Cloning Terror

“In this heady brew of biopolitics and biotechnology, W. J. T. Mitchell explores some of the greatest terror of our times—the fears that claim us and chain us. His deft and defiant reading of the technologies of image-making lays bare the brutality and banality of the war on terror. This is a passionate and polemical engagement with reality and representation.”

“This is a brilliant and wide-ranging book that considers the role of images in the recent war on terror, locating a new logic of reproduction within the visual field. The centrality of imagery for understanding and waging the so-called war on terror is widely discussed, but few scholars are able to trace the animating effects of reproducible images with Mitchell’s acuity. Here we find a restatement of the ‘pictorial turn’ in the context of the Bush years and in the present when the icon of Obama remains a site of conflicted investment. Cloning Terror will surely become indispensable reading for a wide public of readers interested in cultural and literary criticism, visual studies, history of art, and political analysis.”—Judith Butler, author of Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

“Forget What Do Pictures Want?—the inspired title and theme of one of W. J. T. Mitchell’s earlier triumphs. The question is what do we want? The answer to which couldn’t be simpler: More Mitchell! In this, his latest entertainment, and a darkly unsettling one at that, the sly magus trains his eyes on the sorry times just past, decanting an entirely fresh instance of the sort of recombinant iconographies for which he is becoming so celebrated. A master theorist of political aesthetics, he does what all the great theorists going back to the Greeks are called upon to do: he gives us fresh eyes to see, and at a moment when the need for such clearsightedness couldn’t be more urgent.”