9/11, Iraq, Abu Ghraib: Time, death and empathy

Abstract

The paper provides a reading of the repressed television footage of suicide on 9/11, the disappearance of the Iraqi body in media coverage of the Gulf War and its return in the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. The purpose of this article is twofold: to stage, or at least begin to imagine, an intersubjective relationship between subjects shaped by empathy, rather than only distance and indifference; and, to begin to move beyond the ocularcentrism that characterises a great deal of the analysis of these mediascapes. It is argued that because this ocularcentrism privileges a hierarchical subject/object relation at the expense of an intersubjective one, and because its concentration on vision excludes the other senses which influence how we experience, and relate to, the world, it is necessary to think beyond it. To this end, the image's agency, its synesthetic potential, is explored and a consideration is made of how the viewer might engage in a form of empathetic identification in the face of the duplicitous encounter with death which television structures in these scenes. The paper is written in dialogue with others who have asked: How might scenes of violence and death “move” us? It opens up questions around how this material simultaneously reveals and conceals death, and what affects these operations might yield. The writer suggests that these images have the potential to engender an affective economy of empathy.