ABSTRACT
The move from “genocide” to “the genocidal” disrupts longstanding assumptions about the causative origins of events, the lineal nature of temporality, and the voluntarist bases of agency. This essay argues that epigenetics points us toward new ways of attending to subjective orientations toward belonging, especially because it instantiates a kind of non-determinist, non-lineal, systems-level logics—one that has surprising affinities with the existential logics of thinkers like Kierkegaard and one that echoes the logics at work within the turn toward “the genocidal.” Epigenetics thereby proffers an account of causation that privileges developmental relations over cause and effect, sociality over individualism, and complexity over linear progression. Thinking existentially about epigenetics, in turn, proffers an account of subjectivity that privileges becoming over being, embedded and situated relations over individualism, and distributed agency over voluntarism. Such subjectivity is at odds with the kind of selfhood that is authorized (and required) by the nation-state, and it suggests a mode of existence that undermines genocidal violence without furthering the imperialist projects of nations.
