What is terror? Terror implies and often mediates violence, but the crucial form of terror is a mode of visibility. Terror works by constituting an image, a spectacle. Terror works against a given state of affairs that is experienced as intolerable. The intensification of intolerability leads to a situation where visible violence is preferred to the hidden violence of slow death. Terror makes manifest something that is usually hidden. The difference between terror in general and what is called terrorism can be distinguished in relation to the state. The contemporary nation-state is threatened with violence from within and without, by peoples, weapons, economic and energy constraints, but it works to contain this violence in different ways. If the state possesses the monopoly on violence, which is only ever true in theory not in fact, then it sometimes resorts to terror to enforce and preserve state power. Terrorism is the name given to acts of terror that are used by non-state actors against supposedly illegitimate states and their people.

To engage with a Deleuzian perspective on global terror, I want to consider his treatment of the image. Specifically, Deleuze articulates the time-image in Cinema 2 as a way to free the image from the spectacle that is aligned with terror. Here I endorse Paola Marrati’s striking claim that ‘Cinema 1 and 2 are the key texts in which Deleuze develops his political philosophy’ (Marrati 2008: x). This claim is not intended to minimise the importance of Guattari, or the groundbreaking political thought of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, but much of the specific schizoanalysis of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus will remain in the background so that I can consider the nature and stakes of the image.

In his famous book Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord presents the spectacle as the culmination of a world in which images have been detached from life and ‘fuse[d] in a common stream’ that constitutes ‘the concrete inversion of life’ (Debord 1983: §2). Here images mediate all of our social relations, replacing the directly lived experience of human beings. Debord’s Situationism attempts to expose and counter the alienation introduced by the spectacle, whose ultimate content is capital. Our lives are more and more regulated by images that mediate commodities as objects, and the assemblage of these images into a whole composes a spectacle.