The Essay That Could Be Written – But Won’t Be

A few days ago, I ran an experiment. I took a well-established set of critical theories—Foucault on power and spectacle, Edward Said on representation, Judith Butler on gender—and applied them to the ongoing performance in Gaza, the Hamas Theater of Cruelty.

Disclaimer: I didn’t write the piece myself. I instructed ChatGPT to generate it. Not because I couldn’t write it. I went to graduate school in the 80s. Literary theory was my sacred scripture. I could do it in my sleep. But why would I expend time on the exercise when Generative AI already has the protocol?

This is the point: the intellectual tools exist; the theoretical frameworks are available. And yet, no one in the woke academy will write it.

Generative AI did what any competent critic trained in the tradition of 1980s and 1990s literary and cultural theory would do.

Youtube Screen Grab

Here’s an excerpt:

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish provides a crucial foundation for understanding this moment as a form of power spectacle. The medieval ritual of public execution—where punishment was not simply about justice but about making power visible—is echoed in Hamas’s orchestration of this event. The corpse, in this framework, is not merely a body—it is a text onto which power is inscribed. The disappearing corpse in this vile spectacle is itself a statement, a refusal of closure, an assertion of control beyond death.

Edward Said exposed the ways in which colonial discourse framed the “Oriental” as irrational, violent, and theatrical—a vision that Hamas, ironically, embraces and weaponizes.  At the same time, Said invites us to see this spectacle as part of a broader narrative war: it is an assertion that Hamas, not Israel, dictates the terms of life and death, presence and absence, victimhood and power. In a sense, this is the ultimate power move: to withhold even the right to mourn.

Etc., etc.

St Edward (Wiki-Commons)

I sent the unframed version of this essay to an editor who took my essay at face value. I console myself: Swift’s Modest Proposal also suffered that fate. She also told me that I risked my credibility by using ChatGPT (or publicly announcing as much).

So be it. I have been ChatGPT-shamed before.

But the real issue is that the theoretical tools that are the mainstay of woke Israel-bashing are not meant to be applied to Hamas, to Gaza, to Islam. Foucault and Said remain the most dominant figures in academia, with their methodologies selectively applied – to Jews and Israel. The same theoretical languages used to analyze Israel as ‘settler colonial ethno-nationalist state’ are off-limits when it comes to Hamas’s Theatre of Cruelty, the staging of a performance of terror against Jews.

Foucault (Wiki-Commons)

AI didn’t invent the argument—it merely revealed what is intellectually permissible and what isn’t. This is not an active suppression of inquiry, but more subtle: An orthodoxy that does not need enforcers because its limits are internalized. A discourse that does not need to silence because it has already decided what is worth speaking about.

And: the essay remains unwritten.