Torture photos enact a psychic intimacy that both creates and threatens racial hierarchy

Evidence

The photos from Abu Ghraib depict acts of intimacy, acts requiring a psychic closeness that endangers the barrier between the human and the subhuman even as it creates and affirms it. Totalitarian regimes turn hatred into fantasy, Jacobo Timerman wrote in an account of his own torture in an Argentinian prison, knowing that torture is much more than a physical method of getting prisoners to talk. This chapter explores what we can learn from Abu Ghraib about some of the psychic processes of empire, the terror that moves empire forward, and the individual performance of violence on which empire relies. It charts the realm of fantasy that we can just barely glimpse from the photos, where gleeful torturers seek to emasculate, to turn their prisoners into sexually violated men, and to keep their moment of intimacy and triumph alive through thousands of trophy photos. Empire, it must be hypothesized, comes into existence through multiple systems of domination. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 147 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Abu Ghraib photographs revealed American culture’s dependence on the sexual-humiliation equation. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 194; Torture photos reveal psychic intimacy and fantasy, not just physical coercion — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 147; Focusing on torturers’ bodies reveals how their acts build racial identity (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Torture photos reveal psychic intimacy and fantasy, not just physical coercion #expands (0.95) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 147