Abstract
In this essay, I argue that the contemporary notion of law has been reduced to regulations and disciplinary codes that do not and cannot give meaning to our emotional lives and moral sensibilities. As a result, we have increasing numbers of what I call “abysmal individuals” who suffer from a split between law—broadly conceived as that which gives form and structure to social life—and personal embodied sensations of pain and pleasure. My attempt to understand the place of Abu Ghraib within American culture leads to an analysis of our valorization of innocence and ignorance that not only becomes the grounds on which we morally (if not legally) excuse abusive behavior as “fun,” but also becomes part of the justification for condoning some forms of violence while condemning others. In addition, I argue that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence trades on underlying assumptions about the relationship between culture and nature, technology and bodies, wherein bodies are imagined as natural and outside of the realm of law.
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Notes
Hart and Serrano (2005).
Fuoco (2005).
Herald Sun (2005).
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that the definition of criminal and insane has changed over time in conjunction with government and societal attempts to control certain populations. The recent incarceration of Arabs without due process could be seen as the latest example of population management ostensibly for the sake of national security, where as we will see, this security is defined in terms of protecting our property and life-style even if it means supporting our economy through war. Angela Davis continues Foucault’s analysis of prisons, applying it to prisons in the United States that in most cases contain and manage black male bodies (Foucault 1979).
Ghassan Hage says that “the rise and dominance of neoliberal economic policy and its substitution of the welfare state by a penal state is a well-documented and researched phenomenon today, especially in the United States, where this penal stat has become a particularly salient feature of the social structure.” Hage (2003, p. 85). See also Mauer (1999).
See Davis (2003).
Hage (2003, p. 86).
Kristeva diagnoses what she calls the new “malady of civilization” as a failure to integrate the symbolic Law into the psychic apparatus (Kristeva 2005, p. 347). In New Maladies of the Soul, she described these “maladies of the soul” as failures of representation caused by a split between word and affect (meaning and body) which is intensified by media culture with its saturation of images (Kristeva (2002, pp. 207; 443–444).
Kristeva (2005, p. 346).
In Homo Sacer, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben introduces the notion of “Bare life.” There he argues that Western politics constitutes itself through the exclusion of bare life, which sets up a structure of exception upon which sovereign power sustains itself. Bare life, or the biological body in itself is imagined as outside of politics and therefore excepted from law. This makes some lives (imagined as bare life) or bodies of supreme value and some completely worthless as decided by the sovereign power. This is to say that if life or the body is imagined as lying in the realm of nature outside of culture or politics, then it can be either killed or revered without recourse to reason or law. Agamben defines bare life as that which can be killed without sacrifice or homicide, which is to say that which has no value whatsoever. His analysis of bare life could be related to the war in Iraq and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay insofar as the bodies of those prisoners are treated as worthless. The U.S. soldiers who are killed in action, on the other hand, are seen as making the ultimate sacrifice. See Agamben (1998).
See Sontag (2004, p. 28).
Cavarero (2008).
Ibid.
See Oliver (2007).
Cavarero (2008).
Kristeva describes that abject: “it is thus no lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, and rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” Kristeva (1980, p. 232).
Ibid., p. 4.
See Reuter (2004).
See Agamben (1998).
I discuss some ways to reestablish connections between bodies and law and to support sublimation in The Colonization of Psychic Space. See Oliver (2004).
References
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Oliver, K. Bodies against the law: Abu Ghraib and the war on terror. Cont Philos Rev 42, 63–80 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-009-9096-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-009-9096-y