The Critical Image... Must Not

We Have To Be Able Track The Ways In Which Fear, For Instance, Is Monopolized By State And Media Institutions, Ways In Which Fear Is Actually Promoted And Distributed As A Way Of Bolstering The Need For Greater Security And Militarization.

Bound To Seek Recognition Of Its Own Existence In Categories, Terms, And Names That Are Not Of Its Own Making, The Subject Seeks The Sign Of Its Own Existence Outside Itself, In A Discourse That Is At Once Dominant And Indifferent. Social Categories Signify Subordination And Existence At Once. In Other Words, Within Subjection The Price Of Existence Is Subordination.

I'm No Great Fan Of The Phallus, And Have Made My Own Views Known On This Subject Before, So I Do Not Propose A Return To A Notion Of The Phallus As The Third Term In Any And All Relations Of Desire.

There Was A Brief Moment After 9/11 When Colin Powell Said We "should Not Rush To Satisfy The Desire For Revenge." It Was A Great Moment, An Extraordinary Moment, Because What He Was Actually Asking People To Do Was To Stay With A Sense Of Grief, Mournfulness, And Vulnerability.

I Think Maybe The Destructive Pleasure Got Turned Into The Destructive Pleasure Of War (something We See Still In The Images Of Us Soldiers Urinating On The Dead Bodies Of Taliban Soldiers). Something Of The Pleasure In Destruction Gets Unleashed, And Then Becomes Part Of War Effort Rationalised First As Revenge (or Justice Defined As Revenge). But Then It Takes New Forms, As We See Now.