lingis- the torturers & their public

7/30/2019 Lingis- The Torturers & Their Public

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Chicago, Oren Gross of Minnesota, Sanford Levinson of the University

of Texas, and Richard Posner of the University of Chicago Law School,

in a collective volume entitled Torture, sought for ways to institutionalize

torture in the war on terror.

From earliest times war has been a prime topic of artdepicted in

epics such as the Mahabharata, the Iliad, the Jewish Bible, and in archi-

tectural monuments such as Angkor Wat, Chichen-Itz, and the cathedral

of Santiago de Campostela celebrating the defeat of the Moors in Spain

and the Spanish conquest of South America. This art depicted the ruler

as sublime in himself, absorbing into his destiny the lives of nameless

multitudes. It depicted the slaughter of armies and populations turning

into golden radiance about the victorious ruler.

High art worked to justify the slaughter of war, even when the cam-

paign was not victorious, by depicting these deaths as redeemed in the

heaven above by the anointed lord. Such are martyrs immediately re-

ceived into the arms of God, such is the Christian Son of God who laid

down his life for the salvation of men, and such are those fallen in battle.

After the French Revolution, it is the nation that assumes the functions

of God; the blood of those who die in war pulses through the nation and

they live on in its immortality and glory.Francisco de Goyas set of 80 etchings,Disasters of War, nished in

1808 but not published until 1863, 49 years after the end of the Napo-

leonic occupation of Spain, is the rst great work of contemporary art.

They depict close-up men cornered and disarmed and then castrated

and dismembered, the butchering of the inrm and aged unable to ght

or ee, the mutilation and slaughter of children. The great causes of the

warthe Napoleonic armies heralding the Enlightenment advancing

into the darkness and superstition of rural Spain, the resistance of theindigenous people and its loyalties, traditions, and valuesare invisible;

soldiers, peasants, women, children tear at one another like so many rabid

dogs. Goya depicts mutilated corpses covered with ies and picked at by

vultures under dark skies, where there is no god above to witness, pity,

and redeem so much agony, so many deaths.

The classical art of wars and battleelds depicted, in and through the

spectacle of mass slaughter, a transcendent sphere of the goodthey

invoked the victorious Alexander, Charlemagne, or Joan of Arc absorbinginto himself or herself the agony and death of the brave and redeeming

them with his or her glory, or else invoked a transcendent God pitying,

honoring, and redeeming those fallen in battle. With Goya both the glo-

rious Napoleon and the glorious King of Spain have disappeared; God


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has disappeared. Their place is taken by the viewer, who in his horror

and disgust, feels rising from his depths his own core moral instincts, an

immanent sphere of the good. Thus, after having been rst suppressed

and not published until thirty-ve years after his death, GoyasDisasters

of War, depicting nothing but rabid and pointless slaughter, now rose to

displace classical art to be proclaimed the great and essential humanist

art of our time.

Although Goyas pictures of war have been recognized as truthful

to the point that they have virtually put an end to the classical art that

gloried and redeemed agony and death in war, they had no effect on

the forces that drive Europeans to war, to the wars in which they were to

twice embroil most of the world. Does this make us think that humanist

art has no power to affect the course of human conductor does it make

us think that the humanist sentiments it provokesthe conviction of a

core moral integrity in usactually functions to serve the war industry

in our times?

Jake and Dinos Chapman spoke of the secret pleasure of Goya barely

concealed in his set of etchings of the horrors of war drawn with such

artistic perfection. In the year 2000 they purchased for 50,000 pounds

sterling a set of Goyas etchings, and painted grinning clown and puppy-

dog faces over the faces Goya had depicted stricken with heart-wrenchingpathos. By desecrating Goyas work, the art desperately called humanist

in our barbarous age, the Chapmans denounce the publics conviction

of their own core moral instincts as the principle obstacle to the lucid

analysis of the state and the military juggernaut. Ethics henceforth would

have to undertake an extensive analysis of the aims of nation-states and

of the internal dialectics of military technology.

The media had itself suppressed the Abu Ghraib torture photographs

for two weeks after they received them; now every news hour projectedthem again and againthe media and the public could not have enough

of them. These photographs do not depict the victorious United States

War President as absorbing into his destiny the glorious deeds of his

troops. What dominates in the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib and

the recent FBI report of practices at Guantnamo was the bizarre sexual

degradation of the captives. The photographs feature men forced into

homosexual acts and piled up naked penis upon buttocks in a grotesque

forced homosexual orgy before the gleeful smirks of young Americanwomen. In these photographs there is no sign of the proclaimed cause of

the warthe liberation and democratization of Iraq, and, although the

picture of the hooded captive with arms outstretched invokes the Spanish

Inquisition, there is here no evidence of a transcendent God guiding the


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hands of the torturers. His place is taken by the viewer. Viewers outside

of the United States judged the acts depicted: they took them to exhibit

the cause of liberation and democratization as lies, following upon the

lies that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction capable of destroy-

ing Great Britain within 45 minutes. But viewers in the United States

felt repugnance and disgust, felt rising from their depths their own core

moral instincts, an immanent sphere of the good.

The insistent projection of the photographs to the American public

were contrived to provoke intense feelings of revulsion. President Bush

gave the watchword: Americans view these images with disgust and

repugnance. The intensity of disgust and repugnance across the land

functioned as evidence, in each viewer, of his or her own core decency,

his or her instinctual moral integrity. The aroused feeling of their own

core moral integrity convinced them that, apart from these few perverts,

the 150,000 National Guardsmen and enlisted servicemen and women

there are brave, generous, idealistic liberatorsSenator Lieberman even

insisted: kind.

The now approved media broadcast of the photographs would serve

the American invasion. In his rst public statement after the release of

the photographs, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared: Now the

world will see American Justice. The army itself was charged with theinvestigation and with punishing these few of its troops for violation of

its own code of conduct. The public was reassured of the irreproach-

able integrity of the army, whose procedures would now be installed

in the interim Iraq government, for the public trial of Saddam Hussein,

immediately arraigned. The photographs had functioned to convince

the American public of their intrinsic righteousness, and the intrinsic

righteousness of a collective action taken in their name by citizens like

themselves.Immediately after the attack of 9/11 on the control centers of American

military and economic power, the American War President had identied

the attackers as irrationally motivated by pure evil, and, by contrast, the

American population as good. But launching, from Florida, long-range

high-altitude bombers to reduce Afghanistan to rubble was too obvi-

ously a massive outburst of revenge to convince the Americans of their

intrinsic goodness. It was the photographs, the disgust and revulsion

they aroused, that made their intrinsic goodness evident to them. Theyreturned President Bush to ofce by a majority, seeing in him one like

themselves.

lingis- the torturers & their public

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