Abstract

What international law has come to describe as genocide has evidently become a privileged form of politics in the 20th century. In this perspective, three questions present themselves-genocide’s relationship to the past, its nature, and its future. When compared to ail previous massacres, the extermination-form seems to be original, even though it draws on an ancient arsenal of forms of hatred . Genocide is state violence taken to the extreme, a violence that defies the logic of war and depredation and is instead preferentially directed against its own populace. In the end, genocide finds its purpose in the prospect of self-purification, which, totally in disregard of the conditions required to form an authentic people, can proceed as far as self-extermination. Genocide’s goal can thus no longer besought in the elimination of the victim, but rush, r fist and foremost in terms of a radical crisis in the construction of identity. If Nazism is the most extreme example, the genocide in Rwanda appears to be the most pure. One might think that industrialized States have passed beyond this stage, because they judge it too costly, but that they have bequeathed it to the entities they dominate, whose identities have been gradually shattered under the pressure of decades of colonization, and now of globalization