Event overview
Just Terror: The Visual Communication of ISIS Lecture by Emmanuel Alloa
Traditionally, the concept of terrorism was used by state powers to discredit political enemies (adapting a famous formula by Carl Schmitt, one could say: sovereign is he who decides who is a terrorist). For the first time however, with the so-called Islamic State, a state-like entity has reclaimed the concept as a self-description. In order to understand this decisive semantic shift, this paper analyses the kind of political discourse put forward in the media materials produced by ISIS. More specifically, it focuses on Dabiq, the centrepiece of its printed propaganda, directed mostly at the West. By studying the concept of ‘just terror’, put forward in issue 12 of Dabiq, and placing it back into the context of a highly elaborate strategy of communication which, more than ever, makes use of visual resources, this talk aims at showing that the phenomenon of ISIS has been largely misread. Fashioning ISIS fighters as archaic, anti-Western barbarians that oppose real death to the society of spectacle not only misses how much ISIS is itself by and large a result of the West, but falls prey to the strategy of polarization that the group has been seeking since the beginning.
Chaired by Shela Sheikh
Department of Media and Communications
Emmanuel Alloa is Research Leader in Philosophy at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), and teaches aesthetics in the Arts Department of the University of Paris 8-Saint Denis. His research focuses mainly on Continental Philosophy and on Aesthetics, with a special emphasis on the question of images and their powers. Among his publications are La résistance du sensible. Merleau-Ponty critique de la transparence (2nd edition 2014), translated as Resistance of the Sensible World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017) and Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie (2011). He is editor of the series, Penser l’image (Dijon: Les presses du réel).
[Image: IS-published image of the destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin at the ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria, August 2015]
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Jan 2018 | 5:30pm - 7:30pm |
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