Torture and Enjoyment

Torture and Enjoyment names the psychoanalytic intervention into the biopolitical legitimation of torture: specifically, the argument that what structurally drives torture is not the extraction of information — the epistemological rationale offered by the state — but jouissance, the Real-register enjoyment that exceeds and disrupts every instrumental justification. The concept emerges from Neroni's reading of the Abu Ghraib photographs and the post-9/11 cultural and juridical normalization of "enhanced interrogation." On the biopolitical surface, torture is presented as a clean, rational, body-directed technique for accessing truth: the body is treated as a container whose inner contents (information, confession) can be unlocked through physical pressure. This fantasy depends constitutively on the suppression of enjoyment — the torturer must be figured as a neutral technician, not as a subject organized by desire.

The Abu Ghraib photographs shatter this suppression. They document what the biopolitical-ideological apparatus requires to be invisible: the guards' enjoyment, their sexualized pleasure, their investment in the spectacle of suffering. This is the structural logic of fetishistic disavowal in reverse — not the disavowal of an absent truth but the catastrophic exposure of a disavowed presence. The photographs make jouissance visible in a way that the ideological narrative of information-extraction cannot absorb. For Lacan, jouissance is the surplus that escapes symbolization; here it erupts into the visual field as the gaze — an unassimilable stain that reorganizes the entire ideological scene, revealing that what the post-9/11 state is actually producing and distributing is not security but enjoyment of violence.

The concept lives in neroni-hilary-the-subject-of-torture-psychoanalysis-and-biopolitics-in-televisio, at the intersection of biopolitics and psychoanalytic theory. It functions as a direct specification — or, more precisely, a symptomatic puncture — of biopolitics as defined in this corpus: where biopolitics assumes the body and its information as the primary unit of political management, Torture and Enjoyment insists on the desiring subject whose jouissance cannot be sublimated into that frame. The concept extends the corpus's general critique of biopolitics (Neroni, Žižek, McGowan) by identifying a concrete historical site — Abu Ghraib — where the biopolitical fantasy fails and the Lacanian Real of enjoyment becomes visible. It is simultaneously an application of fetishistic disavowal: the state "knows very well" that torture involves pleasure and sexuality, yet the official discourse proceeds as if these elements were absent. The photographs strip away the "as if," producing a traumatic encounter with the disavowed kernel. The gaze is also structurally operative here: the photographs function as that disturbing object which looks back, turning the viewer into a witness of the ideological stain that ideology required to be invisible. Finally, Torture and Enjoyment stands in implicit tension with sublimation — if sublimation is the social-symbolic redirection of drive-energy into legitimated forms, what the Abu Ghraib photographs document is the failure of that redirection, the return of raw drive as visible, photographic fact.

The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and FilmHilary Neroni · 2015 (page unknown)

The photographs, however, told another story. They depicted a range of enjoyment on the part of the guards that did not fit the description of torture as a clean and effective military tactic.

The phrase "a range of enjoyment" is theoretically loaded because it names jouissance — not incidental sadistic excess but a structurally operative force — directly in the empirical domain of military practice, while "clean and effective military tactic" precisely names the biopolitical-ideological frame that torture's legitimation requires; the opposition between the two reveals that the official epistemological rationale (information-extraction) is a cover for what is actually at work at the level of drive.