Torture photos reveal psychic intimacy and fantasy, not just physical coercion

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the torture-as-psychic-process thread from the same book’s broader argument about racial violence and empire, and to Leviathan-esque analyses of state violence as identity-making.
• FICTION: The image of torturers keeping ‘their moment of intimacy and triumph alive through thousands of trophy photos’ is fertile ground for fiction about perpetrators documenting their own crimes.