This paper reads the Abu Ghraib prison photos and Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ with the psychoanalytic concept of perversion. Special attention is paid to the optical dynamics of vision and gaze to disclose the political unconscious embedded in the textual structure beyond the shocking surface of torture and perverse acts. After a short analysis of the "most beautiful ass" contest scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini's film, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, I review the psychoanalytic theories of perversion from Sigmund Freud through Jacques Lacan to a recent film theorist, Joan Copjec. The concept of perversion as disavowal of the lack in the Other with its visual and political implications, I argue, reveals the structural affinity between the two strikingly heterogeneous and seemingly unrelated events, Abu Ghraib and Passion. Abu Ghraib prison photos contain the anonymous spectral gaze as the superegoic Other that witnesses and endorses the perverse acts of torture, and Passion bears the visual misrecognition that mistakes a mediated perception for objective representation and, in so doing, equates the camera's subjective, pathological perspective with God's transcendental vision. My paper, then, suggests that Abu Ghraib is a necessary and inevitable symptom that embodies the undeniable truth of the empire, and that Passion harbors visual violence and perverse cruelty as the political unconscious of Abu Ghraib.
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