폭력, 정치 그리고 라캉의 정신분석 : 아부 그라이브 감옥과 영화 <그리스도의 수난>에 나타난 고문의 논리와 도착의 시선

• 영문명: Violence, Politics, and Lacanian Psychoanalysis : The Logic of Torture and the Gaze of Perversion in Abu Ghraib and The Passion of the Christ
• 발행기관: 한국비평이론학회
• 저자명: 김용수(Yongsoo Kim)
• 간행물 정보: 『비평과 이론』제10권 제1호, 155~171쪽, 전체 17쪽
• 주제분류: 어문학 > 영어와문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2005.06.01

영문 초록

This paper reads the Abu Ghraib prison photos and Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ with the psychoanalytic concept of perversion. Special attention is paid to the optical dynamics of vision and gaze to disclose the political unconscious embedded in the textual structure beyond the shocking surface of torture and perverse acts. After a short analysis of the "most beautiful ass" contest scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini's film, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, I review the psychoanalytic theories of perversion from Sigmund Freud through Jacques Lacan to a recent film theorist, Joan Copjec. The concept of perversion as disavowal of the lack in the Other with its visual and political implications, I argue, reveals the structural affinity between the two strikingly heterogeneous and seemingly unrelated events, Abu Ghraib and Passion. Abu Ghraib prison photos contain the anonymous spectral gaze as the superegoic Other that witnesses and endorses the perverse acts of torture, and Passion bears the visual misrecognition that mistakes a mediated perception for objective representation and, in so doing, equates the camera's subjective, pathological perspective with God's transcendental vision. My paper, then, suggests that Abu Ghraib is a necessary and inevitable symptom that embodies the undeniable truth of the empire, and that Passion harbors visual violence and perverse cruelty as the political unconscious of Abu Ghraib.