Impassable Visions
Published
In 2018, a book chapter I co-authored with Alexander Laban Hinton, in A Companion to the Anthropology of Death (edited by Antonius C. G. M. Robben), was published by Wiley-Blackwell. The chapter, “Impassable Visions: The Cambodia to Come, the Detritus in its Wake,” 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.
A Companion to the Anthropology of Death (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018)