‘The Face of Evil’: The Discourse on ISIS and the Visual Complexities in the ISIS Beheading Videos
This article deals with ISIS’s beheading videos of Western victims from 2014 and inscribes itself into an emerging body of literature on visuality in IR. The paper contends that the image of ISIS beheadings has been mobilized in a Western political discourse that classifies ISIS as evil, and has hereby helped shape the conditions under which international politics operate. The article offers a Nietzsche-inspired critique of the value judgment of evil in the Western discourse and, in extension, seeks to nuance the assessment of ISIS through a ‘re-reading’ of the beheading image. For this purpose, the article proposes to expand Lene Hansen’s concept of inter-iconicity to capture how an icon’s meaning is produced in relation to other icons and, in this light, explores the inter-iconic relations between the image of ISIS beheadings, on the one hand, and the decapitations of the French Revolution and the image of the ‘body politic’, on the other. The inter-iconic reading draws out alternative meanings of the image of ISIS beheadings that counter the classification of ISIS as evil, thereby expanding the conditions for political speech and action regarding ISIS and opening up space for a broader critique of politically motivated violence.