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 itse...