The Abu Ghraib pictures

By Bülent Diken & Carsten Bagge Laustsen

When time has erased all details and ambiguities concerning the Iraq war it will be the Abu Ghraib pictures that will be recalled and remembered. The article asks why? On the one hand we follow the debate on the pictures closely – its uses as forms of resistance against the “collation of the willing” and the Bush governments succeeding attempts at damage control - and on the other hand we ask why pictures potentially have such enormous impact. Certainly, it cannot be the event itself – the fact that torture was applied – that caused the harm. Most people know that such acts do occur in wars. As an alternative explanation the iconic potential of the various photographs especially the hutted man standing with in a “Jesus Christ pose” with wires attached to his limbs and genitals are discussed. And on a more fundamental level it is, following the work of Slavoj Zizek, argued that the perverse practices known from the prison work as a “secret” and disavowed basis of American power which the display brought to light. Suddenly, the American ideals appeared on the same plane as its constitutive exceptions leaving the Administration with the choice of either denying the existence of this down side or in generalizing the exception (legalizing torture etc.). It was in fact by not choosing one of the strategies, by playing both cards simultaneously, that the Bush government lost big time.