Mittwoch, den 1. Juni hält Herr Prof. W. J. T. Mitchell von der University of Chicago im Rahmen des Basiskollegs einen öffentlichen Vortrag zum Thema:
Mittwoch, 1. Juni 2005, 18 Uhr c.t. Raum R 712
Cloning Terror. The War of Images 2001-2004.
In the months before
September 11, 2001, the cloning debate was the leading issue in American newspapers.
After September 11, terrorism dominated the news. This paper explores the logic
that connects cloning and terrorism as the twin phobias of our historical epoch.
The clone and the terrorist are cultural icons linked by the fear of the "uncanny
double," the mirror image of the self as its own worst enemy. The terrorist
is the enemy who doubles as a friend or countryman, pretending to be "one
of us." The clone is the figure of biological doubling as such, the inverted,
perverted mirror image of a parent organism, an artificial simulation or twin
of a natural person.
The terrorist is the "evil twin" of the normal, respectable citizen-soldier,
and the clone is the "evil twin" as such. The "war on terror"
therefore is also a "war of images" that draws its vocabulary from
the language of epidemiology, of plagues, sleeper cells, and viruses, on the
one hand, and from iconoclasm, iconophobia, and holy wars over images on the
other. Tracing the "war of images" in mass media and popular culture
from the cloned Schwarzenegger of The Sixth Day to the clone armies of George
Lucas, from the destruction of the World Trade Center to the Abu Ghraib torture
photographs, this paper explains why the war on terror is actually "cloning
terror" by breeding more terrorists.
Herr Mitchell gehört zu den international bekanntesten Bildwissenschaftlern und ist derzeit Fellow im Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.