Drawing upon Edward S. The fictional representation of re-implacing the Iraqi prison, now an incorporated foreign body, calls for an ethical response to the suffering of others and the ontological recognition of the grievability of lives Judith Butler, Frames of War []. The worst is that it all becomes a parody of violence, a parody of the war itself, pornography becoming the ultimate form of the abjection of war which is unable to be simply war, to be simply about killing, and instead turns itself into a grotesque infantile reality-show, in a desperate simulacrum of power.
Scranton Their corporal integrity is violated by perpetrators who are displaying their prowess with signs— postures, grins and thumbs-up gestures—that accentuate the celebration of physical and ontological collapse. Drawing an analogy between war trophy photographs, harem and lynching postcards and the Abu Ghraib images, Mary Ann Tetreault contends that the latter, before entering the public arena,. Tetreault 40 2. Thus, the prism of pornography distorts perception: it is not content, the essence of what took place, which seems to carry weight, but form, the appearance of the event, how it was performed and represented with pathos formulas.
The piece explores the memory and the conscience of Aaron Stojanowski, a former National Guard soldier who shot torture pictures in an Iraqi detention center for insurgents and intelligence targets. Saved on a thumb drive, the photographs brought back from Camp Crawford exist not only because Aaron looked at the suffering of others but also because at some point, he must have looked ahead , or rather, looked forward to recollecting with—and maybe showing to others—the visual souvenirs of the horrorist violence he and some of the guards were repeatedly witnessing and perpetrating.
The anticipated re-visitation of the past with photographs downloaded on a memory stick calls attention not only to the essence of picture-taking, the paradoxical mixture of predation and non-intervention, the possession and objectification of the subject Sontag , 8, 10, 96 but also to the playfulness and the flexibility of digital photography, which allows immediate seeing, exchange and editing.
It remains there as a scene that furnishes toxic points of attachment. What Aaron exactly re-implaces and how his memories of, and insight into, the past misdeeds surface in the unsettling account will be examined in the following discussion.
