The Possibility of the Political Act for Political Prisoners in Iran (A Zizekian Analysis of Torture from the Shah to the Islamic Republic)

Abstract

Although exercising torture has been a commonality between the previous regime in Iran (a secular government headed by the Shah) and the Islamic Republic, based upon Zizek’s reading of the discourses of the master and university we can detect a qualitative difference in the two regimes’ approach to torture. During the Shah, torture complemented the Shah’s gesture of the symbolic father of the nation, thereby desexualized even in cases where torture involved prisoners’ sex organs, whereas in the Islamic republic era, torture complements conservative hardliner’s lesson that Islamic teachings are not dictated by them but, rather, are neutral knowledge about innate inclinations of human beings. In the conservative hardliner’s version, western culture, apart from its science and technology, leads people astray as it propagates animality in human beings, especially when it comes to sexuality. Our efforts to learn the lesson are doomed to failure, yet because the unconscious remains unarticulated this failure is embodied including in the figure of the Islamic Republic’s interrogator who knows something about us, especially about our sexuality, which we ourselves can never know; hence torturing political prisoners is sexualized in the Islamic Republic even in cases where it does not involve physically or verbally prisoners’ sex organs. In this situation, a political act involves a hyper-agreement with the interrogator: we wouldn’t mind making confessions to anything attributed to us by the interrogator if he is included in the confessions as the one who told us to do it.