EN
This essay deals with the reception of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy and contemporary media theories in Elfriede Jelinek’s plays Bambiland (2003) and Babel (2005). In these plays, addressing the war in Iraq and the problem of its presentation in the media, Jelinek refers to Agamben‘s theorem of the state of exception, which has become a paradigm of government today, and exposes the structures of economy and power in the context of the Iraq War. The events in Fallujah and Abu Ghraib serve as a starting point for a critical reflection on the ideological dimension and the specifically pornographic character of the globally distributed images of torture and suffering. Moreover, Jelinek thousands of real victims of the war and discuss the question of the role of the contemporary artist in times of “news wars”, media influence on people and the trivialisation of pictures, words and emotions related to death.