Free Flesh: The Matrix, the War on Iraq and the Torture of Democracy

Abstract

Something is always lost to the sovereign, democratic, liberal or otherwise. This is the very function of law, but in contemporary times of (anti) terror, when obedience demands obeisance and protection from terror includes torture, it is becoming increasingly difficult in the United States, Australia and Britain to imagine a `fair and free contract' with the sovereign. What is to be done? Purchasing freedom as cars, perfume and fries performs one evasion of the violence of the sovereign decision. The collapse of signification into the product is an effective gesture to enable a liberal democratic subject to imagine it is obtaining or ingesting freedom in the cloth or, as a food group. Similarly, offering freedom as a gift to the Middle East enacts a denial or even foreclosure that speaks of freedom as if it can be administered militarily. This article discusses the mirroring of the imagery in the Wachowski brothers' Matrix Trilogy with contemporary political rhetoric in the West on the War on Iraq and on the use of torture. The momentous copulating of Trinity and Neo in Matrix Reloaded, I argue, offers both the characters and cinemagoers the promise of the birth of freedom from the white loins of the characters. This birth mirrors the promise of a birth of freedom qua capitalist democracy from the loins of the White House and further renders freedom a product or gift which can be quantified and possessed, obscuring the loss that the subject endures before the contemporary democratic sovereign. Law, Culture and the Humanities 2007; 3: 416—434