LATE MODERN ANXIETY AND DIGITAL JIHADIST ALTERNATIVE IN ANNA ERELLE’S IN THE SKIN OF A JIHADIST AND TIMUR BEKMAMBETOV’S PROFILE

Abstract

For almost a decade, ISIS has held the status of the West’s radical other, its symbolic and real challenge to the western idea of modernity becoming ever more prominent and threatening with a growing accessibility of online propaganda content and recruitment via social media platforms in a largely unregulated social networking environment. In that context, the paper discusses Anna Erelle’s book In the Skin of a Jihadist and its film adaptation Profile as two distinct but complementary visions of the West and its other. My argument is that Timur Bekmambetov’s adaptation, as a Baumanesque critical reading of the West’s late modernity, is supplemental to the original text and its liberal views of jihadist otherness. Profile thus views the West and ISIS as two universalist visions of the world so that by facing the dangerous alterity on the computer screen, the West should not only see the morally inferior enemy to be exposed, transformed or eventually defeated but the reflection of its own late modern failures, disappointments and frustrations.