This September, The Pervert’s Guide to Utopia premiered at the Venice Film Festival, presenting the final installment in Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and director Sophie Fiennes’s trilogy of feature-length films of psychoanalytic cinema criticism. Like its predecessors, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the film follows the idiosyncratic pathways of Žižek’s thought through a series of monologues intercut with archival footage.
On the occasion of the film’s premiere, revisit Žižek’s “Biopolitics: Between Abu Ghraib and Terri Schiavo,” an essay on human rights, faith, and torture published in Artforum’s December 2005 issue. Beginning with the United States’ “extraordinary rendition” program of CIA black-site torture prisons in the early 2000s, Žižek questions how notions of rights, ethics, and personal subjectivity collapsed during George W. Bush’s “war on terror” in the face of a “phantasmic” outside threat. Žižek ties the phenomena of justified torture and revocations of legal personhood from suspected “terrorists” and immigrants to a “new religious fundamentalism” in the US, bringing up the case of Schiavo—a woman in a persistent vegetative state whom conservative and Christian activists (and President Bush) campaigned to keep alive on the basis of human rights—as the “opposite side of the same coin.” In both cases, dignity, justice, and freedom are shown to be the unstable constructions of state morality, which applies or withholds rights selectively in accordance with its immediate political aims.
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Read “Biopolitics: Between Abu Ghraib and Terri Schiavo” in Artforum’s December 2005 issue.
And explore more essays on art and politics from Artforum‘s archive. . .
September 2020: Staking Claim
December 2018: Eclipse of the Sun
February 2017: κρίσις Management
April 2003: Sylvère Lotringer: My ’80s
November 1995: Critical Reflections: Paul Virilio