Terror and the Time-Image: How Not to Believe in the World

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