Cinematic Terrorism: Deleuze,ISIS and Delirium

This paper will use the concept of time-image discussed by Gille Deleuze in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 as a heuristic tool for thinking about the Internet films of the Islamic State (ISIS). By considering that ISIS films primarily operate on two different axes: a time-image that presents a recollection of a mythic past, and a movement-image that reverses roles of power and sovereignty with a Western antagonist through mimesis, I discover that although we are unable to consider the ISIS films strictly as documentary, they are nonetheless not representational either. Within this context, I will argue that ISIS films may be experienced as actualizations of a global schizophrenic delirium. The ISIS films demonstrate what Deleuze describes as the “powers of the false.” They show a reality that is unbearable to witness. In the same way that the Marquis de Sade exhibited in life and fiction a physical violence and perversion that were symptomatic of the chaotic and brutal realities of the French Revolution, ISIS itself, and not only its film productions, becomes the foci of a symptomatic and cinematic realization of the failures of our globalized society in the post-Cold War/Arab Spring era. We experience the unbearable violence in the form of schizophrenic delirium, as if this violence is being performed somewhere else, by someone else, to someone else. These forms of spatial and temporal shifts, detachments, and interchanges are emphasized by the arrival of war refugees to the Western world from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In this process of becoming the Other, there is no escaping the delirium of Otherness.