The Question of Genocide

Abstract This written dialogue studies how the “question of genocide” has infiltrated media ecology and come to permeate every meaning, gesture, and relation. Confronting Israel's escalation, since October 2023, of its genocidal siege on Palestine, two writers (a Palestinian and a Jew) engage in an experiment of thinking together that is at once critical, theoretical, affective, and emergent, in an effort to configure and, indeed, live part of their solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation and self-determination. Necessarily, the roles of photography, semiotics, social media, computation, racism, weaponry, and other machines of war and capital are here rendered as part of the micrological murmurations of thought, sensibility, and communication, even as they macrologically reform geopolitical terrains both real and imagined. Thought, feeling, knowledge, epistemology, intellectual, and cultural practice are all understood to unfold in the theater of racial capitalist warfare that offers up genocide not as exception but as paradigm.