When confronting violence in the ethical scene—the precise moment at which the shooting of an unarmed person is justified or condemned—it is the realm of interiority that guides our image of existence. That is, bearing on the question of justice in any deployment of violence is the presumption of the subject as a self-knowing thing that is separable from the conditions that anticipate that violence. Yet what if, as Denise Ferreira da Silva asks us to do in her 2022 book, Unpayable Debt, we attended to necessity ‘as [the] exteriorization of a formal determinant’? By naming necessity as an authorising force, Ferreira da Silva exposes how otherwise unconscionable acts of violence are resolved through economic and juridical conditions, rather than in the ethical scene.

 In this paper, I consider a moment of ethical circumscription in the 1934 execution of the Aboriginal Anangu man Yukun by the white police officer William (Bill) McKinnon. Yukun, unarmed and unconnected to the crime McKinnon was seeking justice for, was shot while hiding in a cave at the base of Uluru. In that incident, and with the emergence of new evidence nearly 90 years on, I find that necessity remains fully operative. That is, I locate necessity as a formal determinant that cannot be captured within the interior stage, and that works to justify and maintain ongoing settler-colonial violence in Australia. Further, I suggest that when Yukun’s relative, Abraham Poulson, names a tree overlooking the cave as ‘a witness,’ he provides an image of existence through which we might apprehend and halt necessity’s operations in the global present.