Discussion
Jasbir K. Puar and Nasser Abourahme on “genocide not only as a politics of extermination but also as a politics of living in negation.”
It’s unremitting, obviously, and best read in small chunks (because of Puar’s somewhat academic prose style as well as the topic), but it is clear and urgent and profoundly insightful. Beautifully illustrated throughout by Adam HajYahia.
There is one point at which I part ways with Puar, though: in describing the global media circulation of images of people intentionally wounded and maimed by the IDF during 2018 protests, she says, “These photographs of Palestinian men had an undeniable ideological impact, working to acculturate the ‘international community,’ such as it was, to accept Palestinian bodies as damaged, Palestinian men as powerless, and the Palestinian cause as lacking vitality and force.”
Surely she cannot be arguing that it would have been better for such images to remain unseen? Was (and is) it not vital to establish the pattern of what the IDF was (and is) doing to Palestinian bodies? I can easily imagine a righteous *demand* for such images to be seen, in a world in which their circulation was suppressed, and would support such a demand.
Nobody should be compelled to see their lives reduced to trauma porn, certainly – but sometimes documenting atrocity is the sole moral response remaining available.
Indeed, Puar herself acknowledges this later: “…the evidence of body counts, mass graves, and visual documentation are (*should be*) legible forms of proof of atrocities to courts and the media” (emphasis added).
As I’ve often enough argued vis à vis the work of Forensic Architecture, it’s somewhat frustrating, if not painful, to have the painstaking, practically and emotionally difficult work of reconstructing an atrocious event reposed ultimately in the discretion of a liberal-institutional apparatus whose legitimacy one cannot help but question. But documentation – the necessarily mediated act of witness – has a moral force independent of its institutional uses, and cannot be reduced to spectacle or heedless spectation. Shit’s complicated.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
