ABSTRACT
In a marvelous passage that performs quick but vast remembrance and nuanced interrogation of Western history's violent mythos, J. Glenn Gray situates the erotic mystery of war at the level of the image and the enigma of "likeness," a single notion that maintains tensions between similarity and difference. Patriotism is a peculiar habit or way of filling the void, materializing Nothingness, and rendering judgment. American democratic patriotism during the Second World War was organized around a heinous kernel of idiotic enjoyment which nevertheless remained an open secret of the scopic field, structuring judgment of the other as radically Other through a variety of visual techniques and caricatures. In 1943, the Japanese skulls functioned as what Zizek would term "sublime objects of ideology"—objects whose materiality, shape, and reality are radically sublimated. The sublimation of Japanese skulls does not desexualize them, or render them as castrated/destroyed enemies, as passive/perverse viewings of both photos, recommended by their captions, would suggest.
