Abstract
Following in the phenomenological tradition, I aim to ground my chapter in the lived experience of a particular form of violence: torture. Torture, and likewise torturous violence, is a phenomenon that crosses both the immanent (functioning at the level of social bodies and institutions) and the individual (a subject who is tortured and one who is the torturer) thresholds of violence. As such, it reveals unique connections between violence and the intersubjective constitution of meaning. Using the work of Walter Benjamin and his interpreter Giorgio Agamben, I hope to illuminate the nature of founding violence (mythic violence), and then in dialogue Jean Améry and Elaine Scarry demonstrate the species of founding violence operative in torture, as social bodies are dismembered and replaced through individual acts of torture. Moreover, I argue that torturous violence targets the resistance of the tortured, in order to break down the meaning-making capacities that a person has, including within the intersubjective field of capacities. By presenting Benjamin and Agamben, Améry and Scarry, I intend to further the study of violence using the spectrum of violence present in torture. In connecting the concepts of founding violence, intersubjectivity, torture, and resistance, I demonstrate that the logic of founding violence works itself out in unstable social bodies in the form of torture, in order to deconstruct the resistances offered by subjects within those intersubjective communities.
And yet, twenty-two years after it occurred, on the basis of an experience that in no way probed the entire range of possibilities, I dare to assert that torture is the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself.
—Améry 1986, p. 22
Only in rare moments of life do we truly stand face to face with the event and, with it, reality.
—Améry 1986, p. 26. For Améry, this moment was the experience of torture
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- 1.
Throughout the edited volume, Violence, Victims, Justifications, several scholars, including the editor, argue that violence is fundamentally relational. For examples see, “Introduction: Violence, Discourse and Human Interdependence” (9), “Violence as Violation” (80), “Freedom versus Responsibility? Between Ethical Indifference and Ethical Violence” (132), and the afterword (235). See F. Ó Murchadha, ed. (2006), Violence, Victims, Justifications (Bern: Peter Lang AG).
- 2.
This is what Bernhard Waldenfels argues in his article, “Violence as Violation,” in Violence, Victims, Justifications, 73: “What seems to be especially important is to see that violence is a cultural phenomenon which cannot be transposed to some kind of brute nature.”
- 3.
For some examples, see R. Girard (1989), The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press).
- 4.
For an approach to the violence constituted in law, see W. Benjamin (1996), “Critique of Violence,” in The Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, edited by M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
- 5.
This may seem to encompass too much, as violence could be seen in parenting as well as across the battlefields of war. Some might argue that these phenomena (e.g., spanking and shelling) differ not merely in degree but in kind. I argue, on the other hand, that they do not, insofar as both affect structures of subjectivity through similar means (pain produced in affective flesh).
- 6.
See the arguments that response to the critiques of the use of torture and argue for its qualified use in M. Bagaric and J. Clarke (2007), Torture: When the Unthinkable is Morally Permissible (Albany: SUNY Press).
- 7.
This is from the second epigram to this chapter; see footnote 2. The notion of the event is a complicated one in philosophy, as is reality, but here Améry is suggesting that his torture is an event that connects him to the fundamental nature of what is real, which is for him a kind of nothingness and meaninglessness.
- 8.
It should be noted that phenomenology is normally tasked with the understanding of constitution, both in its constituting and constituted elements, but the act of torture and acts of extreme violence are acts of de-constitution, that is, where constituting functions fail and where constituents are dissolved.
- 9.
These themes are developed and analyzed in my forthcoming dissertation, “The Flesh in Pain: A Phenomenology of Torture” (University of Leuven).
- 10.
It is notable that here we can distinguish a phenomenological account of violence, as what is at issue is not human dignity but the fundamental constituting consciousness of the world.
- 11.
See the afterword in Violence, Victims, Justifications, in which Ó Murchadha argues this point (235).
- 12.
Here what has been called the problematic of peace and proximity runs up against that of violence—being in proximity to the another will ultimately cause violence to arise, not because of the other, but because of the “third,” another other who demands as much justice from me as the other. Categorization and other forms of violence then occurs. This is a detailed argument in Emmanuel Levinas’ “Peace and Proximity,” proposing another approach to the issues of polis than the usual political (violent) approaches. See E. Levinas (1996), Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 161–169.
- 13.
See Benjamin, “Critique of Violence.” This is seen throughout the essay, particularly in his development of the concept of mythic violence.
- 14.
This interpretation is part and parcel of his work: G. Agamben (1998), Homo Sacer, trans. by D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
- 15.
See note 4 above.
- 16.
See E. Scarry (1985), The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- 17.
One example is seen in Shelia Cassidy’s first-person account of torture under the Pinochet regime in Chile (S. Cassidy (1992), Audacity to Believe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd)). Both through her experience in the torture chamber and her experience in prison, Cassidy conveys a sense of the breakdown of language and subjectivity, e.g., fellow prisoners did not speak about their tortures but only in brutal facts regarding their experiences, that is, not how it was experienced but what was.
- 18.
This is seen in Cassidy’s narrative (above), as well as in dozens of cases documented by Amnesty International, who reference this problem in terms of collecting evidence of torture and other forms of abuse by the state. See, Amnesty International (2014), Above the Law: Police Torture in the Philippines (London: Amnesty International).
- 19.
Cavanaugh draws on how liberation theology, developed in Latin America, articulates a fuller image of the Kingdom of God, which competes with images of the state and its role in shaping citizenry.
- 20.
Scarry articulates a similar structure in the experience of torture. See Body in Pain, 50–52.
- 21.
Specifically, E. Husserl (1989), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure and Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers). Hereafter, Ideas II.
- 22.
This is first described in Husserl, Ideas II, 165–166. It is taken up throughout Leder, The Absent Body.
- 23.
See Waldenfels, “Violence as Violation,” in Violence, Victims, Justifications.
- 24.
This image, along with others, were released under the Freedom of Information act. See, https://www.propublica.org/article/abu-zubaydah-drawings-pictures-from-an-interrogation; accessed 1 June 2018.
- 25.
This is built upon the Husserlian analysis of the constitution of time, which can be found in E. Husserl (1991) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. By J.B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).
- 26.
The torture techniques that function on this principle most fully are (1) mock burial and (2) mock execution. Examples of these techniques can be found in Amnesty International (2014), ‘Welcome to Hell Fire:’ Torture and Other Ill-Treatment in Nigeria (London: Amnesty International), and United States and D. Feinstein (2014), The Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture: committee study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program (New York: First Melville House Printing). Hereafter, Report on Torture.
- 27.
Unfortunately, this is extremely evident in the cases of torture outlined in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on Torture.
- 28.
Not only is this Améry’s experience, but it is a phenomenon that is still detailed in today’s torture victims. See, M. Apuzzo, S. Fink, and J. Risen (2016), “How US Torture Left Legacy of Damaged Minds,” New York Times (October 8).
- 29.
Here, there is also the phenomenological problem of empathy, as it is seemingly reversed from a common understanding, in order to exploit the known vulnerabilities of what it means to be a subject.
- 30.
This thought goes beyond this essay and into international political philosophy, but it is observable in the unstable regimes currently in the world, as well as past regimes (Pinochet in Chile, ISIS, and Boko Haram). The unstable position of the United States might also be observable in the use of torture.
- 31.
Here, there is a connection with the philosophical anthropology that Sigmund Freud develops in his famous essay, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” See S. Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey, A. Freud, et al. (London: Hogarth Press).
- 32.
See F. Fanon (2014), The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin Books Ltd), particularly in J.P. Sartre’s preface, which emphasized the use of violence as a form of resistance.
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Heuslein, J. (2019). Torturous Violence: A Phenomenological Approach to the Violence in the Acts of Torture. In: Lauwaert, L., Smith, L., Sternad, C. (eds) Violence and Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_9
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