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  • The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film by Hilary Neroni
  • Jason Middleton (bio)
The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film by Hilary Neroni. Columbia University Press. 2015. $28.00 paper; $80.00 hardcover; $27.99 e-book. 200 pages.

Approaching the fifteen-year mark after the epochal terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American film and television continue to adapt their narrative and genre conventions in response to the trauma of the attacks themselves, the George W. Bush administration’s “war on terror,” and the massive global instability that has ensued. Much scholarship has been dedicated to various forms of post-9/11 media culture, but Hilary Neroni’s The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film offers an original through line connecting some of the most significant and symptomatic of these.1 Neroni argues that a theoretical framework based on the concepts of biopower and biopolitics is inadequate for explaining the practice of torture and its cultural mediation in the post-9/11 period. She counters that psychoanalysis is a better hermeneutic for this troubling nexus of culture and politics, and that it offers a means [End Page 143] of intervention in the regime of biopower—which, for Neroni, must be viewed as an ideology, albeit the “prevailing ideology of our epoch.”2

In psychoanalysis Neroni finds the best possibility for articulating an alternative to what she terms the “torture fantasy,” which props up cultural narratives examined in the book, including “torture porn” horror films; the popular television series 24 (Fox, 2001–2010, 2014); Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012); and the initial trilogy in the Bourne action film franchise (Doug Liman, 2002; Paul Greengrass, 2004, 2007). In the book’s first chapter, “Torture, Biopower, and the Desiring Subject,” Neroni defines this central concept of the torture fantasy, which she then explores throughout the book as the ideological substrate of her objects’ formal and narrative structures.3 The post-9/11 torture fantasy maintains that “the body holds within it the secrets to how it will act in the future, and torturing the body … will inevitably cause it to disclose these secrets. … This fantasy that torture is the key to truth underlies every contemporary practice of torture and most popular representations of torture that justify the practice.”4 The book’s psychoanalytic framework aims to reveal the gaps and contradictions in this fantasy’s manifestations in popular film and television.

Following this theoretical overview, chapter 2, “The Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer in Post-9/11 Documentary Films,” proceeds from the introduction’s claim that we cannot understand and critically analyze torture without taking account of “the torturer’s pleasure in the victim’s pain.”5 A key contested term in Neroni’s critique of biopower as the ideological foundation of the torture fantasy is, of course, “truth.” The practice of torture is justified as a necessary recourse taken to reveal vital, life-saving information, and this (totally falsifiable) premise depends on a conception of the body as “a repository for truth” that can be revealed through violence done to that body.6 For Neroni, post-9/11 documentary films critical of torture are a valuable intervention in the dominant narrative of torture’s efficacy and necessity, but they are also insufficient for explaining the underpinnings of torture itself as symptomatized by the unavoidably visible smiles of the torturers in documents like the Abu Ghraib photos. The documentaries contest the truth of information obtained through torture but are ill equipped to analyze the American soldiers’ relationship to their Arab prisoners and how racist fantasy fills in the gaps in the symbolic fiction of torture’s truth claims.

Neroni groups together documentaries by Errol Morris, Rory Kennedy, and Alex Gibney through her analysis of their limitations. She describes all three films in terms of a model of investigative documentary in which hidden truths must be brought to light and official narratives that conceal countered with documentary evidence that reveals. Neroni’s Lacanian analysis reframes the goal: the enjoyment on the faces of the torturers reveals the “unsymbolizable traumatic kernel” or point of excess in the ideology...

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