Hilary Neroni

Neroni brings Lacanian film theory to bear on the representation of torture, exposing how cinematic fantasy structures the ideological normalization of state violence.

Profile

Hilary Neroni operates at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalysis, film theory, and biopolitical critique. Her project is not simply to apply Lacan to cinema, but to use the apparatus of Lacanian theory—fantasy, the gaze, jouissance, the subject—as diagnostic tools for reading how moving images produce and manage political consent. Where much Lacanian film theory inherits the apparatus-theory tradition (Metz, Baudry) and then revises it through Lacan's account of the gaze, Neroni pushes that revision into explicitly political terrain: the question is not only how cinema sutures the subject into ideology, but how it marshals enjoyment in the service of sovereign violence and biopolitical control.

In The Subject of Torture, Neroni focuses specifically on the post-9/11 cultural moment in which torture—historically a taboo—became normalized, even celebrated, across American popular culture (television procedurals, Hollywood films, news media). Her argument is that cinematic and televisual representations of torture do not merely reflect a pre-existing political will to torture; they actively constitute the fantasmatic frame through which the subject comes to identify with the torturer, displacing the abjection of the tortured body. This is a Lacanian claim about the structure of fantasy as the support of ideological reality: torture-spectacle allows the viewer to occupy a position of mastery that disavows the traumatic real of state violence. The book thus connects Lacan's theory of the gaze and jouissance to Agamben's biopolitics, reading the tortured body as the figure of bare life upon which sovereign power inscribes itself—and popular culture as the screen that renders this inscription pleasurable rather than horrifying.

Intellectual lineage

Neroni reads Lacan through the North American film-theory tradition established by Joan Copjec, and is productively situated alongside Todd McGowan, with whom she has collaborated editorially. She engages Foucault and Agamben as the biopolitical coordinates that give her Lacanian analysis its political edge, and her work implicitly responds to Žižek's account of ideology and fantasy while applying that framework to a more concentrated domain (state torture, the post-9/11 security apparatus). Her institutional home at Vermont places her within a broader conjuncture of politically committed Lacanian scholarship in the American academy.

Distinctive contribution

Neroni's distinctive contribution is the argument that cinematic representations of torture function as a fantasy apparatus that recruits spectatorial jouissance in support of sovereign exceptionalism. Rather than simply condemning torture-entertainment as ideologically complicit, she specifies the psychoanalytic mechanism: the torturer-as-protagonist positions the viewer in a fantasmatic relation to mastery that disavows the real of bodily suffering, converting biopolitical violence into a site of imaginary identification and enjoyment. This reframes both the Lacanian account of the gaze (the spectator does not simply look; they enjoy from a position structured by the other's abjection) and the Agambenian account of bare life (the tortured body is not merely a political-legal category but a libidinal object around which cinematic fantasy is organized). No other corpus author performs precisely this synthesis.

Works in the corpus (titles)

• The Subject of Torture

Commentary on works in the corpus

The Subject of Torture (the single corpus entry) is Neroni's most politically focused work and demonstrates her method at its sharpest. It is neither an introduction to Lacan nor a survey of torture film; it presupposes familiarity with Lacanian concepts (the gaze, fantasy, the real, jouissance) and with the post-9/11 political context. The book's theoretical architecture combines Lacan with Agamben's state-of-exception framework, making it demanding for readers who know only one tradition. For those already conversant with Žižek-style ideological critique via Lacan, however, The Subject of Torture offers a distinct contribution: it grounds its claims in close, sustained readings of specific films and television episodes rather than using cultural texts as mere illustrations of theoretical theses. The book is best approached after readers have some prior exposure to Lacanian film theory—ideally Joan Copjec on the gaze or Todd McGowan's work on cinema and fantasy—so that Neroni's specific interventions are legible against that backdrop.

Where to start

Begin with The Subject of Torture. Read the introduction carefully, as it explicitly lays out the double theoretical framework—Lacanian gaze/fantasy theory plus Agambenian biopolitics—before the film analyses begin. Readers who find the Lacanian apparatus unfamiliar should first consult Todd McGowan's work on cinema and the real, which shares Neroni's orientation and provides a gentler on-ramp.

Frequent engagements

Todd McGowan, Joan Copjec, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault