Veröffentlichung von Emmanuel Alloas Sammelbandbeitrag _Just Terror

Im Rahmen des von Emmanuel Alloa und Chiara Cappelletto herausgegebenen Sammelbandes Dynamis of the Image. Moving Images in a Global Worldy erscheint Anfang Mai 2020 Emmanuel Alloas Artikel 'Just Terror'. The Visual Communication of ISIS.

Auszug The Return of the Real?
»In 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was at the time Al-Qaeda’s second in command, addressed the movement’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, in the following terms: »I say to you that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.« [1] One of the greatest misunderstandings in recent history is the idea that, with the phenomenon of suicide bombers, reality has finally overtaken virtuality: that the screen of simulacra with which the Hollywood dream factory has encircled us has been breached once and for all by individuals ready to use their own bodies as weapons. In yet another rush to judgment, we were told that terrorist attacks sounded the death knell of postmodernism, which met its brutal end on September 11, 2001. It has been said that the attack on the Twin Towers in New York consigned the reign of simulation to the history books and ushered in the famous ‘return of the real’ announced by Hal Forster. [2] After decades of being inundated by the image-machine with disaster movies that offered the thrill of make-believe fear, suddenly the most extreme scenarios have been outstripped by reality. For a Western society that had ceased to believe in its own representations and in the matrix of its simulacra, those fanatical suicide bombers performed more or less the role played by the first Christian martyrs during the Roman Empire: whatever cause these people believe in, thought their contemporaries, it must be pretty powerful if they are ready to lose their lives for it.«

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[1] Letter from Al-Zawahiri to Al-Zarqawi, press release from the Director of National Intelligence in the United States, October 11, 2005, www.dni.gov/release_letter_101105.html.
[2] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.