The Spoiled Milk Paradox: When the Label Devours the Word

To silence truth, the state must betray both its victims and its own.

This essay is a critique of the systems of power, not the lives they affect, and seeks to defend those caught in their machinery: the Palestinians subjected to the siege and violence, and the Jewish people whose safety and moral integrity are endangered by the same mechanisms of domination. Every abusive and inhumane system has its tells. Just as the narcissistic parent would rather let milk spoil in the fridge than see their child enjoy it, states too reveal their priorities by choosing control over care, domination over protection. I call this the spoiled milk paradox: when enjoyment is not forbidden in order to preserve resources but in order to destroy them. In the Lacanian sense, the parent’s act is not driven by need but by jouissance – a perverse satisfaction in ensuring the child’s pleasure never arrives. Gilles Deleuze shows us that the ‘spoiled milk’ is not accidental waste but the reterritorialization of flows: milk is allowed to rot because its decay better serves the purpose of domination than its nourishment would. And for Alain Badiou, such refusal is a betrayal of the universal ethic of sustenance, the reduction of truth into petty particularity.

Today, this paradox is not confined to families but scales up to geopolitics. Humanitarian aid intended for Palestinians is blockaded, food and medicine transformed into tools of siege. The ‘milk’ that should feed becomes the milk deliberately curdled at the border, its rot weaponised. For Lacan, this would be the foreclosure of the Palestinian as subject: hunger itself is stripped of its legitimacy, denied symbolic recognition. For Deleuze, the blockade would be a diagram of control – flows of aid stopped, coded, and re-coded as part of the state’s war machine. For Badiou, it would be the anti-event: a refusal of the truth of equality, a nihilistic fidelity to domination over life.

Anyone who dares speak out is swiftly branded antisemitic – a label stripped of its protective meaning and wielded to silence criticism. But in stripping ‘antisemitism’ of its true meaning, the state also abandons the very people the word was meant to protect. Jewish individuals who oppose atrocities or simply refuse complicity are cast out, their safety diminished by the hollowness of a term that no longer distinguishes between hatred of Jewish people and resistance to injustice. As Mandy Patinkin recently warned, Netanyahu and his right-wing government are not only endangering Palestinians but also ‘the Jewish population all over the world,’ turning a word that should safeguard against hatred into a tool that spreads it.

The spoiled milk paradox mutates here into language: the very signifier meant to protect Jewish lives is allowed to rot, its meaning soured until it silences truth. Instead of defending it. Lacan would call this the emptying of the Master-Signifier, its meaning collapsed into pure policing. Deleuze would call it the capture of discourse: deterritorialized speech re-coded as surveillance. While in Badiouian terms, it would be the most cowardly betrayal – the weaponisation of a universal struggle against hatred into a particular shield for injustice.

Paradoxically, the state claims to care about Jewish lives while simultaneously jeopardising them, turning Israeli citizens into human shields to enforce a strategy of control. The spoiled milk now curdles inward: citizens are told their deprivation is proof of their protection. Lacan unmasks this as the obscene injunction of the superego where the subject is told ‘you must suffer so that you may be safe.’ Deleuze shows how life is coded into the war machine, each citizen reterritorialized as a node in the apparatus of domination. Badiou names it treason against survival itself, for the universal ethic of life is sacrificed to the state’s machinery of control.

Unfortunately, some of these citizens, far from resisting, embrace the role – absorbing and projecting the state’s hatred, celebrating atrocities, or simply remaining complicit. Here the spoiled milk paradox becomes psychological: denied genuine enjoyment (truth, justice, authentic enjoyment), people cling to the rot itself, mistaking cruelty for belonging. For Lacan, this is identification with the aggressor, a perverse alignment with the jouissance of cruelty. For Deleuze – micro-fascism, the desire for one’s own oppression, the ‘joyful’ plugging into the machine of hate. For Badiou, it is the collapse of fidelity: the failure to recognise the event of injustice and remain loyal to it.

The real victims, the Palestinians, endure deliberate suffering, while the state’s own population is both manipulated and willingly complicit. The spoiled milk paradox reaches its final form, where nourishment is inverted into poison. The Palestinians are cast not as subjects of the symbolic order but as its excluded remainder, reduced to bare life (according to an Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, bare life is stripped of all social, legal and political protections; it is a concept he referred to as he examined how the Nazi regime reduced Jewish people, among others, to life that could be killed without consequence) so that the system’s perverse structure can persist. In Badiouian sense, the Palestinians do not embody truth because they suffer – suffering is never the foundation of truth. Rather, their exclusion violently demonstrates the lie of the state’s universality. In this exposure lies a site where equality insists, despite denial: to remain faithful to the principle that equality belongs to all, precisely against the machinery that denies it. The demand is not born from suffering itself, but from the truth betrayed in the act of exclusion.

Killing the word to save the lie

The most telling index of how language is weaponised is the fate of those who wield it. In Gaza, more journalists have been killed than anywhere else on earth in recent history (according to Al Jazeera: ‘Israel has killed nearly 270 journalists and media workers since it launched its war on Gaza’). This is no accident. To the state, the journalists are dangerous precisely because they restore words to their proper use: famine is famine, massacre is massacre, apartheid is apartheid. Such words puncture propaganda, exposing the lie that domination is protection.

The state therefore makes language itself the battlefield. By killing the journalist, it kills the sentence. It interrupts testimony before it can be inscribed, replacing description with accusation, substituting narrative with silence. What remains is a repertoire of prefabricated charges: ‘antisemitism’ for the external critic, ‘Hamas-affiliated’ for the internal witness. Both serve the same function – to erase the content of what was said or shown and replace it with an accusation that precludes further speech.

This is not rhetorical. Victor Ostrovsky, a former Israeli Mossad agent, confirms the process explicitly:

When I was in the Mossad and we had a guy that gave us problems in the US, and he was speaking out, and he was talking like Pete talked once and said: Israel is bombing Lebanon with cluster bombs. We say, hey, who’s that guy? … he makes a lot of noise, and you can’t get rid of him. So what you do is you get in touch with a guy in the station in New York or in the station in Washington and you say, tell the guys at B’nai B’rith to label him. And of course, the campaign starts. And before you know it, the guy is labelled. And he’s an antisemite. Because that’s what we say he is. And that’s one stain you cannot wash. It shames me as a Jew to tell you that. But that’s the fact, and it’s wrong.

The murdered journalist is thus not only silenced but rebranded in death: stripped of his words, retroactively scripted into the state’s narrative as a terrorist. Truth is erased twice – once by the bullet, and again by the label.

Ironically, recently, on a podcast, Netanyahu feigned shock at the idea that podcasting might be regulated in the US: ‘Why are you regulated? You’re regulated? By what? You should have the freedom to say whatever you want… I didn’t realise there’s regulation on podcast.’ The irony is obscene. While he postures as a defender of free expression, his state actively silences those who speak truth: journalists are murdered, critics branded ‘antisemitic,’ witnesses reclassified as ‘Hamas-affiliated.’ To proclaim freedom while murdering those who speak is not mere hypocrisy. It is the weaponisation of irony itself, where language is hollowed out until even the word ‘freedom’ serves domination and oppression.

For Lacan, this is the purest operation of the Master-Signifier. ‘Freedom of speech’ is invoked not to guarantee speech but to structure power. This signifier floats empty, detached from practice, yet it anchors the entire symbolic order the state depends on. In this sense, the hollower the word becomes, the more useful it is to the master: freedom as an image endlessly repeated while its real practice is annihilated. Netanyahu’s shocked performance – ‘you’re regulated?’ is less a lie than a ritual, a staging of freedom as though it were present precisely where it has been most violently foreclosed.

In Lacanian terms, this foreclosure means that the truth of speech, its capacity to name atrocities, to testify to suffering, is expelled from the field of the sayable. It returns only in the form of violence: the murdered journalist, the silenced witness, the absent word. ‘Freedom’ is therefore not simply hypocrisy; it is the fetish-object that conceals its own impossibility. Just as in my spoiled milk paradox, milk meant to nourish is deliberately allowed to sour, so too is language corrupted: the field of the sayable becomes a terrain of hunger and absence, where truth cannot feed the morally deprived world.