Camouflage, Travesty and Intimidation (2)

Atrocity and un-burial of the body is not only executed to profane and preclude the deceased from going to a sacred place --wandering forever on earth having to take care of his remains-- or to mark a possessed territory or protest its occupation. Another side of horror, torture and mutilation is the function that fear has a conditioner of attitudes and behavior. The ego is formed in the reaching out of the child to its image in the mirror. “Lacan … proposes to conceive of the ego in the image of the image: far from preceding the image, the ego is outside itself from the start, transported into its image. Thus the double come first” (Borch-Jackobsen 46). “The ego erects itself –raises itself permanently and stably upright) only before “itself”, by anticipating itself…” (Ibid 48). The image in the mirror functions as a model, a paradigm of what he could be. By standing up, leaning his body against the mirror, touching the reflection of his fingers, from potential to realization, the child becomes the possibility of himself. If the image in the mirror is the mutilated body of the fellow warrior, the effect is of fear and petrification. Nobody wants by his actions to become a corpse, the logical conclusion is to remain quiet, inmovil. The expected effect of terror is petrification.
Fear produces paralyses and the drive to stay alive made us create tactics not to be seen. Not to be seen by the enemy is probably the greatest tactical advantage of modern warfare. Among the techniques you are taught in the army, camouflage, as one of the techniques for not to be seen occupies an important place. Camouflage counts as one of the three techniques of mimicry along with travesty and intimidation. Camouflage “is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but, against a mottled background, of becoming mottled” (Lacan 94 concepts…). When the technological superiority and fire-power of the enemy is uncontestable, camouflage is the only way to gain advantage over a situation that otherwise would be out of control –the Vietcong knew this and perfected the techniques of camouflage to a level unheard before. In order to overcome the effects of camouflage, the enemy lures you to show yourself to his gaze. On the other hand, travesty has the “function of a lure … something before which we should suspend judgment before we have properly measured its effects” (Ibid 100). There were many instances of lure in the Angola war, famous among them the “caza-bobos” device –literally meaning “fools-hunter”, a mine disguised under a piece of food, a pair of boots or a picture of a naked woman. The function of travesty is to counteract the effects of camouflage, to lure the camouflaged person to separate from the background and let himself to be seen.
If travesty implies a change of appearance in order to suspend moral judgment and to loosen rational excuses in order to let ourselves to be carried away by the senses, intimidation “involves this over-evaluation that the subject always tries to attain in his appearance” (Ibid 100). In any case we must distinguish between the function that the eye has on intimidation from that of the gaze. Is the image of terror effective because resembles the eye of a powerful menacing creature or because it is looking at you? While spending his youth years at Brittany, Lacan saw a sardine can floating by the sea, “it was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that look a me is situated” (Lacan 95). Lacan is talking about the subject-object relation that occurs at the intersecting point of the coordinates of perception. That which is seen, that which exist for others, is a subject. And it is seen because reflects light in its desire to be seen. There is nothing closer to death that the wanting of not to be seen, the no existence for others. The dismembered body wants to be seen, is strenuously screaming to be seen in order to produce the model of destruction, the mirror or the inverted paradigm of imperfection, it is looking at us in order to makes us want not be like itself, in order to paralyze us.





Andy Warhol, “Self Portrait with Camouflage”, 1986.