THOSE OTHER SPECTERS
Organized Violence and The Inheritance of The West
GCAS Review Journal
Vol. II, Issue 2, October 2026
Editor: Filippo Scafi
EDITOR’S NOTE
The Sentence
A letter to shareholders, dated 3 February 2025. Say an analyst opens it the next morning between two screens, looking for guidance. Fourth-quarter revenue up thirty-six percent, the company placed “at the center of the AI revolution,” and then, in the last paragraph, a sentence by Samuel Huntington: the West rose “not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” Palantir’s stock closed twenty-four percent higher that day.
The sentence was thirty years old. It had circulated as provocation and as warning, or as the target of Edward Said’s polemic. In February 2025, its address changed. Alexander Karp, Palantir’s chief executive, placed it in a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and sent to the people who price the company’s future.
We start from that sentence, and from an admission that is unpleasant to make: in one sense it is true. Two responses come together. One denounces the speaker; the other corrects the history. Both leave the sentence where it stands, a description of the past that has turned, without anyone deciding it, into an instruction for the future. — But if it is true, a reader of Karp’s letter might ask, why not say so plainly? Because saying it plainly to investors is already a use of it. The truth of the sentence and the work it does have come apart, and this issue is written in the gap between them.
What we say about the essays collected here can only be read from where we stand. We wrote the call that brought them in. It asked contributors to work with the cold curiosity of the anatomist and to leave the judge’s bench empty. Some readers took this as a request to suspend judgment. It asked them to delay the verdict until the body was open. An anatomy exposes; every essay here takes a position, and none of them received that position in advance.
Twenty months on, the rhetoric has a budget. The Pentagon’s contract for the Maven Smart System, Palantir’s targeting platform, has risen to a ceiling of nearly $1.3 billion. The Army has folded seventy-five agreements into a single vehicle worth up to $10 billion. Investigative reporting from Gaza has described systems that produce human targets faster than any review can follow them. A sentence about the past now lives in procurement and in interface design, in doctrine.
The second half of Huntington’s sentence sets the course of this issue. Westerners often forget; non-Westerners never do. It is a sentence about memory: who keeps it and who loses it, and what keeping it compels. What if (1) Huntington is right about the past? And what if (2) being right about the past has become a way of selling the future? Both questions concern inheritance. Derrida’s Specters of Marx asked what it means to inherit a promise that was never kept, and we here ask the specular question. What does it mean to inherit a crime that one of its heirs has declared a qualification?
Seven Anatomies
It should be said, by way of intelligibility, that the seven essays fall into three groups. The cut is ours, and every essay crosses it somewhere. The first group reads the ledger and the myth that underwrites it; the second, the interface and the rulebook that apply both to populations; the third, the psychic economy that makes the whole arrangement feel necessary to those inside it.
I. The Ledger and the Myth
Joel Naoki Christoph’s “Those Other Algorithms” reads Karp’s letters as what they also are, financial documents, and matches what Palantir tells investors against what the Pentagon records it buys. Civilizational rhetoric turns out to generate demand. Long-term contracts, usage-based pricing and the slow integration of software into military routine convert a diffuse sense of threat into recurring revenue. The essay’s sharpest point concerns time. A subscription needs a threat that keeps approaching and never arrives, since “an enemy that never quite arrives keeps the renewals coming.” Palantir’s business model, in Christoph’s phrase, “gives the specter a ticker symbol.” The payoff is convex: the firm gains whether a conflict escalates, freezes or subsides, while states, publics and targeted populations carry the risk. Christoph also notes Karp leaves out that Huntington wrote the sentence as a warning about Western fragility, while Karp reads it as a business plan.
Nicklas Quirós van Outrive’s “Palantir’s Return” approaches the company from the other end, through the long duration of the myth it invokes. He writes from a double position, Belgian and Mexican, and from there “the West” looks like a delusion in Karl Jaspers’ sense, a belief defined by its incorrigibility: “A concept that cannot be pinned down cannot be refuted, it can only be wielded by delusion.” The genealogy passes through Leopold II’s human zoos, the Valladolid debate, the nineteenth-century invention of prehistory, and Josep Borrell’s garden and jungle. It ends at Peter Thiel’s “The Straussian Moment,” which Quirós van Outrive rereads as a Schmittian one, and at a formula that holds the essay together: “What Mbembe calls necropolitics, Palantir calls decision acceleration.”
The two essays should be read together, and against each other. Christoph keeps to what the filings can show and explicitly declines to connect Palantir to the targeting systems used in Gaza. Quirós van Outrive follows the genealogy down to its fascist residues. The first shows how little ideology the machine needs in order to run. The second shows why the machine wears that ideology so easily.
II. The Interface and the Rulebook
A headset, issued to every soldier. Parham Ghalamdar’s “Gamified Necropolitics” is theory-fiction, written as the user manual of an augmented-reality system that must never be built. Three layers, Skin, Score and Story, remove the face, the duration and the history from the encounter in which a person becomes a target. The manual’s patch notes carry the argument: “Fixed an error in which the operator continued to remember a target after confirmation. Memory now clears when the next objective appears.” Forgetting, here, is a specification. Conscience shows up in the system as latency, a delay to be engineered down to zero. The essay holds itself to its own critique. It concedes that its AI-generated images reproduce the shorthand they condemn, and it refuses to let the moral injury of Israeli soldiers become the emotional center of a text about Palestinian mass death: “Palestinians do not become politically visible only when an Israeli soldier dreams about them.”
Martin Stocker’s “When Memory Becomes a Rulebook” describes the reverse operation. In Russia after 2022, and in the occupied territories of Ukraine, official memory stops telling stories and starts administering people. Stocker names three mechanisms. Duty Grammar turns remembrance into debt. Enemy Mirror sets up the “collective West” as a moral counter-order, so that dissent at home can be filed as loyalty to the enemy abroad. Law Lock-in writes authorized history into criminal law, citizenship decrees and school curricula. Under Decree No. 307, residents of the occupied territories who decline Russian citizenship become “foreigners” in their own homes.
Here the West appears from outside, as the coordinate of another power, and the second half of Huntington’s sentence, non-Westerners never do, has become administrative law. Remembering, too, can be an instrument. Baudrillard’s indestructible Other can also be a state that has armed its own memory. Read side by side, the two essays describe the symmetry of one apparatus forgetting by design and the other remembering by decree, and both make memory into an operation on populations.
III. The Psychic Economy of Inheritance
Robert P. Rozek’s “The Lucid Parricide” turns a clinical account around. Lacan describes psychosis as foreclosure: the paternal function was never inscribed. Rozek argues from Freud and Hegel that the psychotic subject met the Law and annihilated it. The post-1945 “never again” served as the West’s paternal metaphor, and Karp, on this reading, executes that father in broad daylight: “The Huntington citation is not confession but trophy.” In Totem and Taboo, though, the dead father returns stronger than the living one. Hence the paranoid temporality of permanent pre-emption. Hence also a diagnosis that should trouble anyone who writes critique, ourselves included: inside this structure every appeal to law arrives as enemy action, and “critique is decoded as coup.” The essay closes on a civilization that keeps refining its framework and will not undergo the symbolic death that would let it change. “The water keeps rising, and the beast keeps targeting it.”
Eni Qirjako’s “Necromantic Jouissance” starts from guilt without a creditor. Secular modernity has lost the theological mediators that once absolved collective guilt, and so its colonial, totalitarian and fratricidal inheritance comes back as act instead of memory — more exactly, as repetition: borders, purges, pre-emptive aggression. The essay’s most difficult concept is the desire to be unborn, a longing for a plenitude prior to language that, on this account, only war can still stage. Its counterpart is the disposal gaze, which makes the other killable by first making it visible as waste. Its geography is the Mediterranean, which “determinate negation has thus transformed […] into the largest ritual altar of secular modernity.” The essay offers no absolution. It offers the “difficult labour of articulation.”
Muskaan Dhoundiyal’s “The West as the Other” reaches the same knot through Joan Copjec’s reading of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and his forty thousand photographs of draped Moroccan bodies. The target is historicism’s fantasy of a subject who knows itself, together with a utilitarian ethics of reciprocity that justified colonial assimilation as the happiness of all. Beneath that ethics lies a fear of the neighbor who enjoys too much. “Western philanthropy and violence are two sides of the same coin,” she writes in closing. The essay also turns on the pluralist discourse that set itself against Western hegemony and ended up giving it shelter.
These three do not agree. For Rozek the West knows exactly what it killed. For Qirjako it cannot symbolize what it did. For Muskaan its claim to know itself is the symptom. Lucidity, foreclosure, misrecognition: three accounts of how an inheritance can be held without being taken up. We have left the disagreement standing, since the issue thinks best where its contributors contradict one another.
What Is Inherited
Karp has said that “we must take responsibility for what we are, and be what we are.” The essays deny, each from its own side, the premise folded into that phrase: that there is a we that knows what it is and can therefore be it. Huntington’s sentence needs a West able to be the grammatical subject of a sentence, one that forgets or remembers, rises or declines. Opened up, that subject turns out to be a revenue model, a delusion, an interface, a counter-image drawn by another state, a parricide, a guilt without a creditor, a fantasy of self-knowledge. Seven findings for seven essays. None of them dissolves the violence. The organized violence was real, and so is its present organization. What dissolves is the claim that this violence is an identity one could simply take up.
The specter, then, consoles no one. Baudrillard was right that the Other survives every attempt to exterminate it, and Ghalamdar is right that “excess does not stop a bomb.” What the apparatus cannot classify is where politics may begin. It guarantees nothing. The essays answer the question of responsibility concretely for that reason, and their answers differ. Christoph asks for intervention in contracts, procurement rules and liability regimes. Ghalamdar asks that responsibility be traced through the whole apparatus instead of being loaded onto the last operator. Quirós van Outrive asks that the convergence of myth and machinery be named before the window for naming it closes. Stocker proposes something drier, a checklist that lets monitors recognize when memory has become a condition of access. Rozek asks for a symbolic death, the acceptance of a loss that does not destroy. Qirjako asks for articulation without absolution. Muskaan asks that we stay inside the gap every identity is built to cover.
They share a refusal. Huntington’s sentence leaves two exits open, the war cry, on one side: they remember, so we strike first; the alibi on the other side: we have forgotten, so we are innocent. Athens knew a version of the second, as Nicole Loraux taught us, when in 403 BCE, after the Thirty Tyrants, the city swore not to recall past wrongs, mē mnēsikakein, so that the civil war, the stasis, would not begin again. Amnesty, amnēstia, is a non-remembering — or a promise, legally sanctioned, not to bring the memory forward, which is something else, since the oath presupposes what it forbids. That oblivion was a legal and political act, decided and sworn. The oblivion Huntington attributes to Westerners is deliberate as well. Nobody swore to it, and it pays. Inheritance, as these essays practice it, takes neither exit. It means remembering without being authorized by what one remembers.
Huntington thought Westerners often forget. These essays suggest that the West remembers well enough and has learned to invoice the memory. The task is to break that conversion, so that what is remembered can be acknowledged as a debt and stops circulating as a capacity for sale. An issue of a journal cannot do this alone, but it can show where the conversion happens, and that may be enough to refuse it once, in the place where it is shown.
Filippo Scafi
October 2026