Ecstasy forensics, minor detail: on complicity – theatre, performance, and the question of Palestine

This essay examines the relationship between a message posted to a community-generated digital archive, ‘Queering the Map’ – which records perhaps the final words of someone addressing a lover in the face of Israeli genocidal annihilation – and two photographs of an Israel Occupation Force soldier posing with pride flags. Thinking with Adania Shibli’s ‘Minor Detail’, Jasbir Puar’s ‘homonationalism’, Forensic Architecture, and Saidiya Hartman’s practice of ‘speculative fabulation’, I ask: what are the conditions under which a soldier of the IOF expresses his participation in a genocide as an act of pride? Deconstructing the ecstatic libidinal structure of genocidal violence these images unleash, I move deeper into the speculative poetics of the minor, betraying the craft structures of linearity and form, to explore an ethics of witnessing that is comprised of the wounding and complicity of being in relation to – yet failing to stop – this death.