GENOCIDE AND MODERN POLITICS
GENOCIDE AND MODERN POLITICS

Summary/Abstract: How difficult it is to reflect on something so emotional as a presentation on genocide, deportation, and the erasing of a whole world and civilisation. It requires opening up the topic from a personal perspective, and I mean the sorrow out of which a self stands up and gains the right to speak out of its standing upright to address a strait saying. I have myself distant Jewish origins, as do many French people, and by the play of hazard my former wife and my children are Jewish. This may sound an odd confession. However, this strange judeity, which is not Jewishness, is the sorrow inhabiting me at the same time it does not allow me to speak for the dead as though they were my ancestors. It is also an irony that weighs on me – of not being a Jew while haunted and surrounded by Jewishness. I have thus no legacy from them, no right inherited through and from them. However, I am required from this painful sorrow to answer or steal the responsibility to speak to all the deeds of history to which Walter Benjamin, commenting on Klee’s painting, has already given the necessary witness. I would thus, out of sorrow, give back to history some rights vis-à-vis a testimony of inheritance. Could genocide be a heritage? Who would be the heirs inheriting genocide? The long history of humanity, and I mean here not only humanity as a collection of human beings, but humanity as both the political and the anthropological conceptual system that has been built through philosophy to be the leading concept, the basic hypothesis that sustains modernity, and therefore should at least be criticized. What strange heritage might genocide be, given that it is precisely the erasing of populations, devastation, and annihilation? How is annihilation to be inherited? What is inherited then?

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