On Disregard: Gaza and the Productive Failures of the Imagination

Abstract

How is the Gaza genocide, arguably the most documented genocide in history, not being seen by so many? This article offers two potential explanations for the paradox of hypervisible invisibility by outlining two key imaginative mechanisms of disregard. The first is the racial humanitarian imaginary, which sets an impossible bar of perfect innocence for Palestinians to be seen, all while continuing to treat them as terrorists with flat interiorities. The second revolves around the core Israeli fantasy of Palestinian disappearance, imagined as a necessary eventuality and as involving no Israeli agency. This subject position proclaims knowledge only in order to derealize and sidestep seeking knowledge—and specifically, to avoid imagining others’ conditions and one’s own complicity in producing the ideology that sustains them. Taken together, these mechanisms constitute the matrix of an ideological practice of disregard, which—far from hinging on simple ignorance, silences, denial or repression—makes ample use of the imagination to elaborately alter one’s relation to current conditions.