The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Genocide is one of the deepest problems for human thought. What we discover in genocide is the omnipresent negativity of every human aspiration. What we learn in thinking about genocide is that human culture is a fragile veneer that hovers over the abyss of cruelty. Genocide thus calls for the best efforts of human reflection.

There are two parts to this reflective activity. We need to understand genocide—its causes, motivations, and implications. But we also need to imagine alternatives and modes of resistance. Bruce Wilshire tackles the first of these tasks in a descriptive effort that aims at understanding the phenomena of genocide and terrorism.

But Wilshire acknowledges that genocide shows us the limits of understanding. He claims that genocide is unthinkable and that it is impossible to [End Page 262] exhibit the essence of genocide. This approach echoes Adorno, who claimed that after Auschwitz "our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience" (Adorno 1994, 362).

Genocide occurs at the limit of human experience. Thus in describing genocide, Wilshire turns to metaphor in an effort to ground this unreal event in something visceral. His guiding metaphor for describing genocide is diarrhea: genocide is the social body's explosive instinct to expel the alien other. This metaphor aims to account for the tendency of the genocidal group to think of the alien other as filth or shit. The imagery of diarrhea helps us understand the nearly uncontrollable physical convulsion of the body politic that occurs in genocide when individuals are ecstatically transported in the corporate struggle to eliminate the infectious other.

This is a useful descriptive endeavor. Especially significant are Wilshire's repeated attempts to describe the experience of what he calls "ontological hysteria" or "mimetic contagion." We see this topic broached in Wilshire's provocative title with its exclamation marks: Get 'Em All! Kill 'Em! This title evokes the hysteria of the genocidal imperative. Individuals are commanded by this imperative to destroy the infectious others without discrimination, without reservation, and without thought.

This is an important reminder of the power that culture has over the individual. When a culture feels itself threatened, the corporate body reacts with violence and individual members can be caught up in panic and frenzy that leads to the uncanny intoxication of the genocidal rampage. This is why Wilshire claims participants in genocide have a difficult time explaining (and even remembering) what happened: the self is absorbed in such moments into the purgative cultural act.

Related to the urge to purify, one of the chief causes of genocide according to Wilshire is the experience of mortality. This is the sense of the imminent death of the self and the far worse sense of the impending demise of one's culture. When a group is threatened with mortality by an alien other, the corporate body responds with expulsive rage.

Wilshire's descriptive endeavor is quite valuable for reminding us of the primal roots of violence. Unfortunately, his approach is not useful in imagining antidotes for this poison. Wilshire's focus on metaphor and description does not lead him to propose a positive cure for genocide. Instead one is left with the impression that genocide is an inevitable human possibility since every social body is rocked—from time to time—with the volatile urge to exterminate the alien other.

Most significantly, Wilshire ignores politics and its potential as a cure. One reason for this may be that Wilshire tends to think of politics as more the cause of the problem than the solution to it. He recognizes that a genocidal mob needs a "head." But he fails to consider the way liberalism creates institutional [End Page 263] safeguards against violence by effectively decapitating the mob through a division of powers. Wilshire...