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Paper short abstract

From a kitchen-table desire for "mir u duši" to Višegrad’s negationist landscapes, I trace genocidal logic as an assault on facticity that demands proof. Against healing-as-closure, I propose healing-as-refusal: antigenocidal reweaving amid ongoing annihilation, from Bosnia to Palestine—carefully

Paper long abstract

A question at a kitchen table in (perpetual) exile: “what do you desire?”

The answer—collectively personal, non-clinical—returns: “mir u duši.”

Almost immediately, a demand arrives to make it “concrete”: name the nightmares, the scenes; produce the legible wound.

This paper begins there, where a desire-for-healing is interpellated by a pedagogy of admissibility—where “healing” is morphed into measurable improvement, therapeutic statecraft, and the correct narrative-form. That interruption is spatio-temporally enmeshed in Višegrad’s (and Eastern Bosnia’s) negationist landscapes: “genocide” ground off a memorial; a ‘spa’ reopened after functioning as a sexual torture site; Andrićgrad’s ethnonationalist “Renaissance,” performing innocence. These are denial-techniques that target the possibilities of facticity: what is recognised as a wound, a crime, a grievable death; who is believed, what becomes actionable.

Wrestling with the provocation that “Genocide is not a fact,” I analyse this as genocidal logic: an enduring violence that assaults the conditions of proof and then demands proof; that unweaves world-relations—land, burial, kinship, language—and then requires “recovery” within the very order that persists. The archive is summoned as remedy, yet refusal must be uttered from within history. An impossible provocation.

From that “impossibility”, a possible reframing emerges: healing-as-refusal. Not closure or reconciliation’s timetable, but antigenocidal reweaving. A fidelity to the seemingly unresolvable that refuses to be defanged. Refusing (negating) negationism the right to dictate the terms of care, mourning, and futurity. I end by gesturing—carefully, without analogy—toward Palestine, as a condition of the world, where demands to narrate, to prove, to “move away-and-on,” circulate amid ongoing annihilation.