Entanglements:
Journal of Posthumanities
E-ISSN: 3107-488X

(Article)
Erasing the World: Ruination, and More-than-Human Refusal in Occupied Palestine
Authored By — Elias Brossoise

Abstract

This article explores the ongoing devastation in occupied Palestine as a process of erasure, where ruination extends across human lifeworlds and reverberates through multispecies, elemental, and epistemic registers. It introduces the concept of damaged cosmography to describe how settler-colonial violence dismantles the connective tissues of life-land, plants, water, and kinship-thereby undoing the very conditions of worldmaking. Drawing on feminist posthumanist thought (Despret, Neimanis, Azoulay) and Indigenous epistemologies (Watts, Simpson, TallBear), the article develops a mode of witnessing grounded in situated accountability and more-than-human response-ability. Case studies include the militarization of archaeological sites, herbicidal warfare, the collapse of hydrological systems, and the disarticulation of vegetal and animal kinships across Gaza. These acts constitute deliberate strategies of ontological unmaking: ruins function as instruments of epistemic foreclosure, while plants, animals, and aquifers endure as wounded witnesses. Through the lens of refusal, the article also attends to forms of survivance-seed saving, oral memory, rooftop gardens-that persist without monumentalizing continuity. Writing under siege becomes a method of copresence: not a detached observation of violence, but an ethical participation in the fractured yet enduring textures of life. We argue that thinking with posthumanist frameworks amid genocide affirms, rather than abstracts, suffering-by tracing how ruination reverberates across all that composes a livable world.

Keywords

Palestine, damaged cosmography, ruination, more-than-human, refusal, posthumanism

Read/Download Full Article