Blogging in Times of War: The July 2006 War in Lebanon and Mazen Kerbaj Imaging the Unimaginable

Abstract

“The word/image problem is ‘inside’ the problem of the image, and vice versa … the word as image, image as word; the word as limit for the image, and vice versa.”¹ According to W. J. T. Mitchell, during situations of trauma, words and images fail to capture the density of lived experience. In wartime, we find ourselves unable and sometimes forbidden to make an image of what we cannot speak about.²

This chapter analyzes the drawings that Mazen Kerbaj posted on his blog since the outbreak of the July 2006 war in Lebanon.³ These drawings can be seen as part...