Date: Sun Jul 30 12:35:36 1995
Subject: the torture problem


Bouncing off of David Blacker's post again.
 
"At any rate, the way the problematic was always presented to me was one of 
Sartre in the resistance 
(he was, as I recall, a minor courier, after imprisonment) wondering why some 
people break down 
under torture and some don't.  Everyone was wondering how THEY  would hold up. 
 For S, the 
inauthentic bad faith move is to say "they made me tell" because, it seems, 
there was always that 
millisecond longer you could have held out, so it was YOU that made the 
choice.  Very rigid on 
responsibility!"
 
Violence propagates itself through a series of ruptures 
to the truth, ontological ruptures, displacements, etc. 
The general status quo concerning violence, the 
epistemology of violence in praxis, can be read off 
according to how the situation of torture of the 
individual is read off, understood, thought about. 
Breaking under individual torture can be attributed to 
many things: the ferocity of the torturer, the moral 
goodness of the tortured, the skill of the torturer, the 
skill of the tortured, the psychological profile/style of 
the tortured, etc. The rupture (but not necessarily 
violence) of the revelation of secrets under torture can 
be taken as either an effect of the violence of the 
torturer or the tortured, or in combination. A "good man" 
may have a psychological configuration which breaks 
easily under torture. To what extent do people capitalize 
on this violently extreme situation and take the breaking 
down as a determination in general of the "goodness", 
along with other ontological determinations like 
"manhood", patriotism, etc., of the tortured? Like 
Heidegger's comment about the status of thinking held in 
the artificial grips of "logic" in the scholastic sense, 
"Such judgment may be compared to the practice of trying 
to evaluate the nature and powers of a fish by seeing how 
long it can live on dry land." To what extent is the very 
breaking down itself simply another violence perpetrated 
by the torturer and his or her group? How is this kind of 
determination made? How does justice move through these 
questions? In my best estimation, fallen moral dasein, 
even those on the "right side", would fare very badly 
when brought into view within a free and open conception 
of *essential* violence as opposed to *physical* 
violence.
 
War, as the paradigm of physical violence, hypostatizes 
the division between the "physical" and the "psychical". 
Heidegger's thinking makes possible, in conjunction with 
the space of thinking he works in interaction with (as 
per, for example, David S.'s recent post applauding 
Heidegger's method of recognizing the limited truth of 
prevailing/everyday undstandings), a freer conception of 
*essential* violence. The conception of *essential* 
violence does not restrict itself to the limited 
paradigm, itself practical to a certain extent, of blood 
and ruptured flesh. Answering the question or approaching 
the problem of this torture example, Sartre's operational 
explanation of "bad faith", the logics and regimes of 
choice, will, intention, etc., would involve not simply 
deplying a test like Sartre's, but would activate one's 
own relation to violence as such and would require an 
intependent and substantive thematization of violence. 

---
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.

Tom Blancato
tblancato-AT-envirolink.org
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)




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