Document Type
Article
Abstract
In this article Dina Nashar Baroud explores, using the Iraq war and its media coverage as her point of reference, a larger trend to fetishization in the emergent politics of the image. This politics as image combines the most important components of the fetish, which becomes simultaneously an illusion, a seductive commodity, and, most importantly, a pulverization of history into fragments. And yet, given the image network's intimate relationship to hegemonic technologies, the pulverization of history in favor of images is not simply something we can reject. Employing the ideological theorization of Slavoj Žižek, where ideology is not what we "believe" so much as how we live, Baroud explores what is at stake in this politics of the image fetish. It is a prolegomenon of the counter-discourse to come, which must of course reconsider what it means to run "counter" to the apparatus itself, which we all live with and use to communicate either explicitly or implicitly.
Repository Citation
Baroud, Dina N.. "Fetishizing Death: Hyperspaces for Freedom." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1–8. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss4/19