whispered lineage

An essay examining some of what the world has been witnessing the past three years, in Gaza and beyond. It focuses on the ethics and law of just war and the mechanisms those moral and legal disciplines employ to limit the killing of civilians in wartime (the discussion referring to different historical contexts but mainly Gaza). It describes how those mechanisms tend to permissively enable rather than robustly prevent that killing, and then how genocide as an intentional set of acts with a final purpose is understood in order to legally punish it. But I argue, via a discussion of the failure of ethical universalism, that determining genocidal intent in these terms largely ignores the unconscious dimension of its psychogenesis, and appeal to psychoanalytic theory to describe what is really happening psychosocially, including among those who might not be doing the killing directly but are otherwise in support of those who are.