2.4. Pixels of Death

Hack: 7 October 2023, Southern Israel, Morning

The morning of 7 October 2023 begins like any ordinary Saturday.
At 6:30 a.m., the air is torn by the wail of sirens. At 6:35, the first messages appear on social media — not from official sources, but from those who find themselves inside the events. At 6:42, the first video appears, filmed on a GoPro by the attackers themselves: young men in military uniforms, their faces showing the excited exhilaration of hunters, a jeep crossing the border behind them.
Over the following hours, the world witnesses what will later be called "the most documented mass attack in history." The attackers livestream on TikTok. Victims write final messages to their families. Hostages film events from inside their shelters. Drones capture scenes of destruction from a bird's-eye view. Eyewitnesses publish footage on Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram.
Death ceases to be an event reported hours or days later. It becomes a live broadcast. It can be watched in real time, rewound, paused, shared with friends. It is intercut with pizza advertisements and cat videos. It exists in the same stream as all other content.
In the following days and weeks, this dynamic only intensifies. Retaliatory strikes in Gaza are documented by the same means: drones show destroyed buildings from above, smartphones show the faces of survivors picking through rubble, surveillance cameras show the moments of missile impacts. Death becomes pervasive, ubiquitous, inescapable in its documentary authenticity.
Thousands, tens of thousands of videos. Millions of views. Social media algorithms compete for viewers' attention, pushing the most shocking footage to the top. Platforms attempt to moderate content, but the flow is unstoppable. Death flows through the screens of smartphones, tablets, computers, televisions.
To adequately grasp the philosophical significance of the events of 7 October 2023 and the subsequent media war, it is necessary to distinguish three regimes of the mediatisation of violence, which in this conflict coincided, forming an unprecedented configuration.
The first regime: filming from the point of view of the perpetrator. For the first time in the history of large-scale armed conflict, attackers massively used body cameras to document their actions. GoPro videos filmed by Hamas fighters show violence from the perspective of the one committing it. The viewer is placed in the position of the one who kills, who captures, who triumphs. This is not reportage, not testimony, but a direct transfer of subjectivity: for a few minutes, the viewer becomes the perpetrator, sees through his eyes, shares his excitement.
The second regime: filming from the point of view of the victim. Simultaneously, videos filmed by those under attack appear online. Final messages, footage of shelters, documentation of approaching danger. Here the viewer is placed in a different position — the position of fear, helplessness, the expectation of death. Empathy is activated at full power, but this empathy has no outlet, cannot be converted into action. The viewer sees death approaching but can neither prevent it nor look away.
The third regime: filming from above, from the point of view of God. Drones, both Israeli and those used by various groups, provide a perspective inaccessible to humans. From a bird's-eye view, and then from the height of an unmanned aerial vehicle, what none of the participants can see is visible: the panorama of destruction, the scale of the catastrophe, the geometry of the strikes. This perspective creates the illusion of objectivity, a view from nowhere that sees everything and participates in nothing. It is the gaze of God — or of one who has appropriated the divine position.
The three regimes overlay one another, creating a hyperreality in which death is given simultaneously in all possible perspectives. The viewer can switch between them, as between channels, choosing the degree of proximity and distance he can bear. Death becomes an object of consumption, available in different packages.

From Execution to Content

Philippe Ariès, in his classic study Western Attitudes toward Death, showed how attitudes toward death changed in European culture. The "tamed death" of the Middle Ages — public, ritualised, integrated into life. The "one's own death" of the early modern period — intimate, private, hidden from outsiders. The "forbidden death" of modernity — expelled from public space, hidden in hospitals and morgues, stripped of ritual and meaning (Ariès, 1974).
Michel Foucault traced the transformation of public executions. In the classical age, execution was a spectacle, a performance, an affirmation of sovereign power through the demonstration of the right to kill. The crowd gathered in the square, watched, was horrified, identified now with the victim, now with the executioner. Execution was an event that united the community in an experience of horror and the triumph of law (Foucault, 1995).
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries removed execution from public space. Death became a private matter, hidden behind the walls of prisons and hospitals. The last public execution by firing squad in France took place in 1939, the last public execution in the United States in 1936. Death ceased to be a spectacle, became intimacy, taboo, that which is not spoken of in polite society.
The twenty-first century returns death to screens, but in a completely different quality. This is not a ritual, not an affirmation of power, not a communal experience. It is content. It exists in the same stream as advertisements, weather news, travel posts. It can be liked, commented on, saved to favourites. It obeys the logic of algorithms: the more shocking, the more views, the higher in the feed, the longer the retention of attention.
Susan Sontag analysed the paradox of photographs of war victims. They are meant to evoke compassion, prompt action, stop violence. But they can also evoke numbness, habituation, cynicism. The more images of suffering, the less they mean. The more often we see death, the less real it becomes (Sontag, 2003).
The videos of 7 October 2023 push this paradox to its limit. They leave no distance, which photography preserved. They move, they last, they capture. We see not a moment but a process. We hear screams, we guess movements, we are present. But this presence is a fiction. We are present but cannot intervene. We see but cannot prevent. We sympathise, but this sympathy is not converted into anything except another view, another comment, another repost.
Emmanuel Levinas built ethics on the relation to the Other. The face of the Other, for Levinas, is the manifestation of the commandment "thou shalt not kill." In the face of the Other, the infinite appears to me, demanding a response, summoning to responsibility. The gaze upon the face is the ethical event par excellence (Levinas, 1969).
What happens to this event when the face of the Other appears to us on a smartphone screen? When we see the face of a person about to be killed, or the face of a person who has just killed? Does the gaze retain its ethical force, or is it dissipated in the stream of images?
Levinas insisted that the encounter with the Other is an event that cannot be mediated. The Other must be nearby, face to face, in immediate proximity. Only then does his face demand a response, only then does his nakedness and vulnerability obligate. The mediated image, for Levinas, always risks reducing the Other to an object, to a content of consciousness, to a phenomenon among other phenomena.
Videos of death broadcast through screens create a monstrous hybrid: proximity without responsibility, presence without possibility of action, testimony without power. We see death as those nearby see it, but we can neither protect nor avenge nor even truly mourn, because mourning requires the body, requires presence, requires community.
Jean-Luc Nancy wrote that death is always an event that cannot be appropriated. I cannot die another's death, cannot experience another's death as my own. The death of the Other is the limit of my experience, that which I can only witness but not share (Nancy, 2004).
Witnessing requires proximity, requires presence, requires risk. The witness is one who was there, who saw with his own eyes, who can say: I was a witness. Witnessing through a screen is not witnessing but the simulation of witnessing. We were not there. We did not see with our own eyes. We saw an image that may be authentic or may be fabricated, that may be death or may be a staging. This uncertainty erodes the very possibility of witnessing.

Trauma Without Therapy

The psychological consequences of mediatised violence were studied long before the events of 7 October, but these events gave the problem new urgency and scale.
Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of the "death drive" (Todestrieb) — the fundamental drive of the living being toward a return to the inorganic state. Trauma, for Freud, is the intrusion of an excessive quantity of excitation that the psyche cannot process. Traumatic neurosis arises when defence mechanisms fail, when the stimulus exceeds the threshold of tolerance (Freud, 1961).
The thousands of videos of death passing through the screens of contemporary users create a situation of chronic micro-traumatisation. Each video is a small intrusion, a small wound, a small shock. Individually, they are bearable. Collectively, they change the psychic landscape, making it increasingly rugged, increasingly less capable of processing experience.
Melanie Klein, in object relations theory, introduced the concept of the "schizo-paranoid position" — an early stage of development in which the psyche is incapable of integrating good and bad objects, splitting them into idealised and persecutory ones. Mediatised violence returns us to this position: the Other becomes either absolute victim (good object) or absolute aggressor (bad object). Integration, recognition of complexity, the holding of ambivalence become impossible (Klein, 1975).
Donald Winnicott spoke of the necessity of "holding" — a holding environment that allows the psyche to cope with anxiety. The mother holds the child, contains his fears, returns to him processed, safe stimuli. The screen does not hold. The screen broadcasts but does not contain. The viewer remains alone with images he cannot process, with horror he cannot share, with trauma that cannot be healed (Winnicott, 1965).
Freud distinguished between a healthy reaction to loss (mourning) and a pathological one (melancholia). Mourning processes loss, gradually detaching libido from the lost object. Melancholia becomes stuck, incorporates the object, turns aggression against the self. Mediatised death does not allow mourning to be experienced, because it does not give an object. We do not know names, do not see faces, cannot mourn. We only consume images, and this consumption blocks any genuine work of grief.
Arthur Schopenhauer, in The Basis of Morality, held compassion to be the foundation of ethics. Compassion, for Schopenhauer, is immediate participation in the suffering of the Other, a breakthrough through the principium individuationis that separates us from others. In compassion, I cease to be only myself and become implicated in another's pain (Schopenhauer, 1995).
Compassion requires action. It cannot remain only a feeling, because a feeling that does not lead to action quickly exhausts itself and turns into its opposite — cynicism or indifference. Schopenhauer was not naive: he knew that compassion is often powerless, but this powerlessness is a tragedy, not a norm.
Mediatised death places the viewer in a situation where compassion cannot be converted into action. We see suffering but cannot help. We hear screams but cannot protect. We are present, but this presence is powerless. Compassion becomes pure suffering — suffering from one's own powerlessness, which is merely added to the suffering caused by the sight of others' torment.
Luc Boltanski analysed the paradoxes of mediatised compassion. We see the suffering of distant people, and this vision can evoke sympathy, can prompt donations, can change policy. But it can also evoke "compassion fatigue," when the quantity of suffering exceeds the psyche's capacity to process it (Boltanski, 1999).
The videos of 7 October 2023 create unprecedented proximity to suffering — and simultaneously unprecedented impossibility of action. We are closer to death than ever before, yet we are as powerless as if we were on another planet. This powerlessness is not neutral: it erodes the very capacity for empathy, making us simultaneously more sensitive to images and more indifferent to reality.
Hume, in the Treatise of Human Nature, argued that sympathy is based on similarity and proximity. We sympathise more easily with those who resemble us, who are close to us in space and time. Mediatised death creates proximity without similarity, proximity without community. We see faces, we hear voices, but these are not our faces, not our voices. This proximity does not create community — it creates the solitude of the viewer before the screen.
The events of 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza created an unprecedented situation of collective trauma broadcast in real time. Thousands of people in Israel, in Palestine, around the world experienced the same events simultaneously, through the same screens, on the same social networks.
Dominick LaCapra distinguishes between trauma as event and trauma as experience. The traumatic event may be one for many, but the experience is always individual. Moreover, the very possibility of sharing trauma, of speaking about it, of finding a witness who will confirm the reality of what happened, is a condition of its processing (LaCapra, 2001).
Mediatised trauma creates a paradoxical situation: the event is shared by millions, but the experience remains isolated. We all saw the same videos, but we saw them individually, each on our own screen, each in our own solitude. Social networks create an illusion of community, but this illusion is destroyed at the first attempt at real contact.
Julia Kristeva, in her works on negative narcissism and depression, showed that trauma which has not found symbolisation, not been incorporated into language, not been shared with another, becomes a source of chronic depression, emptiness, loss of meaning. Symbolisation requires the Other, requires a listener, requires community (Kristeva, 1989).
Who can be a listener for trauma experienced by millions? Who can contain suffering of such magnitude? The psyche of the individual viewer cannot cope, defends itself, shuts down. The collective rituals of mourning that traditional societies developed over centuries do not work here, because death has become too massive, too distant, too mediatised.
The result is a phenomenon that can be called trauma without community. The trauma exists, the suffering exists, witnesses exist, but there is no common language, no common ritual, no common memory. Each remains alone with images they can neither forget nor process.

Is an Ethics of the Image Possible?

The events of 7 October 2023 raise a fundamental question about the possibility of an ethics of the image in an era when death has become content and the viewer an accomplice.
Hans Jonas argued that ethics must be rethought in an era when technology has acquired planetary power. Responsibility, for Jonas, must be directed toward the future, toward the preservation of the conditions of human existence (Jonas, 1984). Applied to images of death, this means responsibility for what images we create, disseminate, and consume.
Susan Sontag concluded that the prohibition of images of suffering is impossible and undesirable. We must see in order to know. We must know in order to act. But we must see in such a way that sight does not kill the human in us (Sontag, 2003).
Georges Didi-Huberman defended the right to the image even in the face of unimaginable horror. Even in the gas chambers, he argues, photographs were taken, and these photographs are testimony that cannot be destroyed, cannot be forgotten, cannot be declared obscene (Didi-Huberman, 2008).
The paradox is that the same image can be both testimony and pornography of violence. There is no image that is only one or only the other. Context, frame, mode of showing, mode of seeing — all determine the ethical status of the image.
Perhaps the way out is not the prohibition of images nor their unlimited dissemination, but the creation of an ethics of the gaze. An ethics that requires the viewer to account for what he sees, why he sees it, what he does with his vision. An ethics that refuses the position of pure consumer and demands the position of witness — a witness who bears responsibility for what he has seen.
Jacques Lacan, in the seminar on the gaze, argued that the gaze is always already included in the field of the Other. I do not merely look — I see myself looking through the eyes of the Other. The gaze is always dialogical, always ethical, always demands a response. The question is whether I am ready to give that response (Lacan, 1998).
The events of 7 October 2023 and their mediatisation expose the fundamental structure we have observed in many previous chapters: the structure of a permanent conflict between proximity and distance, between compassion and indifference, between witnessing and consumption.
Technologies of mediation create the illusion of resolving this conflict. They promise proximity without risk, compassion without action, witnessing without responsibility. But this illusion is destroyed at the first encounter with reality. Proximity without responsibility erodes the soul. Compassion without action turns into cynicism. Witnessing without risk becomes pornography.
And here, as in all previous chapters, the outline of that language emerges which will be systematically unfolded in the subsequent treatise. Tristasis proposes not a method for resolving this conflict (for resolution would mean either complete distance, leading to indifference, or complete proximity, leading to the destruction of the psyche), but a language for thinking it. A language in which the conflict between proximity and distance, between compassion and self-preservation, between witnessing and consumption is thought not as a pathology to be eliminated, but as a constitutive condition of human existence in an era when death has become content and compassion has become a commodity.