How does one write about stills and video images we cannot bear to look at – images that not only depict barbaric acts of brutality against humans and non-human beings, but which attack the very sense of sight and the very ability to look and to be an observer? Images that are not only intended to document violence but also take an active part in its making and in its amplification? On October 7, 2023, live videos of murder, arson, kidnapping, and mutilation of Israeli citizens in their homes filmed by Hamas terrorists wearing Go Pro cameras were broadcast and published on Telegram and Twitter.

The article shows how the use of digital media and social networks was not an appendix or addition to the event but was an integral part of the military and religious logic of revenge and redemption. Those who publish violent images and share them with others produce, transmit, and refine an effect, and enable the establishment of affective communities that are created from viewing and distributing the humiliating images. Through live broadcast and use of social networks, a sense of social connection is forged, which takes on an antagonistic political status attributed not only to the images’ representational or referential aspect but first and foremost to their affective form of appeal. Under these circumstances, a paradox is created regarding images of violence and their contrasting reception in different communities: the more “real,” raw, and uncensored the images seem, the more they evoke the phantasmatic, ghostly, and spectral dimension of the violence.

https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.60.2024.5978