Against ‘DOMICIDE’

‘Domicide’ – and the cohort of neologisms to which it belongs – represents a pseudomorphosis of rights: assuming the outward form of rights advancement while actually consolidating the atrophy of general rights protections. Drawing on Spengler and Adorno’s concept of pseudomorphosis, the career of shelter in rights talk from the 1948 Universal Declaration through the two great covenants of the twentieth century discloses how the meaning of protection – i.e. civil and political rights – was progressively demoted to assistance, and how that demotion was compensated for by the proliferation of particular rights claims addressed to discrete populations. Domicide is the terminus of this process – a term that renders obliterated shelter a self-evident index of its own juridico-political status, foreclosing rather than advancing the critical work of rights adjudication. In the context of the digital contestation of the Gaza conflict, the landscape of rubble has come to be treated as self-sufficient proof of genocide – an approach that replicates, at the level of international criminal law, the same pseudomorphic logic that drives domicide arguments. Against this, what victims of mass violence require, and will not be robbed of, is a standard of justice intransigent to pseudomorphosis.