Is That Legal?

"On seeing the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, many critics, art historians and others experienced the disorientation of the uncanny because they saw in the hierarchic disposition of bodies, the mock-erotic scenarios, and the expressions of triumphant glee on the faces of the captors, something that was disturbing and intensely familiar, but could not be named or fully called to consciousness. What they recognized but quickly forgot -- in a process akin to what Freud in an earlier text called 'parapraxis' -- is in fact a key element of the classical tradition in art that extends back more than 2,500 years, at least to the age of Athens. It is an element seen in the equipoise of the animals led to slaughter on the Pan-Athenaic frieze; in the cruelty of the Battle of Gods and Giants on the Pergamon Altar; in the anti-Islamic zeal of a fresco by Raphael in the Vatican Palace; in the morbid eroticism of a marble slave (and the crucified Hamen painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling) by Michelangelo; and in the exquisite anguish of a colossal, sculpted saint by Bernini in St Peter's Basilica. And it thrives today -- often in odd and etiolated form -- in American popular media. That feature of the Western classical tradition is specifically the motif of tortured people and tormented animals who appear to sanction their own abuse..."