and Henry David Thoreau: Perpetual Peace Versus Abolishing War The multiple positions on war in Plato’s Politeia anticipate reflections on the subject in much later times. Socrates’ point that citizens in

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democracies would not tolerate a leader who started wars to augment his own power is taken up by Immanuel Kant, who believed that his age had succeeded in bringing the people out of Plato’s cave. Enlightened, and with a republican constitution, they would never be suckered into war in the first place: If (as must inevitably be the case, given this form of constitution) the consent of the citizenry is required in order to determine whether or not there will be war, it is natural that they consider all the calamities before committing themselves to so risky a game.27 The threat to their personal wellbeing as soldiers and additional taxes could never, Kant wagers, entice them to assent.28 How has that bet pay off? In the relatively short history of republican governments, Kant is clearly the loser. Perpetual peace requires more than a republican constitution. Indeed, political theorists writing after Kant, including the vast majority of so-called liberals, have largely repudiated Kant’s desired goal, not just its means. Hegel mocked it outright: “War is the spirit and the form in which the essential moment of the ethical substance, the absolute freedom of the ethical self from every existential form, is present in its actual and authentic existence.”29 In war, the individual realizes his identity is fully merged with a greater power; as this state is sovereign and free to rampage and exercise its will without restraint, so too is the citizen who, willing to risk his own life, is so absorbed by this power as to realize his own freedom through the independence of the state. The first writer of whom I am aware that advanced the position that most concerned Hegel was Henry David Thoreau. Less than three decades after the Philosophy of Right appeared in 1821, Thoreau connected his opposition to war and slavery with the development of democracy into anarchy: The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect of the individual . . . Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? . . . There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.30 This notion that the individual is the irreducible object and source of justice is a far cry from the objects of statecraft we encounter not only in Plato’s Politeia and Hegel’s Staat, in which the equation of the rational and the actual precludes individual skepticism of state policy, but also in Kant’s anthropological narrative in which democrats reject war because

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it is expensive and on someone else’s behalf, not because, as Thoreau will explain, it is unjust to kill a stranger simply because he is a stranger and a government instructs you to do so. Not only did the British empire falsify Kant’s psychologically informed hypothesis about representative democracies, the very philosophers who might have been expected to advance Kant’s pragmatic arguments had little to say explicitly on the subject of war while implicitly defending the use of force to defend the expansion of England’s dominion around the world. In arguing against pragmatic conformity with government policies, first appearing in Locke and then reprised by Paley (“the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of resisting it on the other”), Thoreau writes: But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expedience does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. The people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.31 This line returns us to Plato’s Politeia. Both Plato and Thoreau subvert the identity politics of the friend and enemy: in a war fomented by tyrants, albeit elected by majorities, the latter stand against the citizens, though the citizens may not realize it. For Plato and Thoreau, the just individual is friends with those who are good, even if this brings to an end one’s compatriots as such, and they, with Thoreau, become part of the Republic of Mexico.

III. Hannah Arendt and Other Friends of War It is this crystallization of the problem of war—the Hegelian, nationalist state whose righteous existence requires individuals to leave statecraft to the leaders—that brings us to the problem at the heart of this chapter: the notion in international laws and intuitions across all classes worldwide that genocide is always unjust and deserving of concerted, heroic efforts to prevent and condemn, while war is as indifferent to criteria of justice as rain and, much as was the case in the time of Homer, just as impervious to our explicit preferences. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (originally published in 1963 and then revised by Arendt in 1965) advances this contrast quite self-consciously. To her credit, Arendt grapples with how to distinguish the nation-state and the wars it engenders from the genocides

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whose perpetrators she condemns to death. Arendt never explains why she remains willing to share the world with Harry Truman and not with Eichmann. After all, it was Truman who unleashed the atomic bomb as part of a massive, macabre demonstration project and experiment on hundreds of thousands of innocent residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The use of the bomb had many causes, including an ongoing interest by the military in radiation studies to assess the bomb’s utility going forward—inquiries that continued through ongoing research that also might be characterized as manslaughter perpetrated on unwitting subjects in hospitals, army units, and entire communities throughout the world.32 The protocols for dropping the bombs included logistics for studying the mortality rate and effects on survivors and their descendants, which is why the US Human Genome Project had its origins in the Atomic Energy Commission and later the Department of Energy, moving to the National Institutes of Health only in the 1990s.33 How are the individuals who decide to kill for the purpose of achieving national dominance or racial dominance, and indeed select a racialized target for scientific study in advance suitable companions, but not Eichmann, whose pursued his desire to separate Germans from Jews in close coordination with Jewish ghetto leaders whose interest in an exodus of Jews to Israel— in keeping with their mutual appreciation of Theodor Herzl’s tenets for a Jewish state—aligned with Eichmann’s?34 Before turning to the axioms about group difference on which Arendt relies in making these heuristic distinctions between war and genocide and appraisals of their relative merits, it is worth reviewing the facts she herself presents that suggest empirical continuities between war and the genocide she rejects. First, although Jews were enslaved by Germans in Nazi work camps and tortured in the name of experimentation, it took the outbreak of the war in the East to initiate the campaign of Jewish extermination. The renunciation of the pact with Stalin, she points out, brings about the “Final Solution”: On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched his attack on the Soviet Union, and six or eight weeks later Eichmann was summoned to Heydrich’s office in Berlin. On July 31, Heydrich had received a letter from Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.  .  .  . The letter commissioned Heydrich to prepare “the general solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe.”35 Thus, Arendt associates the timing of the mass extermination of the Jewish people in Europe with the opening of the Eastern front. This is important for understanding how the slaughter of Jews was part of the broader war effort and not only, or even primarily, connected to the Nazi government’s targeting of Jews in Germany. Due to demographics and timing, the number of Jews from Germany Hitler killed as a result of the

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“Final Solution” was between 134,500 and 141,500—a small fraction of the total.36 The Nazi targeting of Jews was closely coordinated with Eastern European and Baltic native forces, and was not done instead of concentrating on the Wehrmacht advance into Russia, but was a means of rallying the troops, so to speak, in a fashion that recalls the opening scenes from Voltaire’s Candide.37 When the Einsatzgruppen allied themselves with the local forces by organizing the corralling of their Jewish neighbors into ghettos, and the plundering of their homes, wealth, and labor, this was not instead of marching into Russia, as Arendt suggests, but a means of securing territory through the support of anti-Semitic, anti-Communist partisans who had personally benefted from the mass evacuations, slave labor, and redistribution of property.38 Just as ethnically based massacres may be associated with strategic objectives, democratic publics may clamor for vigilante violence targeting racial or national groups during war, with the strategic purpose subordinated to nativist impulses of annihilation. The same month the US dropped the atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, a Gallup poll found 5% of their sample opposed dropping the action, 54% of their sample supported the action, and an additional 23% agreed with the statement “We should have quickly used many more of the bombs before Japan had a chance to surrender,” with US demographics supporting this outcome prompting Paul Boyer to ask, “Did the greater bloodthirstiness of the southwestern states reflect higher levels of anti-Oriental prejudice?”39 Intellectuals contemporary with Arendt characterized the irresponsibility of US leaders behind the bomb as akin to madness that appeared normal.40 Louis Mumford wrote in 1948: “If militant genocide does not turn the planet into an extermination camp . . . fear and suspicion may turn it into a madhouse, in which the physicians in charge will be as psychotic as the patients.”41 Can Arendt sustain the proposition that the Nazi impulse behind targeting Jews for elimination because they were Jews differs categorically from the US public support of massacring Japanese civilians simply because they were Japanese? Arendt not only recognized the historical connection between the timing of the alliance with Baltic and Slavic militias, in particular, who were unhappy at their colonial status in the Soviet Union, but also recited the hallmarks of the old- and new-fashioned nationalism that informed the Jewish genocide. Again, the facts she includes support a narrative that connects the slaughter of a people with the logic of a nationstate’s war, and not a separate, zero-sum analysis. The militarization of the war and the campaign against Jews helps us understand Jews who escaped being rounded up because of military service to the German government, just as German nationalism informed the crafting of policies for Jewish identification based on the rules of jus sanguinis, resembling those Napoleon Bonaparte instituted in 1803 for determining French nationality, not to mention, as Arendt points out, the laws of modern Israel.42 The

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expatriation of French women who married foreigners, a policy taken up reciprocally by other European countries and the United States in future decades, was also not so different from the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which expatriated Jews but allowed them to remain in Germany as resident aliens (as would be the case for spouses of foreign husbands throughout Europe in this time frame), and did not recognize mixed marriages, as was the case in the United States in most states until 1967.43 Moreover, the second-class legal status of Jews was a long-standing part of German political culture—requiring those born to Jewish parents to convert if they wanted to become lawyers or serve in government, including as professors—again, part and parcel of the effort to establish a German nation and prevent its cultural watering down into the empty humanism Arendt herself would also oppose.44 Finally, Arendt’s effort to single out Eichmann’s reductionist genocidal equation of a group with efforts at the national body’s purification producing Jews, in this case, as biological waste—in contrast with the supposedly more historical and political commitments war entails— overlooks Eichmann’s embrace of Theodor Herzl, and also Eichmann’s ties with Zionist officials in Europe as well as Palestine, which Arendt notes repeatedly with the same commitment to a nationalist agenda that Herzl himself advanced.45 Arendt ridicules Eichmann as trite, banal, and thus anti-intellectual, but these comments are undercut by the material she herself presents. How many US deportation officials today have read Simone Bolivar’s nationalist tracts (analogous to the work of Herzl), much less Immanuel Kant, as did Eichmann?46 Crucially, Hilberg’s three-volume work The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) opens with several pages of tables that chart political and other violence against Jewish communities since antiquity, placing the Nazi policies in this context and not as an event that is, as Arendt argues, completely new. Alongside the parallels with other nationalist and racist expatriation, deportation, and miscegenation policies, all of which occurred in the United States and throughout Europe, the other significant challenge for Arendt’s goal of distinguishing the great injustice of genocide from the necessary violence of war, as previously alluded to, was August 6, 1945. If those ordering violence who are the furthest removed from its implementation should be held the “most responsible” for its consequences—the rationale of the Israeli court convicting Eichmann, who never personally killed a single individual, and which Arendt quotes at length and strongly endorses (246–7)—then why did Arendt not demand a war crime trial for President Harry Truman? This is not a question that just emerges in hindsight.47 A letter to Time magazine, written on August 6, 1945, states: Sirs, The United States of America has today become the new master of brutal infamy and atrocity. Bataan, Buchenwald, Dachau,

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Jacqueline Stevens Coventry Lidice were tea parties compared to the horror which we, the people of the United States of America, have dumped on the world in the form of atomic energy bombs. No peacetime applications of the Frankstein monster can ever erase the crime we have committed. We have paved the way for the obliteration of our globe. It is no democracy were such an outrage can be committed without our consent! (Walter G. Taylor of New York City)48

Such a view seems not so different from Arendt’s own position in The Human Condition, published in 1958, just two years before her Eichmann assignment. She, too, dwells on the horrifying implications of just the potential for the Earth’s inhabitants to render their planet permanently toxic, and it would be equally plausible for her to point out that the use of this novel device and this novel context would require elites carry forward the message of Mr. Taylor, precisely to prevent the atomic bomb—far more threatening to humanity than any gas chambers, much less machine gun fre—from further use. And yet Arendt ultimately finds that Eichmann, not Truman, is the person unworthy to share her world. The 1958 work focuses on the novelty of the atomic age, whereas in 1961 Arendt evokes the emergence of genocide, a project she claims was entirely separate from the war, and even in tension with it. Arendt quotes Churchill on the implications of the “blotting out of whole peoples, the ‘clearance’ of whole regions of their native populations” as “crimes that ‘no conception of military necessity could sustain’” and that were, Arendt emphasizes, “independent of the war.”49 She further explains that what had prevented the Nuremberg Tribunal from doing full justice to this crime was not that its victims were Jews but that the Charter demanded that this crime, which had so little to do with war that its commission actually conflicted with and hindered the war’s conduct, was to be tied up with the other crimes.50 Prior to the United Nation’s convention on genocide, ratifed in 1951, Arendt claimed no punishment under international law was available if government offcials committed massacres for no reason other than the targets’ racial, ethnic, or religious identities and not any alleged crimes. The bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were advertised as part of the effort to force the emperor to surrender, a position Arendt stakes out despite copious contemporaneous evidence to the contrary.51 Arendt inferred this rationale allowed Truman to target major cities for annihilation and still escape prosecution as a war criminal: “[T]echnical developments in the instruments of violence had made the adoption of ‘criminal’

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warfare inevitable.”52 Arendt is claiming that aerial bombardments, and of course the atom bomb, inherently required the foreseen deaths of civilians, which was a violation of the Geneva Convention. But she asserts that these actions, for which the president and officers go unpunished because “only those outside all military necessities, where a deliberate inhuman purpose could be demonstrated” could be prosecuted.53 Truman might evoke a plausible “military necessity” for his order. Eichmann, Arendt claims, could not. This is striking. In 1958 Arendt warns that the atomic age had destroyed the Archimedean point from which we might experience a world separate from our control as a vantage point for meaningful, independent perspective on ourselves. In 1961, Arendt effectively surrenders her independent judgment to the nuclear age, capitulating to a monstrous techne without resistance. Arendt needed to emphasize the novelty of Auschwitz to explain why she supported convicting Eichmann for crimes against humanity but not Truman. There was, she says, “a clear recognition of the new criminal who commits this crime,” a crime that was different from other war crimes, including the shooting of partisans, the killing of hostages, and the annihilation of native populations “to permit colonization” because the Jewish genocide was a “crime that could not be explained by any utilitarian purpose,” and thus Eichmann’s crimes, in “intent and purpose ‘to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surface of the earth’ were unprecedented.”54 This scans well, perhaps too well. As we have seen, Arendt herself has acknowledged that the first slaughters were directly associated with the war, and that Eichmann assisted Zionists to organize the transportation of Jews from Europe to Palestine.55 To advance the claim of the Nazi’s novel Jewish genocide, Arendt struggles with some facts and ignores others. Alert to the fact that Jews in previous epochs had been targeted for simply being Jews and no other reasons, Arendt criticizes the judges in Jerusalem for placing Auschwitz in the context of other pogroms and projects of the nationalist nation-state: They therefore believed that a direct line existed from the early antiSemitism of the Nazi Party to the Nuremberg Laws and from there to the expulsion of Jews from the Reich and, finally, to the gas chambers. Politically and legally, however, these were “crimes” different not only in degree of seriousness but in essence.56 But it was not only the judges in Jerusalem who made this point. Hilberg had as well, and not only that, he and others later made it clear that the early efforts at rounding up Jews into ghettos and slaughtering them in forests on the city outskirts throughout the Baltic countries and in Poland had nothing to do with gas, but relied on local armed forces coordinating with Rudolf Heydrich’s team, of which Eichmann was a part.57 Such

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actions were indeed in places that had histories of pogroms. Seeing the killing of Jews in these places during World War II as continuous with earlier pogroms is not the grave confusion Arendt suggests. When Arendt’s majestic writing style confronts selected intuitions about politics, the form forces a corrective to sloppy thinking. However, when it comes to war, her lofty certitudes reiterate conventional stupidities as wisdom and thus normalize, naturalize, and thus depoliticize war. Of course wars vary from one and other. But it seems the biggest difference between Hitler’s destruction of the East European Jews as well as other Slavs, by the millions and largely in hand-to-hand combat, and slaughters by the conquistadors in the Americas, is that the latter had no literate survivors to historicize their suffering. The nations inhabiting America at the time of Spanish and English conquests only had earthen mounds to mark their prior existence as a people after they were slaughtered to the last individual, their villages razed by the hundreds, and their grave sites made invisible as such following being ransacked for gold and jewelry, according to the priest chronicling Hernando De Soto’s expedition.58 This is not to diminish by one iota the horrors suffered by Jews or other groups the Nazis targeted, but to propose that thinking and justice require the abolition of all wars and the criminal indictment of anyone responsible for the taking of a human life, that is, the removing of the quotation marks Arendt places around “war crimes” and the condemning of all perpetrators of violence for reasons other than an immediate defense against immediate violence. Lurking behind Arendt’s commitment to the novelty and singularity of the Jewish genocide is her heartfelt if not sentimental commitment to the nation-state, which appears episodically throughout her work, in particular in “We Refugees” (1944) and The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958), and leads to this unpersuasive analysis, and thus to claims that, returning to Plato, seem to advance a view of friends and enemies that normalize allegiances based on a warfare and thus injustice—claims that Arendt scholars almost unanimously have accepted if not embraced. Arendt argues that rights in the abstract are useless and that only the nation-state can protect these, and only for those individuals who belong to them, specifically endorsing the “pragmatic soundness” of Edmund Burke’s claim that the “rights which we enjoy spring ‘from within the nation’ . . . the ‘rights of an Englishman’ rather than the inalienable rights of man.”59 Arendt’s defense of the nation-state bears no marks of Arendt’s otherwise nuanced, in-depth, and therefore clear-sighted research and analysis, but instead sloppily recapitulates the prevailing intuitions of Burke’s age, her age, and our own. Truman is not in Arendt’s sightline because the Japanese civilians targeted for his human experiment with mass immolation and vaporization were denizens of a city and their destruction was not an “attack upon human diversity as such, that is upon a characteristic of the ‘human status.’”60 That is, it is one thing to kill a large number

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of people; that is war and that is unfortunate. It is an entirely different and more heinous crime if these deaths aim to eliminate a nationality, a people, as such.

IV. Conclusion: The Banality of War We can now revisit the questions asked by Plato and the assertions made by Thoreau. What exactly is so horrible about contemplating the disappearance of a people as such, that is, an intergenerational kinship group, in exchange for the persistence of individuals, humanity, and justice?61 According to Arendt, would the Japanese school child eating lunch deserve less concern because the purpose of her death is a war treaty and not the death of all Japanese? Are nations really so vital to the human condition that they are worth our wars? Arendt says “yes.” Comments on an essay by Karl Jaspers are helpful for understanding the positions she takes in denouncing genocide while allowing war in Eichmann. Arendt does not dodge the equation of nations with wars, but acknowledges that the nation entails war and that this is preferable to a “shallow humanity.” In “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” (1968), Arendt attacks her old professor for refashioning Kant’s teleology of a federated system of world governance into a political theoretical cause and arguing on behalf of the “actually existing solidarity of mankind”62 (93). Arendt disparages Jaspers’ objective because it “destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence”63 (87). Instead of her usual clear-eyed logic, Arendt displays an under-motivated commitment to “national traditions” and not those of non-hereditary communities, such as cities, regions, labor, trade, or professional groups, not to mention transcultural hybrid communities that appropriate and recirculate practices and identities from elsewhere, which is indeed the definition of any nation, whether or not it is honest about its hybridity, contingency, and fluidity. Arendt, alas, will have none of this, but prioritizes (pseudo) national traditions as “authentic,” a claim that only mystifies, i.e., locates the nation in a distant ahistorical past, and refuses understanding of either the nation or its traditions. Arendt mobilizes the myth of authentic nations in service of challenging the humanist, leveling, peace-mongering story Jaspers tells: “It looks as though the historical pasts of the nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly shallow unity.”64 Of course, the substantive differences have never been the problem. The purpose of the disparate practices is to provide a purely formal, arbitrary distinction of one people from another. The Hebrew God demands attention to cloven hooves and fabric composition because he says so, and not for any other instrumental reason.65 It is precisely the arbitrary and otherwise foolish quality of these traditional practices that reveals the

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authenticity of the leader, followers, and alike. Just as it would be insane to demand people kill on behalf of an economic cause, it would be mad for people to only wear wool and not mixed fibers in service of any cause other than revealing a commitment to a vengeful God. Arendt insists that the elimination of the nation would not only produce a thin humanity, but that absent the nation “mankind cannot even technically survive.”66 Were such a claim on behalf of a belief that were not widely shared by the vast majority of those who already endorse these myths, then Arendt would require at least an argument to sustain this point. But none is forthcoming, much less actual evidence for its support. Instead of any analysis of the nation, Arendt provides a metonymy that contemporary law and politics have made untenable, at least as a truism if not outright wrong: just as man and woman can be the same, namely human, only by being absolutely different from each others, so the national of every country can enter this world history of humanity only by remaining and clinging stubbornly to what he is. A world citizen, living under the tyranny of a world empire, and speaking and thinking in a kind of glorified Esperanto, would be no less a monster than a hermaphrodite.67 Leaving aside the false empirical claim—that the fall of the nation requires world government, as opposed to administratively autonomous, sovereign states without nations that acquire citizens synchronically, not diachronically—one can imagine as well a queer sexuality, sex, and politics that not only fails to succumb to the pointlessly totalizing heteronormativity Arendt exalts, but affrmatively and infnitely proliferates diverse forms of being well beyond those of a single cis masculinity in contrast with a single cis femininity.68 Indeed, the worldview Arendt puts forward is not just one that falls on the sword of current sexual politics, which has the distinction of actually falsifying her metaphor—the demise of the so-called authentic man and woman did not produce the collapse of sexual diversity—but whose absurdity is anticipated as well by none other than Plato. The “Symposium” suggests, at the very least, that the figure of the hermaphrodite is not a eunuch but implies the inherent diversity, if not plu-versity of an eros that Arendt claims is monstrous. Eros has characteristics of masculinity and femininity, and is distinguished not only by ambiguity, but also fluidity between mortal and immortal. In contrast, in ancient Babylon, the boundary between god and comprehension and self-knowledge was not permitted such fluidity when God jealously destroyed those striving for mutual comprehension and omniscience. Arendt is herself leaving the intellectual company of Plato’s academy and its pursuit of truth and justice, if not “the academy” more generally, and subordinating herself

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alongside the other Israelites to the God of the Hebrew Bible. This angry, vengeful God of war and genocide demands their thoughtless subordination because he says they are different, and chosen, and he is their one God who controls their destiny. “That is why it was called Babel— because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”69 Arendt concludes the critique of Jaspers by writing: The abolition of war, like the abolishment of a plurality of sovereign states, would harbor its own peculiar dangers; the various armies with their old traditions and more or less respected codes of honor would be replaced by federated police forces, and our experiences with modern police states and totalitarian governments, where the old power of the army is eclipsed by the rising omnipotence of the police, are not apt to make us overoptimistic about this prospect.70 Does she mean the codes of honor to which the Spanish conquistadors swore before they annihilated the villagers encountered in their scorchedearth massacres? The code of honor of the British forces who settled the colonies with indentured labor from London prisons, which were managed by the same businessmen who issued charters? The code of honor among the US troops that slaughtered the villagers in Mai Lai? Arendt celebrates the American Revolution over the French Revolution, but seems not to attend to the lessons from revolutionaries who were frst and foremost citizens and not nationals.71 Arendt is a more and less self-conscious descendant of Moses and not Socrates, of Hegel, Schmitt, and Heidgger, and not Thomas Paine, who decried all communitarian ideologies for their violations of human peace, large and small, including the cacophony of church bells and minarets.72 Arendt seems unwilling to contemplate the possibilities of an individuality that is liberated from the friends and enemies established through and indicated by the nation-states—the ties that the US revolutionaries rejected. Perhaps this is why Thoreau, in one of the least fathomable nation-states in history, a sovereignty named after a geographer from another country, enthusiastically proposes trading a brand name to avoid injustice. His critique of the Mexican-American war, slavery, and the Civil War—which also almost ended the country—suggests that Arendt is the one who is not thinking, and is a cog in the war-mongering machine that may display at any given point new techniques, but whose basic engineering is ancient and largely intact.

Notes 1. Plato, “Socrates’ Defense (Apology),” trans. Hugh Tredennick, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Bollingen, 1961 [c. 399 B.C.]), 32c-d.

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2. This work is referred in an English translation as “The Republic.” However, Plato’s discussion of a politeia or political community does not anticipate the specific types of governments and their theories associated with the modern institutions we today call “republics.” 3. Before exploring these tensions, I should note that they are so notable as to raise the question about the integrity of the text producing them, and whether it was indeed all written by the same individual and not added either by fellow co-authors or scribes copying the manuscripts at a later time (Jacob Howland, “Re-Reading Plato: The Problem of Platonic Chronology,” Phoenix 45 (Autumn 1991); Gerard Boter, The Textual Tradition of Plato’s Republic (Leiden: Brill, 1996 [rev.]). According to the version based on TK, Plato envisions that polemos (war) (a) arises entirely independent of the division between friends and enemies Socrates introduces in Book I; (b) has connotations other than simply armed combat, but also conflict more generally and Plato is calling on the qualities of leadership in disputes such as the dis-cutio of the dialogues; and (c) Plato is going back and forth between the qualities of leadership for an ideal state versus those of a more likely state. Another possibility is that different hands contributed different views on this topic. The one indisputable fact is that there are clear logical and substantive differences between the definition of friends and enemies in Book I, and those that appear later in the Politeia. 4. Modern critical scholarship tends to overlook Plato’s views on war, or claim that Plato either embraces war (Craig 1996, Baracchi 2002) or assumes its necessity as a thought experiment (Syse 2010). Syse notes: “Although he wrote no single dialogue with war as its explicit, main topic, it should still come with some surprise that there has been so little secondary literature on Plato’s treatment of ethical aspects of warfare and indeed of his treatment of warfare as a whole” (2010, 104). For an exception, see Hobbs (2008) and especially Frank (2007). Frank disputes common interpretations that suggest war prepares guardians for philosophy, pointing out that Plato is “underscoring the tensions between the conditions of war and those of philosophy” (450, 454). Frank here and in a later work provides close readings and historical context that challenge long-accepted 20th century readings of The Republic (2018). 5. Politeia, 460b, 468c; Peloponnesian Wars (Book II, line 64). 6. Politeia, 543, emphasis added. 7. Other passages in which Plato extols or normalizes friends and enemies based on nationality and not virtue include Book 5, lines 466e, 468d, 469c, 470b. 8. Politeia, 470d. 9. Ibid., 471a. 10. Ibid., 471b. 11. Cf. Ibid., 562c–563b. 12. Another reading, consistent with Frank’s observation that Plato finds participation in war incompatible with the qualities of judgment necessary for philosophers, is that the so-called “city of pigs”—the way of life Socrates first describes and Glaucon dismisses—provides the contours of the truly ideal city (372d). On this reading, the elucidation of the protocols for guardians and other practices of the city that is second-best, a “fevered state” (372e) does not contradict Socrates’ views in Book I and the beginning of Book II. Rather, Plato is narrating the awkward and unpleasant lives of guardians as a means to parody the hardships to which Athenians submit in their hapless pursuit of ease and leisure. 13. Ibid., 327a.

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14. Ibid., 328b; Ibid., 331b. 15. The initial attack on war is relatively subtle and metaphorical, while Book VIII overtly blames creditor oligarchs such as Cephalus for the instigation of civil war (stásis), the greatest harm that a politeia may endure. 16. Ibid., 331b-c. 17. Ibid., 332d. 18. Ibid., 332e. 19. Ibid., 332e–333a. This definition later is contradicted by Socrates defining the enemies of Greeks and non-Greeks as natural (physis). 20. Ibid., 334e. 21. Ibid., 334d. 22. Ibid., 335a. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 335e, emphasis added. 25. Book 8 carries on a similar analysis (see esp. 566c–e, 567a–c). 26. Car Schmitt, Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 28 note 9. 27. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1983 [1795]), 351. 28. Socrates references a tyrant’s order into war, in apparent contrast with the republican constitution requiring legislative support. However, the democracy theorized for the tyrant’s rise also in ancient Athens would have to gain the approval of the generals and the council, at the very least. In this time frame, the council would have been chosen by lot and then, among them, elected a leader and a general. Such mechanisms are different from a republican constitution and the differences may bear further contemplation. 29. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1807]), §475, pp. 288–9. 30. Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in Walden and Civil Disobedience (New York: Penguin, 1983 [1849]), 413. 31. Ibid., 390, emphasis added. 32. Faden, Ruth, U.S Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), xxvi. 33. Frank Putnam, “The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Retrospect,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 95 (1998), contains copy of directive from President Truman providing imprimatur for ongoing research in Japan to study effects of radiation on survivors of atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, available at www.pnas.org/content/95/10/5426. full. “In 1984, geneticists convened by the Department of Energy discussed how to make best use of data collected according to protocols designed to assess the effects of radiation in the wake of the U.S. bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima.” The idea behind the Alta meeting came from another meeting on March 4 and 5, 1984, in Hiroshima, at which new DNA analytical tools were deemed second highest priority for human mutations research, just behind establishing cell lines from atomic bomb survivors, their progeny, and controls. Cook-Deegan, “The Alta Summit,” Genomics 5 (December 1984): 662. See also DOE, “DOE Genomics Timeline,” with information from 1983 through 2017, available at http://genomicscience.energy.gov/program/ timeline.shtml. 34. “The firebombing of Dresden had helped set a precedent for the U.S. air force, supported by the American people, to intentionally kill mass numbers of Japanese citizens. The earlier moral insistence on noncombatant immunity crumbled ruing the savage war In Tokyo, during March 9–10, a U.S. air attack killed about 80,000 Japanese civilians. . . . It may even have been

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35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Jacqueline Stevens easier to conduct this new warfare outside Europe and against Japan because its people seemed like ‘yellow subhumans’ to many rank-and-file American citizens and many of their leaders.” Barton Bernstein, “The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs 74 (1999): 140. Bernstein’s article synthesizes a number of secondary and primary sources supporting his argument that the US aerial bombings that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians were a form of state terrorism used to induce a government’s surrender. See Theodore Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question (New York: Maccabeaen Publishing, 1904 [1896]). Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1965 [rev.]), 83. Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Memorial Center website, www. yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/faq.asp. “At last, while the two Kings each commanded a Te Deum in his camp, Candide .  .  . clambered over heaps of dead and dying men and reached a neighboring village, which was in ashes; it was an Abare village which the Bulgarians had burned in accordance with international law. Here, old men dazed with blows watched the dying agonies of their murdered wives who clutched their children to to their bleeding breats; there, disebowelled girls who had been made to satisfy the natural appetites of heroes gasped their last sighs; others, half burned, begged to be put to death. Brains were scattered on the ground among dismembered arms and legs” (F.-M. Arouet Voltaire, Candide, ed. Norman Torrey (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1946 [1759]), 7). Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003 [1961]). Boyer (1985, 183), citing Gallup (1945). Louis Mumford, “Atom Bomb: ‘Miracle’ or ‘Catastrophe’?,” Air Affairs (July 1948): 329, cited in Boyer (1986, 284). Mumford, “Atom Bomb,” 329, cited in Boyer (1986, 285). Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 103; Waltz (1937); Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 7. Waltz, The Nationality of Married Women, 23, 32, 59; Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 39; Anti-miscegenation laws remained in place in the United States until the Supreme Court Ruling on (Loving vs Virginia in 1967)a. Amos Elon, The Pity of it All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743– 1933 (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), e.g., 124–6; See also Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970) [1968]). For example, see Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 40–1, 60, 61, 136, 252. Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (New York: Knopf, 2014) makes this point using recently discovered interviews with Eichmann, but it is clear already in Arendt’s own texts. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 246–7. Walter Taylor, “Letter to the Editor,” Time Magazine, August 6, 1945, Available ProQuest. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 257. Ibid., 258. In 1946, the Herald Tribune ran an article quoting Fleet Admiral William F. Haley, Jr.: “‘The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. It was a mistake to ever drop it. Why reveal a weapon like that to the world when it wasn’t necessary?’ Halsey asserted that [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

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had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before” (AP, “Halsey Decries Atom Bombing of Hiroshima: Unnecessary Experiment,” ProQuest Historical Newspapers, September 9, 1946). Numerous studies then and now have confirmed this. Truman’s rationale was no more credible than Hitler’s claim that attacking Jews was necessary to confront the world Jewish conspiracy, which of course Arendt rejects. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 246. Ibid. Ibid., 274, 277, 275. E.g., ibid., 59–61. Ibid., 267. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 1: 19. Lawrence Clayton, Edward Moore, and Vernon Knight, eds., The De Soto Chronicles Vol. 1 & 2: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1995). See also, Mann, 1491. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 2d enlarged ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973 [1958]), 290–1, 299. DOE, and see Stevens (2003, 268–9). Stevens (1999, 2009). Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?,” 93. Ibid., 87. Ibid. Leviticus 11:3; Leviticus 19:19. Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?,” 87. Ibid., 89. Stevens (2009). Genesis 11:19. Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?,” 93–4. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990). Thomas Paine, “Worship and Church Bells,” 1797. http://thomaspaine.org/ essays/french-revolution/worship-and-church-bells.html.

Bibliography AP. “Halsey Decries Atom Bombing of Hiroshima: Unnecessary Experiment.” ProQuest Historical Newspapers, September 9, 1946: 3A. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 1965 [rev.]. ———. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. ———. “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” In Men in Dark Times, 81–94. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970. ———. On Revolution. New York: Penguin, 2006 [1963, 1965 rev.]. ———. Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd enlarged ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973 [1958]. Baracchi, Claudia. Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Bernstein, Barton. “The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered.” Foreign Affairs 74 (1999): 135–52. Boter, Gerard. The Textual Tradition of Plato’s Republic. Leiden: Brill, 1996 [rev.]. Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

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Clayton, Lawrence, Edward Moore, and Vernon Knight. The De Soto Chronicles Vol 1 & 2: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539– 1543. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1993. Craig, Leon. The War Lover: A Study of Plato’s Republic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Elon, Amos. The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743– 1933. New York: Henry Holt, 2003. Faden, Ruth (Chair). Advisory Committee on U.S. Radiation Experiments: Final Report. Washington, DC: GPO, 1995. https://archive.org/details/ advisorycommitte00unit. Frank, Jill. Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s “Republic”. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. ———. “Wages of War: On Judgment in Plato’s Republic.” Political Theory 35 (2007): 443–67. Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1807]. ———. Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967 [1821]. Herzl, Theodore. The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question. New York: Maccabeaen Publishing, 1904 [1896]. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003 [1961]. ———. The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996. Hobbs, Angela. “Plato on War.” In Maieusis: Essays in Ancient Philosophy in Honour of Myles Burnyeat, edited by Dominic Scott, 176–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Howland, Jacob. “Re-Reading Plato: The Problem of Platonic Chronology.” Phoenix 45 (Autumn 1991): 189–214. Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace. Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1983 [1795]. Kennedy, Ellen. Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar, 110. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Locke, John. A Letter Concern Toleration. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983 [1689]. Loving v. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967). Mann, Charles. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2005. Mumford, Louis. “Atom Bomb: ‘Miracle’ or ‘Catastrophe’?” Air Affairs, July 1948. Paine, Thomas. “Worship and Church Bells.” 1797. http://thomaspaine.org/essays/ french-revolution/worship-and-church-bells.html. Plato. “The Republic.” Translated by Paul Shorey. In Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 [c. 375 B.C.]. ———. “Socrates’ Defense (Apology).” Translated by Hugh Tredennick. In Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 [c. 399 B.C.]. Putnam, Frank. “The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Retrospect.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 95 (1998): 5426–31. Royer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon Press, 1986.

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Schmitt, Carl. Concept of the Political. Edited by Tracy Strong. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Stangneth, Bettina. Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. New York: Knopf, 2014. Stevens, Jacqueline. Reproducing the State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. ———. States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2009. Syse, Henrik. “The Platonic Roots of Just Wars Doctrine: A Reading of Plato’s Republic.” Diametros 23 (2010): 104–23. Taylor, Walter. “Letter to the Editor.” Time Magazine, August 6, 1945, Available ProQuest. Thoreau, Henry David. “Civil Disobedience.” In Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York: Penguin, 1983 [1849]. Thucydides. The War of the Peloponnesians and Athenians. New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [c. 411 BC]. U.S Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. The Human Radiation Experiments. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Voltaire, F.-M. Arouet. Candide. Edited by Norman Torrey. New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, Inc., 1946 [1759]. Waltz, Waldo Emerson. The Nationality of Married Women: A Study of Domestic Policies and International Legislation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1937.

3

The “Criminal” and the Crime of Genocide Lissa Skitolsky

The category of the “criminal”—always imagined as a one-dimensional, “evil” individual—has played an essential role in supporting and justifying genocidal practices both in the past and the present. Nazi Germany targeted Jews for destruction in accord with their “war on crime,” and we target African Americans, the poor, and the mentally ill as part of our war on crime. Drawing on Claudia Card’s definition of genocide as the infliction of “social death,” I will defend the claim that the US system of mass incarceration has proved to be genocidal insofar as it has traumatized certain populations already marginalized by the racist, classist, and ableist distribution of power relations, thereby reinforcing and ensuring their powerlessness against violence and discrimination. In my previous work on Holocaust victim testimonies, I introduced the term “unlivable life” to designate the state of being suffered by social death, and I found three conceptual markers of unlivable life expressed in these testimonies: 1) some notion that the suffering endured is “worse than death,” 2) the use of the notion of “Hell” to designate one’s space of suffering, and 3) psychic pain over the loss of familial and fraternal bonds. All three of these markers are also present in hip hop songs and testimonies about prison life, and they convey the traumas of incarceration that can never be healed or forgotten. However, these songs are often dismissed as “gangsta rap” and these testimonies are often silenced.1 In the United States, the criminal justice system is based on the assumption that punishment must be painful for those incarcerated in jails and prisons; criminals do not only lose their freedom, but must be subject to degradation, mental anguish, humiliation, poor nutrition, substandard medical care, unhygienic conditions, rape, and torture. In this way, the justice system is inextricable from a system of vengeance. A society that confuses vengeance and justice has historically led to an authoritarian regime whose existence depends upon the oppression of certain groups categorized by race, ethnicity, religion, class, or ability. Our collective indifference to the brutality of the prison system is reinforced by the trope of the “criminal,” or a “type” of person (belonging to a certain “class” or community) who deserves to suffer; thus it is not surprising

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that the notion of criminality has been essential to the economy of genocidal practices in the past and present. In what follows I will cite testimony from women I visit and teach at a medium- and maximum-security state prison to illustrate my thesis that the American prison system is a system of genocide that inflicts social death on communities marked by race, class, and gender. I will also draw on lyrics from underground rap songs that provide testimony about the genocidal conditions of confinement that belie the existence of a just justice system.

The Criminalization of the Other and Social Death In his phenomenological account of being tortured by the SS after being captured as a member of the Belgian resistance, the philosopher Jean Amèry insists that torture is the “essence” of national socialism.2 This seems strange to many who understand the crime of the Nazis (and the crime of “genocide”) in terms of the mass murder of defenseless populations. Surely the “essence” of national socialism (if there is one) must be understood in terms of the physical annihilation of whole communities. However, if we follow the philosopher Claudia Card and conceive of genocidal practices in terms of how they affect their victims rather than in terms of the intent of their perpetrators, we can better appreciate the meaning of Amèry’s claim and its value for the field of comparative genocide. Card regards the unique evil of genocide that distinguishes it from the crime of mass murder as the infliction of social death. It follows that we must regard as genocidal any system of state violence that undermines the social vitality of particular marginalized populations (notwithstanding the ideal “intent” of such systems). Following this view, genocide scholars study how particular populations suffer from the loss of their familial ties and their capacity to thrive morally, economically, and politically as a result of state policies and institutions that attack those social identities, communal bonds, and traditions that make life meaningful. In this sense, we can regard comparative genocide as the study of historically distinct systems of state-sanctioned tortures upon populations marked by race, ethnicity, gender, sex, ability, and class. Genocide scholars need not be preoccupied with discrete occasions of “genocide” that begin and end, but rather can focus on the historical transmutation of genocidal tendencies over time. We can identify present incarnations of genocidal violence through the analysis of categories and discourses on which they depend; categories that have already played a role in the economy of genocide or served to rationalize the exclusion of entire human groups from the protection of the law and moral consideration. The neoliberal democratic nation-state makes use of anti-democratic institutions and policies to eliminate “dangerous” individuals by denying them basic human rights ordinarily guaranteed by the nation-state. The

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Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben claims that in a radically biopolitical state, such as emerged in Nazi Germany, the “protection of life coincides with the fight against the enemy.”3 That is, the state cannot conceive of how to protect its citizens other than to identify and destroy the “enemy” who represents a threat to them (in the process creating what Agamben calls “bare life,” which is neither political nor natural, but instead the politicized form of de-politicized life). As Agamben has pointed out, Western politics has not escaped from the shadow of Hobbes, and genocidal tendencies are woven into the fabric of Western politics. In the Hobbesian view, one who transgresses the law is an enemy to the people; Hobbes recommends that the criminal be thrust out of civil society and into the “state of nature,” or our pre-political condition, in which we attempt to satisfy our self-interested desires “at all costs.” For this reason, Hobbes described the state of nature as a “war of all against all” where the life of man is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” However, although the “state of nature” is a fundamental premise that justifies Hobbes’s political theory and his view of an “ideal” state as a totalitarian dictatorship, he also admits that the “state of nature” is a product of myth rather than history. In fact, our prisons serve as the space for our imaginative reconstruction of the state of nature where a bunch of brutish, violent individuals use and abuse one another for the sake of their own power and pleasure. In reality, our penal policies—based on the (false) assumption that punishment must be painful in order to keep prisoners docile—create the very conditions that we imagine to exist “outside” of civil society. Perversely, we take the consequences of these policies that create a space marked by terror and violence to “prove” the theory that informs it (that prisoners are brutes who deserve pain). This is in accord with the circular logic that Hannah Arendt associated with “totalitarian” rationality whereby an idea is “proved” by the consequences that follow from acting as though it were true (i.e., the behavior of camp prisoners was “proof” of their inferiority). And the notion that all or most of our prisoners are naturally predisposed to “criminal” behavior sanctions an authoritarian state with the power of life and death over its citizens. Our view of the criminal and the role of this category in inciting and justifying state-sanctioned violence whitewashes the genocidal wounds inflicted by the prison system given that certain populations are more vulnerable to incarceration based on their race, ethnicity, and class. What Hobbes referred to as the “state of nature”—as both the myth and geographical space made possible by the myth—Agamben refers to as “the state of exception” that he regards as central to the entire history of Western politics based on the biopolitical control of citizens. For Agamben, the state of exception is a paradoxical space in human society in which its inhabitants are excluded from the protection of the law by means of their more thorough inclusion in the grip of state power. He

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defines a “camp” as the modern state of exception, though he denies that we can understand the ordinary, modern prison as one type of modern camp.4 If we understand genocide in terms of the infliction of social death, then we can argue (contra Agamben) that the prison is the model for the 21st century camp that sanctions the genocidal oppression of racial and ethnic minorities as well as the working class and the mentally ill. Our Hobbesian perspective on the criminal has perpetuated genocide both here and abroad, so we need to contest this view first and foremost by examining our own attitudes toward criminals, the condition of their incarceration, and our own indifference to their wellbeing. In his 2007 book The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality, Michael Berkowitz uncovers the important fact that the notion of the Jew as a natural “criminal” was essential to the propaganda that convinced many Germans to support the Nazi state.5 Berkowitz proves the prominence of the notion of “criminality” in Nazi patter, platitudes, and policy toward the Jews, and explores how Jewish victims experienced the criminalization of their existence.6 We have not ceased to assume the category of the one-dimensional “criminal” in order to endorse state-sanctioned violence that has genocidal consequences. Berkowitz’s study must lead us to question the larger historical relation between our notion (and the social production) of the “criminal” and genocidal violence. In the United States, the notion of the “criminal” has allowed for the criminalization of entire populations in order to more easily marginalize minority populations for the sake of 1) national unity (against the “enemy”), 2) profit (prison-industrial complex), and 3) sovereign power (white male supremacy). How has this category become so powerful as to efface the individual identities of those who are behind bars and to preclude any empathy we might have for them? In her article on “Schematic Racism and White Paranoia” written in response to the Rodney King trial, Judith Butler claims that our visual and imaginative field is always already informed (or colonized) by the racist, sexist, and classist episteme that informs our social and political relations. In Nazi Germany the populace came to see and imagine the “Jew” as a criminal, as a threat to social order and moral decency. In the United States, the populace sees and imagines the black man as a “thug,” or as a threatening individual ready and willing to break the law. Thus the use of preemptive police force against unarmed young black men is both rationalized and disavowed, even as the police manifest the very irrational violence that they project onto the black man they terrorize. The “criminal” looms so large in our collective unconscious, as does our desire for vengeance against those who transgress the law, that it is difficult if not impossible for politicians to criticize the conditions of confinement and remain in office. There is no political or social will to fundamentally restructure our

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justice system so that the process of punishment no longer rests on the infliction of extreme, gratuitous pain. Berkowitz’s study on the importance of the criminalization of Jews for the justification and implementation of the Nazis’ “final solution” illustrates the power of the category of the “criminal” to normalize state violence against minority populations in a nation-state founded on “law and order.” He insists that it is no coincidence that two of the most notorious, unconcealed killing grounds of the Holocaust, Auschwitz and the Ninth Fort (Kaunas, Lithuania), had been, respectively, a “prison camp” and a prison—in a more conventional sense—which no doubt eased their transition to installations of “extermination.”7 The Nazi genocide was facilitated by the transformation of prisons into death camps and ordinary human beings into “criminals” or moral monsters. If the populace could accept state violence against those labeled as “criminal,” perhaps we should ask whether this transformation from prison to camp is better described as a radicalization of certain tendencies already operating in the “more conventional” prison. Berkowitz explains that: the Nazis cited the supposed criminality of Jews as a reason for their confinement in ghettos, as well as for harassing them with a barrage of legislation that further circumscribed their ability to move about and to provide basic sustenance.8 The popular indifference to the wellbeing of criminals is tied to the bad utilitarian reasoning that informs most domestic and foreign policies related to national security. According to this view, it is more important to secure the safety of the populace than to protect the wellbeing of prisoners, which are seen as mutually opposed aims. Here, as Agamben explains, “the care of life coincides with the fght against the enemy.” This is “bad” reasoning because of course it is not true that the infiction of pain against those judged guilty of breaking the law is necessary for public safety. However, our insistence on this non-fact is related to the fact that once the Nazis cast the Jews as “criminals” they were better able to explain to themselves and German citizens the “necessity” of their exclusion and death. Berkowitz supports his thesis about the importance of the criminalization of the Jews to their destruction in Nazi Germany with the following anecdote: As the Criminal Police and the Gestapo competed over who was to get greater control of the Lodz ghetto, Kriminalinspektor Bracken

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supported the extension of his jurisdiction by saying that “in the ghetto live, at any rate, about 250,000 Jews, all of whom have more or less criminal tendencies.” This statement was considered convincing, and his “detachment moved in.”9 The Nazi state required the participation of the police force in order to marginalize and destroy entire Jewish communities, and this participation was facilitated by the rhetoric of criminality. As Berkowitz summarizes at the end of his book: The Nazis’ use of the allegation of criminality, of assigning a collective criminal intent to the Jews, has proven to be one of the more resilient but less obvious aspects of their legacy. In the eyes of Victor Klemperer, it was “one of the many paths along which Hitlerism could march.” Like many of the Nazis’ horrific and bizarre notions, seeing Jews as criminals was unoriginal, even hackneyed. But it probably helped a huge number of Germans and their fellow perpetrators, as well as bystanders, to accept what the Nazis were doing to the Jews.10 Thus, the Nazi genocide was facilitated by general, widely held presuppositions about the “criminal” who perpetually threatens the domestic order promised by the nation-state and who, in fact, is incapable of respecting civil and social bonds, and as such is undeserving of the human and legal rights guaranteed by citizenship. These are the same presuppositions that justify our own indifference to every person in jail or prison, even though more than half of our prisoner population has been judged guilty of non-violent crimes, and at least half of all prisoners suffer from severe mental illness.11 Only in the last two sentences of his book does Berkowitz suggest the larger implications of his study of the criminalization of Jews in Nazi Germany. He writes: Certainly minority groups who have struggled to gain a foothold, and those in marginal economic spheres, have been (and continue to be) stigmatized because of their supposed propensity to crime. Although genocidal regimes existed before and after Hitler, the Nazi imagination of the Jews as criminals is one of the grossest perversions of the respect for law ever to be instituted.12 Though Berkowitz recognizes that the current marginalization of populations marked by race, ethnicity, and class is also facilitated by the criminalization of these populations, he nevertheless reinforces the difference between the genocidal use of the “criminal” that rests on a perversion of the law and a non-genocidal (though still problematic) use of the

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“criminal” in a just legal system. However, what if the genocidal practices made possible by the category of the criminal have always been present in our prison system to a greater or lesser degree? In this case, we cannot make a facile distinction between an illegitimate “genocidal” use of the category of the criminal and a legitimate, “legal” use of the category of the criminal. Rather, the criminal justice system of the modern nationstate allows for and perpetuates a consistent amount of genocidal violence against ethnic and racial minorities, the poor, and the mentally ill. Though Agamben explains that the state of exception is marked by the (legal) suspension of the law, he does not grasp how criminal law allows for the suspension of the law through the multitude of regulations and rules in the prison that generate a culture of gratuitous violence against populations that are already vulnerable to structural discrimination. Recall that Card claims that the special evil of genocide lies in the infliction of social death upon a particular population, or an attack upon the rituals and social bonds that unite a group of people together and foster a meaningful life. She adopts the term from the sociologist Orlando Patterson, who coined it to refer to the “natal alienation” suffered by American slaves. As Card explains in her book Confronting Evils: Genocide not only intentionally strips individuals of the ability to participate in social relationships, activities, and traditions, it aims to destroy the possibility of those particular kinds of relationships, activities, and traditions for others in the future . . . The harm of social death is not necessarily less extreme than that of physical death. In my view, the special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death (when it does that) but social death, producing a consequent meaninglessness of one’s life and even of its termination.13 Card views genocide as an evil; she defnes “evils” in relation to intolerable harms inficted on living things. Card explains that intolerable harms are evils when they result foreseeably from culpable wrongdoing, and when the deeds producing them are morally inexcusable. In one application of her defnition of evil, Card explains that the death penalty in the United States is an evil policy because it has been proved that its application has led to many state murders of people wrongfully accused of a crime. Thus, despite its ideal aim, we can reasonably expect that the death penalty will continue to infict intolerable, inexcusable harm on American citizens. Similarly, despite its ideal aim, we can reasonably foresee that the US criminal punishment system will continue to infict social death on African Americans and undermine the vitality of entire communities.14 There are visible traces of the Nazi past in the carceral present, beyond the ubiquitous presence of swastikas and the “Aryan Brotherhood”—the most murderous of all of the gangs in US prisons.15 Like the camp, the

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judicial system inside the prison is secret and autonomous; there is no government oversight of the punitive decisions made by Department of Corrections staff in local jails, state, and federal prisons. This includes decisions to send prisoners into solitary confinement or deny them parole. For this reason, the D.O.C. staff has absolute power over the prisoners. Finally, prisoners are subject to an infinite number of mental and physical tortures that slowly erode their ability to resist their degradation. One of the recipients of a MacArthur “genius” award in 2014 was Jennifer L. Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford University who conducted a series of experiments to show how “mostly unconscious racial stereotypes can criminalize African-Americans,” and proved that police officers are more likely to judge those whose faces are the most stereotypically “black” as criminals. As she explains, “It’s almost as if people are thinking of blackness as a crime.”16 Surely we can no longer ask how so many ordinary Germans were indifferent to the wellbeing of the Jews unless we feign ignorance of our own indifference to the marginalization of African Americans or accept our moral hypocrisy. Some scholars may balk at a comparative analysis between the criminalization of Jewish life in Nazi Germany and the criminalization of black life in the United States due to the apparent disparity of conditions. However, those who do not think prison life is a scene of gratuitous suffering, violence, and lawlessness have never been to prison or read prisoner testimony or seriously listened to hip hop.17 Further, genocide scholars study the conditions that allow for state violence to become rationalized, rather than establish a hierarchy of suffering whereby some victims don’t “suffer enough” to be proper victims of genocide. Some might object that unlike victims of genocide who are persecuted on the basis of stereotypes, prisoners are punished for what they have done. However, this is not accurate, as prisoners are not tortured for the crimes they are accused of committing, but because they are viewed as “criminals” with inherently violent dispositions who are incapable of spiritual renewal. That is, guards do not inflict pain on prisoners because they grew marijuana, or shoplifted, or got a D.U.I., but instead because these individual transgressions are the sign of a “criminal” disposition or a pathological fixation with harming others.18 Though we can intellectually grasp that committing one crime does not make one a “criminal,” those who are confined in jails and prisons are seen and imagined as inherently threatening, unpredictable, violent individuals who do not respect civil order or social bonds. If all Americans were equally vulnerable to arrest and incarceration as a result of breaking the law, then the system would not inflict distinctly genocidal wounds from the regular torture of the prisoner population. However, we should wonder if the conditions of incarceration would be as violent and degrading if there were a proportionate representation of white people among American prisoners. The statistics of the

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prison population illustrate the racist economy of the US penal system. Today, people of color make up 37% of the US population but 67% of the prison population. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, and Hispanic men are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as non-Hispanic white men.19 African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million people incarcerated.20 African Americans represent 12% of the total population of drug users, but are 38% of those arrested for drug offenses and 59% of those in state prison for a drug offense. African Americans serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as whites do for a violent offense (61.7 months).21 How does the criminalization of entire populations serve the interests of the modern nation-state and, in particular, how does it serve the United States—the very model of the neoliberal welfare state—whose citizens comprise less than 5% of the world’s population and yet confines 25% of the world’s prisoners? Over the past several years, scholars in a variety of fields have traced the dramatic rise of incarceration in the United States to the multiple failures and contradictions of the neoliberal state. In his article “Impedimenta State: Anatomies of Neoliberal Penality,” the geographer Martin Jones explains the connection between the modern penal and neoliberal states: Underpinning [the penal state] is the neoliberal state, which adopts an ever more aggressive, invasive, and neo-paternalist attitude towards the regulation of (urban) poverty resulting from such socioeconomic restructuring. Due to labour market segmentation regimes, which operate in variegated ways to maximise surplus value through exploitation strategies, this process is heavily gendered and racialised. As outlined by Peck, distinctively new forms of policy reconstruction and regulatory “rollout” are in evidence and in an “emergent process of carceralisation”, suggesting perhaps that “the prison system can be understood as one of the epicentral institutions of these neoliberal times.” (Peck, 2003: 226)22 The neoliberal nation-state sustains the disparity of wealth generated by monopoly capitalism by criminalizing those racialized populations who suffer most from economic exploitation under conditions of white supremacy. In this way, the prison system is one of the “epicentral institutions of these neoliberal times,” as it allows the nation-state to betray the liberal agenda of reform through the rhetoric of national security. In his book Punishing the Poor,23 the sociologist Luic Wacquant illustrates how the United States has shifted from the single (welfare) to the double (social-penal) regulation of the poor. Given the insuffciency of social assistance for the poor and the fact that minimum wage does not

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allow for a decent quality of life, the working poor are forced into illicit avenues to general capital. Further, given the racist structure of the labor market and the educational system, we now have a school to prison pipeline that facilitates the criminalization of young, poor black youth. Jones also reports that “more than two-thirds of all prisoners are unemployed when they go to jail (67% compared to a society average of 5%), over 70% suffer from some form of mental health disorder, and 47% return to jail.” The prison system serves to prevent the modern proletariat from economic mobility and serves to traumatize racialized communities who already suffer from structural discrimination. Jones draws attention to the pivotal statement in Wacquant’s book on the prison system/urban ghetto nexus, in which exists: A tightly linked . . . triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology, and cultural fusion. This relationship has spawned a carceral continuum that ensnares a supernumerary population of younger black men, who either reject or are rejected by the deregulated low-wage labour market, in a never-ending circulus between the two institutions.24 In the United States, the socio-political markers of race, class, and ability converge to target specifc populations for incarceration whose mobility would otherwise threaten the white supremacist, capitalist organization of labor relations. Wacquant describes the “proactive penal apparatus” as one of the four “institutional logics” of neoliberalism, as it penetrates the nether regions of social and physical space to contain the disorders and disarray generated by diffusing social insecurity and deepening inequality, to unfurl disciplinary supervision over the precarious fractions of the post-industrial proletariat, and to reassert the authority of Leviathan so as to bolster the evaporating legitimacy of elected officials.25 Today, the obscene growth of prisons in the US is interwoven with capital and sovereign power, and prisoners feel abandoned by their country. The category of the “criminal” serves to normalize and rationalize the state violence inficted in prisons against vulnerable human beings already marginalized in the (white supremacist, neoliberal, capitalist) nation-state. The public critique of the prisons as presented in the popular media focuses on the vast number of young black men in prison, rather than on the conditions of confinement themselves. The public decries the trend of mass incarceration instead of the racist system of incarceration that ruins the health and integrity of individuals and entire communities. My hope is that understanding the prison system of the modern nation-state as part of the genealogy of genocidal practices that still pervade our political

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institutions and socio-economic relations might elicit more shock and moral horror at the conditions of confinement. Further, the politics of abolition require the legal category of genocide in order to expose the illegal and evil nature of the conditions of everyday confinement; for the legal category requires that the structure itself be razed (one cannot “reform” a genocidal institution or policy). The recognition of the genocidal logic that informs the prison system is necessary to provoke the political will to demand the abolition of modern prisons and the penal culture that informs them. When prisoners talk to me about the basic conditions of their confinement, which are governed by rules that serve to generate excessive suffering, I often think of a passage in Foucault’s essay on Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History: Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.26 One of the rules of prison life in the US is that the state does not provide prisoners with products for basic hygiene such as a toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, brush, etc. At the prison where I teach, many prisoners complain that the only free soap is harsh and causes their skin to break out in pimples. Prisoners must buy hygienic products through the commissary, and corporations make an enormous amount of money by selling their products in the prison at grossly infated prices. Further, these prisoners are given a few pairs of underwear for an entire year. Prisoners who do not have family members or friends contributing to their commissary accounts must rely on the salary they make in prison to buy hygienic products. At this prison, the highest paid position receives 20 cents an hour. Further, most prisoners complain about the quality of the food and many prefer to skip meals altogether and eat the processed food they can buy from commissary. This leads to poor nutrition and poor health. If a prisoner is in pain and requests medical attention, it may take years before their request is granted. Prisoners can call their friends and family, but only at grossly infated prices and, of course, under surveillance. Any infraction of prison rules may lead to cell restriction or solitary confnement; if the anguish caused by this isolation further prevents the prisoner from following the rules, then she is put back into isolation. Prisoners cannot go to the funerals of their family and friends, and they are denied the right to vote. Upon release, they are disqualified from most student loans and forbidden from living in Section 8 housing (federally subsidized low-income housing). They are also often disqualified from other government assistance programs such as welfare and food stamps. The only logic operating in these rules is the economy of social death, for

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they reinforce the powerlessness of marginalized populations. Of course, in the prison, the law coincides with the suspension of the law, as correctional officers harm prisoners with impunity and prisoners are not arrested for harming each other, but rather, in extraordinary cases, “sent to the hole.” However, in this space of exception, the laws governing the carceral space work in tandem with the suspension of the law to inflict social death upon the prisoner population. And prisoners suffer acutely from their misrepresentation as “criminals” and the harsh treatment they receive that is justified by this misrepresentation. Countless incarcerated women have asked me: “Why am I being judged as a ‘criminal’ for the worst decision I ever made?” And of course I do not have an adequate answer.

Testimonies of Social Death in the American Penal System In my experience visiting prisoners and teaching philosophy in a mediumand maximum-security state prison for women, words always fail to describe the carceral scene in which the infliction of trauma has been so routinized as to make it seem normal and inevitable. The association of prisoners with criminals serves to efface the irreducible individuality of each prisoner, and suggests that each prisoner is marred by the same moral defect and the possession of evil intentions. In the United States, the prison system depends upon the criminalization of racial and ethnic minorities, the poor, and the mentally ill, which rationalizes their civic and social death. With Card’s support, I have expanded her understanding of the “social death” suffered by genocide victims to include the loss of the social instinct itself, or the ability to relate to others in a healthy and meaningful way, as well as the loss of the personality, or the “self,” who could be in-relation to others. This occurs to prisoners as a regular consequence of the conditions of their confinement and the rules that govern prison life. In the prison I visit, there are feces on the walls in the cells reserved for solitary confinement—reminders of the mental destruction suffered by those who live there alone for months and years. I once had a student in her 60’s who was due to be released from prison in one week, but she had just found out that her daughter (who she hadn’t seen in ten years) had a serious staph infection that doctors predicted would take her life within 48 hours. The prison administration would not let this woman leave six days early in order to say goodbye to her dying daughter. The system attacks the most sacred bonds between humans and the most basic expectations for humane treatment. American indifference to the wellbeing of prisoners is reinforced by the vocabulary we use to describe the conditions of incarceration and the categories of prisoners. When we casually use the word “lifers” to refer to those prisoners who have been sentenced to die in prison; or the

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phrase “solitary confinement” to refer to a regular punishment inflicted on prisoners; or the word “cell” to refer to the tiny cage where prisoners suffer from the loss of identity, pride, and health; or the word “criminal” to refer to every single person in prison, we normalize the extraordinary amount of violence and useless suffering in the penal system as the inevitable, legal, rational consequence of breaking the law (or of having been judged guilty of breaking the law). As previously mentioned, American hip hop is the only form of popular culture that consistently testifies about the conditions of confinement and reveals the perversity of these terms and their centrality in an economy of state violence against African Americans, who are still imagined as “magical” beings able to withstand any pain and survive any brutality. Underground rap songs from the 1970s until today convey the pain perpetuated by these discursive practices that both hide and disavow the inexcusable, intolerable suffering that they sanction. However, popular, radio-worthy hip hop does not provoke critical thought about racism or state violence, and it serves the aim of stereotyping all rap so as to provide reasons to ignore or dismiss the value of underground rap and the testimony it provides about the penal system. For example, in his song “16 on Death Row,” Tupac Shakur draws attention to the plight of juvenile offenders who are sentenced as adults to life in prison or the death penalty. In this song, Tupac raps: “The brother in my cell, is 16 as well/ It’s hard to adapt when you’re Black and you’re trapped in a living Hell.” Later in the song, he raps: “They got you trapped, you’re better off getting shot up . . . /I wish I woulda known while I was out there/Now I’m straight headin’ for the chair.”27 These lyrics convey the idea that the conditions under which one suffers in prison are worse than death; that, indeed, one would do better to go down in a blaze of gunfire than to be arrested and subjected to prison life. Genocide testimonies often detail types of suffering that lead to a sort of death-in-life—a state in which one’s life becomes insupportable as one’s life, and death itself no longer appears as the greater of evils. Escaped slave Harriet Jacobs is quite clear about this in her 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: “Death is better than slavery.”28 Among the inmates at the Nazi camp, the “Muselmann” was the term to refer to this state of worse than death. Although Agamben uses the term “bare life” to refer to this life made unnaturally vulnerable to state violence through its liminal status as homo sacer, I prefer to speak about the conditions of “unlivable life” in the state of exception so as to avoid any possible connotation with some sort of “natural” life stripped of the trappings of civilization. Unlivable life is an aberrant state of being produced by state-sanctioned violence. One example of how prisoners suffer from the distortion of their needs and desires is the disturbing fact that some male prisoners develop an obsessive compulsion to masturbate while staring at other prisoners or

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correctional officers. In prison slang, these individuals are referred to as “gunners,” and they are usually excluded from the general population of prisoners and subject to greater punitive measures as a result of their illness. So the prison creates the conditions that cause the mental disorders for which prisoners are then held responsible and further punished.29 The Nazis created the conditions that necessitated criminal behavior in the ghettos and the camps, and the United States creates and sanctions the socio-economic conditions that necessitate crime in its inner cities and prisons. As Shakur raps: “Crazy, I gotta work with what’chu gave me/ You claimin’ I’m a criminal and you the one that made me. Now I’m lost in this holocaust headin’ for my grave G.”30 In prison, many inmates suffer from the loss of their moral agency and may permanently suffer from the loss of their own personality and their ability to be social in a healthy, nurturing way. Of course this affects the families of these prisoners so that an entire community suffers social death from conditions that are often felt to be worse than death itself.31 According to The National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated, “The uneven geographic distribution of incarceration in poor communities and communities of color means that the effects radiate beyond the individual to the broader community, presenting profound long-term consequences for family integrity, public health and general quality of life.”32 I know a black woman in prison who is 38 and has been incarcerated there since the age of 16; she was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole because she was in the same room as her friend who unexpectedly shot and killed someone. She often describes life without parole as “a slow death.” Indeed, the sentence of life without parole is now often referred to by activist organizations as “the other death sentence.” There is a common phrase among inmates that is also part of the lyrics of multiple rap songs about prison life: “Do Your Time, Don’t Let Your Time Do You.” This phrase recognizes and reinforces an insight that Primo Levi had while imprisoned at Auschwitz, about the great danger presented by the fact that “the personality is fragile,” and subject to disintegrate under traumatic suffering. Many prisoners who regularly suffer from solitary confinement, sexual abuse, and/or hard restraints may never emotionally or physically recover from their suffering. And like many camp inmates, many prisoners in US state and federal prisons often lose their social instincts altogether and find themselves unable to form healthy relations with others either during or after release. Our high recidivism rate is related to the mental anguish suffered in prison, as ex-offenders have an extremely difficult time adapting to the conditions of “normal” life. A 2006 Justice Department study found that 75% of female prisoners and 60% of male prisoners suffer from severe mental illness;33 what is unclear is how many prisoners developed psychiatric disorders as a result of the conditions of confinement themselves.

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Countless rap songs testify to the general criminalization of black youth and their constant harassment by police officers, which undermines their ability to be young, carefree, social, and healthy. Songs like “Police State” by Dead Prez and “Sound of da Police” by KRS1 convey the anger, anxiety, and depression felt by those who are made to feel that they are always already suspect and always already guilty of breaking the law. Here, the mass incarceration of black men hovers as sub-text throughout these songs, driving the urgency of the testimony and protest. For over 30 years, rappers have made use of the terms “genocide” and “holocaust” in order to name the logic of this oppression that is sustained by the network of torture chambers that we refer to as “the penal system.” In this way, hip hop also provides counter-testimony to the rhetoric that reinforces passive indifference to racist oppression and the conditions of confinement, as well as challenges the standard narratives about genocide that support this indifference to the state-sanctioned oppression of racialized communities. As cited previously, Tupac Shakur even used the term “holocaust” as a substitute for genocide, a rather audacious move that also functions as a form of political protest. For this verse serves as a protest against the singular importance granted to the Nazi Genocide and a protest against the exclusion of the American penal system from the popular understanding of genocide. As Shakur clearly understood, our failure to reckon with our genocidal past informs our present indifference to the genocidal wounds suffered by African Americans from their mass incarceration. Thus, the definition of genocide is not merely an academic matter, but pertains to our ability to recognize and thus arrest the genocidal bio-politics that now inform the structure and conditions of incarceration. For this reason, hip hop also serves as a corrective to the overly narrow definitions of genocide promoted by scholars in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies that depart from the more expansive definition provided by the United Nations Convention Against the Crime of Genocide that includes the infliction of “severe mental or physical pain” as a way to “destroy a population.” In her recent article for The New Times Magazine titled “Black Life is a Condition of Mourning,” the poet Claudia Rankine poignantly describes the emotional terrain that attends the social death suffered by the black community as a result of their criminalization: Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system. The unarmed, slain black bodies in public spaces turn grief into our everyday feeling that something is wrong everywhere and all the time, even if locally things appear normal. Having coffee, walking the dog, reading the paper,

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taking the elevator to the office, dropping the kids off at school: All of this good life is surrounded by the ambient feeling that at any given moment, a black person is being killed in the street or in his home by the armed hatred of a fellow American. The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives.34 As genocide scholars, we are in a unique position to detect the routine patterns of state violence against targeted populations that are hidden from view and immune to public scrutiny. Our epistemic vantage point also imparts the moral obligation to oppose genocidal violence and the exclusion of any population from moral consideration and the protection of the law. We must widen our focus beyond the study of discrete occasions of genocide to the genocidal practices that are interwoven into the architecture of the nation-state and normalized through discourse and practice. In his book on Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Michael Rothberg writes that “history is an echo chamber,” and “an ethics of memory establishes fidelity to the echoes.”35 His text suggests that scenes of political violence do not disappear; rather they reverberate in later scenes of violence. When we approach the history of genocide as a series of state-sanctioned mass murders, it doesn’t make sense to ask the question of how the past invades and over-determines the present. So we study the Rwandan genocide, but we don’t talk about the violence that arose in the aftermath and that still rages on in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And we study the moral horror of American slavery in high school, but we are silent about the prisons. In her book on The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander draws a line from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, and illustrates that the United States has always inflicted violence in order to sustain white supremacy.36 The racist and classist prison-industrial complex does not just ruin the lives of those incarcerated, but produces a consequent insecurity and unnatural vulnerability for all African Americans that undermines their social vitality. In this way, social death stretches beyond the prison and to the community as a whole, so that, as Rankine explains, Black life is a condition of mourning. In the United States it is not the case that everyone is equally vulnerable to arrest and incarceration, and yet we still believe that 1) most people in prison belong there and 2) subjecting them to isolation, gang violence, sexual violence, fear, substandard medical care, and poor nutrition will somehow deter future crimes. We also believe that prisons are necessary for our security. None of these beliefs are supported with empirical evidence, but they follow from a cartoonish conception of lawbreakers who want to do evil for the sake of evil. This stereotype justifies the exclusion of 2.5 million Americans from

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our moral consideration and the protection of the law. We must have the courage to recognize the seeds of genocidal ideology in our own criminal punishment system that is sustained by the category of the “criminal.” Though there has been more recent social and academic critique of solitary confinement and the death penalty in the United States, there are few credible, public figures who advocate for the abolition of prisons. In my view, the idea that the prison system is excessive because of the regular use of solitary confinement and the death penalty is akin to saying that the problem with Auschwitz was the existence of the gas chambers. We need to abolish, rather than reform, this network of torture chambers that perpetuates the racist and classist status quo. Insofar as the prison system is autonomous and secret and unaccountable to the government or the public, it represents a “camp” that undermines the ideals of the nation-state. The extent to which the genocidal tendencies of the past still inform the penal system in the present is shocking and morally atrocious. Even more so is its quiet perpetuation.

Notes 1. Lissa Skitolsky, “Finding Man in der Muselmann: The Use and Abuse of the Walking Dead,” in Metacide: Genocide in the Pursuit of Excellence, ed. James R. Watson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 2. Jean Amèry, At the Mind’s Limits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 30. 3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 147. 4. Agamben insists that the modern “camps” based on the “state of exception” which sustain the genealogy of “bare life” in the political process are fundamentally different than modern prisons. “When our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentration camp. The camp—and not the prison—is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos.” 5. Michael Berkowitz, The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 6. Ibid., xiii. 7. Ibid., 53. 8. Ibid., 54. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 226. 11. Prison Policy Initiative, www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html (accessed January 7, 2017), www.urban.org/research/publication/processing-andtreatment-mentally-ill-persons-criminal-justice-system/view/full_report (accessed January7, 2017). 12. Berkowitz, 227. 13. Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 265. 14. Ibid., 265. Card has suggested that the UN definition should be amended to stipulate that the acts in question are genocidal if committed either with the intent to destroy or “with the reasonably foreseeable consequence of destroying, in

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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whole or in part” (Card, 2008). This would be an important step in strengthening the power of the document to force nations to intervene in large-scale atrocities, for then the rationale for intervention would not simply focus on the motivations of the perpetrators, but instead on the consequences of their actions and on the harms they inflict on others. It would recognize both the intention of the perpetrators and the system of violence they help realize as co-determinants of a genocidal process; it would, to borrow the terms used by A. Dirk Moses, recognize the centrality of both agency and structure that are alternatively emphasized as constitutive of genocide by “liberal” and “post-liberal” scholars (Moses, 2002). Southern Poverty Law Center, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ group/aryan-brotherhood. Felicia R. Lee, “MacArthur Awards Go to 21 Diverse Fellows,” New York Times September 17, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/arts/macarthurawards-go-to-21-diverse-fellows.html. As a genre, hip hop has always testified to the suffering of the black community under state violence rationalized as justice, and a criminal justice system based on vengeance. Further, the American public rarely considers the vast numbers of prisoners who have been wrongfully accused of crimes. The legal theorist Richard Leo has shown that the interrogation process itself (in which it is legal for police officers to lie to suspects about what they know or what evidence they already have) creates the conditions for false confessions insofar as suspects become confused, disoriented, and will eventually say anything in order for the interrogation to stop. Although it is impossible to know how many confessions are false, we do know that a vast number of defendants admit to crimes they know they did not commit in order to take a plea deal and avoid the risk of a longer sentence or the death penalty. So given the high number of false confessions and plea deals, and the vast number of prisoners who suffer from severe mental illness, it is not accurate to say that prisoners are harmed for what they have “done.” The Sentencing Project, www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, www.naacp. org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/ Ibid. Martin Jones, “Impedimenta State: Anatomies of Neoliberal Penality,” Criminology and Criminal Justice 10 (2010): 393–404. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Jones, 83–4. Wacquant, 307. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, ed. Daniel W. Conway and Peter S. Groff (London: Routledge, 1998). Page number? 2Pac, 16 on Death Row. Amaru Entertainment. Interscope Records. 1997. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000). In her 2013 article “Pennsylvania Sued Over Treatment of Mentally Ill Convincts,” Sophia Pearson reports that the Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania alleged in their lawsuit that “Pennsylvania houses mentally ill prisoners in ‘horrific conditions’ of solitary confinement, violating their constitutional rights.” The complaint also alleges that “Inmates diagnosed with serious mental illness are confined in so-called restricted housing units that exacerbate their illness.” According to the complaint, “Prisoners in the

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30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Lissa Skitolsky units are locked in small cells for at least 23 hours a day on weekdays and 24 hours a day on weekends.” It describes the situation as “a Dickensian nightmare” that violates the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. “As one judge put it, solitary confinement for a person with mental illness is like an airless room for an asthmatic.” www.bloomberg.com/ news/articles/2013-03-11/pennsylvania-sued-over-treatment-of-mentally-illconvicts. In 2015, the State of Pennsylvania reached a settlement with the DRN and promised to end the isolation of mentally ill prisoners unless there were “exceptional circumstances” that warranted the isolation. 2Pac, Po Nigga Blues Scott Storch Remix. Amaru Entertainment. Interscope Records, 2004. One in nine African American children (11.4%), one in 28 Hispanic children (3.5%), and one in 57 white children (1.8%) in the United States have an incarcerated parent. Parental incarceration is now recognized as an “adverse childhood experience” (ACE); it is distinguished from other adverse childhood experiences by the unique combination of trauma, shame, and stigma. https://nrccfi.camden.rutgers.edu/files/nrccfi-fact-sheet-2014.pdf. The National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated, https://nrccfi.camden.rutgers.edu/files/nrccfi-fact-sheet-2014.pdf. Bureau of Justice Statistics, www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mhppji.pdf. Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-blacklife-is-one-of-mourning.html. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 224. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).

Bibliography 2Pac. 16 on Death Row. Amaru Entertainment. Interscope Records, 1997. 2Pac. Po Nigga Blues Scott Storch Remix. Amaru Entertainment. Interscope Records, 2004. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010. Amèry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Berkowitz, Michael. The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Card, Claudia. Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, edited by Daniel W. Conway and Peter S. Groff. London: Routledge, 1998. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.

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Jones, Martin. “Impedimenta State: Anatomies of Neoliberal Penality.” Criminology and Criminal Justice 10 (2010): 393–404. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Skitolsky, Lissa. “Finding Man in der Muselmann: The Use and Abuse of the Walking Dead.” In Metacide: Genocide in the Pursuit of Excellence, edited by James R. Watson. New York: Rodopi Editions, 2010. Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

4

Genocide and Agency in the Americas Methodological Considerations Rocío Zambrana

In his book American Holocaust, David Stannard argues that we should not ask ourselves whether an American holocaust “can happen again,” but rather whether it “can be stopped.”1 Stannard’s provocation orients my reflection on genocide and agency. My intervention seeks to offer two methodological considerations. First, I develop the notion of exemplarity as a methodological orientation for thinking about genocide. Drawing from T.W. Adorno’s negative dialectics, exemplarity allows critical assessment of the singularity of genocide in terms of the logic particular to a historical experience as well as the universal logic that exceeds that experience. Second, I elaborate on the notion of institutional agency in order to develop the relation between a historical experience and its transposable logic. Agency, I argue, is a feature of institutional distinctions that have a material and logical history. I articulate the notion of institutional agency by developing Aníbal Quijano’s concept of coloniality of power in light of discussions of genocide in America. In this context, I consider Elga Martínez-Salazar and Jodi Byrd’s work.

Exemplarity Adorno’s claim, in his 1966 Negative Dialectics, that “[a] new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen” can be read in two ways.2 First, it can be read in a way that supports what is known within genocide studies as the “uniqueness” of the Jewish Holocaust. Second, and alternatively, it can be read as developing “exemplarity” as a methodological orientation for thinking about genocide. Contemporary debates within genocide studies offer a variety of criteria for establishing the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust.3 Here, I will focus on one criterion, namely, the distinctively bureaucratic and technological methods employed to pursue the goal of total extermination. That Adorno’s claim can be read as buttressing the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust follows from his account of genocide as the result of the logic

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of instrumental rationality distinctive of Western modernity. A logic of identity that is intrinsically instrumental structures not only philosophically conceived enlightenment rationality, it also structures modern scientific, economic, and political institutions. Indeed, Adorno pursues his account at a high level of philosophical abstraction in order to account for, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, the spirit of instrumental rationality, and its modern, bureaucratic form of institutionalization, which made the Holocaust style solutions not only possible, but eminently “reasonable”—and increased the probability of their choice. This increase in probability is more than fortuitously related to the ability of modern bureaucracy to coordinate the action of a great number of individuals in pursuit of any, also immoral, ends.4 Already in his 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, coauthored with Max Horkheimer, Adorno had launched a critique of Western rationality and its logic of identity.5 Quantifiability, calculability, equivalence, and utility are principles of order that respond to the impulse to mastery germane to enlightenment rationality.6 Enlightenment rationality seeks to master (external and internal) nature on the basis of what Adorno and Horkheimer call the “principle of immanence,” which seeks to explain every event as “repetition.”7 Nature is understood in terms of regularity and causality; indeed in terms of identity. Identity is accordingly understood as the principle of truth. Quality, difference, and deviation must be reduced to equality with all else through the leveling principle of identity. Identity guarantees the necessary and universal status of scientific explanation and economic exchange. It does so by sacrificing the identity of anything with itself.8 It sacrifices singularity. “Genocide,” Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, “is the absolute integration.”9 The meaning of the administrative murder of millions cannot be specified by quantity, but is a matter of a new quality that derives from mass killing. Or better stated, it represents a “recoiling of quantity into quality” whereby the methods of killing represent a new form of death itself.10 The concentration camps reduce the individual to a “specimen,” whereby the denial of the individual’s singularity is manifested in the denial of an individual’s death itself.11 It is not an individual who died in the camps, but rather a specimen. This type of death—death in the camps—confirms “pure identity as death.” It confirms, in other words, the logic of identity whereby the nonidentical—the singularity of a life— is integrated into the system with such perfection that not even her death is her own. The camps represent the completion of disenchantment.12 Although there is much to say about this, the claim that Auschwitz is the culmination of a historical process that was always already genocidal is most relevant to our discussion.13 It was always already an attempt to

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reduce the nonidentical to identity by quantitative, calculable, manipulatable means. Following Adorno’s account, the Jewish Holocaust is unique for at least two reasons. First, the methods of extermination employed are the culmination of the development of instrumental rationality distinctive of a Western logic of mastery. It is the culmination of the development of the West—from ancient Greece to 20th century Germany. The Holocaust is unique, then, since it not only expresses but also discloses the logic of mastery germane to enlightenment rationality. It is for this reason that the Holocaust yields a new moral imperative—that our thoughts and actions are ordered in such a way that Auschwitz will not repeat itself. Second, then, the Holocaust reorients moral, ethical, and political concepts and institutions so as to dismantle its very possibility. It is unique since it delivers new ethico-political categories—ones adequate to a world in which bureaucratic mass murder was not only a mere possibility, but became an actuality. Rather than an argument for uniqueness, I argue that Adorno’s insights yield an account of exemplarity.14 It is at once an account of the particularity of the logic of the camps and the universality of the logic of identity at the heart of Western rationality. Although the argument for uniqueness takes these two logics as inseparable, I argue that they should be understood as distinguishable. Indeed, Adornian exemplarity gives us a way of thinking through the particularity of a form of violence while understanding it as an expression or instantiation of the overall logic of a historical development. We should analyze both together and separately. Here, I am interested in suggesting that while Auschwitz is exemplary of the particular form of dehumanization in 2oth century Europe, genocide in the Americas is exemplary of the overall logic—of the colonial/ imperial logic—distinctive of the development of Western modernity. In order to further develop the notion of exemplarity from Adorno’s texts, it is helpful to recall that the notion of exemplarity is developed from Kant’s Critique of Judgment and has been at the center of many discussions of ethico-political critique following Hannah Arendt.15 Arendt read Kant’s theory of reflective judgment as his “unwritten” political philosophy. Exemplarity refers to a shift in how we think of the relation between universality and particularity. In the first Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant writes that [j]udgment in general is the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then judgment, which subsumes the particular under it, is determinate . . . . But if only the particular is given and judgment has to find the universal for it, then this power is merely reflective.16 In refective judgment, both judgment and refection must fnd the rule (the universal) in the particular, rather than subsuming the particular

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under the universal. As a source of the universal, the particular is exemplary. It delivers a “rule” that calls for universal assent.17 The particular makes an objective claim that is theoretical and practical at once. Arendt takes Kant’s account further by arguing that examples are the “guideposts of all moral thought.”18 Their validity is a matter of their communicability and hence of sensus communis—it is a matter of our capacity for an “enlarged mentality,” to think together.19 To say that the particular is exemplary, then, is to say that it guides action that bears objective validity insofar as it is recognized intersubjectively. Following this line of thought, one could argue that Auschwitz is exemplary in the following way.20 The experience of the camps compels us to develop new “moral universals” that should guide our individual and collective actions.21 For example, the very concept of genocide—its legal, moral, political valence—is articulated from this historical experience.22 Similarly, conceptions of bodily and moral dignity are articulated in light of the forms of dehumanization distinctive of the logic of the camps.23 These new categories call for universal assent, given that Auschwitz has disclosed universal features of our conceptions of right or dignity that call for explicit articulation. These conceptions are “actionable” since they inflect juridical, moral, and political national and international discussions of mass killing, mass atrocity, and genocide. Although I am quite sympathetic to this understanding of exemplarity, I want to develop the Adornian alternative previously mentioned, namely, exemplarity as a matter of disclosing the particular and universal logic expressed by a concrete historical experience. It is important to note that, for Adorno, exemplarity does not yield a rule or imperative that can be articulated with normative stability.24 The point of a dialectic of enlightenment is to show that germane to enlightenment rationality is a logic that can be understood as always already genocidal. It is to show that freedom and forms of violence are entwined in ways that are fundamental to Western modernity and that are, for this reason, unpredictable in practice. For Adorno, then, exemplarity discloses a rule or logic that remains normatively ambivalent since it accommodates positive as well as negative meanings and effects. The very concept of genocide or the imperative that follows from Auschwitz do not represent norms or guideposts impervious to critical, ethical, or political distortion.25 They can be misused, coopted, and re-signified. Adorno’s negative dialectics responds to the normative instability that is expressed by the dialectic of enlightenment. A negative dialectics is a negativist strategy. It begins with a particular form of injury or harm (the logic of the camps) and discloses its “truth,” its “universal” logic or form of rationality (a logic of identity and instrumentality). For Adorno, the universal disclosed remains negative in content yet positive in form.26 It is negative in content, since what is disclosed is the untruth of the state of things—that enlightenment freedom is deeply implicated in the administrative killing of millions. It discloses that the “whole is the false,” as

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he put it in Minima Moralia.27 It is negative, since Adorno does not tell us what the right state of things or the good life looks like. He rather articulates the logic of that harm and traces its larger cultural and historical context. Auschwitz is exemplary, accordingly, since it allows us to articulate both the logic of this particular experience—the logic of this particular form of dehumanization and violence—and the overall logic of Western modernity—the logic of identity and its genocidal tendencies. Negative dialectics is positive in form, however. In developing a critique of enlightenment rationality and idealist methodologies, it offers a methodology of interruption.28 It offers ways of thinking vigilant of its own “totalitarian” tendencies.29 Adorno’s critique of identity thinking in Negative Dialectics can be seen as a critique of determinative judgment. Reflective judgment begins to get at what Adorno will term the “preponderance of the object,” whereby cognition mimetically approximates the object—the other, the “nonidentical”—without subsuming or mastering it.30 Accordingly, Adorno emphasizes bodily sensation as a mode of practical abhorrence that serves as the source of moral orientation after Auschwitz.31 Such an alternative model of thinking/judging disrupts the identitarian tendencies of thought itself, of Western modernity itself. The crucial point is that awareness—vigilance—of thinking’s own tendencies is ongoing. Because there is no rule or guidepost that is not itself subject to distortion, cooption, or resignification, a negative dialectics trades in “hope.” It hopes that critique “will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total.”32 Exemplarity, according to Adorno’s negative dialectics, should thus be understood in two ways. The first sense rewrites the argument for uniqueness by reframing it as the logic specific to a particular historical experience. Exemplarity in this sense should be understood as disclosing the particular logic of a historical experience in relation to an overall logic that made such experience possible in the first place. As mentioned earlier, Auschwitz is exemplary of dehumanization distinctive of instrumental rationality within 20th century Europe. Secondly, exemplarity should be understood as disclosing the logic of a general historical framework that made a particular experience possible in the first place. Auschwitz is exemplary since it discloses a logic of identity and instrumentality germane to Western rationality—a logic that was always already genocidal. In this second sense, exemplarity is a matter of disclosing the logic of a broader historical development, thereby situating a particular event in various spatio-temporal directions: backward into its conditions, sideways into its connections, forward into its consequences. This second sense allows us to assess such a logic as transposable, as the logic of an overall historical development that structures a historical experience as well as institutions that have been normalized after the experience itself. Understood in the second sense, the notion of exemplarity presses us to think through genocide in the Americas. It calls for an account of the

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logic of extermination germane to the historical rise of Western modernity such that it can be assessed as an ongoing logic. Here, we must leave Adorno behind. We must move beyond a critique of the enlightenment’s self-destructive tendencies to an account of the enlightenment’s destruction of non-Westerners as germane to its very project. Although the relation between genocide, colonialism, and empire has been documented within genocide studies, I turn to decolonial thought and critical Indigenous studies to account for this alternative dialectic of enlightenment.33 Both decolonial thought and critical Indigenous studies are necessary starting points since they call attention to the fact that the logic of extermination from which America was born is ongoing, albeit in different forms and degrees. Indeed, for Aníbal Quijano, Elga Martínez-Salazar, and Jodi Byrd, the colonial/imperial logic distinctive of Western modernity is not to be studied as a thing of the past. Our present is not to be considered as merely struggling with a legacy.34 The task is to unearth, understand, and interrupt ongoing forms of coloniality and, in the context of our discussion, their relation to genocide. When Adorno argued that our new categorical imperative is to “arrange thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen,” he suggested more than new moral guideposts. I read his statement as an imperative to dismantle the cultural, economic, and political structures that made the Holocaust possible. Redemption of lives lost depends on more than acknowledging the individual’s singularity or her singular experience. It requires dismantling the conditions that make any life subject to radical forms of dehumanization. This means examining and interrupting the historical, institutional processes by which, as Martínez-Salazar puts it, [t]hose whose humanity is protected through force and economic power have influenced and even determined who counts as human— and so whose lives count as lives and whose deaths deserve mourning and remembrance.35 I suggest that this requires examining the agency of forms of institutional rationality. In the next section, I develop the notion of institutional agency in order to think through the transposable colonial/imperial logic that is not only the legacy of a history of extermination—it continues to be at work in contemporary institutions in different forms and degrees.

Institutional Agency In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer traced the structure of instrumental rationality and its logic of identity to Greece. Their account of modernity rejects more familiar notions of the advent of modernity in the scientific revolution, French and German enlightenment,

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or, most relevant to our purposes, the conquest of the Americas. They challenge the standard distinction between the ancient and the modern. Principles of pre-Socratic philosophy (the moist in Thales, the undivided in Democritus) are but “early rationalizations.”36 Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato’s insistence on mathematical truth is a “longing for demythologization.” Odysseus is proto-bourgeois. Western civilization is not a matter of historical events, but rather “built” on the threat of nature and the impetus for “control of both external and internal nature.”37 An analysis of the development of modernity is thus a history of power. Yet power here refers to the compulsion to mastery distinctive of Western rationality. The text reconstructs this cultural rather than factual history of modernity. Such rejection of a factual history of modernity is the weakest aspect of the text—one that compromises the power of the very notion of a dialectic of enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer sacrifice analyzing the actual forms of violence tied to the development of modernity in order to unpack the cultural legacy of the enlightenment from Greece to Europe. In order to navigate between the factual and the logical history of Western rationality, I propose the notion of institutional agency. Agency, in this context, should be understood as a feature of institutions, rather than a matter of victims/survivors or perpetrators. By institutional agency, I understand the ways of being, doing, and knowing that derive from a history of power whereby normative distinctions are instituted and maintained, and through which distinctions become transposable logics that reproduce forms of power or violence. I propose this way of understanding agency in order to examine the history of extermination in the Americas that underwrites an imperial/colonial logic that remains in force. Here, Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power is helpful. Institutional agency is the result of distinctions drawn by a history of power. In the context of discussions about modernity, this history of power is a history of conquest and colonization from the 15th century onward.38 For Quijano, this is a history of specific forms of organizing existence that produce the modern world order. This is a history, then, of the institution of a normative order—a global order based on capitalist, Eurocentric, and heteropatriarchal forms of being, knowing, and doing. Such order is a “normative order” since it institutes distinctions concerning what is intelligible versus that which is unintelligible, valid versus the invalid, human versus the non-human, inviolable versus the dispensable, grievable versus the ungrievable, and so on. “Normative” here means that these distinctions establish what ought to be the case, even if the distinction itself or its history is far from what should be the case. The crucial point is that these distinctions legitimize and therefore mediate institutionalized modes of being, knowing, and doing. The notion of the coloniality of power, then, allows us to track not only the history of violence,

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but also the logic of extermination on which the modern world order has been and continues to be grounded. Power, according to Quijano, is the attempt to gain control over basic areas of human existence. “As we know it historically,” Quijano writes, power is a space and net of social relations of exploitation/ domination/conflict articulated basically in function of and centered around the dispute over the control of the following areas of social existence: (1) work and its products; (2) given the former’s dependence on it, “nature” and its resources for production; sex, its products and the reproduction of the species; (3) subjectivity and its products, material and intersubjective, which include knowledge; (4) authority and its instruments, in particular, of coercion in order to secure the reproduction of this pattern of social relations and to regulate its changes.39 Coloniality, in turn, is the specifc form of domination constitutive of the world capitalist system, which was established as a global pattern with the conquest of the Americas.40 Coloniality thus refers to (a) the racial classifcation of the world’s population via the racialization of relations between the colonizer and the colonized; (b) the confguration of a new system of exploitation that articulates under one pattern, namely, capitalism, all forms of control of labor—wage labor, slavery, indentured labor, small commodity production; (c) Eurocentrism as a new mode of production and control of subjectivity; and (d) the nation-state as a new system of collective authority that excludes populations racialized as inferior.41 María Lugones adds an important element to the concept of coloniality of power-gender. Heteropatriarchy is another constitutive form of organizing existence.42 The coloniality of power is thus a mode of “classification”—of distinction making. Such distinction making carves out not only forms of appearing—that is, forms of legibility within an instituted normative order—it also carves out modes of acting, rules for acting, and expectations between agents. Such rules are institutional structures—from state to juridical to pedagogical structures. The development of capitalism through opening new routes of trade and expropriating land and resources, the establishment of Christianity as a hegemonic religion, the consolidation of Western science as the only valid perspective, and the institution of racial distinction (“Indian,” “Black,” “White”) comprise those institutionalized modes of intelligibility and action.43 The point of the notion of coloniality, however, is to trace the history of that distinction making, since it is a history of “the capacity of one group to obtain and find, to impose itself over others and articulate existence under its control, and indeed to reduce heterogeneous histories to one new social structure.”44

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The history of the modern world order as a history of power cannot circumvent genocide in the Americas as the epistemic and material source of classification. For Enrique Dussel, the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” that founds modern rationality is based on the rationale “I conquest, therefore I exist.”45 The rational subject as the bedrock of modernity, in other words, is dependent on the structure of conquest that establishes alterity only to destroy it. Ramón Grosfoguel extends Dussel’s argument by pointing out that the “I conquer, therefore I exist” itself depends on “I exterminate, therefore I exist.”46 This is an important point, since the relation between “I think” and “I conquest” is established “sociohistorically”—that is to say, materially—by a history of extermination.47 Coloniality is therefore a process not only by which the “other” is established as “other.” He or she is established as disposable, dispensable, and subject to extermination. A history of material and epistemic extermination, then, allows us to grasp the structure of Western rationality in light of an imperial/colonial logic germane to it. The decolonial argument deepens the critical-theoretic claim that a logic of identity that was always already genocidal is germane to Western rationality. It submits that a history of extermination is the material-historical reality of the development of Western modernity. The decolonial perspective, then, maintains that the history of modernity is a history of power whereby genocide is a mode of instituting and maintaining the modern world order—a global capitalist, Eurocentric, heteropatriarchal order. This is the argument of Elga Martínez-Salazar’s Global Coloniality of Power in Guatemala. The genocide of the Maya peoples, she maintains, has been germane to instituting and maintaining this order in Mesoamerica from the 16th to the 20th century. In her book, Martínez-Salazar documents the ways in which the genocide of the Mayas unfolded not only through a history of invasion and killing (whether in warfare or through biological means), or expropriation of lands and the institution of slavery through econmiendas and repartimientos (only to be expanded with the African slave trade), or of racial classification that established the Indian as “savage” and later introduced the category of mestizo.48 It was also pursued through the introduction of a racialized and gendered citizenship and the institution of racist taxonomies, which were re-inscribed in the institution of the nation-state with independence from Spain in the 19th century. Such re-inscription took the form of the physical reorganization of urban spaces through further expropriation of lands, militarization, an ideology of national identity (“ladinization”) through the school systems, among other institutional processes.49 Martínez-Salazar argues that the physical, cultural, and political destruction of the Maya peoples was reactivated in the 20th century within a different geopolitical context—the Cold War and counterinsurgency campaigns. Specifically, Plan Sofía attempted the “the reintroduction of a colonial restructuring of the Maya highlands and territories

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into a militarized, terrorized model, in order to keep Indigenous Peoples controlled and contained.”50 The Maya people were targeted in this context, Martínez-Salazar maintains, drawing from the centuries old perception that they were “culturally unfit” and “politically undesirable.”51 Systemic and everyday racism that targeted cultural practices (language, forms of dress, religious-spiritual beliefs, family structure, education) and that intersected with questions of economic status (as in the case of domestic work) were utilized in the context of the threat of communism to perpetrate forms of state terror against men, women, and children (from executions and massacres to kidnappings and secret detentions to rape and torture to assimilationist pedagogical practices).52 The pursuit of feminicide, at the intersection of race and class, and the attack on Maya children, whether by explicitly violent means or pedagogical practices of assimilation, were crucial aspects of the logic of extermination that was reinvigorated in the 20th century. This logic of extermination, Martínez-Salazar argues, is at the heart not only of the treatment of Indigenous peoples within the Cold War, it is also at work at the intersection of citizenship and neoliberal ideology and practice in contemporary Guatemala. In her book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Jodi Byrd develops the colonial/imperialist logic at the heart of modernity and late modernity with greater theoretical precision.53 She argues that the “Indian” or, more precisely, “Indianness” is germane to the colonial/ imperial logic that structures US institutions from its foundational documents to its current domestic and foreign policy.54 Like Martínez-Salazar, Byrd argues that Indigenous peoples are the historical and logical “other” that grounds ongoing forms of institutional agency. The colonial/imperial logic that survives the material history of conquest and genocide in America is a logic of “paradigmatic Indianness.”55 Now, “Indianness” is not merely a racial category whose opposition to “civilization” is necessary for the development of a world order based on capitalist, Eurocentric, heteropatriarchal distinctions. It is a category that sustains sovereignty by marking some as those who “can be killed without being murdered” (as homo sacer).56 For Byrd, the US depends on the transit of Indianness for its own national constitution and reproduction—materially and ideologically. Indianness is in “transit,” since, as the material and logical other that secures imperial sovereignty, the Indian grounds “multiple subjectivities and subjugations put into motion and made to move through notions of injury, grievance, and grievability.”57 Byrd’s book traces the production of and dependence on this paradigmatic Indianness through a variety of literary, historical, and criticaltheoretic texts. Here, I am interested in the logic of “paradigmatic Indianness” that the book as a whole traces. For Byrd, this logic expresses the discursive and juridical articulation of American Indian lives as “ungrievable in a past tense lament that forecloses futurity.”58 The Indian

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is the “original combative enemy that cannot be grieved.”59 The claim here is not only that Indianness is established as the other that makes possible colonial/imperial institutions and their liberal discourse, it is that such an other is maintained as an other that is lamentable, rather than ungreivable. The American Indian is already dead—as a people, they are already done. The difference between lament and mourning thus resides in the possibility of a future in which “Indians will have been decolonized.”60 The foreclosure of that possibility is implied in the lamentability of the genocide of Indigenous peoples.61 We lament their destruction as a thing of the past, thereby eliding their present and future. For Byrd, lamentability rather than ungrievability is at work in the history of US imperial and colonial ventures—indeed in its “global wars on terror, the environment, and livability” as such.62 The point here is that a colonial/ imperial logic depends on more than the production of alterity only in order to destroy it. It depends on the presence of a malleable other that is not only disposable, but already a thing of the past.63 Indianness is, for this reason, “paradigmatic”—it is at the root of racial classification within and beyond national borders. Byrd’s book seeks to “connect the violences and genocides of colonization to cultural productions and political movements in order to disrupt the elisions of multicultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that birthed settler colonialism through inclusion.”64 For Byrd, Indianness is not only paradigmatic as the lamentable other, it is also a site of interruption. Indianness is crucial for understanding how power, and indeed domination, have been “articulated and practiced.” But tracking paradigmatic Indianness does more than provide awareness of the Western destruction of the non-Western. For Byrd, “the Indian is the transit through which presignifying polyvocality is re/introduced into the signifying regime.”65 That is to say, Indianness is a site of interruption of the normative order that depends on it. It reintroduces and indeed maintains difference in being constructed as the lamentable other. Indianness does more than make explicit the agency of empire, then—it interrupts its course at its core. Bringing this potential to fruition, however, depends on a critical-theoretic understanding of its own elision of Indianness and its consequent complicity with the liberal framework that it criticizes. In my view, this theoretical and practical shift is the only way that we could hope to fulfill the promise of articulating the dialectic of enlightenment.

Concluding Remark I have offered two methodological considerations for thinking through the relation between genocide and agency. First, I have offered the notion of exemplarity via Adorno’s work. With Adorno, I argued that a historical experience should be seen as exemplary in two senses. It should be seen

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as exemplary of a logic particular to it, and it can be seen as exemplary of an overall logic that is spatio-temporally transposable. I have also argued that, in order to think through the relation between these particular and universal logics materially—socio-historically—we might think of agency as a matter of institutions. Agency is a matter of distinctions that carve out a normative order and the transposable logics that such order brings into being. These two considerations press us to consider the significance of genocide in the Americas, not merely to understand our past but, more importantly, to understand our present. I hope that these considerations help us navigate theoretical issues, specifically concerning particular and universal features of the undeniable singularity of each case of genocide, mass atrocity, and systemic violence.

Notes 1. David Stannard, The American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), xiii. 2. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1966), 365. For an instructive account of Adorno’s contribution to genocide studies, see Martin Shuster, “Philosophy and Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3. See, for example, Alan S. Rosenbaum’s essay “Was the Holocaust Unique? An Answer to a Peculiar Question,” in Genocide and the Modern Age, ed. Isidor Walliman and Michael Dobkowski (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), and his 2008 volume Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008). See also Mark Levene, “Is the Holocaust Simply and Example of Genocide?,” Patterns of Prejudice 28, no. 2 (1994). For a critical account of controversies surrounding the latter, see Ward Churchill’s controversial A Little Matter of Genocide (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997). 4. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 18. 5. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002). 6. Ibid., 5. In the Preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer announce that “myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” 7. Ibid., 8. 8. Ibid. 9. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. See also the Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6–7, where Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the principle of immanence gives way to “universal fungiblity.” 12. See Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 394. 13. Although Adorno argues that genocide is entangled with the very structure of Western rationality and its logic of mastery, he believes that enlightenment isn’t enlightened enough, that it must “assimilate its regressive moment” for

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

Rocío Zambrana otherwise “it seals its own fate.” For a compelling account of Adorno on this point, see Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998). Cf. Bernstein, Disenchantment and Ethics, chap. 8. For Bernstein, what follows from Adornian exemplarity is “fugitive ethical events” that represent a promise that “fill the space between logical actual possibility” captured by the new categorical imperative. See chap. 9, esp. p. 419. See, for example, María Pía Lara, Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 179–80. The claim “This is beautiful” for Kant is a claim with objective validity. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Arendt, Lectures, pp. 42–3. To be sure, Arendt had important views about the logic of instrumentality at work in the bureaucratic killing of millions. See Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1963) and Origins of Totalitarianism, 2d enlarged ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973 [1958]). Consider the work of Jeffrey Alexander, e.g., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) on the development of new moral universals. Consider the development of and debates about the concept of genocide from Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe to the previously mentioned volumes on genocide. Consider the work of Jean Amèry, At the Mind’s Limit (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009) or Jay Bernstein’s, Torture and Dignity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For an account of Adorno’s rejection of examples, see Eva Geulen, “Without Example: Adorno,” in Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law, ed. Michèle Lowrie and Susanne Lúdemann (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015). Consider the history of the negotiations within the UN concerning the definition and ratification of convention on genocide. See Buck-Morss and others on whether there is a positive moment in Adorno’s negative dialectics, The Origins of Negative Dialectics (New York: The Free Press, 1977). Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2006). Adorno tracks the way in which “actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience” (Negative Dialectics, 362). See Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4, 18. See Negative Dialectics, “The Object’s Preponderance,” 183ff. See ibid., “Metaphysics and Culture,” 365ff. Ibid., 406. See, for example, Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). As Elga Martinez-Salazar puts it, these phenomena “cannot be researched or theorized as ‘past’ or ‘post,’ as the past is deeply interwoven with the present” (Global Coloniality of Power in Guatemala [Langham: Lexington Books, 2012], 5). Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 5.

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36. Ibid., 3. 37. Ibid., 24. 38. Cf. Mark Levene’s work, esp. Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. He argues that genocide should not be seen as the result of “aberrant and hence isolated social structures and situations,” but rather as a result of the “very process of historical development out of which our entire global, politicaleconomic system has emerged.” For Levene, what is distinctive about modern forms of genocide is not the form that it takes—the means through which it is pursued—but the framework within which it occurs. See also his “Is Holocaust Simply Another Example of Genocide?,” 8–9. 39. Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social,” in Festschrift for Immanuel Wallerstein, Journal of World Systems Research 2 (2000): 345; all translations are my own. 40. Ibid., 342. 41. Cf. Stannard’s account of the relation between genocide and racism in Appendix II of The American Holocaust. 42. See María Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” World and Knowledge Otherwise (2008) and “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010). 43. See Martínez-Salazar, Global Coloniality of Power in Guatemala, 6. 44. Quijano, “Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social,” 345. 45. Quoted in Ramón Grosfoguel, “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11 (2013). 46. Ibid., 77. 47. Grosfoguel discusses genocide and epistemicides “against Jewish and Muslim origin population in the conquest of Al-Andalus, against Indigenous people in the conquest of the Americas, against Africans kidnapped and enslaved in the Americas, and against women burned alive, accused of being witches in Europe.” 48. See chap. 2 of Global Coloniality of Power in Guatemala. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 120. 51. Ibid., 101. 52. See Global Coloniality of Power in Guatemala, chap. 4, esp. pp. 111ff. The UN-appointed Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) “only recognized that certain genocidal acts had taken place.” Genocide as a state policy was not present, according to the Commission, because Mayas were not persecuted and killed for being Mayas, but rather because they were named as “subversives” by state security forces (CEH, 1999; Sanford, 2003, 150–1)” (Global Coloniality of Power in Guatemala, 109–10). For Martínez-Salazar, this has led to the denial of the perpetration of genocide, halting rather than facilitating social and juridical justice. 53. Jodi Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), citations will follow page or location number on Kindle Edition. 54. See ibid., location 231. Byrd also says that Indianness “has served as the field through which structures have always already been produced.” 55. As she puts it, “the United States propagates empire not through frontiers but through the production of a paradigmatic Indianness” (ibid., location 507). 56. Ibid., 227. 57. Ibid., location 220. 58. Ibid.

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59. Ibid., location 179; emphasis mine. 60. Ibid., 37. 61. Byrd writes: “So the most we can say, given the lack of possibility of an Indian future anteriority in which Indians will have been decolonized, is that Indians are lamentable, but not grievable . . . The lamentable is pitiable, but not remediable. It is past and regrettable. Grieving, on the other hand, calls people to acknowledge, to see, and to grapple with lived lives and the commensurable suffering, and in Butler’s frame apprehend—in the sense of both its definitions that include to understand and to stop—the policies creating unlivable, ungrievable conditions within the state-sponsored economies of slow death and letting die” (p. 38). 62. Ibid., location 514. 63. The book also discusses paradigmatic Indianness at work in other forms of racialized violence in the US, such as with African and Asian Americans. 64. Ibid., location 77. 65. Ibid., 19. See also, e.g., 38, 231.

Part II

Bodies and Beyond

5

Generational Being Anne O’Byrne

Genocidal violence has a target, which we can call the genos, even though it is not easy to say what that is. Etymology suggests that it is a group, tribe, kind; Lemkin understood it as a national, religious, or racial group, and made a point of noting that it designated both target and attacker; the UN Declaration added ethnical to his list.1 This has produced a knotted conversation about who or what counts as susceptible to genocide, and who or what is attacked and harmed by genocidal violence: individuals, certainly, but is the group itself a relevant object? Genocide is perpetrated by groups; what responsibility does the individual perpetrator bear? Efforts to respond are stymied so long as we regard the genos as an object at all. Far from a thing, genos indicates a mode of being, specifically, our essential generational mode of being. Generation is the activity of reproduction and modification that ties us to those who came before and those who will come after, and the genos sustains itself— though neither an it nor a self—by generation, bequest, and inheritance. We may think of this in terms of biological ancestors and descendants, but we may also think of historical forebears and posterity, the bearing and transmission of traditions, and the work of preserving a culture through the education of the new. The structure is the same in each case and, at its most general, it is the generational structure of the world. Genos is sentimentally powerful—and dangerous—because it is so easily romanticized, and politically powerful—and just as dangerous—because it is easily naturalized. But it is also existentially powerful and cannot be ignored.2 How relevant can genos really be, now that we’re all 21st-century hybrids and enlightened cosmopolitans? If the choice is between what Zygmunt Bauman called the dream of purity on the one hand and the celebration of hybridity on the other, or the clean lines of racial hygiene on the one hand and the mess of sexual mixing on the other, of course we will celebrate the mix.3 Yet hybridity is not yet a solution. As Nicholas Thomas writes, it is “almost a good idea.”4 It has done the necessary work of demoting purity as a social end, but it has also affirmed its position as a taxonomical condition, efficiently obscuring the question of

96 Anne O’Byrne whether a pure line of descent is a matter of a natural kind or a technique of knowing. As we will see, an initial desire to know where we belong becomes intensified as a desire for absolute belonging, then confounded with a desire to belong to an absolute genos. Yet there is never a genos, only genera. We may belong to several of them—why not? And what we experience or long to experience as belonging to a single, self-evident, self-generating group requires the generation and policing of boundaries: this and not that, this because not that, us because not them. We must establish the distinction between groups before we can have them overlap; we must establish purity in order to give sense to hybridity. Anthropologist Stefan Palmié describes the process: “[genera] are in no way mere reflections of empirically ascertainable, objective ‘occurrences.’ . . . They are the results of the work of situationally authoritative technologies of discernment and discrimination and their specific ‘rules of recognition.’”5 The problem is that the structures we deploy to order our knowledge of the world are taken as ontological givens, and the classificatory infrastructure responsible for “hybridity effects”—in this case, blurring effects—rarely if ever are opened to scrutiny. In 1972, biologist Richard Lewontin published his renowned paper demonstrating that the genetic differences among individuals in each so-called race were greater than the differences between members of different races. What that paper might have been expected to do for the conversation within biology and beyond, Palmié’s treatment of hybridity aimed to do for anthropology 40 years later.6 Yet even as the concepts of genos and genocide come undone, we persist in working ourselves into genera, understood minimally as the network of enduring relations linking us to those (of us) who have gone and to others (of us) who have yet to come. Anthropologists study this under the heading of kinship; Hannah Arendt studied it under the heading of world.7 The study of belonging is a privileged hermeneutic reflection on world. We come to be in a context that we have no choice but to experience it as the world, as world-as-such. It is our world—though we don’t yet know to call it that—because its idiomatic and idiosyncratic address provokes us to understanding. It conditions us as knowers. Our world lays claim to us, puts us on the spot, gives us what we need to begin to understand its signs, and we belong to it before it belongs to us. It is not required that I do indeed understand all the signs—complete transparency is not the criterion—but we find ourselves in the hermeneutic situation where belonging means entering into the language and sign system as a passive, and then also active, participant in the activity of making sense. We come to be by virtue of our passive initiation into the world and then our passive and active engagements in various worlds. The plural is significant. It only occurs to us to claim the world as our world in that moment when we realize that there are others, that is, the moment when

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we are addressed in languages and by signs we have to struggle with in a new way.8 The world that had been right there in the most intimate way suddenly addresses the infant across an appalling distance, and she develops the game of Fort-Da, the schoolchild is set upon in the schoolyard in ways he never experienced at home, the music-lover catches glimpses of other worlds, the student encounters the world of molecular biology, the newlywed tries to understand his in-laws, the migrant scrambles to learn a new language, and the patient tries to decipher the sign system of the medical-pharmaceutical complex. We encounter worlds, each with a history and tradition, each one addressing us. We will come to belong to some, but not all at once and not all in the same way, and in some we will always be strangers. The desire to belong to a genos is not nothing. It not only drives genocidal attacks but also conditions our cherished ways of being together as kin. We like the experience of belonging, but also, as helpless infants and social beings linked to the past and invested in the future, we need to belong. This is why we identify genocide as the very worst thing. In this context, the old fantasy of something called the genos that persists over time continues to make sense and has refused to go away. Ignoring this phenomenon leaves us unprepared for the theoretical work of understanding the relation of belonging, genos, and violence, and disastrously unprepared for the knock on the door—if not ours, then our neighbor’s or the door of the family across town or across the border. It also leaves us unprepared—not finally, but in the first instance—for the reassuring, pernicious rhetoric of them and us. This is why an investigation of genos and genocide must proceed hermeneutically, beginning with our generational being.9

Genealogy and Genos We belong no matter what to those from whom we descended, whoever they were. In this sense, the TV genre of celebrity genealogy is on to something. Such absolute and passive belonging is an ontological status, and to experience it without content is to experience it as though religiously, in the broadest sense of the term. “I belong, absolutely” is a statement as incomprehensible and as worthy of respect as Wittgenstein’s example from the Lecture on Ethics: “I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.”10 Belonging “come what may” has the same affective appeal as Freud’s “oceanic feeling,” for which he in turn had little respect.11 Featured in the US on the PBS genealogy show Finding Your Roots, Deepak Chopra discovers more information about his forebears than he had thought possible, and he describes the experience as finding an opening onto the universe. Yet rather than transcendent, it is an Earthly belonging, born of the planetary fact that we came from and belong to the Earth. Genealogical research is how we give discriminatory content

98 Anne O’Byrne to the feeling of belonging. It is not accidental that Chopra glimpses the universe through or in his family line: “Chopras all the way.”12 On the one hand, we all belong to the same Earth in the same way; that element of our being does not require any real or imagined other against whom to construe our belonging. On the other, we belong differently to our different parents. We share the condition of being somebody’s child, but the fate of being the eldest daughter of my mother and father, born where and when I was born, is different from the fate even of my older brothers or my younger sister, different from the fate of all you sons and daughters of all the other parents. What needs to be thought through here, in the crux of the genocide paradox, is the fact that in the existential grey area between being an earthling and being our parents’ child, each of us could be said to belong in many lineages, most of which we know nothing of. In terms of inheritance, we each occupy an intersection of ignorances. We will never know all the places we came from, nor all those people from whom we came. What do we think we know? Our great-great-grandparents mark a genealogical turning point because there, living memory has given out, and their generation is commonly the point by which oral family history has failed.13 Their parents—for the Romans, the generation of the atavus and the atavia—lie just beyond reach. What had been clear lines of descent reaching back from one person to the next now become branches fading in the direction of unnamed nodes. At this point, “To whom do you belong?” cannot be so easily answered with named, storied men and women, with the result that my people, which until now referred to the many particular people from whom I came, becomes my people in the singular, a people.14 No longer able to answer the question: “Who are my people?” we slip toward: “What is my people?” as if these were the same question. The diachronous project of filling in my ancestral tree cannot determine such a thing; beginning with me, the tree branches infinitely into the past and provides no criterion that will fend off that infinitude.15 We have to draw a criterion from somewhere else, and the ghosts of all the lineages not chosen and the ancestors still unknown haunt every selection. In contrast, the synchronous project of drawing a pedigree seems to banish the ghosts from the start. That inverted genealogical tree figure grows from a single ancestor, identifying all his or her living descendants, and secures a place for me among them. Documenting the rhythm of generation and the geometrical increase in the number of descendants, the pedigree branches out but has its own limiting structure: to belong among these cousins I need only trace a single line that shows I belong to that ancestor. It is an elegant figure and a perilous one. Once the contingent, sovereign decision—this ancestor, not that one—is made, that is, once a family tree or a clade stands out against the Borgesian infinity of possible trees, the fact that it was a decision at all can be forgotten. This group, decisively delineated and consisting of those held together

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by the natural bonds of procreation, becomes both a natural group and the occasion of my experience of belonging absolutely. This is where we indulge the fantasy that the genos—my genos—is the embodiment of its own principle. The desire to know those to whom we belong absolutely is confounded with a desire to belong to something absolute, an absolute genos. It is a tragic longing. When genealogy—as a television spectacle or as personal research— turns to DNA for evidence, it is in the spirit of banishing the tragedy. Henry Louis Gates Jr. hosts Finding Your Roots, where guests investigate their family histories first through family lore, then in the historical archive, and finally by offering up a cheek swab and having their DNA analyzed. The premise is made explicit: “By decoding our DNA and revealing the diversity that is hidden in the branches of our family trees, we’ll discover just how blurred the lines that divide us really are.”16 Sometimes, Finding Your Roots uncovers genetic evidence that fills a specific gap in the historical record, naming an ancestor who would otherwise remain unknown. For people whose enslaved ancestors were not named in the US Census before 1870, there are many gaps that would not otherwise be filled.17 At such moments, the evidence of biology supports the lore of family and kin, and directs historical research to other parts of the archive. At the same time, it aligns with more suspect thinking of race. Each guest is presented with a pie chart, which is then discussed as a picture of who she is: “You are 12% Native American, 28% Sub-Saharan African,” etc. The designators marking the pieces of pie are all geographic, usually referring simply to continents but occasionally they are made to refer to more specific groups: Ashkenazi, British, Iberian Peninsular, Ibo. Each chart does indeed show a diversity of genetic origins and each one is offered as further evidence of blurred boundaries. But the premise perpetuates the problem. Imagine the most satisfying of surprises in such a show: an anti-Semite is presented with a chart showing that she has Jewish ancestors, or a white supremacist turns out to be descended from black people. The racist is convinced of the ontological claim that where you come from is who you are, but this is also the unspoken premise of the epistemological-ontological claim that to know who you are, you have to know where you come from. The racist declares that the divisions between the races are real; for Gates, DNA analysis shows that the blurriness of those divisions is real. Both reinforce the expectation that by telling us where we really come from, science can set us straight about who we really are and where we really belong.18 Dorothy Roberts puts the case starkly: The ideology of race as a natural division between human beings that is written in our genes will have devastating political consequences. It can serve as a linchpin of a new, already emerging biopolitics in which the state’s power to control the life and death of populations relies on classifying them by race.19

100 Anne O’Byrne The invention and discovery of the gene in the late 19th century gave us a way of thinking of the causes of family resemblance as located in the material structures of our bodies. It is also the case that genetics took shape as a science in an era dominated by the ideology of purity. Roberts argues that two powerful ideologies—biological race and genetic determinism—are ascending in tandem in America now, and have a large and growing infuence on public policy and public understanding. Thus large scientifc studies such as the Human Genome Diversity Project and the Genographic Project become the focus of public attention and, while the scientists who run them are insistently opposed to genetic determinism, many Americans remain willing to accept genetic explanations for social relationships and behaviors because they continue to believe that race is inherited biology. “These race-gene claims simultaneously confrm the myths that races exist in genes and that genes can tell us everything about ourselves. Together, they support a biological explanation for the widening racial chasm in health, incarceration, and social welfare.”20

Genos and Race When the attackers come and the men with guns call you out, it does not matter that you think of yourself as a hybrid, or having multiple identities, or as no more or less than a human being. Arendt writes: “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.”21 Subjected to racist attacks, one responds as racialized, not as a matter of accepting the designation imposed by one’s attackers, but as a way of contesting what Jew and race mean. It means reclaiming the genos from the naturalized category of race. Frederick Douglass writes in his 1845 Narrative of an American Slave: My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off.22 His mother was sent to a farm 12 miles away, and on a few occasions she managed to see him, setting out at night to walk to where he was, lying with him as he settled to sleep, and then walking the 12 miles back before sunrise. I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day . . . I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death or burial . . . For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder development of the child’s affection toward its mother,

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and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.23 Injustice can be said in many ways. Douglass responds in terms of nature, as will Orlando Patterson a century and more later when he names this fate of natal alienation a “natural injustice.”24 Douglass’s father was a white man, probably the plantation owner. Douglass belonged to him as an instrument, making impossible the relationship by which he could have belonged to him as a son. In Patterson’s analysis, Douglass was alienated from birth and severed from the practices that constitute a subject to whom a culture may be transmitted. He was alienated from the instant of his birth, which is to say there is no question of agency or responsibility on his part. No one wills his own birth. Birth is not an act one performs, so any consequences that rebound on him by birth are not of his doing. The words bastard and slave attach to us with no reference to anything we have done. Yet so do son and daughter. Moreover, at birth he was denied the capacity to make the claims of birth, and this specifically constitutes what Patterson identifies as a natural injustice. Douglass was alienated from his own birth, which would have tied him to past generations and an existing community, would have given him native, local status, and allowed him to make a claim on those who brought us into the world. He writes of the natural maternal affection that was destroyed in his mother and the filial affection that was stunted in him by an owner whose sexual and generational violence makes a hideous paradox of the word father.25 Patterson writes: It was this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of “blood” and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him by the master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate tool, as imprintable and disposable as the master wished.26 That is to say, being able to make a natal claim on our forebears allows us to turn toward the new generation and in turn open ourselves to their claim on us. Because a slave could not make a claim on his parents, he had no natal claim or power to pass on to his children. With natural injustice Patterson is not objecting to a contingent, natural distribution of characteristics.27 Nor is he concerned with a natural unfairness in the distribution of talents or characteristics. Instead, he points to a breach of what he, like Douglass, takes as a natural order that stands beyond the law. How else is one to name the injustice of a law that attacks the relations of mothers, fathers, and children? What word other than blood communicates the value that is denied when families are broken up by the practice of selling-out? What term other than kinship describes the structure that implodes when, as Hortense Spillers

102 Anne O’Byrne describes, one’s father is also one’s owner and the owner of one’s mother, siblings, neighbors, and coworkers indiscriminately?28 Yet, whose nature is this? What kin? Enforceable ties of “blood” existed for whites in the plantation system in the form of legal institutions of marriage, ownership, and inheritance supported by social institutions of the cult of virginity, the fantasy of dynasty, and ideology of white supremacy. The child of the white slave-owner and his white wife did not suffer natal alienation; he could grow up protected by (and also subject to) his parents and the law, and need never undergo anything like the experience of Mr. Reed, a once enslaved man interviewed by Ophelia Settle Egypt of Fisk University around 1930: The most barbarous thing I saw with these eyes I lay on my bed and study about it now—I had a sister, my older sister, she was fooling with a clock and broke it, and my old master taken her and tied a rope around her neck—just enough to keep it from choking her— and tied her up in the back yard and whipped her I don’t know how long. There stood mother, there stood father, and there stood all the children and none could come to her rescue.29 What was denied to Mr. Reed and his family was something the white family had: the ability to protect each other, to be responsible for each other, to act on that responsibility, and to have those responsibilities supported by law.30 In that case, the injustice can be described by appealing solely to existing legal forms, and the claim to equality can take the form of an appeal for equal treatment under existing law. Justice is a matter of extending protection so that no one may whip a girl without fear of interference from her kin or fear of punishment under the law. Still the question persists—What kin? Daniel Patrick Moynihan would write in his infamous 1965 report that, although African Americans had achieved legal liberty, they had not yet achieved equality due to the pathologies of family life to which the Negro family fell victim: “divorce, separation, and desertion, female family head, children in broken homes and illegitimacy.” He observed that in 1963, nearly one-quarter of Negro births were illegitimate, nearly one-fourth of Negro families were headed by women, and Negro women had “too many children too early,” all evidence that the Negro family was disorganized and breaking down. While the white family “remains a powerful agency not only for transmitting property from one generation to the next but also for transmitting no less valuable contracts with the world of work and education,” the Negro community “has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is too out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.”31 Enslaved people called upon the law; the response, when it came, took the form of access to the naturalized rules that had supported the dominance of white men all along. Yet, as Spillers writes:

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the captive person developed, time and again, certain ethical and sentimental features that tied her and him, across the landscape to others, often sold from hand to hand, of the same and different blood in a common fabric of memory and inspiration. We might choose to call this connectedness “family,” or “support structure,” but that is a rather different case from the moves of a dominant symbolic order, pledged to maintain the supremacy of race.32 What other nature, then? What other kin? How else to describe what Douglass and his mother, Harriet Bailey, suffered in their separation? Slavery imposed conditions that undermined slave families and communities in order to eliminate kinship as a mode of identification and as a place of resistance to the imposed identity of mere slave, the property of this or that plantation. Claudia Card, drawing on Patterson, though making no claims about “blood,” gives us the language of social death, which breaks the bonds between people by suppressing the customs that mark our distinctive modes of being, our entry into the human world, our passage through it, and our departure from it.33 Yet Bailey’s response, in the face of that death threat, was to create a nighttime world where she could put her son to bed. We don’t know how she did it—what support she had from the people who would cover for her, the arrangements she made with the female driver who must have been caring for the child Frederick—but we know enough from his testimony to recognize her as a subversive. Meanwhile, who did feed Frederick Douglass? Who provided him with more of the sustained attention that allowed him to become who he was? As Shannon Hoff writes in her phenomenology of belonging: The individual lives inside broad worlds and structures of significance, and she is able to live a more or less meaningful and competent individual life because of the various forms of involvement she has with these worlds and structures—the involvement of belonging, participating, enacting, mattering, and so on. She develops the capacity for meaningful activity as a consequence of being passive both to their formation and cultivation of her as well as to their meaningfulness.34 Self-possession is an achievement rather than a starting point, one never achieved without the attention and cultivation Hoff describes. These are genealogical relations we can learn nothing of from DNA.

Kinship Revisited Kinship is the name for the object of our longing when we long to belong absolutely; it is the essentially generational structure that ties us to past and future. The relation of parents and children is central, but in two

104 Anne O’Byrne distinct ways. That there have been parents and that there will be children is the minimal material condition for a sustained human world, but, as a material condition, it specifies little about the character of the relation and the shape and content of the world. Rather, our description of the relation simultaneously constitutes it as a condition and begins to constitute a worldly generational structure. Kin are those to whom we belong generationally, and the kinship group is the name anthropology has given us for the self-generating genos in its various forms. Yet, despite the assumptions that informed the discipline for 150 years, those forms are not necessarily founded on a generally shared biological or natural understanding of what parent or child means. Social anthropologist Alan Barnard notes: ‘Kinship,’ as defined in the human context, depends on the existence of [culturally articulated] rules, which in turn are understood by ordinary human beings in relation to culturally specific sets of linguistic and extralinguistic categories. The notion that kinship has a biological foundation is really dependent on the cultural definition of ‘biology’. Even in Western societies [which emphasize biological relation], ‘biological’ kinship is often as much a metaphor for social relations as a statement of relevant biological fact.35 In 1967, Claude Levi-Strauss could still refer casually to the “natural links of kinship,” but in 1984, David Schneider’s reconsideration of his own fieldwork on kinship in Yap demonstrated “the way in which kinship has been studied does not make good sense.”36 The system of relations codified in studies of European and North American families had produced the distinction between real kinship relations (based on biology and nature) and fictive (created) ones.37 Applying it to Yap meant forcing relations there into familiar anthro-biological shapes, but now, making a hermeneutic return to the same data, Schneider allowed the phenomenon to set the system in motion. Other anthropologists would go on to describe Malaysian migrant fishing communities where bonds of kinship are formed not just by procreation, but by the sharing of meals, and Andean villages where the children one feeds are one’s own children.38 Others studied the Inupiat of Alaska, where patterns of naming and belonging take their elements from the role one plays in a hunting crew.39 Still others described gay communities in San Francisco, where kinship was constantly reconceived in terms of love, friendship, and biology.40 In each case, kinship signifies a mode of temporal being together, of being with one another toward past and future. This is the mode of being that is vulnerable to genocidal violence. Significantly, identifying an originary need to preserve something of the dead does not sharpen the boundaries of a genos, but instead opens the questions of which dead and whose need. Jeanette Edwards and Marilyn

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Strathern’s study of the people of Alltown, Lancashire, England shows how a kinship group achieves coherence but evades definition.41 Shifting their focus from social and/or biological relations to modes of relatedness, Edwards and Strathern sidestep the anxiety produced by the thought of an infinite family tree; none of the sets of connections they find is infinite, but peter out thanks to lack of interest or social exhaustion. There in Lancashire, an English population that might be expected to present all the features of the familiar Eurocentric kinship model turns out to use own, our own, and disown in ways that include and exclude according to a shifting and unpredictable set of criteria. People are directly connected to one another, or linked through mediating people who may or may not be relatives. Some people drop off the chain of connections and fall out of the group, whether they are relatives or not. Edwards and Strathern write: “Limits are set by how far one wishes to claim—or own, or own up to—such connection.”42 The genos may be a self-limiting group after all, but with the limits provided by the contingencies of lack of affection, interest, or time, all of which the authors regard not as external factors that interrupt the endless chain of kin, but as internal to the workings of kinship. What is crucial is that the responsibility first felt in the context of familial belonging—the desire to keep something of the ones we know and love—passes into the context of kinship as a responsibility to remember “our dead.” But who are they, our dead? Whose dead? How far back? The originary existential responsibility emerges as a genos-making practice in social and historical conditions that will always have to reckon with lack of interest, forgetting, and memorial exhaustion. Spillers writes of fabrics of memory and inspiration; I want to emphasize networks of memory, which call us to responsibility for the past, and of aspiration, which show our investment in the future. She rejects ethnos when it is deployed as a category that forces a phenomenon into stillness, fixing it in place and in time. She writes: “Moynihan’s ‘Families’ are pure present and always tense. ‘Ethnicity’ in this case freezes in meaning, takes on constancy, assumes the look and the affects of the Eternal.”43 Generation disrupts such constancy; genos, as a generational structure, is always in movement, always expectant, but always in mourning too.

Conclusion Once it is extricated from the certainties of genetics and the presumption of naturalism, kinship emerges as the generational structure of world. We come to be in relation to those already here, and our relationships take shape in the interactions that involve such mundane practices as holding and feeding, speaking and singing. We are addressed in these locally and culturally specific ways long before we are addressed explicitly in the voice of parental or pedagogic authority, and long before we experience ourselves as the inheritors of a distinctive culture. According to all these

106 Anne O’Byrne and other modes of relatedness, we come to inhabit a world and belong to a genos. Its past matters to us and we share it with those who inhabited this world before us. The dead enter our thoughts, occupy places in our world, and make demands upon us, not least that we should sustain our shared world in ways they no longer can.44 Thus its future matters to us not only for the sake of our own actions and creations, which we hope might have a life longer than our own, and not only for the sake of the ones to come, but also for the sake of the dead whose suffering might yet be redeemed. Walter Benjamin anticipated a violence from which not even the dead would be safe, that is, a world-destroying violence that could consign its victims to oblivion.45 The Nazi genocide aimed to kill all generations, but the violence that attacks the belonging-together of generations—using rape, enforced pregnancy, sterilization, stealing children, separating families, moving communities, disrupting education, and preventing handing down and inheritance—attacks a world and is genocidal too. Genos can never be sure of itself, and neither the redemption of past suffering nor the conservation of our present work is ever guaranteed. This must be so, since generational life is necessarily open toward the future in the mode of expectation, toward the past in the mode of mourning, and toward other genera in the mode of uncertainty. What would be new about the new generation if we, their progenitors and educators, could know in advance who they were and what they would do? For Arendt, this newness is simultaneously a promise and a threat: the promise that the work we have done will be maintained and remembered in a world renewed by the ones to come; the threat that, grasping their freedom, they will destroy what we pass on to them. Even as they renew the world by their own lights, they forget, letting go of what we committed ourselves to remembering and reminding us of our own failures of memory and our responsibility to mourn. Finally, genera are necessarily plural, and the distinctive worlds we live in abut and intersect. The world consists of many worlds. So long as we think of genera as fixed and worlds as closed, we have no language for what happens when apparently sharp boundaries run right through us. Overlaps and intersections become occasions for fear and, in the absence of a worldly (political) space where contestation happens without guns, they become the place of genocidal violence.46

Notes 1. R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944), 93. 2. For a powerful argument for the existential significance of genocide as an affront to worldliness, see Shmuel Lederman, “A Nation Destroyed: An Existential Approach to the Distinctive Harm of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 19, no. 1 (January 2, 2017). doi:10.1080/14623528.2016.1250473.

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3. Z. Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York University Press, 1997), 6. https://books.google.com/books?id=zVeQQgAACAAJ. 4. Nicholas Thomas 1996, quoted in Palmié, “Mixed Blessings and Sorrowful Mysteries: Second Thoughts About “Hybridity.” 5. Ibid. 6. When Siddhartha Mukherjee published his bestselling The Gene: an Intimate History in 2016, his repetition of the argument still attracted comment. Then again, we should not be astonished by the need to repeat evidence and still have it fail to penetrate public consciousness in the United States, where Creationism is still sometimes discussed as though it were an alternative to Evolutionary Theory, and where political leaders deny the human causes of climate change. 7. I understand the structure of individual worlds and world according to the pattern established by Arendt when she writes of man, people, and world: “For only within a framework of a people can a man live as a man among men, without exhausting himself. And only when a people lives and functions in consort with other peoples can it contribute to the establishment upon earth of a commonly conditioned and commonly controlled humanity.” Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Ron H. Feldman and Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 297. 8. María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia 2, no. 2 (June 1, 1987). doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.1987.tb01062.x. 9. For an approach to these questions that engages the growing literature on epigenetics, see Ada Jaarsma’s contribution to this volume. 10. Wittgenstein, “I,” 8. 11. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton & Company, 1989), 11. Hortense Spillers reads this Freudian image as an analogy for undifferentiated identity. See Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 72. doi:10.2307/464747. 12. PBS, Finding Your Roots | Deepak Chopra’s Ancestral Pilgrimage | PBS. 13. See the entry for atavus in C.T. Lewis and C. Short, Latin Dictionary: Based on Andrews’s Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). 14. Sociobiologist R.I.M. Dunbar writes of the selection of an ancestor as the unifying element of a kinship group: “What is particularly interesting in this context is that it makes very little difference whether the members of the kinship group are themselves directly related to that ‘ancestor’ or not, since beyond about four generations removed in time the coefficients of relationship between two individuals are so low that they are, to all intents and purposes, unrelated. Indeed, it makes little difference whether that ancestor acutally existed or not: the sun, the moon and Mother Earth are as functional in this context as one’s great-great-great-grandfather.” R.I.M. Dunbar, “Sociality among Humans and Non-Human Animals,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (Taylor & Francis, 1994), 775. 15. See Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 26. doi:10.2307/1343460. 16. Cece Moore. www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/blog/season-wrap-finallydna-takes-center-stage/. 17. The first genealogical shows Gates undertook focused on African Americans in particular. Later, he established a genetic analysis research brand, African DNA. 18. There is a considerable literature on this phenomenon. See Catherine Nash, “Genetic Kinship,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (January 1, 2004). doi:10. 1080/0950238042000181593. and Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How

108 Anne O’Byrne

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: The New Press, 2011). Roberts, Fatal Invention, 2011, 297. Ibid., 299. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 268–9. Douglass, Autobiographies, 15–16. Ibid., 16. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). See Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 76. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 7. Ethics used to offer the example of being born blind while others are born with sight as a natural injustice, but ableism has changed that conversation so thoroughly that the example is obsolete. See Ramon M. Lemos, “The Concept of Natural Right,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7, no. 1 (September 1, 1982). doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1982.tb00088.x. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 76. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 8. Lisa Guenther writes: “Kinship relations were thus constructed in law as a source of confinement without shelter, or constraint without protection, for any child born to a slave woman, while the father’s right to choose or “elect” his children was guaranteed absolutely.” (Fecundity and Natal Alienation 22). “The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Edition—The Atlantic.” Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 75. Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia 18, no. 1 (February 1, 2003): 74. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2003.tb00779.x. Shannon Hoff, “Rights and Worlds: On the Political Significance of Belonging,” Philosophical Forum 45, no. 4 (2014): 360. Alan Barnard, “Rules and Prohibitions: The Form and Content of Human Kinship,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 1994), 786. David Murray Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 201. See also Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship, 171–3. Janet Carsten, After Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139. Barbara Bodenhorn, “He Used to Be My Relative: Exploring the Bases of Relatedness among Inupiat of Northern Alaska,” in Cultures of Relatedness, ed. Janet Carsten (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000) If the kinship among the Inupiat is signaled by blood, it is now the blood of the hunted whale. For additional examples of the reshaping of the concept of kinship in anthropology, see Janet Carsten, Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Not surprisingly, the richest source of theoretical reflection on these questions is Queer Theory. See Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (February 1, 2002); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory,”

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in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007). doi:10.1002/9780470690864.ch15; Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); José Munoz, Cruising Utopia (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Jeanette Edwards and Marilyn Strathern, “Including Our Own,” Cultures of Relatedness, ed. Janet Carsten (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Ibid., 159. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 66. See Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), Thesis 6. Richard J. Bernstein, Violence: Thinking without Banisters (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2013).

Bibliography Alan, Barnard. “Rules and Prohibitions: The Form and Content of Human Kinship.” In Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Tim Ingold, 783–812. Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 1994. Appiah, Anthony. “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 21–37. doi:10.2307/1343460. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Penguin, 1963. ———. The Jewish Writings. Edited by Ron H. Feldman and Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Bauman, Z. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. New York University Press, 1997. https://books.google.com/books?id=zVeQQgAACAAJ. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bernstein, Richard J. Violence: Thinking without Banisters. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Bodenhorn, Barbara. “‘He Used to Be My Relative’: Exploring the Bases of Relatedness among Inupiat of Northern Alaska.” In Cultures of Relatedness, edited by Janet Carsten, 128–48. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Brown, Vincent. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Butler, Judith. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (February 1, 2002): 14–44. Card, Claudia. “Genocide and Social Death.” Hypatia 18, no. 1 (February 1, 2003): 63–79. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2003.tb00779.x. Carsten, Janet. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Douglass, Frederick. Autobiographies. Boone, IA: Library of America, 1994.

110 Anne O’Byrne Dunbar, R.I.M. “Sociality among Humans and Non-Human Animals.” In Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Tim Ingold, 756–82. Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 1994. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Edwards, Jeanette, and Marilyn Strathern. “Including Our Own.” In Cultures of Relatedness, edited by Janet Carsten, 149–66. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Franklin, Sarah, and Susan McKinnon. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Freeman, Elizabeth. “Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory.” In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 293–314. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007. doi:10.1002/9780470690864.ch15. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Hoff, Shannon. “Rights and Worlds: On the Political Significance of Belonging.” Philosophical Forum 45, no. 4 (2014): 355–73. Lederman, Shmuel. “A Nation Destroyed: An Existential Approach to the Distinctive Harm of Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 19, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 112–32. doi:10.1080/14623528.2016.1250473. Lemkin, R. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944. Lemos, Ramon M. “The Concept of Natural Right.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7, no. 1 (September 1, 1982): 133–50. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1982. tb00088.x. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Lewis, C.T., and C. Short. Latin Dictionary: Based on Andrews’s Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Lugones, María. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia 2, no. 2 (June 1, 1987): 3–19. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.1987.tb01062.x. “The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Edition: The Atlantic.” Accessed February 27, 2017. www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihanreport-an-annotated-edition/404632/. Munoz, José. Cruising Utopia. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Nash, Catherine. “Genetic Kinship.” Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 1–33. doi:10.1080/0950238042000181593. Palmié, Stephan. “Mixed Blessings and Sorrowful Mysteries: Second Thoughts about ‘Hybridity’.” Current Anthropology 54, no. 4 (2013): 463–82. doi:10. 1086/671196. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. PBS. Finding Your Roots | Deepak Chopra’s Ancestral Pilgrimage | PBS, 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHwlPTgmxOk.

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Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business ReCreate Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: The New Press, 2011. Schneider, David Murray. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. doi:10.2307/464747. Weston, Kath. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “I: A Lecture on Ethics.” The Philosophical Review 74, no. 1 (1965): 3–12. doi:10.2307/2183526.

6

Epigenetics and the Molecular Memory of Genocide Ada S. Jaarsma

Epigenetics and the Afterlife of the Past In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine writes: “Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight.”1 This is an experiential truth that is gaining scientific validity. Contrary to longstanding 20th-century assumptions about the hard-wired nature of genetic material, scientists increasingly argue that our genes express the cues of inherited and behavioral contexts. Our bodies have memories, they explain, because our biological processes testify to the ecologies in which we develop. As human animals, our genes might be the same, but the ways in which they activate or quiet down bear witness to specific, sometimes highly significant events (dietary, environmental, habitual) that effectuate epigenetic activity.2 Such ever-present developmental dynamics is why there is a genetic paradox: everyone is the same, everyone is different.3 This chapter evaluates the import of the emerging scientific emphasis on epigenetics for one question in particular: does epigenetic research support the turn toward a relational, transhistorical understanding of genocide, one in which the scope of genocidal violence extends beyond the bounds of discrete events or even beyond the boundaries of individuals themselves?4 Could we turn to epigenetic research, for example, as a way to further arguments that identify mass incarceration or settler colonialism as manifestations of genocidal violence? Does the evidence produced by epigenetic researchers—and the uptake of such evidence by policymakers— support a call to recognize and respond to genocidal harms, such as those resulting from the afterlife of slavery? Does the long temporal arc of genocidal violence become more available for scrutiny because of epigenetic research? And, in turn, are the structures and logics that subtend such violence—identified by some as the “racial imaginary”—thereby rendered more recognizable and open for substantive critique?5 On one account, epigenetic research points to molecular markers that testify in particular to the enduring harms of genocidal violence. Given

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that biological data might “help unsettle the political certainties of what we think we stand for, what we think we stand against and where we stand when we make political gestures,” there are reasons to hope that epigenetics might serve as a resource for tracking the biological harms effected by genocidal violence across generations. This would augment arguments that replace definitions of genocide as discrete events with ones that identify the long arc of genocidal logics and structures.6 On another account of epigenetic research, however, its curative leanings and experimental methods undercut the singularity of trauma to such an extent that it risks complicity with genocidal violence. Rather than a relational understanding of genocidal violence, on this account, epigenetic research models an individualizing approach to harm and redress. From this perspective, the uptake of epigenetic research is especially worrisome, given that “environmental epigenetic knowledge is equally readily adopted by those in favor of increasing social welfare spending and public health measures to reduce social inequality as it is by those in favor of increasing individualistic attention to early life development,”7 including highly racialized forms of surveillance. At stake in the difference between these two accounts is not only what counts as injury, including injuries from the past, but also what kinds of measures are in place to seek redress. One way to make sense of this tension is through what Alfred Frankowski calls the “problem of a now.”8 As Frankowski argues, the past is often rendered present in ways that underscore, rather than upset, the practices that subtend the racial imaginary. There are acts of remembrance that seek to render recognizable forms of oppression in order to resist and undermine them, but such acts “may be integrated into the conditions that make the continuance of this oppression normative.”9 This phenomenon that Frankowski is describing is an expression of “white innocence,”10 an approach to the past in which those who benefit from the afterlife of colonialism and racist structures get to feel virtuous (their “wounds” are “salved,” as Audra Simpson puts it)11 instead of implicated in terrible wrongdoing. The logics and structures that underpin genocidal violence in such cases are furthered rather than subverted. It is this risk of complicity with genocide that I explore and track in the following. Epigenetics strikes some as revolutionary, largely because it disrupts linear, predictive portrayals of biological life.12 Whereas the central dogma of 20th-century biology assumed a deterministic logic in which genotype causes phenotype, this claim is now widely understood as an “erroneous inference,”13 opening up for scientific scrutiny the relational co-constitution of organisms with their environments. Epigenetic research has been so influential in recent years that some describe our own era as “the era of the epigenome.”14 Put in general terms, epigenetic research demonstrates that there is a layer of genetic regulation that is “sensitive to a lifetime of experiential and environmental factors.”15 And while the

114 Ada S. Jaarsma extent to which epigenetics is truly trans-generational in scope is an open question for the scientific community,16 many studies trace precisely what Rankine evokes in the epigraph: carrying more than its weight, the physical body inhabits biological memories so salient that “the ‘it’ of a living body is a function of time.”17 Our very cells depend upon epigenetic processes to become distinctive and functional. Whereas embryonic stem cells are “pluripotent” and indistinguishable from each other, they differentiate into one of the more than 200 different kinds of mature cells in our bodies—a process that is contingent upon specific dynamics of development. “The same exact cell,” David Moore explains, “put into different situations can develop in very different ways.”18 Epigenetic marks tend to be relatively stable during development and transmissible across cell division. In theory, epigenetic marks are cleared and reestablished in each generation’s primordial germ cells in order for these cells to differentiate in turn. But the fact that some epigenetic marks seem resistant to such reprogramming points to the mechanisms that enable transgenerational epigenetic inheritance—a discovery that some argue would “fill the gaps” of missing heritability, at least within mammals.19 (There is ample evidence of such mechanisms in plants and fungi, but the search in mammals is ongoing.) One way in which researchers seek to make sense of biological memory is by mapping epigenetic marks—marks that can be read as “retained records of previous experiences.”20 Described variously as an archive, an information-repository, biological memory, and narrative potential, the epigenome is emerging in scientific research as a system that reacts to environmental signals, not only from the current moment but from the past.21 Epigenetic marks are molecular equivalents of sticky notes,22 accumulated over time through habitual responses of cells and organisms to stimuli. Such marks reflect “somatic memory” because epigenetic modifications are semi-stable: they persist beyond the initial stimulus, affecting how the body operates.23 In this way, they can reflect developmental insights from ancestors about what embodied features will best suit a fetus’s environs—a reservoir of signals that one evolutionary biologist describes as a “crystal ball.”24 Since the past’s afterlife in the present can be detected on a molecular level, epigenetic research offers a new way to substantiate the harms incurred by traumatic events. Stress, for example, induces “molecular scars” that scientists can detect and track.25 Along these lines, there is considerable research on the biomarkers of genocidal violence—“proof,” states one study that examines Tutsi survivors of the Rwandan genocide, “of the massive and enduring impact of the genocide.”26 In this way, epigenetic research demonstrates that “trauma effects endure,” as Rachel Yehuda puts it.27 A psychiatrist and epigenetic researcher, Yehuda argues that lower levels of stress hormones or cortisol in Holocaust survivors and PTSD-veterans can be passed on to their children, who are three

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times more likely themselves to develop PTSD after a traumatic event.28 Trauma effects endure because, as epigenetic research makes clear, bodies are interpretative, responding to and relaying informational signals.29 This is why, when explaining her research, Yehuda maintains that there is “intelligence” in the body.30 Such demonstrable intelligence of bodies disrupts any robust distinction between “biology” and “society,” and this might be a reason to place hope in epigenetics as a resource for substantiating claims about the relational nature and trans-historical reach of genocide. After all, this very distinction subtends the logic that many describe as genocidal. Charles Mills explains, for example, that the violence of settler colonialism operates according to a framework that posits science, knowledge, and morality on the opposite side of nature: “They are in the state of nature, and we are not.”31 Those who are caught on the “nature” side of this binary face the onslaught of genocidal attack. The transatlantic slave trade, for example, “established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone,” as Saidiya Hartman explains. The afterlife of slavery, Hartman continues, can be detected in “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.”32 These forms of violence are signs that slavery was never fully abolished. Put differently, such targeting of racialized populations express and perpetuate the logics of the racial imaginary. And epigenetic research substantiates, empirically, the long-lasting quality of the harms effected by the racial imaginary, demonstrating that “people of color can biologically inherit the deleterious effects of white racism.”33 Molecular memory can be evidence of substantive, longlasting harm. As Clarence Gravlee puts it, there is a literal embodiment of inequality, especially racial inequality, in “the biological well-being of racialized groups and individuals.”34 Inequalities such as health disparities, stress, and susceptibility to stress, exposure to toxins, and other environmental traumas are signs that “‘race’ might very well make biology.”35 And so, Gravlee suggests, we might even affirm epigenetic research as a “minor revolution” in how we think about the relations between race and biology: there are biological—but not genetic—pathways through which the effects of inequality and discrimination trauma may be transmitted from one generation to another.36 These symptoms include a higher risk of adverse birth outcomes, as well as adult diseases that link to prenatal and early life conditions. Gravlee concludes, “Systemic racism becomes embedded in the biology of racialized groups and individuals, and embodied inequalities reinforce a racialized understanding of human biology.”37 Epigenetic research verifies the wide reach of structural harms like disproportionate exposure to toxins, showing how such effects extend to second and third generations. In the courts, such evidence puts pressure on the statute of limitations for environmental injustices—a necessary shift

116 Ada S. Jaarsma if justice is to be sought within the courts.38 The very scope of responsibility, especially in the context of juridical arguments, might well expand because of epigenetic research.39 Epigenetic findings could justify, for example, the argument that “societies that foster chronic violence, rampant inequalities, and persistent discrimination should be charged with violating the right to health of individuals and of ensuing generations.”40 However, when “life’s insults” are calculated by way of molecular markers that scientists themselves lay out in quantitative form,41 there is risk that the racial imaginary is reaffirmed, rather than repudiated and subverted. As Yehuda and her colleague Bowers explain, there is considerable conflict surrounding the etiology of intergenerational trauma42— conflict that points to one key motivation that animates epigenetic research: namely, the search for the precise source of “error, adverse effects or disease risk.”43 Since epigenetic research points not only to the contingency but also the reversibility of development, it raises the possibility of alleviating the negative health impacts of inequality or class differences.44 After all, if molecular memories are “erasable,” they can potentially be therapeutically altered. (Along these lines, much epigenetic research is now focusing on cancer.) Note though that harms and their redress, on such accounts, are interpellated into the terms of the “curative imaginary,” which means that injuries become legible in biomedical terms.45 Indeed, courts are increasingly persuaded by biomedical arguments that direct attention away from environs and toward individuals (increasingly understood as genetically “deficient” and therefore not deserving of compensation).46 Rather than undermining the racial imaginary, then, the curative deployment of scientific data reiterates its logic in which some humans are seen as “natural” and others as “biologically defective.”47 Scientists who study the inherited effects of trauma often struggle with the requirement to render harms commensurate: in the words of scientists, with the need “to measure trauma load”48 by means of experimental proxies. But this search for equivalence across different sites of violence risks erasing the singularity of trauma and injury. The very methods employed by scientists, in other words, risk replicating genocidal logics, rather than demonstrating the devastating effects of genocide in ways that demand redress. This hazard is explained in especially devastating and persuasive ways by Ian Baucom and by Hortense Spillers. Baucom argues, for example, that the substitution of a series for the event, of a generic or a proxy for the singular, repeats the logic of the methods inaugurated by the transatlantic slave trade’s actuarial commerce. (Note that these are the substitutions required by experimental models that seek to measure trauma load by approximating them fully in the lab.) Hortense Spillers describes, similarly, how “the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community

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becomes a living laboratory,” as laws and commercial systems worked to transform “personality into property.”49 Such systems work according to genocidal logics, Spiller argues, reflecting “the fantasy of the erasure of the singular.”50 And genocide is redoubled through its supposed redress, as justice systems demand the “stripping a thing of all that is specific to it,” denying justice to anything that falls outside of equivalence.51 This prerequisite of equivalence or commensuration is also required by the genocidal logics of settler sovereignty, as Audra Simpson explains, which sets itself up as “normal, natural and ultimately just” precisely by excluding all injuries and traumatic harms that are not recognizable within its generalizing terms.52 The problem of the now—which we might also describe as the ongoing substantiation of the racial imaginary—restricts justice to “just us,”53 a form of exclusion that might at times prompt attention to the long arc of genocidal traumas, but that adheres to logics that anchor the present securely in the complicities of settler colonialism and slavery. It might help, in further assessing the relevance of epigenetics for confronting genocidal violence, to parse epigenetic research more carefully. In the next section, therefore, I examine two different lines of epigenetic research: one that deploys the prefix “epi” to refer to markers on the gene, and one that uses the term to refer to factors outside of the gene.54 In each case, there are design choices and experimental methods that bear out Frankowski’s cautionary words: namely, that the rendering of the afterlife of the past slips from an epistemic to a normative register. But rather than hailing new norms that disrupt the racial imaginary, such rendering is complicit with its perpetuation. In the final section, I offer a more hopeful reading, looking at a third deployment of “epigenetics” that holds promise for calling out genocidal violence as such. This third case of epigenetic research makes use of a differing logic—one that rejects the ideals of commensuration and equivalence in favor of a more relational, developmental account of embodied life.

The Inner Laboratory and the Metabolic Ghetto The most common definition of epigenetics depends upon a key category distinction: it entails the study of potentially heritable changes in gene expression, in contrast to changes to the DNA sequence itself.55 Scientists use the term “epigenetics” when they seek to understand the many interacting ways through which variations that are not dependent on DNA differences are transmitted in lineages of cells and organisms.56 The prefix “epi” often refers specifically to what is “on” the gene. DNA is not naked, after all, but rather packaged in chromatin, which some describe as “a gatekeeper of DNA accessibility.”57 Indeed, it is because of

118 Ada S. Jaarsma biophysical modifications to the chromatin strand that genes are responsive and sensitive to environmental cues. Two forms of modification, in particular, constitute the epigenetic “links” between development and genes. (These two mechanisms are called methylation and histone acetylation; a “methylated” gene is a silenced gene; histone acetylation is a gene-activating mechanism. A third mechanism that interests epigenetic researchers concerns non-coding RNAs.) Chromatin activity, in other words, is what enables “epigenetic memory.” Research that focuses in particular on what is “on” the gene tends to approach the body as an inner laboratory.58 And, because the common usage of “epigenetics” differentiates between the genome and the epi-genome, scientific examination of the marks “on” the genome relies upon a backdrop of unaltered DNA sequences.59 Such biological models depend upon the category difference between the stable and the heritable that the prefix “epi” signals. For example, the sequence-driven genome is understood as static and invariant, but the epi-genome is plastic and effectible; DNA is implacable, but chromatin is impressionable.60 There is an unmarked quality to the genome in such research, and what counts as “difference” are epi-genetic marks. Scientists search for marker-like epigenetic patterns (i.e., “difference”) by examining the tags, directly on genes themselves, that mark the interactions that influence gene expression. Researchers map the patterns of methylation marks, for example, in order to lay out the “methylome”; other research focuses on the “histone code,” the “transcriptome,” or even the overall “epigenome.” (As another example, the “circadian epigenome” reflects our adaptive responses to daytime and nighttime and to food availability.)61 These tags are the biomarkers that some describe as “ghosts” or “angels” above the genes, providing a signature of environmental exposure for cancer researchers.62 As this latter example attests, such research lends itself in particular to the generalizing claims of curative biomedicine. In one influential study, for example, researchers demonstrate that the brains of suicidal and nonsuicidal people have DNA that is methylated in different ways, leading to the hypothesis that depression is associated with epigenetic effects.63 It is significant that in curative regimes of biomedicine, plasticity is a resource, since reversibility suggests the plausibility of pharmaceutical and other forms of intervention. Epigenetic research on trauma, for example, has led to the discovery of “pre-trauma risk factors,”64 as well as to therapies that seek to intervene and reverse the epigenetic effects of stress, depression, and trauma. (Incidentally, it is the alteration of memory-related genes that is of special interest to scientists here.) The uptake of this research, in other words, is often directly curative. Scientists themselves employ the phrase “Exercise your chromatin!” as a way to affirm dietary and exercise health—regimes in response to epigenetic findings.65

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In an important early essay on epigenetics, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb affirmed the promise of epigenetic research for offering more complex, less reifying methods for studying biological life. In 1989, they coined the term “the gene’s phenotype” in order to foreground the dynamic and developmental contingency of genes that epigenetic research was beginning to disclose.66 But, despite this early confidence, there remains a strong undercurrent of scientific interest in deciphering “the extent to which the epigenome is hard-wired in humans.”67 As a whole, such research does not bear out Jablonka and Lamb’s early optimism; indeed, it does not interrupt the linear or determinist methods of genomics into more complex post-genomic models but rather extends it.68 Rather than transforming into more relational or dynamic experimental models, mapping-based genomic technologies have been adapted to epigenetic research. What drops out of such experimental models is the attentiveness to the contingency of development affirmed by Jablonka and Lamb. Rather than an emergent set of traits that are entangled with the specifics of environment and ecology, the “gene’s phenotype” all too readily correlates with indicators of social difference.69 And when some phenotypes are marked and others are unmarked, the logics of the racial imaginary remain fully intact. Consider, for example, the application of genomic research by carceral systems: genetic data such as ancestry informative markers (AIMs) are sold to investigators in order to confirm a suspect’s identity and even predict who a suspect will be based on racial phenotyping.70 Phenotypes, in such cases, serve as reified markers, rather than the contingent and relational site of development invoked by Jablonka and Lamb. Rather than calling out the racial imaginary, the equation of race with inherited trait “persists as the predominant trope of human difference.”71 This trope of human difference relies upon overly determinant logics of causation. In sentencing, for example, genetic profiles can either mitigate or elevate perceived “criminal dangerousness.” An individual might get a decreased sentence because an internal, stable cause was out of their control or an increased sentence because they are deemed likely to reoffend. In either scenario, evidence of biomechanisms associated with antisocial behavior point to the likelihood that phenotypic behavior can be predicted or explained.72 Along these lines, genetic science “can be friend or foe. It can exonerate or convict.”73 But either case precludes an understanding of human difference as relational and embedded in biosocial structures that develop over time. A second usage of “epi”-genetics also makes use of a category distinction that risks perpetuating the racial imaginary. This research explores what counts as genetic and what counts as epi or outside of genetics. Instead of trying to rule out so-called cultural confounders in order to map out the epigenome,74 as the preceding usage demonstrates, such

120 Ada S. Jaarsma research focuses squarely on such confounders by locating proxies for key social, cultural, and economic factors in order to replicate them in laboratories. Here is what is at stake scientifically. As noted earlier, some biologists identify molecular memory as a “crystal ball” for the fetus because it reestablishes a signature from the maternal environment, or even the grandmother’s environment, since a female fetus’s gametes can be imprinted and then passed on to her daughter and granddaughter. Via the gametes, the influence of in utero exposure might extend from a grandmother to a grandchild, demonstrating “multigenerational exposure to stressful stimuli.”75 Such inter-generational inheritance is experience-dependent but non-germline: it occurs because of the occurrence or reoccurrence of the environment or experience that induced the mark. (In other words, its temporal reach ends at the third generation.)76 Because of this “soma of the matriline,”77 the fetal environment is of intense interest to scientists. But there is another order of inheritance, one that is more trans-generational in scope because the epigenetic signature is transmitted through the germline.78 Some data suggests the possibility that epigenetic marks are reestablished in the absence of exposure or re-exposure to environmental stimuli.79 Something might well be epigenetic, induced by diet, for example, but it is only trans-generational if it lasts over two generations. This is controversial for scientists when it comes to mammals since “it is generally believed that environmentally induced epigenetic changes are not inherited through the germ line and cannot be directly passed from parent to offspring.”80 Some maintain equanimity about this controversy. One commentator explains, for example, that “’inheritance via the germline’ is no more special than any other kind of inheritance” because all genetic materials need to interact with non-genetic factors to develop an organism’s phenotypes.81 But others are highly invested in tracking the data and asserting causal mechanisms by which to make sense of transgenerational epigenetics. In such cases, it really matters what counts as non-genetic (so that its causality can be undermined). An influential researcher, for example, argues that if genetic or cultural inheritance cannot explain a certain set of effects, then trans-generational epigenetics must provide the answer.82 Along these lines, many experiments seek to render “the environment” in ways that operationalize whatever stands out for researchers as salient contextual factors. Social injuries in particular are mediated by the “molecular biological gaze” of experimental practice.83 In such research, injuries arise as epistemic objects in their own right: early-life adversity, for example, or chronic stress. Scientists ascertain and set up proxies that seek to replicate the compilation of risks they want to track and assess, risks including exposure to toxins, drugs, stress, trauma, and neglect.84 In such experiments, events need to be clearly demarcated if they are going to provide access to viable, statistically significant data. To this

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end, experimental rats and other so-called model organisms are routinely bullied and intimidated. They are exposed, for example, to what scientists call “chronic social defeat stress” in attempts to simulate the complex developmental processes that lead to depression in humans.85 There are different degrees of caution expressed by social scientists about this research. Jorg Niewöhner, for example, describes these methods as a pragmatic, rather than ontological, reductionism.86 Margaret Lock identifies a more worrisome form of reductionism: namely that “human bodies are in effect everywhere the same and that determinants of ill health act on individual bodies in a way that can be standardized.”87 But what I’d like to foreground is the markedness of some “environments” (and the implicit unmarkedness of others), such that they prompt researchers to create proxies in the lab. In such research, pregnancy is rendered as an environmental niche, occupied by a fetus, with qualities in need of scrutiny. This understanding of pregnancy as fetal environment leads one biologist, for example, to infer the existence of “metabolic ghettos.”88 This slippage from the effects of economic marginalization to a racialized description of women’s pregnant bodies is one that turns phenotypic variation into something that is not only predictable, but open for surveillance and intervention. The choice of the term “ghetto” to delineate a particular kind of fetal environment belies a commitment to the racial imaginary. A ghetto, after all, is a segregated space that authorizes racialized surveillance because it is attributed with causal properties that contribute to gang members’ “tendencies.”89 (As another example of how proxies reinforce the marked status of certain environments, an anthropologist relays an anecdote about an epigenetic lab in which a scientist muses that a rat model, designed to correlate socioeconomic status with methylation, is “actually a very good model for ‘[human] migrants in deprived urban neighborhoods.’”)90 In other words, there is a somatic determinism at play within epigenetic research that presumes, rather than protests, the structural and relational violence linked, especially in the US context, to the afterlife of slavery. Such reductive methods also raise the specter of individualism, deploying an approach to reproduction that addresses women as “prepregnant.”91 Pregnant women, disproportionately targeted by race and class, are surveilled and immediate family circumstances foregrounded, without taking into account broader factors like history, politics, social environments, racism, and discrimination.92 And as Sarah Richardson notes, despite this experimental focus on “epi”-genetic factors and their proxies, “genes remain very much at the center” here.93 This research, in other words, does not dislodge a firm genetic focus on how genes, regulated by epigenetic mechanisms, create phenotypic outcomes of great curative concern. There are two hazards that such research holds for scholars in search of methods by which to examine the relational nature and trans-historical

122 Ada S. Jaarsma research of genocidal violence. First, epigenetics (whether referring to marks on the gene or environmental factors that are outside the gene) tends to adhere to a Grand Unified Theory of genetic causation, rather than undermining it. Instead of bearing out Jablonka and Lamb’s early hopes, the prevailing logic of epigenetic science is one that invokes an “A to B” chain of causal events in which “origins dominate a linear narrative.”94 The danger is that rather than calling out the racial imaginary, we might subtend it by uncritically engaging with the kinds of experimental proxies created in labs or the reliance upon marked or “different” phenotypic traits. If difference is rendered as “determined” rather than an ongoing site of development, then the unmarked status of whiteness goes unquestioned, and so, too, do practices like the racializing surveillance and incarceration of people of color. Second, there is a logic of commensuration at play that replaces the singular harms of genocidal violence with generalizations about them. This type of injury, that kind of event: this is also the logic that keeps the racial imaginary in play. We examine the past, for example, for “this” or “that” kind of injustice, participating in “the struggle to find some way of doing justice to this ‘sort’ of past [through memorializing projects like the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of South Africa and Canada].”95 And literature on historical trauma bears this out, reflecting “a powerful, coherent and consistent narrative that ignores the vagaries of individual experience.”96 As Loffreda and Rankine write: “[W]e are captive, still, to a sensibility that champions the universal while simultaneously defining the universal, still, as white.”97—But there are ways to enact scientific practices that attend more to the emergent and the differential than to the determinate and the commensurate. The next section briefly examines one such example.

Transduction, Signals, and Thresholds Instead of subtending the past’s afterlife, research into the relational nature and transhistorical research of genocide must prompt encounters with the past that render ourselves strange, as Frankowski puts it.98 Along these lines, Rankine and Loffreda, too, point to essential strangeness as a critical resource for confronting the racial imaginary.99 Rankine writes: “The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness.” I take these suggestions to invoke several methodological qualities. First, a strangeness that evades any attempt to standardize or generalize. Second, a strangeness that disrupts a stable position for an observer, scientist, or litigator. And third, a strangeness that cannot be modeled in advance. There is a kind of biological activity, essential to epigenetics, that reflects these qualities: it is known as transduction. Literally the crossing

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of thresholds, transduction makes it hard to know where environment ends and response begins.100 And, significantly, it demonstrates that the present itself is a shifting terrain.101 This means that we cannot actually locate a stable “outside” within the process of transduction,102 a point that underscores the fact that scientific practice itself is always local, situated, and emergent. Transduction can be tracked, but not in relation to preexisting metrics of correspondence.103 It elides attempts at commensuration. Transduction points to an understanding of epigenetics in which the body’s threshold is a site of activity that cannot be mapped in pre-determined ways. Proteins receive transduced environmental signals, responding by opening, closing, or maintaining chromatin states. And because of a growing emphasis on transduction, chromatin is in the process of being rethought as being composed of movement. Hannah Landecker explains that, on such an account, “a structure is only a frozen movement in the life of molecular flux.”104 Even persistent patterns, after all, need to be actively maintained. And so, Landecker argues, while chromatin was until very lately seen as “a kind of inert scaffold for DNA,” it now prompts a much more dynamic understanding of bodies: “In it we find materialized the emerging scientific image of the body as one of transduced representations of its environs, historically layered through experience and development into the conformation it takes in the present.”105 If we attend to transduction as the way in which the past is stored in us, then our molecular memories correspond to invention, rather than preset templates. Signals, by definition, can have multiple outcomes.106 Rankine points out, “Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you,”107 and therefore our imaginations “are creatures as limited as we ourselves are.”108 There is an interplay here between the open-ended strangeness of embodied life and the cues of environmental, habitual, and ancestral factors. The ways in which we approach and inhabit memories are themselves open for scrutiny and, in turn, re-creation. The emergence of further signals that such re-creations make possible, in turn, place enormous pressure on our relations to memory in the now. An indictment of genocidal violence as relational and trans-historical is one that hails us existentially, as well as politically. Genocidal harms themselves yield existential violence, as they undermine liveliness and sociality to such an extent that some describe them as a “social death.”109 Moreover, their import for each of us is existential as well: insofar as genocide is an attack on the very plurality of our human species, genocidal violence is a violence against the emergence of new signals, new lines of imagination, and new forms of strange and unanticipated social life.110 Epigenetic research into transduction holds real promise as an inventive search for logics that attend to the contingent, embodied, and emergent dynamics of life. Its significance for us includes a mandate to

124 Ada S. Jaarsma forego definitions of genocide as “events” with discrete beginnings and ends in favor of attentiveness to the “strangeness” of genocidal violence and its aftermath, neither entirely “past” nor determinatively “present.”

Notes 1. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014). 2. While epigenetics refers to an area of scientific research, with subfields related to environmental, behavioral, nutritional, and biomedicinal aspects of development, it refers more broadly to what Susan Merrill Squier calls an “explanatory landscape.” See Susan Merrill Squier, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 125. As an explanatory landscape, epigenetics draws attention to the interactions between genes and environment, experience, and culture, manifested in cellular and molecular processes like gene regulation and expression. Catherine Malabou describes the broader import of epigenetics in this way: “a set of complex relations that position the living being as the center of interactions.” See Catherine Malabou, “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance,” trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry 42 (2016): 433. Interpretations of the prefix “epi” differ, referring variously to markers on the gene and to factors outside of the gene. I explore these two definitions, as well as a third more relational definition, reflecting on their import for identifying and redressing genocidal violence. 3. Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation after the Genome (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 34. 4. For example, Claudia Card argues persuasively that social death is a form of genocidal violence: a distinctive harm, incurred through the relational and transhistorical structures of mass incarceration. See Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” in Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide, ed. John K. Roth (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 238–54. 5. Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine, Introduction to The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Life in the Life of the Mind, ed. Claudia Rankine et al. (Albany: Fence Books, 2015), 13. See also James Baldwin’s indictment of the racial imaginary as a “genocidal lie”: “On Being White . . . and Other Lies,” in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David R. Roediger (New York: Random House, 2010). 6. Elizabeth Wilson, Gut Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 35. 7. Jorg Niewöhner, “Epigenetics: Localizing Biology through Co-Laboration,” New Genetics and Society 34 (2015): 224. 8. Alfred Frankowski, The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), xvii. 9. Frankowski, The Post-Racial Limits, xiii. 10. Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 11. Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 20. 12. Evelyn Fox Keller, “From Gene Action to Reactive Genomes,” Journal of Physiology 20 (2014): 2423. 13. John Dupré, “What Genes Are and Why There are No Genes for Race,” in Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, ed. Barbara A. Koenig et al. (London: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 41.

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14. Margaret Lock, “The Lure of the Epigenome,” The Lancet 381 (2013): 1896. 15. Kathryn Hill and Tania L. Roth, “Epigenetics and the Development of Behavior,” in Developmental Psychopathology, Developmental Neuroscience, ed. Dante Cicchetti (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 427. 16. Maurizio Meloni, “Epigenetics for the Social Sciences: Justice, Embodiment and Inheritance in the Postgenomic Age,” New Genetics and Society 34 (2015): 128. 17. Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 119. 18. David S. Moore, The Developing Genome: An Introduction to Behavioral Epigenetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 19. 19. Jana P. Lim and Anne Brunet, “Bridging the Transgenerational Gap with Epigenetic Memory,” Trends in Genetics 29 (2013): 185. 20. Moore, The Developing Genome, 89. 21. Bastiaan T. Heijmans et al., “The Epigenome: Archive of the Prenatal Environment,” Epigenetics 4 (2009): 526; Meloni, “Epigenetics for the Social Sciences,” 135 and 132; David B. Goldstein et al., “Sequencing Studies in Human Genetics: Design and Interpretation,” Nature Reviews Genetics 14 (2013): 460. 22. Frost, Biocultural Creatures, 96. 23. Jorg Niewöhner, “Epigenetics: Embedded Bodies and the Molecularization of Biography and Milieu,” BioSocieties 6 (2011): 290. 24. Christopher W. Kuzawa, “Fetal Origins of Developmental Plasticity: Are Fetal Cues Reliable Predictors of Future Nutritional Environments?,” American Journal of Human Biology 17 (2005): 13. Genomic imprinting is the process that causes genes to be expressed (made active or silenced) depending on epigenetic marks placed in the parental generation that survive erasure as they pass to the offspring. In the case of imprinted genes, while two alleles of each gene are inherited from parents, only one is expressed and the other silenced; this continues in the descendants of the cell. Biologists describe this as a cell’s “memory” of its parent of origin. 25. N. M. Tsankova et al., “Sustained Hippocampal Chromatin Regulation in a Mouse Model of Depression and Antidepressant Action,” Nature Neuroscience 9 (2006): 523. 26. Tutsi genocide survivors who were pregnant during the genocide, for example, were studied along with their children (against a control group of women of the “same ethnicity” and their children), demonstrating that “trans-generational impact of a trauma is a reality not only from a clinical point of view but also from a biological one.” They were evaluated for PTSD, as were their children (the scientists found significant correlation between severity of PTSD and depression in mothers and the severity of PTSD and depression and their children), and blood and plasma samples showed lower cortisol levels in both “exposed” groups, as well as higher methylation status of a specific gene. See Nader Perroud et al., “The Tutsi Genocide and Trans-Generational Transmission of Maternal Stress,” The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry 15 (2014): 341. 27. Rachel Yehuda,“How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations,” On Being with Krista Tipett, July 30, 2015, accessed April 15, 2016, www.onbeing. org/program/rachel-yehuda-how-trauma-and-resilience-cross-generations/ 7786. 28. Rachel Yehuda and Linda M. Bierer, “The Relevance of Epigenetics to PTSD: Implications for the DSM-V,” Journal of Trauma Stress 22 (2009): 427.

126 Ada S. Jaarsma 29. Jesper Hoffmeyer, Signs of Meaning in the Universe, trans. Barbara J. Haveland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 76. 30. Yehuda, “How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations.” 31. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 43. This binary is reanimated, however, in phrases like “cultural genocide,” which is the official designation by Canada of its own settler colonial crimes and presumes a problematic distinction between physical and cultural genocide. It also denies the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. 32. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6. 33. Shannon Sullivan, “Inheriting Racist Disparities in Health: Epigenetics and the Transgenerational Effects of White Racism,” Critical Philosophy of Race 1 (2013): 191. 34. Clarence C. Gravlee, “How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139 (2009): 47. 35. Jonathan Michael Kaplan, “When Socially Determined Categories Make Biological Realities: Understanding Black/White Health Disparities in the US,” The Monist 93 (2010). See also Catherine Bliss, Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), 91. In addition, see Stephanie Malia Fullerton, “On the Absence of Biology in Philosophical Considerations of Race,” in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 251. 36. Gravlee, “How Race Becomes Biology,” 52. 37. Ibid., 54. 38. See Mark A. Rothstein et al., “The Ghost in our Genes: Legal and Ethical Implications of Epigenetics,” Health Matrix 19 (2009): 26, 37 and 47. 39. See Maria Hedlund, “Epigenetic Responsibility,” Medicine Studies 3 (2012): 171–83 and Michele Loi et al., “Social Epigenetics and Equality of Opportunity,” Public Health Ethics 6 (2013): 142–53. 40. Lock, “The Lure of the Epigenome,” 1897. 41. Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Elissa S. Epel, “Telomeres and Adversity: Too Toxic to Ignore,” Nature 490 (2012): 171. 42. Yehuda and Bierer, “The Relevance of Epigenetics,” 11. 43. Sarah S. Richardson, “Maternal Bodies in the Postgenomic Order: Gender and the Explanatory Landscape of Epigenetics,” in Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology After the Genome, ed. Sarah S. Richardson and Hallam Stevens (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 211 and 221. 44. See Moshe Szyf, “The Early Life Environment and the Epigenome,” Biochemica et Biophysica Acta 1790 (2009): 878–85. 45. See Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 27–8. 46. See Sara Shostak, Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment and the Politics of Population (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 171–3. 47. Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 23. 48. Laura Ramo-Fernández et al., “Epigenetic Alterations Associated with War Trauma and Childhood Treatment,” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 33 (2015): 704. See also Vanja Vukojevic et al., “Epigenetic Modification of the Glucocorticoid Receptor Gene Is Linked to Traumatic Memory and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Risk in Genocide Survivors,” The Journal of Neuroscience 34 (2014): 10274–84.

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49. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (1987), 68 and 78, italics in original. 50. Ian Baucom, “Specters of the Atlantic,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (2001): 64. 51. Baucom, “Spectres of the Atlantic,” 74. See also Ian Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 64. 52. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 130. 53. Mills, The Racial Contract, 133. 54. Kasia Tolwinski, “A New Genetics or an Epiphenomenon? Variations in the Discourse of Epigenetic Research,” New Genetics and Society 32 (2013): 366. 55. Frances A. Champagne, “Epigenetic Influence of Social Experiences across the Lifespan,” Developmental Psychobiology 52 (2010): 300. 56. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, “Commentary on the Inheritance of Acquired Epigenetic Variations,” International Journal of Epidemiology 44 (2015): 1105. 57. I. Zovkik and J. Sweatt, “Memory-associated Dynamic Regulation of the ‘Stable’ Core of the Chromatin Particle,” Neuron 87 (2015): 1. 58. Hannah Landecker, “Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism,” BioSocieties 6 (2011): 167–94. 59. Martine Lappé and Hannah Landecker, “How the Genome Got a Life Span,” New Genetics and Society 34 (2015): 170. 60. Hannah Landecker, “Commentary: The Information of Conformation,” International Journal of Epidemiology 44 (2015): 1108. 61. See Lorena Aguilar-Arnal et al., “Plasticity of the Circadian System: Linking Metabolism to Epigenetic Control,” in Epigenetics, Brain and Behavior, ed. Paolo Sassone Corsi and Yves Christen (Berlin: Springer, 2012). 62. Nino Sincic and Zdenko Herceg, “DNA Methylation and Cancer: Ghosts and Angels above the Genes,” Current Opinion in Oncology 22 (2010): 1–8. 63. Patrick O. McGowan et al., “Promoter-wide Hypermethylation of the Ribosomal RNA Gene Promoter in the Suicide Brain,” PloS 3 (2008): 1–10. 64. See Vanja Vukojevic et al., “Epigenetic Modification,” 10274–84. 65. Lappé and Landecker, “How the Genome Got a Life Span,” 172. 66. Republished in Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, “The Inheritance of Acquired Epigenetic Variations,” International Journal of Epidemiology 44 (2015): 1095. 67. Lucia Daxinger and Emma Whitelaw, “Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: More Questions than Answers,” Genome Research 20 (2010): 1625. 68. Niewöhner, “Epigenetics: Embedded Bodies,” 208; Niewöhner, “Epigenetics: Localizing Biologies,” 222–3. 69. Niewöhner, “Epigenetics: Localizing Biology,” 220. 70. Pamela Sankar, “Forensic DNA Phenotyping: Continuity and Change in the History of Race, Genetics, and Policing,” Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History, ed. Keith Walloo et al. (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 105. There is a serious “problem of a now” here. The use of AIMS involves admixtures that are chosen as an “attempt to model the colonial encounter through collecting DNA from people they consider to be from Old World populations”—as if allelic distribution, measured statistically, reflects historically and relatively pure populations. See Duana Fullwiley, “The ‘Contemporary Synthesis’: When Politically Inclusive Genomic Science Relies on Biological Notions of Race,” Isis 105 (2014): 807.

128 Ada S. Jaarsma 71. Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, “Biobanks of a ‘Racial Kind’: Mining for Difference in the New Genetics,” Patterns of Prejudice 40 (2008): 445. 72. Lisa G. Aspinwall et al., “The Double-Edged Sword: Does Biomechanism Increase or Decrease Judges’ Sentencing of Psychopaths,” Science 337 (2012): 846–9. 73. Nelson, The Social Life of DNA, 162. 74. Daxinger and Whitelaw, “Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance,” 1625. 75. Lim and Brunet, “Bridging the Transgenerational Gap,” 180. 76. See Meloni, “Epigenetics for the Social Sciences,” 128. 77. Kuzawa, “Fetal Origins of Developmental Plasticity,” 5. 78. S. Chong and E. Whitelaw, “Epigenetic Germline Inheritance,” Current Opinion in Genetics & Development 14 (2004): 692–6. 79. Tracy L. Bale, “Lifetime Stress Experience: Transgenerational Epigenetics and Germ Cell Programming,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 16 (2014): 301. 80. Richardson, “Maternal Bodies in the Postgenomic Order,” 229. 81. Moore, The Developing Genome, 184. 82. Ueli Grossniklaus et al., “Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: How Important Is It?,” Nature 14 (2013): 230. 83. Niewöhner, “Epigenetics: Localizing Biology,” 224. 84. Ilina Singh, “Human Development, Nature and Nurture: Working beyond the Divide,” BioSocieties 7 (2012): 316. 85. Champagne, “Epigenetic Influence,” 305. 86. Niewöhner, “Epigenetics: Localizing Biology,” 228. 87. Lock, “The Lure of the Epigenome,” 1897. 88. Jonathan C. K. Wells, “Maternal Capital and Metabolic Ghettos: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Transgenerational Basis of Health Inequalities,” American Journal of Human Biology 22 (2010): 1–17; see Richardson’s critique of this research in “Maternal Bodies in the Postgenomic Order,” 221–8. 89. Lisa Marie Cacho, Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 72. 90. Niewöhner, “Epigenetics: Embedded Bodies,” 289. 91. See Miranda R. Waggoner, “Motherhood Preconceived: The Emergence of the Preconception Health and Health Care Initiative,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 38 (2013): 345–71. 92. Lock, “The Lure of the Epigenome,” 1897. 93. Richardson, “Maternal Bodies in the Postgenomic Order,” 225. 94. Michelle Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 110, 116. 95. Baucom, Spectres, 72. 96. Laurence J. Kirmayer et al., “Rethinking Historical Trauma,” Transcultural Psychiatry 51 (2014): 313. 97. Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine,“Introduction” to The Racial Imaginary. 98. Frankowski, The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization, xvii. 99. Loffreda and Rankine, “Introduction,” 21. 100. Hannah Landecker, “The Social as Signal in the Body of Chromatin,” The Sociological Review Monographs 64 (2016): 81. 101. See Stefan Helmreich, “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography,” American Ethnologist 34 (2007): 621–41. 102. Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 106.

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103. Susan Gal, “Politics of Translation,” Annual Anthropological Review 44 (2015): 233. 104. Landecker, “The Social as Signal,” 94. 105. Ibid. 106. See Aimee I. Badeaux and Yang Shi, “Emerging Roles for Chromatin as a Signal Integration and Storage Platform,” Molecular Cell Biology 14 (2013): 211–24. 107. Rankine, Citizen, 63. 108. Loffreda and Rankine, “Introduction,” 16. 109. See Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” as well as Lissa Skitolsky’s chapter in this volume. 110. See Schmuel Lederman, “A Nation Destroyed” for an extended discussion of genocidal violence as existential.

References Aguilar-Arnal, Lorena et al. “Plasticity of the Circadian System: Linking Metabolism to Epigenetic Control.” In Epigenetics, Brain and Behavior, edited by Paolo Sassone Corsi and Yves Christen, 25–30. Berlin: Springer, 2012. Aspinwall, Lisa G. et al. “The Double-Edged Sword: Does Biomechanism Increase or Decrease Judges’ Sentencing of Psychopaths?” Science 337 (2012): 846–9. Badeaux, Aimee I., and Yang Shi. “Emerging Roles for Chromatin as a Signal Integration and Storage Platform.” Molecular Cell Biology 14 (2013): 211–24. Baldwin, James. “On Being White . . . And Other Lies.” In Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, edited by David R. Roediger, 177–80. New York: Random House, 2010. Bale, Tracy L.“Lifetime Stress Experience: Transgenerational Epigenetics and Germ Cell Programming.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 16 (2014): 297–305. Baucom, Ian. “Specters of the Atlantic.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (2001): 61–82. ———. Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Blackburn, Elizabeth H., and Elissa S. Epel. “Telomeres and Adversity: Too Toxic to Ignore.” Nature 490 (2012): 169–71. Bliss, Catherine. Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012. Bowers, Mallory E., and Rachel Yehuda. “Intergenerational Transmission of Stress in Humans.” Neuropsychopharmacology 41 (2016): 1–13. Cacho, Lisa Marie. Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Card, Claudia. “Genocide and Social Death.” In Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide, edited by John K. Roth, 238–54. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Champagne, Frances A. “Epigenetic Influence of Social Experiences across the Lifespan.” Developmental Psychobiology 52 (2010): 299–311. Chong, S., and E. Whitelaw. “Epigenetic Germline Inheritance.” Current Opinion in Genetics & Development 14 (2004): 692–6. Daxinger, Lucia, and Emma Whitelaw. “Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: More Questions Than Answers.” Genome Research 20 (2010): 1623–8.

130 Ada S. Jaarsma Dupras, Charles et al. “Epigenetics and the Environment in Bioethics.” Bioethics 28 (2014): 327–34. Dupré, John. “What Genes Are and Why There Are No Genes for Race.” In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, edited by Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson, 39–55. London: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Fox Keller, Evelyn. “From Gene Action to Reactive Genomes.” Journal of Physiology 592 (2014): 2423–9. Frankowski, Alfred. The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Frost, Samantha. Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Fullerton, Stephanie Malia. “On the Absence of Biology in Philosophical Considerations of Race.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 241–58. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Fullwiley, Duana. “The ‘Contemporary Synthesis’: When Politically Inclusive Genomic Science Relies on Biological Notions of Race.” Isis 105 (2014): 803–14. Gal, Susan. “Politics of Translation.” Annual Anthropological Review 44 (2015): 225–40. Goldstein, David B. et al. “Sequencing Studies in Human Genetics: Design and Interpretation.” Nature Reviews Genetics 14 (2013): 460–70. Gonzalez-Tapia, Maria, and Ingrid Obsuth. “‘Bad Genes’ and Criminal Responsibility.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 39 (2015): 60–71. Gravlee, Clarence C. “How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139 (2009): 47–57. Grossniklaus, Ueli et al. “Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: How Important Is It?” Nature 14 (2013): 228–35. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Hedlund, Maria. “Epigenetic Responsibility.” Medicine Studies 3 (2012): 171–83. Heijmans, Bastiaan T. et al. “The Epigenome: Archive of the Prenatal Environment.” Epigenetics 4 (2009): 526–31. Helmreich, Stefan. “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography.” American Ethnologist 34 (2007): 621–41. Hill, Kathryn, and Tania L. Roth. “Epigenetics and the Development of Behavior.” In Developmental Psychopathology, Developmental Neuroscience, edited by Dante Cicchetti, 416–41. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Translated by Barbara J. Haveland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Jablonka, Eva, and Marion J. Lamb. “Commentary on the Inheritance of Acquired Epigenetic Variations.” International Journal of Epidemiology 44 (2015): 1103–5. ———. “The Inheritance of Acquired Epigenetic Variations.” International Journal of Epidemiology 44 (2015): 1094–103. Kafer, Alison. Feminist Queer Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Kaplan, Jonathan Michael. “When Socially Determined Categories Make Biological Realities: Understanding Black/White Health Disparities in the US.” The Monist 93 (2010): 283–99.

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Kirmayer, Laurence J., Joseph P. Gone, and Joshua Moses. “Rethinking Historical Trauma.” Transcultural Psychiatry 51 (2014): 299–319. Kuzawa, Christopher W. “Fetal Origins of Developmental Plasticity: Are Fetal Cues Reliable Predictors of Future Nutritional Environments?” American Journal of Human Biology 17 (2005): 5–21. Landecker, Hannah. “Commentary: The Information of Conformation.” International Journal of Epidemiology 44 (2015): 1107–8. ———. “Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism.” Biosocieties 6 (2011): 167–94. ———. “The Social as Signal in the Body of Chromatin.” The Sociological Review Monographs 64 (2016): 79–99. Lappé, Martine, and Hannah Landecker. “How the Genome Got a Life Span.” New Genetics and Society 34 (2015): 152–76. Lederman, Schmuel. “A Nation Destroyed: An Existential Approach to the Distinctive Harm of Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research (2016): 1–21. Lim, Jana P., and Anne Brunet. “Bridging the Transgenerational Gap with Epigenetic Memory.” Trends in Genetics 29 (2013): 176–86. Lock, Margaret. “The Lure of the Epigenome.” The Lancet 381 (2013): 1896–7. Loffreda, Beth, and Claudia Rankine. “Introduction.” In The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, edited by Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap, 13–22. Albany: Fence Books, 2015. Loi, Michele et al. “Social Epigenetics and Equality of Opportunity.” Public Health Ethics 6 (2013): 142–53. Malabou, Catherine. “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance.” Translated by Carolyn Shread. Critical Inquiry 42 (2016): 429–38. Manning, Erin. Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Meloni, Maurizio. “Epigenetics for the Social Sciences: Justice, Embodiment and Inheritance in the Postgenomic Age.” New Genetics and Society 34 (2015): 125–51. Merrill Squier, Susan. Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Moore, David S. The Developing Genome: An Introduction to Behavioral Epigenetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Nelson, Alondra. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation after the Genome. Boston: Beacon Press, 2016. Niewöhner, Jörg. “Epigenetics: Embedded Bodies and the Molecularisation of Biography and Milieu.” BioSocieties 6 (2011): 279–98. ———. “Epigenetics: Localizing Biology through Co-Laboration.” New Genetics and Society 34 (2015): 219–42. Patrick, O. McGowan et al. “Promoter-Wide Hypermethylation of the Ribosomal RNA Gene Promoter in the Suicide Brain.” PLoS One 3 (2008): 1–10. Perroud, Nader et al. “The Tutsi Genocide and Transgenerational Transmission of Maternal Stress: Epigenetics and Biology of the HPA Axis.” The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry 15 (2014): 334–45. Ramo-Fernández, Laura et al. “Epigenetic Alterations Associated with War Trauma and Childhood Treatment.” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 33 (2015): 701–21.

132 Ada S. Jaarsma Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. Richardson, Sarah S. “Maternal Bodies in the Postgenomic Order: Gender and the Explanatory Landscape of Epigenetics.” In Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology after the Genome, edited by Sarah S. Richardson and Hallam Stevens, 210–31. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Rothstein, Mark A. et al. “The Ghost in Our Genes: Legal and Ethical Implications of Epigenetics.” Health Matrix 19 (2009): 1–62. Sankar, Pamela. “Forensic DNA Phenotyping: Continuity and Change in the History of Race, Genetics, and Policing.” In Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History, edited by Keith Walloo, Alondra Nelson, and Catherine Lee, 104–13. New York: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Shostak, Sara. Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment and the Politics of Population Health. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Sincic, Nino, and Zdenko Herceg. “DNA Methylation and Cancer: Ghosts and Angels above the Genes.” Current Opinion in Oncology 22 (2010): 1–8. Singh, Ilina. “Human Development, Nature and Nurture: Working beyond the Divide.” BioSocieties 7 (2012): 308–21. Skinner, Michael K. “Environmental Stress and Epigenetic Transgenerational Inheritance.” BMC Medicine 12 (2014): 1–5. Soo-Jin Lee, Sandra. “Biobanks of a ‘Racial Kind’: Mining for Difference in the New Genetics.” Patterns of Prejudice 40 (2006): 443–60. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17 (1987): 64–81. Sullivan, Shannon. “Inheriting Racist Disparities in Health: Epigenetics and the Transgenerational Effects of White Racism.” Critical Philosophy of Race 1 (2013): 190–218. Szyf, Moshe. “The Early Life Environment and the Epigenome.” Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 1790 (2009): 878–85. Tolwinski, Kasia. “A New Genetics or an Epiphenomenon? Variations in the Discourse of Epigenetics Research.” New Genetics and Society 32 (2013): 366–84. Tsankova, N.M. et al. “Sustained Hippocampal Chromatin Regulation in a Mouse Model of Depression and Antidepressant Action.” Nature Neuroscience 9 (2006): 519–25. Vukojevic, Vanja et al. “Epigenetic Modification of the Glucocorticoid Receptor Gene Is Linked to Traumatic Memory and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Risk in Genocide Survivors.” The Journal of Neuroscience 34 (2014): 10274–84. Waggoner, Miranda R. “Motherhood Preconceived: The Emergence of the Preconception Health and Health Care Initiative.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 38 (2013): 345–71. Wekker, Gloria. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Wells, Jonathan C.K. “Maternal Capital and Metabolic Ghettos: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Transgenerational Basis of Health Inequalities.” American Journal of Human Biology 22 (2010): 1–17. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” In Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, 9–89. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

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Yehuda, Rachel. “How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations.” On Being with Krista Tipett, 2015. Accessed April 15, 2016. www.onbeing.org/program/ rachel-yehuda-how-trauma-and-resilience-cross-generations/7786. Yehuda, Rachel, and Linda M. Bierer. “The Relevance of Epigenetics to PTSD: Implications for the DSM-V.” Journal of Trauma Stress 22 (2009): 427–34. Zovkik, I., and J. Sweatt. “Memory-Associated Dynamic Regulation of the ‘Stable’ Core of the Chromatin Particle.” Neuron 87 (2015): 1–4.

7

“We Charge Genocide” Anti-Black Racism in the United States as Genocidal Structural Violence Lisa Guenther

On December 17, 1951, William Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress [CRC] presented a petition to the United Nations entitled “We Charge Genocide.” The petition contained more than 200 pages of evidence and argumentation for the claim that anti-black violence in the United States constituted genocide under the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention.1 The petition included evidence of lynching, racially motivated assaults and bombings, racist police violence, imprisonment, and state execution, as well as more structural forms of violence such as poverty, segregation, lack of access to adequate education and medical treatment, and denial of the right to vote. Quoting the Convention’s definition of genocide as “[a]ny intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnic or religious group,” and emphasizing the inclusion of “serious bodily or mental harm” within this definition, the petition argued that black Americans were exposed to genocidal violence “as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of [the U.S.] government.”2 These charges were not presented as “mere words,” but as “facts felt on our bodies, crimes inflicted on our dignity.”3 While the CRC’s petition was never formally considered by the United Nations, the project of naming, analyzing, and contesting systematic anti-black violence in the United States has inspired social justice organizations such as We Charge Genocide, which describes itself as “a grassroots, inter-generational effort to center the voices and experiences of the young people most targeted by police violence in Chicago.”4 In 2014, We Charge Genocide issued a shadow report for the 53rd session of the UN’s Committee Against Torture, in which the United States was up for periodic review.5 In their shadow report, We Charge Genocide explicitly names the Civil Rights Congress’s 1951 report—in particular, their documentation of “153 racial killings and other human rights abuses, mostly by police” (WCG 2014, 1)—as an inspiration and precedent for their own research. Mariame Kaba, an activist who works with We Charge Genocide, articulates the organization’s core insight: We are always unsafe, living in our skin, in this country. It’s a permanent condition .  .  . Our people are stopped, we are frisked, we

“We Charge Genocide” 135 are criminalized, we are targeted, we are invaded, we are jailed and we are killed. The machine grinds on and we struggle to identify one culprit but there isn’t just one. So many of us are afraid to speak the word. We are afraid to lay claim to it. It’s too awful to believe. No. It sounds too conspiratorial, too pessimistic, too alienating, too (something) . . . Yet there it is, at the forefront of our minds and on the tip of our tongues. When we are feeling brave and safe among those we love & trust we sometimes whisper the words: genocide . . . genocide . . . GENOCIDE.6 In November 2014, We Charge Genocide sent a delegation of eight activists to Geneva to present their report to UN offcials and to provide personal testimony of their own experience of police violence as youth of color in Chicago.7 The report calls for the UN’s formal recognition of torture by police in Chicago, and it recommends an investigation of the Chicago Police Department by the US Department of Justice. But the organization also develops a broader vision of social transformation to support the collective self-determination of people of color. In a 2015 follow-up report, We Charge Genocide argued: The solution is not, as President Obama suggests, renewed commitment to community policing and further investment in law enforcement. Instead, the appropriate response is to reduce funding for police agencies and reinvest that money in social services like education and public health that will meet real community needs.8 We Charge Genocide builds a commitment to social justice beyond the criminal-legal system into its organizational structure and research methodology by centering the perspectives of those who are most impacted by racist police violence and supporting their collective capacity to name, contest, and transform their own situation. This commitment to activist movement-building develops a latent possibility in the CRC’s 1951 petition: namely, the possibility of engaging strategically with formal institutions such as the UN in a way that exceeds the restricted agenda of those institutions and emphatically fights for revolutionary social change. The difficulty of identifying “just one culprit” to justify the charge of genocide, and the risk of having one’s analysis dismissed as a conspiracy theory in the absence of such an identification, haunts the project of charging black genocide from the 1940s to the present. This difficulty is intensified by a geopolitical demand to restrict the definition of genocide in order to satisfy powerful member states such as the United States, and by the UN’s own focus on criminal prosecution as a remedy for genocidal violence. But even if the charge of black genocide were taken seriously by the UN, whom would one prosecute? And even if one could identify an individual or group of individuals responsible for genocidal violence against black Americans, how would

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criminal prosecution help to transform the power relations that structure white supremacy in its more mundane, everyday forms, from racial profiling by police to higher rates of diabetes in black communities? In this chapter, I propose a concept of structural genocide based on a model of social justice rather than criminal justice as a tool for articulating the harm of policies and practices that undermine a group’s life chances, whether or not they directly kill people. This tool is also a weapon for fighting structural injustice and supporting the collective resurgence of communities exposed to genocidal structural violence. The concept of structural genocide is implicit in both the CRC’s 1951 petition and in We Charge Genocide’s 2014 petition, but I think it’s useful to make this concept explicit, both as a way of distinguishing the charge of (structural) genocide from a mere conspiracy theory, and also as a platform for imagining and implementing more effective responses to systemic anti-black violence beyond the narrow scope of criminal prosecution. The chapter begins with a brief sketch of the text and historical context of the CRC’s 1951 petition.

“We Charge Genocide” (1951) “Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet.” —Civil Rights Congress, “We Charge Genocide” (1951)

The Civil Rights Congress was established in 1946 as a more radical leftwing alternative to the NAACP. William Patterson, a civil rights attorney and leader in the Communist Party USA, was national secretary of the CRC throughout its existence, and he was largely responsible for drafting, delivering, and publicizing the organization’s petition to the UN. “We Charge Genocide” gathers evidence of systematic violence against African Americans in the US from 1945, when the UN was established, until 1951, when the CRC submitted its petition. The report presents “typical cases from the voluminous evidence” in order to establish a “pattern of genocide” by demonstrating the connection between legal, structural, and extrajudicial anti-black violence, such that this violence can be understood not as the random acts of a few racist individuals, but as “an integral part of the fabric of American law, government and practice.”9 Typical cases in the petition include: [E]ight Negro prisoners who were shot down and murdered on July 11, 1947 at Brunswick, Georgia, because they refused to work in a snake-infested swamp without boots. Danny Bryant, 37, of Covington, Louisiana, was shot and killed in October of 1948 by Policeman Kinsie Jenkins after Bryant refused to remove his hat in the presence of whites.

“We Charge Genocide” 137 Hosea W. Allen, of Tampa, Florida was shot and killed on September 26, 1948, when he asked to be served a bottle of beer. Victor Pinella, the proprietor of the tavern, explained that he killed Allen because he did not permit Negro customers. He was freed.10 “We Charge Genocide” situates this brutal interpersonal violence in a broader historical context of American slavery, in which “part of the group [was killed] so that the remainder could more readily be exploited for proft,” as well as post-Reconstruction Era violence, in which almost 2,000 lynchings were recorded from 1889–1901.11 In many ways, “We Charge Genocide” continues the work of Ida B. Wells by meticulously documenting the extrajudicial killing of black Americans. But it also documents other forms of violence against blacks: state violence such as police killings, incarceration, and the death penalty; structural violence such as segregation and lack of access to education, medical care, and the vote; and the “economic genocide” of poverty, unemployment, and exploitation whose “prime mover” is “monopoly capital.”12 The report clearly indicts the United States government and its institutions for both failing to prevent or punish anti-black violence and for inficting it directly. The immediate impact of “We Charge Genocide” (1951) was limited, politically and conceptually, by Cold War politics and by the petition’s reliance on the UN’s relatively narrow definition of genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention and in Resolution 96(I), as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.”13 As I will argue at greater length in the second section of this chapter, the UN’s concept of genocide is problematic for reasons that stem from its reliance on a criminal legal model of justice rather than a social justice model. In criminal legal discourses, violence is primarily understood in terms of what Johan Galtung called personal violence, in which Person A intentionally commits an act that limits the capacity of Person B to actualize their possibilities.14 In order to hold Person A accountable for their actions in a criminal legal system, one must prove that they committed these acts intentionally, with a reasonable awareness of their likely effects. In this model, accountability is sought through the identification and punishment of specific perpetrators, rather than through what Fanon would later call “a restructuring of the world” (1967, 82). The criminal-legal approach to violence and accountability makes it difficult to develop a robust account of structural injustice, where the everyday practices and “common sense” of a society is organized around a naturalized, normalized situation of extreme inequality, which diminishes or destroys the life chances of a group without necessarily taking the form of specific actions by identifiable perpetrators. Part of the strength of the 1951 “We Charge Genocide” report is the connection it makes between personal violence against individuals and

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groups, such as homicide, physical assault, and arson, and structural violence such as racial segregation, which imprisons United States Negroes from birth to death, making their status as inferior as a matter of law on the basis of race, cutting them off from adequate education, hospital facilities, medical treatment, and housing, forcing them to live in ghettos and depriving them of rights and privileges of their fellow citizens, which makes them pariahs in their own country.15 Even in situations where a specifc perpetrator cannot be identifed, the policy and practice of segregation (re)produces the conditions for “premature death, poverty and disease” in black communities, systematically undermining their survival as a group and exposing individual members of that group to disproportionate personal violence.16 As evidence for this claim, the CRC’s petition draws on data from life insurance companies and the Offce of Vital Statistics to demonstrate stark racial disparities in the rate of accidents, illness, and infant and maternal death, resulting in an average life span of eight years less for black people than the rest of the US population.17 This analysis of the genocidal structure of what the report calls “institutionalized oppression” anticipates the work of scholar-activists such as Ruth Gilmore, who defne racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of groupdifferentiated vulnerability to premature death.”18 By defning racism in terms of its impact on the life chances of marginalized groups rather than the beliefs or intentions of individual racists, Gilmore develops a powerful critique of the US carceral state as a racist (and arguably genocidal) structure, even in a putatively colorblind, post-racial era.19 But the CRC’s analysis of anti-black racism as a form of structural oppression that is “gilded with the trappings of respectability” and “sanctified by law” is precisely what discredited their charge of genocide in the eyes of Raphäel Lemkin, the legal scholar who first coined the term in 1944.20 For Lemkin, “Genocide implies destruction, death, annihilation, while discrimination is a regrettable denial of certain opportunities of life. To be unequal is not the same as to be dead.”21 In a 1953 editorial for The New York Times, Lemkin wrote: The opponents of the Genocide Convention have been asking, literally, can one be guilty of genocide when one frightens a Negro? Obviously not, because fear alone cannot be considered as serious mental harm, as meant by the authors of the convention; the act is not directed against the Negro population of the country and by no stretch of imagination can one discover in the United States an intent or plan to exterminate the Negro population, which is increasing in conditions of evident prosperity and progress.22

“We Charge Genocide” 139 For Lemkin, lynchings and race riots in the US are not genocidal in nature because “these are actions against individuals—not intended to destroy a race.”23 But as the CRC’s petition makes clear, extreme inequality can and does lead to death and destruction, both for individuals who are targeted on the basis of their perceived belonging to a racialized social group, and also for the group itself, which is not simply “frightened” but systematically terrorized by racist attacks and by the absence of accountability for those attacks. Lemkin’s rejection of the CRC’s charge of black genocide was motivated, at least in part, by the political agenda of securing US support for the newly emerging United Nations. Lemkin’s passing reference to unnamed “opponents of the Genocide Convention” may have included US economist Harry S. Badger, who claimed that the actual agenda of the convention was to establish “an international Fair Employment Practices Commission, together with an international anti-lynching bill;” or to Louisiana segregationist, Leander Perez, who argued that the convention was a “conspiracy to destroy our American institutions;” or to an attorney with the American Bar Association, who worried that an attack on an individual “Chinaman” or “colored person” in the US could be considered genocide under the UN convention.24 The fact that Solicitor General Philip B. Perlman had to reassure a Senate subcommittee that “lynching or individual acts of discrimination did not constitute genocide” suggests that members of the white elite understood that a charge of genocide against the US was plausible, or at least possible.25 While President Truman was initially supportive of the UN’s Genocide Convention in 1948, formal ratification of the Convention stalled in the Senate and was largely ignored by subsequent administrations until it finally passed in 1986, “subject to several reservations.”26 The political challenge of courting American support led UN officials and most member states (apart from the Soviet Union and its allies) to keep their distance from petitions concerning anti-black racism in the US. For example, in 1947, W.E.B. Du Bois drafted a report entitled “An Appeal to the World” on behalf of the NAACP. The report analyzed racial injustice in the United States as a violation of the civil rights and human rights of African Americans, but it stopped short of charging genocide or torture. Du Bois sought support for the petition from Eleanor Roosevelt, who dismissed it as “embarrassing” and stated that “no good could come from such a discussion.”27 In 1948, Du Bois was forced out of his position as the NAACP’s Director of Special Research over a conflict with the organization’s leadership, which was under pressure to withdraw the petition and to distance itself from other efforts to seek international support for fighting racial justice in the United States. After splitting with the NAACP, Du Bois became a signatory to the CRC’s petition, together with William Patterson, Paul Robeson, George W. Crockett, Jr. and other leading activists and survivors of anti-black violence.

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Much of the evidence of personal violence presented in “We Charge Genocide” was drawn from the NAACP’s extensive research on lynching and police violence. So when the NAACP—again under pressure from the US State Department—issued a news release condemning the CRC’s charge of genocide as “a gross and subversive conspiracy,” the organization found itself in an awkward position. Roy Wilkins, assistant secretary of the NAACP, asked, “How can we ‘blast’ a book that uses our records as source material?” This tension was resolved, albeit awkwardly, by executive secretary Walter White, who denounced the petition as “Communist propaganda” but acknowledged that it used otherwise sound data from “non-Communist and anti-Communist sources” such as the NAACP. White added: “Whatever the sins of the Nation against the Negro—and they are many and gruesome—genocide is not among them.”28 In the midst of this controversy, William Patterson traveled to Paris on December 16, 1951, to deliver the CRC’s petition to UN officials. He carried 20 copies on the plane and shipped 60 in advance, sending additional copies to allies in England and Hungary in case US officials seized the report or caused it to go missing. Paul Robeson led a simultaneous delegation to UN headquarters in New York City; Robeson was unable to travel to Paris because his passport had been revoked in retaliation for his left-wing politics and criticism of US foreign policy. In Paris, Patterson met with representatives of the UN as well as delegates from non-aligned countries, but the petition failed to gain traction in the face of powerful opposition from the United States. When Patterson returned to New York later in December, his own passport was seized, and he was subject to a full body search. The petition received almost no coverage in the US mainstream press, although black newspapers covered the story widely, as did French and other European newspapers.29 In 1956, the Civil Rights Congress dissolved after being branded a Communist organization by the Subversive Activities Control Board. In the face of such widespread opposition and indifference, both from enemies and from potential allies, one might reasonably ask: Why charge genocide in the first place? What is the point of making such a bold and serious claim? The rhetorical power of the term genocide is a doubleedged sword; it both commands attention and invites the counter-charge that one is merely seeking attention by overstating the case. The risk of this counter-charge forces those who wish to charge black genocide to adhere as closely as possible to the UN’s official definition of the term; and yet, this definition is clearly shaped by the political agenda of convincing powerful member states such as the United States to sign onto the Convention.30 What would it take for the charge of black genocide in the United States to become politically effective in transforming the social conditions of anti-black violence in all its forms? And what role might the UN play in such a transformation?

“We Charge Genocide” 141 Strategically, the international forum of the United Nations allowed the CRC to formulate a critique of anti-black racism that did not rely on the framework and limits of the United States constitution; in other words, it allowed for a claim to human rights, beyond the specificity of civil rights. But this, too, is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it allows the CRC to make a counter-hegemonic claim to black humanity that contests the systemic dehumanization of black men, women, and children. On the other hand, it exposes this claim to the danger that Hannah Arendt spells out in The Origins of Totalitarianism: that the abstraction of human rights, and the lack of a specific political actor or institution to hold directly accountable for these rights and their violation, underlines the vulnerability of those who are forced to make human rights claims.31 While the creation of the United Nations in 1945 was meant to provide such a forum for accountability, it is not clear from the CRC’s report what the UN should or even could do to stop genocidal violence against black Americans or to restructure the norms and practices that (re)produce this violence. The CRC’s report ends with a “Summary and Prayer” asking the UN General Assembly “to condemn and prevent the crime of genocide now being committed against the Negro people of the United States.”32 And yet, the power of this report lies not in its appeal for condemnation by an international body (or “world police”), but rather in its practice of parrhesia or risky truth-telling as an act of epistemic resistance, and as a valuable resource for generations of social movement-building.33 In order to appreciate the scope and seriousness of the CRC’s charge of black genocide, and to grasp its continuing relevance for anti-racist organizing today, we need to problematize the narrow criminal-legal framework of the UN’s definition of genocide, and to develop a more nuanced account of what Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed calls “structural genocide.”34 The point of articulating a concept of structural genocide is not to gain more traction with the UN’s Advisory Committee on the Prevention of Genocide, nor to advance a case in the International Criminal Court, but rather to develop an epistemic and political resource for social justice movements who seek to transform oppressive power relations for the sake of collective liberation. If hermeneutical injustice is the lack of a concept to identify an existing form of injustice which lacks common recognition because it lacks a name, then the explicit formulation of a concept of structural genocide might help to connect the dots between seemingly unrelated domains, such as infant mortality rates, economic policies, and educational opportunities, and to articulate the way in which racialized social groups are targeted for destruction, even by seemingly colorblind policies.35 By naming the problem of structural genocide as such—not just as structural violence or institutionalized oppression, but as a form of genocide, or the systematic targeting of a social group for destruction—and by clarifying

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the relation between the personal violence of racially motivated killing and the structural violence of exposure to premature death, we may find a way through the impasse of relying on criminal legal solutions to socialpolitical problems.

Toward a Theory of Structural Genocide Raphael Lemkin defines the term genocide in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”36 This initial definition is capacious enough to include forms of structural violence identified in the Civil Rights Congress’s 1951 report, such as racial segregation, denial of adequate medical care and education to black communities, and systematic exclusion from employment opportunities and from the vote. Lemkin’s reference to the destruction of a group’s foundations can be plausibly interpreted to include its social, cultural, and economic foundations, and a “coordinated plan” to destroy these foundations need not take the form of an explicitly formulated and publicly acknowledged conspiracy—although William Patterson found no shortage of such conspiracy in his documentation of public speeches and radio announcements from 1945–51. For example, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi publically announced his membership in the Ku Klux Klan on the radio on Aug. 9, 1946, and joked that “The best way to keep a n—r from the polls is to see him the night before” (quoted on 188; see also 187–191). Beyond documenting this thinly veiled advocacy for anti-black violence by state officials, the CRC also develops a more complex functional account of conspiracy to commit genocide as a tendency that “can be recognized by its results as well as revealed by a dictaphone or exposed by spies.”37 This functional account identifies an “aim” or “coordinated plan” not only in the public statements of key decision-makers, but also in the patterned effects of a social system that is structured around anti-black racism.38 This functional approach anticipates Sartre’s account of genocide for the International War Crimes Tribunal that he co-organized with Bertrand Russell in 1966–67 to investigate and evaluate US military action in Vietnam. While Sartre’s account is also constrained by the 1948 Genocide Convention’s demand for proof of an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” Sartre argues that, in the absence of an overt declaration of genocidal intent, one may nevertheless discern an implicit intent in the actions (and selective inaction) of US officials.39 Sartre asks: Is it possible for us, by studying the facts objectively, to discover implicit in them such a genocidal intention? And after such an investigation, can we say that the armed forces of the United States are

“We Charge Genocide” 143 killing Vietnamese in Vietnam for the simple reason that they are Vietnamese?40 For Sartre, the key defning feature of genocide is the systematic targeting of human beings for destruction qua members of a certain social group. From this perspective, the decisive question for groups like the Civil Rights Congress is not whether the United States government has explicitly formulated a master plan to annihilate the black race, but whether blacks in the US are targeted for destruction as blacks, and whether an objective investigation of “the facts”—facts that the CRC insists are “felt on our bodies” and experienced as pervasively as the “fact” of “gravity”— provide evidence of genocidal anti-black racism in America.41 While it would be diffcult to make a legal case that Senator Bilbo, for example, was guilty of inciting genocidal violence, there is no inherent reason why a criminal legal defnition of genocide should be privileged over a defnition crafted by and for social justice movements. If anything, a focus on prosecuting perpetrators and proving criminal intent may distract the international community from supporting the profoundly important work of reconstruction in the wake of genocidal violence. But the history of the term genocide is very clearly marked by a privileging of criminal legal models of accountability. Already in 1944, Lemkin compared genocide to the “criminal killing of a human being: the crime in the one case as in the other is murder, though on a vastly greater scale.”42 This analogy between homicide and genocide is incorporated into the UN’s 1946 Resolution 96 (I), which defines genocide as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.”43 This definition is problematic for several reasons. First, it implies that the difference between an individual and a group is one of scale; a group is understood either as a large individual or as a large collection of individuals. This conception effaces the specifically social ontology of the group as an emergent whole that is irreducible to its parts. The “essential foundations” of a social group, such as language and culture, are not the property of individuals; rather, they constitute a field of inherited, yet revisable possibilities shared by a social group, and sharable with other groups under conditions of mutual respect and reciprocity. Understood in this way, the existence of a group is irreducible to the totality of actual or occurrent individual members; rather, this inherently collective existence is produced and maintained through the relationship of past, present, and future members, where the structure of relationality is ontologically prior to individual relata. These relationships among present-day members of a social group and virtual or non-occurrent members in the past and future, such as ancestors and future generations, sketch the horizons of a social group and help to define its sense of collective identity. To be clear: it’s not the individual past and future members as such (understood as

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previously actual or soon-to-be-actual individuals) who hold open these horizons; rather, it’s the web of relations between and among generations that constitutes the meaning of the genos, understood as a transindividual field of possibility irreducible to its members.44 Part of what it means to commit genocide is to attempt to destroy or foreclose these horizons, which constitute the group as such.45 On this more phenomenological account of genocide, a group’s “right of existence” cannot be understood as a parallel, counterpart, or extension of an assumed individual “right to live,” the latter of which has been problematized by feminists and (other) critics of biopower who contest the separability of life, or physical survival, from a meaningful life as a social being. Nor can the destruction of a group be understood on the model of individual homicide, the latter of which implies nothing more and nothing less than an act of physical killing. Even the UN’s 1948 definition of genocide includes a broader range of acts and policies that undermine the group’s survival as a group without necessarily resulting in physical death, such as “[c]ausing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” or “[f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”46 The latter form of violence, in addition to the act of “[i]mposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” directly attacks the group’s horizon of possibilities, and its capacity to sustain an open-ended relationship with future generations. The attempted destruction of this horizon does not necessarily involve homicide; it may be accomplished through structurally racist adoption policies, coercive sterilization, and even long-term carceral separation.47 And if we understand reproduction more broadly to include the social reproduction of a group’s culturally specific ways of being, acting, and relating to one another, then the denial of access to education, adequate housing, and meaningful employment can also function as part of a group-destroying or genocidal structure. In his 2007 paper, “Structural Violence as a Form of Genocide,” Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed develops a more complex definition of structural genocide that can accommodate most, if not all, of these concerns.48 Ahmed’s definition draws on Johan Galtung’s account of the structural violence built into social systems, which does not conform to the structure of personal violence (“subject-verb-object”), but which nevertheless diminishes or destroys the capacity of individuals and groups to realize their somatic and mental possibilities.49 For Ahmed, personal violence and structural violence are conceptually distinct but not ontologically separable or reducible to each other; just as personal violence can establish or enforce patterns of structural violence, so too can structural violence engender, justify, or “invisibilize” personal violence to the point where a racist police beating (for example) is literally not seen as such by jury members. In sum, “structural violence can be conceived of as the consequence of agents acting and interacting in enduring patterns of behavior at multiple, interacting spatial scales, in a manner that discriminates

“We Charge Genocide” 145 against relatively powerless groups.”50 Ahmed identifies four key features of structural genocide: 1. They are severe examples of structural violence, that is, configurations of social, political, and economic structure generating systematic deprivation against particular human groups, resulting ultimately in their death. 2. Simultaneously, this violence was the product of policies pursued deliberately by powerful agents possessing pivotal positions in social, political, and economic structures, which they were capable of manipulating. 3. The targets of the said policies were clearly defined human groups [including political groups, which were included in Lemkin’s initial definition but excluded from the 1948 Genocide Convention]. 4. The target groups became targets primarily because they were categorized by the perpetrating regime as ultimately disposable, that is, irrelevant to the pursuit of other interests or goals that were elevated to a more significant level. In this respect, relative to those interests or goals, they were fundamentally dehumanized or otherized.51 By this defnition, the pattern of violence articulated in “We Charge Genocide” would clearly constitute an example of structural genocide. But even Ahmed’s powerful account of structural genocide holds onto the criminal legal imperative of proving genocidal intent in terms of individual agency. He argues that the more power one has as a decision-maker, the more responsibility one has for identifying, acknowledging, and dismantling genocidal structures.52 This is not, in itself, a problematic claim, and yet the perceived need to prove intent remains indebted to the model of criminal justice, where responsibility cannot be established without proof of intent, and where justice is understood as the punishment of specifc perpetrators.53 And it’s not clear how the punishment of a handful of individuals would help to transform the social conditions that make genocidal violence possible, both in its personal and structural forms. What if we understood accountability differently, not as criminal liability and eligibility for punishment, but as the ethical and political imperative to give an account of oneself and to address the harm of genocidal violence—whether intentional or unintentional, conscious or unconscious—by working collectively toward the elimination of structural and personal violence? This is what Galtung calls peace, understood not merely as the cessation of personal violence but also, more profoundly, as the cessation of structural violence through the creation of social justice. The Civil Rights Congress’ 1951 petition resonates with this account of peace, declaring that “The End of Genocide Means Peace,” and defining peace in terms of democratic self-determination:54 The end of genocide against the Negro people of the United States will mean returning this country to its people. It will mean a new

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This vision of peace is not based on criminal prosecution, which may play a limited role in ending personal violence and demanding individual accountability, but that is insuffcient for what Fanon calls a “restructuring of the world” beyond the genocidal logic of racism, poverty, and other forms of genocidal violence. The (re)construction of peace as social justice in the wake of genocidal violence requires a collective participation of all human beings in the transformation of genocidal structures wherever they may be, but especially in those local structures through which one’s own agency and capacities have been constituted. One need not be personally guilty of planning or executing genocidal violence to be implicated in a genocidal structure and to share in the collective responsibility to transform this structure. By moving away from a criminal-legal model of accountability as a backward-looking process of identifying and punishing perpetrators, and moving toward a social justice model of accountability as the shared responsibility for building a world in which no group is targeted for destruction, we move beyond the impasse of relying on the selective recognition of formal institutions such as the UN. Rather, we reclaim both the power and the responsibility to transform our own situation from within. This transformation is only possible through social justice movementbuilding, understood as a collective practice of contesting oppressive structures and (re)constructing the horizons of a shared field of possibilities. The process of reconstruction is sustained by a collective practice of reimagining the relationship between past and future, or between the concrete determinacy of inherited possibilities (including the possibility of charging genocide) and the open-ended indeterminacy of becomingotherwise. This is what epistemic and political resistance to genocide looks like, beyond the narrower criminal-legal agenda of identifying and punishing perpetrators: an affirmative biopolitics of refusing to be killed, but also refusing to be abandoned, rendered disposable, or exposed to premature death.

Notes 1. The concept of “black genocide” resonated with black radical and nationalist groups in the 1960s and 70s such as the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and the Five Percenters, some of whom denounced birth control and abortion as genocidal technologies and urged black women to have as many children as possible. More recently, the discourse of black genocide has been picked up by conservative pro-life groups who equate abortion with slavery and lobby for constitutional amendments to include fertilized eggs within the legal definition of personhood. For a critical review of this discourse, see Robert Weisbord, “Birth Control and the Black American: A Matter of

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

Genocide?,” Demography 10, no. 4 (November 1973), 571–90; and Simone M. Caron, “Birth Control and the Black Community in the 1960s: Genocide or Power Politics?,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 545–69. For an example of this discourse today, see websites such as www. blackgenocide.org. And for a broader critical discussion of black genocide in the US and Brazil, see João Costa Vargas, Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). William Patterson et al., We Charge Genocide (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951), xi; emphasis added by Patterson. Ibid., 7. We Charge Genocide, “One Year of We Charge Genocide,” June 9, 2015, http://wechargegenocide.org/one-year-of-we-charge-genocide/. “Periodic Report of the United States of America to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (Third, Fourth, and Fifth Reports),” August 12, 2013, www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/c59007.htm. Mariame Kaba, “Blackness, Churning Oppression and Militarized Urban Space,”August 30, 2014, www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2014/08/30/blacknesschurning-oppression-and-militarized-urban-space/ See also the video performance of this text by youth activists in WCG: www.uce-equal.org/unity/ we-charge-genocide. To be clear: The organization, We Charge Genocide (2014–16) did not bring a claim of genocide to the UN, but rather a claim of torture. However, the broader context of this claim is a critical discourse of black genocide, understood as lethal, systemic anti-black violence, including both personal and structural violence, and focused in particular on the state-sponsored institutional violence of the Chicago police. We Charge Genocide, “Community Policing Is Not the Answer,” October 28, 2015, http://wechargegenocide.org/press-release-community-policing-is-notthe-answer-countercaps-report/. Patterson et al., 10, 49. Ibid., 9, 11, 13. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 5, 132. United Nations, “The Crime of Genocide,” General Resolution 96, no. 1 (December 11, 1946), 189. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 171–3. Patterson et al., 46. Ibid., xi. Ibid., 5, 125–32. See also Galtung on structural violence: “[I]n a society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are no concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others, as when one person kills another” (171). Patterson et al., 3. Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 2007), 28, 247. [[Is the Ruth Gilmore supposed to be a new reference?]] For a more developed account of colorblind racism, see Bonilla-Silva and Alexander. See also Lissa Skitolsky’s chapter in this volume for an analysis of the genocidal structure of mass incarceration. Patterson et al., 3. Quoted in Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 75.

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22. Raphaël Lemkin,“Nature of Genocide: Confusion with Discrimination against Individuals Seen,” The New York Times, June 14, 1953, E10. 23. As reported in “UN Asked to Act Against Genocide in the United States,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 22, 1951, 19, https://news.google.com/new spapers?id=mdQmAAAAIBAJ&sjid=kgIGAAAAIBAJ&dq=we-charge-geno cide&pg=2113,3191483&hl=en 24. Quoted in Charles H. Martin, “Internationalizing ‘The American Dilemma’: The Civil Rights Congress and the 1951 Genocide Petition to the United Nations,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no. 4 (Summer 1997), 43. 25. Quoted in Martin, 44. 26. Martin, 55. 27. Quoted in Martin, 39. 28. Quoted in Martin, 46, 47. 29. Martin, 47–52. [[[ I decided not to put ibid., in these because they involve “quoted in,” and no two entries simply from Martin come in sequence]]] 30. For more detail, see Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 1997). 31. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1958), 267–302. 32. Patterson et al., 193. 33. Michel Foucault, Discourse andTruth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, ed. Joseph Pearson (Digital Archive: Foucault.info, 1999); José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 34. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, “Structural Violence as a Form of Genocide: The Impact of the International Economic Order,” Entelequia. Revista Interdisciplinar 5 (otoño 2007). One could also conceptualize this in temporal terms as “slow genocide,” building on Lauren Berlant’s concept of “slow death” as “the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence,” or as “the structurally induced attrition of persons keyed to their membership in certain populations” (Berlant 2011, 95, 102). 35. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 147–75. 36. Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79. 37. Patterson et al., 134. 38. See also Ahmed’s discussion of intent (20–1). 39. United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” December 9, 1948, 280; emphasis added. 40. Jean-Paul Sartre, “On Genocide,” Ramparts Magazine, February 1968, 37. 41. Patterson et al., 7, 4. 42. Lemkin, Axis Rule, 91; emphasis added. 43. UN 1946, 188. 44. See Anne O’Byrne’s essay in this volume for a discussion of the meaning of genos. 45. Galtung defines violence as any situation where “human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations . . . Violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is” (168). In my own account of structural genocide, violence is

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46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

not just the insertion of a gap between the possible and the actual, it is the (attempted) destruction of the field of possibilities that define that group’s horizons. UN 1948, 280. See Guenther 2016. See also Ward Churchill’s functional definition of genocide, which helpfully broadens the UN’s definition of genocide to include cultural genocide, and which introduces a graduated scale of degrees of genocidal violence from “premeditated intent” to “depraved indifference”(Churchill 1997, 431–6). However, Churchill’s definition still retains the analogy between genocide and homicide, as well as other analogies with the criminal legal concepts such as felony murder, which have helped to fuel the hyperincarceration of people of color, including blacks, Latinos, and Indigenous peoples. Galtung, 168. See also Arthur Kleinman’s account of structural violence (quoted in Rodriguez 2009, 140). Ahmed, 17. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 26. “For example, the question of agential intentionality inevitably leads to issues of criminal responsibility, and further to issues of legal accountability and the prospect of prosecuting key actors” (Ahmed, 32). Patterson et al., 27. Ibid., 28.

Bibliography Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. “Structural Violence as a Form of Genocide: The Impact of the International Economic Order.” Entelequia. Revista Interdisciplinar, no 5 (otoño 2007). Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1958. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Caron, Simone M. “Birth Control and the Black Community in the 1960s: Genocide or Power Politics?” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 545–69. Churchill, Ward. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights Press, 1997. Du Bois, W.E.B. “An Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress.” 1947. www.blackpast.org/1947-w-e-b-dubois-appeal-world-statement-denial-humanrights-minorities-case-citizens-n#sthash.pIkb4A4k.dpuf. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

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Foucault, Michel. Discourse andTruth: The Problematization of Parrhesia. Edited by Joseph Pearson. Digital Archive. 1999. https://foucault.info/parrhesia/. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Galtung, Johan. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91. Gilmore, Ruth. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. Guenther, Lisa. “Life Behind Bars: The Eugenic Structure of Mass Incarceration.” In Feminist Philosophies of Life, edited by Hasana Sharp and Chlöe Taylor. Montreal: Mc-Gill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. Kaba, Mariame. “Blackness, Churning Oppression and Militarized Urban Space.” August 30, 2014. www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2014/08/30/blackness-churningoppression-and-militarized-urban-space/. Lemkin, Raphaël. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944. ———. “Genocide as a Crime Under International Law.” American Journal of International Law 41, no. 1 (1947): 145–51. www.preventgenocide.org/ lemkin/ASIL1947.htm. ———. “Nature of Genocide: Confusion with Discrimination against Individuals Seen.” The New York Times, June 14, 1953: E10. Martin, Charles H. “Internationalizing ‘the American Dilemma’: The Civil Rights Congress and the 1951 Genocide Petition to the United Nations.” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 35–61. Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Patterson, William et al. We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People. New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951. Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Rodríguez, Dylan. Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “On Genocide.” Ramparts Magazine (February 1968): 35–42. “UN Asked to Act against Genocide in the United States.” Baltimore AfroAmerican, December 22, 1951. Accessed July 27, 2016. https://news.google. com/newspapers?nid=2211&dat=19511222&id=mdQmAAAAIBAJ&sjid=kg IGAAAAIBAJ&pg=827,3191714&hl=en. United Nations. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” (December 9, 1948). ———. “The Crime of Genocide.” General Resolution 96, no. 1 (December 11, 1946). U.S. Department of State. “Periodic Report of the United States of America to the United Nations Committee against Torture (Third, Fourth, and Fifth Reports).” August 12, 2013. www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/213055.htm. Vargas, João Costa. Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.

“We Charge Genocide” 151 We Charge Genocide. “Community Policing Is Not the Answer.” October 28, 2015. http://wechargegenocide.org/press-release-community-policing-is-not-theanswer-countercaps-report/. ———. “One Year of We Charge Genocide.” June 9, 2015. http://wechargegenocide. org/one-year-of-we-charge-genocide/. Weisbord, Robert G. “Birth Control and the Black American: A Matter of Genocide?” Demography 10, no. 4 (November 1973): 571–90.

8

Pornographic Ways of Looking and the Logic of Disposability Kelly Oliver

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who fled Nazi Germany to the United States during World War II, first popularized the use of term “genocide.” Rather than limit genocide to mass murder, Lemkin’s definition includes, “the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to [national] groups.”1 Following Lemkin, the United Nations Genocide Convention cites debilitating living conditions, wherein a genocidal act can include, Less obvious methods of destruction, such as the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for the group’s physical survival and which are available to the rest of the population, such as clean water, food and medical services; Creation of circumstances that could lead to a slow death, such as lack of proper housing, clothing and hygiene or excessive work or physical exertion.2 In these terms, the treatment of refugees fleeing civil wars and violence in Syria, the Sudan, and many other regions, meet the criteria of genocide insofar as their living conditions in camps and detention centers are certainly lacking in personal security, liberty health, dignity, and also often lacking in clean water, food and medical services, proper housing, clothing and hygiene, and lead to sickness, disease, and death. Here, I argue that the conditions in most refugee camps and detention centers, and the political construction of the group identity “refugee,” combined with policies of collateral damage and lessor of evils scenarios, meet the definition of genocide set out by the United Nations. Most particularly, policies that treat refugees as collateral damage or units of exchange, where some lives are more valuable than others as calculated through risk-benefit analysis, renders the lives of refugees fungible, and therefore, ultimately, disposable. In this sense, current policies of treating refugees as collateral damage calculated in terms of cost-benefits or risk-management operate according to a genocidal logic. The fact that the United States and the European Union pay other countries to keep refugees from crossing into their borders makes it clear that the lives of these people can be

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bought and sold like so much cargo to be held in port or lost at sea. The United Nations’ definition of genocide goes beyond mass murder and includes any group who is denied basic human rights on the basis of their membership in that group. I argue that refugees constitute such a group. Whether they are treated as charity cases or security threats, refugees are often given substandard subsistence, fenced in or detained, and implicitly condemned to slow death or slow genocide. Thousands of refugees die every year trying to escape violence at home; and the ones who make it too often encounter violence in their “host” country. Civil war and violence, along with famine and draught, have led to mass migrations of people fleeing for their lives. The UNHCR estimated that worldwide in 2014, there were 59.5 million people forcibly displaced, because conflict and persecution forced an average of 42,500 persons per day to leave their homes and seek protection elsewhere, either within the borders of their countries or in other countries.  .  .  . By the end of 2014, Syria had become the world’s top source country of refugees.3 Refugees make up a signifcant subgroup of the global population. Unlike the national group designated in Lemkin’s defnition of genocide, however, refugees are a nationless group; and it is their stateless status that makes them subject to incarceration and deprivation, and ultimately to the genocidal logic of contemporary international policies governing refugees. The refugee has become a global category that includes millions of people worldwide. Along with violence at home, the insistence on borders, national sovereignty, and citizenship has created the “refugee crisis” wherein most of these displaced people lack proper shelter, clothing, and food; they lack the basic necessities of life. Furthermore, thousands die each year attempting to escape violence at home. The category “refugee” operates according to a genocidal logic insofar as it produces a group of disposable people whose lives are marginal. In other words, it is a genocidal logic that creates a group of people called “refugees,” who, if not outright murdered, are let—or even made to—die, whether from drowning, disease, starvation, or lack of health care. If refugees constitute a group, then as a group they are victims of genocide insofar as they are denied the most basic necessities of life. Moreover, the logic of contemporary approaches to refugees is genocidal insofar as it renders refugees disposable. Insofar as refugees have become a global subset of the human population, and insofar as they have become “collateral damage” in this age of humanitarian warfare, their lives are treated as disposable. Here, I address two intermingled approaches to the refugee crisis: human rights and risk-benefit. While the human rights approach cannot prevent genocide, the risk-benefit approach is part and parcel of a

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genocidal logic. Within the human rights discourse, the abstract category “human” strips people of both their individual and group identities, and reduces them to members of a species whose lives can be managed and controlled by humanitarian aid organizations and governments. Within the logic of risk-benefit, reducing life to statistical models, and calculating costs and benefits, become alibis for a seemingly more humanitarian warfare. Designed to avoid the worst violence (traditionally equated with genocide) by embracing the lesser of the evils, the utilitarian cost-benefit model can actually be used to justify the worst violence. The calculus itself turns human life, or all life, into exchangeable units. This economy in which human life becomes fungible operates according to a genocidal logic in which the lives of refugees have become disposable. Indeed, statistical proportional analysis of collateral damage is part and parcel of genocidal logic, defined as a view of human life (or nonhuman life) that leads to the practice of making one subset of that population fungible or disposable.4 Here, I argue that refugees are a population that has been made fungible and disposable.

The Refugee Today In 2015, more than a million people fled to Europe seeking asylum, primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The vast majority of them arrived by sea, making a perilous journey that has cost thousands their lives. At least 3,700 people died crossing the Mediterranean Sea in 2015. And statistics coming in for 2016 are significantly higher. For example, in just the first six weeks of 2016, crossings increased tenfold, and so have deaths. In Africa, there are more than three million refugees, 12.5 million internally displaced people, and another 700,000 stateless people. In 2015, the majority of refugees were under 18 years old. By the end of 2014, the number of people assisted by UNHCR had reached a record high of 46.7 million people.5 These statistics are mind-boggling. What is more astounding is that most refugees end up living in camps for decades before resettlement. Unlike refugees from WWII, who were resettled by 1952, many of today’s refugees spend substantial portions of their lives in a permanent state of temporary living. For example, the largest refugee camp in the world, Kenya’s Dadaab, turned 25 years old in 2016 year. It was built for 90,000 refugees, but now “holds more than 420,000  .  .  . Currently, the number of years a refugee lives in a refugee camp is, on average, 12.”6 Furthermore, conditions in most refugee camps are dangerous and unhealthy, where people are forced to live in overcrowded makeshift tent compounds without adequate basic necessities like bathrooms, clothes, and food. For example, in Dunkirk camp in France, over 3,000 refugees live in rat-infested tents pitched in ankle-deep mud and human waste with only two water faucets; one resident says, “this place is for animals, not for human beings.”7

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Unfortunately, Dunkirk is not an isolated example. Calais, another camp in France near the Channel Tunnel, is known as the “Jungle” and housed over 6,000 at its peak last summer, most “living in squalor. Doctors working there describing conditions as ‘worse than a war zone’ people sleeping in tents surrounded by raw sewage, stagnant water and mud.”8 One resident told a reporter, “We are humans, not animals.”9 Violent protests and clashes with police throwing tear gas have resulted from the French government bulldozing a large section of the camp last March, further displacing already displaced people.10 At least 129 children have gone missing since the camp was raised.11 Recently, the Greek interior minister, Panagiotis Kouroublis, called the Idomeni camp on Greece’s border with Macedonia “a modern-day Dachau, a result of the logic of closed borders.” “Despite being planned for just 2,500 people, the camp hosts around 12,000 refugees—many from Syria and Iraq—in wet, cold and muddy conditions, which Red Cross officials warn are rife for the spread of disease.”12 These refugees “feel like we are dying slowly.”13 And, since the route to Greece from Syria has now been effectively closed, refugees flee through Libya, making an even more dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea into Italy—one that lead to over 1,000 people dying, and another 4,000 being rescued in a matter of days, in what a spokesperson for Save the Children, called “a massacre.”14 Thousands of miles away, in the United States (which so far has taken only 2,500 of the promised 10,000 Syrian refugees), refugees live in detention centers that look like, and are run like, prisons, with locked cells, jumpsuits, and all. As in other prisons, conditions in detention centers are often poor, with inadequate health care, lack of facilities and personnel, and preventable deaths, including suicide.15 In empirical terms, then, the circumstances of most refugees meet the criteria for genocide set out by Lemkin and the United Nations insofar as hundreds of thousands of people are forced to live in situations without adequate clean water, food, shelter, and medical care; and even if they do get those basic needs met, it is often at the expense of their personal security, liberty, mental health, and dignity. Indeed, no matter how many mind-boggling statistics we accumulate, we can never approach the human element of the equation, which cannot be quantified or reduced to a mere number. Furthermore, statistics piled one on top of the other can lead to “disaster fatigue,” even for those most committed to help. Perhaps this is why most news stories begin and end with “human interest” angles that focus on the experiences of particular individuals to make the numbers come to life. Many news reports on the refugee crisis in Europe or Africa refer to a “humanitarian crisis” and the lack of human rights or inhumane living conditions. But the rhetoric of humanity cuts both ways. For example, one aid worker in the Calais camp described the situation: “There’s no official structure,

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no camp leadership, just a group of people surviving, a random collection of humanity camped in a field.” And, the same report says, “some of the newer British volunteers are cheerful as they hand out supplies. ‘It’s touching, isn’t it?’ they say, brightly. ‘The humanity is amazing!’.” Simultaneously, as we’ve seen, many of the refugees call on their hosts to treat them like human beings instead of animals.16 Here, I argue that while humanistic models based on abstract human rights cannot prevent genocide, statistical models based on risk-benefit calculations of life and death in the context of expected collateral damage and the lessor of evils is part and parcel of a genocidal logic, rendering the lives of refugees exchangeable and ultimately disposable. On the one hand, the universalizing rhetoric of human rights discourse cannot address the singularity of each individual or his or her socio-political situation. And on the other, utilitarian calculating machines reduce human life to mere numbers in abstract equations. It is this reduction of life to numbers, and the quantification of the incalculable, which threatens the worst violence, even as proportional logics promise a way to avoid it. Furthermore, both the human rights and lessor of the evils approaches can be—and have been—used to justify killing groups of people deemed subhuman and therefore lacking in rights, or groups of people whose lives are viewed as disposable, and sometimes both simultaneously. Indeed, insofar as human rights policies treat each one as like every other and abstract each to a common denominator, particularly where what each one has in common is its basic animal needs, then the human rights discourse feeds the utilitarian calculus where one is substitutable for another as determined through formal equations. In fact, in this regard, the utilitarian calculus is more determinant than the human rights approach insofar as it discriminates between refugees who pose risks and those who don’t. Here, I argue that while the human rights approach cannot prevent genocide, the utilitarian approach of collateral damage operates according to a genocidal logic.

Humanity, Human Rights, and Humanitarianism Recently, Zygmunt Bauman called the refugee crisis “humanity’s crisis,” arguing for “the solidarity of humans” capable of mutual love rather than hate or indifference beyond the boundaries of national sovereignty. Yet, philosophers Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and others have challenged abstract concepts of the human or humanity as apolitical, and therefore unable to ground political rights for refugees.17 Taking up the rally cry for humanity and the human does not mean we are necessarily equipped to ward off violence, inside or outside the camps. The abstract category of human rights, founded in the Enlightenment notion of cosmopolitanism, can even become an alibi for genocide.

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Over 60 years ago, following her own escape from Nazi Germany, Hannah Arendt identified what she called the paradox of “inalienable human rights” that reduce the person to an “‘abstract’ human being who seemed to exist nowhere,”“independent of all governments.” As stateless, there is “no authority, or basis on which to protect” refugees. Specifically, in the case of Jews fleeing the Holocaust, she says, “Abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger”.18 Arendt argues rights are political and therefore a matter of enforceable laws, not abstract conceptions of some supposedly innate quality such as humanity. Nearly a decade earlier, already living in exile in 1943, Arendt wrote an essay entitled “We Refugees,” first published in a small Jewish magazine called The Menorah Journal. There, Arendt argues that prior to the war, refugees were people who committed acts or held political opinions making them enemies of one state, thus seeking refuge in another. But, Jews and others escaping the Nazis had done nothing to challenge their nationstate; they were so-called “voluntary exiles” with the supposed “choice” (individual sovereignty) to leave and live or stay and die. These WWII refugees, in response to whom the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention protocol was ratified, are akin to contemporary refugees from Syria in that they are not necessarily enemies of the state, and they supposedly flee voluntarily. Yet, unlike refugees from the 1950s, today’s refugees are not necessarily fleeing “owing to well-found fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” as demanded by the 1951 refugee protocol and its 1967 amendments. Instead, they are caught in a warzone in an undeclared war between the Syrian military, ISIS, Russia, the US, France, the UK, and others committed to the “war on terror.” At the very least, these refugees are collateral damage in the war on terror, if not also climate refugees from an increasingly draught and famine wrought region. Arendt argues for a political solution that takes us beyond human rights. And certainly much of what she had to say about her own situation and that of other refugees fleeing Nazi Germany applies to refugees today. For example, she identifies the problematic binary of treating refugees as either threats to be detained (even worse off than criminals in that they are imprisoned without a trial), or charity cases to be saved, often through so-called “voluntary” internment: “Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration campus by their foes and in internments camps by their friends.”19 And when they aren’t interned, refuges are paradoxically considered both “pariahs and parvenus (social climbers).”20 Closely following Arendt, 50 years later, Giorgio Agamben transforms her notion of abstract nakedness into what he calls “bare life,” and argues there is no place in politics for the concept of the human or rights based

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on this abstract concept. Like Arendt, he insists that only citizens have rights, and even those rights are linked to this problematic apolitical notion of the human. Proposing to take us beyond human rights and beyond nation-states, Agamben claims the refugee is the central figure for contemporary political philosophy—the figure upon which we can build a new community of those who don’t belong, beyond borders and frontiers. He says, It is even possible that, if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.21 Although, like Arendt and Agamben, Jacques Derrida is critical of human rights and state-sovereignty, he demonstrates how within Western thought, the human as an animal species is the flip side of the sovereign citizen. He shows how the category “human” has always been political, and part and parcel of the politics of naming. In The Animal that Therefore I am, and The Beast and the Sovereign seminars, in particular, he shows how humanity and sovereignty are traditionally, conceptually, and politically linked. Furthermore, he argues that the concept of the human already includes what it defines itself against, including the animal and the machine, and the beast and the sovereign. As Agamben provocatively suggests, then, beginning with the figure of the refugee may turn political philosophy on its head, but it still leaves in place the binary opposition citizen-refugee. Rather than merely replacing the dominant side of a binary opposition with its underside, Derrida works to deconstruct the opposition upon which binary hierarchies depend, and he does so from within the philosophical, political, and literary traditions we have inherited—or to put it in more Derridian terms, that we will have inherited, since the past is not a thing laying there to be found, but rather a kernel of the future—the to-come—that shakes the foundations of what we take to be the past. Derrida repeatedly demonstrates that the designation human is always political insofar as it operates according to a logic of exclusion. He reminds us that historically, the names “humanity” and “human” have operated as exclusionary categories, based on a dangerous notion of sovereignty that reasserts itself with more force in those moments when it is undermined or under scrutiny, as it is now with the massive influx of refugees in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. As Derrida point out, the category of the human or humanity has been used to justify killing, even genocide. Indeed, insofar as the category operates as an exclusionary

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category, it is part and parcel of a logic of genocide. As we know, genocide is typically justified by identifying the target group with animals, sub-humans, or inferior beings. Derrida reminds us that human rights discourses inherit this questionable and problematic history wherein the category human was (and continues to be) used to justify oppression, torture, and murder. In 2002, speaking of the way human rights discourse was used as an alibi in NATO’s response to violence in Serbia, Derrida says, we must deconstruct ad infinitum but also denounce the machinations, ruses, lies through which this respectable discourse of human rights accommodates, in an unjust and selective fashion, the hegemonic aims of state-nationalist superpowers. These superpowers do not renounce their own sovereignty. As soon as it seems opportune for them, they do not even respect any longer the organizations of international law that they institute and continue to dominate.22 Certainly, this opportunist approach to international law is evident in today’s covert international military operation’s “rules of engagement,” which are not sanctioned by the United Nations. In that same lecture, Derrida questions the separation of humanitarian missions from government interests: precisely where one claims to be acting in the name of humanitarian and human rights principles that are superior to the sovereignty of states, precisely where one grants oneself the right of intervention in the name of human rights, where one judges or intends to judge the authors of war crimes or crimes against humanity, it would be easy to show that this humanitarianism, which cares little about so many other examples of ‘ethnic cleansing’ going on in the world, still remains, and brutally so, in the service of state interests of all kinds (economic or strategic), whether they are interests shared by the NATO allies, or even in dispute between them (for example between the United States and Europe).23 There are, of course, many examples of this disparate caring. For just one case, take the disparities between Western media reactions to refugees arriving in Europe, and the deaths of refugees at sea on their way to Greece or Italy; Western media coverage of refugees fleeing civil war in Africa, and the recent announcement of plans to close the largest refugee camp in the world, Dadaab, which “houses” over 300,000 people on Kenya’s border. In a world where the lives of some matter more than the lives of others, genocidal logics are always on the horizon. Humanitarian aid is the good face of state sovereignty, and an alibi for the lack of a political solution in the war on terror—a war without

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an easily identifiable enemy. In terms of refugees, this translates into the unhappy choice identified by Arendt of treating those fleeing violence as either threats to be contained in detention centers or charity cases to be saved in camps, where the difference between the carceral model and the charity model is ever more difficult to discern when refugee camps are surrounded by barbed wire fences and checkpoints, and military personnel deliver medical supplies and food to the very people they’ve just bombed. In sum, as Arendt argues, an appeal to abstract human rights not only cannot prevent genocide, it enables genocide by stripping peoples of civil and legal rights and reducing them to a group, species, or race without any explicitly political rights. In Arendt’s terms, it makes the human species just like any other species without individuals wherein any one can be exchanged for another (obviously, Arendt wasn’t a proponent of animal rights either). Once the individual is transformed into an abstract human being removed from national protection, she has no protection. Although international law, particularly in terms of refugees, has changed dramatically since Arendt wrote her critique of post-World War II policies, it is still the case that there is no clear cut way to enforce international refugee laws, which continue to rely on the good will of nation-states. As Arendt foresaw, international law has no army or police force with which to enforce human rights, unless they are already tied to national right. Furthermore, as Derrida teaches us, the category human has always been exclusionary; and, historically, we have just as often used it to justify torture and murder as we have to prevent them. One example of the collusion of human rights discourse and the justification of war, killing, and even torture, is the current textbook for US counterinsurgency used in Baghdad and Afghanistan, which was cosponsored by the director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, who helped draft the manual. According to Eyal Weizman, in her introduction to the Chicago University Press version of the manual, [Sarah] Sewall [then director] announced it as the product of an ‘unprecedented collaboration [between] a human rights center partnered with the armed forces’ that focused on reducing collateral damage as a military tactic.24 Reducing loss of life is a human rights issue, but has become a military issue insofar as it is also strategically advantageous in winning a war. This new “humanitarian” warfare uses the calculus of collateral damage in conjunction with human rights discourse as contemporary weapons of war. In the words of Derrida, in these cases, a discourse on human rights and on democracy remains little more than an obscene alibi so long as it tolerates the terrible plight of so

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many millions of human beings suffering from malnutrition, disease, and humiliation, grossly deprived not only of bread and water but of equality or freedom, dispossessed of the rights of all, of everyone, of anyone.25

Proportionality and the Lesser of Evils The discourse of collateral damage, then, is not only overtaking the human rights discourse, but also incorporating it; the utilitarian logic of collateral damage is both an outgrowth of abstract discourses of human rights and feeds off them. Within this logic of utilitarian calculus of riskbenefit analysis, refugees are numbers to be plugged into complicated equations to assess the benefits of helping them, primarily in terms of the safety and security of the so-called host nations. Even humanitarian aid organizations such as Doctors Without Borders now employ riskmanagement personnel charged with calculating the risks and benefits of giving aid.26 These calculations cannot account for the singularity of individuals and their experiences, nor do they factor in human dignity or respect or the basic quality of life. Within this calculus, refugees become exchangeable, fungible, and eventually disposable. For example, Turkey’s membership into the European Union is contingent upon them taking a certain quota of refugees. Ongoing negotiations between the EU and Turkey revolve around how much money the EU will provide in exchange for each refugee, and whether or not Turkish citizens will be able to move freely within the EU, even while the freedom of movement of refugees is severely restricted and circumscribed. Refugees have become disposable insofar as their lives, safety, and security, along with their freedom of movement, is exchanged for both money and the freedom of movement of others. Refugees have become collateral damage in civil wars and the so-called “war on terror,” when they aren’t pawns to be exchanged in negotiations between governments. In this new form of warfare, international military forces organized by state officials, and operating according to international “rules of engagement,” are no longer necessarily tied to national constitutions or declarations of war. These operations are often designed to minimize “collateral damage.” This form of international warfare without a front line, without a clear enemy, without a formal declaration of war, without judicial approval, and seemingly beyond nation-states, is fought in the name of national security and protecting citizens. Yet, American and European nationals carry out terror attacks from inside state borders, where “hotbeds” of religious fanaticism supposedly spawned in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria are actually sprouting and growing in Florida flight schools or Brussels suburbs. Surgical strikes, smart bombs, and targeted drone warfare are circumscribed by a chain of command of lawyers operating according to extra-judicial powers, yet

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strictly adhering to international “rules of engagement” based on complex computer calculations of collateral damage using classified utilitarian calculus purportedly designed to transform the war machine into a humanitarian machine, reducing death to a minimum, and saving as many (human) lives as possible, all without leaving the military or the government vulnerable to media scandal. These rules of engagement are based on calculations of proportionality in which computer models perform risk-benefit analyses to assess what targets are worth, and what collateral damage is acceptable. Humanitarian aid figures into these calculations insofar as military strategy includes shoring up the sovereignty of so-called “failed states” by considering issues of poverty and famine insofar as they are causes of state failure and radicalization of terrorists, and using human rights discourse to cover over calculations of the risks of poor and hungry people becoming terrorists. Contemporary warfare waged by superpowers looks more like targeted assassination justified by complex utilitarian calculations of what deaths are worth more than which lives. In the words of Daniel Resiner, former head of the International Law Division in the Israeli military, Proportionality is a complex logic with many variables—but how do you compare these? There is no choice but to ask the question, compare and calculate. Proportionality does not tell us what to include in the calculation, what is the equation and what is the exchange rate? . . . Does one dead child equal one dead grownup, or does he equal five grownups? As a lawyer I need numbers to work with. I need thresholds in order to instruct the soldiers. Any number could become a useful benchmark. But when the ground of the law is shaking I am also unstable.27 As a lawyer, Resiner is uneasy with the aftershocks of this earthquake in our conception of tolerance, which defines and quantifies how much suffering we can tolerate in terms of proportional logics and lesser of evils. Tolerance becomes a matter of benchmarks and thresholds wherein “any number” will do as long as there is a clear cutoff between what we can and cannot tolerate. The new war craves precision. Surgical strikes, rules of engagement, and computer formulas for acceptable risks and tolerable collateral damage are part of the fantasy of precision and accuracy that privileges quantity over quality in order not only to justify violence, but also to disavow the pain and suffering it causes. Within the formula of collateral damage, containing violence and suffering becomes an alibi for more violence and suffering in calculations based on arbitrary thresholds of death assigned by government agencies and the military. Who will die and how is calculated using computer programs similar to those used by corporations to project profit margins or insurance companies to

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project risk. Statistical analysis replaces ethics or politics as the basis for assessing “just war.” The impossibility of predicting the future, risks, or benefits is disavowed by the fervent adherence to models for calculation that create the illusion of control, mastery, and measure, all in the name of preventing “the worst” violence. Military analysts weigh their options based on calculable measurements of how much violence and death they expect given different possible scenarios. Invoking these calculations, international “peace keeping” forces justify their killing, and oppose it to the irrational, incalculable killing of terrorists. Western forces claim to operate according to the rules of war, now defined in economic terms, while terrorists supposedly don’t play by the rules. Even as international military forces continue to make and change the rules in this war without end, front, or declaration, they claim their adherence to rational, principled, measured, rules of engagement wherein thresholds of collateral damage and computer programs replace ethical reflection. Within this economic model, the lesser of evils is fewer collateral deaths and more terrorist deaths, calculated with the greatest precision. Of course, reports of civilian causalities and mistakenly bombed hospitals or schools destroys the myth of precision and accuracy in surgical strikes and drone warfare. Even so, within the logic of collateral damage, international military forces can supposedly avoid “the worst.” Certainly, since World War II, “the worst” is associated with the genocide of the Holocaust, if not also the shadow of annihilation wrought by nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. Following the logic of contemporary warfare, the worst is seen as incalculable violence unleashed outside of any equation of exchange or rational utilitarian principle for measurement. In the words of Eyal Weizman, contemporary warfare’s lesser of evils model claims to avoid the worst “by opening a field of equivalence, in which different forms of potential and actual violence, risk, and damage become exchangeable, proportionality approximates an algorithmic logic of computation” wherein the computer becomes the paragon of ethics by removing human sentimentality.28 Within this logic, reason is reduced to calculation, and ethics becomes computation. Indeterminacy, undecidability, and personal responsibility are evacuated from this fantasy of calculability. And the right thing to do is determined by an answering machine rather than an ethical response.

Conclusion: Rethinking “The Worst” In sum, calculation becomes an alibi for continued violence, killing, and warfare. “Just war” becomes nothing more than an arbitrary threshold for collateral damage, a number—any number—assigned by military lawyers making, and changing, the rules of engagement as they go along.

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Reason is reduced to rationale. Ethics is reduced to computation. Politics is reduced to statistical models of population control. And the fantasy of calculability covers over the reality of unpredictability and experiences out of our control. In Derridean language, economic calculation replaces ethical decision. Whether discussing the ethics of hospitality or the politics of democracy, Derrida insists on the impossibility of calculation, even as we calculate.29 When calculation completely eclipses the incalculable, however, and every other is reduced to its countability and exchangeability, then we have replaced an ethical response with a computing machine, and rendered responsibility nothing more than accountability. While Derrida insists the calculable and incalculable are locked into a necessarily aporetic relationship, his analysis of the “war on terror” suggests that when ethics and politics become nothing more than adding machines, we risk the worst violence rather than avoid it, where “the worst” is associated with genocide. Measuring “the worst” is itself part of an economy of hierarchal valuations intended to engage in comparative judgments of which war or whose violence is worse, which killing or massacre is worse. In one reading of Derrida, “the worst” is associated with the “most” of sovereignty in the logic of might makes right (e.g. BS I 213–14). Within a notion of sovereignty that demands indivisibility, absolute power, and self-control (if not also self-certainty), any and all others (foreigners) are threats. Derrida describes the undemocratic response of democracy through which it tries to protect itself by killing off, or quarantining, those others that might threaten it. The incarceration or detention of refugees is an example of what he calls the autoimmune logic of democracy in which in the name of democracy we justify undemocratic policies.30 In a world without a clear enemy, however, where every other becomes a possible threat, this autoimmune response feeds a genocidal logic. In the words of Derrida scholar Leonard Lawlor: today, the number of ‘enemies’ is potentially unlimited. Every other is wholly other . . . and thus every single other needs to be rejected by the immune system. This innumerable rejection resembles a genocide or what is worse an absolute threat.31 As Samir Hadaad argues, the notion of “the worst” evolves in Derrida’s thought from total nuclear war and the final solution to the autoimmune logic of the archive within which the worst is not just mass killing, but also erasing the trace of an archive through either absolute annihilation of a people and its past, or the suffocating covering over of one archive with another.32 While neither of these operations can eliminate all traces of the others or of a people, their logics are genocidal in their attempt to do so. The worst goes beyond literal killing, and signals the erasure a way of seeing the world—or we might as well say a world itself—by covering

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it over with another worldview. In this regard, comparative models that reduce life to units to be exchanged or plugged into equations operate according to a world-destroying genocidal logic. This is to say, when “the worst” becomes part of the economy of “lessor of evils,” life and death are reduced to a logic of calculation that makes them fungible; one life is weighed against another, one war against another. Which is worse (and therefore risks “the worst”): ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or the Nazi death camps? Which is worse: killing one little girl or killing three soldiers? Et cetera. Within the calculus of collateral damage, the worst is reduced to the worse and everything imaginable is also calculable. If contemporary logics of proportionality employed by both humanitarian aid organizations and humanitarian military operations are designed to mitigate and control violence and death in order to avoid the worst violence and death, according to calculations of the “lessor of evils,” then we must ask what is the most evil, or the worst evil. Usually, we think of genocide as the worst evil, and “the worst” is often shorthand for the “final solution” and the Holocaust. Since the end of World War II and the Cold War, “the worst” has become associated with the possibility of nuclear war—even the destruction of the entire planet. Following Derrida, I rethink that worst as a result of the logic of calculation taken to the extreme at the expense of all other worldviews. When lives become fungible and exchangeable, we have already entered a worldview based on a genocidal logic that not only risks “the worst,” but can also be used to justify it. And, though the discourse of human rights can be useful in arguments for political rights, as we’ve seen, because it necessarily operates on an abstract level beyond political rights, it is not an effective antidote to the genocidal logic of utilitarian calculations of risk-benefit and acceptable collateral damage.33 Whatever Derrida does or doesn’t say about the worst, I want to conclude with the Derridean sentiment that the worst, “worthy of its name,” must remain outside this economy of exchange, an impossible condition of possibility for thinking of what is better or worse, the incalculable always in tension with what can be calculated. As Derrida suggests in his final seminar, the death of each and every person, each and every living being, is not just the end of a world, but the end of the world.34 Derrida claims, “there is no common measure able to persuade me that a personal mourning is less grave than a nuclear war” (No Apocalypse, 403). And, once we think there is, we start on the slippery slope of utilitarian calculus and exclusionary line drawing that operates according to a genocidal logic. Analogously, if genocide is the destruction of a world through killing and erasure of archives, then the hundreds of thousands of people literally corralled into the “refugee” camps are victims of a genocidal logic, if not actual genocide through slow death. Statistical models that compute comparative valuations are part of a genocidal logic that can be used to justify “the worst” insofar as they set

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out a hierarchy of life, human and otherwise, through which violence is justified, and some lives are valuable (in this case, citizens), while others are disposable (in this case, refugees). Within the logic of contemporary “humanitarian” warfare, the worst is considered a war without rules— that is to say, without limits on collateral damage. To the contrary, the rationale of collateral damage and proportionality through which lives are reduced to numbers, quantified, and compared for relative value or disposability, operates according to a genocidal logic that can be used to justify the worst violence. As Hannah Arendt suggests, once we imagine the worst, we not only can do it, but we can also imagine something even worse. (She also reminds us that “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”)35 In order for the worst to operate as a limit to our imaginations, it must remain impossible, forever at odds with the genocidal logic of collateral damage and risk-benefit analysis.

Notes 1. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Clark: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2005), 79. 2. “Analysis Framework,” Office of the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide (OSAPG), June 22, 2016, www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/ adviser/ . . . /osapg_analysis_framework. Some theorists make a distinction between genocide and politicide, wherein victims are targets for their political status. We could argue that refugees are victims of both. See Harff and Gurr (1988). See also Lisa Guenther’s contribution to this volume and her discussion of “social death.” 3. “Facts and Figures on Refugees,” UNHCR, May 24, 2016, www.unhcr.org. uk/about-us/key-facts-and-figures.html. 4. While some may find my definition of genocide too broad, even in its inception, genocide referred to much more than mass murder. Here are some examples of attempts to define genocide that take us beyond mass murder: “Genocide is the extent of destruction of a social collectivity by whatever agents, with whatever intentions, by purposive actions which fall outside the recognized conventions of legitimate warfare” John L. Thompson and Gail A. Quets (1987); “Genocide is the deliberate, organized destruction, in whole or in large part, of racial or ethnic groups by a government or its agents. It can involve not only mass murder, but also forced deportation (ethnic cleansing), systematic rape, and economic and biological subjugation.” Compare, Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski (1987), Henry Huttenbach (1988), Manus I. Midlarsky (2005), Mark Levene (2005). Quoted in Martin Shaw, What Is Genocide?, pp. 34. 5. “Migrant Crisis: Migration to Europe Explained in Seven Charts,” BBC News, March 4, 2016, accessed May 23, 2016, www.bbc.com/news/worldeurope-34131911.“Crossing of Mediterranean Sea exceed 300,000,” UNHCR, Geneva, August 28, 2015, accessed May 23, 2016, www.unhcr.org/en-us/ news/latest/2015/8/55e06a5b6/crossings-mediterranean-sea-exceed-300000including-200000-greece.html. The UNHCR reports that in the first eight months of 2015, over 300,000 refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea seeking asylum in Europe. Over 2,500 died in those months, and in 2014, 3,500 died. “Hundreds of Refugees Died on Way to Europe This Year,” Al Jazeera, February 9, 2016, accessed May 23, 2016, www.aljazeera.

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9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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com/news/2016/02/400-refugees-die-europe-2016-160209133941502. html. Sulaiman Momodu,“Refugees Turn to Ethiopia for Safety and Asylum: Country Now Hosts the Largest Number of Refugees in Africa,” Africa Renewal, April 2015, accessed May 24, 2016, www.un.org/africarenewal/ magazine/april-2015/refugees-turn-ethiopia-safety-and-asylum#sthash. DnTD4QY5.dpuf. “Facts and Figures.” Mac McClelland, “How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp,” The New York Times, February 13, 2014, accessed May 23, 2016, www.nytimes.com/ 2014/02/16/magazine/how-to-build-a-perfect-refugee-camp.html. “A Closer Look at ‘Europe’s Worst’ Refugee Camp,” Sputnik International, January 24, 2016, accessed May 28, 2016, http://sputniknews.com/europe/ 20160124/1033644952/dunkirk-france-refugee-camp.html. “Calias Jungle Is Unrecognizable after Bulldozing,” Daily Mail, May 28, 2016, accessed May 28, 2016, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3511855/ Death-Jungle-Incredible-aerial-images-reveal-Calais-slum-just-bareearth-makeshift-homes-flattened-bulldozers-eviction-thousands-refugees. html#ixzz49ytihWY7. Amelia Gentleman, “The Horror of the Calias Refugee Camp,” The Guardian, November 3, 2014, accessed May 28, 2016, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/ nov/03/refugees-horror-calais-jungle-refugee-camp-feel-like-dying-slowly. David Courbet, “Migrants at Calais Camp Given Dignity in Death,” The Local Fr, May 23, 2016, accessed May 28, 2016, www.thelocal.fr/20160523/ migrants-at-calais-camp-given-dignity-in-death. “Almost 130 Refugee Kids Vanish after ‘Calais Jungle’ Demolition—Charity,” RT Online, April 3, 2016, accessed May 28, 2016, www.rt.com/news/338217129-kids-missing-in-calais/. Will Worley and Lizzie Dearden, “Greek Refugee Camp Is ‘As Bad as a Nazi Concentration Camp’, Says Minister,” The Independent, March 18, 2016, accessed May 28, 2016, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/idomenirefugee-dachau-nazi-concentration-camp-greek-minister-a6938826.html. Gentleman, “The horror of the Calias Refugee Camp.” Jim Yardley and Gaia Pianigiani, “Three Days, 700 Deaths on Mediterranean as Migrant Crisis Flares,” New York Times, May 29, 2016, A1 and A6. “U.S. Detention of Asylum Seekers Seeking Protection, Finding Prison,” Human Rights First, April 2009, accessed May 30, 2016, www.humanrightsfirst. org. See also Megan Granski, Allen Keller, and Homer Venters, “Death Rates among Detained Immigrants in the United States,” Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 12 (2015): 14414–19. Gentleman, “The Horror of the Calais Refugee Camp.” E.g., see Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 432–3. See also Henry Rosemont (1991), and Duncan Kennedy (2002, 2004). On refugee rights in particular, see Omri Boehm, NYT 2015. Hannah Arendt, “Decline of the Nation State; End of the Rights of Man,” “Imperialism,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1975), 291–2; 300. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers in Exile, ed. Marc Robinson (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994), 118. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 110. Ibid., 119. Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” Social Engineering 15 (2008): 90. Jacques Derrida, “Unconditionality or Sovereignty,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Oxford Literary Review (2009): 127. Ibid., 125–6.

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24. Quoted in Weizman (2011, 17). 25. Jacques Derrida, Rogues, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 46. 26. Michaël Neuman, Saving Lives and Staying Alive, ed. Michaël Neuman and Fabrice Weissman (London: Hurst Publishers Limited, 2016). 27. Weizman (2011, 13). 28. Ibid., 12. 29. E.g. Rogues, 48, 149; cf. Death Penalty Seminars vol. 11, Session 17. 30. For his part, Derrida gives the example of suspended elections in Algeria when it was clear that the nondemocratic candidates would win. (Rogues, 19). 31. Leonard Lawlor, “Jacques Derrida,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (spring 2014), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2014/entries/derrida/. 32. Samir Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 85–7. 33. For a more sustained discussion of the relationship between human rights and collateral damage in terms of refugees, see Oliver, Carceral Humanitarianism: The Logic of Refugee Detention. 34. For a discussion of what Derrida means by the end of “the world,” see Oliver, Earth and World; and Naas, The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments. 35. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 36.

Texts Cited Agamben, Giorgio. “Beyond Human Rights.” Social Engineering 15 (2008): 90–5. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1975. ———. Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Doubleday, 2009. ———. “We Refugees.” In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers in Exile, edited by Marc Robinson, 110–19. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994. Brown, Wendy, and Janet Halley. Left Legalism/Left Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Loiuse Mallet. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. ———. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1. Translated by Geoff Bennigton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. ———. Philosophy in the Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Edited by Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ———. Rogues. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. ———. “Unconditionality or Sovereignty: The University at the Frontiers of Europe.” Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Oxford Literary Review (2009): 115–31. Haddad, Samir. Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Lawlor, Leonard. “Jacques Derrida.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Spring, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2014/entries/derrida/. Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Clark: Exchange LTD, 2005.

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Neuman, Michaël. Saving Lives and Staying Alive: The Professionalization of Humanitarian Security. Edited by Michaël Neuman and Fabrice Weissman. London: Hurst Publishers Limited, 2016. Oliver, Kelly. Carceral Humanitarianism: The Logic of Refugee Detention. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Weizman, Eyal. The Least of all Possible Evils. London: Verso, 2012 [2011].

Part III

Time and Violence

9

Totalitarianism as Structural Violence Toward New Grammars of Listening María del Rosario Acosta López “If we want to be at home in this earth, even at the price of being at home in this century, we must try to take part in the interminable dialogue with the essence of totalitarianism.” Arendt, “Understanding and Politics”1

The main problem that guides my contribution to this volume comes out of my preoccupation with the status philosophy occupies and the responsibility it has when put in the concrete context of historical forms of extreme violence.2 In such a context, the following questions seem to attain particular relevance: what are the tools that philosophy has at its disposal for dealing critically, and avoiding being complicit with, these forms of violence? Are the categories and frameworks of meaning that we have today enough to give an account of the forces at play when it comes to such complex phenomena? It is my conviction that if there is anything philosophy can do in relation to these questions, this will have to come in the realm of critique and in the production and renewal of meaningful resources to better understand and detect the emergent symptoms of structural forms of violence. Such a critical task for philosophy goes hand in hand with a second set of questions related to the challenge of language in the context of extreme forms of violence. What confronts us in such cases, particularly in cases of extreme violence, is not only the lack of words to form a coherent and unitary narrative about these experiences. What is also difficult is how to “make sense” of what has happened—how to make the events “intelligible” at all. How can we do this if what we encounter in these circumstances, and in the kind of violence they bring to the fore, is the destruction of the very possibility of “making sense” as such? This is why I will concentrate on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism in a volume devoted to philosophical approaches to the relationship between structural forms of violence and the specific phenomenon of genocide. As I intend to show, the nuances and philosophical insights of Arendt’s analysis still offer us very relevant tools for dealing with the

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two sides of the sets of questions just described. On the one hand, Arendt focuses her approach to totalitarianism on the question of whether our philosophical frameworks for making “intelligible” the radical violence expressed in cases of mass atrocity are enough, and thus whether philosophy has something essential to offer in such a context. On the other hand, for her, this issue is closely connected to the question of whether or not philosophy can engage in the very difficult task of preparing the ground for an effective political and historical response and—to a certain extent—interruption of these forms of violence. These are also the two essential sides of a philosophical critique of violence. That is, on the one hand, the task of producing a conceptual analysis that can effectively bring to light the violent structures that lie at the ground of specific political and historical forms of violence. On the other hand, by bringing these structures to light and making them intelligible, such an inquiry can end up producing a shift of frameworks, and thereby developing a form of resistance to the historical and political effects that flowed from the structures under critique. Thus, I want to follow the strategies Arendt puts to the test in her own coming to terms with these philosophical challenges and in the implementation of this form of philosophical critique. In her case, this is connected to an in-depth philosophical analysis of the structure and logic of what she names and describes as “totalitarianism” (and of the logical character of totalitarianism as a structure), and to the urgency of an effective historical response to its horrific novelty. If this response is to be produced in the historical realm, Arendt seems to suggest, it must be addressed also in and by philosophy, that is, at the level of the categories and frameworks that produce definitions and allow us to give meaning to the world. For Arendt, this is related to the need for new grammars. In the face of the unspeakable violence produced in the context of the unprecedented character of totalitarianism, philosophy must take up the production of powerful new conceptual tools and standards of judgment as its main task. What is interesting in the case of Arendt’s analysis, specifically in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is that this task becomes one of listening to what otherwise remains unheard in the testimonies of the survivors, as well as in the reports of the secondary witnesses. What she discovers in the process of her own analysis is that what is unheard will stay unheard as long as it remains unintelligible. Hence these new grammars of listening are for Arendt one of the most effective and critical ways of responding to the urgent demand made by totalitarian violence. In this sense, they also become a way to offer a kind of historical justice that cannot be provided (at least not entirely) by legal and historical (historiographical) realms. In what follows, I will trace the ways in which, through her understanding of totalitarian violence, Arendt creates and exemplifies a critical

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approach to historical forms of extreme violence by way of an acute attention to—and production of—their philosophical “structures.” For Arendt, philosophy needs to learn how to listen to the structural forms of violence that remain silently operative precisely because of how they radically challenge intelligibility. My ultimate intention, with the help of Arendt, is to come closer to an understanding of philosophy as the work of listening, especially when confronted with the ability of violence to destroy and displace sense.

From the Historical to the Structural: Totalitarianism as a Philosophical Problem According to Arendt, the problem of totalitarianism is the problem of our time. “Our time,” locates us in the aftermath of World War II and the consolidation of the Stalinist totalitarian state, which are the main events that gave rise to Arendt’s groundbreaking work on The Origins of Totalitarianism. But, as will become clear throughout this essay, I also think that Arendt’s insight, along with how she articulates the problem of totalitarianism, remains valid today. To a certain extent, particularly in the realm of political philosophy, totalitarianism remains the “unsurpassable horizon of our time.”3 In any case, this is the insight that drove Arendt to write what became perhaps most influential contribution to political thinking in 1951. The book, initially conceived by Arendt as a work of political theory, became one of the first philosophical insights into the historical phenomenon of totalitarianism. In the experience of writing this work, she seems to discover that if one wants to truly understand the principle of action of totalitarianism, one ends up having to deal with a philosophical problem: namely, the paradox that results from the intrinsic connection between the unprecedented character of totalitarianism, and the ontological nature of the violence that it is ultimately seeking to achieve. This does not mean, as some have critically suggested, that in discovering these philosophical features of totalitarianism, Arendt ends up depoliticizing the phenomenon, thereby deviating from politics to metaphysics and depriving totalitarianism of its historical character.4 Rather, it indicates the scope of the results of her very extensive theoretical analysis. Totalitarianism, according to Arendt, is not to be treated as a mere accident in history after which “one’s duty is to restore the old order, and appeal to the old knowledge of right and wrong” (Arendt 1994b, 328–29). Quite the contrary, it has unleashed something radically new and unparalleled in the historical world, something that will not be made to disappear, Arendt claims, “merely by victory over totalitarian governments” (Arendt 1994b, 360). As a radically new structure, and instituting its own principle of action, it has transcended historical reality, going so far as to change the very realm of the possible. Thus, it cannot simply be

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“historically overcome” (Arendt 1994b, 360), nor can it be treated exclusively in its concrete historical manifestations. As a new form of government, she writes, totalitarianism remains “a potentiality and ever present danger” which “is only too likely to stay with us from now on” (Arendt 1967, 478). Thus, she discovers that it is totalitarianism as a structure, in its essence and “truth,” that must become a task for understanding: it will be an interminable quest, as she constantly reminds us, but a quest that nonetheless belongs as much to political theory as to a philosophical outlook capable of detecting and conveying the structures that underlie the multiple concrete faces of the phenomenon. Still, as much as its originality poses a challenge for understanding, it is not only its unprecedented character that makes the rise of totalitarianism philosophically relevant. What seems to make the philosophical insight truly unavoidable here is the paradoxical character of this originality, since what totalitarianism introduces as radically “new” is the destruction of the very tools we have traditionally used to make sense of reality. Totalitarianism has not only “exploded our categories of political thought, and our standards for moral judgment” (Arendt 1994a, 310); its reality “surpasses all our powers of understanding” (Arendt 1967, 441). Its mere existence provokes a radical collapse of the logical frameworks that had thus far constituted the very conditions of intelligibility. Arendt thus writes in her analysis of the camps: The difficult thing to understand is that these gruesome crimes took place in a phantom world, which, however, has materialized, as it were, into a world which is complete with all sensual data of reality but lacks that structure of consequence and responsibility without which reality remains for us a mass of incomprehensible data. (Arendt 1967, 445, emphasis added) Hence, totalitarianism “confronts us with its overpowering reality,” with the danger of its ever-present potentiality, even if “we actually have nothing to fall back on in order to understand it” (Arendt 1867, 459). We must, however, try to understand it. Arendt is absolutely clear on this point (cf. Arendt 1994a, 310). No matter how incomprehensible it appears to us, and even if our tendency, both instinctively and rationally, is to escape the appalling reality it has proved to make possible, there is an urgent need to make sense of it as paradoxical as this task may seem at first glance.5 Beyond assessing the horrific originality of the phenomenon, it is necessary to unveil the structures lying at its core—the conceptual and “logical” grounds that, in the midst of its madness and lack of structure, continue giving shape to a radical, all too real and ever potentially present violence. Any other position runs the risk of either remaining “inexorably paralyzed” by the horrific originality of totalitarianism (Arendt 1967, 441), or to “silently conspire” with its actions by refusing to recognize them as a present and not yet overcome reality (cf.

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Arendt 1967, 459). Because what is at stake, according to Arendt—and this is why this task of understanding is unpostponable—is the very condition of humanity and the possibility, made real by totalitarianism, of its systematic elimination. Arendt writes, there are neither political nor historical nor simply moral standards but, at the most, the realization that something seems to be involved in modem politics that actually should never be involved in politics as we used to understand it, namely all or nothing. All, and that is an undetermined infinity of forms of human living-together, or nothing, for a victory of the concentration-camp system would mean the same inexorable doom for human beings as the use of the hydrogen bomb would mean the doom of the human race. (Arendt 1967, 443) In response to such a historical challenge, there is only one standard of measure that needs to take precedence and become “the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not” (Arendt 1967, 442, emphasis added).6 The introduction of such a measure of judgment or, one could also say, of such a radical standard for political critique, can only be produced by the very urgent demand of a (philosophical) “insight into the nature of total domination” (Arendt 1967, 442). Totalitarianism is therefore no longer just a question for political theory. Its critique cannot only take place in the realm of its concrete political, historical, and hence empirical manifestations. It has shown itself to be a philosophical problem, and as such, it needs to be made visible and recognized. Totalitarianism has produced the collapse of the frameworks that not only made sense of the world and produced the adequate tools and standards to judge it, but also those that gave meaning to the very idea of humanity and its capacity for thought and judgment. In this sense, as Arendt suggests, it has even changed the very realm of the possible altogether. The recognition of such devastating consequences, that is, the recognition of the epistemological and, even further, of the ontological nature of its violence, is the first step of a philosophical critique of totalitarianism. That is, a critique that must find the way to make such an ontological violence visible. Or perhaps, in Arendt’s case, as I would like to suggest, must deal first with the more difficult challenge of making it audible.

The Camps as the Crystallization of Totalitarianism But if, as Arendt suggests, the task is “to isolate the nature of a new unprecedented form of government” (Arendt 1994b, 331), how are we supposed to proceed? How are we supposed to think precisely that which

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has provoked the collapse of our usual forms and capacity for thought? Arendt’s strategy is to go to what seems to be the most obvious limit-case: the concentration camps. The incredibility of the horrors of the camp blurs the dividing line between rationality and madness. It questions the very possibility of representation, putting to the test all our capabilities of communication and thought. It therefore constitutes the limit-case for deciding whether it is possible to make any sense of the system at all. If there is any possibility of “making sense” of the camps, that is, of breaking the “iron curtain created by their apparent lack of purpose” (Arendt 1967, 445), then it may be possible to bring to light the structures and principles of action underlying totalitarianism’s ultimate goals. This is the emphasis in Arendt’s analysis of the concentration camps. The camps, she proposes, are the site where the ultimate realization of totalitarianism’s goals are at stake. If we can make them intelligible, we can tackle the logics behind the structure that makes them possible and for which they are ultimately essential. The camps are, in this sense, the “truth of totalitarianism,” their “most consequential institution” (Arendt 1967, 441), and as such, “dwelling on their horrors” (not escaping them, not discarding them as irrational or declaring them utterly unthinkable)7 is indispensable for understanding totalitarianism as a whole—if there can be such understanding (cf. Arendt 1967, 441). It was precisely in the camps that the model for an ideal totalitarian society was imagined, designed, and implemented. They are not just an outside factor in relation to the project of total domination—an arbitrary element the totalitarian project could do without—but rather “the guiding social ideal of total domination in general” (Arendt 1967, 438). As such, they constitute the first and necessary step into a carefully planned process that has as its ultimate goal the production of a society where human beings have been made entirely superfluous. Totalitarianism, Arendt writes, “strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous. Total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world . . . of marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity” (Arendt 1967, 457). Only then can a project of total domination be made possible at all, in a system whose only purpose must be the survival of the system itself, only for the sake of itself and in spite of everything and everyone else. Hence, “the process by which men are prepared for this end . . . is transparent and logical. The insane mass manufacture of corpses is preceded by the historically and politically intelligible preparation of living corpses” (Arendt 1967, 447, emphasis added). The camp “crystallizes into fixed and definitive forms” the event of totalitarianism, not only in its historical but also in its philosophical dimension (cf. Arendt 1994a, 325). It recollects “its own concrete elements” while allowing them to “illuminate” what in their material experience they simultaneously “serve” to verify: the “elementary structure of totalitarianism” (Arendt 1967, 437).8 Totalitarianism, therefore, survives

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the camps (cf. Arendt 1994b, 360). However, this also means that the camp is itself an underlying structure, and that wherever there is totalitarianism, the “concentration camp-system” may potentially already be in place, structurally reproducing and multiplying its dehumanization process: The danger of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous . . . Political, social, and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous. (Arendt 1967, 459) One could draw at this point a relationship between this face of Arendt’s proposal and Giorgio Agamben’s development of this same gesture (cf. Agamben 1998, Part Three; and 2000, 37ff). There is indeed an important side of Agamben’s argument that conveys in a particularly clear way the contemporary relevance of Arendt’s reading of the camps. Agamben writes: I will ask: What is a camp? What is its juridico-political structure? . . . This will lead us to look at the camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly that—though admittedly still with us—belongs nonetheless to the past, but rather in some sense as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live. (Agamben 2000, 37) This side of Agamben’s proposal is thus very close to the one I am addressing, though I do not think Arendt would have ever agreed to take it as far as Agamben does, namely, turning the camp into the paradigm of contemporary politics, leaving aside the process of “deducing the defnition of the camp from the events that took place there” (Agamben 2000, 37). I think that this radicalization in Agamben’s gesture, as provocative as it is, risks taking away the singularity of what Arendt calls the “concentration camp-system.” It turns the camp into a sort of “wildcard” for designating any political reality that admits its “defnition.” In this sense, and by losing the concrete specifcity that Arendt’s analysis still has, Agamben can end up falling back into the sort of aestheticizing account of the camps that he himself criticizes.9 This is what is so original about Arendt’s way of addressing the problem of the camps. Her manner of proceeding allows her to remain attuned to the singularity of their very concrete and complex historical realities (both in their Nazi and in their Stalinist versions), while also permitting her to move beyond such particularities to the structures that make them possible, and even make them present as an all too real risk.

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The Meanings of Totalitarianism: The Need for New Grammars of Listening The task of “deducing the definition of the camp from the events that took place there,” to borrow Agamben’s own words, brings with it its own particular challenges and becomes again a methodological question in Arendt’s account. Every testimony of the concentration camps, and even every historical report produced in their aftermath, seems to move, according to Arendt, in the aporia between an impossibility to communicate the horrors and the atmosphere of incredibility that surround each and every one of these attempts to communicate. How, then, are we to make sense of what seems to be utterly incommunicable? How are we to deal with these materials, if even those attempting to convey the reality of the camps, even those fighting against the risk of absolute oblivion, cannot entirely believe the truth of what is being communicated? Arendt writes: There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death. It can never be fully reported for the very reason that the survivor returns to the world of the living, which makes it impossible for him to believe fully in his own past experiences. (Arendt 1967, 444) Each report tells us too little and yet too much, making it impossible to listen to what it needs to communicate and to understand and make sense of what it reports. On the one hand, “the peculiar unreality and lack of credibility that characterize all reports from the concentration camps” not only “fails to convince average people” (Arendt 1967, 446), but even the speaker, as she says, is often “assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality” (Arendt 1967, 439). All that we are left with, then, is “a series of remembered occurrences that must seem just as incredible to those who relate them as to their audience” (Arendt 1967, 441). This is why “anyone speaking or writing about concentration camps is still regarded as suspect” (Arendt 1994b, 339). This allows for the triumph of the system despite everything because, as Hitler very well knew, “the very immensity of the crimes guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their innocence with all manner of lies will be more readily believed than the victims who tell the truth” (Arendt 1994b, 339). On the other hand, the reality of this horror is “too monstrous” (Arendt 1967, 446). “Dwelling on the horrors” of the camps, as necessary as it seems, turns out to be a very difficult task. There is an inherent

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tendency in both “recollection and uncommunicative eyewitness report,” she writes, “to run away from the experience; instinctively or rationally. Both types of writer are so much aware of the terrible abyss that separates the world of the living from that of the living dead,” that they fall prey at once to “the bestial, desperate terror which, when confronted by real, present horror, inexorably paralyzes everything that is not mere reaction” (Arendt 1967, 441). Even if we manage to dwell on their horror, the camps surpass all our possibilities of understanding. What is left, then, Arendt asks, to make intelligible the experience of the camps without falling prey to their paralyzing effects? “Only the fearful imagination of those who have been aroused by such reports,” Arendt writes, “but have not actually been smitten in their own flesh . . . can afford to keep thinking about horrors” (Arendt 1967, 441). It is imagination that, on the one hand, “enables us to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice” (Arendt 1994a, 323). It is also this power that allows us, on the other hand, to find within ourselves precisely where “we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, the possibility to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules” (Arendt 1994a, 321). Thanks to it, “our endeavoring to understand something which has ruined our categories of thought and our standards of judgment appears thus less frightening” (Arendt 1994a, 312).10 Ultimately, the question behind Arendt’s own perplexity again goes hand in hand with the unprecedented nature and horrible originality that makes totalitarianism a philosophical problem. What is there to do in absence of any framework of meaning that would allow for these testimonies and these reports to be listened to, let alone to be understood? In dealing directly with the question of the camps, the problem has acquired an additional dimension. What becomes clear in this context is that Arendt’s project is not only directed at bringing to light the rationality of the apparent irrational and purposeless impulse of totalitarianism. The effort also turns out to be making intelligible what up until now could only be taken as a senseless, nightmarish traumatic event separated by an abyss from both the world of the living and the world of the dead. Therefore, the challenge is not just the paradoxical task of making sense of the horrors produced by totalitarianism, that is, making sense of a system whose only goal is the radical elimination of sense. Totalitarianism does not just result in destruction; the destruction it effects in the world introduces a new radical measure for which new possibilities of meaning are needed. Hence, philosophy is confronted with the very difficult task of learning how to listen to the new meanings that totalitarianism itself has been able to introduce. To address the question of the meaning of totalitarianism means to deal, on the one hand, with

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totalitarianism’s philosophical and conceptual structures, which may lead us to understand the meaning of totalitarianism and make it intelligible as a structure. On the other hand, it also means learning how to listen to the new meanings that it institutes and that it leaves behind as its trace. For that reason, Arendt’s project is not just a critical deconstruction of the historical origins of the structure that, once made real by the totalitarian projects of the 20th century, may “stay with us from now on” (Arendt 1967, 478). Hers is also the project of showing the conditions for the possibility of truly listening to the reality of the events, of providing a grammar for listening to those “series of remembered occurrences,” and perhaps turning them into an intelligible narrative of the past. Intelligibility in this context does not mean producing any kind of justification or explanation that may eventually be able to place the events in a causal, historical chain. Once again, Arendt clarifies, understanding in this context differs entirely from “knowing.” She writes: [Understanding] is a complicated process which never produces unequivocal results . . . an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, to a world in which such things are possible at all. (Arendt 1994a, 308) Understanding does not lead us “to condone anything” (Arendt 1994a, 308), and even much less to “forgive.”11 Yet it does open a site where it is fnally possible to listen to survivors’ testimonies as if they do not come from another planet, but from an all too real and all too human world. It allows for the integration of their stories into the world of the living, even if what defnes and constitutes this belonging is nothing but the sharing of a radical void. In this sense, understanding the logics operating behind totalitarianism is not the only challenge for those who set out to criticize it. An effective philosophical critique must also be able to come to terms with the inaudible realities totalitarianism has made possible for the first time. It must deal with the fact that by accomplishing “here on earth things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence” (Arendt 1967, 446), totalitarianism has forever changed the realm of the possible. In doing so, it has changed what we must learn—how to listen, understand, be able to remember, and to give voice in the realms of politics and history. Only once this second task is undertaken can philosophy create the conditions for actively resisting the oblivion that totalitarianism so clearly seeks to implement. Arendt’s gesture reminds us of a responsibility that philosophy too often leaves aside, namely, a responsibility to those who lack the frameworks that would allow them to articulate their own claims, let alone turn their own experiences into a meaningful past. This does not mean—especially

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not in Arendt’s case—that philosophy is responsible for speaking for others, or for giving them a voice. Yet it can and must try to provide the grammars that may allow for these articulations to be understood. The task of philosophy is therefore a modest one. As Arendt puts it, its “practical political value” is “highly doubtful” (Arendt 1994a, 324). And yet she writes: [its] activity is necessary. While it can never directly inspire the fight or provide otherwise missing objectives, it alone can make it meaningful and prepare a new resourcefulness of the human mind and heart, which perhaps will come into free play only after the battle is won. (Arendt 1994a, 310) By avoiding this responsibility, philosophy is too often complicit in the oblivion operating behind totalitarian structures of power and sense. Only by forcing ourselves out of a grammar that “thinks our world in utilitarian terms” (Arendt 1967, 459)—a grammar that has not only made totalitarianism’s actions possible but that has also blinded us to the magnitude of its destructive purposes—only then can we avoid the risk of complicity with its political and historical realities. Imagination, Arendt writes, “has the great advantage to dissolve the sophistic-dialectical interpretations,” the “dialectical acrobatics” (Arendt 1967, 442) that can be put in the service of the massive production of death. Even if philosophy can never “inspire the fght” in the face of an infnite process of putting death to work, of depriving death entirely of its meaning and subsuming it completely to the sole purpose of the survival and triumph of the system as a whole, it can nonetheless produce, what Benjamin calls “concepts completely useless” for the purposes of totalitarianism (cf. Benjamin 1968, 218). It can give us grammars that allow us to open the space of the living to the language of the living dead.

Notes 1. Cf. Arendt (1994a, 323). 2. Participation in the 2015 Summer Research Workshop, Genocide, Agency, and the Nation-State after Auschwitz, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, contributed to the development of the research presented in this paper. I would like to thank all the participants of this seminar for their insightful comments to the first version of this paper. And a special thanks to Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster for organizing and co-leading the workshop, and for the following invitation to participate in this volume. 3. Here, I am paraphrasing Sartre’s well-known statement about communism. I do it in a provoking way, since totalitarianism has been often put aside as an “old” problem, proper of the Cold War era, and surpassed by our more current concerns on terrorism and the very peculiar new forms of violence

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it brings into the historical and political—post-Cold War world. However, totalitarianism remains operative, as has been shown by more contemporary political and philosophical approaches (Nancy, Agamben and Esposito, among others), in the structures that give shape and ground to our “liberal” democracies. I will not have the space to develop this side of the issue, but I would like it to remain in the background of my analysis of the relevance and pertinence of Arendt’s approach. 4. Cf. a recapitulation of this criticisms in Sharpe 2010. 5. One of the clearest expositions of this side of Arendt’s argument is in DidiHuberman’s Images in Spite of All. He situates Arendt precisely on the opposite side of some of the accusations that have been posed against her, namely, that her category of radical evil and the way she introduces it at the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism ultimately serves the purpose of rendering the camps unsayable, and as such, runs the risk of offering a much too subliming account of the camps (cf. Sharpe 2010, 8; Zizek 2002, 61ff). Against these interpretations, Didi-Huberman writes: “Auschwitz has been called unthinkable. But Hannah Arendt has shown that it is precisely where thought falters that we ought to persist in our thought or, rather, give it a new turn.” (DidiHuberman 2008, 25). And his own position on the subject is a development of this possibility in terms of the imaginability of the camps, very much in agreement with the relationship Arendt wants to establish between understanding and imagination. 6. It is probably in relation to statements like this that Zizek reacts by questioning the paralyzing effects that Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism has had over contemporary political and politico philosophical thought: today, reference to the ‘totalitarian’ threat sustains a kind of unwritten Denkverbot . . . the moment one shows the slightest inclination to engage in political projects that aim seriously to challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately ‘Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!’ The return to ethics in today’s political philosophy shamefully exploits the horrors of Gulag or Holocaust as the ultimate bogey for blackmailing us into renouncing all serious radical engagement. (Zizek 2002, 3–4) Thus, according to Zizek, “the moment one accepts the notion of “totalitarianism,” one is firmly located within the liberal-democratic horizon” (Zizek 2002, 2). I take these criticisms seriously because they also go directly to the heart of what I am trying to do by engaging with Arendt here. However, my reading of Arendt wants precisely to show how this prevailing “yardstick” over any symptom of totalitarianism responds to the crucial paradox of producing the possibility of judgment in the face of a phenomenon that has precisely made it impossible for such a judgment to take place. Rather than becoming a Denkverbot, therefore, as Zizek evaluates it, the philosophical analysis of totalitarianism is for Arendt the point of departure for opening the possibility and the production of new meaningful resources for thought, new frameworks of meaning, once the devastating consequences of totalitarianism have been made visible, that is, once the radical collapse of the older ones has been recognized. Quite differently from leaving liberalism unquestioned, it is the deconstruction of totalitarianism as a structure that allows also for a sufficiently critical engagement with contemporary liberal democracies.

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7. See the debates around these positions together with the consequences some of them have had in the accounts of the Holocaust again in Didi-Huberman 2002. For Arendt, rather than a matter of “academic risks,” what is involved in these positions is an all too natural reaction to the horror of the camps—a paralyzing response produced by the immediacy of the terror to which they bear witness. 8. This notion of crystallization, and the use Arendt makes of it for her own analysis, is most probably coming from her engagement with Benjamin’s philosophy of history. It is a well-known fact that Arendt had Benjamin’s original manuscript of the Thesis on the Philosophy of History sitting on her desk while she was typing her own book. For the time being, however, I have to leave aside what seems to me a very interesting possibility of comparison. 9. Cf. for instance LaCapra’s analysis in 2004, 144–194. This of course leads to a further and much deeper difference between Arendt’s strategy and Agamben’s. For Arendt, the camp puts indeed in place a logic of “total disenfranchisement” (Arendt 1967, 451), creating the possibility of lawlessness even within the state. As close as this seems to be to Agamben’s analysis, there is still an important difference at stake: for Arendt, this gesture does not result necessarily from the very concept of the law or from the very structure that makes legality possible. On the contrary, what needs to be recovered through a reformulation of the modern notion of “human rights” is precisely the kind of protection that can only be guaranteed under a general concept of law and right that has to be “rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities” (Arendt 1967, xi) (for a wonderful analysis of this side of Arendt’s project, stemming precisely out of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, see Birmingham 2006). Arendt therefore does not go as far as to say, with Agamben (who at the same time is following Benjamin’s lead in his essay Critique of Violence), that the very structure of the modern politico-juridical state contains and puts in motion the type of inclusion by exclusion made real under the camps. If, for Agamben, there is ultimately something at the ground of the political space in modernity that marks “the system’s inability to function without transforming itself into a lethal machine” (Agamben 2000, 43), Arendt thinks this only happens in the radical collapse of all our political categories under the breakdown produced by totalitarianism. There are, of course, causes connected to this collapse that can be traced back and located in modern philosophical and political conceptions (particularly conceptions of sovereignty and human rights), but this does not mean that the possibility of the camp is engrained in the structure of modern sovereignty. 10. In later works, Arendt will develop in much more in-depth ways this possibility of philosophical understanding through the power of imagination. She will relate it closely to Kant’s Third Critique, offering a reading of Kant’s reflective judgment and his idea of the exemplarity of the judgment of taste. I have no space here to develop this side of Arendt’s analysis. It relates very closely also to the reasons why I use the notion of “grammar” in connection to Arendt’s own project. As it is the case with Kant’s notion of exemplarity, the idea of grammar also makes us think of “rules” which, in the case of the singularity of testimony, for instance, as Arendt is thinking of it, are required and need to be produced anew every single time—and are also in a way brought with it, exemplified in its very singular occurrence. 11. “Yet, in their effort to prove that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive. When the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer

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References Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Means without End. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. ———. “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding.” In Essays in Understanding, 328–62. New York: Schocken, 1994b. ———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1967. ———. “Understanding and Politics.” In Essays in Understanding, 307–27. New York: Schocken, 1994a. Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections, translated by Edmund Jephcott, 277–300. New Yok: Schocken, 1986. Birmingham, Peg. Hannah Arendt and Human Rights. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. LaCapra, Dominick. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Sharpe, Matthew. “When the Logics of the World Collapse: Žižek with and against Arendt on ‘Totalitarianism’.” Subjectivity 3 (2010): 53–75. Žižek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? New York: Verso, 2002.

10 Gendercide, Rwanda and Post-Genocidal Violence Alfred Frankowski

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide is distinguished from other contemporary genocides by the speed with which a country went from the chaos of ethnic conflict and civil war to the full-blown hell of systematic mass killing.1 It is the speed with which the genocide took place that confounds the usual logic of genocide. It is by no means a mistake then that the vast majority of genocide scholars writing about the Rwanda genocide focus on the way ethnic conflicts stemming from colonial divisions of power and policies that employed indirect rule facilitated the genocide.2 This narrative is certainly present in any examination of the public rhetoric leading up to the genocide3 and supports the idea that the genocide was an extension of ethnic conflicts between the Hutu and Tutsi stemming from their history of colonial rule. There is no argument that ethnic discourse was the explicit language of the genocide, but it is equally important to note that the first acts of genocide, their first service to the nation, were not only acts targeting Tutsi, but acts of gendered violence. For a significant number of future genocidiares, their first act of devotion to their country required that they kill their Tutsi wives, mothers, or other female relatives.4 Although women were largely noncombatants during the genocide, they were expected to, and often willingly, played roles as informants, betraying neighbors and family members.5 But in less explicit ways, the genocide proceeded at the intersection of an ethnic discourse heavily marked by the language of everyday gender violence.6 Therefore, I think it is fair to claim that we understand the genocide poorly if we forget that the primary targets of the genocide were boys, men, and other groups that represented anything like a Tutsi form of masculinity. Or, that the form of language of the genocide traded in terms of sexual violence cloaked in the language of ethnicity. Throughout this chapter I will focus on gendered violence during the genocide and attempt to keep this focus present in attending to how this violence shapes the post-genocide situation and warrants consideration of what post-genocide violence means. In the first section of this chapter, I argue that gendercide is not only an essential concept for thinking about

188 Alfred Frankowski the role gender played in the genocide, but more importantly that it is a fundamental prism through which the normative violence of the postgenocidal state can be seen. Largely building on the work of Adam Jones and Claudia Card, I work out a preliminary phenomenological definition of gendercide that argues for the philosophical analysis of the lived social and generational experiences of the trauma of the genocide. In the second section, I examine the narrative descriptions of the genocide from survivors and attempt to rethink their relationship with the national discourse, paying close attention to how the intersection between ethnicity and gender not only disclose the sense of the genocide, but also provoke questioning into the structure of the community post-genocide. In the third section, I will return to the questions provoked by the development of the gendercide analysis to think through the relation of gender in male perpetrators and state violence, and question the formal relation of gender to the post-genocide politics. In the fourth and final section, I argue that gender becomes interwoven with discourses contextualizing, recognizing, and routinizing the practices of genocidal violence as running parallel to the processes that are set out to prevent genocide. In general, I will argue that to elide the question of gender is to ignore the lived experience and lived politicization that bodies have gone through during and since the Tutsi genocide. Gender refers not only to who was targeted, but to the formal relation of bodies to the political. I will argue that before and after there remains a masculinist relation of bodies to the nation and the national discourse. By masculinist politics I mean that the political power is formed around a discourse that signifies the multitude of power into one unit, and more particularly employs strategies that fear this multiplicity as a type of emasculation. This is further problematic in how gender is intertwined and silenced at the same time in the political discourse of the post-genocide. And while it is the intersection between gender and ethnicity as a silenced form of violence that shapes the post-genocide that I wish to critically explore, to be clear from the start, it is my intention and hope that this exploration doubles as a source of agitation. I shall argue that we must understand the post-genocide also as a gendercide in order to begin to think about the meaning of post-genocidal violence—and, therefore I hope that such an analysis goes some way toward the task of breaking of the very relation it is analyzing.

Gendercide, Social Death, and Gender-Violence Trauma The analysis of gender in relation to genocide is often only seen in a diminished way. Gender violence is framed as a dynamic of genocide, but not as something that is essential to understanding genocide, or genocidal violence, itself. However, in Adam Jones’s pivotal essay, “Gendercide and Genocide,” he argues that “gendercide,” which may be defined

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as gender-selective mass killing, has been an ubiquitous feature in modern genocide.7 He points out that genocides in general ought to also be considered gendercides since they aim to destroy a people by targeting non-combatant, non-political men at exceptionally higher rates than they target women. Gender is so commonly used as a tool that it becomes not only a dynamic of genocide, but it constitutes a key technology, or mode of developing from violence to genocidal violence. But this distinction warrants closer consideration of what we mean when we call genocide also gendercide before accepting Jones’s analysis. In the broadest terms, gendercide focuses on the use of gender in conflicts as a means to mass elimination. In “Genocide and Gendercide,” Jones points out that, “non-combatant men have been and continue to be the most frequent targets of mass killing and genocidal slaughter as well as a host of lesser atrocities.”8 He remarks that the prevalence of male aggression toward targeted males may provoke a rethinking of what we mean by gender in the context of genocide altogether.9 His focus on the imbalance of violence directed toward men seems to conflate sexbased violence with what makes genocidal violence against men gendercidal. Jones holds that men experience genocidal violence more regularly as a type of gender-based violence. If Jones’s characterization is right, then gendercide is the wrong term to apply because this only refers to a practice of targeting men based on sex, not on gender. R. Charli Carpenter critiques the notion of gendercide by insisting that gender differences are not reducible to sexed differences and so it follows that gendered violence is not the same as sexed violence.10 Carpenter agrees with Jones that gender is a dynamic term and that it plays an intricate relationship in contexts of mass killing, but she urges us to think in more nuanced ways about this role, and what analysis of it means to those bodies not only expressing their gender but having their gender become a factor that exposes their group to genocidal violence. Both Carpenter and Jones use the term gendercide as a way of thinking of a technique used in mass atrocities; both remain concerned with understanding the relevance of this term to the United Nations definition.11 But just as the term genocide does not simply demarcate the phenomenon of mass killing—it is not merely a stand in for the orchestration of mass atrocities but rather, genocide defines a set of excessive violences that go beyond mass killing toward the elimination of the meaning of the lived modes of that group—gendercide, too, should refer to the intertwining ways in which an excessive violence eliminates populations and fundamentally alters their existential meaning. This is more complex in relation to Rwanda’s genocide since the language was ethnically divisive, but also presented the fear of emasculation at the same time. The intersection between gender and ethnic violence became practiced in unique ways. In “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” Jones argues that the political language and propaganda that became instrumental for group coercion

190 Alfred Frankowski as well as animating gendered themes of masculinity and femininity combined with coded ethnic terms.12 What makes the Rwandan genocide defined by gendercidal violence is not simply that boys and men were targeted, but that it is the masculinist formal relation to genocidal violence that disrobes these killings as genocidal and gendercidal at the same time, and yet, this coincidence also marks a difference between the discourse of violence and the many ways in which this violence is embedded in practices of violence. What Carpenter’s critique of Jones reveals about gender and genocide is that sex/gender is much more complex than it initially appears. For Jones, the mere fact that men were targeted for the violence of genocide makes the violence gendered. He does not consider that while men were targeted in one way, women were targeted in another way, nor does he consider that gendered violence is a product of patriarchy. Instead, he focuses only on men—and men alone. This poses a further problem in how gendercide is used to understand gender-based violence as genocidal, because Jones is not concerned with what man or masculinity means in the Rwandan context. He does not offer a gender theory that shows a deep understanding of masculinity outside the Western framework or within the colonized gender-scape of the African continent. He merely talks about men, not African men, not Hutu or Tutsi men—just men. What this reveals about Jones’s conception of gendercide is that it is, at best, a hollow concept indicating one dimension of experience, but one that is not only incapable of adding to the literature or research on genocide because it marks a regression from the gender literature, but also because it does not map the experience of the targets of genocide through their gender. Likewise, Carpenter’s resolution that his view can more accurately be understood as sexed-based violence holds, but is equally hollow as it pertains to the subjects of genocide. Gendercide is hollow as a prism to see genocidal violence through because it could only be seen as such in the post-genocide, making it a concept of post-genocidal analysis, and of purely analytic significance. But here, too, it is hollow because it misunderstands its subject. During the Tutsi genocide, the genocidaires did not target men as a category, but rather Tutsi men and Hutu men who were moderates. That is, ethnicity does work outside of gender or vice versa. The ethnic-political category allows for the gender category to be a marker of targeting. It is hollow because one cannot think about the violence of the genocide without thinking how gender-ethnic-political categorization co-inform one another. Thus, what Jones calls gendercidal violence as a concept collapses into an analysis of colonial categories of race or ethnicity as well—but this is exactly what Jones’s theory attempts to avoid. Gender violence is more than just a method by which a population targets a community or group—it is a decisive way of altering gender

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relations within the national discourse in deep and lasting ways; it is a way of highlighting how gender, as a formal relation to state power, becomes a site of genocide in a way that is particular to the way in which gender functions or is performed more broadly.13 It is practiced violence, otherwise the targeting of men is merely sexed-based violence without effecting masculinity.14 Gendercide then would simply be an excessive term, linking it only to the way a mechanism is manipulated within the context of genocide, which is already a political activity defined by masculine aggression.15 If gendercidal violence refers to the lived experience and expression of the community’s bodies, then gendercidal violence refers to the ways people are targeted because of this expression or performance, and ultimately how these performed meanings are eliminated or forced to exist in non-revitalizing ways. Carpenter concludes that the more precise term for use is sex-selected massacre. Gendercidal violence is not gendercidal only because it involved men violating other men or men violating women, but because Hutu men worked to eliminate anything like a Tutsi form of masculinity or to fundamentally sterilize Tutsi femininity. It was gendercidal because it shaped the experience of genocide based on the way formal gender violence was perpetrated, but remaining wedded to a masculinists politics all the same. Jones argues that women played a particularly powerful role in the Rwandan genocide as both perpetrators, victims, and as something in-between both. He writes, Women were far more likely than men to receive “mercy” from the killers, though often at the price of surrendering themselves sexually to their captors . . . Reflecting the patrilineal character of Rwandan society, women were frequently viewed as less Tutsi than their men— or capable of being ‘liberated’ from their ethnicity by rape or forced concubinage.16 Women were not simply victims in this process, but what it means to be a Hutu or Tutsi woman after the genocide takes on a particular relation to gendercidal violence, and frustrates the victim/perpetrator model itself. What this reveals is that the target of the genocidal violence was both the Tutsi men and women, but Tutsi men as representatives of Tutsi masculinity and Tutsi women as representatives of Tutsi femininity were targeted differently via the national confguration of who the public enemy was.17 Not only were these acts about eliminating present combatants or future rebels, it was about the elimination of combatants in total. The Hutu genocidaires had to act out of a logic that held that to be a Tutsi man meant to have a latent desire to enslave, subordinate, or oppress Hutu masculinity. This superstition is absurd in relation to actual men, since it did not square with their everyday experience of Tutsis. Regardless of the

192 Alfred Frankowski actual experience of Tutsi men, Tutsi masculinity had to be confgured as a public enemy of the nation in a unique way so that Tutsi men were also a threat to the emasculation of Hutu masculinity. Along with this, though, there needs to be some notion of the difference between gender pre- and post-genocide. Gender pre-genocide may simply be formed in relation to colonial violence, but this changes postgenocide. Gendercide in these terms is post-genocide phenomena—it only has meaning after the genocide and marks the way the genocide eliminated a meaning and became a site of life-denying terror, embodied. Gendercide makes not only the violence of genocide a lived and embodied dynamic of political violence, but it throws into question gender as a relation to the violence of the nation-state post-genocide. From the point of view of the victim, gendercidal violence presents the undergoing of an elimination of vitality and meaning that is indifferent to their individuality. One is always also present to this violence. In Claudia Card’s “Social Death is Genocide,” she argues that genocide is not continuous with war or social conflict, but rather that it forges a set of relations that undermine living, social practices, and practices that constitute the shared cultural meaning of a group, and without such practices, the absence constitutes a type of unrepairable wound—an unlivable condition that she calls “social death.”18 For example, Card holds that rape is a technique of genocide despite the fact that the rape victim may not physically die from this violence. She argues that not only does the penis and sperm become a weapon, they are weapons of mass destruction in the way they enact an unrepairable damage on the victim’s body, family, and other social relations. She writes, “It is foreseeable that not only will many victims die but that many survivors will suffer lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) . . . Rape humiliates. Public, unremitting, irreparable, deep humiliation is among the techniques of genocide.”19 Card’s elaboration of social death as a gendered reality of the practices of genocide allows us to think of the way the practices employed in warfare and in the militarization of both peace keeping and conflict areas take on a different and gendering meaning. Given Card’s arguments, it is important to situate social death as being defined by the ways that institutionalized practices turn from procedures interfering with one’s life to assaults on a community’s vitality.20 This violence is not a new trauma or a past trauma, but a lived experience that is also already always present to violence. In her study on post-genocide trauma, Elisa von JordenForgey argues that this trauma names “a ritualized pattern of violence that targets the life force of a group by destroying both the physical symbols of its life force as well as its most basic institutions of reproduction, especially the family unit.”21 It is not only the practice or the context that is important, but the way that these lived structures remain as forms of trauma.

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Gender violence is specifically seen on the level of practices. The practice of frequent identity checks, for example, which may seem to be continuous with the normal function of law enforcement and employ the language of ethnicity, carried out gendered violence.22 Indeed, the practice itself may be mundane and carried out without requiring any hatred from the individual officer, but it may cumulatively reinforce gendered violence, targeting not only individuals and groups, but producing a violence located in the targeting of the vitality of those victimized by the genocidal practices themselves.23 But these practices enact gender violence in severe ways that, as gendercidal violence, remain in play in the lived structure of public life after the genocide. In an interview with a Rwandan survivor named Immaculée, she recounts, A friend found them identity cards marked “Hutu,” so Immaculée and the children attempted to travel by taxi-bus, hoping to blend in and avoid drawing attention to themselves. When the taxi-bus arrived at a roadblock near her husband’s birthplace, the Interahamwe stopped the bus to check the passenger’s identity cards. One of the men recognized Immaculée’s son who greatly resembled his father, and forced the family to get off the bus. Immaculée pleaded for their lives for a long time. The negotiations ended when her oldest son said, “Mom, let them kill us so that you [Immaculée and her daughters] may live.” The Interahamwe butchered her sons with machetes and forced Immaculée and her daughters to watch. The Interahamwe then told them to leave, saying, “Let the others finish you off. We’ve worked enough . . . She said, “Many of us don’t like to talk about those times. If I think about that, I fear that I might go crazy for good. Someday, they’ll find me up on the rooftop, naked, screaming hysterically.”24 Immaculée’s narrative illustrates not only the devastation of the genocide but also poses several questions about the intersection between genocide and gender, and the role it played during the genocide and the role it plays afterward. But it is not fair to say that the genocidal violence targeting ethnicity is the same as the violence targeting gender. Whereas the ethnic genocidal violence may have ended, the gendercidal violence remains in play and continues to be lived out. As Immaculée’s narrative points out, one of the more striking acts of gender violence was present in the way that the Tutsis were gathered and men were separated from family, boys from mothers and sisters, splitting family and determining the chances of death and survival. This selection meant that women were targeted by the violence differently and it suggests further that the politics of this practice, which genders survivors distinctly, cannot be separated from the way in which the genocide continues to be lived out in between the national discourse and the bodies of those who survived. Thus, the violence that

194 Alfred Frankowski gendercidal violence describes is not only present in the killing of targeted people, but also in how the textures of a community’s lives are undermined, dispossessed, and destroyed by the violence, making whether the person died or survived meaningless, or at least resulting in the same. In this sense, the intersection between ethnicity and gender violence shows a negative relationship, discursively, where genocidal violence may have ended, gendercidal violence may remain in lived and permanent ways. By focusing on gendercide as a term to describe not only the events of the genocide but as range of and shift in practices in how gender is performed, social death and life force atrocity/trauma are concepts continuous with understanding the lived experience of genocide, beyond the historical and political markers of the event. Gendercidal violence focuses our attention on the ways in which gender itself continues to harbor discreet forms of violence perpetuated initially through the genocide, but continued thereby also after it in an altered form and thus its expression captures something of lived experience and its relations phenomenologically. Throughout the next sections I will explore how this violence is revealed in the narratives of survivors and the very context through which a post-genocidal state emerges.

Survivor Narratives and Post-Genocidal Violence The phenomenological analysis of gendercide requires a multifaceted account of the lived experience, before and after the genocide, paying attention not only to what is said in the narratives, but also attempting to understand the relation of gender within the larger political discourse. In Burnet’s Genocide lives in us, she records several interviews from women who were genocide survivors to explore women’s memory in the context of the Rwandan genocide. Burnet writes that, Though not all Rwandan women were genocide survivors, they all lost loved ones in the genocide (April–July 1994), in the civil war (1990–94), in the refugee camps and rainforests in eastern Zaire (1994–97), or in the insurgency in northern and western Rwanda (1997–2000). All women—Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa—have violent pasts to remember.25 She points out that for Rwandan as well as for African women in general,26 marriage and motherhood are essential to one’s socially constructed identity, not simply because of patriarchal structures but because of the way lineage is linked to social vitality.27 On the one hand, women are literally rebuilding the country. On the other hand, state violence remains present in gendered discourses and silences. The narratives the women offer in Burnet’s text describe how the genocide affected and continues to affect women’s lives and animates a sense in which genocide continues to

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touch everyone in the post-genocide situation. In this section, I will focus on how the narratives present complexities of what it means to live in the post-genocide as a survivor and how that condition is marked by a relation to the larger political discourse, in which state violence continues as gendered political violence and is thus continuous with practices of gendercide. The genocide was perpetrated against the Tutsi, and for many Tutsi women, this meant going into hiding with their children and not knowing whether their husband or other male relatives were dead or alive. Burnet describes the experience of Oliva, who was a farmer and mother of six (four sons and two daughters), who lived through similar circumstances. She was pregnant and living with her husband and his relatives in their hometown in the beginning of April, just prior to the killings. As the killings began, she was in full labor.28 On April 9,1994, she gave birth to her fifth son while hiding in a friend’s home. She then traveled on foot with her seven children to seek refuge in her hometown after she received word that all of her husband’s relatives and her husband were dead. Shortly after her arrival, everyone in the village was called to gather in a town hall meeting and were forced to stand in lines for hours while the crowd was divided into groups of Hutu and Tutsi, and then again into groups of males and females. Her newborn was identified as a girl, so he was allowed to stay with Oliva. Burnet writes that, Oliva begged them to let her leave with her sons, but the men refused. They led the boys away with the other men. That was the last Oliva and her daughters saw of the boys. Oliva stopped her story there. It seemed that she did not feel that the rest of her survival story was important. She seemed to view her sons’ deaths as her personal failure as a mother to protect them.29 Burnet’s analysis traces the ways in which gender violence continues to frame the narrative. She points out that Oliva, like many survivors who were mothers, experience the genocide as not only the event of political violence that took away their husbands and sons, but also as a violence that continues to violate them as mothers. Her narrative itself reveals that the genocide was a gendercide in the way that her role as mother underwent a social death, and after the genocide, this violence continually shapes the form of the Tutsi family and its remaining members. But it is the gendered element of this violence that is present, which, while being present also goes silent. During the genocide, the way gendercide appeared as state violence was explicitly in the targeting of Tutsi women, and this element remains in public discourse. But the focus on Tutsi women ignores the general way women were targeted and decontextualizes the violence that Hutu women experienced and their status as genocide survivors in the

196 Alfred Frankowski post-genocide. In Burnet’s interviews, she shares Seraphine’s narrative (a Hutu) that begins with her recounting of the night her husband, a Tutsi, had gone to a public meeting and did not return. Seraphine states, “My husband may have been hit on the head with a spiked club but he was not dead. My neighbor found him and brought him home.”30 She and her neighbor bandaged his wound and hid him until they could get a doctor who they trusted to attend to him, where it was determined that he was in a coma. She attended to him, the family, and the situation by hiding him in a kitchen pantry for months, while she worked to pay bills and the tuition for her children without assistance and to put up with routine house checks by the authorities. Burnet’s account suggests that Seraphine paid the soldiers so they would not check to entire house as a means of survival. Her gendered relation to state violence increased to the same degree that her vulnerability proliferated. She states, When [The General] first came, I thought he was just visiting. But it became clear that he wasn’t here for a simple social call—it was late, after all. He brought me here [she pointed at the floor]. He told me I could have sex—either willingly or by force—it was up to me. [at this point in her story, Seraphine’s voice began to quaver and her eyes fill with tears]. What could I do? My husband was still alive. My children were in the next room.31 Neighbors and her elder children knew what was going on, but Seraphine was stigmatized as collaborator in all of this. She states, “I am a survivor even if people don’t see it. I have my husband—and I thank God for that—but it is up to me to fnd my children’s tuition and everything else,”32 Seraphine is forced into performing acts of complicity and docility to continue to protect her husband and children, and while this might be a way of performing her gender role, it is also a dispossession of this activity as well. Protecting her children is linked with the invitation of the generals to rape her whenever they wanted—and like Oliva, despite the end of the genocide, gendercidal violence remains within the structure of Seraphine’s lifeworld, political or not. The remains of gendercidal violence are also present in the postgenocide situation, but this is often talked about solely within the confines of an emerging medical epidemic and not the present remains of genocidal practices. In “Rape as a Weapon of Genocide,” Burnet reports that, “During the genocide, men who knew they were infected with HIV raped women to inflict a delayed death.”33 She argues that genocidal rape meant that women bore a violence that far exceeded death. Rape and HIV ensure that she will live with the genocide. But also, in the post-genocide, if she is Hutu, this violence may not even be addressed in post-genocide interventions because, according to the national discourse,

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she could not be a rape victim. The acts themselves bear little meaning unless we consider how the violence not only traumatizes the victim but also normalizes a series of violences that recall the genocide and violate her gendered relation to the world. A raped victim who is also seen as an accomplice becomes the context of her survival. Seraphine’s narrative not only illustrates the limits of the dominant narrative to see her as a victim in the genocide, but also that these limits are themselves a form of violence to the extent that social interventions in post-genocidal Rwanda focused mostly on Tutsi victims, leaving other rape survivors to cope on their own.34 The political discourse retains a relation to the survivor through genocidal violence that is indicated with a structure of gendercide, but this structure is necessarily silenced. Moreover, gender is further silenced in relation to reconstruction. Whereas women did not play a major role in public life before the genocide, they now play a major role in the economic and political force in the reconstruction and reconciliation efforts of the country.35 Women are not the targets of genocidal practices— yet, they are still reconfigured within the post-genocide discourse of the nation-state as targets, remains, and survivors of the genocide. Their shift in social position is a remnant of gendercidal practices and the national discourse that makes her status as a survivor splinter with suspicion of being an accomplice, and recasts her public persona as redeemer of the current nation. Seraphine’s experience is one that is framed out of the scope of women survivors and reveals that genocide lives not only in the explicit targets but also in how gendered relations take on a new form. I would like to suggest that the phenomenology of gendercide makes it possible to rethink what it means to be a survivor not only within the framework of the national and post-genocide discourse, but from the complex and intertwining lives of the actual survivors. Seraphine is not simply a rape survivor, but a survivor of a genocide that continues to ignore the gendercidal violence perpetrated against her based on her ethnicity. Moreover, there is a form of silence that is based on the inarticulability of her as a genocide and rape survivor that constitutes the decontextualizing of her narrative as a sign of genocidal violence within the discourse of genocide. This pattern of silence is at play and that sets out a way through which one is always also present to violence as a structure of the post-genocide more generally. One way to understand this is that social vitality is linked with the social identity of motherhood to such an extent that mothering became not only a form of domination, but also recalls the extent to which one suffers even in light of an effective performance of resistance as well.36 In the post-genocide context, to be a Tutsi woman survivor means to be complicit in being traumatized by the community you are living with— with the political power that informs you. This disruption is not only

198 Alfred Frankowski a political relation, but is lived out in the performance of gender roles, whether they are the same as before or new. Being a survivor performs the violence of the genocide as a form of social and political femininity—and a remainder of Hutu masculinity at the same time in the post-genocide. But another way of thinking about this is in terms of what has been targeted and therefore liquidated. Patricia Daley argues that, “In contrast [to men], women are targeted because their bodies are perceived as being symbolic of the nation or racial/ethnic group.”37 An analysis of gendercidal violence does not simply show that the violence of the genocide splits into gendered factions. Rather the point is that in the genocide, gendercidal violence completed forms of social death based on gender, and the survivors became the remains of this social death, expressing itself as practices of indifference and of silence. Unlike the narratives of women survivors, the narratives of male genocide survivors have received less attention. This is in part due to cultural norms, whereby men are less likely to talk about their experience of being victimized, but it is also due to the way silence is maintained in terms of gendercidal violence in the post-genocide. Similar to women, ethnicity seems to over-determine the roles one played. Narratives from male survivors follow the tropes of being hunted, escaping by fortune, and of accepting one’s inevitable death. Like women’s narratives, there is much more that comes to the foreground in considering how the performativity of masculinity is shaped by confrontations with masculine violence, and silenced at the same time. For example, although genociderape is thought of as exclusively as applying to women, it applied almost equally to men during the genocide. Jones reports that there is reason to believe that the frequency of the rape of male victims by female and male perpetrators was near the same levels for men as it was for female victims, and this remains consistent through most contemporary genocides.38 For both populations, this includes rape by the same sex as well as sexual coercion or forced sexual violations in public. This also includes acts involving genital manipulation, humiliation, and mutilation.39 But Jones points out that despite the comparable frequency of the experience of being violated, and that males are almost as likely to be selected for sexual servitude and sexual slavery, this experience is silenced socially and politically. He finds that only 3% of the services in the literature mention violence against males.40 But this is just another marker of how the survivor is silenced and an indication of the way in which gendercidal violence frames the silenced form of gender violence of post-genocide Rwanda. Between the political discourse of the genocide and the post-genocide, gendercidal violence is retained permanently within the post-genocide in relation to the political discourse, whereby the gender performativity becomes the committed discourse, animating the survivor narrative or the lacuna through which gendercidal violence structures the formal

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relation of survivor to the post-genocide. Indeed, this violence remains as legible in the present as it was in the past. But the perpetrator is also left out of this discourse, and it is the perpetrator who only comes into view through the prosecution in the post-genocide and who also bears the remains of gendercidal violence in their new form as well. By turning toward the gender discourse present in the narrative of perpetrators, I will attempt to locate the formal relation between post-genocidal gendered violence and the post-genocidal politics of Rwanda.

Perpetrators and Post-Genocide Gender It is easy to find reasons to dismiss the narratives of perpetrators, but to give an account of the phenomenology of the post-genocide I am compelled to consider the gendered experience of violence from this point of view as well. It is also easy enough to think that the genocidaires were exceptionally criminal or hyper-masculine, or that they internalized an emasculated sense of their gender. Phillip Gourevitch speculates that there is a culture of fear and conformity that describes pre-genocide Rwanda.41 It is also reasonable to assume that under such conditions, a government or a political group can get poor, uneducated, and disenfranchised youths to buy into a number of extremist ideologies. But to take up a gendered analysis of their experience, I am not assuming that they represent a homogenous group, rather that their gender performs their role in relation to the political discourse as well. Therefore, here too we will trace what goes silent through gender and what becomes marked by indifference. Without focusing solely on extremists, the genocide itself was an expression of a solution to a gender crisis that had become communicated through the ethnic crisis of the political discourse. Jones comments on the way the language of recruitment was marked by the language of work.42 He points out that with an overabundant population of Hutu men who were out of work, the conditions were already a form of gender crisis, making the distinction between gendered and ethnic violence inseparable during the genocide itself, as it is embodied in the genocidiares. Likewise, in The Order of Genocide, Scott Straus writes, I do not find that preexisting ethnic animosity, wide spread prejudice, deeply held ideological beliefs, deprivation, or even greed motivated the majority of Rwandan perpetrators. Nor do I find that most perpetrators are unattached young men, poorly educated, or militia members.43 He observes that many perpetrators were employed men with average educations, families, and generally with no history of violence—therefore, we cannot assume that the genocidaires were radically different, exceptional,

200 Alfred Frankowski or criminal in any way that differentiates them from the victims, and this makes giving an account of the phenomenology more complicated and equally important in the post-genocide. While Straus points out that, in general, the perpetrators were representative of a normal population, he also indicates that their reasons for participating in killing were also fairly banal, ranging from free beer to the belief that they would be able to secure better work. Straus further points out that men did not typically join in a mass killing based on ideas or preexisting hatred, but rather the most common reason was that they feared being targeted and emasculated publically themselves.44 Their participation in the genocide was equally gendered, expressing reasons that included a desire to have stable work by doing security at checkpoints or as agents. The security work was seen as being continuous with efforts to reduce crime and normalized a technique that was employed to capture and dispose of Tutsis.45 The relation of gender performativity forges a similarity with the gendered participation after the genocide. Even though the targets change ethnicity, the gendered relation between participants remains formally the same. What differentiates the prosecuting gender performance in the post-genocide from the genocidaire performance during the genocide remains in question. While gendercidal and ethnocidal violence could not be separated during the genocide, they become expressed as absolute points of difference in the post-genocide in the prosecution of perpetrators. If victims of genocide were always also present to violence in their gendered relation to the political discourse of the post-genocide, then perpetrators were constantly in a state of being revealed to the juridical violence of this discourse within its limits. In prosecuting perpetrators, gender appears as a limit in post-genocide, because what is being prosecuted really only uses the language of ethnicity, explicitly making Hutu (men) the primary targets. Women are often portrayed as victims of the genocide because of the ways they were targeted differently, and this obscures the fact that both Hutu and Tutsi women acted as either active or passive accomplices during and after the genocide. Somewhere between 6–7% of Hutu women were prosecuted for genocidal crimes, including poisoning their own children, assisting in the clubbing or beating of victims to death, and the rape of women and men. There were a number of ways in which women indirectly or passively contributed to the genocide such as looting the houses of victims, encouraging relatives to take part in the violence, and working as informants.46 The most high-profile female perpetrator remains Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, who served as Rwanda’s Minister of Family and Woman’s development prior to and during the genocide.47 She remains the only woman tried and convicted of genocide and conspiracy to commit genocide, and yet her public persona has not veered from invoking the traditional role of womanhood and mother to evoke the impossibility that she could have been responsible for her actions.

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What this shows is how the juridical scene is more performance conforming with the political discourse and producing the perpetrator at the extremes of whose masculinity and femininity can be thought as continuous with being a perpetrator, or whose masculinity and femininity is continually unthought-of in this regard. The problem is not that one could not prosecute women perpetrators; the problem is that this form of prosecution politically cultivates the post-genocide political discourse of reconciliation while preserving practices of a masculinist political form within the function of juridical power and its limits. The formal relation is what seems to be the point at which understanding gendercide and the post-genocide collide. Post-genocide Rwanda would appear to demarcate a series of shifting relations in Rwanda along the lines of gender. More women own land and are independent than before, but more women also hold office and play major roles in shaping the political and economic structure of post-genocide Rwanda than before. Yet, this post-genocide country is not described as a matriarchy or even as a post-masculinist state. While who operates in the service of the nation has changed, the form of management remains the same. In the post-genocide, gendercide remains an issue because masculinity and male gender separate themselves not only in their victimization and in their perpetration, but in the way neither register a meaning within the political discourse. Therefore, for perpetrators, the post-genocide community is rooted in the unjust unfolding of the expression of gender as impotence wrongfully foisted upon them, while the masculinity of the Tutsi is always already one of being a victim. What has changed in the post-genocidal state is only that the political identity of power has shifted, but the political power’s relation to the community is still fundamentally masculine in that the discourse of unity avoids multiplicity and its approach to governing resituates bodies within the same alignments, often deploying the same techniques, and almost invariably utilizing the same public language learned and deployed throughout the genocide. Gendercidal violence demarcates a circuit through which the gendering of male perpetrators is a complete totality in every killing, and yet it is incomplete in that more killing is required in order to live out a masculinity in line with the logic of the national discourse. The violence of men against women and other men becomes not only social affirmation of one’s masculinity, but a mandate of political power. Masculinity is not only linked to forms of torture and subordination or murder, but in how far one subjugates one’s self as genocidaire—to this activity that continues without pause or rest. The relation is one that is ceaselessly pathological, ceaselessly dispossessing itself as a reaffirmation of itself. Gendercidal violence does not only mean that males are vulnerable to masculine violence, but the context of this violence strips both victim and perpetrator of identity, reducing them to actions, exhausted in the diffusion of the activity itself. If the ends of the action are masculinity,

202 Alfred Frankowski then these ends are realized in both the totality of participating in stateordered murder and in the incompleteness of bringing this end to completion. Masculinity as gendercidal violence may be performed and yet it can never be realized or completed—and as such, it destroys both the persons performing and being performed upon. After their actions they are not left as men or women, but only as murderers. This remains the logic of authoritarian power no matter what gender the bodies are who perform the national discourse. The difference between the pre- and post-genocide is not that women have become empowered at the national level, but rather that all genders are liquidated into the masculinism of the nation in form, if not in content.48 What I have said here should indicate not only worry that the masculinization of power through militarization has not ceased, it should inspire us to think more carefully about the types of crises that are registered in our own gendered relation to state power. What critical inquiry into gendercidal violence has shown is not simply that gender is performed differently in the post-genocidal state, but that gender becomes inseparably an extension of the national discourse and its relation to concealing post-genocidal violence. The ways in which gendered bodies receive and take up modes of political power in relation to state power remains one of pathology, whereby the same formal relations that dispossess the body are reproduced as the normative performativity of gender. This pathology cannot be dismantled through gender but must be approached through showing how gender is performatively illustrating the development of a crisis that is reflective of past violence as much as it is indicative of current patterns of violence. Genocide intervention, recognition, prevention, or reconciliation can begin without first raising the question of how we unlearn former patterns of violence, or learn to make this violence’s disclosure part of gender’s performativity in relation to the frameworks of the political discourse. The task of addressing gendercidal violence in the post-genocide is not primarily an intellectual task in which merely the representation of the facts of the event is enough. It means rethinking gender as the totality of post-genocidal violence and the reiterable incompleteness of that violence at the same time.

The Post-Genocide Remains of Gendercide Throughout this chapter I have attempted to show that the formal relation of survivors, whether they are perpetrators or victims, is a deeply entrenched relation to gendercidal violence that is expressed through what goes silent or becomes indifferent in the post-genocide discourse. I have suggested that while the events of the genocide may recede into memory and practices of reconciliation, the formal relationship to gendercidal violence may remain. I have also argued that gendercidal violence is

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essentially a critique of masculine state power. But it is just these remains, these moments of that which cannot be put into the discourse, that also turns against the presence of gendercidal violence, since remains are never completely silent or inactive. The similarity between genocidal Rwanda and post-genocide Rwanda is more than discursive. Rather, gendercidal violence is taken up as the normal relation between the state and this means there is constant postgenocidal violence inscribed in the form of reconciliation politics. The discursive disjunction allows for state actors to carry out interrogations in the same form and in the same language as perpetrators, to perform the same emasculations and masculinizations, to silence multiplicity in exactly the same way—and perceive a great difference.49 Thus, as Daley points out, the same formal relation is applicable within the context of post-genocide Rwanda and underscores the need not only for new strategies, but the intersection between post-genocide aesthetics and gender.50 In a sense, instead of becoming a critical point of departure from the former structure, gender and ethnicity become irrelevant which means that the post-genocide has diminished, if not completely liquidated these distinctions at the national level. I have tried to set out how gendercide is meant to articulate a lived relationship to the post-genocide. But it is just this lived experience that cannot be settled or set out any further than always also present to violence. More than bearing witness to the horrors of genocide, being attentive to the practices that inscribe gendercidal violence disrupts the way political discourses silence or become indifferent to this violence while engaging in the work of reconciliation.51 The questions this chapter closes with are not what resistance outside the masculinist form looks like, but rather where the meanings of gender remain significant even if they are only remains. More urgently, however, is the liquidation of the political discourse itself. All violence leaves traces, but what follows from this is not the potential for social building, but rather a need to view the always also present to violence as embedded in the narratives that remember the genocide and its beginnings and endings while keeping the question of its discordant practices in view. What we see—and not only in relation to Rwanda—is only the remains of the corpses of a gender at play; a way in which the post-genocide is built out of gendering that has undergone social death, within every pulse of a post-genocide that is making visceral a new incarnation of the former trauma.

Notes 1. I am grateful for the participation in the 2015 Summer Research Workshop, Genocide, Agency, and the Nation-State after Auschwitz, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, which contributed significantly to the development of the research presented in this article. I am also grateful to the

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2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

insightful comments on this work that were provided during its development by Anne O’Byrne, Martin Shuster, Maria del Rosario Acosta Lopez, Ada Jaarsma, Lissa Skitolsky, and Rocio Zambrana. I am especially grateful to George Fourlas and Lissa Skitolsky who commented on earlier drafts of this paper. See Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell Their Stories: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999) and Mark Levine’s discussion of Rwanda in Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: The Meaning of Genocide, vol. 1 (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008). Des Forges, Leave None to Tell Their Stories; Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jared Cohen’s, One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwandan Genocide (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), and Kyrsten Sinema’s, Who Must Die in Rwanda’s Genocide? The State of Exception Realized (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015) for detailed accounts of the public rhetoric broadcast over the public radio before and during the genocide. See Phillip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Out Families (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998) and Des Forges, Leave None to Tell Their Stories for a description of these events. Jennie Burnet, Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 12–13. Jennie Burnet, “Rape as a Weapon of Genocide,” in Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, ed. A.E. Randall (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 141. Adam Jones, “Gendercide and Genocide,” in Gendercide and Genocide, ed. A. Jones (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 11. R. Chari Carpenter, “Beyond ‘Gendercide’ Operationalizing Gender in Comparative Genocide Studies,” in Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 234. See the report by the Office of the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. “The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” www.oas.org/dil/1948_Convention_on_the_Prevention_and_ Punishment_of_the_Crime_of_Genocide.pdf Adam Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” in Gendercide and Genocide, ed. A. Jones (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 101. See Øystein Gullvåg Holter, “A Theory of Gendercide,” in Gendercide and Genocide, ed. A. Jones (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004). He argues that in the structures of societies, we have new formations of gender. Bringing on the scene a new sense of “he” and “she.” His analysis takes into account the role that patriarchal systems play in genocide. Carpenter, “Beyond ‘Gendercide’,” 243. Ibid., 240–1. Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” 111. For a discussion on the public enemy, see Car Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See section 3, 27–37. Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 240. Ibid., 283. Ibid., 237.

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21. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “The Devil in the Details: ‘Life Force Atrocities’ and the Assault on the Family in Times of Conflict,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5, no. 1 (2010): 5–6. 22. See Catherine MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 23. See Falguni Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (New York: SUNY Press, 2009). On the link between racialization and political targeting see Ch. 4, 5, and 7. Also see George Fourlas, “Being a Target: On the Racialization of Middle Eastern Americans,” Critical Philosophy of Race 3, no. 1 (2015): 101–23. 24. Burnet, Genocide Lives in Us, 75–6. 25. Ibid., 6. 26. I am relying on Euro and American constructions of gender role performativity as opposed to reworking the notion of women in Africa. I admit that this approach may have its problems in general, but my point throughout this paper is that in the post-genocidal context, gender takes on a significant relationship to state violence created out of the post-colonial context. For a provocative account of how post-colonialism introduces gender in Africa, see Oyèrónké Oyêwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1997). In particular, see Ch. 4 “Colonizing Bodies and Minds: Gender and Colonialism,” 121–56. 27. Burnet, “Rape as a Weapon of Genocide,” 142. 28. Burnet, Genocide Lives in Us, 81. 29. Ibid., 82. 30. Ibid., 84. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 86. 33. Burnet, “Rape as a Weapon of Genocide,” 151. 34. See Jennie Burnet’s discussion of this in her, “Rape as a Weapon of Genocide.” 35. See John Berry and Carol Pott Berry, “Before, during, and after the Genocide,” in Genocide in Rwanda: A Collective Memory, ed. J. Berry and C. Pott Berry (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1999), 141–69. 36. Burnet, “Rape as a Weapon of Genocide,” 153. 37. Patricia Daley, Gender and Genocide in Burundi: The Search for Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 27. 38. Adam Jones, “Masculinities and Vulnerabilities in the Rwandan and Congolese Genocides,” in Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, ed. A.E. Randall (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 71. 39. Ibid., 73. 40. Ibid., 78. 41. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You, 96. 42. Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” 101. 43. Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 96. 44. Ibid. 45. Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 52–4. 46. Nicole Hogg and Mark Drumbl, “Women as Perpetrators: Agency and Authority in Genocidal Rwanda,” in Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, ed. A.E. Randall (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 192–3. 47. Ibid., 199.

206 Alfred Frankowski 48. See Monique Roelofs’s, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). In particular, see Ch. 3 “The Gendered Aesthetic Detail” and Ch. 7 “Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism.” 49. Daley, Gender and Genocide in Burundi, 230. 50. On gender and aesthetics, see Roelofs’s, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic. 51. For an important analysis of gender and politics see Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 1996).

Bibliography Berry, John, and Carol Potts Berry. “Before, during, and after the Genocide.” In Genocide in Rwanda: A Collective Memory, edited by J. Berry and C. Pott Berry, 158–61. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1999. Burnet, Jennie. Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and silence in Rwanda. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. ———. “Rape as a Weapon of Genocide.” In Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, edited by A.E. Randall, 140–62. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Card, Claudia. Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Carpenter, R. Chari. “Beyond ‘Gendercide,’ Operationalizing Gender in Comparative Genocide Studies.” In Gendercide and Genocide, 230–56. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. Cohen, Jared. One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwandan Genocide. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Daley, Patricia. Gender and Genocide in Burundi: The Search for Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. Des Forges, Alison. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999. Fourlas, George. “Being a Target: On the Racialization of Middle Eastern Americans.” Critical Philosophy of Race 3, no. 1 (2015): 101–23. Gourevitch, Phillip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Out Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998. Gullvåg Holter, Øystein. “A Theory of Gendercide.” In Gendercide and Genocide, edited by A. Jones, 62–97. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. Hatzfeld, Jean. Life Laid Bare: The Survivor’s in Rwanda Speak. Translated by L. Coverdale. New York: Other Press, 2006. Hogg, Nicole, and Mark Drumbl. “Women as Perpetrators: Agency and Authority in Genocidal Rwanda.” In Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, edited by A.E. Randall, 189–212. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. James, Joy. Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Jones, Adam. “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda.” In Gendercide and Genocide, edited by A. Jones, 98–137. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. ———. “Gendercide and Genocide.” In Gendercide and Genocide, edited by A. Jones, 1–38. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.

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———. “Masculinities and Vulnerabilities in the Rwandan and Congolese Genocides.” In Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, edited by A.E. Randall, 62–86. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Keane, Fergal. Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey. New York: Viking/Penguin, 1995. Levine, Mark. Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: The Meaning of Genocide, vol. 1. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008. Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Oyêwùmí, Oyèrónké. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1997. Roelofs, Monique. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition. Translated by G. Schwab. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Sheth, Falguni. Toward a Political Philosophy of Race. New York: SUNY Press, 2009. Sinema, Kyrsten. Who Must Die in Rwanda’s Genocide? The State of Exception Realized. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Straus, Scott. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. von Joeden-Forgey, Elisa. “The Devil in the Details: ‘Life Force Atrocities’ and the Assault on the Family in Times of Conflict.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5, no. 1 (2010): 1–19.

11 Law and Oral History Hearing the Claims of Indigenous Peoples Jill Stauffer

An article by two practicing lawyers, published in a law journal, discussing how laws of evidence work when First Nations bring claims to court in Canada, opens with these sentences: Among the reasons that negotiation is a preferable process for resolving claims for aboriginal and treaty rights is the problem of proof. What becomes clear from a review of the evidentiary rules applicable to such cases is that, while the trend in the law toward a non-mechanistic but rather principled approach to the rules of admissibility generally favors claimants of such rights, the litigation process is ill-suited to resolution of these claims.1 In what follows I’ll explain what, exactly, is happening in this set of assertions, why it matters, and what that has to tell us about how genocide may be built into law—even a form of law seemingly trying to respond justly to longstanding injustice. In this chapter I’ll focus on a case from Canada in which settler colonial courts, even as they try to do justice by expanding what courts can hear, continue to participate in the destruction of Indigenous ways of being. Similar arguments could be made using laws and court rulings from the United States or Australia, two other settler colonial states. I focus here on this case and on Canada both because Canada has worked to make its courts more fair and open to Indigenous claims, and because this groundbreaking case, Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (or Delgamuukw v. The Queen, depending on the stage of its litigation), lays bare law’s genocidal underpinnings both in what it does wrong and what it does right. In other words, it shows both how “bad rulings” can result from racism and colonialism, and how even a “good ruling” may reinforce a structure of domination rather than challenge it. Section 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982 of Canada states that “the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.” The purpose of this clause is to recognize that Indigenous groups, including Indian, Inuit, and Métis peoples

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in Canada, have rights that were theirs prior to state power—rights that were not granted by Canada—a promising development. Along with this “grant” of what did not need to be granted (it is claimed) arise problems of how to recognize what rights there are. That leads us directly to the “problem of proof” mentioned in this chapter’s opening quotation. How might a group with very different conceptions of time, history, law, and responsibility, the members of which have traditionally stored the most important aspects of that history in oral forms rather than in documents, “prove” in court that the rights they claim now are rights they have always had? (A more radical question is: why should they have to?) Pursuant to the more “principled approach to the rules of admissibility,” in various cases heard since 1982, oral history has been admitted as evidence rather than excluded as hearsay in proceedings. “Hearsay,” from a legal standpoint, is a complicated term admitting of various exceptions, but in general, in a court setting, if someone testifies that someone else said something, that is considered hearsay rather than evidence because the statement “Marie told me that she saw Howard there” cannot be verified in the same way that the statement “I saw Howard there” can—Marie is not under oath, nor is she available for cross-examination. Since stories in the oral tradition are passed from third parties to those who testify, they might count as hearsay if courts did not consider the larger picture. That is what is meant by the statement that this new “principled” approach to admissibility “generally favors claimants of such rights” more than a mechanistic application of standing evidence rules would. It is taken as a positive step that standards of evidence have been broadened to allow different forms of proof to be heard. What remains to be seen, however, is whether they do get heard, even when they are spoken. That leads us to the lawyers’ conclusion that, despite Indigenous groups being “treated favorably” with regard to admissibility of evidence, “the litigation process is ill-suited to resolution of these claims.”

Adaawk and Kungax as Legal Title Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (or The Queen) is the legal name for the case brought by the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en peoples in what is now British Columbia, claiming title for their traditional lands. These lands were never relinquished by treaty. Delgam Uukw is a Gitksan hereditary chief and Gisday Wa is a Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief; their names are most prominent in discussions of the case, but the suit was brought by 50 chiefs of various Houses and clans of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en peoples. In litigating this case, they sought recognition of what is already true—that they have dwelled on and had a relationship with the land where they now reside for many generations and that this “ownership” (already a problematic term for cultural translation) was never extinguished. They were not asking for permission to continue their way of

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life. As Delgam Uukw put it in his opening statement, “We do not seek a decision as to whether our system might continue or not. It will continue.”2 They sought legal recognition of what is for them an established truth, that this is now and has always been their land. Indigenous peoples may have rights that aren’t granted by settler colonial states, but the stark legal truth for cases like this is that meaningful recognition of those rights must be granted by the legal systems of those states. This puts Indigenous groups in an unfair position, having to convert the truths and ways of being of one system into those of another in order to get them heard. In the case of Delgamuukw, this meant having to provide some sort of evidence for their claim on the lands in question. In order to make a successful case, the evidence would (according to Canadian law) have to establish that they lived in organized societies prior to contact, that their current House and clan structures show that they still live in organized societies, and that the link between past and present is proved in their oral traditions. For both Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en people, tradition is stored in oral forms. By “tradition” I mean a broad range of rules, history, spirituality, geography, and cultural norms and aspirations, all of which may not be separable in the same way they may be separable in North American settler colonial traditions. The Gitksan oral histories are called adaawk; the Wet’suwet’en, kungax. In addition to using them as evidence, the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en peoples claimed that these oral traditions are their title to the land. A website for the Gitksan people describes the adaawk this way: Each Wilp (House) has an adaawk (oral history), which describes important events in its existence. The carvings on a totem pole record parts of a Wilp’s adaawk. The adaawk is tied to the territory, and events depicted by the crests on totem poles signify jurisdiction over a particular territory by a Wilp and its hereditary chief.3 So, adaawk and kungax both serve to record House ownership of land and resources, and performing these histories at feasts is what Robert Cover would call “jurisgenerative”: it creates law.4 The adaawk, in the telling, reasserts a House’s claim over land and the responsibilities that come with it, and creates (or maintains) a normative order. This is a form of law that does not need state power in order to exist. (If that already seems strange, remember that the rules of various political movements, labor unions, religious groups, or clubs you may belong to also do not require state power. Legalist traditions do their best to obscure that, but it is true.) Part of the legal claim made in Delgamuukw is that “expressions of ownership come through the adaawk, kungax, songs and ceremonial regalia; [and] that the confrmation of ownership comes through

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the totem poles erected to give those expressions a material base.”5 It should be possible to recognize these forms as jurisgenerative legal texts.

Listening to Oral Tradition These songs and stories do not conform to legalist expectations about evidence, nor do they reward assumptions settler colonial societies harbor about how legal narrative works. They lack set beginnings and endings, change according to the setting and purpose in a given situation, and implicate the listener as much as the teller. Cruikshank writes that oral history survives not by being frozen on the printed page but by repeated retellings. Each narrative contains more than one message. The listener is part of the storytelling event too, and a good listener is expected to bring different life experiences to the story each time he or she hears it and to learn different things from it at each hearing. Rather than trying to spell out everything one needs to know, it compels the listener to think about ordinary experience in new ways.6 This is not how truth tends to work in a courtroom. Lee Maracle, writing about how oral and written storytelling functions for Coast Salish people, another Indigenous group in British Columbia, states that the point of hearing (and now reading) story is to study it in and of itself, to examine the context in which it is told, to understand the obstacles to being that it presents, and then to see ourselves through the story, that is, transform ourselves in accordance with our agreement with and understanding of the story.7 This takes us beyond the ease or diffculty of understanding a particular story well, into the question of how different cultures believe stories ought to work. How stories are thought to work (by any group of people) is in turn implicated in how we understand what it means for something to be true. These presuppositions—about what serious study of texts does and intends—may point out to us, if we look, the limits of our own understanding of oral tradition as evidence. Maracle describes study: [It] looks for obstacles for growth and transformation, both in the external and the internal worlds. Once an understanding is achieved, the mythmakers story it up in a way that they hope leads humans toward social maturity and growth. For First Nations people, study is directed at that which is not seen, not known, at what is cherished and hidden. In the discovery of the unknown lies growth. At the bare

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It is collective and collaborative not in the sense that all must take the same position, but that many participate. This is a way of building into a cultural practice an acknowledgment that worlds aren’t built by individuals. They are built by many persons acting together, fguring out how to dwell alongside each other regardless of whether they agree about all the terms of that dwelling. Oral tradition, or even a written story that aims not (or not only) to deliver set rules, but to provoke in the hearer a duty to interpret how to live, guides its subjects to build worlds and implants responsibilities. It is jurisgenerative. Or as Maracle puts it, “Story becomes a means of intervention preventing humans from retraversing dangerous and dehumanizing paths.”9 We might recognize that as one of the aims of settler colonial legalism, or even of Westernized study of texts, though what animates its practices differs quite a bit. That matters. We may even fnd that, read fairly and on their own terms, Indigenous approaches may be better able than our own legal/normative narrative traditions to decolonize the law for the sake of fnally ridding ourselves of its genocidal remainders.

Goat Story The adaawk is an oral tradition normally performed at feasts that reinstantiates House ownership of lands, relationships to other Houses and clans, and the duty of members to live up to their responsibilities. It is normally performed for persons who accept its authority, understand where it comes from and what it aims to do, and honor it for its role in their lives. In Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, portions of a few different adaawk were performed in court—for a very different audience—in order to provide historical evidence for continuous ownership of land, describe Gitksan social structure, and meet the “organized society” test prescribed by Canadian law. Gwaans (Mrs. Olive Ryan), a “wing chief” in the Gitsegukla House of Hanamuxw (both the name of the house and of its hereditary head chief) of the Gisgahast clan, explained that she was authorized to represent the House of Hanamuxw, and provided context of two pole-raising Feasts—one from 1945 and one still in process at the time of the trial. Gitksan society is matrilineal. Gwaans’ mother died when she was three years old, after which she was raised by her grandmother Fanny Johnson (the former Hanamuxw), “who taught Gwaans the adaawk songs, territories, laws and fishing sites for the House of Hanamuxw.”10 Gwaans’ oldest daughter, Joan Ryan, is the current Hanamuxw. In her testimony, Gwaans describes the relationship (called wil ‘na t’ahl) between her house (Hanamuxw) and the other two Gisgahast

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houses in Gitsegukla, in order to demonstrate that in order to share the adaawk she required permission from three Houses, because they share ownership of the adaawk dealing with clan origin. Gwaans then explains that the adaawk is important because the creator put the Gitksan on their land and gave the land’s food to them. She says, that’s the reason why grandmother was talking to me all the time; show me the way, you know, and everything. That—we call that adaawk; trying to pass it on to me, so I pass it on to my—my children and pass it on to others that—the law of the Gitksan.11 On the second day of her testimony, she shared part of a second adaawk dealing with a historical event. I will do my best to offer a narrative of this adaawk, while admitting my difficulty parsing it from the transcript I’ve read. The point of the story seems to be to teach listeners to attend to their relationships with the non-human world, to treat animals and land with respect. (But note here already that my isolation of the story’s main point reduces its narrative to one meaning, against the spirit of the form.) Gwaans reports that young boys were treating some goats badly, mocking them, and even throwing small ones on fires. One boy felt bad about this and protected a small goat. Later, goats who had made themselves look like human beings built a village and invited Gwaans’ ancestors from an ancient village called T’am Lax amit to a pole-raising feast. Then the secret-goat-people gathered the visiting villagers into what looked like a community hall, and the building collapsed during the feast, killing everyone except the boy who helped the small goat. The goat who had been treated well helps the boy who treated him well (whose name is Antgulilbix) back down the mountain, and the boy returns to T’am Lax amit to tell everyone. As Gwaans puts it, They don’t allow us to make fun of those little, little things [the goats], the amxiswaa creature. That’s why they said to—to the young people, not to make fun of those animals, because the creator’s going to get mad if you mistreat them. That’s what grandmother said. The creators will laugh at everything, the man and the girls and the boys that’s created, they created in this world.12 The people of the village make sure their children know to treat animals with respect. And the one-horned mountain goat becomes the crest of the Antgulilbix house. After this event, everyone moves from T’am Lax amit to Gitsegukla, where they have lived ever since. This story establishes a long tradition of the house feast, makes points about deeply held beliefs about the human relationship to and respect for nature, and demonstrates control over one portion of land and reasons for a move to another site.

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The current Antgulilbix (Mrs. Mary Johnson) tells another story based in T’am Lax amit about a bear that causes a landslide that crushes all the warriors who try to combat it.13 This is an unusual bear (called a Mediik) who is large, lives in water, and instead of having fur is smooth. The bear seems to have been angered by some women who were playing around with trout bones, and thus was provoked to attack the village and destroy it. Accordingly, this story functions, like the goat story, as a way to warn against treating nature with disrespect. One may (or may not) doubt that all of this is “true” in the same way that Western legal truths are true. But that misses the point. The adaawk exists as a document of a longstanding relationship to land. That document, read alongside various other historical sources, should be enough to support a claim that the Gitksan are an organized society with a deep historical relationship to the lands they claim. Heard as a complete system, it proves legal occupation over time. One might need to take some time to learn how to hear these claims as legal claims, but it can be done. Sure, some lawyers might seek to show that the narrative forms of oral tradition, when taken apart and subjected to the legal standards of an alien culture, begin to fall apart. But how, in turn, might the Earth-destroying and genocidal forms of settler colonial capitalist legalism also begin to fall apart if subjected to the logic of a more respectful and sustainable relationship between human beings, animals, and Earth?

The Bear Problem The problem of judging adaawk by the truth standards of settler colonial legalism is apparent throughout the trial. I’ll offer two examples. When the lawyer tries to introduce a song associated with the adaawk into evidence, Justice McEachern asks whether the wording of the song is necessary, whether it really has to be sung, and whether, if it is necessary, they could just write the words down and ask the witness if those are the right words.14 He complains: To have witnesses singing songs in court is not the proper way to approach this problem . . . I just say, with respect, I’ve never heard it happen before, I never thought it was necessary, and I don’t think it necessary now. It doesn’t seem to me she has to sing it.15 Antgulilbix sings about a grouse fying, giving itself up to die, and saving some sisters, and she says, “and today the young lady that caught the grouse stood at the foot of our totem pole that we restored in 1973 and she is holding the grouse with tears in her eyes.”16 The judge makes no attempt to read or interpret this song, though there are fertile possibilities in it that bear on land tenure, continuity of culture, and a history of oppression. Instead, he asks the attorney representing the tribes, “All

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right, Mr. Grant, would you explain to me, because this may happen again, why you think it was necessary to sing that song?” Grant responds that the Gitksan express ownership through regalia, adaawk, and songs. The judge replies: I don’t find that a persuasive argument at all. It is not necessary in a matter of this kind for that song to have been sung, and I think that I must say now that I ought not to have been exposed to it. The judge doesn’t quite know what to do with what is being handed to him for judgment, because none of his training has prepared him for this kind of a case. Leslie Hall Pinder writes that the judge is feeling “the visceral effects of the disallowed . . . the body’s discomfort at being at the edge of a path.”17 The second example: After collecting all the adaawk-based evidence, the lawyer for the plaintiffs asserts that the adaawk are told in court for the truth of their contents. The judge interrupts with this question: “Well, do you advance Mrs. Johnson’s evidence about the destruction of the village by a supernatural bear as proof of that fact?”18 The judge can’t get past the Mediik. The lawyer insists that “it is clear from the evidence you’ve heard that the spirit world, the animal world and the human world in many aspects of history are interrelated.”19 It does not seem to be clear to the judge that this is so. What he says brings us back to the disjunction between admissibility of evidence from an oral tradition and capacity of those making judgments to understand what the evidence shows: I don’t have any trouble with the proposition that the adaawk or the oral history of the various houses is admissible. My problem is to define what is the adaawk. Up to now we have been proceeding on the basis that if the witness says it’s part of the adaawk then it’s taken to be part of the adaawk, and that’s an open-ended principle of admissibility almost unknown to our law. And that’s the difficulty I’m having. I’ve heard evidence of what I would describe, and I don’t say this pejoratively in any sense, but the closest thing that comes to my mind is mythology. And if the witness says it’s part of the adaawk, am I bound by that?20 The judge can’t imagine himself being bound by what he calls mythology— what a more generous reader may recognize as a different cultural expression of history, law, and social norm-making. At the same time, he never questions the conditions of production of the history, law, and norm-making over which he himself presides. That is one way in which domination may be invisible to itself. Cruikshank points out that “his [the judge’s] perception that the court stands outside cultural values is clear in his statement that ‘. . . I must assess the totality of the evidence

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in accordance with legal, not cultural principles.’”21 Val Napoleon points out that “most of Gwaans’ evidence related to pole-raising protocol and events, Feasts, names, social structure, detailed descriptions of fshing sites and resource harvesting areas, and territories.”22 These are all ways of demonstrating for the court that the Gitksan can meet the “organized society” test: their ancestors dwelled in a well-established society with ownership of land and those traditions and lands have been passed down over generations. But the court, though it has allowed oral tradition into its proceedings, is not prepared to hear its truths in the form in which they appear. There is no defnition of “true,” for this judge that makes room for this kind of evidence. Thus it matters little that the evidence was allowed in court if it can’t properly be heard there.

Verification Of course, it does push beyond the edges of positivist legal reasoning to include a bear with unusual powers and goats who make themselves look like humans in a description of territorial ownership, lineage, and the reasons for a move. But what does a citizen of the United States or Canada have to say when asked to describe why she has any right to live on the land where she lives? Settler land claims in North America are a trick of law, of a colonial declaration of terra nullius and claim of property, or of outright destruction of lives and cultures, made legitimate by the declarations of monarchs, popes, rulers, and judges, many of whom never lay eyes on the lands or their inhabitants.23 Settler colonial claims to “right” of ownership come from a genocidal set of assumptions about what it means to own land, dwell with nature, and live with others who were there first. No matter what we may think about the existence of a Mediik, we’re all implicated in landslides. The destructive racism of many of the earlier settlers is continued in the way power works between Indigenous groups and settler colonial legal and political institutions. Even a country with a constitution that admits Indigenous persons have rights that transcend anything Canada might grant maintains the power to decide what that means. As Eric Reiter puts it, the judge relies on “the idea that validation requires observation by others, and can never be based on assertion by the Aboriginal groups themselves.”24 Any careful look at the adaawk, however, would show that it does require validation by others—as much as any set of legal rules does. Napoleon describes the adaawk as the “major formal institution that preserves the identification and conceptual foundation of a House.” The Chief recounts the adaawk, then collects responses: Each guest Chief who witnesses the host House’s adaawk will formally and publicly respond, and in accordance with strict protocol

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and from their own direct experience and knowledge of the hosting House’s adaawk, the guest Chiefs may add to the recounted version of the adaawk. The role of the invited guests is to be niid’nt, “the ones who approve.” . . . The witnessing and approval must be publicly declared to effect any change in social standing. In this way, the feast is a public, interactive, and highly political process, conducted with extreme tact and subtlety.25 Anderson adds, “these are stories that resist the agency of contemporaries.” And Borrows asserts that oral traditional practices include such complex customs as pre-hearing preparations, mnemonic devices, ceremonial repetition, the appointment of witnesses, dances, feasts, songs, poems, the use of testing, and the use and importance of place and geographic space to help ensure that certain traditions are accredited within the community. Oral tradition does not stand alone but is given meaning through the context of the larger cultural experiences that surround it.26 So, on the one hand, it’s common for courts to worry about whether oral transmission is stable—by which is meant “true.” But true stories can be both fexible and stable (just as law must be both stable and responsive to survive the passing of time). Annette Kolodny points out that oral history stories can and do change over time. But they usually change according to rules and prescriptions understood by both the storyteller and the community in which the story circulates . . . Traditional stories represent the shared memory and collective wisdom of a people. They are thereby authorized by the ancestors. And one does not easily tamper with the authority of the ancestors. In some Indigenous communities it is an authority as powerful as written documents or archival photographs in Western historiography.27 Stories can be both fexible and stable. That is not an utterly alien truth to Western ears; even settler colonial courts bear witness to how legal rules and principles are interpreted differently over time. However, with oral history, both the reasons for being and the aim of a story may differ substantially from a form that values stability over change. So, while worries about the possibility of error or unreliability “may not take suffcient account of the checks and balances in language, people, and culture that help sustain such memories,” as John Borrows points out, those same worries may miss that there is “something quite different going on in the transmission of oral history than the mere recording of events.”28 This

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does make judging their function as evidence diffcult. But it should not make it impossible.

Genocide Lawyers cross-examining Gwaans aimed to establish that the Gitksan had lost their connection to their territories, that there were disagreements among clan members, that they enjoyed modern comforts like cars and electricity, and that some Gitksan participate in the wage economy or otherwise abandon traditional ways. This is a common strategy—to try to show that Indigenous peoples are “no longer Indigenous,” that they have assimilated to the settler colonial culture. On the one hand, lawyers can’t be blamed for arguing it, because the law does require that Indigenous persons show that they are still connected by means of continuous traditions to groups whose practices were well-established at the time Crown sovereignty was declared over their territories. But if we allow the “other hand” to reside outside of settler colonial legalist assumptions, these very legal requirements are perverse. Where there is a history of oppressive and destructive policies aimed at destroying traditional ways of life, why would law expect that Indigenous persons have lost nothing of their connection to their territory? If all cultures change over time as new resources become available and challenges arise, why would a court think making use of electricity and gas-powered vehicles is the end of a culture rather than its continuation? If Gitksan are human beings, why would law expect that they don’t sometimes disagree among themselves? And if the Gitksan were already there, living as an organized society with welldeveloped ways of governing land use, inculcating values, passing down traditions, resolving disputes among themselves and with neighboring groups, and stewarding natural resources, and their rights to these lands have never been extinguished, how did it ever come to pass that, in order to prove that, they have to make “the Crown” believe it on the Crown’s own terms, except by a genocidal set of assumptions about what counts as evidence, as truth, as a human life worth preserving? I am guessing that by this point in the chapter some readers may pause at my use of the “g” word, and wonder whether it fits. It is a big, powerful word, and you may rightly wonder whether it is used well here, and you may understandably want to make sure that it only gets used where something as serious as genocide is truly happening. According to international law, genocide occurs when certain acts are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”29 Acts that qualify include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” or “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”30 Succeeding in genocide is not necessary for it to

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be a punishable offense. Attempt, complicity, incitement, and conspiracy count as well.31 The history of North America post-conquest should be enough to make a good case for my use of the word. By means of war, law, outlawing of customs and languages, removing children from their homes and forcing them into schools that aim to “kill the Indian in the man,” forcing vibrant cultures onto reservations, taking sacred land integral to cultural survival, and cheating Indigenous peoples of valuable resources, settlers of North America set out with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” those who were here already when they arrived. What I hope to draw to our attention in this chapter is the way in which law, at present, continues that work, even when it is working to remedy past injustice. Law will not stop being genocidal until it decolonizes. It will not decolonize until we admit that it is a source of continuing injustice right now.

Rulings McEachern basically ruled that the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en had no standing to claim existing rights because their rights had been effectively extinguished by Canadian law prior to the 1982 Constitution Act that recognized the rights of Indigenous groups who had not extinguished those rights through treaty or other means. The legal argument for this is not very convincing, but he made it nonetheless. It is based on the colonial assumption that legislative enactments intended to grant unburdened title to settlers were legitimate exercises of power and effectively removed the rights of First Nations to land. Basically, all that is owed to the claimants in this suit, according to McEachern, is the state’s fiduciary obligation to allow them to use unoccupied Crown lands for subsistence purposes unless the Crown needs that land for something else. This gives meaning to Gordon Christie’s assertion that “one cannot say that colonial narratives survive only as a matter of jurisprudential inertia.”32 Delgamuukw was appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, where it got a better hearing. That ruling made determinations about the content of aboriginal title in Canada, described the scope of protection for it, defined how such title may be proved, and outlined how infringements of that title may be justified. It also made clear that oral history must be accepted as valuable evidence and heard fairly on its own terms. Chief Justice Lamer, in rendering the court’s judgment, ordered a new trial but also discouraged new litigation, advising parties involved that negotiation is better suited to a fair solution of the problems at hand. This points us back to where we began, when Gover and Macauley wrote that even when a court’s rules of admissibility favors claimants of aboriginal rights, “the litigation process is ill-suited to resolution of these claims.” And it points to the judge’s knowledge of how courts work: they rely on ideas about evidence that make cases like this hard to argue successfully, and

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they can only offer a yes or no answer where other fields might rest with uncertainty or compromise. His advice, thus, is good advice, given what we know about this kind of law. But there is more to it than that, and that is also how genocide gets built into law. Point one: the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en people chose litigation only after British Columbia refused to negotiate. Point two: the basis on which any negotiation proceeds reflects all the asymmetries of power created by centuries of colonialist law and policy. Point three: Yes, Chief Justice Lamer asserted that Canada is “under a moral, if not a legal, duty to enter into and conduct those negotiations in good faith.”33 This may be wise legal counsel, but it is also deeply hypocritical/ironic. As Cover puts it, “every denial of jurisdiction on the part of a court is an assertion of the power to determine jurisdiction and thus to constitute a norm.”34 Lamer, in saying the Court won’t judge (or doesn’t recommend legal judgment as the right approach), establishes that the Court has jurisdiction. The Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en peoples do not. Pindar argues a similar point more forcefully: “As lawyers we don’t have to take any responsibility for constructing a world. We only have to destroy another’s construction. We say no. We are the civilized, well-heeled, comfortable carriers of no. We thrive on it. Other races die.”35 Lamer and his fellow Justices got the judgment more right than did the provincial court, but they did not free themselves from colonial narratives. The Wet’suwet’en and Gitksan started out seeking sovereignty and jurisdiction over their lands and ended seeking title, a narrower legalist form. The Supreme Court judgment “requires the courts to come to terms with the oral histories of aboriginal societies” and acknowledges the difficulties of explaining Indigenous relationships to land in terms of common law property rules, and these are steps forward.36 But the court’s description of what aboriginal title consists in does little to move beyond colonialist thinking. If tribes are granted title, it includes a right to exclusive use or occupation of the land for various purposes, and those purposes need not be limited to traditional practices, but are still subject to limitations. The land use must be compatible with the nature of a group’s attachment to land (with the implicit understanding that the court decides what that means). If a tribe ever wants to use the land for something not compatible with the “nature” of that attachment, then those lands must be surrendered to the Crown and converted into nontitle lands. In case you’re wondering what that might look like, here’s an example. In the 1950s, the Musqueam Nation decided to lease some of their reserve lands to a golf course developer. In order to do so at that time (under the provisions of the Indian Act), the Musqueam had to surrender the lands in question to the Crown, with the Crown then charged with the task of negotiating a lease arrangement with the golf course developers. After surrender, however, the Crown entered into an agreement that

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seemed to favour the developer, reducing what had been the perceived benefit to the Musqueam Nation.37 Make no mistake. The aim here is cultural assimilation. Residential schools are no longer trying to “kill the Indian in the man,” and allowing tribes to litigate for title makes it harder to establish the state’s “intent to destroy, in whole or in part” Indigenous ways of life. But any nonaboriginal vision of land use is dominated by the designs of state power whenever the two clash, and if tribes want any say at all, they have to participate in a treaty process to transform any unsettled claims (that is, claims on land that has never been surrendered) into “rights” and “title,” thereby allowing the dominant system to dictate the terms of how land claims will be imagined and negotiated.38 Taiaiake Alfred diagnoses this problem: [For] thirty years, our nations have been coopted into movements of ‘self-government’ and ‘land claim settlements,’ which are goals defined by the colonial state and which are in stark opposition to our original objectives . . . Our people were promised that they would be recognized as nations and that their lands would be returned, but instead of realizing these goals we are left with a nasty case of metastasizing governmentalism.39 As Christie writes, all interests are understood by the Court as either already embedded in the state (as “rights” whose entire existence is as creatures of domestic law, firmly under the control of the state) or at best capable of being embedded in the state, replaced with “rights,” firmly under control of the state. The Court is unwilling, then, to make that one small initial anti-colonial step, to acknowledge that not-yet-established interests—the preexisting interests that pre-date the assertion of Crown sovereignty—should be tied conceptionally to Aboriginal sovereignty.40 The Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en peoples set out to have their existing sovereignty and jurisdiction recognized. They ended up pursuing legal title in the terms of Canadian law. Even that was not granted. And title is not sovereignty. Built into any grant of title is a provision held by the Crown, that if titled lands are needed for a broader purpose, aboriginal title may be infringed by state power. Such infringement “must be consistent with the fiduciary relationship”—the minimal obligations of a power to its subjects—but it is state power and state law that determines what objectives count as important enough to override aboriginal title and what counts as compensation for that infringement. The list of things that might justify infringement includes “agriculture, forestry,

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mining and hydroelectric power, the general economic development of the interior of British Columbia, protection of the environment or endangered species, the building of infrastructure and the settlement of foreign populations to support those aims.”41 Conflicting claims of value have to be balanced by an entity empowered to make balancing judgments. In Canada, that power is the Crown—and that itself eliminates Indigenous sovereignty. The Tsilhqot’n First Nation was granted title to its lands by the Canadian Supreme Court in 2014. The conditions developed in Delgamuukw apply: title is not absolute—the Canadian government can still pursue economic development on titled land against the title-holders’ wishes if it can show the need is “pressing and substantial.” This is about as much of a victory as one could have in a Canadian Court at present. And it is a positive development. But the truth remains: the idea that Indigenous groups hold rights not granted by Canada grows thinner the more closely you look at it. Judge Lamer’s respectful treatment of oral history helped to entrench this rather than challenge it. It could have been otherwise.

Jurisgenesis I wrote this chapter as a fairly neutral reporting of a legal case in order to make the point that genocide is built into the settler colonial legalist way of living and thinking. Only by decolonizing legal institutions and (for those of us who are settler colonial subjects) ourselves can we begin to do justice. To do this, we need to learn to listen to what we do not readily understand and work together in equality-based relationships to transform how we build worlds and dwell with others. We all have the power of jurisgenesis. Settler citizens can transform their views on law, land, justice, and ownership, and this could have profound effects not only for Indigenous peoples, but for global climate change, species loss, deforestation, and a host of other problems created by the dominant view of the relationship between human beings, animals, and land. This new form of hearing, then, opens up possibilities of justice and thriving for all human beings. It also creates space for what Glen Coulthard calls a politics that is less oriented around attaining a definitive form of affirmative recognition from the settler state and society, and more about critically evaluating, reconstructing, and redeploying Indigenous cultural forms in ways that seek to prefigure, alongside those with similar ethical commitments, radical alternatives to the structural and psycho-affective facets of colonial domination.42 When listening to oral history in court, McEachern, feeling beyond his depth but still empowered to judge, says that “the closest thing that comes to my mind” is myth—and he doubts he could be bound by that. But a

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decolonial form of hearing, widely practiced, might both reveal Western legalism’s own myths and begin to empower collaborative solutions to deeply entrenched structural forms of genocidal injustice. Making the right legal decision would help but would not solve every problem faced by Indigenous groups trying to survive settler colonialism. A broader decolonizing set of laws, programs, and attitudes could, over time, open up new possibilities, not only for Indigenous persons, but for their settler neighbors. Diverse constituencies, working together, might learn to tell and hear stories differently—within and outside of institutions—for the sake of redressing unjust pasts, creating possibilities for flourishing in the present moment, and thereby opening up a future: jurisgenesis. I’ll give Lee Maracle, a First Nations author and poet, the last word: Critics, instructors, and institutions must respect that the picture First Nations advance is true, even if they don’t see it that way, that it is half of the colonial picture, that what you see may be true, but it is not what we see. . . . The moment we share a commonly constructed picture, a story, then we can begin to pull at the fabric holding the picture together, see its construction, and dismantle and recreate the design. Only then can we collectively recreate a community more human than before.43

Notes 1. Brian J. Gover and Mary Locke Macaulay, “‘Snow Houses Leave No Ruins’: Unique Evidence Issues in Aboriginal and Treaty Rights Cases,” Saskatchewan Law Review 60, nos. 47–89 (1996). 2. Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw, The Spirit of the Land: The Opening Statement of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, May 11, 1987, Reflections Press, Gabriola, British Columbia, Canada, 1989, 9. 3. Gitxsan. www.gitxsan.com/about/our-way/traditional-system/ 4. See Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” in Narrative, Violence and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 95–172. 5. Julie Cruikshank, “Invention of Anthroplogy in British Columbia’s Supreme Court: Oral Tradition as Evidence in Delgamuukw v. B.C.,” BC Studies no. 95 (Autumn 1992): 25–42, 35. 6. Ibid., 33–4. 7. Lee Maracle, “Oratory on Oratory,” in Trans. Can. Lit.: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, ed. Smaro Kambourelli (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2007), 55–70, 55. 8. Ibid., 57. 9. Ibid., 60. 10. Val Napoleon, “Delgamuukw: A Legal Straightjacket for Oral Histories?,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 20, no. 2 (2005): 123–55, 138. 11. Delgamuukw v. B.C., transcript of direct examination of Gwaans (Mrs. Olive Ryan) 10 June 1987 at 1033, quoted in Napoleon 138. 12. From Gwaan’s testimony 11 June 1987, 1116. Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, Proceedings of the Supreme Court of British Columbia.

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13. The description is condensed from Antgulilbix’s testimony on 27 May 1987, 674–6. Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, Proceedings of the Supreme Court of British Columbia. 14. Leslie Hall Pinder, “The Carriers of No,” Index on Censorship 4 (1999): 65–74, 67–8. 15. Ibid., 68. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 69. 18. quoted in Napoleon, 150. 19. Napoleon, 150 [no need to ibid. here right?]. 20. Delgamuukw v. B.C., transcript of the direct examination of Chief Antgulilibix (Mary Johnson), 28 may 1987, 703, quoted in Napoleon, 149, emphasis mine. 21. Cruikshank, 32–3 quoting Allan McEachern, Reasons for Judgment: Delgamuukw v. B.C., Smithers, British Columbia: Supreme Court of British Columbia, 49, Cruikshank’s emphasis. 22. Napoleon, 137. 23. For a good read on this history, see Annette Kolodny, “‘This Long Looked for Event’: Retrieving Early Contact History from Penobscot Oral Traditions,” Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 2, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 90–123. 24. Eric H. Reiter,“Fact, Narrative and the Judicial Uses of History: Delgamuukw and Beyond,” Indigenous Law Journal 8, no. 1 (2010): 55–96, 65. 25. Napoleon, 126–7. 26. John Borrows, “Listening for a Change: The Courts and Oral Tradition,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 39, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1–38, 8. 27. Kolodny, 108. 28. Borrows, 10. 29. The Genocide Convention, Article II. 30. Ibid., sections a, b, c and e. 31. Ibid., Article III, sections a-e. 32. Gordon Christie, “A Colonial Reading of Recent Jurisprudence: Sparrow, Delgamuukw and Haida Nation,” Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 23, no. 17 (2005): 1–35, 3. 33. Lamer, quoted in Mary C. Hurley, “Aboriginal Title: The Supreme Court of Canada Decision in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia,” Background Paper BP-459E, January 1998/Revised February 2000, 1–34, 16. 34. Cover, 100 n.23, emph. in original. 35. Pinder, 71–2. 36. Lamer, quoted in Hurley, 8. 37. Christie, 13. 38. This is, according to Gordon Christie, the outcome of the Haida Nation case. Christie, 20. 39. Taiaiake Alfred, Wasáse, quoted in Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 51. 40. Christie, 21. 41. Lamer, quoted in Hurley, 14. 42. Coulthard, 48–9. 43. Maracle, 69.

Bibliography Borrows, John. “Listening for a Change: The Courts and Oral Tradition.” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 39, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1–38.

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Christie, Gordon. “A Colonial Reading of Recent Jurisprudence: Sparrow, Delgamuukw and Haida Nation.” Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 23, no. 17 (2005): 1–35. Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Cover, Robert. “Nomos and Narrative.” In Narrative, Violence and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, edited by Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat, 95–172. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Cruikshank, Julie. “Invention of Anthroplogy in British Columbia’s Supreme Court: Oral Tradition as Evidence in Delgamuukw v. B.C.” BC Studies, no. 95 (Autumn 1992): 25–42. Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 3 SCR 1010 (1997). Gover, Brian J., and Mary Locke Macaulay. “‘Snow Houses Leave No Ruins’: Unique Evidence Issues in Aboriginal and Treaty Rights Cases.” Saskatchewan Law Review 60 (1996): 47–89. Hurley, Mary C. “Aboriginal Title: The Supreme Court of Canada Decision in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia.” Background Paper BP-459E, January 1998/ Revised February 2000. Kolodny, Annette. “‘This Long Looked for Event’: Retrieving Early Contact History from Penobscot Oral Traditions.” Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 2, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 90–123. Maracle, Lee. “Oratory on Oratory.” In Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, edited by Smaro Kambourelli, 55–70. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2007. McEachern, Allan. Reasons for Judgment: Delgamuukw v. B.C. Smithers. British Columbia: Supreme Court of British Columbia, 1987. Napoleon, Val. “Delgamuukw: A Legal Straightjacket for Oral Histories?” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 20, no. 2 (2005): 123–55. Pinder, Leslie Hall. “The Carriers of No.” Index on Censorship 4 (1999): 65–74. Reiter, Eric H. “Fact, Narrative and the Judicial Uses of History: Delgamuukw and Beyond.” Indigenous Law Journal 8, no. 1 (2010): 55–96. Wa, Gisday, and Delgam Uukw. The Spirit of the Land: The Opening Statement of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, May 11, 1987. Gabriola, British Columbia, Canada: Reflections Press, 1989.

Part IV

Ethos and Violence

12 Violence, Right, and Righteousness Thinking the Political With and Against Lévinas Carly Lane They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. —Jeremiah 6:14; see also 8:11 They are an unreasonable class who cry, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. But what kind of class are they who cry, “Peace, peace, have I not told you that there is no peace!” —Thomas Carlyle, “Chartism”

Introduction On Christmas Eve of 2015, philosopher George Yancey published an epistolary post titled “Dear White America” in The New York Times opinion forum, “The Stone.” Yancey begins his epistle by beseeching his reader to “listen with love” and goes on to echo a thought put forward by James Baldwin in his 1962 New Yorker essay, “Letter From a Region in My Mind.” Like Baldwin before him, Yancey believes that love is “a state of grace” in which one may become critically self-aware, capable of moral imagination, and through moral imagination, also capable of the sort of courageous self-transformation on which any measure of moralpolitical progress—in this case, a disruption of white supremacy and systemic racism in America—depends. As though to remind his reader what the project of moral-political progress is about and for, Yancey signs his letter, “In peace.” The thought that we can and should bring love to bear on our political problems because love prepares us for critical self-transformation, which in turn enables moral-political progress and points the way to peace— understood negatively as the cessation of violence, or positively as the achievement of community, and in either case as the fruit of justice—has a long history. In his 2007 essay, “The Politics of Love and Its Enemies,” historian David Nirenberg argues that the long history of this thought should give anyone tempted by it pause. Nirenberg shares an aversion to the political invocation of love with Hannah Arendt, who upon reading

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Baldwin’s essay, promptly addressed him via personal correspondence, “What frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to preach at the end. In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.”1 Deepening Arendt’s indictment, Nirenberg argues that love is not a stranger, but an all-too familiar character in Western politics, and that when love intrudes upon politics it achieves not just hypocrisy, but also grave destruction and gross self-deception. Nirenberg does not use the word “genocide” to describe the destruction wrought by the politics of love. However, and as we shall see, his descriptions of the politics of love align closely with what we in this volume are calling logics of genocide, that is, structures of thought and practice that either prepare the way for, or perpetuate the possibility of, injustice against some designated genus of people. On this count, the contrast between Nirenberg and Yancey could not be more pointed: Whereas Yancey appeals to love as a means of critically undermining genocidal structures such as white supremacy and systemic racism, Nirenberg avers that love, or its political invocation, consistently gives rise to and reifies genocidal structures while simultaneously disabling our critical faculties with respect to them. Nirenberg’s essay is erudite, subtle, and compelling. It also raises as many questions as it answers. Of special interest to me are the questions it raises concerning the consequences of banishing love from political rhetoric and political life: Are the concepts “justice” and “peace” banished with it? Or do they undergo a transformation? Does some other term come to take the place of “love”? If so, what term is that?2 In what follows I stage a critical encounter between Nirenberg and philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, one of Nirenberg’s named provocateurs and a supposed exponent of the politics of love. According to Nirenberg’s depiction of him, Lévinas shares Nirenberg’s concern about the relationship between love and justice, and the potentially genocidal consequences of our moral-political ambitions. What’s more, Lévinas shares at least two of Nirenberg’s guiding insights: first, that the way we represent the political is constitutive of the political; and second, that when our universalistic ambitions lead us to conceive the political in such a way that our ordinary forms of life are disparaged, and genocidal structures and particularist violence emerge. Surprisingly, Nirenberg and Lévinas pursue these shared insights to radically divergent ends. Nirenberg disparages what he sees as the mechanism of the devaluation and denial of our ordinary forms of life—namely the political invocation of love; but he stops short of developing a positive alternative representation of the political, leaving it unclear whether he would have us invoke some new principle of universalism unencumbered by love, or perhaps have us abandon universalism as a political ambition altogether. Lévinas, by contrast, dedicates his career to developing a positive alternative representation of the

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political in which the conditions of universalism are given in the very ordinary forms of life we have historically devalued or denied. In this way, Lévinas proposes a moral perfectionism that elides the neat but ultimately problematic self-defeating dichotomies Nirenberg sets up in order to advance his argument. After briefly tracing the arc of Nirenberg’s argument, I turn to Lévinas’ representation of the political. In light of Lévinas’ representation, we can simultaneously make sense of what motivates Nirenberg’s critique of the politics of love, and see how the structure of his critique threatens to undermine its own motivational conditions, ironically foreclosing the possibility of representing the political as anything but genocidal. This final point regarding the structure of Nirenberg’s critique would be without import were it not for the fact that the structure of his critique follows the structure of a form of moral skepticism we are individually and collectively susceptible to, and which funds one of our most trenchant representations of the political: This is a representation of the political in which the pursuit of love is depicted as itself to blame for the possibility of unlovingness, and likewise the pursuit of justice for the possibility of injustice. In this view, the abandonment of our moral-political projects is the only path to “peace”—a peace that can be no peace at all. Lévinas helps us to see that while we can live our skepticism in this regard as in others, we needn’t: the conditions of overcoming it are always already given in the social-sensible origins of our being, and the sincere call for universal justice born there. Abiding this call means working at the borders of what Nirenberg calls the politics of love—that is, at once within and beyond them.3

I Nirenberg’s essay is prompted by a still-current trend: In and out of the academy, thinkers of various stripes invoke love and its theologically inflected conceptual cognates as universalizing forces capable of overcoming the particularism that haunts our political, juridical, social, and economic systems. (We might think, for instance, of the way white supremacy plays out in racist voter suppression, jury selection, media bias, and mortgage lending practices; the list goes on. In these instances, as in others, the invocation of law and right apparently fails to meet the ethical exigency of justice. Whether this failure is analytic of law and right is one of the questions under consideration.) As exemplary exponents of “the politics of love,” Nirenberg names Rowan Williams, Slavoj Žižek, Pope Benedict XVI, Catherine Pickstock, Karl Marx, G.F.W. Hegel, Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Jurgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, and Emmanuel Lévinas. What unites these diverse thinkers in Nirenberg’s view is that they are appalled by the violent inequalities that follow upon our inherently interested systems, and

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turn to love, eros, philia, agape, friendship, charity, or recognition (charity’s barely-de-theologized twin), as powers capable of either resolving conflicting interests into common interest or dissolving them in disinterestedness. In this way, they imbibe in what Nirenberg calls the longstanding Western “fantasy that love can free interaction from interest” and thus neutralize the violence, or potential for violence rooted in our ordinary forms of representation, mediation, circulation, possession, use, and exchange, in our structures of language and even thought.4 To illustrate the extraordinary claims made on behalf of the politics of love, Nirenberg cites a remark made by Lévinas in a 1981 interview with Philippe Nemo: Lévinas put plainly the sweeping pretension—political, ethical, and ontological—of the loving relation; “This deposition of sovereignty by the ego is the social relationship with the Other, the dis-inter-ested relation. I write it in three words to underline the escape from being it signifies. I distrust the compromised word ‘love,’ but the responsibility for the Other, being-for-the-other, seemed to me . . . to stop the anonymous and senseless rumbling of being.”5 In a footnote, Nirenberg reminds us that, “Elsewhere Lévinas does not hesitate to use the word love without qualifcation.”6 Indeed, Lévinas uses the word (l’amour) often, usually as a synonym for charity, generosity, compassion, holiness, and what he idiosyncratically calls “ethics.” I’ll have more to say about Lévinas and his invocations of love in the next section. For now, let me note that the problem as Nirenberg sees it is that “far from being an antidote to instrumental reason or to relations of possession and exchange” (far from answering the inequalities engendered by our interested interactions), love—in this fantastical form— actually produces figures who are forced to embody instrumental reason and relations of possession and exchange, figures who then have to be sacrificed, figuratively or literally, at love’s political borders.7 By way of explanation and proof, Nirenberg walks his reader through four historical examples which are meant to make up a partial etiology of the politics of love: These are polities whose political architects pretend that their policies obtain something other than, and transcendent to, ordinary interested interaction, but who are only able to maintain this pretense by defining their polities against certain excluded “enemy” others. Thus: 1. Ancient Israel elevates the love of God as true love, and denigrates other loves, most especially those associated with wealth and power, as false loves. It projects the enduring seductive power of these false loves onto a specific human form, namely the foreign woman who

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in the Pentateuch and Book of Proverbs is made to serve as a foil for Ancient Israel’s self-understanding and assertion. 2. Similarly, Plato’s variously imagined republic insists that citizens be bound in mutual friendship, and for this reason prohibits moneydealing, contract-making, and other expressions of self-love. These prohibited practices become the purview of aliens who are simultaneously rejected from the republic and required to sustain it. 3. Aristotelian political friendship admits of money-dealing, but only so long as the parties involved understand and honor money as token of others’ needs, and in this way are properly “other-regarding.” This caveat is productive of a contrast which in turn is productive of an outcast: the bad or illiberal man will mistake money as an end unto itself and regard others as things. For these reasons, he is categorically disqualified from political friendship and furthermore disenfranchised from the fully human. In this way, he is produced as “bare life.”8 4. Finally, Augustine’s City of God—in its obsessive Pauline distinction between the “spiritual” Christian hermeneutic, and that of the “literal” Jew—is founded on the figure of the inassimilable Jew. This figural Jew is “exiled but not exorcised,” immured “like the furies under Aeschylus’s Athens,” and made to bear the weight of the so-far fallen world.9 (Nirenberg’s 2013 tome, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition is an extended study of how Judaism serves this function for the Western tradition writ large.) Through a brief discussion of Marx’s distinction between alienating mediation which is dehumanizing, and loving mediation which is communal and humanizing, Nirenberg brings his etiology up to the present. He predicts that, like the “political theologies” before them, contemporary politics of recognition will likewise extrude—express and expel— agents of so-called politics of distribution as their enemy-others, and in this way “their promise of universal love” will depend upon and produce “the very exclusions and enmities it claims to be overcoming.”10 Again, it’s in this dependence on and production of an excluded enemy other that we can recognize a genocidal structure at work. Later, we shall have the opportunity to interrogate the supposed-mechanism of this structure. For now, I want simply to point out that Nirenberg’s guiding insights might be framed as follows: First, our figurations of the political will play a constitutive role in the forms the political takes; second, when our universalistic ambitions lead us to figuratively devalue or deny ordinary forms of life—whether in the case of our individual or social interests, our ways of representing and mediating, or even our most basic forms of organization or exchange, economic or otherwise—genocidal structures of particularistic violence tend to follow.

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Again, Lévinas shares these guiding insights, but follows them to a radically different set of conclusions.

II In November of 1934, just a few months after Hitler assumed a position of unchecked power in Germany, Lévinas—then a young man of 28—published an essay in the progressive French Catholic journal Esprit titled “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” The essay opens with the successive claims that Hitlerism harbors a philosophy, and that this philosophy cannot be accounted for by labeling it “racist particularism,” and opposing it to “Christian universalism.”11 Lévinas’ thesis is that, far from being opposed, Christian universalism actually establishes the conditions under which Hitler’s racism originates and appears philosophically compelling. Developing this alternative account of the philosophy of Hitlerism—in terms of its origin and appeal—becomes the task of his essay. Lévinas begins his account with Christianity’s inheritance of Jewish temporality. Unlike the tragic heroes of Ancient Greece who “struggle in the grip of a strange and brutal past,” the Ancient Israelite “finds something in the present with which he can modify or efface the past,” namely “remorse,” which “heralds the repentance that generates the pardon that redeems.” In this way, within Judaism, “Time loses its irreversibility.” Christianity appropriates this reversible time, but institutes it through the “mystical drama” of the cross and its daily commemoration in the Eucharist. Like Jewish remorse, these practices serve to liberate the present from the past. But they also, according to Lévinas, serve to liberate the future from the present such that “Man retains the possibility .  .  . of terminating the contract into which he freely entered.” This retained possibility means that in Christianity, “no attachment is ultimately definitive.” The soul becomes “detached and abstract.”12 As Christianity gives itself over to secular liberalism, “the dramatic aspects of” this temporal liberation dissipate, but the “concrete and positive” power of the soul to become detached and abstract endures. Lévinas writes, “In place of liberation through grace there is autonomy,” and glosses autonomy as “the sovereign freedom of reason” to make choices “while forever keeping its distance” from history, and with history, all “physical, psychological, and social matter”—that is, whatever might otherwise condition the subject, “seethe within him,” and “push him down a determined path.”13 According to Lévinas, it’s by virtue of this distance between the subject’s autonomy and his determining conditions that Christianity and liberalism are able to sponsor universalism: In Christianity and liberalism all men are equal because all men are free, which is to say all men are spiritually or rationally detached from the concrete situations in which

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they are otherwise so unequally bound. But in this detachment, Lévinas warns, all men are likewise detached from the possibility of sincere commitment: As we’ve seen, man retains the possibility of terminating his contracts, and because of this, “the future negation is already brewing” in any present affirmation. In the context of Christianity and liberalism, “deceit insinuates itself” in interaction, and “Sincerity becomes impossible.” To recall the French tripartite motto, the conditions that secure liberté and egalité corrode the possibility of fraternité. Christian and liberal universalism leave us bereft of a public bond.14 Lévinas credits Marxism with attempting to resuscitate a public bond by denying any distance between the subject’s autonomy and his determining conditions. As he sees it, “the basic intuition of Marxism consists in perceiving the spirit to have an inevitable relation to a determined situation.” But Marxism quickly betrays its intuition, for it promises that the inevitability of this relation will be reversed once one “shakes off the social bewitchment,” and “become conscious of one’s social situation.”15 What appears needful then, both historically and philosophically, is a way of representing the relation between the subject and his determining conditions as in fact inevitable—an inevitable intimacy he does not shake off through abstraction or elevated consciousness. Construed as a need, this intimacy “is one that the experience of our bodies seems to fulfill.” In pain, for instance, the subject suffers “the indivisible simplicity of his being,” and the dualism posited by Christianity and liberalism reaches an impasse. But even in less excruciating states, “The body is closer and more familiar to us than the rest of the world . . . there is a feeling of identity.”16 This feeling of identity between the self and the body promises to bind the subject in his concrete situation—physically, psychologically, historically, and socially. Rather than choosing “his own truth,” the subject embodies his truth, the truth of his being. In this way he becomes perfectly sincere, and what’s more, sincerely bound in society, granted a society that can only be “based on consanguinity.” Through embodiment, a public bond is won, but a bond of the body, a bond of blood. With haunting exclamation Lévinas writes, “And then, if race does not exist one has to invent it!”17 Hitlerism fulfills this historical and philosophical requirement: inventing a race so that men can be bound to their brothers by blood. Herein lies its philosophical appeal. But what is a philosophical appeal if not an appeal to the free choice of reason? As Lévinas reminds us, according to the logic of Hitlerism we do not freely choose our affiliations and allegiances. These, rather, befall us as a fate. (In this way, Hitlerism brings the Western tradition back full circle to Ancient Greece.) In order not to falsify itself, Hitlerism must disavow its philosophical appeal and assert itself, instead, as a force. In this way, Hitlerism is a racist particularism

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that paradoxically “brings with it its own form of universalization,” namely “war and conquest.”18 Lévinas’ essay is prescient in its articulation of how national socialism will unfold. It is also predictive of the political and philosophical problem that will preoccupy Lévinas for the rest of his career. This problem is just: How to develop a form of universalism from within the forms of life Christianity and liberalism so disastrously deny. Or, to again cite the French motto: How to ground liberté and egalité in the conditions of fraternité they would otherwise undermine. Like Nirenberg, Lévinas finds that when our universalistic ambitions lead us to devalue or deny ordinary forms of life—in this case, historical embodiment and the sincere commitment it enables—genocidal structures tend to follow. But whereas Nirenberg stops short of proffering a positive alternative to the politics of love and the genocidal logics it gives rise to, Lévinas makes proffering a positive alternative to Christianity, liberalism, and the Hitlerism they unwittingly foster, the substance of his life’s work. Before turning to Lévinas’ positive alternative account of the political, I want to draw the reader’s attention to the way Lévinas formulates this problem in the close of his 1935 essay, “On Escape.” There, Lévinas avers that “the value of European civilization consists incontestably in the aspirations of idealism,” which are also the aspirations of Christianity and liberalism, namely to free the subject from what would otherwise be the determinism of his being. He continues: “It is a matter of getting out of being by a new path.”19 The reader will recall that Lévinas uses this same language of finding “an escape from being” almost 50 years later in the Nemo interview Nirenberg cites. Nirenberg suggests that this is an extraordinary undertaking, one that marks a flight from the ordinary. With Lévinas’ early work in view, we should be in a position to understand this undertaking rather as an attempt to establish us in an unimpoverished ordinary where we are simultaneously historical, embodied, sincerely committed, equal, and free. But what does it mean to establish one’s readers in an un-impoverished ordinary? Darting ahead in Lévinas’ corpus we find an illuminating footnote. In the preface to his major work of 1961, Totality and Infinity, Lévinas describes his project as involving him in “conjunctures in being for which perhaps the term ‘drama’ would be most suitable, in the sense that Nietzsche would have liked to use it .  .  . at the end of The Case of Wagner.” Turning to Nietzsche’s text, we find a footnoted remark in which Nietzsche suggests that drama ought not be translated as action or plot, but rather as “scenes of great pathos” comprising the “sacred story” on which the community is founded.20 In Lévinas’ case, the community at issue is no less than the human community, and the universalistic account of the political he seeks to develop will take the form of a first-person drama which the reader is invited to find herself represented in and by.21 (And here, already I can note a phenomenological orientation that seems to elide the dichotomies that Nirenberg proposes).

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During and immediately following the Second World War, Lévinas finds resources for developing this dramatic account of the political in the arc of erotic desire.22 In From Existence To Existence and Time and the Other, both published in 1947, Lévinas begins where Hitlerism begins, namely with the feeling of identity between the self and the body. Through a wide range of experiences, Lévinas finds this feeling of identity is only intensified: in pain, in pleasure, in need, in shame, in work, in nourishment, even in knowledge. In each of these, the subject assimilates to himself what would otherwise be outside of him. He is, in the etymological sense, uneducable. In what will become a signature inversion of the Enlightenment tradition, Lévinas suggests that much of what has historically passed for autonomy—the free self-legislation of the subject—is in fact a form of unfreedom in that the self-legislating subject is trapped within himself. Incidentally, it’s in an experience of heteronomy that Lévinas discovers the means of escape: In erotic desire for the feminine other, the identity of the self and the body begins at last to come apart. The feminine other proves unknowable to the subject in that she cannot be assimilated to the subject’s experience of himself. Even as he approaches her, caresses her, and shares in pleasure with her, she remains outside of him. His experience of her is an experience of her as outside and other. In this way, eros achieves education for the subject: he is led out himself.23 One might protest that erotic desire is often enough executed as an exercise in assimilation and self-assertion. Making a point he will make again as his account shifts focus from erotic desire to the face of the other, Lévinas counters that “Profanation is not a negation of mystery, but one of the possible relationships with it.”24 In the erotic encounter, the subject is cast in a responsive position; he may respond to the feminine other any number of ways, but whatever he does, it will constitute a response and in this way testify to her exteriority. The subject escapes the fate of being identified with his body by being led out of himself, only to incur the fate of being responsive. But note how this second fate opens onto a freedom, for with respect to the feminine other, the subject is free to assume the responsibilities that, by virtue of her appearance, are already his, or abdicate these responsibilities, which will then adhere to him all the more forcefully as moral failures. In bringing the language of responsibility to bear on Lévinas’ account of the erotic encounter, I risk importing foreign elements from elsewhere in his corpus. This risk is especially pronounced if we follow Lévinas from Time and the Other to Totality and Infinity. In the latter work, Lévinas suggests that profanation is essential to the erotic encounter, and apparently demotes the feminine other from full personhood to inarticulate animality. In light of this shift, it is important to trace Lévinas’ account of erotic desire through to fecundity, for in the engendering of a child, the subject’s escape from being is more fully realized and, as we shall see, responsibility finds surer footing.

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In Time and the Other, Lévinas follows his discussion of the feminine with the question, “How can the ego become other to itself?” and answers, “This can only happen in one way: through paternity.” Whereas in eros, the feminine other allows the subject an experience of otherness and outside-ness, in fecundity she allows the subject to embody otherness and outside-ness. Assuming the voice of the paternal subject, Lévinas explains that my son is at once “a stranger to me,” and also “is myself.” Because my son is myself, my possibilities are multiplied in him; and because he is not myself, his possibilities, which are also mine, are not determined by my being. An indeterminate future opens up, but out of my sincere commitment to my son rather than as a betrayal of the possibility of sincerity.25 This indeterminate future marks a kind of freedom for the paternal subject, but in Totality and Infinity, Lévinas suggests that an even more significant freedom is at work here, namely the freedom of the filial subject. Lévinas explains that the son is engendered by a paternal eros that was never his, but that he nonetheless embodies. The son owes his very unicity to what Lévinas calls the “election” of his father. To be elected is, again, to be cast in a responsive position, such that one can freely assume or abdicate the responsibilities one incurs as a fate (in this case, through the fate of being born). In the space of a single dense paragraph, Lévinas argues that to be elected implies that one is elected among others, and that for this reason, paternal election engenders the son, not just as a son, but “as a brother among brothers.” To be elected as a brother among brothers is to be responsible to one’s father, but for one’s brothers. Just as it appears we have left the conceptual territory of the biological family and entered that of the Hebrew Bible, Lévinas announces that while “biology furnishes us the prototypes of all these relations . . . these relations free themselves of their biological limitation.” Freed from the limitation of his own biological starting point, Lévinas asserts that “all men are brothers,” and further, that the universalism this assertion implies is not a moral overlay on an already-extant subject, but rather “constitutes his ipseity.”26 If this initial account of fecundity, filiality, and fraternity appears rushed in its attempt to develop universalism out of the embodied experience of (male) erotic desire, Lévinas’ account of the face of the other—which he first develops in Totality and Infinity, and which assumes the reader is familiar with his earlier discussion of fraternity—promises a more evenly paced and convincing account. Again, Lévinas begins where Hitlerism begins: with the feeling of identity between myself and my body.27 Assimilating to myself what would otherwise be outside me, I am for-myself, self-interested, and innocent in my self-interest insofar as it is a determination of my being. But now an other appears, who, through the expressivity of her face, interrupts my innocence. The face of the other (which needn’t be her literal face,

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but may be any aspect of her embodiment that discloses her inassimilable exteriority) expresses both exposed vulnerability and transcendent authority through the command, “you shall not murder.” Commanding me thus, the face of the other indicts my prior insouciance as murderous indifference. I am reconstituted as responsible for the death of the other, and because she is still alive but mortal, for her very life. No longer for-myself, I am for-the-other, my self-interest exploded in what, in the Nemo interview, Lévinas calls “dis-inter-ested”-ness, what elsewhere in his corpus Lévinas calls ethics, charity, generosity, compassion, holiness, and love. (Note again how Lévinas uses the language of moral achievement to designate the conditions of possibility for moral achievement, which are equally the conditions of possibility for moral ruin. In his view, the possibility of murder, like the possibility of profanation, testifies to my responsibility for the other.)28 Just as erotic desire for the feminine other does not yet achieve universalism, and stands to be consummated in fecundity, paternity, filiality, and fraternity, so too this disinterested “love” that befalls me through the face of the other begs fulfillment in what Lévinas calls justice. Justice, like fecundity, is inaugurated by a third: alongside the other, there appears another other, whose face likewise commands me, and reconstitutes me as responsible for her very life and death. As Lévinas explains in the Nemo interview, confronted with the singular other, “I owe him everything,” but confronted with two or more others, I am obliged hold back, “to weigh, to think, to judge.” In the memorable phrasing of Lévinas’ major work of 1974, Otherwise Than Being, I must undertake “the comparison of incomparables,” gathering unique others under general concepts and bringing knowledge to bear on them. The knowledge that I bring to bear on others in the social space of justice differs in kind from the knowledge of the solitary and self-interested “I,” for rather than assimilating what would be outside and other, this knowledge is called for by, and responsively testifies to, others’ exteriority.29 This reintroduction—we might think of it as a redemption—of knowledge as responsive brings with it the birth of language and reason, and with them, all manner of representation, mediation, circulation, possession, use, and exchange. Money, for instance, emerges out of the need to justly allocate goods and services between interested others for whom I am responsible.30 Political, juridical, social, and economic systems rise up, along with the institution of the state. According to Lévinas, all of these forms of life have their origin in the conjoined moral exigencies of adjudicating between others’ competing interests, and of justifying my judgments to others. In this way, Lévinas recovers the aspects of ordinary forms of life that Nirenberg worries about. But does he do so only to deny or devalue another aspect of the ordinary, namely self-interest? Certainly, this is Nirenberg’s charge. We shall be in a position to address this concern if we

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follow Lévinas in his evolving dramatic account of the political—from the erotic encounter, to the face of the other, to what in Otherwise Than Being he calls “substitution.” In his account of substitution, Lévinas again begins with the identity of myself and my body. But this identity immediately falls apart as Lévinas collapses the narrative stages of his previous accounts. In the sensible experience of embodiment, I am always already obsessed by the other and the other others. Through the diachrony of my body—which Lévinas describes variously as the passivity of my conception, gestation, and birth, the vulnerability of my skin to sensation, the inspiration and expiration of my lungs, and the systole and diastole of my heart—I bear the other in myself like a maternal body. Bearing the other, I am representative of her, or substitute for her. Lévinas suggests that this relationship has its natural conclusion in my sacrificial death for the other which would constitute an expiation—would constitute an expiation, that is, save for the other others who likewise always already obsess me, and in obsessing me demand that I represent them also. This “incessant correction of the asymmetry” that would otherwise demand my self-sacrifice is borne in and as consciousness. It is a cry for justice that, according to Lévinas, constitutes “the very rationality of reason or its universality.”31 As we’ve seen, justice requires that I discover others to be representative of one another (comparing incomparables in the adjudication of others’ interests). In the concept of “substitution,” we see that justice also requires also that I discover myself to be representative of others, for it is by representing others that I am able to speak in the universal voice of reason and justify my judgments. In this latter discovery, my self-interest is recovered: not as the innocent self-interest of the solitary “I” of course, but as the interest of one who must justify herself to others and who can justify herself to others through the representative use of reasons. As Lévinas writes, “I am an other for the others,” “Thanks to God,” and “a member of society.”32 Perhaps it goes without saying that just as Lévinas uses the language of love to describe the conditions of possibility for lovingness, which are equally the conditions of possibility of unlovingness, so too he uses the word “justice” to designate the conditions of justice which are equally the conditions of injustice. Self-interest can, and often does, prove unjustifiable. “Politics”—Lévinas’ umbrella term for the forms of life associated with a society of three or more—can and often does succumb to injustice, and in so doing deviates from its ethical origins and aims. There are many passages in Lévinas’ corpus where he expresses skepticism over whether politics can hew to ethics as its grounding condition and guiding cause: for instance, in the preface of Totality and Infinity he wonders if social-political life is in fact a war of all against all, and if we are thus “duped by morality;” or yet again, in his 1988 interview

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“The Other, Utopia, and Justice,” Lévinas cites novelist Vassily Grossman’s conviction that the “small goodness” for one person to his fellowman is lost and deformed as soon as it seeks organization and universality and system, as soon as it opts for doctrine, a treatise of politics and theology, a party, a state, and even a church.33 Some thinkers, most notably Jacques Derrida, have taken these expressions of skepticism as a sign that politics and ethics are radically sundered in Lévinas’ thought. In the next section, we shall have the opportunity to explore some of the consequences of this reading of Lévinas (consequences which Nirenberg endorses by proxy). Contra Derrida and those who follow his reading of Lévinas, I would like to suggest that the preface to Totality and Infinity, along with the majority of Lévinas’ philosophical texts, works like a thought experiment that begins, What if socialpolitical life is a war of all against all, and finds its therapeutic resolution in an internal contradiction: well then, our concern about being duped by morality could never so much as occur to us. Importantly, this therapeutic resolution is not a straightforward refutation. It belongs, rather, to a moral perfectionist project in which our failures and shortcomings lead us back to the conditions of possibility for our self-overcoming. In support of this alternative moral-perfectionist reading of Lévinas, I want to point out that Lévinas cites Grossman as going “even further” than he himself would go in distancing politics from ethics. Granting that justice needs “always to be perfected against its own harshness,” Lévinas suggests that in the political form of democracy, this need is at least potentially met. He exclaims: That is perhaps the very excellence of democracy, whose fundamental liberalism corresponds to the ceaseless deep remorse of justice: legislation always unfinished, always resumed, a legislation open to the better. It attests to an ethical excellence and its origin in kindness from which, however, it is distanced—always a bit less perhaps—by the necessary calculations imposed by a multiple sociality, calculations constantly starting over again. Thus, in the empirical life of the good under the freedom of revisions, there would be a progress of reason. As though to bring Grossman back from the extremity of his position, Lévinas summarizes his view with reference to the Talmudic apologue in Rosh Hashanah 17b in which Rabbi Akiva distinguishes between the verdict which expresses justice, and the after-verdict which expresses charity. Lévinas writes, “Justice and charity. This after-verdict, with its possibilities of mercy, still fully belongs—with full legitimacy—to the

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work of justice.” Far from being sundered then, ethics belongs to the work of politics.34 Since Lévinas is not guilty of devaluing or denying our ordinary forms of life—not politics, not self-interest—we do not need to worry about him colluding in genocidal structures in the way that Nirenberg imagines he does. But there is a more prosaic way in which Lévinas might be seen to betray his own universalistic ambitions and collude in genocidal structures, namely in his androcentrism that threatens to cast women and girls as ancillaries in the drama of male subjectivity and sociality, and in his rare, but nonetheless appalling, expressions of racism and xenophobia (see for example Lévinas’ 1960 essay, “The Russo-Chinese Debate and the Dialectic,” in which he warns against “the yellow peril,” posed by Asiatic civilization, or his 1991 interview with Raoul Mortley in which he reports, “I often say, although it is a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks. All the rest can be translated: all the rest—all the exotic—is dance”).35 We should ask whether and how these prejudices emerge out of, or prove aberrant to, Lévinas’ broader philosophical projects. But note that whatever our conclusions in this regard, in being concerned by these expressions and bringing our critical acumen to bear on them, we engage in “the empirical life of the good under the freedom of revisions,” and ratify Lévinas’ claim that responsibility is “the very rationality of reason.” It is because I am responsible to Lévinas and the other whom he menaces with his prejudice, that I rationally undertake to adjudicate between them; and it is because I am responsible to a world of others that I seek to justify my judgments through universal reason. In his essay “The Politics of Love and Its Enemies,” Nirenberg is clearly engaged in a project of adjudicating and justifying his judgments. That is, he is engaged in a project of justice. His way of engaging this project, however, leaves it unclear whether and how projects of justice are so much as possible. What are we to make of this in this light of Yancey and Baldwin’s shared sense that love is a “state of grace”? Or of Lévinas’ suggestion that we would be trapped in determinism were it not for divine election that leads us out into an ethical order? Does the language of divine or gracious surfeit bespeak a skeptical devaluation of the ordinary, as if the ordinary were of itself deficit, insufficient for moral-political projects and pursuits of peace? I think not. I think, rather, this language is meant to attune us to a feature of the ordinary: namely, that in the social-sensible origins of our subjectivity, the conditions of possibility for moral-political projects and pursuits of peace have always already been given. To say that they have been given (as a grace, or “Thanks to God”) is not to say that they are excessive of the ordinary, rather it is to acknowledge that they are excessive of our activity in the ordinary. Our activity only ever begins in response.

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Notes 1. 21 November 1962. Transcript and archival information available at “The Meaning of Love in Politics,” last modified September 2006, www. hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/95/156. 2. Arendt, for her part, suggests that we establish “respect” as a regulative ideal for human relations. To her mind, love is a private sentiment felt only for particular others, whereas respect—which she describes as a kind of political friendship, “a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us”—is at least potentially universal, and so can serve as a properly public bond. Of course the concept of political friendship (“philia politike”) is not unrelated to love. And as many scholars have pointed out, love and its theologically inflected cognates actually permeate Arendt’s account of the political. With Arendt’s example in mind, we might suspect that Nirenberg will have a difficult time parsing love from our conception of the political. 3. Although I do not cite them in what follows, I wish to acknowledge the influence of Howard Caygill’s, Lisa Guenther’s, and Diane Perpich’s insightful readings of Lévinas in what follows. 4. David Nirenberg, “The Politics of Love and Its Enemies,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 576. In his notes Nirenberg also names John Milbank, Creston Davis, Patrick Aaron Riches, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jean-Luc Marion as exponents of the politics of love. 5. Ibid. 574, quoting Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 52. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 575–6. 8. Ibid., 592, 593. 9. Ibid., 601. 10. Ibid., 603. 11. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 64. 12. Ibid., 65–6. 13. Ibid., 66. 14. Ibid., 69. 15. Ibid., 67. 16. Ibid., 67, 68. 17. Ibid., 69, 70. 18. Ibid., 71. 19. Emmanuel Lévinas, On Escape: De l’evasion, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 73. 20. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 28 f.2; Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 249. 21. Although I don’t have the space to develop the claim here, I would like to suggest that Lévinas’ attempt to establish a community through a representative first-person drama can be understood as analogous to what Hannah Arendt calls political judgment in her brilliant reworking of Kant’s Third Critique. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992). 22. It bears noting that Lévinas lost immediate family members in the Holocaust and was himself held captive by Nazis as a French-Jewish POW 1940–1945.

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23. See From Existence To Existence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), and Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987). 24. Lévinas, Time and the Other, 86. 25. Ibid., 91. 26. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 279. 27. My shift to the first person indicates an opening in Lévinas’ heretofore prohibitively gendered account. By writing in the first person I mean to honor the way in which Lévinas’ philosophy demands to be read first-personally. Again, I would refer the reader to Arendt’s, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. 28. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 199. For Lévinas’ use of the words ethics, charity, generosity, compassion, holiness, and love, see for instance the interviews collected in Emmanuel Lévinas, Is It Righteous to Be, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 29. Lévins, Ethics and Infinity, 90; Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being, 158. 30. See for instance Lévinas, Is It Righteous to Be?, 184, 190. 31. Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being, 158, 160. See also, “Substitution,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). Again, I find Lévinas thought resonant with Arendt’s. 32. Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being, 158. 33. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 21; Lévinas, “The Other, Utopia, and Justice,” in Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 230. 34. Lévinas, “The Other, Utopia, and Justice,” 229–31. 35. In the Nemo interview, Lévinas apparently attempts to answer the feminist criticisms lodged against him by suggesting that “participation in the masculine and feminine” is an “attribute of every human being,” and that “Filiation and fraternity” are “without biological bases” Ethics and Infinity, 68, 71. While these comments may well reflect Lévinas later conclusions, they do not appear compatible with his earlier formulations. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Le débat russo-chinois et la dialectique,” Esprit 28, no. 10 (October 1960); Raoul Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation (New York: Routledge, 1991), 18.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso, 2005. (Politiques de l’amité, Paris: Galilée, 1994). Lévinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978. (De l’existence à l’existant, 2nd ed. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1986. First published in 1947). ———. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. (Éthique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. Paris: France Culture, 1982). ———. On Escape/De l’évasion. Translated by Bettina G. Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. (De l’évasion. Notes by Jacques Rolland. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1982. First published in 1935).

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———. “The Other, Utopia, and Justice.” Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. (“L’Autre, Utopie et Justice.” In Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre. Paris: Grasset, 1998). ———. Otherwise Than Being or beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981. (Autrement qu’être ou audelà de l’essence. Phaenomenologica 54. The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). ———. “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Translated by Seán Hand. Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 63–71. (“Quelques Réflexions sur la Philosophie de l’Hitlérisme.” Esprit 2 (November 1934): 199–208). ———. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. (Le temps et l’autre. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1979. First published in: Le choix, le monde, l’existence. Edited by Jean Wahl. Grenoble: B. Arthaud, 1947). ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. (Totalité et Infini: Essais sur l’Extériorité. Phaenomenologica 8. The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961). Lilla, Mark. “The Politics of Jacques Derrida.” The New York Review of Books 45, no. 11 (June 25, 1998): 36–41. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Case of Wagner.” In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Nirenberg, David. “The Politics of Love and Its Enemies.” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 573–605.

13 Structure and Fantasy Holocaust Perpetrators and Genocide Studies Dan Stone

Introduction In Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund, which ponders the possibility of reconciling Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian sides of human life, the vital force which is the young Goldmund thinks to himself at one point that “one of the disadvantages of school and learning” is “that the mind seemed to have the tendency to see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of the intellect shallow and worthless.”1 As scholars, we might be tempted simply to brush off these thoughts as the daydreams of a man of action, or else to admit that the problem exists but that there is nothing to be done about it. Calm reflection and disinterestedness are characteristics of scholarship which always stand in opposition to the flux and dynamism of the actual events such scholarship seeks to understand. But perhaps there is something especially nervewracking about Hesse’s warning when it comes to studying genocide. I refer not to the problem of empathy, for this is a red herring (we do not have to become perpetrators, “only” try and understand their thought processes) but to the shocking contrast between platitudinous—literally, flat, two dimensional—words on a printed page and the horrific violence of what is described. Are not such attempts shallow and worthless? The problem is laid bare in an extract from Anna Langfus’s now littleread novel of 1960, The Whole Land Brimstone (orig. Le sel et le soufre). The protagonist, a Jewish woman passing as Aryan, encounters a Nazi who has recently been involved in killing actions. He explains to her patiently and calmly that the murder of the Jews is a necessity that has been ordered by the Führer. The protagonist is confused by the fact that before her she sees a sensitive man, but one who openly admits to having murdered a whole family: This was no out-and-out murderer. This was not someone who killed for revenge, for greed, or in a fit of madness. This was a man who had ardently performed an act that was quite uncharacteristic of him. Moreover, he would be sincerely astonished to hear the word

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killer, the word murderer, applied to him. He did not murder; he executed—an operation as natural as smoking out a wasps’ nest, carried out because it was useful. Nothing in that to trouble a man’s conscience. I heard him say: “You mustn’t go on thinking about it.”2 Such depictions shake our instinctive wish to see perpetrators as just “mad” or somehow entirely different from “us,” and thus begins the need to study such people. Recently, there have been criticisms of attempts to study Holocaust perpetrators, along the lines that such studies represent a morally dubious position and that a “correct” approach would be to focus on the victims.3 This argument is at best confusing and at worst devious. One should certainly encourage studies of victims, whether re-creating the worlds that were lost before the Holocaust, especially Jewish life in Eastern Europe, or explaining varieties of resistance, or undertaking micro-histories of inter-ethnic relationships, as in Omer Bartov’s recent work. A study such as Simone Gigliotti’s on the experience of deportation is especially valuable, for the evidence she highlights, which derives mostly from survivor testimonies, presents information which not only explains the victims’ sensory experiences in ways that would remain otherwise inaccessible, but flatly contradict the image of the murder process presented by the Nazis, as “efficient,” “clean,” or “smooth.” All such studies enrich our understanding of the Holocaust. But unless we want to give up on such questions as how and why the Holocaust could occur, we have no choice but to study perpetrators. It is necessary to study perpetrators, not—it should hardly need to be said—because doing so encourages some sort of identification with them, but because only this way can we think about the conditions which are necessary for genocide to take place. As Federico Finchelstein, one of the most penetrating analysts of fascist ideology, has noted: “Only fascists can explain to themselves the meaning of victimization. For non-fascists in general, and their victims in particular, the Holocaust makes no sense.” The Holocaust is, in this understanding, a meaningless event from the standpoint of reason. However, it was also the objective outcome of meaningful mythical formations rooted in unreason . . . fascism embraces imaginary politics and produces radical events that are beyond the limits of rational representation and justification.4 We are thus required to study the perpetrators.

Holocaust Perpetrators First, I will briefly survey some of the work on perpetrators that has been done by other scholars, and which I have discussed in more detail

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elsewhere.5 The general aim here is to show first that there is no single, homogeneous perpetrator type; indeed, one can go so far as to say that there is even no ideal-type of Nazi except insofar as the perpetrators’ actions demonstrated in practice what it meant to be a Nazi. Rebecca Wennberg calls this “ideological incorrectness,” that is, we should not look for a single definition of Nazism, derived perhaps from intellectual history, for there is none to be found. Instead, we see that even those who were in many respects not ideal Nazis (from the point of view of party discipline, perhaps, or inclination) could go on to become archetypal perpetrators of genocide, e.g., Arthur Greiser or Odilo Globocnik. This is especially true of Scandinavian collaborators such as those in the Ragnarok circle in Norway, who were committed Nazis but often out of sorts with the Nazi leadership. Examples can be found across Europe, whether in the Netherlands or Croatia, of Indigenous fascists who saw themselves as representatives of a local Nazism that was in no way simply a form of collaboration with the Germans—this notion that they were protecting the nations’ interests was often their preferred form of postwar defense. Second, this survey shows that irrespective of the heterogeneous nature of the perpetrators, perhaps even because of it, the end-result of their actions was strikingly homogeneous. That is, whatever their reasons for participation, the result was the same: none blanched at the task of killing the Jews. If there was such a thing as a typical perpetrator, one might look to men like Werner Best, Alfred Six, or Paul Werner Hoppe, the commandant of Stutthof, whom Orth identifies as the typical perpetrator: imbued with radical völkisch ideas and able to act according to objective, rational calculations; an ideal “political soldier.”6 The Camp-SS, the Gestapo and the “Judenberater” (Jewish advisors) all conform to this model of educated men carrying out mass murder, as do the men on the next rung down the hierarchy, the SSPF and HSSPF like Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Friedrich Jeckeln, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, Otto Ohlendorf, Fritz Rauter, and Odilo Globocnik.7 Even the somewhat unusual Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reich Commissar of Ukraine, more a highly competent administrator than a Nazi fanatic, followed a familiar trajectory of radicalization during World War I, the Freikorps and the struggle for National Socialist dominance. His success in East Prussia meant that he was one of the very few leaders of the Third Reich whom Hitler was prepared to back against Himmler.8 Not very many perpetrators fit the stereotypical bill, like Christian Wirth, who was described as a man “who had no feelings or consideration, who treated people—whether Germans, Jews or Ukrainians—as numbers, or even worse,” who had “an exceptional talent for organization,” who “despised and abused people” and “was a Jew-hater on an unimaginable scale.”9 Claudia Steur writes in her study of “Eichmann’s emissaries” that “one can say that the Judenberater’s way of working was marked by

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an increasing radicalization and perfectionism.”10 The emissaries can, according to Steur, be divided into two groups: those with close links to Eichmann and those without. Among the first group were Theodor Dannecker, Dieter Wisliceny, Alois Brunner, Fritz Boßhammer and Franz Abromeit. In second group were Kurt Asche, Wilhelm Zoepf, Heinz Röthke, Anton Burger, Gustav Richter, Hermann Krumey, and Otto Hunsche. All were born between 1905 and 1913, lived through World War I as children, and came to maturity in the post-war period. They constitute classic examples of those who had the ground pulled out from underneath their feet by the Weimar crises: “Almost all the Judenberater came from the middle class, which had been especially hard hit by the crisis.” Most were businessmen who joined the NSDAP between 1930 and 1933. A combination of opportunism and craving for social status seems to have been central to their participation: “The main reasons for their later participation in the murder of the Jews lie in their striving for power, respect and social ascendancy.” Boßhammer, for example, found the measures being taken against the Jews “terrible and inhuman” and was shocked, that he “should find himself employed in the Judenreferate.” But he still took the job: “Only with ‘unconditional obedience’ could one get the chance to rise to the position of Regierungsrat.” “In the face of their superiors,” writes Steuer, “these men made blind belief and obedience the order of the day and identified themselves completely with Hitler’s state.”11 Globocnik, the subject of a recent biography, is perhaps exceptional, for he allowed his fanaticism to override any notion of dispassionate bureaucratic administration; indeed, it was his demotion from Gauleiter of Vienna (because of corruption) to SS Police Chief in Lublin that gave his violent anti-Semitic instincts free rein, as he became closely involved in the activities of the Einsatzgruppen in the USSR in 1941, and shortly afterward the key figure in Operation Reinhard.12 The empirical evidence provided by Orth, Herbert, Steuer, and others seems to confirm the cliché of the perpetrators as “cultured demons.” On the other hand, recent research takes us back to Christopher Browning’s claim that not all perpetrators were radical ideologues; with reference to the Einsatzgruppen, for example, below the leadership level, and especially once conscription and local collaborators had to be used to bolster numbers, one sees a rather heterogeneous group.13 Current research, then, seeks to balance organizational and situational factors against ideological ones. But of course the two overlap, especially when an organization such as the police was heavily impregnated with ideological training. Still, most historians agree that an emphasis solely on ideology, as if comes from nowhere and has no organizational setting, is inappropriate. Edward Westermann, for example, writing about Order Police battalions in occupied Eastern Europe, writes that “it is a grave oversight to dismiss the organizational culture of the Uniformed Police in a search for the motive force behind their participation in the conduct of

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genocide.” Still, they acquitted themselves as expected, with police chief Daluege congratulating Himmler that For Adolf Hitler, this corps of the SS and the police represents his struggle for a greater Germany, Europe and the world. Its [the SS and police corps’] task is the annihilation of the eternal enemies of all völkisch and racially conscious nations.14 Westermann still arrives at the conclusion that ideology was important, but tries to present it as the outcome not of an innate national belief system, but of deliberately organized institutional frameworks to which the men willingly subscribed; he thus seeks to avoid “focusing on the ideological forest at the expense of losing sight of the individual trees of human causation.”15 The same sense of complexity—and hence greater adherence to human behavior—informs recent discussions of “desk killers” versus “active murderers.” The dominant image of the desk killer, prevalent from the 1960s until the 1990s, cohered largely with the functionalist notion of “industrial genocide” and reluctance to confront the brutality of the events. We now know that the division is unjustified, for the men most often identified as “desk killers”—Eichmann and his staff—were actively involved in implementing murderous policies on the ground throughout occupied Europe.16 Similarly, according to the RSHA’s policy of rotation, two-thirds of Gestapo leaders—with their middle-class upbringings, humanist schooling (almost half of them with doctorates in law), and narrow avoidance of military service in 1914–18—were “actively involved as leaders of Einsatzgruppen and—kommandos as well as leaders of Stapo- and Sipo-posts in the mass murder of the Jewish population of the occupied regions.”17 Clearly, it is wrong to focus only on bureaucratic efficiency or on radical racist passions, when Nazism in action combined them so successfully. As George Browder neatly puts it: “‘Committed ideologue’ versus ‘banal bureaucrat’ may even be a false dichotomy; they are at best two extremes on a multidimensional spectrum of perpetrators.”18 This research, whilst placing greater stress than Browning on ideology, appears to confirm a neo-functionalist perspective for two reasons. First, it places considerable emphasis on decisions made at the periphery rather than in Berlin. Second, it suggests that policy developed in a zig-zag fashion rather than following a pre-ordained blueprint. However, these points are counterbalanced by the fact that many of these studies strongly reassert the primacy of ideology, in that these heterogeneous “ordinary men” (as well as the smaller number of less ordinary, committed careerist Nazis) operated in a framework suffused with anti-Semitism as a result of which their actions did not need to be directed, for it was already clear to them who their targets were. Whether they were committed ideologues or

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criminal “Exzeßtäter,” their generational, social, religious, educational, and ideological heterogeneity did not get in the way of the production of a homogeneous victim group: “In the final instance, the Shoah proved to be a collective deed carried out by division of labour on a European scale, to which the most varied perpetrator groups contributed with total devotion.”19 Irrespective of the fact that the men of the Einsatzgruppen came from diverse backgrounds, Nevertheless, the Einsatzgruppe developed a horrifyingly ‘homogeneous’ murderous effect, so that an end neither to their lust for conquest nor to the possibility of realizing it appeared foreseeable from a geopolitical or military standpoint in the winter of 1941–42.20 This is a conclusion at which Browning also arrives in a later study of the Order Police: “Clearly the German Order Police was not monolithic,” writes Browning, “but in the end the diversity of attitudes and motives made little difference.”21 When we add in other groups of perpetrators— female SS auxiliaries, nurses and doctors, and local collaborators across Europe who had very many different reasons to become involved—this conclusion (i.e., that a heterogeneous group committed a homogeneous crime) seems even more self-evident. These considerations reveal that the historiography of Holocaust perpetrators has become complex and mature; it leads us to consider a question which arises out of this scholarly literature: what is the most insightful way of trying to explain the perpetrators’ actions? The question arises because in the past, scholars have assumed that there is a single type of perpetrator or that perpetrators’ motivations derive from a unique psychological make-up. Ernst Cassirer, for example, rightly identified myth as crucial to Nazism, but explained it as an all-embracing monolithic position. His argument that the Nazis targeted the Jews because Judaism represents the rejection of myth par excellence (in the forbidding of graven images, for example) was a suggestive and rich argument. In forwarding it, Cassirer identified the reason why speaking of mere anti-Semitism is insufficient for understanding Nazism. Instead, he says, Nazism demands “a life and death struggle which could only find its end in the complete extermination of the Jews.”22 Yet, at the same time as trying to make English-speaking readers understand the singlemindedness of the Nazis, he painted an undifferentiated picture of them which reduced them to the same. Not all people who became Holocaust perpetrators were dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semites or believers in the world conspiracy of “the Jew” as put forward by Hitler and his inner circle; many became involved for far more mundane reasons. As this section has shown, we now have a historically rich account of the different sorts of people who can become perpetrators, most obviously and thoroughly in the case of the Holocaust, but increasingly so

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for other cases of genocide, too. Even if in the end they converge on a consensus position that a specified enemy group needs to be eliminated, the paths to that point are actually remarkably varied. In order to try to answer this question in more detail, this essay will henceforth broaden its scope beyond the Holocaust to think about genocide perpetrators more generally. I hope that the justification for doing so—analytical clarity— will become evident along the way. My aim is to examine one of the most intractable separations in the historiography on perpetrators with the aim of reconciling the competing interpretations, thus providing a meaningful synthesis of them, with the hope of explaining that scholarly divide to a non-specialist audience and encouraging further research on genocide that takes a new, wider approach to the subject. The divide in the literature to which I refer is that between those who study the Holocaust (and genocide in general) as a structural phenomenon—the outcome of major international pressures such as competition between states and the radical decision-making of states in crisis—and those who study it as a voluntaristic phenomenon, with a focus on the actual killing process, often examining perpetrators as individuals in a quasi-anthropological fashion as meaning-producers in moments of crisis, but with less focus on elites and the decision-making processes that brought about a genocidal situation in the first place.23 I will refer to these two approaches as “structure” and “fantasy” for convenient shorthand, though it is of course the case—as with all ideal types— that scholars who fall into one or other category rarely ignore the other factors altogether. All historians are familiar with these concepts since debates about individuals and structures have underpinned many paradigmatic debates in modern historiography, from the Annales School’s focus on large-scale structures in the longue-durée of human affairs, English Marxist historiography’s version of social history, the Bielefeld School’s inversion of (what they perceived as) individualistic German historicism in favor of “structures” when explaining the Sonderweg (special path) of the Kaiserreich, or competing assessments of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), which returned the reader’s attention to the role of individuals and their scope for moral choices even in the face of structural frameworks not of their own making.24 I seek to demonstrate that while both approaches have contributed greatly to our understanding of genocide, bringing them together allows us to perceive genocide as a part of “normal” human behavior insofar as it derives from and exacerbates social crises that require the institutions and structures of the modern state in order to function, but that also require fantasythinking in order to be thought of as permissible in the first place and in order that the context of crisis in which genocide takes place can be made manifest, with the consequence that perpetrators feel the necessity of their action.

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Structure and Fantasy Genocide is often regarded as a crime of state, which therefore relies on the agencies, institutions, bureaucracies, and power of the state. Although the UNGC does not specify that genocide must be committed by states (Article IV speaks, rather, of “persons committing genocide . . . whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”), in the 20th century (and beyond) it was the case that states were indeed the major perpetrators of genocide. In a world divided into nation-states, few other actors have the kind of control over the means of violence and the bureaucratic and technological capacity for such organized attacks on whole population groups. From the destruction of the Armenians in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire to the systematic attacks on “Black” (as opposed to “Arab”) Sudanese in Darfur a century later, genocide has achieved its dreadfully spectacular results thanks to state-led organizations, from access to weapons to local bureaucracies’ ability to separate in-groups from out-groups, thanks to censuses and the workings of local administration, such as the burgomaster system in Rwanda. Given the nature of IR discourse on states, which employs vocabulary such as “the state system,” we should not be surprised that the focus in much genocide scholarship tends to be on rational decisionmaking processes, bureaucratically driven dynamics which follow their own course in an almost deterministic fashion, and a tendency to portray elites as driven less by ideology than by perceptions of raison d’état. Yet the decisions of elites, and the participation of their subordinates, in genocide, do not rest at the level of objective social relations: warfare, insurgency, threats to territorial integrity, treasonous contact with foreign powers, and so on. Rather, while these are often the settings for genocide, to make the jump from the conflicts involved in any of the previous scenarios to genocide, fantasies about the nature of the enemy collective as such must exist. These can take many forms, and just as there is no single type of perpetrator so there is no uniform fantasy about the “enemy” group. To take one obvious example: when the Young Turks felt the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire to be threatened by the actions of small groups of Armenian nationalists—who they believed were fifth columnists, in league with the Russians and thus the Triple Entente—they responded not by disarming such groups, but by deporting and massacring Armenians in general. What possible logic can have led them to believe that the group as such was a threat to the security of the Empire? Even the context of warfare and the unfortunate timing of the Van uprising just as the Empire was being invaded at Gallipoli are insufficient to explain the series of events that became genocidal. Only a sense of paranoia and resentment at the humiliation of the Empire at the hands of the Western Allies can help in explaining the otherwise incomprehensible leap from countering a few (from the Ottoman state’s point of view)

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terrorist groups to destroying a whole population group. Similarly, the perception of Stalin and the leading circle of communists around him that the Soviet Union’s security and territorial integrity was threatened not just by actual military enemies but by potentially traitorous national groups all the way along the country’s vast borders led to the order to deport so-called “punished peoples”: half a million Chechens and Ingush were deported in 1943–44 as Nazi collaborators, as were large numbers of Kalmuks, Karachais, Crimean Tartars, and others; and in the few years before the war, many other national groups arrayed along the borders, from Poles or Finns in the west to Koreans in the east, found themselves shipped off from places where fifth columnist activities could be harmful to places in the interior where, as the regime saw it, such schemes would be rendered impotent, such as Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, or Siberia. Whether or not these actions constitute genocide—as Norman Naimark argues—one has to account for the fact that, apart from the problem of the groups that fell victim to Stalinist criminality not always fitting the UNGC (“kulaks”), it is hard to establish an attempt to destroy the group “as such,” even in the case of the Koreans, which saw a whole population group (172,000 people) deported from the Soviet Far East to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan because they were suspected (highly improbably, it need hardly be said) of being Japanese collaborators.25 The question of definition aside, however, such actions clearly owed less to any empirical evidence that non-Russian national groups were undermining the Soviet Union than to fears of being swamped by enemies without, aided by their national compatriots within. We are reminded here that genocide is a group crime. It is committed by groups against individuals only insofar as they are members of another group, as defined by the perpetrators—and people exist in societies, so the decision to participate or not in genocide is rarely, if ever, purely a matter of individual moral choice; nor is it explicable simply via individual psychology. Nevertheless, we can perhaps take some psychoanalytical categories that apply most obviously to individuals and adapt them to group situations. The argument is not that there is such a thing as a “group mind” in a literal sense. But there are such things as group dynamics and shared narratives of history and identity, and individual being in the world is always experienced in society—one’s sense of selfhood is defined partly in opposition to one’s daily life as part of one or more collectives. Thus, we are dealing here not with fantasies at the level of individual psychologies—although these may be highly influential through writings, speeches, charismatic leadership, propaganda, education, terroristic control of society, and so on—but with fantasies that are always already built into the structures of society and of rule-making. Marvin Hurvich’s notion of “annihilation anxieties” is perhaps the most productive psychoanalytical approach here, although one also needs to pay attention

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to theories which deal with emotions such as fear, hatred, and humiliation, as well as the fantasies of revenge and retaliation which such emotions engender, often in the process creating cycles of hatred and violence that span generations and geographical setting, making these cycles very hard to break. My argument is that these fantasies are not found in a separate sphere of human experience from the rational, structural factors that make genocide operational, but that they are themselves constitutive of those very structures. What appear to be—and often are—“modern,” technological, and even rational processes of categorization, collection and deportation of “enemy” groups are underpinned not by rational calculation in the narrow sense, but an instrumental rationality that is based on a non-rational understanding of what is taking place. It is not that some genocides are driven by rational calculation—for example, competition for land, food, or other resources—and others by pure fantasies— such as the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy—but that all genocides involve a combination of the two. The fantasies in question are of course often rooted in actual experiences of ethnic violence or other forms of group division, but they need not be: the case of the Holocaust is the prime example here, as the heartfelt notion that Germany was being colonized by Jews or that the Aryan race was deliberately being destroyed by Jewish plots for miscegenation and racial degeneration had no basis in fact, no matter how hard the Nazis tried to convince themselves and the German people of the existence and meaningful agency of “world Jewry.”26 The point is that, no matter what histories of actual conflict might exist, genocide demands a kind of thinking (“thinking with the blood”) that advocates “final solutions” far removed from the actual conditions which led to the conflict in the first place. Thus, even in a case like Rwanda, where the RPF invasion made sure that a genuine conflict provided the background for the genocide in 1994, a purely military strategy would not have involved attempting to hunt down and kill every last Tutsi as if they were all in league, or potential fighters for the RPF. Genocide scholarship tends to hold these two fields of human existence apart for heuristic reasons: on the one hand, explaining either the workings of bureaucracies or elites’ decision-making processes; on the other hand, explaining the “carnivalesque” dimension of enjoyment or frenzy in killing. The two approaches derive largely from two separate methodological traditions and sets of assumptions about how societies function, with the former (more social scientific in orientation) looking more toward “objective” social relations and networks of power, the latter (inclined more toward anthropology or history of ideas) focusing on moments of transgressive behavior, especially among individual perpetrators or small groups of grassroots killers—mobs, instead of elites.27 But the two are in fact inseparable: both focus on moments of crisis when the norms of society are turned upside-down, or when rules that

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normally control “civilized” (for want of a better term) behavior legitimize “barbaric” behavior, often in the name of being civilized or defending civilization. What we have said so far argues that the decision-making processes of elites—which are the real key factors in bringing about genocide as a policy—are suffused with fantasy-thinking. By the same token, the frenzy or “license” with which individuals or groups of killers operate during genocide are not simply driven by bloodlust, although this factor should by no means be downplayed; they too derive from structural factors as much as from “voluntaristic” motives.28 It is also the case, in other words, that “There is always a danger when detailing structural factors in history of seeming to absolve individual actors of decision-making power and moral responsibility.”29 I want to bring these two approaches together, not just because they are in fact always simultaneously present in genocide, but in order to challenge some common methodological assumptions. The first is that genocide is a “modern” phenomenon, in the sense that it requires the state and its bureaucratic and technological capacities to become a widespread and successful policy. This has the consequence of making the Holocaust the paradigmatic case, even at the cost of ignoring aspects of the murder of the Jews which do not fit the bill of “factory-line genocide,” such as the ghettos and face-to-face killings in Eastern Europe.30 And the second, no less damaging assumption is that massacres or frenzied attacks take place among more “primitive” societies; indeed, the condescending term “communal violence” which is commonly used to describe events in India/Pakistan carries with it unmistakable colonial undertones of “restless natives,” completely occluding the role played by officialdom, the military, or the state, and seeing only passion-fueled hatred between groups divided along primitive ethnic or religious lines—passions to which “we” in the civilized world are, of course, not subject.31 My basic assumption then is that all modern genocides (from 19thcentury colonial genocides onward), and probably all cases of genocide before that, involve a combination of power relations and structures that can be analyzed using tools of political science or political economy, and a form of fantasy thinking that defines the enemy and makes perpetrators feel that their actions are required and justified. Genocide does not occur solely as a slide, without human agency, of structures into genocide, i.e., a radicalization of social structures that is built into the system (à la Bauman); but nor can fantasy alone (anti-Semitism, racism, fear of pollution or being “swamped,” for example) account for why genocide occurs at one moment but not another. Rather, the combination of the two factors, to varying degrees, is a necessity if we are to understand the meaning of the “dark side of modernity.” The example of Holocaust historiography is instructive here, with its language of networks, competencies, inter-agency cooperation, and

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competition, as well as a scientific vocabulary of eugenics, racial hygiene, and medicalizing technology. All offer an image of the Holocaust as a rationally planned, efficiently executed murder process (which is in fact only partly true). By contrast, the language of the carnivalesque, Rausch, jouissance, license, frenzy, and transgression all appear on the face of it to be inapplicable. It is relatively straightforward to speak, as LaCapra does, of the Holocaust being characterized by a combination of these elements; “perhaps,” he writes, “only this disconcerting conjunction helps to explain the incredible excesses of brutality, cruelty, and at times carnivalesque or ‘sublime’ elation in Nazi behavior towards Jews.”32 The difficulty is to demonstrate in detail how these two aspects of genocide worked together in the Holocaust. Can the Holocaust as such can be understood as a moment of “effervescence,” “elation,” or “transgression,” including the “rational structures” and planning processes that went into realizing it (and which seem a long way from the frenzy of a massacre)? Is it possible to show that the face-to-face killings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and their accomplices, the authorized pogroms in eastern Europe, the vicious and degrading treatment of Jews in Transnistria, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere on the part of the Nazis’ local collaborators, and the mocking and jeering crowds that accompanied deportations in Germany itself were all not simply the actions of mobs acting out their “license,” but were part of a broader network of perpetration, centrally directed and controlled and subject to administrative planning? Here the notion of “transgression” or “elation” might be useful, insofar as they apply not only to the behavior of rampaging mobs, but to the decisions of elites—an aspect of state planning that is commonly missed in structural accounts. Certainly, one can helpfully demonstrate that political movements such as the Muhajir Quami Movement (MQM) in Pakistan, or Zdravko Primorac’s Bosnian Croat “violence formation” are characterized by what Oskar Verkaaik calls the “aesthetics and ethics of transgression” and the “effervescence of collective violence.”33 And, as Mart Bax notes, describing collective violence as only directed carefully from above implies an uncritical acceptance of a central or national leader perspective, dismissing as deviant anything that does not go according to plan and denying the significance of specific local and regional circumstances or at any rate failing to problematize and examine them.34 Nevertheless, what is often fgured as a bureaucratically organized, managerially effcient and division-of-labor-based state-led operation— which genocide might well be—is always already suffused with a sense of elation, borne from the “necessity” of directing a great project, one which will possibly save a nation, race, or other group from the putative

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predations of another. For grassroots violence to be effective, we still need to see, as Jacques Semelin reminds us, opinion leaders who will affrm: this is what is happening to us, this is who is responsible for our misfortune. It is they who are the cause of our suffering. We absolutely must get rid of them. We promise that afterwards everything will be better. Just give us your support, or better yet, join in the fight to rid ourselves of this scourge.35 To this extent, the historical analysis of the networks and bureaucracies of genocide, though vital, are only partial explanations unless they can also account for this non-rational premise which informs elites’ decisions to embark on what we might henceforth call (in clear breach of the term’s meaning in theorists such as Georges Bataille) “organized transgression.” “Non-rational” here is meant the premise on which the project is built, not the execution of the project. Even the premise implies a logic: if one believes that one’s “race” is being thwarted by a Jewish world conspiracy then it makes sense to target “the Jew.” But the premise—the idea that “the Aryan race” is threatened by “the Jew”—is non-rational in the sense that it is not amenable to evidence-based confrmation. All thinking always already contains rational and non-rational elements in this sense: much of what we believe is subject to change in the face of evidence, but not all of it. In the case of genocide, a crisis of some sort, usually in recent history a crisis of the state, suffces to bring to prominence beliefs that would normally not be sanctioned because of their un-verifability; “the logic of genocide” refers then to a process by which a non-rational premise becomes policy, and is then driven through in a logical way. “License” is taken to the heart of the system, permitting a controlled and instrumental execution of a radically transgressive premise. It is this “organized transgression” which brings about genocide. Distasteful though it is, this is why we must study perpetrators.

Notes 1. Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 73. 2. Anna Langfus, The Whole Land Brimstone (London: Collins, 1962 [orig. 1960]), 159. 3. See especially Alexandra Garbarini, “Reflections on the Holocaust and Jewish History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 1 (2012): 81–90. See also Rebecca Jinks, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 24 n71. 4. Federico Finchelstein, “The Holocaust as Ideology: Borges and the Meaning of Transnational Fascism,” Dapim: Studies on the Shoah 25 (2011): 278–9. 5. Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch2.

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6. On Hoppe, see Karin Orth, Die Konzentrationslager-SS: Sozialstrukturelle Analysen und biographische Studien (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 217–21. See also Orth’s discussion of Hoppe in “Die Kommandanten der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager,” in Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, ed. Herbert, Orth and Dieckmann, vol. 2, 755–86. It is worth noting Miroslav Kárný’s comments in that volume’s next chapter (“Waffen-SS und Konzentrationslager,” 787–99), that the ideal-type of “political soldier” broke down into something altogether more shabby and brutal in the face of the reality of the camps—which these same “political soldiers” created. 7. Ronald Smelser and Enrico Syring, eds., Die SS: Elite unter dem Totenkopf. 30 Lebensläufe (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000) for some of these men. 8. Ralf Meindl, Ostpreußens Gauleiter: Erich Koch—eine politische Biographie (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2007). 9. Michael Tregenza, Christian Wirth: Inspekteur des SS-Sonderkommandos “Aktion Reinhard” (typescript held at Wiener Library, London, 1993), 1, citing Franz Suchomel. 10. Claudia Steur, “Eichmanns Emissäre: Die ‘Judenberater’ in Hitlers Europa,” in Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg: “Heimatfront” und besetztes Europe, ed. Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (Darmstadt: Primus, 2000), 403–36, here 431. 11. Ibid., 431, 432, 433, 434. On Dannecker, see Claudia Steur, Theodor Dannecker. Ein Funktionär der “Endlösung” (Essen: Klartext, 1997). 12. Berndt Rieger, Creator of Nazi Death Camps: The Life of Odilo Globocnik (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007). Unfortunately, the author seems more interested in Globocnik’s personal life than in the broader context necessary for a “political biography.” 13. Klaus-Michael Mallmann, “Menschenjagd und Massenmord: Das neue Instrument der Einsatzgruppen und—kommandos 1938–1945,” in Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Mallmann and Paul, 304. 14. Daluege cited in Edward B. Westermann, “Shaping the Police Soldier as an Instrument for Annihilation,” in The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives of the Third Reich and Its Legacy, ed. Alan E. Steinweis and Daniel E. Rogers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 145. 15. Edward B. Westermann, “‘Ordinary Men’ or ‘Ideological Soldiers’? Police Battalion 310 in Russia, 1942,” German Studies Review 21, no. 1 (1998): 42. 16. Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1993); Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (London: Continuum, 2002). Lozowick is somewhat out of step with most perpetrator research, seeing his subjects as “monsters” in the manner of post-war stereotypes; see the review by George Browder, “No Middle Ground for the Eichmann Männer?,” Yad Vashem Studies 31 (2003): 403– 24. For an excellent example of a man who was both a desk killer and an actual murderer, see Jürgen Matthäus, “Georg Heuser—Routinier des sicherheitspolizeilichen Osteinsatzes,” in Karrieren der Gewalt: Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien, ed. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004), 115–25. 17. Gerhard Paul, “Von Psychopathen, Technokraten des Terrors und ‘ganz gewöhnlichen’ Deutschen: Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung,” in Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche?, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002), 45. See also Steuer, “Eichmanns Emissäre” for similar comments on the “Judenberater”, especially Dannecker and Brunner, who combined bureaucracy and ideological commitment with particular brutality.

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18. George C. Browder, “Perpetrator Character and Motivation: An Emerging Consensus?,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 3 (2003): 495. 19. Paul, “Von Psychopathen,” 62. 20. Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 450. 21. Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169. 22. Ernst Cassirer, “Judaism and the Modern Political Myths,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7 (1944): 126. See also Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), esp. Part III for more detailed discussion. 23. For example: Donald Bloxham, “Organized Mass Murder: Structure, Participation, and Motivation in Comparative Perspective,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22, no. 2 (2008): 203–45; Dan Stone, “Genocide as Transgression,” European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 1 (2004): 45–65. 24. Chris Lorenz, “‘Won’t You Tell Me, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?’ On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Modernization Theory for Historical Study,” in The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historiography, ed. Q. Edward Wang and Franz L. Fillafer (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 113–16; A. Dirk Moses, “Structure and Agency in the Holocaust: Daniel J. Goldhagen and His Critics,” History and Theory 37, no. 2 (1998): 194–219. 25. Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (2002): 1–29; cf. Nicolas Werth, “The Crimes of the Stalin Regime: Outline for an Inventory and Classification,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 400–19, and Nicolas Werth, “Mass Deportations, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocidal Politics in the Later Russian Empire and the USSR,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 386–406. 26. But cf. Dirk Moses’ claims in “Paranoia and Partisanship: Genocide Studies, Holocaust Historiography, and the ‘Apocalyptic Conjuncture’,” The Historical Journal 54, no. 2 (2011): 553–83. 27. John Mueller, “The Banality of ‘Ethnic War’,” International Security 25, no. 1 (2000): 42–70. 28. “Licence” comes from Aristotle Kallis, “‘Licence to Kill’ and ‘Ordinary People’: The ‘Carnival’ of Eliminationist Violence,” in ch 10 of Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (London: Routledge, 2009). 29. Donald Bloxham and Fatma Müge Göçek, “The Armenian Genocide,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Stone, 367. 30. Tim Snyder, “The Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” New York Review of Books, July 16, 2009; Dan Stone, “Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography after the Cold War,” in The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 15–24. 31. Veena Das, “Collective Violence and the Shifting Categories of Communal Riots, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Stone, 93–127. 32. Dominick LaCapra, “Lanzmann’s Shoah: Here There Is No Why,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 268–9, n4.

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33. Oskar Verkaaik, “Fun and Violence: Ethnocide and the Effervescence of Collective Aggression,” Social Anthropology 11, no. 1 (2003): 3–22, on the MQM. 34. Mart Bax, “Warlords, Priests and the Politics of Ethnic Cleansing: A Case Study from Rural Bosnia-Hercegovina,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 1 (2000): 28, on Primorac. 35. Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (London: Hurst & Company, 2007), 13.

Bibliography Angrick, Andrej. Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003. Bax, Mart. “Warlords, Priests and the Politics of Ethnic Cleansing: A Case Study from Rural Bosnia-Hercegovina.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 1 (2000): 16–36. Bloxham, Donald. “Organized Mass Murder: Structure, Participation, and Motivation in Comparative Perspective.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22, no. 2 (2008): 203–45. Bloxham, Donald, and Fatma Müge Göçek. “The Armenian Genocide.” In The Historiography of Genocide, edited by Dan Stone, 344–72. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Browder, George. “No Middle Ground for the Eichmann Männer?” Yad Vashem Studies 31 (2003): 403–24. ———. “Perpetrator Character and Motivation: An Emerging Consensus?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 3 (2003): 480–97. Browning, Christopher R. Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Cassirer, Ernst. “Judaism and the Modern Political Myths.” Contemporary Jewish Record 7 (1944): 115–26. ———. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946. Das, Veena. “Collective Violence and the Shifting Categories of Communal Riots, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide.” In The Historiography of Genocide, edited by Dan Stone, 93–127. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Finchelstein, Federico. “The Holocaust as Ideology: Borges and the Meaning of Transnational Fascism.” Dapim: Studies on the Shoah 25 (2011): 273–300. Garbarini, Alexandra. “Reflections on the Holocaust and Jewish History.” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 1 (2012): 81–90. Hesse, Hermann. Narcissus and Goldmund. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Jinks, Rebecca. Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Kallis, Aristotle. Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe. London: Routledge, 2009. Kárný, Miroslav. “Waffen-SS und Konzentrationslager.” In Die nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager, edited by Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, and Christoph Dieckmann, vol. 2, 787–99. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002.

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LaCapra, Dominick. “Lanzmann’s Shoah: Here There Is No Why.” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 231–69. Langfus, Anna. The Whole Land Brimstone. London: Collins, 1962. Lorenz, Chris. “‘Won’t You Tell Me, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?’ On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Modernization Theory for Historical Study.” In The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historiography, edited by Q. Edward Wang and Franz L. Fillafer, 104–27. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. Lozowick, Yaacov. Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil. London: Continuum, 2002. Mallmann, Klaus-Michael. “Menschenjagd und Massenmord: Das neue Instrument der Einsatzgruppen und—kommandos 1938–1945.” In Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg: “Heimatfront” und besetztes Europa, edited by KlausMichael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul. Darmstadt: Primus, 2000. Matthäus, Jürgen. “Georg Heuser—Routinier des sicherheitspolizeilichen Osteinsatzes.” In Karrieren der Gewalt: Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien, edited by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul, 115–25. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004. Meindl, Ralf. Ostpreußens Gauleiter: Erich Koch—eine politische Biographie. Osnabrück: Fibre, 2007. Moses, A. Dirk. “Paranoia and Partisanship: Genocide Studies, Holocaust Historiography, and the ‘Apocalyptic Conjuncture’.” The Historical Journal 54, no. 2 (2011): 553–83. ———. “Structure and Agency in the Holocaust: Daniel J. Goldhagen and His Critics.” History and Theory 37, no. 2 (1998): 194–219. Mueller, John. “The Banality of ‘Ethnic War’.” International Security 25, no. 1 (2000): 42–70. Naimark, Norman M. Stalin’s Genocides. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Orth, Karin. “Die Kommandanten der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager.” In Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, edited by Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, and Christoph Dieckmann, vol. 2, 755–86. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002. ———. Die Konzentrationslager-SS: Sozialstrukturelle Analysen und biographische Studien. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004. Paul, Gerhard. “Von Psychopathen, Technokraten des Terrors und ‘ganz gewöhnlichen’ Deutschen: Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung.” In Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche?, edited by Gerhard Paul, 13–90. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002. Rieger, Berndt. Creator of Nazi Death Camps: The Life of Odilo Globocnik. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007. Safrian, Hans. Die Eichmann-Männer. Vienna: Europaverlag, 1993. Semelin, Jacques. Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. London: Hurst & Company, 2007. Smelser, Ronald, and Enrico Syring, eds. Die SS: Elite unter dem Totenkopf. 30 Lebensläufe. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000. Snyder, Timothy. “The Holocaust: The Ignored Reality.” New York Review of Books, July 16, 2009.

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Steur, Claudia. “Eichmanns Emissäre: Die ‘Judenberater’ in Hitlers Europa.” In Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg: “Heimatfront” und besetztes Europa, edited by Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann. Darmstadt: Primus, 2000, 403–36. ———. Theodor Dannecker. Ein Funktionär der “Endlösung”. Essen: Klartext, 1997. Stone, Dan. “Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography after the Cold War.” In The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory: Essays in the History of Ideas, 15–24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ———. “Genocide as Transgression.” European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 1 (2004): 45–65. ———. Histories of the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Tregenza, Michael. Christian Wirth: Inspekteur des SS-Sonderkommandos ‘Aktion Reinhard’, Typescript held at Wiener Library, London, 1993. Verkaaik, Oskar. “Fun and Violence: Ethnocide and the Effervescence of Collective Aggression.” Social Anthropology 11, no. 1 (2003): 3–22. Weitz, Eric D. “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges.” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (2002): 1–29. Werth, Nicolas. “The Crimes of the Stalin Regime: Outline for an Inventory and Classification.” In The Historiography of Genocide, edited by Dan Stone, 400– 19. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ———. “Mass Deportations, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocidal Politics in the Later Russian Empire and the USSR.” In The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 386–406. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Westermann, Edward B. “‘Ordinary Men’ or ‘Ideological Soldiers’? Police Battalion 310 in Russia, 1942.” German Studies Review 21, no. 1 (1998): 41–68. ———. “Shaping the Police Soldier as an Instrument for Annihilation.” In The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives of the Third Reich and Its Legacy, edited by Alan E. Steinweis and Daniel E. Rogers, 129–50. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

14 Reasonable Religion, Reasonable States, and Invisible Violence1 Heather Rae

Introduction It is striking how citizens and governments of settler colonial states have struggled to come to terms with the violence on which their states were founded, and how easily and for how long such societies have sought to evade any sense of responsibility for such violence and the consequences of it. In this chapter, I draw on Charles Taylor’s concept of the modern social imaginary to explore how genocidal violence toward Australia’s Indigenous populations was made possible, how it was rationalized, and how the reality of violence has long been obfuscated and denied.2 Within this “Grotian-Lockean” social imaginary, massacre on the expanding frontier, forced displacement, starvation, and ongoing cultural destruction, including the systematic removal of children from their families, were seen by many in white settler society from the early 19th century until well into the 20th century as parts of a “natural” or “evolutionary” process in which Indigenous peoples would die out, a process for which Europeans bore little or no responsibility. It was only in the second half of the 20th century, in a period when World War II had brought explicitly exterminatory violence into the heart of Europe, and European empires had crumbled, that the “repressed” history of such violence was examined in any systematic way. In this changing social and political environment, activists demanded equality and land rights. At the same time, historians began to question the silences in Australian history, which had, despite some honorable exceptions, ignored the existence of Indigenous peoples and violence on the frontier, or blamed Aboriginal peoples for what befell them.3 Thus investigation into the violent history of white settlement in Australia accelerated from the 1960s into the 1970s and 1980s as historians ventured into the archives and discovered a “fiercer kind of historical reality.”4 Yet, in the 1990s, conservative scholars, commentators, and politicians refuted claims about the violence at the heart of modern Australia’s history, setting off debates known as the “history wars.”5 I contend that genocidal patterns of violence are part of the historical record in colonial settler states, including Australia. While there was

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no single policy of extermination applied across Australia, exterminatory discourse can be found in different areas at different times and practices that were known to be destructive of both individuals and groups were pursued, regardless of the consequences. While some individual settlers and officials raised questions, the overwhelming logic in play was, to use Patrick Wolfe’s term, a “logic of elimination.”6 As the editors of this volume note, “genocidal violence spills beyond historically limited episodes and emerges in structural forms.” So, for example, in the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, “the history of specific acts of genocide—for example, the Trail of Tears—does not adequately reveal the persistent structures within which those episodes occurred, and continue to occur.”7 Likewise, albeit in different configurations, in Australia, specific events such as massacres and the forcible removal of children are part of a wider and deeper story of displacement, control, and cultural destruction—of not only removal from their lands but also of attempted erasure as Aboriginal—which occurred within a social imaginary which had no place for Indigenous Australians.8 To investigate these issues, I begin with brief consideration of genocide as an essentially contested concept and what this means for our understanding of and approach to the study of genocide in settler colonial states. I go on to discuss the modern European social imaginary, which was imported into Australia from the late 18th century. I then turn to consideration of how a shared “logic of elimination” developed in this context, which gave rise to the acceptance on the part of white Australia of social structures of violence and social exclusion that were destructive of lives, livelihoods, and communities—that were, in short, genocidal in their effects. The story of genocide in Australia is not a story of a single attempt to wipe out one people but a combination of different eliminatory strategies against different groups at different times and in different places as the frontier shifted and as territorial control in the form of private and Crown ownership of land was consolidated. Aboriginal peoples never were completely eliminated; indeed, the overall Australian Aboriginal population has more recently taken a demographic upturn. However, this logic of elimination has nonetheless had a strong impact on Indigenous peoples, the wider Australian society, and the relationship between them, as it played a crucial part in the formation of a nationstate out of a colonial outpost and has framed, for better or for worse, the context of contemporary contestation over past violence and what this violence means for the present and for the future.

Genocide as an Essentially Contested Concept In a 1974, a discussion by William Connolly noted that while Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide had been taken to refer to the planned extermination of racial or national groups, other situations might arise in

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which extermination is not complete and not planned as such “but flows knowingly from [for example] a war policy shaped by quite other objectives.”9 Under such circumstance, he argued, some may seek to revise the criteria by which the concept is defined, but if others resist that redefinition, then genocide would become a contested concept. Connolly notes how an essentially contested concept may be a “cluster concept,” meaning an “internally complex concept with a broad and variable set of criteria [in which] each criterion is itself relatively complex and open,” referring to other concepts. As Connolly puts it, “its very characteristics as a cluster concept provide the space within which such contests emerge.”10 It is apparent that this is the case with the concept of genocide and the way that contestation over its application has arisen in relation to the violence suffered by Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism.11 The Genocide Convention was created in the wake of the Holocaust where the records are clear and the intention to systematically kill millions is easy to find.12 The story is different in Australia where there was not an explicit “war policy” as such, though scholars have pointed to the important, though overlooked, role of war on the expanding frontier, and where there is no explicit state-sponsored policy of extermination to be found, although localized exterminatory discourse can certainly be identified.13 Here, the dominant European “Grotian” understanding of war “in the strict sense” as between “civilized” sovereign states must be called into question, as it served to obfuscate the reality of colonizing frontier wars.14 Behind the violence in Australia was a project of land usurpation and transformation into privately held agricultural land in the European model in which the consequences of death and cultural destruction did indeed “flow knowingly.” Following this, from the late 19th century the practice of removing children of mixed heritage from their families and communities also had a genocidal effect. The 1997 Bringing Them Home report into the “stolen generations,” referred to this as genocide as defined under Article II of the Convention, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including “(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”15 What is striking in reading the report is how often the word genocide is used in submissions to the inquiry on which it was based. Many of these are not concerned with debates over legal definitions, but with communicating what they had lived through or witnessed. As Dirk Moses points out, the destruction of Aboriginal ways of life was set in motion once Europeans considered it worth appropriating the land for a pastoral economy and this had a “genocidal effect.”16 This is where questions of intention and agency arise, for, as he asks, “can processes per se be genocidal? Does not genocide require an agent, or agents, that makes conscious choices and decisions?”17 What we see in Australia is that, while the initial impulse was not necessarily genocidal, the intention to appropriate land, the inability or refusal of the majority, if not all

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settlers, to recognize Indigenous peoples’ rights to land and the living to be gained from it, and the resistance of Aborigines to this usurpation, did lead to localized or regional exterminatory policies, as well as widespread displacement, disease, and social and cultural disruption, exacerbated in turn by culturally destructive government policies. Combined, these had a genocidal impact. I use both the terms “logic of elimination” and “genocide.” The strong potential for a logic of elimination to develop can be seen in the social imaginary that was imported into Australia, but it was in interactions between Aboriginal peoples and white settlers that this developed into a particular social formation, one that, although it shared a trajectory with other settler colonial states, also has its own unique qualities. By its very nature, genocide in Australia took a structural form, which is to say that social, cultural, and political configurations and the practices these legitimated over the longer term evolved out of an eliminatory logic. One criticism that can be made of this is that the “sense of the possibly complex and multivalent character of social action is what is missing in Wolfe’s attempt to fully encompass the present within a continuing logic.”18 However, to recognize how social structures develop and the effects they have does not have to mean overlooking agency and resistance in the development, perpetuation of, or changes to such structures. In Australia, genocidal processes developed out of the interaction between agents—white settlers and Aborigines—who existed within radically different social imaginaries, which, I argue, were and are nested within different ontologies. Tracing such genocidal effects means tracing a diverse and diffuse range of documented statements, policies, and practices, and historians have done just this. It also means investigating notable silences, to the extent that this is possible.19 It means accepting a wider definition of genocide that does not depend on “intention,” narrowly defined, or restrict this to official state actors.20 This also means looking at the social imaginary that was imported to Australia at colonization, and how this carried the potential for such systematic and destructive violence within it. It is to consideration of this that I now turn.

The Modern Social Imaginary The concept of “the modern social imaginary” speaks to how common understandings can develop in which “ordinary people imagine their social surroundings,” in non-theoretical terms, even though theories may influence the shared imaginary: the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. In addition, we should note that what start off as theories held by a few people may come to infiltrate the social imaginary, first that of

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Taking this approach, which emphasizes “political and even spiritual changes,” to understanding violence in colonial Australia is not to say that those who emphasize the economic imperative behind land appropriation are mistaken.22 Rather, it highlights how the economic imperative was itself part of a broader reconfguration of social, political, and moral order that had been developing over centuries leading into the early modern period. The transition into what we now regard as the modern epoch entailed not only the development of capitalism and early modern states but, concomitant with these changes, new conceptions of the individual subject and, in the Protestant Reformation, a new conception of the relationship between the individual and God. This in turn impacted understandings of the relationships between the individual, society, the sovereign, and the state. In the context of these changes, well underway but by no means fully recognized in the 17th century, John Locke articulated a distinctive idealization of a society of rational, property-owning individuals, whose government was based on consent. Central here is an economistic conception of society in which Locke “views mutual service in terms of profitable exchange” between individuals, and in which economic activity should be “ordered, peaceful, productive.”23 As Taylor notes, this modern social imaginary is now so self-evident to us, we have trouble seeing it as one possible conception among others. The mutation of this view of moral order into our social imaginary is the development of certain social forms that characterize Western modernity: the market economy, the public sphere, the self-governing people, among others.24 For our purposes, this must be amplifed: this social imaginary is implicitly statist, as self-governing people are taken to be within the bounds of a territorial sovereign state, it is imperial in its reach and its hierarchical conception of political relations between the “civilized” and “uncivilized,” and in this it is deeply racialized, excluding those considered to be “lesser” (i.e., not white) races from civilization and, often, humanity.25 There was both continuity and change in the 17th-century understanding of how imperial acquisition of territory and domination of peoples could be legitimated. The idea that all things in nature exist in potential to be used by humans can be traced to Aristotle and then onward through Christianity. From this perspective, it is the nature of human beings to realize this potential through their use and exploitation of natural

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resources, through which “they establish property and just dominion.”26 As Andrew Fitzmaurice argues, These principles are foundational for Western cultures; they are not just the intellectual propositions of philosophers. The ideas that ownership of property is based upon use (later also expressed by John Locke) and more broadly that we demonstrate that we are human through the exploitation of nature (or that we are not human if we fail to do so) are fundamental to European history.27 However, the framework within which “use” was understood and applied was changing in the 17th century with a shift toward property being understood in a more individualistic way, and it was Locke who articulated this most clearly. Where others, even in his own time, considered that the state existed to protect private property, which it made possible, for Locke the state was created in order to protect private property that already existed.28 Individuals were understood by Locke to hold property, in their persons and their labor, prior to the existence of the state: Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.29 This conception of the individual as holding property in the person shows the reconfguration of selfhood in play in Locke’s time, particularly in England, into what we now recognize as a version of homo economicus. As J.W. Gough notes, “Locke’s theory of labour as the origin of the right of property leads to the labour theory of value. It is labour, he declares, that ‘puts the difference on value of everything.’”30 Gough distinguishes Locke’s conception from later ones in that it was value for use, as it was for Aristotle. But despite this continuity, Locke also pivoted toward a very different social imaginary: value for use in the context of a market economy in a society made up of individuating, if not yet fully individuated and individualistic, subjects of government, the principles of legitimacy of which were also under serious challenge from these changes, with Locke himself playing an important role in this challenge. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that by the 17th century there was a move away from emphasizing the role of conquest in gaining imperial possessions. Instead, empire came to be understood as commercial and benign, that is, liberal, and therefore bound to bring progressive

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change to those in its path. While this self-understanding may certainly have worked as an ideological rationalization, or a “sentimental reflection,” it was also an expression of English and later British identity as a commercial and self-governing people.31 In practice, this reimagining of the collective self, and the world in which it operated, would enable both the justification and the denial of violence committed in the name of bringing such “liberty” and development to the peoples ruled over or colonized in the name of the British Empire, arguments exemplified in the 19th century in the work of James and J.S. Mill. Given the “refurbishing [of] the image of empire” it is also not surprising that even in his time Locke was “squeamish” about using the term conquest, even though British lands in America had actually long been held as “lands of conquest.”32 Returning to the concept of “use,” in 16th-century debates over the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, Francisco di Vitoria had famously argued that where peoples explicitly make use of the natural world they have established property. Thus, according to the Roman law of the first taker, res nullius, since the land had been used it was not free to be taken by the Spanish.33 There have always been internal critiques of imperial expropriation, but nonetheless, arguments that justified such expropriation, displacement, and elimination were dominant.34 In the 17th century, English thinkers, including Locke, argued that North American Indians had not made use of the land and therefore they could take possession of it. Indeed, the influence of Locke’s engagement with British interests in North America runs through his chapter “On Property” in the second of his Two Treatises on Government.35 North American Indians, thought to be living in a state of nature (“In the beginning All the World was America”) provide a constitutive foil to his reflections on Europeans’ higher stage of social, political, and economic development— what he understood as their more sophisticated conceptions of property, and how political life should be organized. I now turn to consideration of the impact of the European social imaginary in Australia. How did this underpin a “logic of elimination,” to return to Wolfe’s term, that gave rise to policies and practices that would develop into genocidal patterns and, what is also important to understand, how did it—and how does it continue to—obscure the reality of this violence for the great majority of white Australians?

The Australian Social Imaginary Locke’s work both articulated changes that were underway in his time and pointed to the future. By the late 18th century, when the First Fleet landed in what would become Australia, what may have seemed abstract social theory in Locke’s time was deeply embedded in everyday understanding and practice. Conceptions of turning “commons” into private property through labor, of value gained through such use of natural resources,

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the moral superiority of a pastoral or agricultural economy, and of the contrast between civilization and savagery were well entrenched in a way that blinded most, if not all, settlers to the savagery of their onslaught on Australia’s Indigenous peoples and their environment. John Gasgoine notes how this deeply entrenched way of understanding the world was exported to Australia, forming “a central core of the mental world of what eventually became the Australian nation.”36 This mentality was nested in an ontology that was both world constructing for the white settlers and world denying for Indigenous Australians.37 The British imported an individualized conception of the self and therefore particular conceptions of relationships between individuals and between individuals and the land that they set out to take ownership of and to control. This was deeply at odds with Indigenous conceptions of sociality, cosmology, and their reciprocal, “profoundly relational” connections to land.38 If agriculture “holds a sovereign place in the Western imaginary,” in a history that reaches far back beyond modernity, by the late 18th century, this was now pursued within the frame of the far-reaching changes I have outlined here, with agriculture now understood in terms of the generation of private profit and capital accumulation, within an expansionary imperial economic context.39 Filtered through the preconceptions of the settlers, if land was seen as uncultivated it could be understood as common property, so that it could be, in explicitly Lockean terms, “legitimately” appropriated and turned into private property through the application of labor. Wolfe notes that this was not merely a matter of what was observed by settlers but rather, that “Indigenous people are by definition nonagricultural,” and they were represented this way no matter what they actually did, in both North America and Australia. The centrality of agriculture to colonial identity, he argues, meant that, “settler-colonial discourse is impervious to glaring aporias such as sedentary natives or the fact that the settlers themselves have come from somewhere else.”40 More recently, Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe, using the diaries of early settlers and explorers, show how they actually recorded evidence of land management and cultivation all around them, but most failed to credit Australian Aboriginal peoples with working the beautiful and productive lands they came across.41 For the early European arrivals in Australia, the imperative, beyond the initial one of physical survival, was economic development, which also provided a strongly aspirational motivation for freed convicts and formerly landless immigrants. This inevitably meant ever-widening encroachment upon Aboriginal lands. This is not to say that there were never any critics among the settlers or in London, or that some individuals could not see that Aborigines were doing no less than what they would also do in seeking to defend their livelihoods.42 However, the majority blamed Aborigines for their own destruction, drawing on stadial conceptions of history to cast the extinction of Indigenous peoples as inevitable. Thus,

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the diseases such as smallpox that killed many Aborigines early on were seen a part of evolution playing out and the effects of social breakdown were taken as proof of Aborigines’ moral failings.43 This outlook was given further credence in the 19th century by the reception of Charles Darwin’s work on evolution. While it is the impact of the “civilized” on the “savage” that will see Aborigines die out, there is no responsibility to be apportioned as it is taken to be part of the natural order of things. As Tony Barta notes, Darwin conflated natural and human history in a way that drew from the practices of exterminating colonists and served (whether or not this was his intention) to naturalize them. Embedded in the modern social imaginary, the “‘realistic’ frontiersmen who were not by instruction or imitation [Darwin’s] disciples had a broad understanding and moral ideology hard to separate from the conclusions he was developing, in part, from their example.”44 It was as though there was a “mysterious agency” at work. Thus, “any ‘extirpating’ acts the ‘varieties of man’ might commit are naturalized in terms that would be reassuring to his readers but now sound more disturbing.”45 Those who survived this onslaught were pushed off their lands and corralled into missions and reserves. However, by the late 19th century, those who were sure Aborigines would die out were also faced with the reality that, while the numbers of “full blood” Aborigines were in decline, the numbers of mixed-heritage children were growing. These concerns began to crystallize around the time of federation (1901) into what would become policies of child removal in the name of racial absorption and, after World War II, cultural assimilation. As Barta puts it, “The question of race calculated in fractions was plain sense to Europeans of the time. It was never recognized by Aborigines, except as an insult to their humanity that they had to cope with every day.”46 This differed from the North American “one drop rule,” whereby any African ancestry “makes a person Black.”47 Instead, the concern was that “half-caste” children should not be brought up in “full-blood” communities. Rather, Aboriginality should be “bred out” into the white community so that: “In the course of a few years there will be no need for the camps and stations; the old people will have passed away, and their progeny will be absorbed in the industrial classes of the colony.”48 “Half-castes” were perceived as a moral threat to the white community and it was regarded as immoral to allow half-white children to grow up in Aboriginal communities. As Manne notes, “Some believed that unless the problem of the half-caste was solved, the White Australia idea—the most powerful consensual political value of the young Commonwealth— would be fatally compromised.” The solution was state-engineered “biological absorption.”49 Thus, as the conception of Australia as a sovereign state consolidated it was tied to an Australian identity understood as white European and the active pursuit of this policy by agents of the state was part of national state-building.50

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In the wake of the Holocaust, Australia stepped back from notions of biological absorption and cultural assimilation became the order of the day.51 Here, the logic of elimination took another form, but its cultureand community-destroying impact continued. Such removals, whether done in the name of absorption or assimilation, which occurred in every state except Tasmania, resulted in generations of Indigenous Australians and their descendants being separated from their families and distanced from, and sometimes unaware of, their cultural heritage.52 The Bringing Them Home report into the Stolen Generations was commissioned by the center-left government of the Australian Labor Party, but was delivered to a conservative government in 1997. As Manne describes it, this report was “treated by the Australian government, by the popular media, and by the right-wing intelligentsia with levity and derisive contempt.”53 The pendulum swung the other way under the center-left government that followed, and in 2008, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, on behalf of the nation, made a formal apology to the Stolen Generations. While the significance of the apology should not be underestimated, it has also given rise to disappointment. No reparations were considered and, as Barta notes, the apology did not situate the Stolen Generations in a wider historical context, namely recognition of the genocidal impact of a white settler state that had no place for Indigenous Australians. Instead, as he puts it, the reality of genocide got buried in the national apology.54 In short, official acknowledgements of historical wrongs, with few exceptions, have not recognized the full scale and meaning of Australia’s history. As I noted earlier, one danger of focusing on the logic of elimination is that it can underplay the agency of generations of Indigenous people who have resisted and fought for their rights. It may also discount government attempts at reform and how Australian society has changed, giving rise to a concerned Australian public, a significant part of which is now more sympathetic to Indigenous Australians.55 While this is certainly not the intention here, nonetheless, government policies continue to fail and the sympathetic public coexists with still widespread hostility toward Indigenous peoples.56 The return to parliament of, and rising support for, the populist, right-wing One Nation party, which is hostile to Indigenous rights and multiculturalism (most recently taking a strong anti-Islamic turn) sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to the thousands who recently marched to protest the Australia Day national holiday being held on the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet in 1778.57 Therefore, it is fair to argue that despite many changes, there are also many continuities with the modern social imaginary brought to Australia in the late 18th century, even though it may be under significant challenge from some quarters. Indeed, the contemporary triumph of neoliberal ideas and the hyperindividualization this carries, including the pathologizing of “problematic”

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communities as a drain on the resources of the state, are the latest manifestation of the Lockean social imaginary, albeit one on late modern steroids. Here, Locke’s “punctual self”—self-reflexive, self-responsible, self-objectifying, rational, and calculating—a “subject of disengagement and rational control,” that “has become a familiar modern figure,” takes form as the contemporary self-disciplining and disciplined subject of the neoliberal state.58 When Indigenous citizens are cast as problematic subjects of this state, it echoes the idea of the “ungovernable dispositions” of Indigenous Australians, as put forward by history Professor Stephen H. Roberts in the 1930s.59 While Morgan Brigg rightly cautions against accepting simple dichotomies, for after all, Western and Indigenous ontologies have become intertwined over the last 200+ years, all the same, it is obvious that significant differences of cosmology, culture, and law remain, as do extremely asymmetrical power relations.60 Indigenous Australians were not counted in the national census until 1967, and to this day, they are not mentioned in the Constitution, (though a referendum on this issue is currently under consideration), while Australia is the only settler state that has not signed a treaty with its first peoples, which remains a highly contentious subject. Indigenous peoples remain under significant pressure to move into the mainstream, even though they face significant barriers to doing so. Brigg terms this “excluded inclusion,” while Elizabeth Strakosch points to a continuing powerful logic of elimination that runs through both progressive and conservative politics and policy-making.61 This results in a structured form of violence and exclusion—a continuing “social formation of settler colonialism” that affects the lives and life chances of Indigenous Australians.62 Within a territorial sovereign state, in which the orientation toward the natural world is one of control and extraction, and the social orientation is highly individualist, Indigenous forms of knowledge, conceptions of identity in community and through attachment to land— that is, alternative ways of being—struggle to gain social respect and political traction. As Strakosch notes, unlike the post-colonial contexts in which oncecolonized peoples have achieved national self-determination and sovereign statehood, settler colonialism never came to an end, though recognition of this is rarely forthcoming: as she argues, “settler colonialism is a set of political relationships which continues to structure the Australian state’s relationship with Indigenous peoples and to obscure this structuring.”63 The pull then, she argues, in policy and scholarship, and despite the many good intentions of particular individuals, is often toward the denial of autonomous Aboriginal existence, which is rendered problematic for, and as posing a risk to, the unitary sovereign—“unruly dispositions” indeed. It is within this framework that successive governments have sought to recast their approaches, all with little success. All have failed to deal with the problems faced by Indigenous communities, and all have been

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characterized by the assumption that Indigenous peoples have to “come on board” with what exists. As Morgan Brigg and Lyndon Murphy put it, “Aboriginal people have been invited to join a political order, not to be a party to constituting one.”64

Conclusion In my discussion of the modern social imaginary and genocide in Australia, I have outlined the broad contours of the ontological “map” that was imported to Australia at white settlement. This was individualist, economistic, and instrumentalist, while the stadial view of history embedded in it resonated with and was reinforced by the racialized evolutionary discourse that developed in the 19th century. It was imperial and, at its core, both statist and racist. From the beginning, British conceptions of sovereignty at home and the empire abroad were carried into Australia and, over the course of the 19th century translated into a consolidation of sovereign statehood, the legitimacy of which was reflected in J.S. Mill’s argument that settler colonies were entitled to self-government.65 I have argued that this social imaginary underpinned the genocidal logic of elimination that quickly developed in colonial Australia. The effects of this logic can be seen in explicitly exterminatory practices, in widely shared notions of the “inevitable” dying out of Indigenous peoples, in the corralling of Indigenous peoples in reserves or missions, in the forcible removal of children of mixed heritage from their families and communities, and, today, in the continuing “social formation of settler colonialism” in which the life spans and life chances of Indigenous Australians continue to be severely compromised. The modern social imaginary also underpinned the occlusion of the reality of the foundation of the nationstate in a story of Australia as a white country, in which white pioneers had struggled valiantly against the bush, as though Aboriginal Australians were never there and agents acting according to the logic of elimination had not been at work pushing them out of sovereign space, one way or another. As I noted, this conception of Australian society and history has been challenged since the second half of the 20th century, not least by Indigenous activists. Historians went back to the archives and wrote histories that questioned the “whitewash” that had obliterated the reality of violence on the frontier and all that followed which, as I have argued, had genocidal effects, the consequences of which Indigenous Australians still live with today. Although there have been significant changes in the 20th and 21st centuries, “reconciliation,” such as it is, has occurred in terms of a framework set by the settler social imaginary, which now takes neoliberal form. Thus, Indigenous Australians live under conditions of “excluded inclusion,” where other Australians can be “sorry, and not sorry,” that is, yes we are sorry, but don’t push us to look too hard at our

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past. In short, there is still strong resistance to looking squarely at the past and to naming the violence that occurred, in various forms down the generations, genocidal. Taken together, the continuing challenges faced by Indigenous Australians today—from dire standards of living and education for many, high rates of infant mortality, and preventable diseases and high rates of incarceration, to the lack of adequate recognition of the history of genocidal violence that accompanied white settlement, and how this history lives on in the present—all point toward the continuation of the modern social imaginary as the dominant social formation and, with it, the continuation of the logic of elimination. To say this is not to argue that it cannot be challenged, but it is to acknowledge that this social formation retains great coercive and discursive power.

Notes 1. For helpful conversations about and comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, I would like to thank Chris Reus-Smit, Morgan Brigg, Paul Muldoon, Paul Keal, and the editors. 2. Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 91–124; Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 3. A. Dirk Moses, “Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 12–16. On Aboriginal activists of the 1930s see Tim Rowse, “The Reforming State, the Concerned Public and Indigenous Political Actors,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 56, no. 1 (2010): 66–81. 4. Raymond Evans, Fighting Words: Writing about Race (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999), 15; also see Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War (Sydney, NSW: NewSouth Publishing, 2013), 1–7; for an early collection of documents see Henry Reynolds, ed., Aborigines and Settlers: The Australian Experience 1788–1939 (North Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1972). 5. Robert Manne, introduction to Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, ed. Robert Manne (Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2003); also see Thomas James Rogers and Stephen Bain, “Genocide and Frontier Violence in Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research 18, no. 1 (2016): 83–100; A. Dirk Moses, “An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colonization of Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 89–106. 6. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 102–32. 7. See p. 1 of the present volume. 8. Wolfe, “Structure and Event.” 9. William E. Connolly, “Essentially Contested Concepts (1974),” in William E. Connolly: Democracy, Pluralism and Political Theory, ed. Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007), 270.

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10. Connelly, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” 260; also see Christopher Powell, Barbarian Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 58–78. 11. Robert van Krieken, “Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and Settler-Colonial State Formation,” Oceania 75, no. 2 (December 2004): 126. 12. Raymond Evans, ‘“Crime without a Name’: Colonialism and the Case for ‘Indigenocide’,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 133–47. 13. Reynolds, Forgotten War; Rogers and Bain, “Genocide and Frontier Violence.” On the often bitter disputes over whether the Holocaust stands as the measure by which all genocides should be defined, see A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 7–36. 14. Paul Keal, “Beyond ‘War in the Strict Sense’,” in The Globalization of International Society, ed. Tim Dunne and Christian Reus-Smit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), 165–84. 15. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, “Bringing Them Home”: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Canberra, 1997); van Krieken, “Rethinking Cultural Genocide,” 126. 16. Moses, “An Antipodean,” 90. 17. Ibid. 18. Francesca Merlan, “Reply to Patrick Wolfe,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 41, no. 2 (1997): 11. 19. Jan Kokiumbuas notes that what was not said about smallpox in the new colony is interesting in itself. See Jan Kokiumbaus, “Genocide and Modernity in Colonial Australia,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 77–102; also see Christopher Warren, “Smallpox at Sydney Cove: Who, When, Why?,” Journal of Australian Studies 38, no. 1 (2014): 68–86. On the silences surrounding massacres in the area of Gippsland in the state of Victoria, see Rogers and Bain, “Genocide and Frontier Violence.” 20. Wolfe, “Structure and Event.” 21. Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” 106. 22. Moses, “An Antipodean,” 104; Wolfe, “Structure and Event.” 23. Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” 97. 24. Ibid., 92. 25. Edward Keene, Beyond The Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Paul Muldoon sees the principle of sovereignty that was assumed to be universal at this time and that was quickly imposed on Indigenous Australians as Hobbesian, whereas I see a version of Locke’s imperial and statist version of sovereignty, namely a form of sovereignty that was consonant with liberal imperialism, in play. This aside, Muldoon clearly traces the way in which under the settler construction of sovereignty and Indigenous resistance was framed as “criminal.” Paul Muldoon, “The Sovereign Exceptions: Colonization and the Foundation of Society,” Social and Legal Studies 17, no. 1 (2008): 59–74. On the deeply racist conceptual assumptions at work see Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

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26. Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius,” Australian Historical Studies 38, no. 129 (2007): 7. 27. Fitzmaurice, “The Genealogy,” 7. 28. J. W. Gough, John Locke’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 81. 29. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), V: 27, 287. 30. Gough, John Locke’s Political Philosophy, 92. Locke, Two Treatises, V: 40, 269. 31. Anthony Pagden, “The Empire’s New Clothes: From Empire to Federation, Yesterday and Today,” Common Knowledge 12, no. 1 (2006): 42. Also see Mills, The Racial Contract, 18, on the “epistemology of ignorance” in which a received version of history serves to erase the violence of white imperialism and the inequality of the social structures that developed in its wake. 32. Pagden, “The Empire’s New Clothes,” 40. 33. Fitzmaurice, “The Genealogy,” 6–7. 34. Andrew Fitzmaurice, “Anticolonialism in Western Political Thought: The Colonial Origins of the Concept of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 55–80. 35. David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Treatises of Government’,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–27. 36. John Gasgoine, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6. 37. In this regard, it is interesting how Claudia Card, drawing on Orlando Patterson’s work on slavery, characterizes genocide as “social death,” in which as it destroys the “relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that create contexts and identities that give meaning and shaper our lives.” Claudia Card, Confronting Evils (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 237. 38. Morgan Brigg, “Biopolitics Meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia,” Australian Journal of Political Science 42, no. 3 (2007): 407, 410. 39. Wolfe, “Structure and Event,” 112. 40. Ibid., 113. 41. Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2011); Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2014). 42. Moses, “Genocide and Settler Society,” 6. 43. Jan Kociumbas, “Genocide and Modernity in Colonial Australia,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 82. 44. Tony Barta, “Mr Darwin’s Shooters: On Natural Selection and the Naturalizing of Genocide,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 128. 45. Ibid., 124–5. 46. Tony Barta, “Sorry, and Not Sorry, in Australia: How the Apology to the Stolen Generations Buried a History of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 2 (2008): 202. 47. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism.” 48. Robert Donaldson, chief inspector of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board for more than a decade after 1916 cited in Peter Read, “The Return of the Stolen Generation,” Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 59 (1998): 10. 49. Robert Manne, “Aboriginal Child Removal and the Question of Genocide,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous

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51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

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Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 227. In this characterization, I revise an earlier conception of how state-builders create a unified corporate identity through targeting minorities, using a range of practices ranging from assimilation to extermination, which I termed “pathological homogenization.” The implication of this could be that assimilation may not be genocidal, whereas ethnic cleansing or extermination would be. Australia, like other settler states, shows that policies of biological absorption and cultural assimilation can be genocidal in their effects. Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Manne, “Aboriginal Child Removal,” 239. Read, “The Return of the Stolen Generation.” Manne, “Aboriginal Child Removal,” 218. Tony Barta, “Sorry, and Not Sorry,” 201–14. Tim Rowse, “The Reforming State.” In a recent national poll, 59% of Aboriginal respondents reported experiences of discrimination. Recent African migrants and Muslim women also reported even higher rates of discrimination. Scanlon Foundation, Australians Today Report, 2016, http://scanlonfoundation.org.au/australians-today/ Martin McKenzie-Murray,“The Return of One Nation,” The Saturday Paper, July 9, 2016, www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2016/07/09/thereturn-pauline-hanson-and-one-nation/14679864003470; Kate Darian-Smith, “Australia Day, Invasion Day, Survival Day: A Long History of Celebration and Contestation,” The Conversation, January 26, 2017, http://theconversation. com/australia-day-invasion-day-survival-day-a-long-history-of-celebrationand-contestation-70278 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 160. Cited in Moses, “Genocide and Settler Society,” 14. Brigg, “Biopolitics,” 405; Elizabeth Strakosch, “Colonial Risk Management,” Borderlands 11, no. 1 (2012): 6. Brigg, “Biopolitics,” 407. I cannot do justice to these issues here, but according to recent findings, Indigenous male life expectancy is 10.6% below that of non-Indigenous males, while female life expectancy is 9.5 years less. Sixty-five percent of Indigenous people die before the age of 65, compared to 19% for nonIndigenous Australians. Infant mortality is falling, but is still at 4.2% for the Indigenous population compared to 0.8% for the non-Indigenous population. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, The Health and Welfare of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples 2015 (Canberra: AIHW, 2015), Chapter 6. While Indigenous Australians make up 3% of the population, they represent 28% of the prison population. Indigenous juveniles are 31 times more likely to be in detention than their non-Indigenous peers. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Corrective Services, Australia, June Quarter 2016, Cat. No. 4512.0, Canberra, 2016, www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/ [email protected]/mf/4512.0. Finally, in a pattern that is also to be seen in Canada, an epidemic of suicide, including youth suicide, is currently sweeping Indigenous Australia. Leonie Thorne, “Indigenous Suicide: Thousands Call for Royal Commission, Prevention Measures,” Australian Broadcasting Commission, last modified July 14, 2016, www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-14/ calls-for-royal-commission-into-indigenous-suicide/7626862 Strakosch, “Colonial Risk,” 5. Morgan Brigg and Lyndon Murphy, “Noel Pearson’s Hunt for the Radical Centre is Doomed,” The Age, last modified February 18, 2016, www.

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theage.com.au/comment/pearsons-hunt-for-the-radical-centre-is-doomed20160218-gmxcbe.html 65. Though later in life, Mill did have reservations when faced with the reality of settler violence toward Indigenous peoples. Katherine Smits, “John Stuart Mill on the Antipodes: Settler Violence Against Indigenous People and the Legitimacy of Colonial Rule,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 54 (2008): 1–15.

Biblography Armitage, David. “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two ‘Treatises of Government’.” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–27. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Corrective Services, Australia, June Quarter 2016. Cat. No. 4512.0. Canberra, 2016. www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/ mf/4512.0. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. The Health and Welfare of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples 2015. Canberra: AIHW, 2015. Chapter 6. Barta, Tony. “Mr Darwin’s Shooters: On Natural Selection and the Naturalizing of Genocide.” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 116–37. ———. “Sorry, and Not Sorry, in Australia: How the Apology to the Stolen Generations Buried a History of Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 2 (2008): 201–14. Brigg, Morgan. “Biopolitics Meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia.” Australian Journal of Political Science 42, no. 3 (2007): 403–17. Brigg, Morgan, and Lyndon Murphy.“Noel Pearson’s Hunt for the Radical Centre Is Doomed.” The Age. Last modified February 18, 2016. www.theage.com.au/ comment/pearsons-hunt-for-the-radical-centre-is-doomed-20160218-gmxcbe. html. Card, Claudia. Confronting Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Connolly, William E. “Essentially Contested Concepts (1974).” In William E. Connolly: Democracy, Pluralism and Political Theory, edited by Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver, 257–79. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008. Darian-Smith, Kate. “Australia Day, Invasion Day, Survival Day: A Long History of Celebration and Contestation.” The Conversation¸ January 26, 2017. http:// theconversation.com/australia-day-invasion-day-survival-day-a-long-historyof-celebration-and-contestation-70278. Evans, Raymond. “‘Crime Without a Name’: Colonialism and the Case for ‘Indigenocide’.” In Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, edited by A. Dirk Moses, 133–47. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. ———. Fighting Words: Writing about Race. St. Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1999. Fitzmaurice, Andrew. “Anticolonialism in Western Political Thought: The Colonial Origins of the Concept of Genocide.” In Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, edited by A. Dirk Moses, 55–80. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. ———. “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius.” Australian Historical Studies 38, no. 129 (2007): 1–15.

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Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2011. Gasgoine, John. The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Gough, J.W. John Locke’s Political Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. “Bringing Them Home”: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Canberra: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997. Keal, Paul. “Beyond ‘War in the Strict Sense’.” In The Globalization of International Society, edited by Tim Dunne and Christian Reus-Smit, 165–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Keene, Edward. Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics. Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kociumbas, Jan. “Genocide and Modernity in Colonial Australia.” In Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, edited by A. Dirk Moses, 77–102. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited with introduction and notes by Peter Laslett, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Manne, Robert. “Aboriginal Child Removal and the Question of Genocide.” In Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, edited by A. Dirk Moses, 217–43. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004. ———. Introduction to Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, edited by Robert Manne. Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2003. McKenzie-Murray, Martin. “The Return of One Nation.” The Saturday Paper, July 9, 2016. www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2016/07/09/thereturn-pauline-hanson-and-one-nation/14679864003470. Merlan, Francesca. “Reply to Patrick Wolfe.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 41, no. 2 (1997): 9–19. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Moses, A. Dirk. “An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colonization of Australia.” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 89–106. ———. “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust.” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 7–36. ———. “Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History.” In Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, edited by A. Dirk Moses, 3–48. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004. Muldoon, Paul. “The Sovereign Exceptions: Colonization and the Foundation of Society.” Social and Legal Studies 17, no. 1 (2008): 59–74. Pagden, Anthony. “The Empire’s New Clothes: From Empire to Federation, Yesterday and Today.” Common Knowledge 12, no. 1 (2006): 36–46. Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agricultures or Accident? Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2014.

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Powell, Christopher. Barbarian Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Rae, Heather. State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Read, Peter. “The Return of the Stolen Generation.” Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 59 (1998): 8–19. Reynolds, Henry, ed. Aborigines and Settlers: The Australian Experience 1788– 1939. North Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1972. Reynolds, Henry. Forgotten War. Sydney, NSW: NewSouth Publishing, 2013. Rogers, Thomas James, and Stephen Bain. “Genocide and Frontier Violence in Australia.” Journal of Genocide Research 18, no. 1 (2016): 83–100. Rowse, Tim. “The Reforming State, the Concerned Public and Indigenous Political Actors.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 56, no. 1 (2010): 66–81. Scanlon Foundation. Australians Today Report, 2016. http://scanlonfoundation. org.au/australians-today/. Smits, Katherine. “John Stuart Mill on the Antipodes: Settler Violence against Indigenous People and the Legitimacy of Colonial Rule.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 54 (2008): 1–15. Strakosch, Elizabeth. “Colonial Risk Management.” Borderlands 11, no. 1 (2012): 1–28. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. ———. “Modern Social Imaginaries.” Public Culture 14, no.1 (2002): 91–124. ———. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Thorne, Leonie. “Indigenous Suicide: Thousands Call for Royal Commission, Prevention Measures.” Australian Broadcasting Commission. Last modified July 14, 2016. www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-14/calls-for-royal-commissioninto-indigenous-suicide/7626862. van Krieken, Robert. “Cultural Genocide in Australia.” In The Historiography of Genocide, edited by Dan Stone, 228–55. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ———. “Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and SettlerColonial State Formation.” Oceania 75, no. 2 (December 2004): 125–51. Warren, Christopher. “Smallpox at Sydney Cove: Who, When, Why?” Journal of Australian Studies 38, no. 1 (2014): 68–86. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. ———. “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide.” In Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, edited by A. Dirk Moses, 102–32. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.

Epilogue Theses on Our Only Possible Future James R. Watson

1 History, like the course of a child’s development, is marked by repression, repetition, memory, the return of the repressed, and unpredictable breakthrough. The latter threatens guardians of history, social normality, and especially children. But history, society, and human beings are not closed systems. Of the many things imposed upon today’s youth, terrifying images of the undead in tireless pursuit of life’s vital fluid form a good part of children’s developing transcendental frame of reality. And it’s not just zombies! Other images concocted by the culture industry supplement the prime directive of the Master Signifier—Capital: Accumulate, concentrate, and destroy whatever/whomever stands in the way of expansion. No longer confined to Transylvania or Peoria, Illinois, the Master Signifier allows no limitations, especially all forms of regulation still oozing from the dead signifiers, humanity, and the nation-state. Once bitten, you survive only by biting others harder. Such is the way of domination, power—excellence, leaving others behind. We have now left so many behind, plutocracy—the rule of the best, brightest, and richest— seems inevitable to the rubbed away detritus. At long last, politics has been taken over by the business class.

2 I remember one of my earlier encounters with this future as a repetition of the galloping present. While on a short break from my welding labors at Allis Chambers in Milwaukee, I joined a group of comrades watching a huge robotic welding machine perform what we were then still paid to do. The older workers simply moaned. They knew they were about to be left behind. We younger ones began to understand the worn faces of our elders—we were all in the accelerating repetition of the same called the rationalization of work. Robotic labor, we, each and all, anticipate as mindless and repetitive paid workers, achieves nothing other than the relentless depletion of resources in the insatiable lust for profits for the employers. It was my first encounter with “artificial intelligence” and the

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telos of completely “rationalized” production. My experience of the socalled rationalization of production and the worker came some 40 years after a Ford worker recalled his experience: Workers cease to be human beings as soon as they enter the gates of the shop. They become automatons and cease to think. They move their arms to and fro, stopping long enough to eat in order to keep the human machinery in working order for the next four hours of exploitation . . . Many healthy workers have gone to work for Ford and have come out human wrecks.1 But I, on the other hand, was only earning enough to get a “Master’s” degree in philosophy. I did not then understand the many ways of becoming superfuous and the genocidal implications of rationalized production. Then, along with many others brighter than me, I knew about the supposed population problem: too many people and not enough food. And, so I thought then, rationalized, automated production would certainly solve this problem. But again, I did not understand the horrifc consequences of such increases in capitalist production and environmental destruction.

3 Today, however, there is no excuse for not knowing that “if the poorest 3 billion people on the planet somehow disappeared tomorrow, there would be virtually no reduction in ongoing environmental destruction.”2 The rich nations and peoples are the real population problem. The growth of prosperity fueled by the profit imperative and the consequent destruction of resources has resulted in a vapid distinction between “fine art” and art that is not only useful but indicative of centuries of creative experience necessary for sustainable life. We now learn how to obey without historical and current experiences contradicting the violent intromissions refusing all translation and thus governing our unconscious psychic life.3

4 We thereby learn what the Master wants in the many burgeoning schools of power, domination. In 1933, a year of great celebration for antiSemites, John Dewey wrote some very intelligent essays concerning the immediate effects of science and technology upon customs and institutions of society. Chronic insecurity, intensified emphasis of acquisition, apathy and incapacity of thought in collective matters, heightened individual egoism, distrust of planned endeavors to regulate worsening social conditions, growing pessimism about the value of democracy, and the creation of “a popular mentality which regards acquisitive motives as

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the normal ones in human nature and which correspondingly depresses activity that is moved by direct interest in work itself for its own sake, productive activity as such.”4 The way out of domination is ironically the way in, and through things without dominating them. You cannot know another person/object by means of domination, including the unconscious imperatives making such attempts so very difficult. You can’t go with your “gut” to break the hold of domination.

5 Dewey was one of my earliest encounters in philosophy. In time, I understood him as one of the greatest advocates of the centrality of art as experience, as a way out of domination (power) by freely working in and with things, persons, and places. It was Dewey who first said, “the idea of art as a conscious idea [is] the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity.”5 Shortening a rather long and very convoluted story, I became what the globalized anti-Semites call a materialist who loves people, animals, and things in free interplay.

6 Back in the day, in 1787, Kant cautioned us that the schematism of our understanding is “an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.”6 Our psychic apparatus has been captivated and tortured for many centuries. Guardians, like the warden in the film Cool Hand Luke, insist that we “get our mind right.” In 1951, Camus wrote: Sade’s success in our day is explained by the dream that he had in common with contemporary thought: the demand for total freedom and dehumanization coldly planned by the intelligence. The reduction of man to an object of experiment, the rule that specifies the relation between the will to power and man as an object, the sealed laboratory that is the scene of this monstrous experiment, are lessons the theoreticians of power will discover again when they come to organizing the age of slavery.7

7 In the last 500 years, genocide, mass slaughter, slavery, imperialism, and degradation of workers have all intensified. With regard to the creation of concepts, let us call our inheritance what it really is—a skanky body of prescriptions for worldwide exploitation and slow death. We are immersed in this skanker culture. I say skanker because this culture is

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predominantly, but not exclusively, masculine. It is a culture of Big Dicks aroused by the humiliation, torture, and eventual annihilation of everything sustainable and anyone suspected of empathy, compassion, morality, and solidarity. It is le grand auto-da-fé under the direction of very rich sociopaths united against the vast majority of living beings. And some of them even get elected to run governments in the business-profit mode.

8 In the euphony of the recurring hierarchical dream of excellence, the master signifier Capital draws blood. Swollen to a mass of 6.8 billion humans and committed to another 2.7 billion by 2050, the animals make way for their masters. National ruling classes metastasize into global elites of businessmen, financiers, and politicians steering supra-national organizations such as the Americanized European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Produced in small quantities at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, a new superclass arrives in customized Gulfstream jets at the World Economic Forum at Davos, the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg meetings, Bohemian Grove seminars, and the Carlyle Group of financiers and former presidents plotting to make each other richer. As the earth’s population swells, inequality grows by staggering proportions. The richest 1% of humans now own 40% of the planet’s wealth. Jedem das Seine. Arête maintains its formal identity as all diversity is relegated, in true Platonic fashion, to mere material differences. Each part of the swollen earth is now parceled out to higher men organized in businesses for rendering all others their due. The others? Domesticated animals of various intelligence levels: pets, cattle, all beasts of burden, and all herded humans whose toil and trouble only brings the redemption of cultural exclusion. The great shepherds of Being do not chat with the blatherers.8

9 Since WWII, the higher men have become increasingly brazen in their quest for world domination. The teachings of Leo Strauss and his disciples, not to mention Ayn Rand, have come home among the richest of the rich. “There should be philosophy and knowledge for the elect, religion and sentimentality for the masses.”9 Commoners cannot understand the economic rationality of the malefactors of great wealth. Faith and opiates are their properly prescribed medications. Come eat and drink, enter into initiation, humiliate yourselves, and grow weaker in congregation. Above all, renounce the arrogance of thinking you can understand why yacht and private jet owners must not pay taxes. Though you cannot

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understand the great books of philosophy, you should follow Kierkegaard’s corrective for endless and pointless reflection. It can only be halted by the great life-transforming leap of faith.10

10 What are the projections for world population growth, global warming, and the ever-increasing global concentration of wealth? Today, the richest 1 percent of the world’s population own as much as the poorest 57 percent. Half of the world’s population live on less than two dollars a day; more than a billion people live on less than one dollar a day. Meanwhile, the top 20 percent of those living in high-income countries account for 86 percent of all of the world’s private consumption expenditures.11 Everyone knows what this means for the very near future, for the many who will be left behind in the rapture of globalized anti-Semitism on its way to world dominion. Men without political rights are superfluous men. They have lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with the power to defend such rights. They were perfectly consistent in demanding that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps. They also understood that by exterminating stateless men and women, they violated no law because such people were covered by no law.12

11 Do we, 70 years later, have any law to stop the accumulation and concentration of global capital in the face of impending global catastrophe? What is the United Nations but a reflection of the World Trade Organization? As Hannah Arendt pointed out in 1951, government has become the Hobbesian Commonwealth “based on the delegation of power, and not of rights.”13 Piece by piece, corporate reckoners have been fabricating a Hobbesian utopia—a totally privatized world government, a completely secretive, autocratic rule of multinational corporations empowered to eviscerate any laws and policies enacted by elected officials in the remnants of the nation-state. Forcing compensations from taxpayers must punish anything harming profits. In its most recent incarnation it is called the Trans-Pacific-Partnership (TPP). This cozy agreement between nation-states and corporations was initiated by President

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George W. Bush, “but instead of turning it around and making it something different, the Obama folks picked it up and, frankly, have made it even more extreme.”14

12 Is it really possible to stop the accumulation and concentration of capital and begin anew? Was Hannah Arendt being overly simplistic when she said: The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to a certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected of him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.15 Yes, and No. Political organization can and does regulate corporations and money, neither of which should ever be confated with politics itself: the good life can never be the life of riches stolen from people. Politics requires regulation of private interests to stop their exclusivity from preventing citizens’ participation in the public realm. It is no accident that very rich men attempting to enter and sabotage the public realm are often, despite their intentions, very comical . . . and frightening. Donald Trump has been elected president of the most powerful country in the world! The current attempt to privatize all public spaces aims precisely at the plurality of the human condition, attempting to transform plurality into a hodge-podge of opinions and lies that make no difference. Against this privatization attempt we must steadfastly assert “We are all equal and this is why our differences truly matter.”16

13 And this is what, against the odds, people are struggling to achieve—forming cooperatives, placing democracy within the workplace. “Currently, one billion people around the world are members of cooperatives.”17 It is even possible that universities, at least the public ones, will become cooperatives with professors in solidarity with other cooperative workers, delivering the goods by going outside the caves of private property and changing our subjectivity into something like what Kant called a transcendental subject—human equality. Never again: we will not renounce the hope for which millions perished. Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day?18

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14 Good judgment is not a trait of the recent U.S. Supreme Court. On January 21, 2010, in a five-to-four decision, the court declared the government incompetent to limit corporate power. The court upheld corporations as possessing all the rights of “free speech.” Government of, by, and for the people cannot limit the artificial hands of soulless corporations.19 Artificial intelligence now “trumps” human reflection, self-determination, and resistance. As the selection processes of global capitalism ramps up under the protection of special legal rights handed to it by superseded nation-states, the prospects for education after Auschwitz are not promising. The legal rights of corporations and investors now prevail over what remains of the rights of unions, public interest groups, and lessthan-wealthy individuals. The new artificial person, the corporation, is attempting to render the old flesh-and-blood person powerless to challenge and impede the divine flow of capital accumulation and concentration. As trade deals make clear, any educational program threatening corporate profits will be brought before secretive international tribunals composed of corporate attorneys to determine its fate. Sovereign nationstates are being eroded by what is rapidly becoming a privatized world government of transnational corporations. Power and domination set the odds, but never what people can do against the odds.

15 Domination engenders greater domination. What Adorno called “happiness without power” infuriates anti-Semites, old and new, who delight in domination and the eradication of equal rights.20 In America, during WWII, Adorno wrote: Modern society, in which primitive religious feelings and new forms of religion as well as the heritage of revolution are sold on the open market, in which the Fascist leaders bargain over the land and life of nations behind locked doors while the people sit by their radio sets and work out the cost; a society in which the word it unmasks is thereby legitimized as a component part of a political racket: this society, in which politics is not only a business but business the whole of politics, is gripped by a holy anger over the retarded commercial attitudes of the Jews and classifies them as materialists, and hucksters who must give way to the new race of men who have elevated business into an absolute.21 Seventy years later, what has changed other than the replacement of radios with cell phones? Who today, in the paranoiac eyes of antiSemites, are the ones with retarded commercial attitudes, the materialists and hucksters who refuse the replacement of democratic governments

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by the locked-door machinations of multinational cartels? Who, in other words, are the targets of contemporary globalized anti-Semitism?

16 The Council of Conservative Citizens, the Confederate League of the South, and Stormfront, to mention only a few defenders of American Southern symbols and heritage, warn us in the venerable tradition of oldfashioned anti-Semitism of the eminent Jewish-led attack on European Americans. Perhaps the racketeers of hospital and health care cartels? Yes, these racketeers do take aim at whatever and whoever impedes the privatization of public services. But the global intentions of contemporary anti-Semitism becomes visible only in the leaked documents of international trade deals during the last 15 years: NAFTA, CAFTA, and now TPP all strive for the establishment of a privatized world government with “secretive international tribunals to sue sovereign governments for damages when those governments pass public interest policies that threaten to cut into a corporation’s profits or seize a company’s property.”22

17 Unions, public interest groups, and individuals are rapidly becoming powerless against corporate rights to use secretive international tribunals called the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). TPP may or may not become law, but it clearly indicates the transnational corporations’ refusal to tolerate the “retarded commercial attitudes” of the “materialists” opposed to their privatized world order. Happiness without power will not be tolerated. Under such laws, the worker will be removed if he or she returns more to the thing upon which they work more than they received from it.23 The violence of capital aims at everything creative because to be happy without power is to be happy without conquest.

18 Capitalism is unhappiness projected without reflection upon all who return more than they receive from things. Greed demands the unhappiness of the happy. The dark force, the lust for conquest and domination, arises within those who cannot give more than they receive. Hatred of the surplus generated by creative persons, what Marx characterized as labor’s capacity, demands its impossible appropriation by those who cannot return more than they take from nature and workers. The capitalist hates those from whom he gets more than he pays precisely because the surplus appropriated brings no happiness, only the mania for more riches. The more demanded by the capitalist produces the impoverishment of the worker—the generalized misery of society.24 The morbid

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aspect of anti-Semitism is capitalism’s inability to see anything or anyone as capable of freely giving more than they receive.25 Everything received must be the product of conquest and domination. The ego—the self— must become nothing more than a dominated thing. The Jew must be conquered, annihilated.

19 Damaged life is normal life for survivors. Yet, happiness without power is life, severely damaged as it is, refusing to yield to domination. Today, in “the world of mass series production, stereotypes replace individual categories” and “judgments are no longer based on a genuine synthesis but on blind subsumption.”26 This is universalized anti-Semitism.

20 Metacide, the premeditated annihilation of spontaneous, free, and unpredictable creative activity, expresses the global, alienated truth of antiSemitism. What was done to Jews, to anyone happy without power, is now the Final Solution for all workers. The global corporate state’s project aims not just at the destruction of ecosystems for the sake of greater profits, it desperately craves substantiation of its metaphysical telos— the eradication of species-being.27 Elimination of surplus populations follows from rather simple arithmetic—a basic operation of capitalist reckoning.28 What’s good for business is not good for species-being. Supposedly, we all have a natural right to all things, but not all of us have the power to secure them—thus, competition. There can be no happiness without power.

21 The power of domination takes aim at any stretch in nature, at every region where thinking refuses rapid reckonings. All subjects are now taught as if they are known. Mediation is neither required nor permitted. Privatized schools lead, ironically, to a steady decline in the unique and unrepeatable process of the individual’s education.29 The formation of mass humans in schools follows the course of mass production under the banner of liberation from the grip of collectivist big government. All such slogans are feeble attempts to divert attention from what Marcuse analyzed as the specific historical project—“the experience, transformation, and organization of nature as the mere stuff of domination.”30 Privatization of education repeats the long process of isolating workers from one another in serialized production and union busting. However, just as parents and teachers complicit with the requirements of discipline for excellence in education cannot determine, except in the harshest of

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regimes, what children will “make” of what is imposed on them, violently inscribed production routines can only paralyze a working-through of these impositions if psychotic enclaves within workers develop as a result of seemingly inviolate categorical imperatives.31 The price for insisting upon the possession of nature is a psychosis, what Adorno calls reified consciousness.

22 Contrary to this psychosis, however, dialectic arises when we work freely with nature requiring reflection and mediation.32 Dialectic is a stretch in nature, never the simple, deceptive exchange of equivalents. Consciousness of the dialectic does not preexist the stretch. With free, spontaneous work, dialectic arises in the natural interaction of human animals and things. This consciously developed and articulated dialectic infuriates the capitalist insisting on ecological disaster for the sake of profit. Insistence on domination is fundamentally theological: only a supreme being has dominion over its creations. However, learning to work, individually and cooperatively without domination, liberates workers and nature from the utterly destructive imperatives of the psychotic capitalist master signifier. All so-called necessary historical development, especially that of the victory of the capitalist over the land-owner, issues from reified consciousness and its compulsive demand that the product of labor can only have the form and content preordained by the Master.33 All so-called necessary development is necessarily theological, following in accordance with the history of slavery. Such is the legacy sustained and propagated by capitalism. In the new geologic era, the Anthropocene, capitalist production has surpassed the Earth’s sustainable limits.34 We are truly on the path of the Rapture.

23 With free, creative work, the dialectic opens for all. The monster called world spirit, the entire culture of domination and slavery, can thus be seen as the backdrop pitted against a future revealed as possible in a global society of free, creative work. This dialectic requires a radical transformation of philosophy, one that should have begun immediately after Auschwitz. Happiness without power, the end of domination and metacide. It is our only possible future.

Notes 1. As quoted by Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 131–2. Also, for the connection of Kraft (domination) and Marx’s conception of human freedom as a consequence of

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

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expanding capitalist production, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor (New York: Basic Books, 1990), Chapter Three. Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, 2016), 112. On the distinction between implantation and violent intromissions crippling individuals, see Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (New York: Routledge, 1999), Chapter 4. John Dewey, “The Social-Economic Situation and Education,” in The Later Works, vol. 8: 1933 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 61. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934), 25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 183. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 46–7. Albert Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 69–70. Metacide: In the Pursuit of Excellence, ed. James R. Watson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 296–7. As paraphrased by Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (London: Verso, 1995), 97. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 105. Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 245. Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), 33. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 141. As quoted by Amy Goodman, “Flush the TPP,” The Progressive Populist (April 15, 2015): 22. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 178. See Alain Badiou, The Subject of Change: Lessons from the European Graduate School (New York & Dresden: Atropos Press, 2013). Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy American and What We Can Do to Stop It (New York: Twelve Books, 2013), 255. Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Vedder (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 121. See Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016 (New York: Twelve Books, 2013), 154–8. “Glück ohne Macht”: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 172; Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1997), Band 3, s. 196. Ibid, 173; s. 197. David Sirota, “The TPP Gives Corporations Special Legal Rights,” The Progressive Populist (August 1, 2015): 7. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 188. GS, s. 213. This is Marx’s conclusion in the First Manuscript of his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 concerning Adam Smith’s analysis of The Wealth of Nations. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 239.

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25. The recent attempt by Vivendi to takeover Ubisoft exemplifies the capitalist hatred of free creative work. “Ubisoft Workers Caution Viviendi: Back Off Takeover Key Talent Warns,” Arkansas Democrat Gazette (March 28, 2016): 1D–2D. 26. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 166–7. 27. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 275–7. 28. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), Chapter V. 29. Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (London: Continuum, 1974), 143. See William Deresiewicz, “The Neoliberal Arts: How College Sold Its Soul to the Market,” Harper’s Magazine, September, 2015: 25–32. 30. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), xvi. 31. This is the difference that Laplanche distinguishes between implantation and intromission. Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (New York: Routledge, 1999), Chapter 4. 32. A largely forgotten project is the one proposed by Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). 33. Marx, ibid., 288. 34. See Angus, Facing the Anthropocene.

Contributors

María del Rosario Acosta López is Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies, University of California, Riverside. She is the author of books on German Romanticism (2006) and Friedrich Schiller (2008), and compilations on Hegel (2008), Schiller (2008), aesthetics and politics (2010), contemporary political philosophy (2010, 2013 and 2014), and philosophy of art (2009 and 2016). More recently, her work has also moved into the areas of memory, trauma, and representations of violence with a focus on Colombian and Latin-American contexts. Donald Bloxham is Richard Pares Professor of European and Modern History at University of Edinburgh. In addition to many edited volumes, he is, with A. Dirk Moses, the editor of the Oxford Handbook to Genocide Studies (2010). His published books include The Final Solution: a genocide (Oxford University Press, 2009); Genocide, The World Wars, and the Unweaving of Europe: essays by Donald Bloxham (Vallentine, Mitchell and Co., 2008); The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); (with Tony Kushner) The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester: Manchester University Press, January 2005); and Genocide on Trial: war crimes trials and the formation of Holocaust history and memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). He is presently on a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship until 2020. Alfred Frankowski is an assistant professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is author of The post-racial limits of memorialization: Toward a political sense of mourning (2015) and co-editor of Rethinking Genocide in African and the African Diaspora (forthcoming) with Jeanine Ntihirageza and Chielozona Eze. Lisa Guenther is Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies at Queen’s University. She is the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and co-editor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015) with Geoffrey Adelsberg and Scott Zemon.

296

Contributors

Ada S. Jaarsma is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Humanities at Mount Royal University. She is the author of Kierkegaard after the Genome: Science, Existence, and Belief in this World (2017) and co-editor of Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom (2020) with Kit Dobson. She is an associate editor for Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy. Her research, bridging philosophy with science studies, examines the dynamics and import of pedagogy, epigenetics, and placebo effects. Carly Lane is a doctoral candidate in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Anne O’Byrne is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. She specializes in social and political philosophy with particular interests in political ontology, critical phenomenology, and radical democracy, and in the work of Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, and JeanLuc Nancy. She’s the author of Natality and Finitude (Indiana University Press, 2011), editor of Subjects and Simulations (with Hugh Silverman), and translator of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural (with Robert Richardson, Stanford University Press, 2000), Corpus II (Fordham University Press, 2013) and Being Nude (with Carlie Anglemire, Fordham University Press, 2014). Her current book project is The Genocide Paradox: on Democracy and Generational Being. Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of 15 scholarly books, including Response Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield 2018); Carceral Humanitarianism: The Logic of Refugee Detention (University of Minnesota 2017); Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape (Columbia 2016); Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (Columbia 2015); Animal Lessons: How They Teach us to be Human (Columbia 2009); The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppression (University of Minnesota 2004); and perhaps her best known work, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (University of Minnesota 2001). Her work has been translated into eight languages. Most recently, she has published several novels in The Jessica James Mystery Series, the Kassy O’Roarke, Pet Detective Mystery Series, and the Miss Lemon Mysteries. Heather Rae is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Australia. She has a long-standing interest in state violence, reflected in her book State Identities and the Homogenization of Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2002). She is currently working on a project that looks at the liberal state and violence. Martin Shuster is associate professor of philosophy at Goucher College, where he also directs the Center for Geographies of Justice and where

Contributors

297

he is jointly appointed in the Humanities Center. In addition to many articles and book chapters, he is the author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity and New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre, both published by the University of Chicago Press, in 2014 and 2017, respectively. He is also the translator, with Daniela Ginsburg, of Jean-François Kervégan’s L’effectif et le rationnel: Hegel et l’esprit objectif (Vrin, 2008), published as The Actual and Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit (University of Chicago Press, 2018). With Henry Pickford, he is currently editing the Oxford Handbook of Theodor W. Adorno. His latest book, How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism, is in press with Indiana University Press and should appear in 2021. Lissa Skitolsky is the 2019–2020 Simon and Riva Spatz Visiting Chair in Jewish Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie University. Her research in the fields of genocide studies and continental philosophy focuses on illustrating the connection between discourse and sensibility in the normalization of state-sanctioned, systemic violence against racialized and gendered groups. Her forthcoming manuscript with Lexington Books, Hip-Hop as Philosophical Text and Testimony: Can I Get a Witness?, concerns the importance of underground hip hop culture as a form of wisdom and political praxis. Jill Stauffer is Associate Professor and Director of the concentration in Peace, Justice and Human Rights at Haverford College. Her book Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard was published by Columbia University Press in 2015, and she is editor (with Bettina Bergo) of the volume Nietzsche and Levinas: After the Death of a Certain God (2009). Jacqueline Stevens is Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies at Northwestern University. In 2013–2014, she was a Guggenheim fellow and she is also the founder and director of the Deportation Research Clinic of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies. She has edited two collections, the first, with Richard Falk and Balakkrishnan Rajagopal, titled, International Law and the Third World (Routledge, 2008); and the second, with Benjamin Lawrence, titled Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Stateless (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also the author of two books, Reproducing the State (Princeton University Press, 1999) and States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (Columbia University Press, 2009). Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author or editor of 16 books and some 80 scholarly articles, including Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool University Press, 2002), Histories of

298

Contributors

the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2010), Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014), The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press, 2015) and Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019). Having recently completed a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for a project on the International Tracing Service, his forthcoming monograph, Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after the Holocaust and World War II will be published by OUP in 2021. He is currently writing a book on the Holocaust for Penguin’s revived Pelican series. James R. Watson is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy. His publications include Louisiana Labor from Slavery to “Right-to-Work” (1985), Thinking With Pictures (1990), Between Auschwitz and Tradition (1994), Portraits of American Continental Philosophers (1999), coeditor, Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz (2000), editor, Metacide: In Pursuit of Excellence (2010). He is President of the Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust (SPSGH) and editor of the Brill series Holocaust and Genocide Studies (HGS). He and his wife Suzette live in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas. Work freely and abolish all domination. Rocío Zambrana is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emory, Co-Editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and columnist for 80grados (San Juan, Puerto Rico). She is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (under contract with Duke University Press). Her work examines critiques of capitalism and coloniality in various philosophical traditions.

Index

acknowledgment 5, 8, 21–2, 92n61, 212; see also recognition Adorno, Theodor W. 8, 11n9, 13n30, 19, 28n2, 29n7, 32n56, 78–84, 88, 90n13, 90n24, 90n27, 90n28, 231, 289, 292 Americas, The 48, 78–92, 265, 270 Anthropocene 10, 292 Arendt, Hannah 6, 9, 11n8, 12n18, 26, 28, 29n10, 31n48, 32n55, 36–8, 42–51, 54–5, 60, 80–1, 90n18–20, 96, 100, 106, 107n7, 108n21, 109n45, 141, 148n31, 156–8, 160, 166, 167n18–19, 173–86, 229–30, 243n1, 244n27, 287–8 atomic: bomb 43–4, 46–7, 53–5; war 146 Auschwitz 47, 62, 71, 74, 78, 79–83, 183–4, 289, 292; see also concentration camp Austin, J.L. 7, 13n28 Australia 4, 10n1, 15, 208, 264–82 Baldwin, James 9, 124n5, 229–30, 242 Bauman, Zygmunt ix–x, 79, 89n4, 95, 107n3, 156 Bosnia 165, 257 Burke, Edmund 48 Canada 32, 39, 122, 126, 208–25, 279 Cavell, Stanley 5, 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 31 Char, René 6 Christianity 85, 234–36, 268 colonialism ix, 1, 37, 83, 87, 88, 112–17, 126, 208, 223, 266, 274–75 concentration camp 179, 288; see also Auschwitz criminal 3, 40, 46–8, 58–77, 119, 136–7, 141–3, 145–6, 157, 199–200, 251, 277n25

decolonialism 83, 86, 223; see also post-colonialism Derrida, Jacques 159–65, 241 disposability 9, 152, 166 epigenetics 4, 107n9, 112–34 genocide: crime of 10, 11n4–5, 46–7, 49, 58–78, 141, 147n13, 148n39, 180, 200, 204n11, 251, 253–4, 277n12; vs. genocidal 1–10, 59–61, 63–7, 72–4, 75n14, 81–2, 104, 113–14, 134–6, 138–9, 142–6, 152–4, 159, 189–91, 214, 218, 230–1, 253, 265–6, 284; logics 1, 3–4, 9–10, 19–20, 38, 44, 60, 68, 72, 78–90, 115, 146, 152–69, 174, 187, 191, 235, 253, 258, 265, 267, 270, 273–6; perpetrators x, 2, 4–5, 11n8, 36, 43, 48, 59, 63, 75n14, 84, 137–8, 143, 145–6, 191, 198–203, 246–61; structures ix–x, 1–4, 8–10, 11n8, 19–20, 28, 67, 79, 86, 89n13, 91n38, 95, 113, 138, 142–6, 174, 176, 197, 230, 236, 242, 246–63, 265; victims ix, 5, 46, 58–9, 61, 65, 69, 84, 106, 153, 165, 166n2, 191–3, 197–8, 200, 247, 251 Genocide Convention see United Nations Genocide Convention Hegel, G.W.F. 19–36, 38, 40–2, 51, 53n29, 231 Heidegger, Martin 27 Hilberg, Raul 45, 47, 54, 55 Hiroshima 43, 46, 53n33, 55n51; see also atomic, bomb Holocaust, the ix–x, 58, 62, 71–2, 79–80, 83, 114, 157, 163, 165, 184, 185n7, 243n22, 246–63, 266, 273;

300

Index

and epigenetics 114; and hip-hop 71–2; and other genocides 78–80, 89n1, 89n2, 277n13; see also Nazi genocide Homer 37, 42 Human Genome Project 43 incarceration, mass see prison Indianness 87–8 indigenous peoples 87–8, 208, 210, 218, 219, 222, 264–7, 271–5, 279, 280 indigenous studies 83 Islam 146, 273 Jaspers, Karl 38, 49, 51 Jim Crow 2–3, 11n7, 73, 76n36 Judaism 233–4, 251, 260n22 Kant, Immanuel 22, 24, 27, 30n20, 31n43, 40–2, 45, 49, 53n27, 80–1, 90n16, 185n10, 243n21, 244n27, 285, 288 kinship 4, 8, 38, 49, 86, 96, 101, 103–5, 108 language 5, 7–8, 12n13, 13n29, 32n52, 51, 72, 87, 96–7, 103, 106, 143, 164, 173, 183, 187, 189, 193, 199–201, 203, 217, 219, 232, 236–7, 239–40, 242, 256–7 law 2–3, 7–9, 24–5, 42, 44–7, 50, 54n37, 59–65, 68–70, 72–4, 80, 101–2, 108n30, 117, 136, 138, 157, 159–64, 185n9, 208–25, 231, 250, 270, 274, 287, 288, 290 Lemkin, Raphael 6–7, 10, 12n19, 13n24, 14n35, 90n22, 95, 106n1, 138–9, 142, 145, 148n22, 148n36, 148n42, 152–3, 155, 166n1, 265 Levinas, Emmanuel 30n15, 229–44 Locke, John 42, 268–71, 274, 277n25, 278n29, 278n29, 278n35 lynching 2, 134–40

omnicide 10 ordinary language philosophy 5, 7–8, 12n15, 13n29, 31n26 Paine, Thomas 51 phenomenology 6, 59, 144, 103, 188, 194, 197, 199–200, 236 Plato 36–42, 48–50, 51n1, 52n2, 52n3, 84, 233, 286 post-colonialism 205, 274; see also decolonialism prison 3, 51, 58–74, 134, 136, 138, 155, 157 racism 3, 11n12, 61, 70, 72, 87, 91n41, 115, 121, 126n33, 135, 138–9, 141–3, 146, 147n19, 208, 216, 229–30, 234, 242, 256 rape 5, 58, 87, 106, 166n4, 191–200 rationality 20, 60, 178, 181, 240, 242, 286; enlightenment 81–2, 84, 86, 89n13; institutional 83; instrumental 79–80, 255; totalitarian 60 recognition 22, 30n17, 68, 96, 146, 177, 210, 224n39, 232–3; see also acknowledgment refugee 3, 9, 48, 152–66, 167, 194 religion 58, 85, 157, 264–82, 286, 289; see also Christianity; Islam; Judaism Rwanda 73, 114, 187–208, 253, 255 Schmitt, Carl 38, 40, 51 Serbia 159 social death 6, 12n21, 13n22, 58–61, 64, 68–9, 72–3, 103, 123, 124n4, 166n2, 188–9, 192, 194–5, 198, 203, 278n37 Thoreau, Henry David 40–2, 49, 51, 53n30 totalitarianism 174–86 Trail of Tears 1, 265

Mai Lai 51 Marx, Karl x, 231, 233n4, 235, 290, 293n24 Marxist 252 metacide 291, 292

United Nations 6, 72, 134, 139, 141, 153, 155, 157, 159, 189, 287 United Nations Genocide Convention 6, 7, 134, 137–45, 152, 266 United States of America 45, 46, 53, 134, 289

natal alienation 6, 64, 101–2 Nazi genocide 2, 4, 6, 12n21, 62–3, 72, 106; see also Holocaust, the

victim ix, 5, 46, 58–9, 61, 65, 69, 84, 106, 153, 165, 166n2, 180, 191–3, 197–8, 200, 202, 247, 251, 254

Index war 3, 10, 24, 26, 36–57, 58, 60, 86–7, 137, 146, 152–3, 155, 157, 159, 160–6, 175, 183n3, 187, 192, 194, 219, 236–7, 240–1, 248–9, 253–4, 265–6, 272; and genocide 32n53, 36–57; in Hegel 26–7

301

We Charge Genocide 2, 3, 11, 134–40 Xenophon 37 Yancy, George 9 Yugoslavia 257; see also Bosnia; Serbia