Death and Sex in Palestine

There was a great deal of death in my childhood, almost all of which came by way of Palestine. As a matter of fact, death and Palestine were synonyms. Well, I’m not speaking of actual deaths, of these there were very few, but death at large, death as a specter, as an ever-present image, death as ecstasy, death ritualized, stylized, and aestheticized — a death that wills itself as the apotheosis of time, place, and man. Death and Palestine were indeed synonyms.

News of death and the dead was carried almost daily, especially during the years of the Second Intifada, on television and on every front page of every newspaper my father brought home. One of my earliest memories of this kind of death was a close-up on the corpse of a Palestinian child on the screen as it was being pulled out of the rubbles of a collapsed building. As the men lifted it, the body turned out to be torn at the torso, and it flapped in the middle as if it were empty, eviscerated of content. I may have been ten at the time, and to say the image was horrifying is an understatement. I recoiled in panic backward, and my mother, who was sitting next to me on the couch, immediately wrapped her arms around me and pressed my head into her chest, saying ma’alesh, habibi, da shahid. It’s okay, habibi. He’s a martyr. She used her words to try to provide protection from my first encounter with the abyss of senseless destruction by placing the image in a frame that made it okay; a teleological frame that closed death to interpretation and domesticated it to the understanding of even a child. Horror domesticated and subdued. A martyr is a hero, a good thing, an eternal winner of life. Her love and her protection of me were thus inseparable from the transmission of what is quintessentially — and unbeknownst to my loving mother — an ideology. In other words, her profound love required the falsification of reality.

Palestine never ceased to supply martyrs, a supply that never failed to generate ever higher demand. A few years later, as I reached the troubled years of puberty and adolescence, Palestinian death and its visuals took on a whole new meaning. The martyrs, as part of their eternal winning, are promised to be surely rewarded with an eternity of virgins for their every sexual pleasure and whim after death — a promise which supplied a fertile sexual aperture for the budding, unwieldy erotic imagination of young boys. It made for a private erotic theater that was religiously sanctioned, approved, not to say encouraged, an imaginative world whose deathliness and eroticism reinforce one another. It was often the case, especially in those troubled years of Intifada and suicide terrorism, that the imams’ Friday sermons would alternate between lamentations of death and the massacres of the innocent in Palestine and sensuous descriptions of the joys awaiting the martyrs in heaven; the breasts hanging like ripe pomegranates, the skin as soft as water, and the ecstasy of a million unions. The mosque, thus, helped produce an eschatological erotic theater around death. Palestine was the eternal score of the human condition, alternating between the two tunes of death and sex. To a Western reader, these memories might have seemed oriental mysteries only a few years ago. No longer. The sirens of Palestine, singing of death and sex, can now be heard from everywhere. This essay is an attempt to help you understand your new world.

This essay, which will be published in two installments, will attempt to show, not just that Palestinian political culture is heavily dependent on the aestheticization of death which I believe is not a exactly a new observation, but that modern atrocity spectatorship has developed into an aesthetic economy of voyeurism in which real death is converted into reproducible affect and that the Palestinian martyr aesthetics is an unusually perfected instance of a larger post-Christian structure who originates in the secular devouring of Christian sacred representation. In the second installment, the delicate relationship between aesthetized death, death kitsch, and the erotic, especially homosexual erotics, will be discussed.

Note: This essay is not intended as another intervention in the culture war or the information war surrounding Israel and Palestine. It is written against the degradation of death itself. Whatever one’s politics, one should be able to recognize the catastrophe in a world that can no longer grant death its singularity and dignity. This is an attempt to help myself and you to resist that condition, and perhaps, in doing so, to once again feel human.

My mother’s fundamental desire to domesticate the intolerable is by no means unique. It is an enduring human instinct that transcends time and geography. It is entirely expected, then, that Palestinians, existing as they do within a long and punishing conflict, would seek to do the very same with their own atrocities and their dead. But what begins as a universal mechanism for psychological survival undergoes a radical mutation when it meets the machinery of mass reproduction and the needs of mass ideology: there is a critical distinction between the private act of a mother comforting her child and the structural function of a society mass-producing that comfort as a mobilizing political aesthetic.

Palestinian death footage and visuals have never lacked for transmitters. The front page of newspapers carried them in the morning and TV carried them in the evening, and the cutting-edge Al-Jazeera satellite channel, which dissolved the fixed hour of the evening news broadcast into a continuous stream, carried them at every hour into every Arabic speaking living room, until the phone completed the dissolution and delivered them into the individual hand, no longer at the family’s appointed viewing time, no longer within the communal world of the living room, but privately, continuously, and unbidden, supplied by an algorithmic logic that constantly learns what holds the eye and returns it in increasing concentrations.

Each media carrying the image imposed its own rules. The newspaper photograph was studied at the reader’s pace and set aside by his decision; the televised footage arrives at its own pace and as a managed sequence of images, narrated in the voice of the anchor and the context of the news segment, and could be escaped only by leaving the room; the image in the algorithmic feed arrives without context, anchor, warning, wedged between an advertisement and a personal post, and the hand that scrolls past it has already, in the instant of passing, received it. The voyeuristic consumption of the Palestinian dead has been transformed, over decades of endless production and transmissions from an event to a condition.

The visual culture of Palestinian death—that is, the recurring images, footage, and graphic designs through which Palestinian death is publicly represented and circuilated—gradually consolidated into a recognizable visual repertoire, governed by an accumulated and increasingly codified set of conventions of framing, composition, color, gesture, presentation of the corpse, disposition of mourners, and deployment of political and religious symbolism.

This repertoire is familiar to anyone who has lived within reach of these images, which by now means almost anyone at all: the child’s body pulled from rubble; the mother bent over the body of her son; the funeral procession, with the dead carried aloft on a stretcher or upon outstretched hands; the shrouded body, sometimes very small, laid on a hospital floor; the rescuer running toward the camera with a child in his arms; the row of wrapped bodies awaiting burial; the posthumously composed portrait of the martyr, assembled from photographs taken in life and set against al-Aqsa Mosque, a celestial landscape, or some lurid, Disney-like garden of paradise. Almost every reader will recognize these images immediately. He has seen each of them many times, across decades and cities, produced by different hands and under radically different circumstances; yet, more importantly, he has learned to see them as iterations of the same image, instances of the same form. Their repetition suppresses what death ought most forcefully to disclose: the irreducible singularity of the person who has died and the singularity of the event itself.

For all practical purposes, this has become an established genre of photographic composition, complete with templates, conventions, recurrent poses, and expected objects, no less formally recognizable than the wedding album or the graduation portrait, with its gown, cap, rolled diploma, fixed smile, and standardized backdrop. The difference, of course, is that here the object being subjected to generic form is death itself.

One of the typical photographic compositions of Palestinian death-kitsch goes like this: a woman, usually a mother, leans over the body of a young man and kisses his forehead. The keffiyeh is wrapped around his head, arranged so that the black-and-white pattern frames the face and closes beneath the chin; sometimes white flowers lie across his chest; the covering beneath him is green or white. His face is composed and occupies the center of the frame, lit and clear, while the faces of the living around him are partial, cropped, or turned away. The main event, the kiss, occurs at the point of maximum focus. A viewer formed by the European pictorial tradition will recognize immediately the arrangement of a grieving woman and a dead young man at the image’s center. Nothing appears disordered. Whether this order was produced before the shutter or by the photographer’s selection of angle, moment, and crop scarcely matters for the resulting image, which reaches the viewer as a completed composition.

Another typical visual is the body of a young man, wrapped in the Palestinian flag or the flag of one of the Islamic movements, carried on a stretcher above a dense crowd. The keffiyeh is again wrapped, or alternatively, an Islamic headband, framing a face that is composed, tilted slightly backward, eyes closed, centered in the frame, and catching the light. The flag converts the body’s outline into its own geometry. The visual object at the image’s center is no longer a corpse in any ordinary sense but an emblem with a face. The crowd is young and male almost without exception; the faces nearest the stretcher are grave and turned either toward the body or toward the camera; hands reach from every direction to touch the stretcher’s rails until the rails themselves disappear beneath them; rifles sometimes rise vertically from the crowd, carried as ceremonial objects, their barrels composing the upper register of the image.

At the bottom of such a frame one sometimes finds another figure: a man holding a camera above his head, its lens directed toward the body. The image therefore casually contains representation of its own production. The camera has become as conventional an element of the public funeral as the flag. Photography has entered into the ritual form of the event itself. The funeral presupposes spectators beyond those physically present; its elevation of the body, its gestures, its objects, its lines of sight, and its symbolic arrangements belong simultaneously to mourning and to their future existence as images. The composition presupposes the position from which it will be seen.

A third example is no longer a photograph at all. It is a designed graphic issued by an institution, and it demonstrates that the conventions obeyed by the first two images have become explicit enough to be reproduced digitally and deliberately. A photograph of a flag-wrapped body carried on outstretched hands has been desaturated and darkened around the edges until it reads less as an actual photograph than as texture or atmosphere. Above it, ornamental typography announces the total number of martyrs since the beginning of the war: 71,391. The outrageous number, an attempt at maximum escalation of affect, is the composition’s true visual subject, printed in the largest type and in red. Its performance of precision, down to the final digit, has a function that is not informational, since no viewer retains such a random number, but liturgical, since the figure is merely one sequence in an ever-changing and rising count. The escalatory effect of the rising itself is the content and the rising number itself becomes an affective form.

Here the development of the repertoire reaches a decisive stage. Palestinian death imagery has become a set of specifications that can be fulfilled even in the absence of an identifiable corpse and what began as the representation of particular deaths has matured into a transmissible visual syntax.

Convention by itself, of course, is not kitsch. Funeral rites have always been conventional; religious art is often more rigorously codified than any modern photograph. The Pieta, the Christian icon, the military funeral, and the various forms of funerary monuments all depend upon inherited conventional forms. The decisive question is therefore not whether Palestinian death imagery possesses conventions, but what those conventions do to the singular event they represent. Kitsch appears when the form ceases to submit itself to the particularity of the thing before it and instead receives that thing into an already completed affective structure. The image no longer waits upon this death to discover what this death might mean. The meaning precedes the dead person. The repertoire is already prepared with martyrdom, sacrifice, grief, innocence, nation, defiance, redemption, and the emotions appropriate to each. The individual supplies an instance; the form supplies the meaning and, increasingly, the emotion through which that meaning is to be experienced.

This is why the extraordinary stability of the genre matters. As with a highly conventionalized school of painting, the individual image can become difficult to locate once the identifying insignia have been removed. Gaza or Nablus, 2002 or 2026, Hamas or Fatah may require the flag, the caption, or some incidental marker to distinguish them. The underlying composition survives these differences because it has become refined and stable and possesses reliable conventions.

The final achievement of the repertoire is therefore more radical than the mere aestheticization of death. Death, in reality, resists substitution absolutely. My death cannot be yours; this dead child cannot be another child; this person disappears once, and no other person can occupy that event. Yet the visual form renders death substitutable. One corpse can occupy the place previously occupied by another because the form precedes them both. Complete aestheticization does not merely beautify death or make it emotionally legible. It supplies death in advance with the image through which it is to appear. It turns death itself into kitsch.

A junior league rehearsing of the genre
If Palestinian deaths became merely instances in the circulation of highly conventionalized form, does this mean that a Palestinian death is a non-event?

In 1962, surveying what American media had done to public life, Daniel Boorstin gave the name pseudo-event to a class of happening that the age of graphic reproduction had brought into being. The pseudo-event, in Boorstin’s analysis, is identifiable by four marks. It is planned, planted, or incited; someone arranged for it to occur. It is arranged primarily for the convenience of its own reporting, so that the question of its success is the question of how widely it circulates. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous at best. And it tends toward self-fulfillment, since the report of the thing produces the condition the report describes. Boorstin’s inaugural example was a hotel, wishing to be thought distinguished, stages a thirtieth-anniversary celebration; the celebration is covered; the coverage makes the hotel distinguished; the event has manufactured the reality it purported to report. The press conference, the ribbon-cutting, the photo opportunity, the leak timed for the Sunday editions and the whole repertoire of managed publicity belong to the class. (Sadly, Boorstin didn’t live to see the age of social media.) The pseudo-event is hollow at the center. Its being is exhausted in its being-reported; it realizes, in the historical domain, Berkeley’s principle that to be is to be perceived. Subtract the media coverage and nothing remains. The unreported anniversary banquet is a dinner. The unattended press conference is a room with chairs.

At first, the Palestinian death visual seems to satisfy every mark in the definition. The event is arranged — often the confirmation is incited and planned, the press is called in, the corpse prepared, the material brought in, the crowd organized around the corridor through which the lens will see best; the man holding his camera above the crowd at the bottom of the stretcher photograph is the second criterion present inside the image itself. Success is measured in circulation. The relation to underlying reality is ambiguous since what the viewer receives as spontaneous grief is the execution of a template. And the whole thing is self-fulfilling with a completeness Boorstin’s innocuous examples never approached: the photographed funeral recruits the next funeral’s corpse, the image of the martyr produces more martyrs, the report generates the condition it reports.

Despite all of this, Boorstin’s pseudo-event must be refused, not just on ethical grounds, but also conceptual ones. As a matter of fact, Palestinian visual culture of death is something significantly worse. A funeral may contain pseudo-eventual elements; a media ceremony may be staged for reproduction; the corpse may be cosmetically and symbolically prepared for the camera. But all of that occurs around an event possessing an irreducible reality independent of representation. Death is real. Beneath the spectacle indeed lies a young man who was alive and now is dead; subtract every camera from the funeral and the corpse remains, the mother remains, the burial proceeds, the loss is what it is. The pseudo-event is defined by the hollowness at its center, and the Palestinian funeral has at its center the least hollow thing in human experience. Boorstin himself was careful to distinguish the pseudo-event from the lie — the pseudo-event is ambiguously true, a synthetic fact rather than a false one — and the distinction, applied here, cuts in both directions at once: the death visual is no fabrication, and it is no pseudo-event in the strict sense, because the reality it processes is neither invented nor hollow. A staged atrocity with no corpse would be a fraud, and fraud belongs to the ordinary economy of truth and falsehood. The ethical catastrophe here is that a real death is made to exist in the manner of a produced thing. The event remains true and becomes false in the mode of its appearing. For this operation the ordinary economy of truth and falsehood has no instrument, since nothing said about the event is untrue; the falsification has been executed entirely at the level of form.

The better concept here is kitsch. As I have explained elsewhere, kitsch is more than simply bad art or cheap aesthetics. It is the romantic impulse itself — the unavoidable human reach toward the infinite, toward beauty that exceeds the finite, toward myth that touches reality — attempting to satisfy itself through finite and rational means, which is to say, through the systematic production of the desired effect. It is an industrialization of romanticism, the longing for transcendence converted into a process of consumption. Under this conversion, the emotional effect becomes the primary consideration of any work of representation; the feeling is no longer evidence of contact with reality and instead substitutes for it; and the validation of every claim passes to its affective register, where the single surviving criterion is whether it moves. A representation that produces the correct feelings is judged to be working correctly, and the judgment terminates there, because there is nowhere further for it to go. But since the ground that would yield genuine contact is absent, the feeling must be produced by force, and force admits of degrees. Because the means are finite and the impulse is infinite, the only available compensation is escalation: more sentiment, more spectacle, more intensity, more volume. This ever greater falsification of life produces kitsch’s characteristic trajectory of unending sentimentalization, the endless inflation of feeling that is at once its signature and its confession — a count set in red and rising past 71,391 toward whatever figure next week requires.

Without entering the larger philosophical discussion of kitsch and art, a discussion that necessarily terminates in obscurantism, two things must be noted. The first concerns its historical position: kitsch is the cultural form of post-Christian mass society. The genitive runs in both directions. Kitsch answers to the demands of that society — the demand for ceremony without sacrament, for myth without belief, for the feeling of ultimate meaning delivered on a schedule and at scale — and it operates through that society’s characteristic instruments, the technologies of mass reproduction and circulation, without which the systematic production of affect would remain very limited. The press, the poster, the broadcast, the feed: each successive instrument of reproduction has been, simultaneously and necessarily, an instrument of kitsch, because a mechanism built to multiply and distribute representations without limit is a system whose native product is the representation calibrated for immediate effect; a kind of simplified, degraded, and insipid emotion full of morbidity and depersonalization.

The second concerns its political function, which was analyzed in the case of Nazism by Saul Friedländer. Kitsch is an aesthetically inadequate mode of representation that aims at eliciting an immediate, unreflective emotional response; its function is to be or to promote something — commercial or political — without contextual restriction; and it enforces identification within a specific and well-defined context, principally an ideological one which made it the supreme technique of modern mass politics. It handles the core values of a political regime or an ideological system as a closed, harmonious entity that must be endowed with beauty in order to be made effective. From this requirement follows its characteristic stylization, which reaches for the most obvious mythical patterns available, so that political myth and religious myth fuse — and in modern societies, the political religions are accordingly the natural world of mass kitsch. The sequence of entailments follows logically from this understanding. An ideology that must be felt rather than examined requires beauty; beauty summoned for the purpose of enforcement requires the elementary mythical patterns, since only these produce identification that is immediate and unreflective; and the elementary patterns are, without exception, religious in origin, so that every ideology aestheticized in this manner becomes, whatever its official metaphysics, a political religion operating on kitsch mythology.

This is what made kitsch the greatest ally of all modern totalitarian movements and ideologies — the indispensable ally, since the mobilization of masses around a closed system of values cannot be accomplished by argument and can only be accomplished by the manufactured sentiment whose production is kitsch’s entire competence. The alliance is so constant that the historical record permits a stronger formulation: there is no modern political atrocity without its kitsch (think of the repertoire of the aesthetic conventions of antisemitic visual representations.) The revolutionary tribunal has its festivals, the Reich its torchlight and its Führer-portraits, the gulag state its radiant tomorrows, the killing fields their pastoral of renewed innocence — the atrocity and its aesthetic accompaniment must arrive together, function together, and are intelligible only together, to the point where one might treat them as synonyms. German thinker Hermann Broch, who understood this already with the dawn of the age of kitsch, drew the conclusion that kitsch is the principle of evil within the value-system of art, its Antichrist. The Antichrist is not the open adversary of the sacred order; he is its counterfeit, indistinguishable from what he imitates at every point of surface and inverted at the single point of ground, offering redemption’s entire appearance while foreclosing redemption itself. The counterfeit is dangerous because it does not look like the negation of the original, but its intensification. (Even less law, more mercy, more love, everything is forgiven.)

Kitsch, so constituted, acquires a special relationship with death. A mode of representation whose entire competence is the extraction of maximal sentiment must gravitate toward the material in which sentiment is most densely saturated, and no material in human experience compares, in this respect, with death — the singular event which pulls the entirety of a human existence into itself, and which arrives therefore already swamped in pathos, already charged beyond any charge that representation could add. Death has always been a treasure for art. The medieval totentanz (German for “Dance of Death,” a widespread artistic and allegorical motif from the Late Middle Ages illustrating the universality of death) frescoed along the arcades of Gothic churches and cemeteries, the baroque vanitas with its skulls and guttering candles. With the advance of modern mass society the treasure passed into other hands, and death became kitsch’s great ally: the richest of all reservoirs of affect, now pumped by an industry whose purpose is the opposite of the totentanz’s — the delivery of death’s emotional voltage with the encounter removed. The Hollywood death is the elementary modern specimen: the hero expiring with one hand pressed to the bleeding wound while the other still grips the pistol, lucid to the last, granted a final sentence in complete coherence, his death interrupting nothing, disfiguring nothing, meaning precisely what the film requires it to mean.

Ossuary ( House of Bones ). Drawing number 32 from a series of 33 drawings of the Totentanz by Hans Holbein the Younger
Romanticism, the mother of kitsch, already had found some of its greatest inspiration in death. An impulse that reaches for the infinite through finite means will be drawn to the one finite event that borders the infinite directly, and once the theological administration of death had weakened, the border could be visited for the feeling alone. The graveyard poetry of the eighteenth century, such as that of Robert Blair’s The Grave, Edward Young’s Night-Thoughts, (two of my most favorite poems of all times) made the visit into a genre: the poet among the tombs, extracting from mortality a sweet and profitable melancholy, launched the gothic imagination that has run unbroken from the churchyards of the 1740s to the present.

The German Romantics, in the typical German fashion of systematizing and never knowing when to stop, radicalized this to its fullest extent. Goethe’s Young Werther gave aestheticized, sweetened death its apex and its exemplary form: the beautiful young suicide, dying of feeling, his death the sweet consummation of his sensibility rather than its defeat. Magnificence is used to advertise death, in the phrase of Adorno about Wagner. The novel’s career is even more astonishing than the story itself. Napoleon carried it on his person through the Egyptian campaign and told its author he had read it seven times; young men across Europe shot themselves in Werther’s yellow breeches and blue coat, in numbers sufficient to have the book banned in Leipzig, Copenhagen, and beyond; and when the new science of sociology later required a name for imitative suicide as such, it called it the Werther effect. A fictional death, rendered beautiful, then produced real corpses, which confirmed the fiction’s power, which enlarged its circulation even more.

Kitsch approaches death incessantly and represents it never. Kitsch death is death disguised as life: death concealed, adulterated, and masked — the corpse composed into serenity, the agony edited into eloquence, the decomposition nowhere, the rupture nowhere, the silence nowhere. The mask it fastens over the fact is pious in appearance or heroic in bearing, and it is in reality pharisaic: an exterior of reverence enclosing no ethical substance, and lacking the one element without which no posture before death has ever been serious, the religious or sacred element — the acknowledgment that in this event the human being stands before something that no representation can domesticate and no sentiment can discharge. The globalization of death kitsch marks the progress of a single loss: the loss of respect for death itself, respect being the capacity to let the fact stand in its own weight rather than in the weight of the feelings it can be made to yield.

Within the general economy of kitsch and propaganda there runs a division of power through the political history of the last century. We established that all modern mass politics must employ kitsch but, just like Orwell’s animals, not all kitsch is equal. We must agree that both Israeli and Palestinian representations are of enormous scale of kitschiness and in this only they are quite equal. But having agreed on so, there is still a serious distinction to be made between life-kitsch and death-kitsch as I’m outlining.

Kitsch attached to the celebration of life, usually employed by communists and liberals, is short-winded and of limited yield. Its perfect emblem is the hedonistic slogan “Long live Life!” a formula whose mindless circularity confesses its imbecility. Since a life without a religious dimension cannot justify itself, can celebrate itself only by pointing at itself, it therefore generates a sentiment that reaches no depth and with, at best, transient affect, spent by the next morning. Israeli hasbara kitsch sings of progress and fun, of the start-up, beach, pride parade, prosperity, etc., and the song is transparently solipsistic and, ironically, dead, running on a bankrupt affective register: the celebration of a mainly non-religious life that presents itself as immanently self-justifying but that cannot actually produce its own justification, life-kitsch performing its constitutional weakness on a global stage.

On the other hand, kitsch attached to death and sacrifice, as we discussed earlier, stands at the very core of every extreme and radical political mobilization of the modern age because it taps the deepest deposits of religious emotion, laid down over millenia around the fundamental motifs of death, resurrection, and eternity, deposits which survive the death of the theologies that formed them and which respond to the correct stimulus with an immediate, unreflective force that no argument and no interest can match. In the competition between political forms capable of assimilating sacrificial death versus political forms whose principal self-representation is abundance, normality, pleasure, emancipation, and sexual delight (this latter should be distinguished from the erotic proper), it is the former that will always be supreme.

What death-kitsch mines from these deep, archaic, and pre-conceptual deposits is the material of the apocalyptic imagination, the eschatological structure in which the element of death is central, since death is there the engine of the final transformation, the passage through which history reaches its consummation and its rectification, the point at which monotheistic salvation history touches myth. Here, the Palestinian individual death ceases to be a loss and becomes merely an installment, an iteration, another deposit toward the end; each funeral anticipates the last judgment, Wagnerian motifs accumulating, ever intensifying, towards a final conflagration. The mounting count of the dead as exactly such accumulation toward the promised reversal of fallen life conditions rather than as subtraction from the living.

Israel’s hasbara life-kitsch, of course, commands no equivalent power, and can command none. Life-kitsch possesses no eschatology, progress, that dead and deadening 19th-century trope: eschatology deprived of an eschaton, interminable by definition, a horizon that recedes rather than arrives. A kitsch without an end-time, without the singularity in which accumulation becomes consummation, has nothing toward which life could finally count. Death-kitsch converts chronology into teleology. Progress flattens all into mere sequence.

And beneath even these eschatological motifs lie the tribal, pre-monotheistic deposits in which the classical death of the heroic young warrior carries its own immediate charge of paganistic vitality and which brings erotic motifs with it as a matter of anthropological constancy. And essential to death-kitsch in all its political forms is a tension of opposites, the juxtaposition of harmony and destruction, sweetness and annihilation, the idyll and the grave, a tension that life-kitsch, as a matter of principle, cannot generate, since it has exiled one of the two poles, and that supplies death-kitsch with its hypnotizing power.

The Palestinian production does more than touch the deep affective strata of human experience; it digs deep and at the richest points of the images of death, resurrection, eternity, etc., while drawing simultaneously on the pre-monotheistic tribal charge of the slain young warrior and classical, paganistic heroism. Its aim is nowhere near the justification of life that hasbara intends and fails to achieve. Through the concealment of death beneath an aestheticized representation of death and its euphemistic techniques of sweetening, glorification, and emptying of terror, it accomplishes the reverse: the radical devaluation of life, which, working on the post-Christian residue, leads to its only possible justification: death.

Where death has become an apotheosis, life is subordinated and reduced to a mere prelude, and a life so devalued discovers its highest justification in the possibility of being relinquished. The only possible meaning of life then becomes life’s own negation. A whole new transvalued world opens up, in which death loses its character as negation and life loses its character as an end — a world whose answer to the Socratic question of how one ought to live has death as its entire content. Martyrological justification is, in the last analysis, a form of dis-justification that passes as counterfeit justification.

This is why fascist and Nazi kitsch triumphed over communist kitsch on every terrain where the two competed, and it is why Palestinian death-kitsch triumphs over Israeli hasbara kitsch by the same logic and with the same completeness. (There has been, of course, a tradition of sacrificial communist activism which saturated Europe and competed with Nazism in the interwar years and throughout the War. It however soon after was submerged by the rise of Western Marxism with its sexual hedonism and life-affirming, sex positive kitsch.) One production is wired into the most fundamental reality of the species; the other is the work of a perhaps girlboss-run marketing department.

(All of this, then, generates an unavoidable difficult question: if death-kitsch is deeper, affectively richer, and more powerful than life-kitsch, and if Israel, for insurmountable political and sociological reasons, is committed to life-affirming kitsch that cannot access the deep religious substrate, then Israel loses the propaganda, and erotic, war permanently and structurally, and there is nothing Israeli hasbara can do to correct this at the level of technique no matter how many tens of millions of dollars flushed down the hasbara toilet. This loss is not a geopolitical failure of resources, but as a fundamental mismatch in metaphysics.)

At the center of the winning production stands the martyr. The theological proposition that underwrites him is nowhere argued and everywhere assumed: God calls home to Him the entirely pure, the men much too pure to remain on our defiled earth — so that the death of the hero, far from opening any question about the cause that dispatched him, stands as the sealed testament to his ur-purity, the proof in blood that he was too good for the world that killed him. Upon this proposition the imagery builds an interpretation of death that must be called, in the strict sense, childish: the martyr unvanquished by the deadly event that has just destroyed him, endowed with a supernatural incandescence, a haloed being, pure and rooted in a world of timeless values, faithful to the cause unto death and completed rather than ended by it. Around him the elementary religious motifs are reproduced in imitative form — above all the Christian motif of the massacre of the innocents, restaged in every image of the small shrouded body — and the reproduction compounds continually in scale and in kitschiness, imitation feeding on imitation without any natural point of arrest, in obedience to the escalatory law already established. And the whole figure is draped in two banners at once: the banner of religion and the banner of primitive and archaic ethnic values — blood-faith and blood-kinship fused into one fabric, the fusion of political and religious myth accomplished in a single body, which is the accomplishment toward which mass kitsch, in its political employment, always tends.

The sum of these operations is the making of death beautiful, the perfuming of corpses. For the beauty is received by the viewer as though it were a moral datum: the loveliness of the composed face is taken for the righteousness of the cause, the harmony of the funeral for the justice of the violence, the tears drawn by the image for an act of judgment, of solidarity, of understanding — for all the things that tears are not. This is the confusion of the aesthetic for the ethical, the terminal operation of death-kitsch, the point at which the inversion that defines kitsch in general — feeling substituting for contact with reality — completes itself upon the one subject where the substitution is metaphysically catastrophic. A public that has learned to receive beautiful death as moral truth has surrendered the faculty by which atrocity is recognized in the conviction that its own susceptibility to being moved is the proof of its conscience.

To surrender to this beauty, however, is to invite a different kind of seduction. The aestheticization of the corpse achieves its most hypnotic power by isolating the physical perfection of the fallen youth and transforming it into an object of intense physical fixation. By stripping death of its radical alterity and converting it from ethical catastrophe into an aesthetic triumph, the repertoire prepares the ground for its ultimate inversion. If the highest justification of life is its willing relinquishment, and if the corpse is the beautiful, haloed proof of that relinquishment, then death is no longer a cessation; it is a climax. The eschatological promise of eternity, the pagan vitality of the slain warrior, and the hypnotic tension between sweetness and annihilation do not merely solicit grief; they solicit arousal.

Kitsch, as we have seen, demands an unreflective emotional surrender to the overpowering sensation of the moment, and thus operates by dissolving boundaries. The last boundary dissolved in this communal ecstasy is the one separating mourning from lust. In the second installment, I will examine how this hyper-aestheticized visual repertoire doesn’t just function as a political justification for radical violence but terminates in a theater of sublimated desire, exploring the delicate, undeniable relationship between death-kitsch, the aestheticized male form, and the distinctly homosexual erotic economy that underwrites the cult of martyrdom.

Published originally on August 24, 2026.