When underground militants — Irish or Basque, Action Directe or Red Brigades — use outrages, murder or torture to gain publicity, feeding the media with photos for their sacrificial victims, the act of internal war throws back to its psychotropic origins in sympathetic magic, to the riveting spectacle of immolation and death agony, the world of ancient religions and tribal gatherings. Terrorism insidiously reminds us that war is a symptom of delirium operating in the half-life of trance, drugs, blood and unison. This half-light establishes a corporeal identity in the clinch of allies and enemies, victims and executioners — the clinch not of homosexual desire but of the antagonistic homogeneity of the death wish, a perversion of the right to live into a right to die. ‘War abounds with suggestions and hallucinations,’ writes General E. Gambiez. ‘The search for psychological factors — whether depressive or tonic — helps to restore the true countenance of battle.’
— Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso Books, 1989; repr 2009), 7.
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