This essay continues where “On Violence and Memory: Nietzsche, Forgetting, and War,” left off, which laid some of the theoretical groundwork — and opened up the various avenues — that will be explored by this project.
There is a particular role that torture plays within the folds of the relationship between violence, on the one hand, and the social relations that it either reformulates or destroys, on the other. One such social relation is that of each individual to their own sense of self, in particular their memory, and that will be the focus of this essay. From a cursory and strategic perspective, it is not at all obvious why torture happens in war at all. Perhaps occasional torture, amongst other acts of brutality, can be explained on the basis of a hatred for one’s enemies, but torture is an institutionalized activity within war zones; it installs itself, often with a permanence that outlives the official confines of the conflict in space or time.
This essay is not an extensive description of torture either historically or contemporarily. A resource that was indispensable in this regard is Ezat Mossalanejed’s Torture in the Age of Fear. The report Welcome to Hell by B’Tselem also discusses the particular network of prisons that function as torture centres for Palestinians by the state of Israel in Occupied Palestine.
One of the most famous institutions of torture is Abu Ghraib, which is known about because of photos taken by the torturers themselves. This latter fact is significant, and will be explored more thoroughly in a subsequent section of this project. Immediately, however, these photos raise the question of the evident visibility of the crimes that torture produces. Without minimizing the extraordinary effort by individuals who have sought to make these crimes known to the world, the inherent visibility of the crime itself raises a series of philosophical problems.
I
The justification often given for torture is the gathering of intelligence, and in this context the idea of the “secret” plays a fundamental role. The victims of torture, as potential holders of this “secret”, are in a paradoxical state of inherent potential guilt. Nothing affirms the victim’s guilt until they reveal the “secret”, but the victim must be presupposed to have this “secret” in order to justify what is being done to them. This sort of pragmatic justification has problems of its own: on the one hand, a victim of torture will say anything to make the torture stop, including fabricating information, and on the other hand, even if the victim has the information the torturer seeks, there is no way of testing its reliability. This is not to say that, if this were not the case, the torture would be in any single case justifiable. It is important to point out the inefficacy of torture as a tool for extracting information, however, because it indicates the degree to which the elicitation of information is not the true purpose of torture as a mass, institutionalized phenomenon. That purpose is the very reason why it is difficult to even read about torture.
In 1961 Jean-Paul Sartre writes “A Victory” in the context of the Algerian War of Independence from France, a war that functions as a paradigm for institutionalized use of torture by a colonial regime.
Sartre’s essay makes a very crucial point about the nature of this “secret”: rather than the secret being some particular piece of information, or the fact that the victim is a member of some targeted group or is otherwise guilty, what constitutes the secret is that the victim is inhuman. The guilt, and moreover the cries of anguish, are an admittance to this animality in the eyes of the torturer. And through this admittance, the victim removes the torturer of their guilt.
The concept of the animal is crucial not only in war, but in all of the most extreme forms of violence. Animals exist, of course, but to compare a human being to an animal invokes a conception of what animality is that has a life all of its own. The animal is, foremost, that living creature that we are allowed to do violence to. This human-made concept is characterized precisely by defining what legitimate violence is, in a similar way to how the ancient Roman legal definition of property is derived from the concept of the slave, and in particular from the slave owner’s right to kill the slave if they so choose. At the same time, the animal cannot keep a secret, and, thus, cannot be properly guilty. The status of the victim of torture must therefore oscillate: not capable of being any more than a beast, they are nonetheless responsible for their crimes. The phrase that denotes this paradox perfectly is: “human animals.”
This phrase was used by Yoav Gallant, the Defense Minister for Israel, referring (with a crucial ambiguity) to either Hamas militants or to the entire Palestinian population. The ambiguity of the subject of the phrase becomes irrelevant in the face of the proposed (and then executed) series of war crimes that constituted the “siege” of Gaza that was then being planned. What was said just prior to this moment, by Yoav Gallant, makes this clear: “there will be no electricity, no water, no food, no fuel.” The rhetoric of martyrdom or human sacrifice, when referring to Gaza, might without metaphor be supplemented with the characterization of mass torture being inflicted upon the Palestinian people. Thus, the accusation that the Israeli state is collectively punishing the people of Gaza does not go far enough, since it retains the rhetoric of guilt being at least in theory attributable to the collective. In order to elicit this guilt, one must torture not just one or several people, but a collectivity. We will see how an essential component of that task is to rend collective memory from the flesh of the collective body.
In Torture and the Age of Fear, Mossalanejed describes both psychological and physical forms of torture, with large sections of the book focusing on the imposed status of limbo and the threat of violence as themselves forms of torture (including, but not limited to, the death penalty). While this will be more relevant for further sections of this project, for now it is important to note that included in the list of psychological forms of torture are techniques of purposefully traumatizing the victim. One must be perfectly clear about the following: Mossallanejed does not use the term torture in an overly broad sense. He simply illustrates how multifaceted and widespread this phenomenon actually is. For instance, the experience of watching one’s family be massacred, inside or outside of an official war, is a torturous one. This is not to say that torture and trauma are equivalent, but simply that trauma itself may be used as a method of torture.
II
Let us return to the problem of the visible traces of torture — it leaves scars, literally and figuratively. One might object that, for instance, waterboarding is a technique used precisely to avoid leaving any evidence, and to a certain extent it is true that these institutionalized torture centres are covert, even secret, operations. But the majority of institutionalized torture does not take this form — most leaves evidence. We propose that due to the essential nature of torture, as a excess that legitimizes, it will inevitably have to occur in excess of whatever supposedly “regulated” and “purposeful” torture does occur. It is because torture is something “necessary” for any oppressive force, and not simply for the extraction of information by select intelligence services, that it cannot ever be completely hidden.
Not only does torture transform the traces it leaves behind for the purpose of covering over its tracks (to a certain, limited degree that we will further explore), it is also in itself an act that produces erasure and forgetting — forgetting not as an ability to move on, but as an inability to remember. A forgetting that is imposed and foreclosed at the same time. The victim of torture, even if they can never forget their experiences, cannot remember them in a full and active sense either. By this we mean that they are incapable of appropriating these memories, of re-integrating their own experiences into their constitutive sense of self. In this sense, torture serves a related function to terror, which at once calls memory, but also fixes its gaze in place. Terror implants within memory an entity that will shock the nervous system whenever it is returned to, so that even if forgetting becomes impossible, memory cannot pick up the experience and re-examine it, but must simply stare blindly at it, like the sun. This is what we mean by the creation of an active capacity for forgetting. Memory itself has been transformed into a blinding visibility that takes the form, in the end, of forgetting.
Catherine Malabou writes about the concept of destructive plasticity, that our brains (and thus our minds) can undergo experiences and physical changes that are not symbolically appropriable into our sense of self. We are a different person afterwards, definitively — there has been a break:
In contemporary neurology coldness, neutrality, absence, a “flat” emotional state, are instances of this mode of destructive plasticity that Spinoza anticipated by envisaging the existence of a destructive metamorphic power, without any possible reintegration into the thread of a life, a fate or a true idea…Today we see that all trauma survivors, whether of biological or political trauma, show signs of this kind of indifference. In this sense we must take destructive brain plasticity into account as a hermeneutic tool to understand the contemporary faces of violence (Malabou 37-38 Ontology of the Accident)
If we relate this to the position of the individual victim, as well as the community to which they belong, it becomes clear that the goal of the oppressive force is to produce a “generic” subject, an individual without relations, even to their own memory. Extreme violence (this sort of war-time, institutionalized torture being a particular subset) are thus essential to the program of colonial enterprises, as Sartre’s essay indicates. Colonialism produces generic subjects because each individual must be exchangeable for another. The “inherent potential guilt” presupposed by the torturer is mirrored by the universal guilt proclaimed by the colonial force — in other words, a proclamation that the colonial subject is guilty of not being fully human.
The further away one is from these sorts of violence, the more the photographs of the victim as animalistic do the work of justifying the violence in question. But the closer one gets, the more one is presented with this paradox of an animal that is somehow also guilty. How does the institutional process resolve this? Many have noted the extent to which prisons and torture centres function also as indoctrination centres for the torturers themselves. The locus of guilt has to be inverted. Strangely enough, this is done once again by means of the concept of the animal. This time it is the torturers that must temporarily embody the concept, and allow themselves a degree of “bestiality” in order to carry out acts of extreme violence. This is what Mehdi Belhaj-Kacem refers to as parody. For Kacem, it is not simply that we must play at being animals in order to appropriate our own, humanistic forms of violence. These human forms of violence are themselves how we perversely appropriate, by means of a parodic twist, our own animality: “Therefore man, through technological astuteness, overbids on animal appropriation and incited Evil in the strict sense: planetary expropriation, torture — and no longer the “simple” predatory cruelty of the strongest” (Kacem 10, Transgression and the Inexistent).“Cruelty” is the word we often associate with our capacity as human beings to be animalistic, even though it is in truth the means by which we parody and exaggerate what we perceive to be a “natural” sort of violence.
Kacem goes further, returning us to the essential character of this excessive violence: any process of appropriation produces a waste product, but what is unique to humans is that we fetishize this waste product, and maximize its production. The indoctrination process that produces more torturers is thus how the violence-process integrates itself into itself — or, more precisely, how it organizes the waste product into a second, intentionally excessive version of the first. It is not a re-consumption, this is precisely Kacem’s point about appropriative maximization; if it were re-consumed, torture would not be excessive but would fulfill a direct function in the war machine. Torture fulfills a function, but this is because of its excessive (and, thus, in-appropriable) character.
All of this is possible because of the accepted idea that there is a normal, even natural, amount of human violence. Only by exceeding this amount can violence’s extreme forms come to parody themselves, and retroactively accomplish the task of removing the humanity of its victims. This excess is in the service of a subtraction precisely because this concept of the animal can be projected as being both “more” and “less” than human. The animal is more violent and less guilty; somehow, it is simultaneously less violent (in the way that humans are) as well as more guilty (that is, of being inhuman).
III
Many points dealt with in this essay remain insufficiently explored. Sartre’s essay dealing with torture is itself a response to La Question by Henri Alleg, an Algerian-French journalist who was tortured by the French occupying force in Algeria. Alleg’s title refers, at the same time, to the question of torture as such, as well as being itself the term for torture in pre-revolutionary French law. The book was banned in France in short order, which brings to the fore the entire problematic of visibility, communication, information, suppression of information, and suppression of communication. A further question is how this relates, in a more fundamental way, to shame. Arguably one of the few contexts in which most people believe shame to be a “good thing” is when a war criminal clearly lacks it. Here, the animal is central once again, and it concerns how individuals interact with collective structures of memory and forgetting. In this context, the way in which the victim of torture relates to the world, the world that is allowing them to suffer, is crucial and illuminating.
Mossallanejad, Ezat. Torture in the Age of Fear. Seraphim Editions, 2005.
B'Tselem. (2021). Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps. B'Tselem.
https://www.btselem.org/
Sartre, Jean-Paul. "A Victory." We Have Only This Life to Live, translated by Patrick O'Brien, 1st ed., New York Review of Books, 2006, pp. 47-56.
Gallant, Yoav. "Speech by Yoav Gallant." YouTube, uploaded by No Comment TV, 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbPdR3E4hCk.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills, Fordham University Press, 2008.
(This is one year’s seminar, belonging to the series The Autobiographical Animal)
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011.
Malabou, Catherine. The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Polity Press, 2009.
Belhaj-Kacem, Mehdi. Transgression and the Inexistent: A Philosophical Vocabulary. Translated by P. Burcu Yalim, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.
Alleg, Henri. The Question. Translated by John Calder, George Braziller, Inc., 1958. Marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/alleg/alleg-question.pdf.
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