Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 14: The Warring Logics of Genocide

14 The Warring Logics of Genocide The very mention of genocide usually elicits a shudder, a frisson of horror, of psychological revulsion and moral outrage. Images of mass annihilation, of the dead and dying that the term evokes are especially troubling, since genocidal killing, now endemic to the world of postmodernity, is envisioned as a slaughter of innocents. It is understood that those earmarked for destruction are selected on the basis of criteria that lie outside the standard rules of conduct in war, even if genocidal events occur in the context of what is designated conventionally as war. Genocidal killing is often justified by its perpetrators not principally on the grounds of what the dead are presumed to have done but rather as required by an ontological flaw, as it were, attributed to the victims. The significations conveyed in ordinary usage pass into the criteria of what counts as genocide as defined by international law. Imbricated in its juridical phraseology is a visceral aversion to what the term evokes, the destruction wreaked upon countless numbers of individuals because of who they are or who they are alleged to be, individuals whose ‘‘crime’’ is an identity to which negative value is ascribed and which can be eliminated only through the extermination of its bearers. The legal definition takes cognizance both of the magnitude of the exterminations and of the fact that groups targeted are deliberately rather than randomly chosen. In addition to the parameters established by the legal definition of genocide, I shall also 222 consider meanings ascribed to the term ethnic cleansing as starting points for a discussion of the warring logics intrinsic to events of mass extermination. I shall then turn to Janicaud’s insightful account of the way in which rationality is currently configured as it bears upon, even if (as I believe) it fails fully to capture, the character of the warring logics at work in genocide. I interpret ‘‘logic’’ as referring not to rules of inference deployed to determine the status of arguments or to a mode of reasoning invoked to justify moral norms but rather to a complex of interpretive indicators or perspectives that arise within the sphere of events. In the case of genocidal acts, these ‘‘logics’’ are exhibited as the modus operandi of the acts themselves. The first of these warring logics is best described as the rationality of unencumbered replicability , the sensed multiplication of individuals so that vast numbers are seen as indistinguishable from one another. This absence of distinctiveness gives rise to a second logic, the logic of indiscernibles, so that individuals lacking difference meld into an undifferentiated sameness, a solidary yet formless being from which individuation is absent, which I shall explicate in terms of Levinas’s concept of the il y a. In so doing, I do not wish to offer an account of the psychology of the perpetrators. Instead, I shall proceed somewhat in the phenomenologically minimalist manner Janicaud attributes to MerleauPonty : ‘‘the visible dimension of Invisibility . . . a search for sourceforms [formes-mères], an investigation of bodily encroachments and social rumblings’’ that are cultural in appearance.1 I shall take for granted the cultural, political specificity of individual events but cannot , in the present context, undertake an analysis of each. However, I shall presume that the logics of techno-science are imbricated in widely divergent social and cultural situations, even when the means of extermination differ. What is more, I shall argue that this logic is involved in movements of resistance to it.2 Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing: Juridical Perspectives Before turning to the warring logics of genocide, consider first its international legal definition as found in Articles II and III of the 1948 ‘‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.’’ Identifying genocide’s mental and physical aspects, the document states: The Warring Logics of Genocide 223 The mental, ‘‘the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national , ethnical or racial group as such,’’ and the physical, which includes five acts: ‘‘killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group . . . deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’’3 Acts constituting part of a policy to destroy a group’s...