The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film

Beginning from this position, one believes that the body exists as a fact repository whose information was stored in an archive that just needs to be accessed by medical procedures, health initiatives, or even torture.1 This biological approach to the body predominates today and provides the theoretical foundation for torture. If the body is nothing but a biological entity that wants to survive and flourish, torturing the body is the best way to retrieve the secrets that it harbors. Under the threat of pain and death, the body reveals the truths that it contains.

The other conception of the body, which is not nearly so widespread, rejects the idea that the body has an inherent vitality and that it aims at survival. The origin of psychoanalysis lies in the fact that subjects do not seek their own good but instead endeavor constantly to undermine their own self-interest. The problem for psychoanalysis is not aiding subjects in overcoming their egoism—which separates it from the confessional and from moral philosophy—but in helping them to avoid completely destroying themselves through their various modes of enjoyment. The body, as understood by psychoanalysis, is then entrenched within a subjectivity that enjoys itself through painful repetition and thus does not aim at its own good. It is a body we don’t have access to, a body that traumatizes and delights us, a body that plays a significant role in our desires and yet that we cannot totally control when it comes to satisfying those desires. This body is a body that can only exist in its connection to our psyche, and it must be understood through the complex relationship between mind and body, which is precisely where psychoanalysis places its emphasis. Because of this mind/body connection and its unpredictable results, this body is difficult to know or to control, and it is difficult to elicit any information from this body that really makes sense or is useful in a direct way. Dealing with this body, then, requires other ways of thinking about the greater good and politics.2

When Descartes first conceives the modern subject, he posits a strict division between the mind and the body. This dualistic approach both shaped subsequent centuries of philosophizing and earned him the opprobrium of many thinkers in the late twentieth century. According to Descartes, “there is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible.”³ Though Descartes theorizes a divide, he places much more emphasis on one side of the divide than the other. If subjectivity for him does include the body, it is nonetheless the mind that predominates. As he makes clear in the Meditations, the mind, not the body, is the essence of the self. The body serves as a source of doubt—we can’t trust our bodily sensations—while the mind provides epistemological certainty through the act of thinking. Contemporary emphasis on the body has emerged to counter this one-sidedness of the modern conception of subjectivity, but the result has been an inverse one-sidedness. Today’s common sense views the body as determinative in relation to the mind. This is evident in the privileged position that neuroscience holds as a popular explanatory device. Neuroscience can demonstrate the lack of any autonomy on the part of the mind in relation to the physiology of the brain. Psychoanalysis does not at all reject the insights of contemporary neuroscience, but it does insist on sustaining the idea of a split between the mind and body.

Taking the Cartesian conception as its starting point, psychoanalysis rejects both the apotheosis of the mind and the reduction of the mind to the body. According to the psychoanalytic approach, subjectivity emerges through the collision of mind and body, a collision that produces desire. Desire is born out of the intersection between the mind and the body. Desire is not reducible to biological impulses, and, in fact, it often compels subjects to act against these impulses. Unlike the knowable body, the subject of desire bespeaks the ineffectiveness of torture because the body does not hold the key to the subject. The body is instead marked by its enigmatic status. The subject’s relationship to bodily pleasure or violence is unpredictable, and the subject doesn’t always do what is best for the body. For example, in terms of bodily health, subjects notoriously undermine it through excessive eating or ingesting substances that harm the body immediately or in the long term. Though it is counterintuitive, the subject has the capacity to enjoy its suffering and thereby work to sustain it rather than put an end to it.

My basic claim is that these two theoretical approaches to the body are thoroughly opposed to each other. One cannot reconcile biopolitics with psychoanalysis or the machinelike body with the desiring subject. There is, I contend, no possible compromise position.4 Our contemporary political predicament depends on which approach we decide on, and this decision will also determine the role that torture will play in our political future. Today, biopower represents the ruling ideological structure and remaining within the paradigm of biopower guarantees that society will continue to live under a regime of torture.

Though I often use the terms interchangeably, there is an explicit distinction between biopower and biopolitics.5 Theorists who analyze biopower see it as a new form of power that focuses on the living body rather than on the threat of death, which is the way that traditional forms of power operated.⁶ These theorists are uniformly critical of biopower. Theorizing biopower as the most recent form of power does not entail endorsing it but rather critiquing it and trying to discover a mode of resistance appropriate to this new form of power. This mode of resistance, according to many of the theorists of biopower, is biopolitics, a politics that takes the body and its pleasure rather than the desire of the subject as its starting point. The apotheosis of the body as resistance to biopower finds its most straightforward expression in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who conceive of the body without organs as the opposite of the psychoanalytic desiring subject. For them, psychoanalysis is part of the problem rather than the solution.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that the body exists independently of its subjection to the signifier, a subjection that turns our attention to specific organs rather than to the body as an assemblage. The body becomes reified by the despotism of the signifier. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “There is a primacy of the machinic assemblage of bodies over tools and goods, a primacy of the collective assemblage of enunciation over language and words.”⁷ In other words, the body is more fundamental than the way it is used or the way it is taken up in language. It is the way the body speaks the words rather than the words themselves. The emphasis here on the body, combined with the critique of language, reveals the distance that separates biopolitical theorists from psychoanalysis. But, at the same time, their unapologetic investment in the body bespeaks a failure to break fully from the regime of biopower that they criticize.⁸

Though the regime of biopower and the articulation of biopolitics are distinct and in some basic sense opposed, there is a common ground that the two share, and it is this common ground that psychoanalysis contests. Both biopower and biopolitics view the body as the sole political battleground, and both see subjectivity as inessential or epiphenomenal in relation to the body. According to the premises of both biopower and biopolitics, the body has no necessary relation to signification but can be approached in its immediacy. This is why I will theorize biopower and biopolitics as similar projects, despite the explicit opposition that the proponents of the latter advance against the former. The great theoretical divide today is not between biopower and the biopolitical opposition to it. It is between biopower and biopolitics, on the one side, and psychoanalysis, on the other. For psychoanalysis, one cannot theorize the social order or politics without an idea of subjectivity as expressed in desire, enjoyment, fear, anxiety, and so on. But for biopower, and even for the biopolitics criticizing it, this aspect of subjectivity is unimportant if not deceptive. These aspects of subjectivity are considered utterly ideological and therefore misleading. This is why biopolitics speaks of bodies rather than subjects. Psychoanalysis certainly theorizes the unconscious (and its expression in desire and so on) as embroiled in ideology, but not as wholly within ideology. The potential for subjects to react against their own interest or against what ideology is asking of them is an essential part of subjectivity and is not quantifiable. While biopolitics and psychoanalysis are truly in opposition around the idea of the subject, they are united in their recent attacks on the impact of biopower. To understand biopower, it is essential to begin with its analysis by biopolitics since biopolitical thinkers, much more than psychoanalytic theorists, have made it their business to grasp how biopower functions and why it dominates today.

Foucault sees biopower as the politicization of biology. Within the regime of biopower, biology becomes not just one science among others but the privileged site for the deployment of power. This begins with the consideration of humanity as a species. In his lecture course at the Collège de France entitled “Security, Territory, Population,” Foucault describes the emergence of biopower in the following terms: “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is roughly what I have called bio-power.”9 Biopower concerns itself with the betterment and the survival of the species, and this justifies the measures of security that leave bodies under an ever-increasing control. Power must constantly care for the bodies that constitute the species.

Biopower, according to Foucault, emerges out of the logic of the Christian pastoral. Pastoral power takes care of those who belong to its flock and occupies itself with every aspect of the lives of those it oversees. Though regimes of biopower are secular rather than religious, they have imported, he argues, the Christian pastoral into their deployment of power. This is why Foucault uses interchangeably the terms biopower and pastoral power. The Christian pastoral doesn’t retain the devotion of its members through the threat of death but through the act of giving life. This is exactly how Foucault sees biopower functioning.

The emergence of biopower changes the way that power operates. As Foucault sees it, sovereign power—the traditional form of power—creates a sense of fear in those it governs. It punishes those who disobey and it avails itself of death to punish the most egregious offenders of its law. In the lecture course entitled “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault proposes that biopower reigns in a quite different manner. He says, “Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.”10 The turn from sovereignty to biopower entails a shift in our way of thinking about power. It is not vertical but horizontal. Power is productive, not repressive.

Power exists within intersubjective relations, and thus power operates at every social level. It is not simply imposed from above but manifests itself even at the bottom of the social hierarchy. That is to say, even those who are the victims of social power can act to perpetuate this power. Foucault abandons the idea that oppression involves external oppressive force acting on a group of people and contends instead that oppression inheres internally within every group.

Foucault also sees contemporary power relations developing out of a certain historical progression. He argues that this history develops from sovereign power to disciplinary power to pastoral power, though he readily grants that much historical overlap exists between these three forms. Foucault claims that the onset of biopower occurs within pastoral power when the state begins to see its job as controlling and organizing individual behavior and routines. This grows into the extensive carceral, medical, and educational institutions of contemporary society, whose purpose is to regulate all aspects of individual behavior. About this final stage of power, Foucault explains, “Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death that gave power its access even to the body.”11 Foucault suggests that this happens through the concept of population and the issues attached to it, such as hygiene, health, incarceration, and reproduction.¹²

Foucault’s theorization of the shift in power is well illustrated in his writings on disciplinary power and the shift in types of punishment. As I mentioned in the introduction, he begins his study of this shift with a description of torture used as a public display that acted as a punishment, but also as a warning to the population watching the spectacle. He describes power at this time as sovereign power. The sovereign utilized torture as punishment and a way to control the populous through fear. Sovereigns relied on their own personal leadership style and ethical codes rather than a ubiquitous national or global standard. During disciplinary power, torture retreats behind closed doors as discipline becomes more and more internalized and embedded in the structure of society. In the eyes of the state, however, torture became something that was a barbarous practice of the past. During this shift the importance of political rights rises and becomes the cornerstone for democracy. Built into the idea of political rights and of freedom is the right not to be tortured by one’s own government. In the United States, this manifests itself in the Eighth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and other modern nations have similar foundational codes that proscribe the practice of torture.

But under biopower torture has begun to return. Sovereign power thought it could force people to do what it wanted by threatening their deaths. Biopower, on the other hand, thinks it can make people do what it wants by manipulating what people think they have to do to stay alive. It works in a productive manner rather than a repressive manner. While the logic of torture doesn’t seem to fit into the tenets of democracy, it does fit into biopower’s regard of the body as productive. Political rights find themselves more and more in contradiction with the demands of biopower. To change this mode of power would obviously not be to return to an earlier mode but rather to shift the emphasis to political rights and subjects and away from productive power and bodies.

The body under biopower is a body made visible; it is a body that is known, characterized, catalogued, and completely controlled. Power, according to Foucault, arises out of control of the body and by making the individual believe that the life of the body is more important than anything else—more important, for example, than political rights. Foucault doesn’t often suggest an antidote to what he sees as our contemporary quagmire, but, famously, at the end of The History of Sexuality, volume 1, he intimates that it is through bodies and pleasure that we might be able to fight biopower.13 This seems like a strange suggestion in reaction to his critique of the way our bodies have been defined by contemporary power, and many critics have commented on the inappropriateness of this solution. His point, however, is that it is through these very controlled bodies that we can break the hold of power.¹⁴ This has nothing to do with subjectivity for Foucault. He is adamantly against any recourse to the subject, which he sees as a concept used by biopower to control us and make us believe that we have agency when in fact we do not. Biopower is in charge.

Without a conception of the subject, however, there is no avenue for contesting biopower. Without the subject, one ipso facto accepts the premises of biopower and accedes to the efficacy of torture. Though a biopolitical thinker like Foucault can argue against the practice of torture, he has implicitly given it his theoretical endorsement by insisting on the ontological privilege of the body. Foucault sees the problem that leads to the contemporary outbreak of torture, but he refuses the tools that would enable him to respond to this problem.

At the close of The Order of Things, and throughout his work, Foucault’s refusal to see subjectivity as a possible mode of contesting biopower stems from his rejection of humanism. The subject is always an illusion, and it is an illusion that Foucault associates with the concept of the human. But psychoanalysis makes clear that the subject is distinct from the human, that the subject is the inhuman—what exceeds and cannot be assimilated to humanity. The biopolitical human controls itself and has agency in the world, while the psychoanalytic subject continually stumbles over its unconscious. The unconscious marks the point at which the subject’s agency exceeds the subject. That is to say, the subject has agency, but this agency has nothing to do with the conscious will of a self-identical being that knows what it wants. Foucault’s inability to see subjectivity in this light, his reduction of subjectivity to an effect of power, leads him to cling to the body as the sole mode of resistance to biopower, and it is a theoretical decision that reverberates among later biopolitical theorists.

Like Foucault, Hardt and Negri reject the idea of the subject and argue that the subject is a construction of power that limits hybridity. Instead, they proffer the idea that we can see bodies as linked in a community that has the potential to dismantle biopower, a community they call the multitude. Defining the multitude, they explain, “The figures that coalesce in the multitude—industrial workers, immaterial workers, agricultural workers, the unemployed, migrants, and so forth—are bioplitical figures that represent distinct forms of life in concrete places, and we have to grasp the material specificity and spatial distribution of each.”15 Hardt and Negri emphasize the singularity of each person in the multitude and strive to hold onto differences while advancing the concept of the multitude that they believe has revolutionary potential. The singularity and differences, however, are biopolitical in and of themselves, as they have to do with differences of place and identity. In this way, Hardt and Negri are trying to theorize how bodies and identities can resist and potentially dismantle biopower while never quitting the terrain of biopower.¹⁶ Thus they repeat the error of Foucault’s critical response to biopower, and his attempt to construct a biopolitics, because they do not leave room for the subject’s desire to either undermine or propel it toward a revolutionary change.

In a related vein to Hardt and Negri, Georgio Agamben analyzes biopower and theorizes a way to dismantle it. He argues that we live in a time when bare life has become more important than political values, when politics has dissolved into an obsession with bare life.17 He explains bare life by suggesting that previous forms of life had combined animal life with political life. Agamben’s own name for this previous political being is a form-of-life, a form he feels has been bifurcated by biopower. Biopower foregrounds bare life to the detriment of a form-of-life. In other words, the political life becomes lost to the privileging of animal life, what he calls, in its modern form, bare life. As he explains, “The same bare life that in the ancien régime was politically neutral and belonged to God as creaturely life and in the classical world was (at least apparently) clearly distinguished as zoē from political life (bios) now fully enters into the structure of the state and even becomes the earthly foundation of the states legitimacy and sovereignty.”¹⁸ Biopower creates a zone of indistinction where politics and political struggle disappears under the dominance of bare life, which vitiates the possible development of any form-of-life.

At the heart of biopower, for Agamben, is the structuring and formative nature of the sovereign’s invocation of a state of emergency. Agamben turns to such different thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Schmidt because they all emphasize the risk to politics occasioned by the turn to bare life and the corresponding invocation of the state of emergency.¹⁹ The sovereign invokes the state of emergency and creates zones of exception; these zones are at first spatially confined but then spread through the society. Agamben cites the Nazi concentration camps as well as the prison at Guantanamo Bay. He also points to the Patriot Act, an act declaring a state of exception and thus lifting various rights that all Americans previously had. In these zones of exception, zoē and bios are decoupled, and the people are reduced to just bare life. Agamben emphasizes that as a result today we are in a constant state of exception and bare life has become the controlling mechanism of power.

Agamben agrees with Foucault on some important levels. He explains, “Foucault’s thesis—according to which ‘what is at stake today is life’ and hence politics has become biopolitcs—is, in this sense, substantially correct.”20 Agamben’s term bare life comes directly out of Foucault’s ideas and yet seems to more specifically define what Foucault meant by life itself. Despite his clear debt to Foucault, Agamben’s explanation as to how we arrive at this point is somewhat different. Foucault theorizes the receding of the sovereign and the rise of a more regulatory power that inaugurates life as the sole concern of politics. Agamben, on the other hand, sees the sovereign as still the nexus of political power, a power located in the proclamation of the state of emergency. Agamben also emphasizes that this stripping down to bare life is a constant process, one that therefore can be resisted. By bringing back the importance of the sovereign, while at the same time acknowledging the power of disciplinary and regulatory practices, he opens up the possibility for creating a contemporary political being that is not reducible to its bare life and that his term form-of-life embodies.

In this way, Agamben goes further than Foucault in theorizing various places where we can disrupt this contemporary political environment in which people are controlled by the idea that their body is more important than their political being. Agamben, after Foucault, asks: how do you reignite the political and thus resist biopower? He suggests, for example, that we can work to decouple concepts such as violence and right, which would unravel a nexus, he argues, that greatly defines our society controlled by biopower. He also wants to repoliticize other categories, such as the term refugee, that force politics to reexamine its terrain. Like Foucault, he also turns to the body itself by theorizing the potential for gesture to show us something far different about the body than bare life suggests. But it is precisely where he returns to the body that the distinction between Foucault’s politics and Agamben’s becomes clearest.

Gesture, for Agamben, shows us something beyond the body, something about the person that goes beyond just the person’s physicality. This places him more proximate to the psychoanalytic conception of subjectivity than the biopolitical body. He explains, “The gesture is, in this sense, communication of a communicability.”²¹ In other words, for Agamben gesture suggests a communicability that is form beyond content. While we may be controlled by biopower today, communicability and the power of language itself suggests something beyond biopower, beyond the mere body. Even when Agamben sees resistance in terms of the body, his distance from Foucault is evident. Resistance doesn’t involve simple “bodies and pleasures” but the implication of the body in language, precisely what other biopolitical theorists like Foucault want to avoid.

Agamben argues that the way to prevent the stripping down to bare life is to enact a politics of thought and communication in which form and content are so clearly linked that bare life can no longer be isolated. In his discussion of gesture, Agamben mentions cinema, and he suggests, “Cinema leads images back to the homeland of gesture.”22 Here I would insert that the way “back to the homeland of gesture” is through the desiring subject, and it is cinema, and its related forms of television and other media, that constantly brings the desiring subject to the fore. Cinema (to one degree or another) almost always reveals—through its unique form—the psychoanalytic subject rather than just the bare life body, and it does this through its presentation of the body.

Though it is impossible to marry the basic tenets of biopolitics and psychoanalysis, Agamben actually forms a bridge between the two modes of responding to biopower. He takes Foucault’s critique of biopower as his starting point, but he formulates resistance in a way that approximates psychoanalysis. Agamben is not a psychoanalytic theorist, but concepts like that of gesture reveal a thinker sympathetic, even if unconsciously, to the psychoanalytic subject and suspicious of Foucault’s body in pleasure.

The important contribution of biopolitics is its analysis of biopower and the changed relationship between power and the body. Clearly, many representations of the body in scenes of torture depict this bare life body produced and controlled by biopower and thus illustrate, if not participate in, biopower. Understanding biopower is essential to theorizing how the body is coded and depicted, and biopolitics has had the great virtue of bringing the critique of biopower to the fore. There are many ways, however, either through the torture scene itself, its placement in the plot, and its thwarting or satisfying genre expectations that these scenes at times also reveal the way in which biopower can fail and not fully control or define the body. This is why cinema does not fit smoothly into the regime of biopower and why Agamben turns to it when he theorizes the politics of gesture. In analyzing scenes of torture in film and on television as well as the Abu Ghraib photographs, it becomes apparent that the bare life body is at the heart of biopower’s contemporary fantasy but completely disintegrates in the face of the actual practice of torture whose violation of political rights is so glaring.

The traditional understanding of ideology sees it as multiple: there are various ideologies, and one can accept or reject them as one pleases. This conceptualization leaves ideology on the level of consciousness and thus misses its significance for those who exist within it. Ideology is not a set of ideas that individuals either accept or reject. It was Louis Althusser who first recognized this, and he made a fundamental advance in the theory of ideology when he positioned the process of interpellation as the foundation of ideology. According to Althusser, “all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.”23 In this vision, ideology permits individuals to see themselves as subjects—that is, as agents who have control over the direction of their own existence.

This theory of ideology remained the predominant one for twenty years, and many contemporary theorists still accept it. But, despite Althusser’s debt to psychoanalysis, his theory represents a betrayal of the psychoanalytic conception of the subject. Althusser conceives of subjectivity as always ideological, but this conception makes it impossible to imagine the emergence of resistance. In order to make sense of how resistance is possible, a different theory of ideology is requisite, one that retains Althusser’s notion of interpellation but transforms the position of the subject in this interpellation. The subject is not the result of interpellation, but what interpellation attempts to escape.

Ideology is an effort to avoid the trauma of subjectivity, and this is why individuals too often accept their ideological interpellation rather than rejecting it out of hand. Ideology is a reaction to a fundamental lack in the subject, a lack that is constitutive of the subject. This conception of ideology appeared for the first time in Slavoj Žižek’s Sublime Object of Ideology in 1989. As Žižek explains, “The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic real kernel.”24 Theorizing ideology as covering over some lack or unsymbolizable divide prompts an investigation into the relationship between the subject and the ideology they are ensconced in rather than assuming they are wholly defined by this ideology. It also explains both why ideology usually works and why it sometimes fails.

A powerful ideology, biopower defines various aspects of our contemporary social and political landscape. The biological explanation for the phenomena of social life almost always prevails, and this explanation has the virtue of avoiding the gaps that problematize other explanations. The power of biopower as an ideology stems directly from the thoroughness of its approach. It leaves no area of social existence beyond its purview. But, like every ideology, the ideology of biopower nonetheless has points where its symbolization of phenomena breaks down.

We can see the manifestation of the ideology of biopower in various contemporary social practices, such as biometric identification and genetic investigation. Biometrics is a technological science that relies on bodily characteristics to identify individuals. Often it is used to identify and characterize groups under surveillance. Some of the most common modes of identifiers used are fingerprints, facial recognition, DNA, palm prints, iris recognition, and retina recognition. Used by New York City Police in a systematic way to identify criminals in the early 1900s, fingerprinting as a mode of identification was one of the first modern biometric identifiers. Like all the techniques that followed in its wake, fingerprinting seemed to be an infallible way to identify an individual. Because no two fingerprints are exactly the same, finger-printing carries with it the idea that it can identify an individual with complete certainty. All biometric forms of identification follow from this same precept.

Nowhere is this perverse paradox more evident than in the phenomenon of cloning. The existence of cloning should function as an argument against biopower insofar as it reveals that DNA cannot define an individual. But cloning advances rather than halts the march of biopower. This is a point that W. J. T. Mitchell makes, as he argues that one of the most important expressions of the dominance of biopower today can be found in cloning and its media representations. Mitchell says, “But the most dramatic and symbolic innovation of this sort has been, as I have argued, the invention of cloning, which combines the revolution in information science with the one in biotechnology to inaugurate an age of ‘biocybernetic reproduction,’ one that promises to literalize and technologically realize many of the premonotional fantasies of biopower and biopolitics.”25 Mitchell investigates how the science of cloning, an expression of biopolitical ideology itself, is then also employed as a fantasy in media representations specifically to cover over the gaps in the conception of cloning.

It is easy to look at biometric identification and believe that biopower is simply how power functions today. It doesn’t require an act of interpretation on the part of the theorist to arrive at this conclusion. One simply needs to cross an international border, board an airplane, or watch an episode of C.S.I. The manifestations of biopower are ubiquitous. But it is precisely this self-evident ubiquity that reveals biopower to be an ideology and not the totality of the structure of all aspects of society or potential expressions of the subject. If biopower really structured our contemporary social order, we would not be able to recognize it so clearly.

Biopower enables those invested in it to believe that they are self-identical, to avoid encountering their self-division as subjects, and this is the fundamental task of ideology as such. Biopower is especially effective in this task because it has the backing of biology. The subject’s belief in science (which is not necessarily wholly ideological) functions as a support for the subject’s investment in the ideology of biopower. But the accuracy of biological claims tells us about the body and not about the subject. Unlike the subject, the body doesn’t lack, and this absence of absence provides a sense of security. The individual interpellated into the ideology of biopower can know who it is and can experience the sense of self-identity that stems from considering oneself a pure body, even if the authorities can use this knowledge to track the subject’s every move. Biopower imprisons the subject not through its technological apparatuses but through the psychic investment that it demands. For example, people’s psychological investment in tracking their calories, heart rate, and cholesterol levels outweighs their understanding of the lack of privacy that goes along with this.

But despite its seeming infallibility, biopower suffers from incompleteness just like every ideology, and the necessary incompleteness of every ideology demands a collective fantasy to fill the gaps within an ideological structure. The existence of fantasies is one proof that an ideological structure is not whole because they testify to amendments that subjects must make to ideology in order to continue to function within it. In the case of biopower, the gaps exist not in the realm of knowledge—the knowledge always appears complete—but in the emergence of the knowledge, the act by which we acquire knowledge that provides a complete explanation. As a result, it is difficult to discern these gaps, but they manifest themselves when we examine the fantasy that operates within the ideology of biopower. A key fantasy of this ideological structure is the torture fantasy.

When we confront the ideology of biopower and the torture fantasy that supports it, the limitations of the biopolitical response to biopower become evident. Any insistence on the body as the site of resistance sees a power structure where an ideological structure is actually at work. As a result, biopolitics can perpetuate the system that it is trying to contest. It falls victim to the ideology of biopower because it fails to recognize it as an ideology. What is needed is a conception of the body that sees the body’s subjection to the signifier as a transformative event that renders the body alien to itself. This is the point at which one must turn to psychoanalytic theory as a way to respond to the ideology of biopower and the torture fantasy that accompanies it.

Beginning with Freud’s theory of the subject as subject of the unconscious, Lacan emphasizes that the unconscious forms through the individual’s encounter with language.26 He theorizes that when the animal body is subjected to the signifier the result is the formation of the unconscious and thus of the desiring subject. Here desire is a very different idea than an animal instinct that derives from the pure body. The subject relates to its body through the mediation of the signifier, and even bodily instincts are experienced through this mediation. For psychoanalysis, the body is not just the animal body, nor is it just a construction of signification. Psychoanalysis is neither naturalist nor is it constructivist.²⁷ According to psychoanalytic thought, a constant interaction between the body and the signifier occurs, and any attempt to separate them or minimize the violence of their collision necessarily misses subjectivity itself. Thus there cannot ever be, contra Agamben (and also Foucault), a time in which the body (animal instinct) is separate from the mind (political being). Certainly due to ideological shifts and new political regimes, this ideological assertion of the bare life body can dominate, but the subject and its relation to signification are still present.

It is important to note that this desiring subject does not follow the Cartesian model, with the mind on the one side and the body on the other. Instead, the mind and the body are each divided from themselves: there is no pure access to one or the other, either to the signifier or to the body, which is why both naturalism and constructivism are untenable alternatives for psychoanalysis. The mind doesn’t totally understand its own motivations, and, additionally, the mind doesn’t have direct access to the body. By the same token, the body can’t express itself or know itself outside the mind. This lack of access, as counterintuitive as it sounds, is in fact at the heart of the subject’s potential radicality, of its ability to act, of its ability to create. All this can’t be completely controlled for either good or not good ends.

The fact that the mind doesn’t have complete control over the body is a key aspect to the experience of the subject. In this way, the body isn’t completely subsumed by signification and fully mastered. Psychoanalysis developed as a theory in reaction to the way that the body refuses to be fully signified. The birth of psychoanalysis occurred with Freud’s study of physical symptoms—points on the body that resist the signifier. In other words, patients had bodily functions that marked a refusal to accept the social demand articulated through the signifier. These symptoms could not be explained through medicine. And yet they also could not be explained away as nonexistent.

Freud followed the path of these symptoms through the patients’ analysis to repressed trauma and unconscious desire that motivated these symptoms and had complex relationships to the social and its ideologies. For example, Freud’s patient Dora initially presented a persistent cough, which had no medical explanation and would last for many months. Frequently the cough would also be accompanied with a complete loss of voice. Freud assessed that in her case the cough and aphasia were symptoms, bodily markers that pointed to a web of repressed trauma and desire, which he details throughout his case study. In Freud’s analysis these bodily symptoms indicated past trauma and sexual desire that was continually inflamed by one particular family friend. After analyzing the details of this case, Freud argues, “sexuality does not simply intervene, like a deus ex machina, on one single occasion, at some point in the working of the processes which characterize hysteria, but that it provides the motive power for every single symptom, and for every single manifestation of a symptom.”28 In this case and others like it, the body is telling the truth, but not a factual or evident truth. Instead, it points to an unknown truth, unknown especially to the person who has the symptoms. Following the path of these symptoms led Freud to the unconscious again and again, a path he had begun to forge in his study of dreams. Thus began the path of psychoanalysis as a theory that addressed this incongruent mind/body relationship.

When Jacques Lacan takes up the project of theorizing psychoanalysis, he adds to it a structural dimension, one in which he brings together the insights of linguistics, structural anthropology, and philosophy. Lacan broadens Freud’s thought to focus on the question of subjectivity. Lacan argues that in the case of Dora, Freud shows that the unconscious can deceive, but that even in its deception it reveals its own truth. After explaining this nuance in Freud, Lacan then claims, “In this way, I have distinguished the function of the subject of certainty from the search for the truth.”²⁹ What psychoanalysis reveals, Lacan posits, is that the Cartesian subject’s certainty of its identity is utterly distinct from the subject’s search for truth, an impossible and not wholly articulated truth that arises in the relationship between the psyche and the body. This search for truth is better represented by the structure of one’s desire.

Psychoanalysis theorizes our psyche as motivated by different repeated structures: the structure of desire and the structure of the drive. Ultimately the structure of desire is nestled in the repetitive structure of the drive, but it is the more consciously present structure. Desire has a structure in which we desire an object and go after that object. The pleasure is in the pursuit and the idea of satisfaction that we will have once we acquire the object. Once we do reach the object, however, it doesn’t end desire all together. Instead, our desire turns to a new object. Both Freud and Lacan, point out that this is because what we are really searching for is a lost object; the actual objects just stand in for this original loss. Of course, there is no object that was once lost. In the end, it is loss itself that haunts us and motivates our desire toward an endless string of objects that may cause some pleasure but never end desire all together. Freud’s important discovery here is that we are not only motivated by pleasure or by seeking pleasure.

There is a type of enjoyment that comes out of pain or self-sabotage and that often surprises us. This enjoyment is linked more to the drive and its compulsion to repeat, and it arises when language fails. In fact, it is often an enjoyment of that failure, a kind of pleasure in pain. Jacques Lacan calls this enjoyment or jouissance. Theorists often use the French when referring to Lacan’s concept of jouissance because the distinction between that and pleasure is more precise in French whereas in English pleasure and enjoyment are, in casual speech, quite similar. Psychoanalysis sees the phenomenon of jouissance as a key part of the psyche. Or, rather, it is an expression of our deep investment in our own form of repetition. In this way, it is a type of symptom: a marker of our own unique pathology. In Seminar XVI, Lacans claims, “everything that is repressed in the symbolic reappears in the real, and it is for this reason that enjoyment is absolutely real, because, in the system of the subject, it is nowhere symbolized, nor symbolizable.”30 It is precisely because enjoyment exceeds every signification that it consumes the attention of subjects of the signifier. They derive enjoyment from what the symbolic structure does not provide for them, and it is through sex and violence that this excess becomes visible.

Considering this complexity of the subject, the psychoanalytic point regarding violence begins at the intersection between psyche and body that defines the drive, an intersection that one cannot fully pin down or make understood. It is not scandalous, for example, to point out that there is a kind of pleasure in destruction and in violence. This is evident throughout the history of humanity. The pleasure is a pleasure of self-destruction as well. It is the inexplicable proclivity of subjects to self-sabotage and undermine their own interests, to hurt the ones they love, and to offend those they desire.

Psychoanlaysis can reveal that what torture ultimately signifies is a failure of our ability to find the truth or know what to do. It is employed when we can’t find the truth, whether that means we can’t solve a crime or stop an attack. Torture doesn’t help the problem; it doesn’t lead to the truth. Instead, it redirects libidinal energy and anxiety toward this violent activity. It allows us to avoid the trauma of an attack or potential attack. This ritualized practice entails myriad violent tactics, many of which are laced with a libidinal charge. Freud first theorizes the link between torture and enjoyment in his analysis of the Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer) in 1909. The Rat Man gains his moniker from his obsession with a form of torture described to his superior, an army captain. The Rat Man haltingly describes this torture to Freud. Freud recounts, “‘the criminal was tied up … a pot was turned upside down on his buttocks … some rats were put into it … and they … ’—he had again got up, and was showing every sign of horror and resistance—’ … bored their way in … ’—Into his anus, I helped him out.”31 Though this method of torture horrifies the Rat Man, it also provides enjoyment for him, and the struggle with this enjoyment is the source of his neurosis. Freud adds that he displays “horror at the pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware.”³² Though Freud doesn’t take up the occasion to theorize torture as a practice, his analysis of the Rat Man nonetheless provides the key to understanding this phenomenon. Even as it horrifies both the torturer and the victim, torture is a libidinal irrational practice that can never be a fact-finding tool. It can even provide a shameful enjoyment, which is why many torturers and victims suffer the fate of the Rat Man or even worse. Rather than confront this destructiveness, society employs the torture fantasy as a screen that allows it to continue unabated though disavowed. The fantasy that truth can somehow be accessed through violence gives this violence a false structure or container within which it can be employed. The torture fantasy underwrites acts of torture today and justifies the expression of an otherwise unacceptable violence.

Torture and its representation provide a vehicle for contemporary violence.33 People feel a range of emotions when committing violence, from disgust to anger to equanimity to enjoyment. But torture channels violence into a specific avenue. Torture is an extreme and specialized violence that involves an element of ritual and performance in the way it is structured. But, for all this structure, it doesn’t take away the element of irrationality that is at the heart of violence. Torture aims to harness violence, to force it to be productive. The contemporary torture fantasy offers potential respite from the irrationality of violence, but this irrationality always trumps the fantasmatic structure.

The torture fantasy emerges out of a failure to discover the truth. It promises access to the ultimate truth—the truth of the body. And yet, the practice of torture acts as a fundamental barrier to the truth of the subject. Torture prevents us from finding the truth that it promises because truth is not bodily but inheres in the act of the subject. Slavoj Žižek describes torture as “the extreme expression of treating individuals as Hominini sacer,” a term he borrows from Agamben’s Homo Sacer. This is a biopolitcal way of understanding torture. But then Žižek turns to the psychoanalytic point when he argues, “The tortured subject is no longer a Neighbour, but an object whose pain is neutralised, reduced to a property that has to be dealt with in a rational utilitarian calculus (so much pain is tolerable if it prevents a much greater amount of pain). What disappears here is the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject.”³⁴ In other words, the contemporary fantasy about torture tries to cover over the desiring subject. The infinite abyss of the subject that Žižek refers to here is the infinite nature of the desire and the drive and the lack that marks its pursuits. We might look at torture, then, also as an attempt to destroy the subject. Or to destroy what we can never understand about the subject, its desire. The effects of torture are quite often devastating. The trauma of prolonged and frightening violence and degradation often creates lifelong psychic problems for both the torturer and the victim. But the torture fantasy continues to hold sway in the public imagination today because of the rampart against the trauma of the subject that it provides. We would rather confront the trauma of torture than that of the desiring subject.