The Genocide Paradox: Democracy and Generational Time

By Anne O'Byrne

We regard genocidal violence as worse than other sorts of violence—perhaps the worst there is. But what does this say about what we value about the genos on which nations are said to be founded? This is an urgent question for democracies. We value the mode of being in time that anchors us in the past and in the future, that is, among those who have been and those who might yet be. If the genos is a group constituted by this generational time, the demos was invented as the anti-genos, with no criterion of inheritance and instead only occurring according to the interruption of revolutionary time. Insofar as the demos persists, we experience it as a sort of genos, for example, the democratic nation state. As a result, democracies are caught is a bind, disavowing genos-thinking while cherishing the temporal forms of genos-life; they abhor genocidal violence but perpetuate and disguise it. This is the genocide paradox.

O’Byrne traces the problem through our commitment to existential categories from Aristotle to the life taxonomies of Linneaus and Darwin, through anthropologies of kinship that tether us to the social world, the shortfalls of ethical theory, into the history of democratic theory and the defensive tactics used by real existing democracies when it came to defining genocide for the U.N. Genocide Convention. She argues that, although models of democracy all make room for contestation, they fail to grasp its generational structure or acknowledge the generational content of our lives. They cultivate ignorance of the contingency and precarity of the relations that create and sustain us. The danger of doing so is immense. It leaves us unprepared for confronting democracy’s deficits and its struggle to entertain multiple temporalities. In addition, it leaves us unprepared for understanding the relation between demos and violence, and the ability of good enough citizens to tolerate the slow-burning destruction of marginalized peoples. What will it take to envision an anti-genocidal democracy?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781531503277

Anne O'Byrne

Anne O’Byrne is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Natality and Finitude (Indiana, 2010), coeditor of Logics of Genocide (Routledge, 2020), and translator or cotranslator of four books by Jean-Luc Nancy.

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Cover: The Genocide Paradox, Democracy and Generational Time edited by Anne o’Byrne

THE GENOCIDE PARADOX

Democracy and Generational Time

ANNE O’BYRNE

Fordham University Press

NEW YORK2023

Copyright © 2023 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

25 24 235 4 3 2 1

First edition

To James, Marie, and Vincent

Ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann

CONTENTS

Introduction: Democracy and Genos

Generational Being • Genocidal Violence • Ontology and Judgment—On Method • A Note on Genos

1Genos

Introduction • The Tree of Porphyry: The Pleasure of Order • Linnaeus: The Sane Systematizer • Darwin: Heredity and the Temporal Order • The Unstable Clade and the Naturalization of Generational Being

2How Much Kin Does a Person Need?

Introduction • Absolute Belonging: Atavus and Beyond • The Life of Blood • The Evidence of DNA • Genealogical Thinking • Creating Kin • Genocide as Aenocide

3What’s Wrong with Genocide?

Introduction • Genocide and the End of Ethics • Genocide beyond the End of Ethics • Genocidal Life: The Case of Sexual Violence • Ontology and Politics

4Democracy of Generational Beings

The Democratic Paradox and the Genocide Paradox • Genos and Cosmos • Genos and Demos • The Problem of Time for Democracies

Conclusion: The Antigenocidal Democracy

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction: Democracy and Genos

Democracies are remarkable for being founded on nothing other than themselves. They are supported by no divine or natural right, and those who belong to a democracy do so by virtue of belonging to the people. Yet a democratic people is a people in a peculiar way: The demos, specifically and above all, is not a genos. Faced with the violence and ambition of the aristocratic Athenian families who claimed power by virtue of inheritance and the constant, hysterical scrutiny of the rolls to see who did and did not belong to the citizenry of Athens, Kleisthenes in 508 BCE invented the demos to cut through the categories of family, clan, and tribe and redistribute power across the country. This is not meant metaphorically. The demes were expanses of land in the countryside, stretches of coastline, and city districts, and a man became a member of the demos by virtue of his belonging to a deme. If democracy had been born as a matter of law under Solon, it was born again as a matter of place under Kleisthenes. Politically speaking, genos could now become a thing of the past.

In that same moment, the problem of democratic time took shape. The genos, in all its possible translations as tribe, family, or nation, is the embodiment of its own temporal principle. Genos describes a structure of relations by which one generation generates another, not only in the paradigmatic manner of bearing and begetting but also in terms of bequest and inheritance, teaching and learning, tradition and renewal. If democracy required its citizens to identify themselves based on where they chose to belong, how would it itself maintain continuity over time? Would deme membership be constantly reconstituted as each citizen made his choice as he came of age? In 508, every man who had any claim to Athenian citizenship chose his deme. What, then, of their sons, the newcomers by birth? What of those other newcomers who might arrive from elsewhere? Kleisthenes’s democratic interruption turned out to be just that. It was an interruption that reorganized and recalibrated the pattern of descent but did not replace it; after the generation of 508 BCE, everyone belonged to the deme of his father, and the demotoi of each deme could decide on the roles permitted other sorts of newcomers.

Yet when we speak of democracies—Athenian democracy, modern democracy, our democracy—we have in mind both the interruptive revolutionary impulse that undoes the old order and also a way of living together that persists beyond the actions of the founding generation. We have in mind a set of institutions, practices, allocations of power, and distributions of violence that emerge from the contingencies of a specific democratic intervention but then, somehow, reproduce themselves over time. They sustain themselves according to law—as Aristotle notes, a polity is the same as a past polity insofar as it shares the same constitution—and, as Kleisthenes’s solution of the problem of the second generation shows, they sustain themselves according to the reproductive or generative principle of genos. What would it mean for a democracy to instead sustain itself democratically? The world needs new young people if it is to survive, and newcomers enter the cosmos every day, each one generated in and by a genos. How can they regenerate a demos? The question points us to the temporal version of the democratic paradox.

Most often, democracy’s paradoxes are traced to the modern confluence of democracy and liberalism and are most often thought in spatial terms. When sovereign power no longer resided in the person of the monarch and rule was no longer underwritten by a transcendental authority, democracy placed the people in the place left empty by their disappearance.¹ The people became the only source of legitimate rule, and the prize offered by its self-rule is individual freedom.² That is to say, collective rule is meant to deliver the freedom that will be a constant threat to collectivity. Put another way, self-rule requires sharing the work and responsibility of creating the rule to which all will be equally subject, even though we experience the very requirement that we be involved in the work of ruling as an infringement of the freedom that the rule promises.³ Indeed, in the face of clashing ideas of freedom, we might, as Rousseau warned, have to be forced to be free. At the same time, it was Rousseau who also grasped that, in order to rule, the people must be something other than a collection of individuals and certainly something other than the collection of all individuals. Legitimate rule will not be achieved by people, or the people, but by a people, and, crucially, this people capable of self-rule is not found but must be created.

Essential to this creation is a boundary or criterion of belonging, and this produces another formulation of the paradox. Carl Schmitt points to the distinction between friend and enemy as the essential political distinction, and the inability of any liberal democracy to provide a liberal, democratic criterion for belonging demonstrates the problem with the form; for him, this was not a paradox but a contradiction that doomed the democratic project to failure and led him to a theologized politics and a fascist affirmation of genos-thinking.⁴ The contradiction is avoided by cosmos-thinking, by which I mean the various forms of cosmopolitanism that might acknowledge the existence of peoples, and even the strategic necessity of creating peoples, but that also argue that, in all cases, a people’s political existence can be governed by universal rules. From this point of view, peoples are at bottom indistinguishable from people-as-such when it comes to political arrangements. In its classical formulations, this is because we leave difference behind when we think ourselves into the public realm, the prepolitical original position, or the ideal speech situation.⁵ Contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers are increasingly attuned to the fact that difference is both stickier and more precious than these formulations suggest. They acknowledge that the distinctions we make among ourselves are graduated—we regard some as close, others less so—and overlapping—a difference that is significant in one circumstance is imperceptible in another—without any being a fundamental distinction.⁶ Yet indistinction before universal law remains fundamental. Cosmos-thinking rests on the assumption that, even if we are not all the same, we can always see the world from the other fellow’s point of view.

Radical democratic theory responds to Schmitt’s version of genos-thinking, on the one hand, and cosmos-thinking, on the other, by taking on the democratic paradox as what follows when social existence is fully acknowledged as part of political life. Indeed, it embraces it as a life-giving paradox. Social identities rely on the existence of others against whom to demonstrate their distinctness—us, not them—in turn creating the political challenge of discovering a mechanism that can ensure that an identity will avoid the drive to create enemies, to marginalize, exclude, and eliminate those very others, whether inside or outside the boundaries of the state. How will we prevent a single social or national identity filling the empty form of democratic citizenship or the abstract form of universal citizenship with its own contingent content? Can we uncouple cosmos-thinking from its roots in the particularities of European enlightenment and imperialism? William Connolly writes: The depth grammar of a political theory is shaped, first, by the way in which it either acknowledges or suppresses this paradox, and, second, by whether it negotiates it pluralistically or translates it into an aggressive politics of exclusive universality.⁷

The tension also has a temporal form. Democracy lacks its own temporal principle, and this takes concrete shape in the problem of time for democracies. Some effort is needed to uncover its contours. After all, Kleisthenes’s solution of following the democratic interruption with a return to genos-time remains codified in the democratic nation-state, where the institutional time of the state and the generational time of the genos—in the form of the nation—together ensure that the problem of a distinctively democratic time never arises. The state’s perpetual claim to the whole of its territory grants citizenship to those born on that territory, according to jus soli; the generational life of the nation grants citizenship to children born of citizens, according to jus sanguinis; in both cases, the point is to translate the accident of birth into a matter of essential belonging and, at the same time, secure a future citizenry. No one chooses to be born, and none of us chose our parents or the where and when of our birth, yet these initial facts of existence are taken up by the naturalized, biologized version of genos-thinking as the ultimate determinants of our lives, establishing our place in an ordered cosmos and setting us into the generational flow of past into future. It is a powerful principle, even if the satisfaction it offers is complicated and dangerous. It fulfills our desires for categories into which to organize our experience, relationships that let us feel that we belong, patterns of signification that stabilize meaning and lodge us in a world, and a sense of time that allows us to feel sheltered and carried forward rather than exposed to the nothingness of destruction and oblivion. It shields us from the ruination that Lewis Gordon points to as signaling the human paradox: Not to be ruined means to be a god. But that means not to be human.⁸ All this, transmitted in what would seem to be the merely natural fact of generation. Generation is indeed a matter of nature, but all this epistemological, existential, and political work is carried out not by a natural phenomenon but by a technology of knowledge that emerges historically, across various lifeworlds, and is illuminated by various disciplines.

Approached from the tradition of cosmos-thinking, genos is irrelevant to politics (as it is to ethical life), and cosmopolitanism gives us formal principles of political organization that set aside family, tribal, and national existence. This also means setting aside the problem of history and of time. Once instituted, every political form strives to sustain itself over time; every institution needs to reinstitute itself or justify itself to new generations.⁹ Despite everything, the genos is not nothing in political life.¹⁰ It was not nothing for Kleisthenes, and it is not nothing for today’s nation-states and their citizens. The starkest yet most neglected indication of this is the fact that, even now, the name for the worst, most awful thing, the greatest evil—worse than war, worse than other forms of mass violence and destruction—is genocide, the murder of the genos.

Invented in 1943 to name what was perpetrated upon Armenians in Turkey in 1915 and what was being done to the Jews of Europe right at that moment, geno-cide unites the Greek genos with the Latin -cide to name massive violence directed against people because of whom they belonged with, that is, because of who they were. We are familiar with the images: emaciated corpses lying in piles, human skulls stacked in heaps, thousands of people on the road carrying children and belongings, men peering through barbed-wire fences. We know the exemplary cases: Armenians, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Yet, though it names an extreme horror, we are not always able to account for what horrifies us, and there was and still is little agreement about the definition. The UN Convention on Genocide of 1948 describes attacks committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such, but what this means was a matter of dispute in the years before ratification and has continued to be ever since. Genocide is violent, but with what sort of violence? On what sort of group? By what sort of group? It is massive, but how much destruction counts? How enormous does it have to be? From one point of view, we seemed to need to move toward a more perfect definition that would be more theoretically satisfying and more legally effective; from another, the encroaching perfection would leave us at the mercy of a definition that is never adequate to the phenomenon.

What concerns me here is not precisely the phenomenon of genocide, or the efforts to define it, or even the correctness or otherwise of the judgment that violence that targets a genos is as bad as bad can be. After all, we can compare sufferings and evils and coherently assert that any given large-scale civil war was worse than this or that small-scale genocidal attack. Indeed, scholars of genocide have also argued against labeling genocide the ultimate crime.¹¹ Yet it is a judgment that persists in the world, and that fact is a point of access to the shared sense that genocide is particularly bad, that is, bad in a way different from other sorts of violence.¹² This judgment about genocide is the impetus for the analysis I give here of genocide as an attack on generational groups, that is, groups made up of old and young connected by patterns of generational inheritance. Biological genetic inheritance provides the model, but it is not the definition. I will return to this often. Biological inheritance is essential to the story of generational being but is not the whole story. My argument is that genocide is an attack on generations and generational being, and it is abhorrent like nothing else because we value generational being like nothing else. We value the generational structure of our lives and our generational belonging to those who came before and those who will come after. We value the mode of being in time that anchors us in the past and in the future, that is, among those of us who have been and those of us who might yet be. Genocidal violence attacks the existential structure by which we live together, generationally, in a shared world.

This is why it is impossible to grasp what genocide is and what genocidal violence does if we approach it solely in the moral terms of the harm one person can do another or in terms of the relations between individuals. We are singular plural, which is just to say that the fact that we live our lives and are who we are, with and among others, is not an incidental feature of human existence but utterly essential. As an attack on a group as such by another group, genocide targets the way we exist together plurally, and, for this reason, political and social thinking must find a way to countenance it. It looks like a moral problem—genocidal situations generate terrible moral problems, and there is no denying that the atrocities committed by genocidal attackers demand the most vociferous moral condemnation—but moral thinking can also be a bar to understanding. By taking a different approach, I hope to open up a space of thought around the horror rather than drowning in it.

Genocide is a complex legal problem that, since the genocidal violence in Rwanda and the former Yugolavia in the 1990s, has prompted the development of a set of legal devices and challenged the deepest principles of jurisprudence. Genocide can be approached as an ethical, legal, or political problem, but it is also a problem for ethics because ethics cannot come up with a conclusive demonstration of why it is wrong, a problem for law because of the difficulty of developing a legal framework that can encompass it, and a problem for politics because politics—by which I will always mean democratic politics—does not make the genos redundant and the concept of genocide meaningless. In identifying genocide as a distinctive evil, perhaps the worst there is, we reinforce our commitment to the genos and thus reinforce one of the conditions that produce genocidal violence.¹³ Note that the convention was generated by and addressed to the united nations of the world and that the contracting parties, for the most part, consider themselves nation-states.

Others have pointed to the nation as an inherently genocidal structure and the nation-state as an efficient mechanism for the distribution of genocidal violence. If the genos were the only way we knew to organize ourselves and understand our existence, there might be violence of tribe against tribe, nation against nation, wars of domination and annihilation, and we might be horrified by the suffering inflicted, but we would have no specific category of genocide; there would be nothing special about violence that attacks a genos. This also holds true for cosmos-thinking, though in a different way. War and violence, whatever their motivations and whomever they target, are already an affront to the highest cosmopolitan value, that is, our shared humanity. Insofar as this is valued as a timeless ideal, cosmopolitanism need not address the fact of generational being or the phenomenon of generational groups nor consider that there is anything particular about violence that targets a group. It is war that is abhorrent as an affront to our humanity, and nothing is added by specifying some attacks as attacks on a genos.

But note that many of the contracting parties to the convention considered themselves—and consider themselves—democracies. When we approach violence against the genos from the point of view of democratic values, the concern sharpens into a paradox. On one side, the demos is the antigenos, the group of whomever, formed without appeal to a criterion of birth and inheritance. Indeed, historically, it was formed in pointed opposition to the genos, making the values of the genos anachronistic and anathema to it. On the other side, the demos is never accounted for by its relation to a timeless, cosmopolitan ideal. Yet it does not have its own distinctively democratic mode of being in time, and, in its absence, democracies lapse into the structure of generational time. The problem is not that we continue to value the genos like nothing else but that, without its own temporal principle, the demos is experienced as a sort of genos. Demos-thinking, which dwells on the conscious affirmation and reaffirmation of the group of whomever, struggles against genos-thinking, which sees its membership as unfolding naturally over generational time. It is an uneven struggle, and democracies respond with a sort of doublethink that disavows genos-thinking while continuing to cherish the forms of genos-life; they identify genocidal violence, abhor it, but also perpetuate and disguise it. This is another formulation of the democratic paradox—call it the genocide paradox. What will it take to acknowledge it? To negotiate it pluralistically? What will it take to envision an antigenocidal democracy?

Aristotle taught us that politics is a matter of deciding how to live together well, and democracy is how we do so as people who need have no more than being together in common; politics is the work of demos rather than genos. Real existing democracies do as a matter of history take on the genos structures that they find ready to hand, and in doing so they evade the problem of democratic time; yet, at the same time, they remain committed to the democratic impulse and in various ways resist resolving its revolutionary drive back into the category of genos. The tension is never more apparent than when genocidal violence erupts in some part of the world and the world’s democracies find themselves responding with fierce ambivalence. Democracies are no strangers to violence—like any state system, democratic states are mechanisms for the distribution of violence—but, on the one hand, genocidal violence must be construed as utterly far removed, exotic, and atavistic, the assertion of a value quite irrelevant to the democratic principle that thought to replace genos-thinking. Genocidal tendencies must be regarded as endemic to those societies, those places where genos identity remains available as a default when demos identity and democratic institutions are absent, weak, or in crisis. On the other hand, there is an accompanying acknowledgment of the special horror of attacks on people who become targets because of whom they belong with, that is, people linked together according to the temporality of generations, often—though not necessarily or exclusively—connected by biological descent, and engaged in the ongoing care of a distinctive shared world. Genos-thinking remains embedded in demos life.

The distancing/fascination effect has more than one source: It springs from the fact that, alongside our democratic commitments, we also sustain deep attachments to just such groups beyond our demos life and from the knowledge that the demos itself borrows the generational form and exists according to generational time. As a result, democracies are always at risk of having demos collapse into genos. Indeed, as we will see, the collapse was routinely courted—enforced—in the founding of modern democracies like the United States, where the celebration of revolutionary violence that spilled the blood of (imperial) tyrants and (colonizing) patriots masked genocidal violence against indigenous peoples and racialized, enslaved people. It continued and continues to be courted in the insistence on cultural assimilation as essential for political cohesion, in the ignorance and refusal of founding genocidal violence, and in the specific efforts by globally powerful democracies to export, institute, and sustain the democratic system.¹⁴ Democracies and democratic theory both require an ongoing and painstaking decolonization.¹⁵ Meanwhile, the structures of democratic life themselves turn out to be capable of obscuring varieties of violence that produce genocidal results in the form of social death, slow death, and forms of suffering that democracy cannot name.

From a sufficient distance, a genocide can be made to appear to belong to another world, one beset by a sort of violence our policies could not have prevented and that our foreign intervention surely would have no hope of stopping, a violence so foreign that it could surely never erupt here. For the democracies of Western Europe, the genocidal wars that destroyed Yugoslavia were often understood as spurred by a resurgence of old tribal thinking, genos against genos. In order to place the phenomenon of genocide in the past and far away, the Balkans would be remade as a marginal zone of Europe/not-Europe and as a throwback to the old Europe of belligerent nationalisms that had otherwise been replaced by the new Europe of federated commerce. Yet embedded in the horrified response was the knowledge that it was not so long ago or so far away. Democracy did not and does not make the genos irrelevant; it holds genos and demos in tension at its core. This is the oldest version of the democratic paradox, as old as Kleisthenes’s invention of the demos, and it is what this book is about.

To begin, we must think about what it is to be generationally. We must try to understand what is meant by genos and how we value it, and by the activity of generating and how we value it. Here, we is not an authorial device; I mean the we quite seriously. If we are to shed light on the phenomena of genocide and genocidal violence we all—scholars, researchers, citizens, people—need to turn our attention to genos and generation. This is essential if we are to arrange our thinking and actions so that there will be less genocidal violence rather than more.

Rhetorically, this is far from satisfying. After 1943, we—scholars, people—began to say Never again; in 1948, the United Nations articulated its condemnation in the form of the Genocide Convention. Yet genocide did happen again, and if we keep cultural existence (the object of the deleted Article III) within the ambit of the concept, genocidal violence turns out to be insidious, running through our societies and taking deadly hold of generational groups and communities and their distinctive ways of being with a terrible tenacity. Instead of a rallying cry—though we will need those too—this research aims to get at the specific structures of existence that shape our judgments of genocide and genocidal violence. Genos and generation are two such structures, which we value as elements of generational being in ways that make it impossible simply to jettison them in the face of the affirmation that genocide must never happen again. Yet this does not put them beyond critical interrogation. The consensus around the judgment that genocide is evil makes it hard to see it as a judgment, which means that it will take some time to allow the deeper values supporting the consensus to open themselves for critical examination.

The structures I have in view are not structures we encounter in an objective way, yet they are also not merely subjective, personal, or psychological. They are not open to observation in the mode of the natural or political sciences, nor are they accounted for by singular firsthand experience alone. They are the existential structures of us and our shared world. They are the ways beings like us exist, which is to say that the claims I will argue for here are ontological, though offered as quasi-transcendental claims, characterized by the antidogmatic hesitation of critical phenomenology, already understood as socialized, and subject to the operations of power and biopower.¹⁶ They will require observation that starts from the midst of things in the natural attitude, but with an eye to the fact that the things among which we find ourselves are always experienced in specific, contingent, historical arrangements. The structures that come into question bring us into question too: the observers and questioners, perpetrators, sufferers, bystanders, survivors, inheritors, commemorators, forgetters, all of us generational beings.¹⁷

Before the end of this chapter, I will consider questions of method in more detail, and in the final chapter I address the question of what the antigenocidal democracy could look like. First, we need a sense of what we talk about when we talk about generational being and genocidal violence.

Generational Being

We come to be between past and future. It’s not that we enter into a place between, or set ourselves up in the eye of a storm, but rather that we exist in the movement between past and future, generated and generational. Brought into the world, each of us somebody’s child, we grow, some of us have children, a new generation emerges, and the genos is perpetuated. We sustain shared worlds, where sustaining means also holding them open for ways of being we have not anticipated. We send something of ourselves—genes, knowledge, ways of speaking, ways of being—into a future that is otherwise foreclosed for us mortals, and we do so knowing that we cannot control what will become of it but expecting that it will be valued and remain in some way recognizable as ours. My great-grandmother could not have known that there would be me. My being here is not a matter of her having extended herself into the future world but, rather, of her having had children and thereby having held open the possibility of something else, something more, perhaps something other, perhaps her wildest dreams, perhaps something that would shock or disappoint her, perhaps something she might be happy to acknowledge as hers. Built into generation is an anticipation that we might somehow remain for a while in memory, postponing oblivion and continuing to be part of the world. This means that we would destroy our own best hope of worldly immortality if we thought of the new generation as though they were clones or if we dreamed of clones that would repeat me, me, and more me. This courts the same danger that is embedded in all tradition, the risk of striking from the hands of the new their chance to renew the world.

Nietzsche was not wrong: Oblivion awaits us all, since a time will come when it will be as though none of us had ever been.¹⁸ But we don’t need Nietzsche to tell us that one day we each will die. Somewhere between grasping my own mortality and confronting the eventual death of us all, we come to value generational life. Arendt was also not wrong when she wrote that by virtue of being born we each owe the world a death, since by dying we make way for others. Between the death that makes way for others and the death that ends it all, there is a movement of living and dying. Between the realization of my own mortal finitude and the realization of human finitude as such, a space opens that we fill with the banal activities—eating, working, having sex, dancing—as well as the existential activities of making meaning, judging, and valuing. They are often the same thing.¹⁹

We know something of what it is to be mortal. We undergo it in the deaths of others, the sensations of growth and aging, the anxiety or sorrow or joy brought on by consciousness that our time is short. Philosophy has not ignored this. Plato showed us the condemned Socrates making his friends laugh with his remark that philosophers spend their lives practicing death. Heidegger drew twentieth-century philosophy back into the question of Being through an analysis