by JEAN-CLAUDE PAYE and TULAY UMAY
hen watching the broadcast images of the lynching of Mouammar Gaddafi, our political leaders manifested a strange pleasure. “Strange Fruit” [1], these images remind us of the images of the hanging of Saddam Hussein organized on the day of the Eid al-Adha, the feast of the sacrifice.
These two instances inscribe us into a religious structure which, through the substitution of the human sacrifice to the one of the ram [2], restores the primitive image of the Mother goddess. It turns the Old Testament upside down. Such book-free religion is reduced to a fetish [3]. It has neither Other, nor Law. It merely bids public opinion to enjoy the spectacle of death.
Through images, the will to power becomes unlimited. Transgression is no longer bounded as in the sacrificial rite, neither in space, nor in time, it is everywhere. It echoes the continuous violation of the order of Law that can be observed since the 9/11 attacks.
Confinement within tragedy
The way Gaddafi’s body was treated is a token of the tragedy the Libyan people went through. The treatment of his remains was the object of a double exception, a double violation of the symbolic order that rules society. Instead of being buried on the same day as required by Muslim rites, his corpse was displayed for four days in a cold room, before being buried in a secret location in spite of his wife’s request to the UN that she may retrieve the body.
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