Tuesday, January 10, 2006
(10:15 PM) | Anonymous:
Zizek on Torture
Today's Guardian has a comment piece by Zizek on the subject of torture, with particular reference to the fourth season of 24.Zizek has asserted, contra Levinas, that "the face is the ultimate ethical trap"; that justice is without pity. It's interesting in this connection that he dwells on the torture of their own relatives by CTU members as an example of the "suspension of ordinary moral concerns" encouraged by 24's breathless urgency. The CTU are pitiless even with regard to their own self-preservation: "the agents treat themselves as expendable, ready to put their lives at stake if this will help to prevent an attack". Theirs is an impersonal - indeed, radically depersonalised - agency: they function collectively as a defence mechanism, preserving the putative victims of terrorist violence from imminent harm.
Now, Zizek makes the familiar point that 24's ideological posture consists in presenting this depersonalised agency as the work of "warm human beings", who suffer "emotional dilemmas" in the performance of their duties. If their emotions were to obstruct them in their duties - if they were to refuse to torture their own offspring, say - then the terrorists would win.
But if "the face is the ultimate ethical trap", then the problem is not that the agents do not "listen to their feelings", but that the diegetic constraints of 24 enable them to maintain the fiction that their feelings are (and remain, even when they are torturing their own children) intrinsically good, civilised and noble. If only the stakes were not so high, they would of course behave in the most decent way imaginable! Love and pity would, in normal circumstances, be their primary motivations...
Would agents of the pitiless justice Zizek advocates suffer the same qualms, and measure their own goodness by the extent of their suffering? If not, then what would their relationship be to the necessary violence of justice? Primarily, it would be to surrender the alibi of necessity, to take responsibility for the violence they enacted, without keeping back an inviolate, ever-innocent part of themselves that looked on in little-girlish* horror while they did "what must be done". In other words, do not Jack Bauer and his colleagues shirk the full implications of Bonhoeffer's "venture of responsible action", by maintaining the fiction of a conscience that is not committed to, or in any way modified by, the atrocious acts of torture and mayhem they carry out?
* Not that the little girl I live with has ever been known to shirk violence when the situation demanded it.
