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72 Others NakedArabBodies Is it because young Arab men caught America so nakedly unprepared, like an emperor with no clothes, its vulnerability exposed for the whole world to see and gawk at, that our leaders and a sizable portion of the people felt the need, in turn, to bare and humiliate Arab bodies? Is it as payback for its humiliating defeat in Algeria that the French Republic thinks it has the right to rip headscarves from the faces of Muslim girls who attend its public schools? Has reason always been barbaric and thus (etymologically) foreign to itself? And has it always been so sexual? As Jean-­ Luc Nancy suggests, sensual desire and the desire for thought may not be so easily disentangled, and what takes the form of sex in the realm of the senses is a sort of openness to contact no different in nature from that of thought itself: If intelligible order escapes from the sensible [le sensible, what pertains to the senses] and exceeds it, it is in the sensible that the momentum for this escape and for this excess originates. Sensual ardor itself is already a desire for thought. There is thus no thought that isn’t also sexual. Whether it manifests itself as a“homo” or a “hetero” sexuality, thought is in itself the opening of this difference to the incommensurable terms of which“sex” is both site and figure, form and force: difference, which isn’t a relation to an object but, rather, touch and tension between beings. What happens, though, when I need to deny this continuum between body and thought for fear of losing myself (my self) forever in an abyss of pure relationality and difference,of touch and tension? How can I resist my coming undone? To expose someone else’s body without his or her consent for the sole purpose of humiliation instantly and unwittingly transforms the reviled person into an object of desire—­ or perhaps reveals that person to have always been one. The quickest way to resolve this tension between the reviled and the desired, the hated and the loved, is rape—­ in particular anal rape, in that this specific mode of violent bodily penetration seeks to destroy the other person’s personhood by undoing the very boundaries that are constitutive of it. Think, for example, of the NYPD officers who inserted a police truncheon into the rectum of Abner Louima, a Haitian man, or of the impalement by right-­ wing skinheads of a recently buried Jewish man in the old Carpentras cemetery in France. The link between anal rape and the Others 73 humiliation of ethnic or cultural others is all too apparent. But the intimacy thus created (and as the historian Joshua Cole has shown in the context of the French-­Algerian war,torture is a form of relational intimacy) has the immediate potential of ruining the entire project of subjugation and exclusion (a policing project); or,rather,intimacy reveals that the project is impossible to begin with because desire was always at work within. If torture enacts a form of intimate contact with that-­with-­which-­there-­must-­be-­no-­contact, it does not, however, allow for a simple, unintended reversal—­ “really” exposing the torturer’s inhumanity reasserting the humanity of the tortured. In her take on Abu Ghraib, and specifically on the attention lavished on thetorturers,thequeerscholarJasbirK.PuarmakesacommentthatIfound so perplexing that I wonder whether it stemmed from a temporary lapse of judgment or careless reliance on ideological autopilot. She writes:“It is devastating , but hardly surprising, that the U.S. public’s obsessive consumption of this story nevertheless did not result in any deep-­ seated or longer-­ term demand to know who the victims are, what they experienced and felt, and how their lives are today.”Yes,there’s got to be a way to make these guys talk. What takes place when any contact occurs is always and necessarily reciprocal. This doesn’t imply moral equivalence, especially in the sort of violent contact that we are discussing here, but it invites us to consider the situation in a more complex fashion. If you’ve seen Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side, a documentary film about Abu Ghraib, that showed interviews with American soldiers accused of committing acts of torture—­ the Bush administration’s infamous “bad apples”—­ in parallel with actual footage of the acts they committed, you may have realized that what often emerges from these juxtapositions is the shared humanity...

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