This book chapter, “Impassable Visions: The Cambodia to Come, the Detritus in its Wake,” coauthored with Alexander Laban Hinton, examines what we argue was a key dynamic underlying the Cambodian genocide. If the revolutionary society of the Khmer Rouge was “to come,” to borrow Jacques Derrida’s phrase, the aspiration contained the seeds of its own undoing: the detritus—from the physical garbage of the old regime to its corrupt traditions to the contaminating incorrigibles—needed to constitute the imagined pure state to which it was opposed.
The chapter is available via the Wiley Online Library.
