Abu Ghraib: friends prefer not to know
example · geopolitics: Abu Ghraib ·
retold in 3 talks
After Abu Ghraib, some American acquaintances told Žižek: 'We know this goes on, but why make it public? Do it discreetly, we don't want to know.' This illustrates the subject's preference for voluntary ignorance of state violence.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“torture, do whatever you want, just do it discreetly. Do it behind the closed door, we don't want to know about it.”
“it wasn't oh my god horrors are happening… it was more they should do it but discreetly we don't want to know about it”
“The series of photos showing Iraqi prisoners tortured and humiliated”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
fetishist disavowal
×1
subject supposed to believe
×1
reactive violence
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Michelle Pfeiffer1Daniel Day-Lewis1Audrey Hepburn1Shirley MacLaine1Gerhard Richter1William Wyler1Anatoly Lunacharsky1Gregory Bateson1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
After Abu Ghraib, some American acquaintances told Žižek: 'We know this goes on, but why make it public? Do it discreetly, we don't want to know.' This illustrates the subject's preference for voluntary ignorance of state violence., illustrating ideology,disavowal,freedom of the press,Assange
Žižek cites a leftist analysis of the Abu Ghraib scandal: the public outrage was not 'horrors are happening in our name' but 'they should do it discreetly, we don't want to know.' This is his example of operative ideological hypocrisy., illustrating displaced belief,ideology,systemic violence
4:31 Vintage Slavoj Zizek Predicts the Future Need for the Phantasmic Guise #web3 #reality #crypto2004-06-08 · 1:56:12
American soldiers staged humiliating photos of Iraqi prisoners, including themselves, revealing an 'obscene underside' of American culture and a desire for an impossible gaze., illustrating Spectator’s Malevolent Neutrality,dirty obscene background,fantasmatic, non-existent, impossible gaze