Un/Intended Acts: Killing Without Limit

Recent history has afforded the global spectacle of lethal conflict in which immense numbers of civilians have with apparent impunity been killed as unintended but foreseeable targets of military action. While the ethics of just war and international humanitarian law (IHL) present rubrics of proportionality to evaluate and limit civilian liability, these remain vulnerable to misinterpretation as well as their abuse in potential genocide. Mass civilian death, in clear excess of these limits, thus requires criminal assessment as meeting the conditions for genocide by virtue of intent, thereby informing its theorization as a thanatology—that is, as a logic of lethality determining an actual biopolitics. This paper analyzes these determinations in their relations to their normative goals: understood, first, with respect to the failure of a human universalism and, second, the theorization of the Freudian unconscious as an analytical means to account for the psychogenesis of genocide as such. Genocidal intent is thus conceived as an unconscious volitional complex that as ‘unintended but foreseeable’ defies both the legal–moral means to contain it and the ability to account univocally for its origin as a crime.