Besiege Your Siege With Madness: Or, Why Resistance Comes First

Is all genocide social? Are some genocides more social than others? Is settler colonial genocide especially social? How does one explain not only why Zionism has descended into exterminatory violence now, but why genocide so openly, so aesthetically, so socially, and in turn, so nihilistically? Psychoanalysis and ideology critique risk more than they offer here. And neither biopolitics nor foundational critiques of the state are much help. The coordinates are drawn from the annals of frontier settlerism and insecure racial supremacisms, from settler colonialism's “anxieties of annihilation.” Zionism's embrace of its abyss is above all the exterminatory expression of its inability to fully vanquish what it sees as the phobic objects that stand in the way of its full consummation. It's the stuff of existential angst and ecstatic abandon at once. If Zionism is going mad, it's only because the unlikely endurance of the time of anticolonial resistance has kept it maddeningly stuck at its foundational impasse.