Posted on 15/05/04
Words and wounds
The first chapter of Harvard professor Elaine Scarry's marvellously supple The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985) is still one of the best places to begin if you want to start thinking seriously about torture -- in particular her dazzling deconstruction of the fiction of torture as an effective tool for the collection of information (the kind of information you get by terrorizing people out of their minds, after all, in most cases consists of panicky, hysterical drivel, and outdated drivel at that). Torture, rather, she suggests, should be thought of as a discourse, a teaching, a lesson.
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