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91 f i v e On Psycho-Photography: Shame and Abu Ghraib “The illiteracy of the future,” someone has said, “will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography.” But shouldn’t a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less counted as an illiterate? Won’t inscription become the most important part of the photograph? — wa l t e r b e n j a m i n , “Little History of Photography” Although one might want to argue that all politics can be seen as an attempt to manage fear, in the aftermath of 9/11 fear has explicitly dominated prevailing political discourse and dictated U.S. domestic and foreign policies. More specifically, the decision to wage preemptive war in Iraq was justified as a reasonable and defensive response to the fear of a future attack. Since U.S. intelligence ostensibly knew that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and since we knew that Iraq was a breeding ground for Al-Qaeda, and since we knew that Hussein and Al-Qaeda were colluding to plan another surprise attack on U.S. soil, it was imperative, it was argued, to wage war on Hussein there in Iraq now in order to ward off an attack here in the future. In that heady time leading up to the Iraq war, those who refused to acknowledge the fear-provoking evidence or failed to experience the need for fear were dismissed as foolish at best and irresponsible at worst. According to this logic, a certain understanding of and faith in the truth of “fear” was required in order to conclude that war was imminent, Marder-Ch05.indd 91 Marder-Ch05.indd 91 11/10/2011 4:03:45 PM 11/10/2011 4:03:45 PM 92 Photography and the Prosthetic Maternal necessary, and inevitable. The argument that it was vital to U.S. security to take immediate action (made famously by Colin Powell at the United Nations in the spring of 2003) was predicated on the insistence that the danger to U.S. security was not only “real” and “present,” but also therefore that the “fear” caused by the danger was rational and reliable. Fear, in other words, became both a measure of political reason and a justification for military action. Once launched, the logic of this politics of fear demanded not only that we initiate war with Iraq immediately but also asserted that (appearances to the contrary) the offensive strike in Iraq was actually (in the immortal coinage of Ronald Reagan) a “defensive retaliation.” Seen in these terms, the decision to instigate war in Iraq was conceived of as a measured “response” to a palpable future threat in the ongoing “war on terror” based on the need to prevent an attack like the one the United States had already passively (and traumatically) endured on 9/11. Implicitly, the official position of the U.S. government relied upon its faith in the validity of its own capacity to register, assess, and respond to “fear” appropriately. The war in Iraq provided the Bush administration with an effective and strategic way to use fear as a motivation to take “action.” Once mobilized into action, fear became deployed as a defensive weapon in the war against terror. But how are we to understand the paradoxical logic according to which “fear” was invoked as a viable defensive weapon in the “war on terror” since the aim of terror is, after all, to produce fear? How can fear be conceived of both as a protection from terror as well as the very sign that one has already succumbed to its effects? As we saw in the last chapter, if one turns to psychoanalysis for insight here, it emerges that understanding the precise dynamics of the kind of anxious fear about the future described earlier proved to be an intractable stumbling block for Freud in the construction of the description of how the psyche is organized (what we have come to call his “metapsychology”). In the pages that follow, I propose to take a look at the traumatic temporal structure of the events surrounding the Abu Ghraib photographs in order to show how the temporality of shame anxiety participated in the production of many of the meanings that became attributed to the images and their exacerbated shameful impact. Before turning to the photographs, however, I would like to return briefly to some of salient points about anxiety that...

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