Sincerity, “Tautopolitics,” and Abolitionist Irony in Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003) and The Key (2024)

In consideration of the hypocrisies, contradictions, and “unserious” postures taken by the West in the wake of the Gaza genocide, this essay examines sincerity and irony as aesthetic and political modes deployed both within and outside of the imperial core. Imperial sincerity is manufactured through what this essay describes as “tautopolitics,” a cynical deployment of reasoning by the Israeli carceral state and its use of AI warfare that determines guilt and produces the “terrorist.” By taking up Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s claim that “a new ethics based on irony” can powerfully critique power and servility, this essay explores the ways in which Palestinian cinematic irony, a form of everyday abolitionist imagination, challenges Zionism and the Israeli occupation. Irony, in particular, is used as a critique of power in two Palestinian short films, both of which draw upon genre conventions. Sharif Waked’s short film Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003) ironizes the aesthetics of neoliberalism in order to disassemble the sincerity of western colonialism, and Rakan Mayasi’s short horror film The Key (2024) confronts Isreal’s ethnic cleansing and denial of the Palestinian right to return.