ABSTRACT
Torture appears as an image: once, of sovereign power, more recently, of acts performed on people not even defined as prisoners. It served to instruct, now it serves to entertain, as image and spectacle. Law's entertaining of torture both enables the spectacles Seen (and not seen) since Abu Ghraib, and intersects with wider cultural practices, especially in cinema and television. Torture has been a form of entertainment as much as it has been a subject of revulsion. Recent justifications of torture have sought cinematic backing. The US Justice Department torture memos, and the scandals of Abu Ghraib and beyond, link attitudes towards torture with a culture of entertainment and spectacle, up to the point at which the law comes to entertain torture. At stake in both spectacle and actual practices is a form of corporeal sovereignty: the wholeness of the sovereign against the brokenness of any body that would threaten such wholeness. This paper explores these intersections, along with the logic of a sovereign disregard for the body, through readings of the torture memos, First Blood, and the investigations into prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq.
