ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature of threat in a mediatized world after 9/11. It uses the metaphor of the specter to understand the ability of mediated threats to blur the boundaries between presence and absence, reality and imagination, and the past, present, and future. The deconstructive logic of the specter, I argue, is at least as responsible for the frightening effect of mediated threats as the fear of the terrorist threat itself. The chapter follows Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality and situates it in the tradition of technological philosophy, tracing its genealogy back to Günther Anders’s notion of television phantoms in The Obsolescence of Man. In the end, this contribution elaborates on the specter as an epistemic instrument that is informed by deconstruction, media theory, and the study of threat in order to be able to describe and understand the complex nature of mediated threats without being threatened and confused by them.
