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

by Neroni, Hilary (2015)

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Synopsis

Hilary Neroni's The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (2015) argues that the explosion of torture imagery in post-9/11 American media is not merely a reflection of political events but the symptom of a structural ideological formation she calls the "contemporary torture fantasy"—a fantasy whose coherence depends on reducing the human subject to a biopolitical body, a transparent vessel from which truth can be extracted through pain. The book's central intervention is to pit two incompatible theories of the body against each other: the biopolitical body (Foucault, Agamben), which biopower renders knowable, catalogued, and productive, and the psychoanalytic subject (Freud, Lacan), which is irreducibly marked by unconscious desire, lack, and jouissance. Neroni contends that biopolitics, however analytically powerful, fails as a mode of critique because it shares the very premise that grounds torture—the body as the ultimate locus of truth—and that only psychoanalytic theory, with its insistence on the desiring subject, can expose what torture actually produces: not information, but jouissance. Moving through post-9/11 documentary films about Abu Ghraib, torture-porn cinema (Hostel, Saw), the television series 24, the film Zero Dark Thirty, the Bourne franchise, Homeland, and finally Alias, the book constructs an ascending typology of media forms distinguished by whether they sustain or disrupt the torture fantasy. The book introduces two heuristic figures—the "biodetective," who trusts surveillance, biometrics, and torture to access bodily truth, and the "detective of the real," who reads the subject's desire and stages fiction to arrive at truth—as the organizing poles of its media analysis. The argument concludes that Alias, with its privileging of masquerade and fictional aliasing over coercive interrogation, exemplifies the epistemological and political alternative to biopower's torture fantasy: truth has the structure of fiction, and only the desiring subject can navigate that structure.

Distinctive contribution

Neroni's book makes a contribution that is rare in both Lacanian film/media studies and in the critical literature on torture: it situates the debate about post-9/11 state torture squarely within the antagonism between biopolitical and psychoanalytic frameworks, treating that antagonism not as a theoretical dispute but as a materially consequential ideological conflict with real-world stakes (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the "torture memos"). While scholars such as Žižek have touched on the relationship between jouissance and state violence, and while biopolitical theorists (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito) have analyzed biopower's logic of the body, no other work in the secondary Lacanian corpus performs this sustained, systematic confrontation between biopolitics and psychoanalysis specifically through the lens of torture representation in contemporary television and film. The neologism "biodetective" versus "detective of the real" is Neroni's own coinage and functions as a conceptual contribution to media theory: it provides a typology for distinguishing ideologically opposed narrative epistemologies and for reading genre form as the vehicle of ideological content, not merely its container.

The book's second distinctive move is methodological: it treats formal analysis of film and television as genuinely theoretical work rather than as illustration of pre-established concepts. The analysis of 24's ticking clock, for instance, is not merely an observation about narrative urgency but a demonstration that the digital countdown performs a specific ideological operation—converting Heideggerian open temporality into finitude-saturated urgency—that makes torture appear rationally necessary. Similarly, the reading of Alias's "hard cut" to Sydney's alias (the omission of any preparation sequence) is deployed to argue that the show's form enacts the Lacanian proposition that truth has the structure of fiction, rather than simply illustrating it. This combination of Lacanian subject theory, biopolitical critique, and close formal analysis of popular genre television and film is genuinely novel within the corpus and makes the book an important bridge between psychoanalytic theory, critical media studies, and post-9/11 political critique.

Main themes

• The torture fantasy as ideological formation sustained by biopolitical reduction of the subject to a body
• Jouissance as the irreducible Real that exposes the failure of the torture fantasy's promise
• Biopolitics versus psychoanalysis: two incompatible theories of the body and their political consequences
• The biodetective versus the detective of the real as competing epistemological figures in post-9/11 media
• Formal analysis of genre television and film as ideological symptom and potential critique
• Fiction, masquerade, and the Lacanian claim that truth has the structure of fiction
• The desiring subject as the site of resistance to biopower
• The gaze as stain: the return of the Real in the Abu Ghraib photographs
• Race, sexuality, and the obscene underside of the torture fantasy
• The ticking clock as the formal vehicle of biopolitical temporality and justification for torture

Chapter outline

• Introduction: Confronting the Abu Ghraib Photographs
• 1. Torture, Biopower, and the Desiring Subject
• 2. The Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer in Post-9/11 Documentary Films
• 3. Torture Porn and the Desiring Subject in Hostel and Saw
• 4. 24, Jack Bauer, and the Torture Fantasy
• 5. The Biodetective Versus the Detective of the Real in Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland
• 6. Alias and the Fictional Alternative to Torture

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Confronting the Abu Ghraib Photographs

The introduction opens with the Abu Ghraib scandal as both its historical provocation and its theoretical entry point. Neroni observes that the most disturbing element of the photographs is not merely the torture they document but the visible enjoyment—the smiles and thumbs-up gestures—of the torturers. This enjoyment, she argues, is systematically disavowed by the official discourse that frames torture as a clean, utilitarian tool for extracting life-saving intelligence. The photographs destabilize this framing by showing soldiers enjoying themselves rather than pursuing truth, which is precisely the contradiction that the rest of the book sets out to theorize.

Neroni establishes the book's dual theoretical framework here: biopolitics (Foucault, Agamben) provides the account of how contemporary power has come to treat the body as the locus of truth, and psychoanalysis provides the account of why this is a fantasy—why the desiring subject always exceeds the body and therefore renders torture epistemologically as well as ethically bankrupt. The introduction provides a brief history of post-9/11 torture policy, including the Yoo torture memos and their redefinition of torture as only that which causes organ failure or death, situating the ideological stakes of the analysis. It also surveys the proliferation of torture imagery in post-9/11 film and television, arguing that these representations mark a 'nodal point' in the contemporary ideological landscape at which the conflict between biopolitical and psychoanalytic conceptions of the body becomes legible.

Crucially, the introduction stakes a methodological claim: representations of torture are not mere reflections of political reality but active ideological formations. Understanding them requires not just factual analysis but attention to fantasy, jouissance, and the unconscious—the very elements that documentary investigations of Abu Ghraib fail to examine. The book's argument, Neroni announces, will move from those documentaries toward representations that more fully stage the logic of desire, concluding with Alias as an example of media that offers a genuine epistemological and political alternative to the torture fantasy.

Key concepts: Torture Fantasy, Jouissance, Biopolitics, Ideology, Gaze, Fetishistic Disavowal Notable examples: Abu Ghraib photographs; 24 (TV series); Alias (TV series)

1. Torture, Biopower, and the Desiring Subject

Chapter 1 is the book's theoretical foundation. It develops the central opposition between biopolitics and psychoanalysis as competing ontologies of the body, each with different implications for understanding torture. Neroni traces Foucault's genealogy of power from sovereign power (which uses public torture as spectacle) through disciplinary power (in which punishment internalizes and becomes invisible) to biopower (in which the body is made productive, monitored, and controlled). Under biopower, torture paradoxically returns as a technique consistent with the regime's logic: if the body is the locus of truth and productive life, then the body can also be coerced into yielding that truth. The chapter critiques Foucault's famous suggestion at the end of The History of Sexuality vol. 1 that bodies and pleasure might resist biopower, arguing that this solution fails because it remains entirely within the logic of the body and cannot account for the subject of desire.

The chapter then turns to Agamben's concept of 'bare life' (homo sacer) and its connection to the contemporary state of exception, noting that Agamben offers the most incisive account of how biopower can strip subjects of political rights and reduce them to bare life. Neroni acknowledges the contribution of Agamben's framework—particularly its identification of torture's 'zone of exception'—but argues that Agamben, like Foucault, ultimately lacks the resources to theorize resistance because he too remains at the level of the body and rejects the subject. She notes, however, that Agamben's concept of 'gesture' points tentatively toward a psychoanalytic position.

The chapter's positive argument introduces the psychoanalytic subject as the genuine alternative. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, Neroni argues that the subject is constituted through the collision of body and signifier, producing unconscious desire that is irreducible to biological impulse or social construction. The subject's relationship to its body is always mediated by the signifier and therefore unpredictable—a subject can enjoy its suffering, undermine its bodily health, and resist the utilitarian calculus that torture assumes. This is why torture cannot extract truth from the subject: truth, for psychoanalysis, is not lodged in the body but inheres in the act of the desiring subject. The chapter concludes by recasting biopower as ideology (in the Žižekian, not the Althusserian sense): it does not describe the totality of the social structure but operates as a dominant ideological formation that requires fantasy to fill in its gaps, and it is precisely in those gaps that the desiring subject appears.

Key concepts: Biopolitics, Subject, Desire, Ideology, Jouissance, Interpellation, Symbolic Order, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Agamben, Homo Sacer; Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

2. The Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer in Post-9/11 Documentary Films

Chapter 2 performs close analyses of three post-9/11 documentary films about Abu Ghraib: Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (Rory Kennedy), Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney), and Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris). Neroni argues that while these films represent important interventions against the Bush administration's torture policy, all three fail to confront the most scandalous element of the photographs they examine: the torturers' visible enjoyment. The documentaries operate at the level of the symbolic—marshalling facts, chain-of-command evidence, psychological explanations of obedience—while systematically avoiding the question of jouissance.

Neroni deploys the Lacanian concept of the gaze as 'stain' to theorize the smiling faces in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The smiles function as what she calls a return of the Real within the image—a point of symbolic failure that disrupts the ideological fiction of torture as clean military tactic. The documentaries' formal choices (carefully lit seated interviews, blurred backgrounds, focus on testimony) formally enact the same disavowal: they direct attention away from the enjoying subject and toward the symbolic order of orders, policies, and facts. The films thus inadvertently reproduce the very ideological operation they seek to critique, remaining within 'the logic that the torturers themselves employ'—the logic of finding a hidden truth by exposing facts.

The chapter also draws on Yannis Stavrakakis's account of the relationship between symbolic fiction, fantasy, and jouissance to argue that the 'quilting point' of torture is not the chain of command but the soldiers' imagination (fantasy), which the documentaries explicitly decline to investigate. The Abu Ghraib photographs' sexual dimension—including the interleaving of abuse photos with pornographic images of MPs—is read, following Susan Sontag and Dora Apel, as evidence of a racist fantasy structure in which the sexualized torture of Arab bodies connects the Abu Ghraib photographs to the history of American lynching photography. Exposing the facts of torture, Neroni concludes, will never dismantle the torture fantasy; one must instead force the enjoyment—the jouissance—'into the light of day, where it can reveal how it shapes subjectivity.'

Key concepts: Jouissance, Fantasy, Gaze, Ideology, Real, Fetishistic Disavowal, The big Other Notable examples: Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (Kennedy); Taxi to the Dark Side (Gibney); Standard Operating Procedure (Morris); Abu Ghraib photographs; Milgram experiment

3. Torture Porn and the Desiring Subject in Hostel and Saw

Chapter 3 argues that the 'torture porn' genre—dismissed by critics as conservative or simply exploitative—actually stages the psychoanalytic logic of torture more honestly than any other contemporary media form, precisely because it places the torturer's enjoyment at the center of its narrative rather than treating it as a problem to be explained away. The chapter reads Hostel and Saw not as celebrations of violence but as symptomatic texts that expose the libidinal underside of the biopolitical torture fantasy.

In Hostel, the torture factory is analyzed as a sexualized zone of exception—a commodified space in which the desire to touch the 'essence of life' (the subject's unconscious) is explicitly the torturer's stated motive. Neroni reads the failed doctor's speech about wanting to hold 'the very essence of life' in his hands as an articulation of the sadist's logic: the torturer becomes an instrument that provokes the subjectivity of the victim, seeking a glimpse of the unconscious. The chapter draws on Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality to underscore the inextricable link between sex and violence, arguing that Hostel foregrounds this link rather than concealing it, as the biopolitical torture fantasy does.

The Saw films are analyzed as an explicit dramatization and refutation of the biopolitical logic of torture. Jigsaw Kramer's project—torturing victims so that they will confront death and thereby learn to appreciate life—is, Neroni argues, a perfect cinematic expression of Foucault's concept of 'making live': a biopolitical intervention that uses the body as the vehicle for enlightenment. But the films systematically give the lie to this premise. Victims do not escape, do not achieve enlightenment, do not become more alive; they die. The torture devices penetrate ever deeper into the body across the seven films, and yet no truth emerges. This progressive failure demonstrates that the body is not equivalent to the subject and that the subject always exceeds the body. The 'game' of torture has no winner because enjoyment lies in playing it, not in winning it—which is to say, the drive (not desire) is what sustains the torture scenario.

Neroni is careful to distinguish torture porn from 24: where 24 suppresses the torturer's enjoyment to sustain the biopolitical fantasy, torture porn foregrounds it and in doing so inadvertently exposes what biopower must repress. Both genres are limited—torture porn does not offer a positive alternative—but its very excess makes it a more honest symptom of the torture fantasy's underlying logic.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Fantasy, Drive, Desire, Sadism, Objet petit a, Biopolitics, Surplus-jouissance Notable examples: Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005); Hostel: Part II (Eli Roth, 2007); Saw (film series); Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

4. 24, Jack Bauer, and the Torture Fantasy

Chapter 4 offers a sustained ideological analysis of 24 as the paradigmatic media expression of the contemporary torture fantasy. Neroni argues that the show's famous formal innovation—the real-time, twenty-four-hour narrative structure organized around the digital ticking clock—is not merely a stylistic device but the ideological vehicle through which the justification for torture is naturalized. The clock converts time from an open Heideggerian horizon of possibilities into a finitude-saturated urgency in which every moment is a state of emergency and the suspension of rights appears not just acceptable but rationally required. The formal analysis demonstrates that the ticking bomb scenario is not a premise the show adopts but a logic it produces through its very form: 'torture scenes make sense only through the importance of the ticking clock.'

The chapter tracks how 24 systematically strips all its characters—Arab villains, heroic agents, even Jack Bauer himself—of desiring subjectivity. Arabs in the show are depicted as either asexual villains or asexual patriots, never as desiring subjects; this erasure of Arab sexuality is read against the Abu Ghraib photographs' contrary evidence of a violently sexualized fantasy. Jack Bauer is similarly desexualized: he is a 'calculating body focused on other bodies,' a utilitarian instrument of biopower whose heroism consists precisely in his willingness to reduce torture to a technical procedure. The absence of the unconscious—of any character who does not know exactly what they want and why they want it—is what makes the torture fantasy on 24 internally consistent and ideologically effective.

Neroni concludes the chapter by noting the documented real-world consequences of 24's torture fantasy: U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan reportedly visited the show's producers to ask them to stop depicting torture as effective, because soldiers in the field were citing the show as a model. The show's narrative, she observes, ultimately literalizes biopower's logic in its final season by reducing all important human knowledge to information that can be stored on a SIM card—'the biopolitical body par excellence' and simultaneously 'the impossible dream of biopower,' since what can never be transcribed onto the SIM card remains the desiring subject.

Key concepts: Torture Fantasy, Ideology, Fantasy, Biopolitics, Jouissance, Fetishistic Disavowal, Point de capiton, Anxiety Notable examples: 24 (TV series); Heidegger, Being and Time; Jack Bauer character analysis; Ticking bomb scenario

5. The Biodetective Versus the Detective of the Real in Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland

Chapter 5 introduces the book's central typological distinction: the 'biodetective' versus the 'detective of the real.' The biodetective is the figure who trusts in surveillance, biometrics, DNA evidence, and torture to access truth lodged in the body—a figure whose epistemology corresponds to the biopolitical reduction of truth to the symbolic order. The detective of the real, by contrast, approaches truth through the subject's desire, reading desire's traces and staging fictions that provoke the emergence of the Real within the symbolic. This typology, Neroni argues, organizes the ideological differences among post-9/11 security narratives and allows for a precise mapping of where particular texts stand in relation to the torture fantasy.

Zero Dark Thirty is analyzed as a paradigmatic biodetective film. Maya, the protagonist, is driven (in the sense of being directed toward a specific object—bin Laden—rather than circling the objectless repetition of the drive) and operates as the embodiment of the biopolitical conviction that torture and surveillance will yield truth. Neroni reads Bigelow's formal choices—the night-vision goggles sequence, the documentary-style handheld camera, the opening juxtaposition of 9/11 emergency recordings with the first torture scene—as the cinematic realization of the biodetective's epistemology: the camera's desire for transparency and authenticity enacts the fantasy that reality is directly accessible through the right technology. Bigelow's own claim to have 'deconstructed' torture is read as itself symptomatic: the film's form reproduces the biopolitical trap even as its director disavows it.

The Bourne films are briefly analyzed as a transitional case—a figure caught between the biodetective and the detective of the real, since Bourne's body is the product of biopower's surveillance apparatus yet his amnesia forces him to read his own desire.

Homeland is analyzed as a more ambivalent and ultimately more complex case. Carrie Mathison oscillates between biodetective and detective of the real, and this oscillation is mapped onto her bipolar disorder—a structural metaphor for the show's own ambivalence about how to access truth. When Carrie operates as detective of the real, staging fictions and reading desire (including her own desire for Brody), she arrives at truths that no biometric evidence could yield. But Homeland's limitation, Neroni argues, is that Carrie cannot stage a fiction and treat it as a fiction; she is consumed by it, living it rather than using it. This is the final step that the detective of the real must take—recognizing the fiction as fiction—and it is precisely this step that Alias achieves.

Key concepts: Biodetective, Detective of the Real, Biopolitics, Desire, Drive, Gaze, Scopic Drive, Trauma, Fantasy Notable examples: Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012); Homeland (TV series); Bourne film series; Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2008)

6. Alias and the Fictional Alternative to Torture

Chapter 6, the book's conclusion, presents Alias (2001–2006) as the most fully realized cinematic/televisual alternative to the contemporary torture fantasy. Unlike 24, which uses torture as its privileged vehicle for truth, Alias centers its epistemology on fiction: the aliases that Sydney Bristow adopts are not merely tactical cover stories but the structural principle of the series' approach to truth. Torture rarely works in Alias; when Marshall is tortured in season 2, he produces deliberately false information that sends his captors in the wrong direction. Truth, the show argues, can only emerge through the staging of the fiction of desire.

Neroni grounds this argument in Lacan's distinction between truth and the Real (Seminar XXIII): truth is not identical to the Real (which does not please, necessarily, because it is traumatic and unsatisfying) but is what emerges when the distortion that the Real creates within the symbolic becomes legible. A psychoanalytic approach to truth requires taking into account the symbolic, the imaginary, and the Real together—precisely what the biopolitical torturer's faith in the purely symbolic body cannot do. The 'good detective,' Neroni argues, is one who reads symbolic facts, imaginary identifications, and the subject's desire in concert, and this is what Sydney does through her aliases.

The chapter develops a sustained analysis of femininity-as-masquerade in Alias, contrasting the show's formal treatment of Sydney's transformations with the conventional 'makeover' narrative of films like Pretty Woman. In the conventional depiction, the woman's femininity is shown being constructed (dress, makeup, deportment) but is ultimately presented as the revelation of her true self; the construction is in service of an authentic identity. Alias, by contrast, uses a 'hard cut' directly to Sydney already in her alias—the preparation is never shown—which Neroni reads as a formal enactment of the Lacanian claim (developed through Joan Copjec's reading of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills) that there is no authentic identity behind the masquerade. The alias has no outside; 'womanliness is always but masquerade.' By positioning Sydney as the partial object rather than the whole authentic woman, Alias enables her to trap the desire of the other—not by revealing a truth lodged in a body, but by staging a fantasy scenario that provokes the emergence of the other's desire, where truth actually resides.

The chapter concludes with a discussion of the show's treatment of 'the mother doesn't exist' (the Lacanian formula for the non-existence of the big Other), developing the argument that Sydney's unusual capacity as a detective of the real stems from her understanding that there is no authentic Other behind appearances—no mother, no complete symbolic Other, no body that houses the final truth. This structural absence of the big Other is what frees Sydney from the biopolitical fantasy and allows her to operate epistemologically in the terrain of desire rather than the terrain of bodies. Alias, Neroni concludes, demonstrates that fiction is not an obstacle to truth but its necessary condition—a position that is both a critique of the contemporary torture fantasy and an implicit political program for rethinking how knowledge, security, and subjectivity are related.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Masquerade, Truth, Real, The big Other, Desire, Objet petit a, Detective of the Real, Symbolic Order, Scopic Drive Notable examples: Alias (TV series, 2001-2006); Zero Dark Thirty; Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills; Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990); Copjec, Joan, Imagine There's No Woman; Seminar XXIII

Main interlocutors

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
• Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended
• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
• Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception
• Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy
• Slavoj Žižek
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII
• Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
• Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
• Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman
• Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
• Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Heidegger, Being and Time
• Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left
• Jacques-Alain Miller
• Susan Sontag
• Laura Mulvey

Position in the corpus

Neroni's book occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of Lacanian film/media studies, biopolitical theory, and post-9/11 political critique. Its nearest neighbors in the Lacanian media studies corpus are Todd McGowan's The Real Gaze and The Impossible David Lynch (which model the kind of formal-psychoanalytic analysis Neroni performs), Joan Copjec's Read My Desire (whose account of the gaze and femininity-as-masquerade is directly deployed in chapter 6), and Slavoj Žižek's work on ideology, fantasy, and jouissance (which underpins much of Neroni's theoretical architecture). It should be read after acquiring familiarity with Lacan's registers (RSI), the concept of objet petit a, the logic of fantasy, and the basics of Foucauldian biopolitics. Readers coming from the biopolitical tradition (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito) will find the book a vigorous and substantive critique of that tradition's theoretical limitations, particularly its inability to theorize the desiring subject as a site of resistance.\n\nWithin the post-9/11 cultural studies literature, Neroni's book diverges sharply from accounts that analyze torture representations primarily through the lens of ideology critique, trauma theory, or feminist film theory without psychoanalytic depth. It should be read alongside or after Neroni's earlier The Violent Woman for its treatment of gender and subjectivity in film, and it pairs productively with Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies and Living in the End Times for the theoretical framework on ideology and jouissance. For readers interested specifically in biopolitics, the book serves as a bridge to more straightforwardly Lacanian treatments of political theory such as Copjec's Imagine There's No Woman and Stavrakakis's The Lacanian Left. It is essential reading for anyone working on psychoanalysis and political violence, torture as cultural spectacle, or the ideological dimensions of the post-9/11 security state in media.

Canonical concepts deployed

• Fantasy
• Jouissance
• Ideology
• Subject
• Desire
• Real
• Biopolitics
• Gaze
• Unconscious
• Torture Fantasy
• Biodetective
• Detective of the Real
• Fetishistic Disavowal
• Objet petit a
• Symbolic Order
• The big Other
• Signifier
• Splitting of the Subject
• Drive
• Interpellation