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This book offers a wide-ranging elaboration of the effects of the American military's torture of prisoners during the Iraq war. Torture by the American military and intelligence services was practiced and documented in the context of the post-9/11 zeitgeist. Here, the practice in its psychological and cultural significance is viewed through the Lacanian lens of the desiring subject.
Chapter titles illustrate the book's far ranging field of observation: “Torture, Biopower, and the Desiring Subject;” “The Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer in Post-9/11 Documentary Films;” “Torture Porn and the Desiring Subject in ‘Hostel’ and ‘Saw’”; “24, Jack Bauer, and the Torture Fantasy;” “The Biodetective Versus the Detective of the Real in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and ‘Homeland’”; “Alias and the Fictional Alternative to Torture.”
The book begins with a brief history of torture, culminating in the Bush Administration's classifying prisoners as existing outside the rules of the Geneva Convention, not POW's but rather enemy combatants or detainees (essentially stateless actors). The author states:
What ideological shifts occurred to change our fundamental beliefs against torture? Clearly, the shift begins with the September 11, 2001 attacks and the trauma of that event. The reaction is a seismic [emphasis added] shift. All of a sudden torture becomes a method of interrogation that promises to reveal valuable information, which the state can employ with impunity.“ (pp. 7-8)
The basic thesis of the book is laid out in “Introduction: Confronting the Abu Ghraib Photographs.” A fundamental belief legitimizing torture is that the human subject is reducible to its body. The author contends, “Understanding the individual as a desiring subject irreducible to its body, however, would instead prompt us to view torture not only as unthinkable but also as completely ineffectual” (p. 9). The former belief, that the subject is its body, considers the body as a container of truth (where else would it be in s