Mourners gather around the bodies of Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli army, at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on March 18, 2025 [Abdel Kareem Hana/AP]
1- It is the first genocide broadcast live and direct, visible worldwide as it happens, and this marks a turning point, a milestone: the breaking of a moral pact that lasted eighty years, since the end of the Holocaust, and it was agreed that genocide was taboo, that it was wrong, that one could not be in favour of a genocidal massacre, ethnic cleansing, the destruction of a city, of a people. This was a felt consensus, at least in the West. Of course, the case of Palestine-Israel is also very peculiar in this regard, because Judaism is a Middle Eastern religion that, at the same time, constitutes a central root of the West. Borges: every Westerner has something Jewish and something Greek in them. Israel is the West in the East… (Could one of the reasons for anti-Semitic hatred be that we Jews deny Western purity as a negation of the East?)
After the Holocaust, after the Shoah, no one in the West dared to embrace genocide as a policy. To embrace: to justify, to propagate, to declare oneself an agent of the slaughter, to give it epic status, to create a culture of genocide (jokes, songs, rituals) as we see so many Israeli soldiers and settlers, along with Zionist fanatics doing the same in other parts of the world as well. Only in the name of the victims of that past genocide could the rupture of the moral and cultural pact with which it was subjectively settled be assumed. Only as a victim can you dismantle the rule that was put in place to protect you. Although eighty years is a generation, there are the descendants of the victims. I think of my ancestors, who came to this remote southern part of the world fleeing the pogroms: their legacy calls for defending the most fragile against the great machines of power. Those who today expand their power by massacring a people, if they do so under the protection of the Shoah, enabled by the Shoah, then they are beneficiaries of the Shoah.
2- Is Gaza far away? Images inserted into our beds, our bathrooms, our workplaces. What does genocide kill in its viewers? Dimensions of those of us who watch, damaged, dissolved, by this viralised genocide.
We become accustomed to images of genocide. They become part of the everyday landscape, normal. This, of course, is for those of us who are willing to see. We are all offered bubbles that immunise us to the evidence we do not want to see. But those of us who are willing to see the images of children being killed by bullets to the head from professional snipers, or children who have lost their entire families and now live without water or medicine or anything, or Zionist settlers murdering unarmed Palestinians, or endless images of horror and disproportion, raw, precarious images, filmed in motion, we see them wrapped up in images of recipes for chia and pumpkin sticks, or Diego Maradona talking to Roberto Perfumo, advertisements for T-shirts or sequences for achieving a perfect abdomen in thirty days, local calamities, memes that make us laugh at others’ misfortunes…
The connective spectatorship of genocide does not, for now, manage to interrupt it, but instead normalises its images in a regime of anxiety and generalised nervous boredom. The numbness puts them in series with anything else visible under the same pattern. A genocide that ends up being tolerated because of the tedium and fatigue produced by the infinity of images; a cruelty that becomes naturalised as part of what burns the mind; something else that reconfirms the adversity of the world; perhaps the most extreme. An image horrifies for a few seconds, a minute, and the finger types its disappearance; thus, the eye updates its content, and the update sustains the connection. A horrified spectatorship where horror is anaesthetised in the assembly of chains of perception linked with purely connective criteria, without any line of meaning, without any experience. A horror without experience, something that further atrophies the experiential power, if, as Bifo says, after every great horror, humanity takes a leap of abstraction. The horror of the world—mediated on the mobile phone—pushes us further to protect ourselves from the world—and cling to the brightness of the virtual.
3- As a global pedagogy, genocide fulfils a function in the current stage of capitalism: it declares that likeness, similarity, no longer exists. A face no longer says thou shalt not kill, as Levinas wanted. What is possible is what is technically possible, and there is nothing sacred in the human condition (neither sacred nor supreme); not as such. Humanity – practically speaking – does not exist: there is nothing in common. The ability to feel—”deep down”—the pain of others is contingent. This impacts the collective self-perception of all of us as humans, because we know that we do not embody or carry anything sacred, or even respectable, as humans.
There is a warnign in this: truly human humanity is not for everyone. Some are subject to scorn, and any kind of atrocity can be accepted and even celebrated. Cruelty is when the pain of others causes joy, like when the villain in American children’s films breathes fire. Pedagogies of cruelty have a productive function: they establish that the condition of human similarity is contingent, and therefore, is anyone going to complain about inequality?
Live genocide publicises the extent to which we are not equal: we are not even similar. Be content with inequality; be grateful that your life is recognised as having some value. Viral genocide reaffirms the end of similarity, and that is productive; it produces the chronic naturalisation of inequality. At the heart of inequality lies cruelty.
And so a certain kind of realism is also reinforced, as another effectively true premise, which affirms that the current state of affairs, power relations, the mode of production, the meaning of value—of things and life—are an immutable fate. A horrified global crowd fails to influence daily genocide. That is how little the world is ours, how little we can shape reality: images that affirm our powerlessness. Genocide in the open is a boast of the dominant order. However, thousands and thousands are moving, doing things, stirring things up: they are causing trouble. There, images no longer mediatise—they do not leave us as poisoned and stunned spectators—but rather, they mediate. They mediate between one reality and another production of reality; a medium between one action and another action; between a crime and an active subjectivisation of the witness. Mobilisation gives images another status, no longer mere ‘content’—subordinate to the reproductive device—but a fuse, a spark, proof, commotion, a stimulus to movements—physical, discursive, emotional—that interrupt the totalisation of horror.
Agustín Valle: A viral genocide as spectacle
From Lobo suelto! (30/04/2025)
1- It is the first genocide broadcast live and direct, visible worldwide as it happens, and this marks a turning point, a milestone: the breaking of a moral pact that lasted eighty years, since the end of the Holocaust, and it was agreed that genocide was taboo, that it was wrong, that one could not be in favour of a genocidal massacre, ethnic cleansing, the destruction of a city, of a people. This was a felt consensus, at least in the West. Of course, the case of Palestine-Israel is also very peculiar in this regard, because Judaism is a Middle Eastern religion that, at the same time, constitutes a central root of the West. Borges: every Westerner has something Jewish and something Greek in them. Israel is the West in the East… (Could one of the reasons for anti-Semitic hatred be that we Jews deny Western purity as a negation of the East?)
After the Holocaust, after the Shoah, no one in the West dared to embrace genocide as a policy. To embrace: to justify, to propagate, to declare oneself an agent of the slaughter, to give it epic status, to create a culture of genocide (jokes, songs, rituals) as we see so many Israeli soldiers and settlers, along with Zionist fanatics doing the same in other parts of the world as well. Only in the name of the victims of that past genocide could the rupture of the moral and cultural pact with which it was subjectively settled be assumed. Only as a victim can you dismantle the rule that was put in place to protect you. Although eighty years is a generation, there are the descendants of the victims. I think of my ancestors, who came to this remote southern part of the world fleeing the pogroms: their legacy calls for defending the most fragile against the great machines of power. Those who today expand their power by massacring a people, if they do so under the protection of the Shoah, enabled by the Shoah, then they are beneficiaries of the Shoah.
2- Is Gaza far away? Images inserted into our beds, our bathrooms, our workplaces. What does genocide kill in its viewers? Dimensions of those of us who watch, damaged, dissolved, by this viralised genocide.
We become accustomed to images of genocide. They become part of the everyday landscape, normal. This, of course, is for those of us who are willing to see. We are all offered bubbles that immunise us to the evidence we do not want to see. But those of us who are willing to see the images of children being killed by bullets to the head from professional snipers, or children who have lost their entire families and now live without water or medicine or anything, or Zionist settlers murdering unarmed Palestinians, or endless images of horror and disproportion, raw, precarious images, filmed in motion, we see them wrapped up in images of recipes for chia and pumpkin sticks, or Diego Maradona talking to Roberto Perfumo, advertisements for T-shirts or sequences for achieving a perfect abdomen in thirty days, local calamities, memes that make us laugh at others’ misfortunes…
The connective spectatorship of genocide does not, for now, manage to interrupt it, but instead normalises its images in a regime of anxiety and generalised nervous boredom. The numbness puts them in series with anything else visible under the same pattern. A genocide that ends up being tolerated because of the tedium and fatigue produced by the infinity of images; a cruelty that becomes naturalised as part of what burns the mind; something else that reconfirms the adversity of the world; perhaps the most extreme. An image horrifies for a few seconds, a minute, and the finger types its disappearance; thus, the eye updates its content, and the update sustains the connection. A horrified spectatorship where horror is anaesthetised in the assembly of chains of perception linked with purely connective criteria, without any line of meaning, without any experience. A horror without experience, something that further atrophies the experiential power, if, as Bifo says, after every great horror, humanity takes a leap of abstraction. The horror of the world—mediated on the mobile phone—pushes us further to protect ourselves from the world—and cling to the brightness of the virtual.
3- As a global pedagogy, genocide fulfils a function in the current stage of capitalism: it declares that likeness, similarity, no longer exists. A face no longer says thou shalt not kill, as Levinas wanted. What is possible is what is technically possible, and there is nothing sacred in the human condition (neither sacred nor supreme); not as such. Humanity – practically speaking – does not exist: there is nothing in common. The ability to feel—”deep down”—the pain of others is contingent. This impacts the collective self-perception of all of us as humans, because we know that we do not embody or carry anything sacred, or even respectable, as humans.
There is a warnign in this: truly human humanity is not for everyone. Some are subject to scorn, and any kind of atrocity can be accepted and even celebrated. Cruelty is when the pain of others causes joy, like when the villain in American children’s films breathes fire. Pedagogies of cruelty have a productive function: they establish that the condition of human similarity is contingent, and therefore, is anyone going to complain about inequality?
Live genocide publicises the extent to which we are not equal: we are not even similar. Be content with inequality; be grateful that your life is recognised as having some value. Viral genocide reaffirms the end of similarity, and that is productive; it produces the chronic naturalisation of inequality. At the heart of inequality lies cruelty.
And so a certain kind of realism is also reinforced, as another effectively true premise, which affirms that the current state of affairs, power relations, the mode of production, the meaning of value—of things and life—are an immutable fate. A horrified global crowd fails to influence daily genocide. That is how little the world is ours, how little we can shape reality: images that affirm our powerlessness. Genocide in the open is a boast of the dominant order. However, thousands and thousands are moving, doing things, stirring things up: they are causing trouble. There, images no longer mediatise—they do not leave us as poisoned and stunned spectators—but rather, they mediate. They mediate between one reality and another production of reality; a medium between one action and another action; between a crime and an active subjectivisation of the witness. Mobilisation gives images another status, no longer mere ‘content’—subordinate to the reproductive device—but a fuse, a spark, proof, commotion, a stimulus to movements—physical, discursive, emotional—that interrupt the totalisation of horror.