Location
Stewart Center 310
Session Number
Session 16: TERRORIST (IN)VISIBILITY: ETA AND THE SPANISH STATE
Start Date
9-9-2011 3:15 PM
End Date
9-9-2011 4:45 PM
Abstract
This essay explores the omnipresence of the subject of (Basque) terrorism in Spanish political discourse and media representations in ways that construct the average citizen as both victim and voyeur of a terrorist subject always already rendered invisible either by its reduction to a legal “bare life”or by its figuration in terms of the unspeakable. My analysis centers on Jaime Rosales’ Bat Buruan/Tiro en la cabeza/Bullet In The Head,2008, arguably the most radical and unsettling of the Spanish cinematic figurations of the terrorist subject to date, where the spectator is forced to occupy such a paradoxical position as both victim and voyeur.
Included in
Forms of (In)Visibility in Recent Spanish Films on Basque Terrorism
Stewart Center 310
This essay explores the omnipresence of the subject of (Basque) terrorism in Spanish political discourse and media representations in ways that construct the average citizen as both victim and voyeur of a terrorist subject always already rendered invisible either by its reduction to a legal “bare life”or by its figuration in terms of the unspeakable. My analysis centers on Jaime Rosales’ Bat Buruan/Tiro en la cabeza/Bullet In The Head,2008, arguably the most radical and unsettling of the Spanish cinematic figurations of the terrorist subject to date, where the spectator is forced to occupy such a paradoxical position as both victim and voyeur.