Massacre reduces victims to undifferentiated, meaningless remains.

Evidence

In the case of massacres in particular, lifeless bodies are quickly reduced to the status of simple skeletons. Their morphology henceforth inscribes them in the register of undifferentiated generality: simple relics of an unburied pain, empty, meaningless corporealities, strange deposits plunged into cruel stupor. In the case of the Rwandan genocide—in which a number of skeletons were at least preserved in a visible state, if not exhumed—what is striking is the tension between the petrification of the bones and their strange coolness on one hand, and on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 147

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The tension between petrified, meaningless bones and their stubborn will to signify is a dense, nuanced meditation on the semiotics of mass death that resists summary.
• XREF: Connects to Mbembe’s necropolitics vocabulary (the dead as undifferentiated/undifferentiated corpse) and to Agamben on bare life, both part of the critical-theory toolkit the reader is assembling. — connects to: Unprovable anti-Muslim actions erode victims’ sense of reality. — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us…, 506; Removing risk reduces the soldier to a mere executioner in need of new victimhood

Broader Connections

• Unprovable anti-Muslim actions erode victims’ sense of reality. #qualifies (0.75) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 506
• Removing risk reduces the soldier to a mere executioner in need of new victimhood #expands (0.72)