Atrocity, celebrity, deictics: a new heurethics for media by Peter Hulm.

Abstract: Atrocity, not suicide, it is suggested, is the key issue for modern philosophy because of its destruction of all subjective meaning. For media atrocity remains an irreducible anomaly, unable to become news more than momentarily. But atrocity and celebrity are the twin polar tools of modern politics, employing the same tools of repression and panopticism. Posthumanism provides guidance on how the media can create a new 'heurethics' (ethics that requires invention), to do justice to atrocity, starting from the standpoint of 'positioned knowledge' (deictics). A number of contemporary artists, ranging from Chantal Akerman and Claude Lanzmann to Steven Spielberg, Peter Greenaway and Jean-Luc Godard, open doors on the same vistas.

This dissertation introduces a number of new terms into communications theory: language-event, the culture of interruption, the penumbra of the present, aporias of knowledge, terminality, bricollage, deictics and heurethics (among others). It also challenges a number of traditional conceptions within specific disciplines, particularly the political and social sciences

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