Habeas Corpus: Behold the Body

Abstract

This essay is drawn from brief remarks I offered at a teach-in at New York University, "Critical Interventions: The War in Iraq," which was sponsored by NYU's Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies Program and coorganized by Patrick Deer and Shireen Patel. The event was timed to coincide with the first Iraq War Moratorium Day (21 September 2007), a national project designed to focus critical attention on the war through monthly actions and educational forums. For more information, go to http://iraqmoratorium.org.¹

"Hurry up. Quiet. I have to finish talking." Leave it to television's Flying Nun to shake things up. Accepting her Emmy award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her role in ABC's Brothers and Sisters as a mother whose son is about to be deployed to Iraq, Sally Field took her few minutes at the microphone at the 2007 Emmy Awards to call attention to the women across the world who wait at home for their loved ones to return from war. Field rushed to finish her acceptance speech before the music came up and the Fox Network censors came down. "Let's face it," she closed, "if the mothers ruled the world there would be no goddamned wars in the first place." Whatever one thinks of Fields's maternal politics (and the leading role US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has played in the Iraq debacle, not to mention the past pugilism of other female heads of state, such as Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, argues against the sentimental notion that women, mothers or not, would necessarily be slower to go to war), it was nonetheless a rare moment of political criticism voiced at the defanged Emmy Awards. Voiced but not heard. Making use of a seven-second delay, Fox producers cut the sound and pulled back to a wide shot. It was yet another un-made for TV moment in Operation Iraqi Freedom.²

Perpetual detention without charge. Extraordinary rendition. Secret surveillance courts. Saturated with the image, we nonetheless live in a profound moment of not seeing, even, of un-seeing.

Embedded reporters take us to the heart of battle; bombings take on the aspect of a video game as we follow a missile to its point of contact, cans of soda in one hand, the remote control in the other. In the United States, the President sends young men and women off to fight and die for "freedom." A pivotal American freedom is freedom of the press. And yet, this same President has banned the photographing of the returning coffins of American service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The official reason for this ban is respect for the "privacy" of the surviving family members, who, we are told, need to mourn in their own way. However, the ban on just seeing the coffins of American war dead actually effects a ban on public mourning. The construction of a nation—of a public—ready and willing to fight and die for freedom (or at least ready and willing to send someone else's sons and daughters off to war) requires this segregation, this privatization, of loss. We must not know what we will not see. This is not mourning but mania. Unable or unwilling to mourn, the nation at war acts out its losses without knowing their meaning or value, without making itself accountable to who and what have been lost.³ These losses include not just the people who have died—each of whom is singular and particular to the families and friends who loved that person—but also the precious self-images a nation has built up of itself, but before which it so often falls short (see Freud [1917] 1957:243). In this context, it is worth recalling another war, the "Great War," and Freud's still timely 1915 essay "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1957), which he composed in the heady early months of World War I, when his sons were fighting for the "Fatherland" and when he found himself surprised by his own identification with the Austro...