Munro Public Lecture

W.J.T. Mitchell (Professor of English and Art History, University of Chicago)
Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 2001-2004

7 pm, October 26, 2005
SFU at Harbour Centre (515 West Hastings Street)

In the months before September 11, 2001, the cloning debate was the leading issue in American newspapers. After September 11, terrorism dominated the news. This paper explores the logic that connects cloning and terrorism as the twin phobias of our historical epoch. The clone and the terrorist are cultural icons linked by the fear of the “uncanny double,” the mirror image of the self as its own worst enemy. The terrorist is the enemy who doubles as a friend or countryman, pretending to be “one of us”—or just the opposite. He appears as the Evil Twin, the dark other, masked, invisible, but racially stereotyped or “profiled.” The clone is the figure of biological doubling as such, the inverted, perverted mirror image of a parent organism, an artificial simulation or twin of a natural person. The terrorist is the “evil twin” of the normal, respectable citizen-soldier, and the clone is the “evil twin” as such. The “war on terror” therefore is also a “war of images” that draws its vocabulary from the language of epidemiology, of plagues, sleeper cells, and viruses, on the one hand, and from iconoclasm, iconophobia, and holy wars over images on the other. Tracing the “war of images” in mass media and popular culture from the cloned Schwarzenegger of The Sixth Day to the clone armies of George Lucas, from the destruction of the World Trade Center to the Abu Ghraib torture photographs, this paper explains why the war on terror is actually “cloning terror” by breeding more terrorists, and suggests some ways that this war might be managed and brought to an end.