Images of Violence and the Terror of War: Media Governmentality of the ominous

Abstract

The present text poses a brief genealogy of contemporary war and the administration of extreme violence. Our hypothesis is that with the articulation of weapons of mass destruction and the technologies of image consummated at the beginning of the twentieth century, there is a gradual transformation of war, characterized by the introduction into a mediatic governmentality. Since then two new war paradigms will follow: the first, post-Vietnam, featured as a “silent war” that spread from its images the violence and horror of the confrontation, familiarizing the public with its deployment. The second one, produced after the attacks on the Twin Towers, working as a deterritorialized war against the terror of the own war. To understand this new moment, which is the one we presently live in, we recur to the Freudian idea of the sinister and we declare that if the paradigm of the silent war pretended, with the administration of the images, to make us familiar to the sinister aspect of war (its extreme violence), this new moment marked by the dispersion of terrorist acts, is characterized by an impasse of media governmentality in an effort to contain the sinister return of the violence that before was trying to silences.