
Contents
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Introduction Introduction
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ISIS’s Visual Rhetoric of Humiliation ISIS’s Visual Rhetoric of Humiliation
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Islamist Discourse and Retaliatory Humiliation Islamist Discourse and Retaliatory Humiliation
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Acknowledgments Acknowledgments
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References References
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Notes Notes
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Visual Rhetoric, Retaliatory Humiliation: ISIS Executions, Performative Violence, and Sovereign Power
Get accessRoxanne L. Euben, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
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Published:20 April 2023
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Abstract
The ISIS videos staging the executions of American captives are usually understood within the logic of instrumental rationality as devices to deter, recruit, and “sow terror.” By contrast, taking these videos as performative events and communicative acts in need of close reading brings into sharp relief a disjuncture between what they say and how they work. While the verbal rhetoric largely hews to the logic of instrumental rationality, the visual rhetoric enacts what Islamists define as retaliatory humiliation, an inversion of power in two different registers. It symbolically converts the public abjection of the captives by the Islamist executioner into an enactment of ISIS’s invincibility and American impotence. Second, it transposes the roles between the United States—mass terrorist, failed sovereign, and rogue state—and ISIS, now repositioned as legitimate, invincible sovereign. Circulating repetitively across digital networks, the events depicted are constituted as continually unfolding, part of an ongoing present rather than a completed past. This makes available to millions the viscerally intense and immediate experience of witnessing such humiliation, soliciting spectators either to suffer vicariously with the victim—or relish the brutal humiliation of two men who have, through metonyomic slide, become the American body politic. Inasmuch as such rhetorical practices seek to actually constitute their audiences through the visual and visceral power of their address, the end of ISIS’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria augurs not the irrelevance of the videos but the remaking of their affective power in aspirational terms.
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