Resisting the Affective Economy of Genocide

Artist and researcher Anna Dasović and scholar, writer, and curator Natasha Marie Llorens have engaged in a years-long dialogue on the relationship between representation and violence. Dasović’s artistic practice focuses on the rhetorical structures that make genocidal violence visible, as well as the mechanisms by which those structures are instrumentalized to deny genocidal violence. Llorens is a curator and writer whose research engages North African and Middle Eastern contemporary art and film, philosophies of violence, and decolonial curatorial practices.

In this conversation, Llorens asks Dasović to build upon her previous work on genocidal violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, bridging a transhistorical gap that speaks to broader conclusions relevant to the ongoing genocidal violence in Gaza. Dasović introduces a key concept at the heart of her current PhD work: the “affective economy of genocide,” the resistance to which Llorens illustrates with several examples, including the work of Selma Selman and of Valentina Desideri.

Natasha Marie Llorens: What happens when we refer to what is happening in Gaza as horrifying or horrific? You suggest that we start from the word itself, an insistence on the importance of specific language that runs through your practice. The word horror in the Latin is derived from the verb horrēre, meaning “to bristle with fear,” or to feel one’s hair stand on end, or one’s body shudder in physical response. Its use in English dates to the 14th century, but today horror still signifies a profound emotional response, an intense sensation of fear or dread in the body. It can also be used to describe rejection, as in deep loathing or abhorrence. Both usages have psychosomatic implications; the person experiencing horror does not have full rational control over their response. The etymology of horror refers to a bodily, affective response in the viewer.

Anna Dasović: Yes, I feel the bristling of the hairs on my arms when confronted with an image of the dismembered body of a child my daughter’s age. I feel something the size of a tennis ball stuck in my throat when I witness the total destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure. I feel pain in my stomach when I see young boys in Palestine on their knees, blindfolded, stripped to their underwear, their arms bleeding from restraining rope. To say these scenes are horrifying indexes the effect witnessing this genocidal violence has on me—what the images make my body do. When I utter a pronouncement of horror, I am already displacing what is happening to Palestinians, the horrendous violence they are enduring.

NML: It makes it about us, essentially. The word horror locates the event in the viewer’s body, and etymologically, this has been its function for hundreds of years.

AD: Yes. And when we use the phrase unspeakable horror, we contradict ourselves, because unspeakable implies that something takes place where language fails, that there is a collapse of language before the enormity of destruction we are witnessing, which results in our or my inability to speak. Unspeakable horror becomes a stopping point— “there are no words”—which paradoxically says something very definite. It says I cannot find words, I am overwhelmed. This language testifies to our own limits.

By using such language, we are, perhaps unconsciously, protecting ourselves against both the affective response and the attendant failure. It gives us a way out of speaking about the gravest form of systematic genocidal violence many of us have seen or known about so directly, in our lifetimes.

NML: Okay, so how can the language we use enable speech, or produce articulation that is not structurally narcissistic?

AD: I am not suggesting we should shy away from using horror to describe what is happening to the Palestinians, but we have to think about how our language can become a demand to look, to describe, to narrate, to insist, to refuse silence rather than to foreclose witnessing. And I think that we should acknowledge the bodily, visceral dimension of witnessing, even at a distance. If we do not work through it somatically, we will ultimately end in collective silence. The challenge for us as people who live in societies that are complicit in this genocidal violence, is to transform affect into accountability. To produce speech that demands an acknowledgment of the fact of genocidal violence conducted through a colonial settler regime. That this genocidal violence has created a state of apartheid in Palestine, a state of exception, which began with the Nakba, or actually with the occupation by the British of Palestinian land.

NML: I want to go back to the structural foreclosure before we get into the somatic implications of your point here. This isn’t just a refusal of the nonspeakability of horror but relates to a broader debate about the representation of genocide, or the possibility of representing it; this debate emerges from scholarship on the Holocaust but isn’t limited to that historical context. In your doctoral research—maybe even before that—you draw on philosopher Jacques Rancière’s work and his claim that “the extermination of the Jews is inscribed in the project of self-mastery of Western thought, in its will to have done with the witness of the Other.”¹

I think Rancière’s insight gets to the heart of your critique of the discourse on nonrepresentability in the context of genocidal violence. If I follow your thinking correctly, we cannot be masters of ourselves, cannot comply with the central imperative of Western thought, unless we define genocidal violence as that which is impossible to represent or bear witness to. Defining it as “unrepresentable” actually allows for closure, relieves us of the responsibility for the open, uncontainable task of witnessing; it dispenses with the Other and the way their witnessing might undo us, un-master us.

AD: Exactly. Unimaginability, perhaps unwittingly, locates the bystander/witness of genocide outside the sphere of influence or responsibility, or it allows them to remain unmarked. In societies and politics in the Global North today, we see this denial of the catastrophe in Palestine play out in devastating ways through language and inaction. Terms like unimaginable and unrepresentable permit all kinds of refusal to witness and therefore of responsibility, as Judith Butler defines it—that is to say, through the frame that produces all the positions attendant to genocidal violence as it unfolds or has unfolded.

NML: A lot of your work over the last 15 years centers around the genocidal violence that took place in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which culminated in the slaughtering of 8,372 Bosnian Muslim men, boys, women, and babies in July 1995. How could we speak about Gaza after Srebrenica?

AD: Srebrenica matters today as a framework because until Gaza, it was the most well documented and discussed contemporary genocidal violence to date. The atrocities that took place there over a few weeks, were made utterly visible to us over decades. Less so, but still to some extent, the racialized humanitarian narratives produced to justify the genocidal violence, as well as the failure to intervene. This “failure” was not only governmental or institutional but also had a ripple effect on those who stood by at a distance, it resulted in an ethical crisis.² I believe that the international community’s unwillingness to fully respond to the seriousness of the situation in 1995 circulates as a kind of affective residue in the present. Despite all the “reckoning” that has supposedly taken place in its wake, I think Srebrenica produced the conditions of seeing, witnessing, and standing by under which we are still operating. The Euro-North American viewer got used to witnessing this genocidal violence toward Muslims, they learned how to watch their governments not intervene. If we have not fully come to terms with how that kind of witnessing implicated us, then how do we come to terms with what we are witnessing now?

What is happening to the Palestinians is unknowable to me in a profound sense; I cannot know. But I do know how it feels to stand over a mass grave. That is knowledge that I hold in my body. Since October 7, I have felt the weight of my response to standing over a mass grave for the first time in Bosnia, which is part of the reason it has been difficult to speak. Yet I have the sense that people around the world are beginning to feel, however distantly, what it means to stand over a mass grave. This is the affective economy of genocide working multidirectionally. On the one hand, it moves through the viewer of extreme violence, meditated through our phones when we find it unbearable. But on the other hand, the economy also operates in us, the viewers at a distance, as feelings of guilt and shame considering the complicity of our governments. The shift from Srebrenica in 1995 is not substantive, I think, but rather the speed at which the affective economy of genocide is moving, touching us, embalming us in shame.

NML: Is it possible to represent the fact of genocidal violence and still be accountable—that is, without seeking to master or replace the Palestinian experience with our own experience of horror?

AD: It depends on the capacity of those who watch genocidal violence at a distance to tolerate the speech of the survivor. Walid Sadek wrote that “the survivor is not an over-liver but rather a witness who knows too much, carrying an unwelcome but necessary knowledge.”³ What I see in the context of my work in Bosnia is that this knowledge has persistently been dismissed, or replaced, in public debate by White Europeans who failed to protect them. The trauma of survivors is conflated with the experience of White Europeans in their collective failure, while those same people cast survivors as too traumatized, too emotional, to be reliable sources of knowledge, when that knowledge touches them. So, I believe it is possible, but only if we build environments that center the survivor’s unwelcome knowledge, which is held in the body but denied by society’s authorizing structures.

NML: Together in Amsterdam, we made the show From what will we reassemble ourselves, dedicated to your work on Srebrenica. One of our main challenges was how to take the subjective experience of those who were raised in the Territories of the former Yugoslavia into account in a project that was about trying to broaden the representational frame around genocidal violence that took place there. I remember that Selma Selman’s work was very important in this sense. She was comissioned to make these delicate drawings on unframed paper, and they were installed in a scattered manner on the walls. They were self-portraits, like much of her work, but at a very modest scale. “Her drawings encourage the viewer to re-evaluate that which is assumed to be unchangeable, impossible or unnegotiable,” I wrote in the exhibition guide.⁴ They insist on the affective mutability of survival. For me, this work kept the whole project from slipping into factual or archival investigation. It represented a position of vulnerability that was not simply injury. I think this is an example of the kind of knowledge you are talking about above, knowledge that creates political emergence that manages to elude a strictly defined arena where “political action” takes place.

AD: That project drew on an intuition that I am trying to theorize more fully now, both in the doctoral project and the aesthetic work that is part of it, a proposition that draws on Sara Ahmed’s writing on affective economies. She examines how hate, fear, disgust, shame, love, feminist attachments, and queer feelings are mobilized within public discourse—or, how emotion circulates between signs and bodies. She argues that:

In such affective economies, emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments. Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.⁵

I think we are in an “affective economy of genocide,” that we are all somehow constituents.

NML: This idea allows for an exit to the loop Rancière theorizes, or a way to prop open the closure of the Western subject, reject his burning desire for self-mastery.

AD: It’s a possibility.

NML: The “affective economy of genocide” describes the cycle of genocidal violence, which produces horror in the viewer, which results in silence as they draw into their own response, which elicits guilt and shame that further alienates the bystander from the survivor and the witness. Is that correct? And so, in order to speak and respond, this affective economy must be resisted, and first of all, from the perspective of our own psychosocial position as bystanders?

AD: Yes, but it is not only that. The affective economy of genocide results in the profound dehumanization of Palestinians, it provides the conditions for their physical and social death. It ripples through Israeli society, radiating into Palestinians’ lives. This affective economy sanctions the government’s argument that the use of genocidal force is about the survival of the Jewish people against a reoccurrence of the Holocaust and not about extermination of the Palestinians.⁶ Because the violence is now so extreme, and Euro-North American governments are so complicit, the affective economy of genocide has saturated those societies completely, as well.

A major shift at the level of discourse is needed, one that recognizes that genocidal violence of this intensity does not only destroy bodies and communities, but it also destabilizes the very language through which we encounter it. The words we choose can either sustain the affective economy of genocide—reinforcing silence, distance, and the impossibility of relation—or they may open up spaces of speech, listening, and collective response.

To resist the affective economy of genocide is therefore not only to address the violence and denounce it but also to cultivate forms of language that refuse to let horror settle into closure. This means finding words that do not seal off the event as “unspeakable” but that keep it palpable, describable in affective and somatic terms, despite the gravity of its nature. It means asking what kinds of affect we want our language to circulate, what attachments we want our words to make possible.

NML: Let me see if an example can help here. I took part in a workshop that Valentina Desideri conducted, based on her work with embodiment and language. It was titled after Audre Lorde’s famous quote, “Your Silence Will Not Protect You.” Desideri led the audience—maybe 50 people, sitting in rows, in a traditional auditorium, in the dark—through a series of simple vocalizations while Lorde’s phrase was projected on the main screen. It began with collective breathing, then humming, then free sound vocalization.

Then she put a series of text passages up on the screen, one after another, with testimonies about different forms of genocidal violence from a first-person perspective: Mary Hooks, interviewed in February 2024, during the Stop Cop City in Atlanta protests; Greta Thunberg, speaking to Democracy Now! on board the Freedom Flotilla in June 2025; Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine in July 2025; and excerpts from Columbia student and activist Mahmoud Khalil’s speech in June 2025, upon his release from federal detention, among others.

Desideri invited the audience to vocalize in response to the texts in whatever way they felt called to do so. Paradoxically, the point of speaking was not to express one’s outrage or despair and be heard but instead to protect the speech of others who were voicing at the same time. In the cacophony of collective sound, it became possible to articulate freely and to practice articulation aloud, and in public, without fear of exposure or censure, tacit or explicit.

I didn’t have a clear response to the passages chosen, so I just read them aloud as many times as was necessary before the slide changed. Even this very simple speech act put my voice into the position of the witness, asked me to identify as the witness, in a room full of people who were also speaking. I couldn’t really hear anything else through the sound of my own voice and the general sonic chaos. So, I just sat in the sound of my own identification with people who were not at such a distance from genocidal violence for 20 minutes, in the dark, with others. I felt the authors’ rejection of complacency and their unmitigated clarity as though it were my own, dimly aware of the struggle others were also having to speak and sense the distance between themselves and the authors.

After a handful of slides, the screen returned to Lorde’s indictment, and Desideri had us relinquish language and hum together. When it was over, I had the sense that the people around me were infinitesimally more fluid in their capacity to speak. It got me thinking about this kind of encounter at a different scale, or as a daily collective practice, and what it could change about the affective economy of genocide, which, as you have explained, invests heavily in silence.

AD: Perhaps the task ahead is to find new nodes of attachment—words, gestures, and practices that let love, solidarity, and radical responsibility … stick. I am using Sara Ahmed’s notion of “stickiness” here. She argues that emotions have a rippling effect: “they move sideways (through ‘sticky’ associations between signs, figures, and objects) as well as backward (repression always leaves its trace in the present—hence ‘what sticks’ is also bound up with the ‘absent presence’ of historicity)”⁷ If fear and hate stick to certain bodies, if “unspeakable,” “unthinkable,” and “unimaginable” stick to genocide as a perpetual descriptor, then we produce Gaza as “a site beyond words,” rather than a place where specific, human, thinkable suffering is happening.

Another site where the affective economy of genocide operates is in the weaponization of antisemitism accusations in Western societies. Here, the affective force of a word like antisemitism, charged with a long and devastating history, is mobilized to regulate who may speak, and on what terms. In this economy, the charge does not stay put: it is made to “stick” to speech acts, signs, demonstrations, or even people, censoring and structurally silencing people by shifting them into unemployment. Speaking becomes dangerous not because of the intrinsic meaning of words, but instead because of the affective circulation in which those words are caught.

The IDF entered Gaza City in the last few weeks, and I saw a video of them blowing up a high-rise after giving only a 15-minute warning to its residents.⁸ I thought to myself, this is the end of anything civilized. How do we continue to keep on living when they are dying? While we are standing on top of the rubble, and they are underneath it, trying to reach for us?

I know, I feel, but I cannot act in proportion to what I witness. The temptation is to turn inward. The economy thrives on that withdrawal—silence sustained by guilt, paralysis disguised as shame. But shame could also be a moment of exposure, a possibility. If we let it turn us inward, it sustains our role in the economy. But if we allow it to open us outward, to bind us to others in solidarity, then shame can become one of the nodes that help us resist the circulation of hate and indifference.

Anna Dasović is focused on the rhetorical structures that make genocidal violence visible, and those deployed to obscure the politically inconvenient aspects of such conflicts. She examines the production and use of (visual) documents as objects that seek to form notions of truth and social and/or political perceptions. Her work has been exhibited at the Van Abbemuseum, Framer Framed, Stedelijk Museum, Bergen Assembly, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Oberhausen short film festival and SAVVY Contemporary, among others. Currently she is undertaking a PhD in artistic practice at HDK-Valand Gothenburg university.

Natasha Marie Llorens is a Franco-American arts writer and curator based in Stockholm, where she is Professor of Art Theory at the Royal Institute of Art and co-director of the Center for Art and the Political Imaginary. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, both in New York. In 2023, Llorens and Algiers-based curator Myriam Amroun won a multi-year grant in artistic research from the Swedish Research Council for “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” a project centred on minor transnationalism in curatorial methodology.