The Pure Subject of Torture: Or, Lynndie England Does Not Exist

Abstract

The scenes of torture in Abu Ghraib both shocked and excited the western world. While several of the perpetrators in the photos were charged and imprisoned for the acts, it was Lynndie England — the woman holding the leash with a naked man attached — who attracted the most vitriol and condemnation from the public. England received a harsher sentence than most and has, since here release, received death threats and hate mail from around the world. This article considers the scene of torture, as a psychoanalytic scene in which there are the three figures: that of the torturer (as sovereign representative), the tortured and the one looking on. These three figures are discussed as similar to those in the imagination of a ‘child being beaten’ Freud’s patients. But England represents not only a fourth but an ambiguously gendered fourth in the scene. Her role, I explain, is enigmatic, and in a Lacanian idiom, not quite that of Woman.