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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Tele-Visioning Terror, Caroline Zekri
Tele-Visioning Terror, Caroline Zekri
Re-visioning Terrorism
This paper is devoted to the relationship between terrorism and media, with a special focus on the theoretical notions of “icon”, “mass” and “distance”. It aims to show how the phenomenon of modern terrorism calls into question the essence of modern democracies and their systems of information, based on the distance between vision and event.
Symbolic Violence As Subtle Virulence: The Philosophy Of Terrorism, Jonathan Beever
Symbolic Violence As Subtle Virulence: The Philosophy Of Terrorism, Jonathan Beever
Re-visioning Terrorism
Jean Baudrillard’s semiotic analysis of violence leads us to understand the form of violence as three-fold: aggressive, historical, and semiotically virulent. Violence of the third form is the violence endemic to terrorism. If violence has been typically understood as of the first two types, terrorism should be understood as the virulence of simulacra. The conflation of these types of violence explains the failure of militaristic responses to terrorism. This paper will explore Baudrillard’s conception of symbolic violence as the virulence of signs and help us come to terms with the semiotic foundation of terrorism.