Are our minds becoming numb to images of death and violence? Though this question could hardly be settled even by the most extensive public polling techniques, it is of grave concern to theorists of modern visual media. It has become almost common sense that something momentous has happened in the proliferation of mechanical reproduction and electronic simulation, transforming our very sensory faculties to dangerous and largely disempowering effect. Some of the most radically historicizing media theory written in recent years concerns the alteration of our senses by discourses of vision or technologies of mass- mediated visuality (Crary 1990; Buck-Morss 1994; 1997; Feldman 1994; Levin 1993). These writings often turn on arguments about violent ruptures in modernity between the body qua body and the body as represented visually, especially where it concerns the depiction of the abject, such as in graphic violence and death. An over-kill of body-imagery circulates in what may seem like a postmodern “hyperspace” without corporeal bearings (Jameson 1991), flowing in “global mediascapes” with little regard to the limitations of time and space (Appadurai 1996), in flattened simulacra divested of multi-dimensional sensory embodiment (Buck-Morss 1994; 1998; Feldman 1994), and in an apparatus which enforces the privilege of the realm of vision over all other sensory channels (Crary 1990; Levin 1993). Two-dimensional reproductions swirl over the surface of the planet, carrying impressions of the body in violence and in death, graphic images that repeat themselves with such serial regularity that we are possibly becoming inured to them, and ever further distanced from the suffering they represent. Where our capacity for empathy, outrage, and compassion disappears, there also goes our ability to initiate sane reactions to insane actions.