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.

Citation
Jonathan Beller, Ali Musleh; The Question of Genocide. Social Text 1 December 2024; 42 (4 (161)): 81–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-11369803

Jonathan Beller is professor of humanities and media studies and cofounder of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University; Visiting Professor at REMESO / Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linköping University, Sweden; and Visiting Researcher, University of the Arts, Helsinki Research Institute, Finland.

Ali H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies.