Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2004 08:58:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Zizek: "Between Two Deaths: The Culture of Torture"


Between Two Deaths: The Culture of Torture 

by Slavoj Zizek 

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/06/23/8774033

Does anyone still remember 'Comical Ali', Saddam's
information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who, in
his daily press conferences, heroically stuck to the
Iraqi line in the face of the most glaring evidence?
(He was still claiming that TV footage of US tanks on
the streets of Baghdad were just Hollywood special
effects when the tanks were only a few hundred yards
from his office.) He didn't always fail to make sense,
however. Confronted with claims that the US army was
already in control of parts of Baghdad, he snapped
back: 'They are not in control of anything - they
don't even control themselves!' I was reminded of that
when news of the weird goings-on in the Abu Ghraib
prison broke a few weeks ago. 

George W. Bush was understandably keen to have us
understand that the photographs of Iraqi prisoners
being tortured and humiliated by US soldiers did not
reflect what America stands and fights for: the values
of democracy, freedom and personal dignity. That the
case turned into a public scandal was, in some ways, a
positive sign: in a truly 'totalitarian' regime, it
would have been hushed up. (In the same way, it is a
positive sign that US forces did not find any weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq: a truly totalitarian
power would have behaved like a bad cop who plants
drugs then 'discovers' evidence of the crime.) 

However, although the photographs were only made
public at the end of April, the International Red
Cross had been sending the US and UK authorities
reports of abuses in military prisons in Iraq for
months, and the reports were ignored. It wasn't that
the authorities weren't getting any signals about what
was going on: they simply admitted the crime only when
(and because) they were faced with its disclosure in
the media. The immediate reaction of US army command
to the photographs was surprising, to say the least:
their explanation was that the soldiers hadn't been
properly taught the Geneva Convention concerning the
treatment of prisoners of war. Nowadays, it seems,
soldier have to be taught not to humiliate and torture
prisoners. 

The contrast between what happened latterly at Abu
Ghraib and the 'standard' way prisoners were tortured
during Saddam's regime is striking. Instead of the
direct, brutal infliction of pain, the US soldiers
focused on psychological humiliation. And instead of
the secrecy practised by Saddam, the US soldiers
recorded the humiliation they inflicted, even
including their own faces smiling stupidly as they
posed behind the twisted naked bodies of the
prisoners. When I first saw the notorious photograph
of a prisoner wearing a black hood, electric wires
attached to his limbs as he stood on a box in a
ridiculous theatrical pose, my reaction was that this
must be a piece of performance art. The positions and
costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical
staging, a tableau vivant, which cannot but call to
mind the 'theatre of cruelty', Robert Mapplethorpe's
photographs, scenes from David Lynch movies. 

This brings us to the crux of the matter. Anyone
acquainted with the US way of life will have
recognised in the photographs the obscene underside of
US popular culture. You can find similar photographs
in the US press whenever an initiation rite goes wrong
in an army unit or on a high school campus and
soldiers or students die or get injured in the course
of performing a stunt, assuming a humiliating pose or
undergoing sexual humiliation. 

This, then, was not simply a case of American
arrogance towards a Third World people. The Iraqi
prisoners were effectively being initiated into
American culture: they were getting a taste of the
obscenity that counterpoints the public values of
personal dignity, democracy and freedom. No wonder,
then, that on 6 May, Donald Rumsfeld admitted that
these particular photographs were just the 'tip of the
iceberg', that there are stronger things to come,
including videos of rape and murder. In early 2003,
the US government, in a secret memo, approved a set of
procedures to put prisoners in the 'war on terror'
under physical and psychological pressure in order to
secure their 'co-operation'. The 'excess' at Abu
Ghraib is the reality behind Rumsfeld's statement, a
couple of months ago, that the Geneva Convention is
'out of date'. 

In a recent NBC debate about the prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay, one of the arguments used in
ethico-legal justification of their status was that
'they are those who were missed by the bombs.' Since
they were the target of legitimate US bombings in
Afghanistan and accidentally survived, no one can
complain about what happens to them afterwards as
prisoners: whatever their situation, it is better than
being dead. Such reasoning puts the prisoners in the
position of the living dead. Their right to life is
forfeited by their having been the legitimate targets
of murderous bombings, so that they are now examples
of what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, the one who
can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the
law, his life no longer counts. (There is a passing
similarity between this situation and the - legally
problematic - premise of the 1999 movie Double
Jeopardy: if you were condemned for killing a man and
later, having served your time in prison, you discover
that he is still alive, you can kill him with impunity
since you can't be found guilty twice of the same
act.) And just as the Guantanamo prisoners are
located, like homo sacer, in the space 'between two
deaths', but biologically are still alive, the US
authorities that treat them in this way also have an
indeterminate legal status. They set themselves up as
a legal power, but their acts are no longer covered
and constrained by the law: they operate in an empty
space which is, nevertheless, within the domain of the
law. The recent disclosures from Abu Ghraib make plain
the consequences of putting prisoners in this space
'between two deaths'. 

The exemplary economic strategy of modern capitalism
is outsourcing: subcontracting another company to take
on the 'dirty' aspects of material production.
Ecological and health regulations are much slacker in,
say, Indonesia than in the West, and by outsourcing
parts of its production process there, a Western
global company can avoid responsibility for any
'necessary' violations. Are we not seeing something
similar with regard to torture? Isn't torture being
'outsourced', left to Third World allies of the US who
aren't troubled by legal problems or public protest?
Such outsourcing was explicitly advocated by Jonathan
Alter in Newsweek immediately after 11 September 2001.
'We can't legalise torture; it's contrary to American
values,' he wrote, but went on to conclude that 'we'll
have to think about transferring some suspects to our
less squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical.
Nobody said this was going to be pretty.' Today,
America doesn't trust its allies to do the job
properly; the 'less squeamish' partner is the
disavowed part of the US government itself (the CIA
has been teaching the techniques of torture to US
allies in Latin America and the Third World for
decades). 

Who can forget the Department of Defense news briefing
in February 2003, when Donald Rumsfeld pondered the
relationship between the known and the unknown: 'There
are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We
also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we
know there are some things we do not know. But there
are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we
don't know.' What he forgot to add was the crucial
fourth term: the 'unknown knowns', things we don't
know that we know, which is precisely the Freudian
unconscious, the 'knowledge which doesn't know
itself', as Lacan used to say. Rumsfeld thought the
main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the
'unknown unknowns', the threats from Saddam that
hadn't been foreseen. The Abu Ghraib scandal shows
where the real dangers are: in the 'unknown knowns',
the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene
practices we pretend not to know about, although they
form the flipside of public morality. (In Britain, the
exposure of the Mirror's photographs of British abuses
as fake has allowed government and public alike to
repress, for the moment, their own 'unknown knowns'.)
Bush was wrong: in the photos of humiliated Iraqi
prisoners, what we get is, precisely, an insight into
'American values'. 

...................... 

Slavoj Zizek is a dialectical-materialist philosopher,
a psychoanalyst and a senior researcher in the
department of philosophy at the University of
Ljubljana. His books include The Ticklish Subject,
Welcome to the Desert of the Real and The Puppet and
the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. 



===="What war is not a private affair, and, inversely, what wound is not a war that comes from society as whole?"

- Gilles Deleuze, Logique du Sens (1969)


		
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