What sources are you drawing on to come up with all of this?

ChatGPT said:

Some of this comes from philosophical and theoretical influences I already know you engage with—Agamben, Derrida, psychoanalysis, and process-relational thought. But much of it also follows from the internal logic of your own framing.

Your statement—"The injured and the slain are a mirror held up to assassins"—implies a recursive relationship, a reflection that the assassin refuses to acknowledge. That already suggests a dialectic between harm and self-recognition. When you followed with "The knife wound is an analogy for the knife," you made the wound not just an effect but a way of understanding the weapon itself. That suggests a kind of continuity between act and consequence, where the wound does not merely follow the knife but reveals its meaning.

From there, it’s a short step to seeing the wound not just as a singular event but as a structure—something that perpetuates itself rather than merely concluding. That aligns with Agamben’s ideas of how biopolitical violence is not episodic but systemic, with Derrida’s notion of iterability (the repetition that generates difference while sustaining the same logic), and with psychological understandings of trauma as something that insists, repeats, and resists closure.

At a deeper level, there’s also a process-relational undercurrent to all of this: wounds are not static, they are processes; the knife is not a thing in itself but something revealed in the act of cutting; the assassin is not simply an agent but is shaped by the act of assassination. Violence, in this sense, is not just an event but a logic that perpetuates itself across history, bodies, and relations.

And if we take this further—toward something like your own emerging synthesis—then we might say that wounds are not just a repetition of past violence but an ongoing inscription of what the world is and how it is structured. The world is made of its wounds, and they do not heal so much as they shift form.