The  phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it.

Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies.

Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the Star Wars saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable “fronts” of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, Cloning Terror will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.

An insightful reconsideration of our historical moment seen through the lens of madness

In Seeing Through Madness, W. J. T. Mitchell pursues the idea of “putting madness to work” by transforming it from an individual affliction—an illness to be treated—into a critical framework for understanding the human condition. The human species is now a danger to itself and others—the very definition of mental disorder in most societies. Therefore, it is time, Mitchell argues, for a fundamental reconsideration of madness, not only as a subject in media and the arts but more fundamentally as a “critical optic” on our historical moment. It is time to see through madness in all its variations, to see by means of it as a template for understanding, and to see it through to some form of wisdom. 

While drawing a sense of urgency from Michell’s conviction that the whole world is experiencing a widespread political madness, the book specifically focuses on American psychoses and collective disorders, not least the country’s delusional exceptionalism. 

Incisive, eclectic, and occasionally enraged, Mitchell’s essays are the guide we need to see us through crazy times.