Abstract

The article examines the politicization of fear following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Towers. It analyzes the role of mass media imagery in the wide-spread production of fear, focusing on the color-code « Terror Alert System » put in place by the Bush administration. It is argued that the recentering of governmental action on the preemptive response to threat has introduced a new time structure into politics which effectively renders futurity present. Through signs of fear conveyed in mass media imagery this present futurity strikes the body at the level of affect, triggering the unfolding of a process bifurcating onto a number of self-differentiating but interconnected levels of experience. That process is construed in the essay as a « collective individuation » in Gilbert Simondon’s sense. A new vocabulary for the understanding of affective unfolding is proposed involving a four-fold distinction between « vitality affect », « pure affect », « emotion », and « affective tone »