Torture and Terror

“Torture and terror are reciprocal phenomena,” says Paul W. Kahn in Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Law, Meaning, and Violence) : “terror is met with torture, and torture with terror.” That is because “both work in the most primitive register of political meaning.”

This can be explained in terms of one of the standard narratives of modern political history. In contrast to premodern societies, where judicial torture was commonly practiced, the modern state operates within the rule of law. When torture comes to public view, “it will always be denounced as illegal.” Terror and torture, like war itself, point to a political space outside the rule of law, in Schmittian terms, the locus of sovereignty, the “state of exception.” For that reason, Kahn thinks that most of the objections to torture are beside the point. Inquiring about the definition of torture, its usefulness, the political morality, legal procedures for torture is “like debating the geography of heaven . . . instead of asking about the elementary sources of religious meaning.” In short, “terror and torture press up against the sacrificial character of the state,” and challenge the non-sacrificial account of the state in liberal political theory. Terror and torture also arise together, Kahn argues, because both are “political performances” or “rituals” that “inscribe meanings on bodies through pain and the threat of pain. Each proclaims the presence of an idea so powerful that it can determine life and death.”

Kahn does not “want torture in my world any more than I would want terror.” But he gives little hope that either can be eradicated: “For that matter, I do not want the state and politics as a form of meaning founded in violence sacrifice. We can dream of peace; we can imagine a global order of perfect lawfulness. But we dream of these things from a position deep within the political formation of a state that has its origins in violence, that will maintain itself through violence, and that claims a unique right to demand sacrifice of all its citizens.”

Torture and terror without Eucharist.