CONTRIBUTI / 3 / Massimo Canepa /
«A head! Just a head! That’s not much» – exclaimed Mrs. De Lespinasse in D’Alembert’s dream. Is it still like this? Is for this reason that the capture of «Bulldozer» – the giant Isis executioner – has not been on the front page of newspapers and the killing of the gorilla in the zoo of Cincinnati to save a child fallen into his cage has created instead more emotions and press coverage than 21 beheaded Christians? «Do you want to get power thanks to the pictures? Therefore you will die of the feedback – pictures. The carnival of the pictures in also the (self) cannibalism through the pictures». This is a formula that reduces terrorism to an «idiocy» of an executioner captured and taken away as a hunting trophy and sees the «humiliation» of the killing of a gorilla getting more press coverage than the execution of 21 infidels. And yet this is a convertible formula that places Bataclan, Pulse, Charlie Hebdo, Nice, Berlin and Istanbul massacres into the frame of cannibals attacks to the Western carnival. Attacks no longer directed to its political-economical power symbols – as with the Twin Towers – but to its very places of freedom and entertainment, parties and transgression in which the pictures are everything that matters. If «the terrorism is the verdict and the sentence that our own society says to itself» (Robespierre ended up beheaded) what about the hostages? The unpleasant truth is «we are all hostages, all at the same time victims and executioners – lost in the same monopoly […] that nobody owns anymore». Therefore, embrace the Evil Principle, the «cursed side» inside of us that still speaks sometimes, could be the main route for the Worse.
