TY - JOUR AU - Antonio Scurati PY - 2015/01/27 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Farewell Messages from the Dying to the Living: Tragic and Obscene Representations of Dying Individuals in Literature and in the Electronic Media JF - Between JA - BW VL - 4 IS - 8 SE - Visual Technologies and Digital Arts DO - 10.13125/2039-6597/1413 UR - https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/view/1413 AB - The essay compares the letters written by some sentenced to death combatants of the Italian "Resistenza" –with special emphasis on the letter sent by Leone Ginzburg to his wife Natalia from the Regina Coeli prison on February 4, 1944– to the video messages of the prisoners decapitated by Al Quaeda. There follows a reflection on the different testamentary communication practices that the media –both literary and visual– tend to create between the dying individual and the addressees of his or her extreme message. The hypothesis is that, by provoking a catastrophe of signification, the terrorists' video messages initiate a new era of the representation of death in which the image of the dying has lost its capacity of symbolic communication. ER -