These lines applies the conceptual apparatus developed by Lynne Tirrell in “Genocidal Language Games”[1], a text in which the author offers a philosophical analysis of the role of language in the preparation and execution of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Tirrell’s work belongs to a growing tradition within the philosophy of social and political language, where the philosopher conceives of herself as an activist who intervenes rather than merely describes reality[2]. This tradition, running from Austin’s speech acts to the contemporary critical pragmatics of Rae Langton and Mary Kate McGowan, holds that analyzing the language of power is already a political gesture. A philosopher who exposes the discursive mechanisms of extermination abandons a neutral position and consequently assumes a position of resistance. It is from that position that this text proceeds, denouncing implicit practices within mainstream discourses that still insist on silencing the ongoing genocides perpetrated by the Zionist entity—or just “the entity”—against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples.
Tirrell’s central thesis is that certain utterances, which she calls deeply derogatory terms, are not merely insults or expressions of subjective contempt. Rather, they are action-engendering: they generate conditions of permissibility for non-linguistic actions, including physical violence and extermination. Their force does not reside in the intention of the individual speaker but in their insertion within socially sedimented linguistic practices that erode protective norms and construct new norms of treatment toward the designated group. The deeply derogatory term does not describe a reality: it produces one against humanity, executing a slaughter in plain sight. It does not name what is there: it authorizes what is already being done.
This mechanism operates with disturbing clarity in the discourse produced and sustained by the entity regarding the Palestinian and Lebanese populations, further legitimized by major journalistic outlets backed by the empire, yet increasingly repelled by that mass of individuals Spinoza calls multitude. The terms that have circulated in official declarations, aligned media, and colonial military discourse do not constitute mere war rhetoric. They constitute, in the precise technical sense that Tirrell establishes, a genocidal linguistic practice. Ministers of the entity government have referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, as a population that must be “crushed”, as entities whose very existence is the problem. These terms do not float freely: they are inserted into a system of sanctioned inferences that determine which actions are rational, permissible, or even required toward those so designated.
To understand the mechanism in its depth it is necessary to follow Ludwig Wittgenstein, from whom Tirrell takes the notion of language game[3]. A language game is not an ornament of social life: it constitutes a form of life. Language does not reflect the world from the outside but articulates the practices within which the world takes shape, within which certain things become visible and others invisible, certain actions become thinkable and others unthinkable. What the entity has constructed over decades is precisely a genocidal language game: a system of discursive practices that renders the Palestinian visible only as a threat, as an obstacle, as a dispensable thing. Within that game, certain inferences become automatic and certain actions cease to require justification.
Sellars on Language Games
Wilfrid Sellars, an analytic philosopher whose legacy heads an inferentialist intellectual revolution in our time, allows us to specify the mechanism in three moments[4]. Language entry transitions are the movements through which someone or something enters the game: the moment in which “Palestinian”, “Lebanese”, or “Arab” becomes associated, in the discourse of the entity, with “terrorist”, with Hamas or Hezbollah, with “human shield”. This entry is anything but innocent. As Tirrell notes following Wittgenstein, the position one occupies upon entering the game determines in advance the range of permissible moves, since, as Sellars would say, what is taking place occurs within the space of giving and asking for reasons. If the Palestinian enters the game as a terrorist, the entire subsequent inferential architecture is directed toward that entry. Language-language moves are then the internal inferences that become available: if he is a terrorist, he is not a civilian; if he is not a civilian, he has no protection; if he has no protection, attacking him is not a crime but part of an operation. Each internal move expands the range of the permissible, sliding along an apparent logic that conceals the violence of its premises. Language exit transitions, finally, are the moment in which the game abandons the discursive plane and becomes action: the bomb that falls on the hospital, the order of forced displacement, the blockade of food and water, the systematic demolition of homes.
The institutional dimension of the mechanism becomes visible when one considers that the entity has imposed upon the Palestinian population a status-function: “X counts as non-person in C”, where C is the geopolitical and discursive space that it itself controls and defines. This function is not a brute fact but a construction sustained by reiterated linguistic practices, by legal frameworks, by media narratives, by the complicit silence of Western governments. And like every status-function, it carries built-in direct consequences: if the Palestinian counts as a non-person, then displacing him is not expulsion, blockading him is not starvation, bombing him is not massacre. Language does not accompany violence: it precedes it, organizes it, and justifies it from within. The same applies to the colonial advance in southern Lebanon and the constant bombardment of urbanized areas filled with innocent living beings.
Making this mechanism explicit, in the sense that Robert Brandom gives to that operation—that is, discursively articulating the commitments and permissions that a practice carries implicitly but does not itself thematize—is not reducible to a merely academic exercise. It is an act of political resistance insofar as genocidal power depends, for its reproduction, on the opacity of its own discursive procedures. The entity does not present its project as extermination: it presents it as defense, as security, as response. The support it invokes to justify its colonization consists of decontextualized biblical texts and the protection of the US empire. In other words, it needs its language games to pass as a neutral description of reality rather than what they are: a performative machinery that violently produces the reality it claims merely to describe.
When philosophy makes that mechanism explicit, when it names the entry move, traces the internal inference, identifies the exit move and connects it to the body that falls, it wrests from power its most prized instrument: the naturalization of what has been artificially constructed. To expose genocidal language as genocidal language is to restore to extermination its name, and to restore to the exterminated his condition as victim of deliberate and systematic violence — or, to use the subtle term of factical ethics, his condition of “specter”, of an unjust and innocent death that haunts us from the other bank of the river. In that gesture resides something more than academic justice: it resides the refusal to be complicit in a mass crime through conceptual silence, the refusal to allow the murderer to keep choosing the words with which he legitimizes what he does.
Making explicit can be, in this sense, the most radically political philosophical gesture that exists. Normativity that sustains extermination can only be challenged when it ceases to be implicit, and to express it is precisely the condition of possibility of its transformation, the first movement, austere and necessary, logical and formal, of all emancipation.
See, for an in-depth exposition of this hard problem, Agha, Saleh, Karim Barakat, Ray Brassier, and Zainab Sabra. 2025. “The Uncritical Mind: On Academic Complicity and Genocide.” Journal of Palestine Studies 54 (4): 79–100. doi:10.1080/0377919X.2025.2603340.
[1] Tynne Tirrell, “Genocidal Language Games,” in Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech, eds. Ishani Maitra and Mary Kate McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 174–221.
[2] Justin Khoo and Rachel Katharine Sterken, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language (London: Routledge, 2021); David Bordonaba Plou, Víctor Fernández Castro, and José Ramón Torices, eds., The Political Turn in Analytic Philosophy: Reflections on Social Injustice and Oppression (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022).
[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958).
[4] Wilfrid Sellars, “Some Reflections on Language Games,” Philosophy of Science 21, no. 3 (1954): 204–28.
Hyperspekulation 
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