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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, 2001
IDELBER AVELAR
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In the course of the last decade, a series of writings, centred on the term
‘post-dictatorship’, have articulated knowledges that are irreducible to the
framework of ‘democratic transition’. This irreducibility should not be confused
with exteriority pure and simple, but displays a supplementary character in the
strongest sense of the word: the transition does not emerge as such until it
represses and excludes from its eld that which makes it possible. Silenced so
that the framework of transition can be established as the unique horizon of the
politically intelligible within the post-dictatorship countries, such experiences
mobilize in their theoretical elaboration a lexicon with certain recurrent terms:
mourning, melancholia and trauma are the most common. The work carried on
during this long period in the elds of philosophy, literary and cultural criticism
and the plastic arts has had the merit, whatever its ambiguities and inadequa-
cies, of displacing the debate on the transition onto a terrain where such
experiential tensions have found a voice.1
The bibliography is diverse but what unies it is a certain lexical attention,
which is absent in other discussions of the legacy of the dictatorships, be they
social-scientic or journalistic-testimonial. Whilst a schematic outline does not
do justice to the works involved, the following are some of the most signicant
lexical displacements:
1. The term ‘transition’ has been removed from the social scientic terrain (in
which it designates a return to a democratic-parliamentary ‘normality’) and
has been used to designate the truly epochal transition achieved by the
dictatorships in shifting the countries of Latin America from the national state
to the globalized market. This change in the understanding of the term not
only removes the emphasis from an empirical-contingent problem and redi-
rects attention towards a problem of foundational character, but also makes
the truth of the transition visible, namely that the transition has led us to a
place which appears no longer to be in transit, that is, a state of affairs which
threatens us with its denitive stay (Thayer).
2. There has been a critical dissection of post-dictatorship testimonialism, attent-
ive to the complex relations between motifs of betrayal, confession and guilt:
this has had the merit of focusing on the ambiguities and aporias proper to
discourses of restitution, even those which bring to light truths censored and
hidden by dictatorial power (Richard).
3. There has been a demonstration that the rips and breaks in representation
made obvious in the post-dictatorship period refer back to a Latin American
ISSN 1356-932 5 print/ISSN 1469-957 5 online/01/030253–19 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1356932012009004 5
254 I. Avelar
Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of a World notes the absence of literary
representations of physical pain, in contrast with other forms of suffering. There
is something in the literary representation of pain that tends to convert it into the
formulaic, the stereotypical, the reassuring or the simply timid. Such a breach in
the representational apparatus of literature in the face of pain says much about
the literally brutal nature of the phenomenon, but also something about the
limits of literature. What this paper suggests is that these limits, once mapped
would allow us to say something about what the practice of torture does to
representation, or better, to what extent torture makes possible, or makes
possible the cancellation of, representation as such and, on the other hand, how
representation makes possible, and makes possible the cancellation of, torture as
such. The limit of these questions opens onto a number of consequences,
amongst them the understanding of the link between the practice of torture and
democracy.
Let us return to our initial investigation, then. Testimony, accusation and
empirical studies have told us all we need to know about the worldwide spread
of torture (even in the First World, where its invisibility grants to the freethink-
ing liberal the comfort of believing torture to be a monopoly of ‘terrorist’
regimes, so as to see it, in a second moment of the dialectic of bad faith, in
Cuba but not in Guatemala, in Cambodia but not in East Timor, in Libya but
not in Chile or Brazil), its organic and systematic character within the recent
Latin American dictatorships, and the persistence of its practice inside the
transitional democracies (as an everyday practice suffered by the poor, by
Blacks, by landless peasants, by immigrants). Given all this, what do literature
or philosophy—neither anchored in experience—still have to tell us about the
phenomenon? If literary studies, and more specically philosophically in-
formed literary studies that have dedicated the last decades to the mapping
of the conditions, possibilities and limits of representation, could we not
postulate from this perspective some hypotheses about the phenomenon
whose rst and most immediate operation is its violent breaking with any
representational apparatus whatsoever? From this proposal, then, we can risk
an initial thesis on the inseparability of the practice of torture from
(non)representation. This thesis can be elaborated in dialogue with Scarry’s
The Body in Pain, a most important book, whose attention focuses on the
devastating effects of torture on language and the world we endorse. However,
we distance ourselves from her postulation of such terms as ‘world’, ‘language’,
‘representation’, ‘body’ with contents already constituted in advance and which
are only subsequently threatened and destroyed by torture.2 The three sub-
256 I. Avelar
sequent theses, on torture and its relation to speech, narrative and sexual
difference, will detail such difference. Our objections to Scarry’s study will lead
us on to a fth thesis, elaborated after being inspired by Page DuBois’s (1991)
revolutionary book, Torture and Truth, which postulates a co-extension between,
on the one hand, the practice of truth as the foundation of the mechanism by
which the slave was incorporated into the Greek juridical apparatus and, on the
other, the contemporaneous origins of the western philosophical concept of truth
(alêtheia, veritas). These reections would not have been possible without the
perspective of Michel Foucault’s ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, which discerned
the possibility of a history of torture in its relation to the juridical paradigms of
the production of truth, that is to say, proof (l’épreuve) and inquiry/interrogation
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(l’enquête).3 At the limit of our reection, there is the axiom that torture is a
central chapter of any history of truth.
gregarious power of the sign, which threatens that experience with the dilution
of its singularity. For the survivor, such a war is worth what the experience itself
is worth, and he approaches it with all the urgency of one who knows that
maintaining experience—maintaining it as material that can be narrated, that is
to say maintaining it as such—is the very condition of survival, its constitutive
moment.
Reading the documents published by Amnesty International one crude and
repeated element of the torture apparatus emerges: its exhibition and display, its
representation to the tortured subject. From the forced contemplation of the machin-
ery of torture in the Greece of the Junta (1967–71), to the insistent sound of locks
opening (announcing the arrival of the torturer) in the Basque Country, to the
hysterical verbalizations of torture by its Southern Cone practitioners, or the
exhibition (in sound or vision) of the tortured to their loved ones, whether
prisoners or not: the modern technique of torture systematically includes, as a
central element of the apparatus of terror, its own double in the realm of signs,
its own farcical semanticization, its own display. Such a representation is a
fundamental component of terror itself, a surplus without which the modern
science of torture would not have taken the forms that it has, a constitutive
surplus frequently experienced as the worst possible pain, the pain of antici-
pation, of the representation of the pain to come.
The technology of torture has evolved from its premodern moment, character-
ized by its public display, with spectators witnessing it as a ‘spectacle of
suffering’,6 to a modern moment, which keeps the condemned prisoner in the
classic condition of ‘herald of his own condemnation’ (1985, p. 43), but now
displaced, conned, hidden in prison cells and torture chambers. If premodern
torture ‘establishes execution as the moment of truth’ (1985, p. 43), the modern
apparatus maintains the equation between truth and punishment but now
withdraws it from the public sphere, in fact making the latter into the site of a
possible struggle against torture, given that the conned space has been technol-
ogized and rationalized to the point where the torturer is granted a power that
cannot be threatened. If, in the premodern moment, ‘a successful public ex-
ecution justied justice, in that it published the truth of the crime in the very
body of the man about to be executed’ (1985, p. 44) the modern science of torture
converts the inscription of this truth into information and, as such, is capable of
being appropriated and monopolized by the state. In both moments of the
technology of punishment, however, torture rests upon an act of representation,
which is not subsequent to the act of the executioner but is its constitutive moment.
The apparatuses and practices of representation—auditory, visual, tactile—are
258 I. Avelar
not instruments added on to the practice of torture, but are central chapters in
its history, moments of its essence. What is proper to torture is the obscene
exhibition, in public or private, of its own power. This gives rise to the truth
which is captured by Kafka’s allegory of modern, rationalized torture, ‘In the
Penal Colony’ (1988, pp. 140–167), a story which is less the narration of an act
that a description of an apparatus.
that of the repeated action of the voice of God upon the bodies of men. To be God
is to lack a body but to speak, for example from within the burning bush, ‘being
only a voice’ (Deuteronomy 4:12); to be human is to have a body on which the
divine voice is impressed. The voice commands the body, the word is impressed
upon the esh. In both the Old Testament and the Gospels, ‘the experienceable
“reality” of the body that can be read not as an attribute of the body but as
an attribute of its metaphysical referent’ (1985, p. 184). The repeated functional-
ization of pain in the Jewish Bible (to provide the link that ties the subject to
belief) makes of the body an instance of actualization of a metaphysical truth
incarnated in the word. Pain stamps belief into the body. In reality, there is no
clear separation between the divine creation and the act of iniction of pain
(generation and wounding): ‘Apart from the human body, God himself has no
material reality except for the countless weapons that he exists on the invisible
and disembodied side of’ (1985, p. 200). The making present of the transcendent
reality of the voice of God is the very pain which is felt by the body: ‘God
ordinarily permits himself to be materialized in one of two places, either in the
bodies of men or women, or in the weapon’ (1985, p. 235). The weapon with
which he wounds the body is here the privileged incarnation of the voice of God
in the Jewish Bible. And it is this that gives rise to the strict prohibition, which
becomes emblematic in the command: do not represent God, do not confer upon
him a body, do not make him materialize. His innite power depends upon his
being maintained within the realm of pure voice.
In the very origins of civilization one nds such subjection, the same subjection
characteristic of the act of torture: the iniction of the pain of the voice on the
body. Scarry’s reection on what she calls ‘the structure of torture’ presents a
forceful argument about the ‘transformation of the body into voice’ (1985,
pp. 45–51). The magnication of the body for the tortured subject, caused by the
experience of extreme pain, converts him/her into a subject deprived of a world,
deprived of a voice and of a self. ‘The transformation of body into voice’ is the
operation carried out by the torturer: his body is marked by its absence, he is the
one who monopolizes the world, the voice and the self. According to Scarry’s
axiom, then, ‘the torturer has no body, only a voice, and the tortured subject has
no voice, only a body’. To the extent that the very voice of the torturer, the
demand or the question itself, is obviously ‘whatever its content, an act of
wounding’ (1985, p. 46), the torturing voice takes on a greater measure, becomes
the central instrument of torture upon a subject which is now converted into a
body—a body which hurts the subject, which wounds him/her, and therefore,
according to the hateful calculation of torture, produces in the subject a
Five Theses on Torture 259
separation and alienation from his/her body, its conversion into a traitorous
body.
Scarry’s starting point is thinking the voice is fundamental to the battle against
the practice of torture, to the work of depriving it of its political legitimacy and
of making its horror visible. We know that torture does not happen because the
subject who is tortured possesses some information that the torturer would nd
useful. Rather, in the modern technology of the iniction of pain, the question
is always a component of pain itself (which is justied because it causes pain)
not in some pragmatic revelation of a piece of information. The interrogation is
obviously not something that once resolved to the torturer’s satisfaction would
signify the end of the subjection of the other to torture. The interrogation is a
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Our disagreement with Scarry’s thesis on torture and the voice stems from
this: to oppose the idea of a ‘voice that is destroyed’ is not a merely philosoph-
ical dispute, carried on at a distance from the hard truth of atrocity. What is put
forward here is a political position founded on different therapeutic engage-
ments with the victims: the hypostasization of a subject and a civilization
constituted in advance, and which express themselves in a ‘voice’ that is
subsequently destroyed by torture, can only lead to a practice of treatment that
is nostalgic and defeatist, haunted by the project of an impossible restoration of
pre-traumatic subjectivity. This is the terrain on which the topos of voice and
torture is played out. Taking a distance from the xed binary opposition,
presence of the voice (in the torturer) x absence of the voice (in the tortured) and
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moving towards more pluralist premises (which would not see the voice simply
as a ‘good’ appropriated by the torturer), opens up a possibility that the
therapeutic practice unravel everything that the voices, the assertions of the
tortured subject—no matter when: before, during or after torture—was complicit
with torture, coexisted with it, was appropriated by it, and resisted it. A much
wider eld opens up for the subject in which to recompose their subjectivity.
Our second thesis, then, is: what is at stake in the critique of the liberal-phono-
centric thesis on torture is not only the loss of illusions (and hopes) that
civilization is not corrupted by atrocity, but also the possibility of a positive
space where the production of a post-traumatic subjectivity is made possible.
there can be no elaboration and overcoming of the trauma without the articula-
tion of a narrative in which the traumatic experience is inserted in a signifying
way, inserted as signication. But this very insertion can only be perceived by
the subject as a real betrayal of the singularity and intractability of the experi-
ence, ‘being treated—whether by drugs, or by telling one’s history, or both—ap-
pears to many survivors to imply the abandonment of an important reality, or
the dilution of a special truth within the comforting terms of therapy. In fact, in
Freud’s early writings on trauma, the possibility of integrating the lost event into
a series of associative memories, as part of the treatment, is seen precisely as a
means of allowing the event to be forgotten’ (Caruth, 1995, p. vii). Therapeutic
recall has as its aim the production of forgetting, the anticipation of which
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antagonisms and breaks into a story (be it one of decline and fall, or one of
realization).
It is precisely here that trauma studies displace the emphasis given by
psychoanalytic critique to the neurotic illusion. The two enterprises necessarily
give rise to different emphases, since for the survivor it is precisely narrative
that is promised, that cannot not be promised. This promise takes on a form,
which is that of the retrospective construction of a witness, just where all instance
of bearing witness has been eliminated. Absolute atrocity produces a world in
which one can no longer be a witness, since the very imagination of the other,
the very postulation of a ‘you’ one could address has been prevented, aborted,
cancelled in advance by the absolute interiority of the victim of such atrocity.
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presupposes the identity between what is confessed and what is true. As we will
see, such an identity belongs to a strategy of representation that subsumes the
problematic of torture under the gure of interrogation. Such a subsumption
would be constitutive of a certain conception of truth, itself dependent on the
delimitation and abjection of the feminine.10 The problems that will occupy us
here will be the relations that are established historically between torture,
confession, sexual difference, and truth, and at the same time the specic (and
yet very typical) symptomatic appearance of such relations in the Dorfman/
Polanski lm.
The dramatic tension of the lm lies in the portrayal of a scene of restitution,
of payment (and demand for payment), which comes about quite by chance.
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Gerardo Escobar (Stuart Wilson), an important lawyer and the head of a new
government commission on the violation of human rights under the recent
dictatorship, and husband of a former political prisoner who had undergone
torture, Paulina Lorca (Sigourney Weaver) gets a lift home (at night, after a
puncture during a rainstorm) from Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley), a former
torturer and now a good Samaritan. This is a nice occasion for the unpredictable
workings of chance. Paulina recognizes Miranda’s voice—although the implied
author does not do so immediately, nor does the spectator, necessarily—as the
voice of the doctor who had raped her during and after the torture sessions she
suffered during the dictatorship. The whole action of the lm unfolds inside
Paulina and Gerardo’s house, and takes place between the two of them and the
former torturer Roberto Miranda, or more precisely between Paulina and the
two men, until the nal resolution, overlooking a cliff, in one of the lm’s few
external scenes. Despite appearances, though, we are not dealing with a triangle
here.
At the lm’s opening, we see the inside of a theatre, in which the Schubert
quartet, that names the lm, is being played. In the audience, revealed by shots
that alternate with mid-distance shots of the musicians, we see Sigourney
Weaver and her husband played by Stuart Wilson. Weaver’s body and facial
reactions are visibly shown as more central for the lm than the husband’s,
a difference already indicated by the close-up of her hand as she grabs his,
and then the close-up of their faces, with him trying impotently to decipher
the emotional tension in her features, an impotence that is repeated to the point
of implausibility throughout the lm. The shot frames Weaver frontally,
something which cannot help looking odd if contrasted with the end of the
lmic diagesis, when the close-up returns, in the scene of the torturer’s con-
fession by the cliff. It is obvious by now that the formal coincidences are not
coincidences, nor are they merely formal. The coincidence we have just pointed
out indicates the equation that the lm makes between the confession of the
woman being tortured and that of the torturer, or better, the validation of her
confession in his, made at the end of the lm. But let us not get ahead of
ourselves.
Let us just say for now that only the cut and the violent image of water
striking rocks during a night-time storm interrupt the opening scene, which will
be left hanging until the end, when the camera will bring us back to the theatre
where ‘Death and the Maiden’ is being performed. Over the image that indicates
the beginning of diagetic time is superimposed the explanation, ‘A country in
South America, after the fall of the dictatorship’ [emphasis added]. Within this
264 I. Avelar
more or less standard rhetorical procedure for indicating time and place in
cinema, and in itself not necessarily something worthy of note, my attention was
drawn to the incongruent uses of the articles, ‘a’ and ‘the’. If we are in a country
in South America, somewhere imprecise, why is the reference to a moment in the
history of this undened country made by the denite article ‘the’? What could
‘the dictatorship’ mean if we are in a country in South America? Even if this
undened country only had a single dictatorship in its history, wouldn’t the
structure of the utterance itself still require the use of the indenite article? We
can see that here the formal question does not just mark a formalism on our part:
only in ONE South American country could the reference to THE dictatorship be
made like this, without qualication. Brazilians, Argentines, Peruvians, Ecuado-
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rians—have all known many dictatorships. Only in one South American country
could the reference to the dictatorship be maintained in the absolute singularity
of the denite article. Such a fact is of no little importance for the lm, since the
achievements or failures of the Polanski/Dorfman lm lead back to the ways in
which it symptomatizes (and betrays) the experience that the indenite article (‘a
country’) at once alludes to and hides, the Chilean experience. Such an act of
allusion and elision (and of elision of its constitutive allusions) is, as we shall see,
the backbone of the lm’s rhetoric.11
The allusion to Paulina’s trauma, thematized in the lm’s opening and
metaphorized by the Schubert quartet, returns in the following scene, which
shows Gerardo arriving home just after his acceptance of the post as head of the
commission has been announced on the radio. Paulina has heard this; she is
‘madly’, ‘unreasonably’ opposed to his taking the post, speaking from an
experience that is totally fetishized. Gerardo is given a lift home by Roberto
Miranda, who came across his car with a at tyre on the highway. When she
sees the car headlights in the distance, Paulina begins desperately to rush
around closing all the doors in the house, putting out the lights and candles, and
getting out a gun, which she has kept in a drawer. In Paulina’s actions,
Polanksi/Dorfman rehearse the Hollywood cliché of the upper class character
who defends ‘his/her property’ against the invasion of a ‘criminal’ or supernat-
ural threat. The property itself is a suburban, North American mansion built in
the best style, situated to the side of a road that cuts through semi-forest, more
reminiscent of Illinois or Iowa than Chile. The female character’s reaction to
‘defend her property’ obviously has nothing much to do with what would be
plausible behaviour in a Latin American activist (unthinkable even in a former
militant now of the upper class, the wife of a minister, and correctly ‘made
over’). Paulina’s ‘false alarm’ is repeated a few minutes later, when Miranda
returns with Gerardo’s spare tyre, and in a series of cuts we see an alternation
between the two environs, the living room where the two ‘reasonable’ men talk
about the future of the country (with the living room brightly lit) and the (dark)
bedroom where the madwoman is frantically getting her clothes together for
what is made to look like a mad ight—but will in reality be the preparation for
the insane theft of Miranda’s car, which will then be pushed over the cliff, in
another scene lacking in historical and diagetic plausibility.
Paulina’s ‘unreasonable’ reactions form a pattern within the lm. She system-
atically reveals her ‘obsession’, incomprehensible to her, but not to the two male
characters, the implied author (also presupposed as male) and the implied
reader (likewise male). We see the character’s ‘madness’ when she gets the
Five Theses on Torture 265
revolver out before the car arrives, when she throws her husband’s meal away
(when he refuses to disclose his conversation with the President), when she cries
and yells out ‘I don’t exist’ (when her husband suggests a legal, rational,
parliamentary outcome). Her madness is already there long before she pushes
Miranda’s car over the cliff—like a madwoman—the very car that has brought her
husband and then his spare tyre back to the house. If we were to sum up the
position of the female character, it would be that Dorfman/Polanski put her in
the place of the hysteric: the one who symptomatizes the truth, but who is incapable
of speaking it, of articulating it. Such a reduction of the feminine to an experience
that is fetishized and hystericized is strange and contradictory, because very
clearly the lm also wants to make a gesture towards feminism. Obviously, for
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this it reserves the melodramatic conrmation of the ending, which shows that
Paulina was right in her identication of Miranda’s voice. But this conrmation
only emerges, however, with the torturer’s confession, and is only valid inasmuch as it
comes from his own mouth. Moreover, this is the only possible way out for the lm,
since whatever the resolution of the status of Paulina’s testimony (truth or a lie,
true despite her being mad, or because she is mad), this can only be cleared up
with the torturer’s verication.
What is at issue here is what Foucault maps as proper to the juridico-discur-
sive paradigm of truth, the equation between what is true and what is
confessed. Such an equation is not only presupposed by the lm, but is
transposed in a sordid manner into the torturer’s confession, placed at the end
as the key to the resolution of the pseudo-suspense constructed at the cost of
stereotyping the female character. Throughout the lm, Paulina’s irrational
body, her hystericized experience, is incapable of completely convincing the
virtual spectator (the spectator imagined by the lm) of Miranda’s guilt. In
reality, it is the presumption of a lack of resolution to this question that
represents the only invitation that the lm gives us to carry on watching. The
spectator imagined by the lm would therefore be a replica of Gerardo, the
husband, the ingenuous, foolish liberal who is incapable of learning the truth
that his hysterical wife screams out. The pseudo-feminism of the resolution is
of a piece, then, with the pathetic, caricatured portrait of the husband. He
comes over as almost mentally retarded, incapable of seeing the absolutely
obvious and incapable of believing his wife who went through torture on his
behalf. Nevertheless, he is oddly capable of being the head of a commission on
human rights set up by the post-dictatorship government, and yet at the same
time does not know what any Latin American would know about torture: the
torture of women invariably includes rape and sexual violence. In other words,
in trying to be feminist, the Polanski/Dorfman lm constructs a couple com-
posed of an hysteric and an idiot. The only one of Dorfman’s gallery of
characters who is not pathological, the only one who is rationally credible, the
only one who reasons and is plausible, then, is the torturer—a fact which has
important theoretical and political consequences. The work, which claims to be
a validation of the experience of the woman who has been tortured, nishes up
being a sordid psychology of the torturer, crowned by the image of the
‘ordinary paterfamilias’ who attends a concert with his wife and children, the
odious shot that closes the lm.
The greater part of the lm is devoted to the grotesque ‘cage of justice’ that
Paulina creates. After pushing Miranda’s car over the cliff, she overpowers him
266 I. Avelar
and ties him to a chair. Hysterical and screaming, she demands a confession. Her
husband oscillates between defending the torturer and asking for a ‘fair trial’.
Talking in private with her husband on the porch, Paulina confesses to him that
she was raped by the doctor who is now tied up. Paulina has omitted the ‘detail’
of the rape during her previous conversations with Gerardo, and now confesses,
a signicant fact and one that reinforces the sordid paradigms of the lm,
equating torturer and tortured under the sign of confession. The conversation
between Paulina and Gerardo is as follows:
‘I want him… to talk to me, I want him to confess.’
‘To confess?’
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installs the body of the slave as a body that can be tortured (and not only as a
body that can be tortured but as necessarily truthful when tortured) has played
a role in the very constitution of the concept of alêtheia. The problem would be,
then, the relation between the slave’s testimony as an instance of the establish-
ment of juridical truth, as an instance of alêtheia which emerges as the resolution
to a struggle, and the conception of truth as buried essence, static, hidden, to be
unveiled and brought to light, extracted from an unknown interior that knowl-
edge attempts to penetrate, in the habitually sexualized Greek metaphor. There
is an organic relation, not merely historical but conceptual, between these two
processes, since the truth that is produced in the slave’s testimony only emerges,
by denition, in the interior of the basanos. Basanos dissolves resistance, brings to
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light, drags into visibility and into provability. It replicates in the architecture of
the metaphor deployed to describe it, the very same movement of the philoso-
pher who drags truth from its condition as buried and unknown. If such a
movement cannot but evoke the juridical process of truth through the slave,
neither is it devoid of operational effectivity in the production of gender
difference. We know about the extensive connections that Greek poetry and
philosophy established between alêtheia and ‘hiddenness, secrecy, female poten-
tiality, the tempting enclosed interiority of the human body, links with both
treasure and death, with the mysteries of the other’ (1991, p. 91). Both woman
and slave are receptacles, containers of truth, but they themselves do not have
access to it as subjects: their function is to provide such access to the free man,
to the citizen. Truth is never constituted independently of the abjection of these
containers.
It is in Plato’s dialogue The Sophist where we can best see the link between the
extortion of truth (realized by the philosopher on the sophist, through which the
former brings to light the truth that the latter, of course, remains unconscious of)
and the process described by Demosthenes, Antiphon and others, as character-
istic of the juridical production of truth through the body of the slave: ‘the best
way to obtain a confession of the truth would be to put the statement itself to
a mild degree of torture [basanistheis]’ (237b). The relationship that DuBois calls
attention to here is that ‘like the slave, the Sophist yields truth only under
violent interrogation and stress’ (1991, p. 115). DuBois suggests that we could
map an antidemocratic conception of truth in Greek thought, as that which is
unveiled through the body of the other. Such a conception is implicated in the
instrumentalization of the other in the philosophical route towards a truth that
is already reied, buried, in need of being dragged into the light. Clearly, the
process cannot fail to evoke torture, basanos in its legal context, to such an extent
that the following question would clearly be justied: to what extent does the
very conception of truth which is installed in western philosophy take us back
to this procedure carried out on a bastard body? The Platonic metaphor
transforms the Sophist’s argument into a body that must undergo suffering,
harassment by the attack of Logos. Logic and dialectic are arts of torture, are
implicated in it, and are so theorized in Plato in a very explicit way, in the very
moment of their constitution and systemization.
Our itinerary through Foucault, Scarry and DuBois unfolds a double project,
or perhaps two projects that, at points in their trajectories, have to coincide: (1)
the interminable (unrealizable in its totality, but unavoidable as a horizon)
Nietzschean project of the reconstitution, design, elaboration, recounting, and
Five Theses on Torture 269
reimagination of what has been the history of truth in the West—and not only,
and not exclusively in the West, since such a history, of course, could not be
given without calling into question the very process through which the frontiers
of the ‘West’ are constituted and named; (2) the study, critical dissection and
arraignment of the discursive apparatus—philosophical, legal, literary, sociolog-
ical—that has justied torture, and which, as such, is not innocent in the
constitution of the history of truth described in (1), given the historical and
conceptual connections between the practice of torture and the production of
truth. The hunting and cornering of the Sophist in Plato, just like the defeat
imposed on doubt by Descartes, represents a privileged moment of the
metaphorization of truth as imprisonment. Such an imprisonment—we know
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from Irigaray and Butler—is not only sexualized, but also founds the sexual as
such. It founds the masculine, the marked term, just as much as the feminine,
which comes to be, precisely, as the moment abjected by the masculine, as its
unavoidable supplement (the masculine in its turn, of course, does not pre-exist
such an act, but is constituted in it). In other words: the very production of the
opposition masculine/feminine takes place by resort to the privileged metaphor
of being caught, locked up, circumscribed as interiority (and at the same time
revealed as truth which is detached from such a container, brought to light, in
a process of extortion).
From this we can derive a project of innite re-reading, which is where we
would conclude: in the very foundation of sexual difference (its invention, its
constitution, its initial coming to intelligibility) we will nd a fundamental,
constitutive chapter both of the history of torture and of the history of truth. We
should not underestimate the constitutive tie that binds these two histories
together.
Notes
1. See especially: Willy Thayer, La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna: Epõ´logo del
conicto de las facultades (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1996); Nelly Richard, Residuos y metáforas:
Ensayos de crõ´tica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1998);
Alberto Moreiras, Tercer espacio: Literartura y duelo en América Latina (Santiago: ARCIS-LOM,
1999); Idelber Avelar, Alegorõ´as de la derrota: La cción postdictatorial y el trabajo del duelo
(Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000).
2. Only after having formulated this sentence, thought it through again, projected a whole reading
of Scarry’s book on the back of it, and then having survived the various rewritings of this article,
did I realize that it almost exactly reproduced the formulation in which Page DuBois expressed
his disagreement in his Torture and Truth, p. 148. I keep the initially unconscious citation as a
tribute to DuBois’s notable book.
3. Michel Foucault, ‘La Verité et les formes juridiques’, in Dits et écrits, II, p. 586. We have here the
odd fact that a text by Foucault of signal importance was only available until 1994, unless I am
mistaken, in Portuguese (original publication 1974, in a series of talks given at the Catholic
University of Rio de Janeiro between 21 and 23 May 1973) and in Spanish (trans. by E. Lynch
in 1980). Now in retrospect, with the publication of the complete Dits et écrits, we can see much
more clearly just how important this text was in Foucault’s thought: it gives the best exposition
of the battle between two conceptions of truth–the mapping of truth as proof, game, contest (in
Homeric epic, and, defeated, in Sophoclean tragedy) against a notion of truth as an unveiling,
dragged, brought to light (in the practice of interrogation). The unfolding of these two poles in
270 I. Avelar
1987).
5. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as such and on the Language of Man’, in One Way Street,
pp. 107–123.
6. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 46.
7. Dori Laub, ‘Truth and Testimony: the Process and the Struggle’, in Trauma: Explorations in
Memory, ed. by Cathy Caruth, p. 64.
8. I refer to ‘The house is in order’, the manuscript of a talk given at Duke University in 1994. I
do not know if Tununa has ever published a version of this text.
9. As is well known, this is a lm, directed by Roman Polanski, based on the stage play of the same
name by Ariel Dorfman. The screenplay was a collaboration between Rafael Yglesias and Ariel
Dorfman. Dorfman himself was present during the lming, and nished up granting the lm a
co-authorship.
10. Among the expressions that obscure rather than clarify the understanding of this process, I
count the term ‘French feminism’. Concerning the problem of truth and sexual difference, it
would be necessary to distinguish between the positions of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray not
only as different but as radically opposed. As Judith Butler shows, Kristeva accepts in advance
the distinction between rationality (the symbolic, the masculine, the phallic) and the corporeal
undifferentiated of the khora (the semiotic, the feminine) and then goes on to romanticize this
latter as the source of subversion, precisely in terms of the attributes conferred on it by the
Platonic binarization, which remains unquestioned. In Irigaray, however, we nd another
position, quite different: a process of genealogical investigation of the constitution of binarism
itself, which reveals the coming-into-being of the opposition reason—body as a process insepar-
able from the emergence of a presupposed and normative masculinity, and the subjection of a
‘feminine’ which does not pre-exist such an operation but which is itself constituted as well
within it. In Irigaray as opposed to Kristeva, there is no prior anteriority of the khora that can
be recovered and recouped. Reading Irigaray, of course, takes us much further than the pious
and redemptive Christianization of psychoanalysis that Kristeva proposes. For the development
of such a dispute, see Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, especially the remarkable essay that gives
the collectio n its name, pp. 27–55.
11. One more peculiar reference, of course, is what Sigourney Weaver does when they kidnap her
in front of the ‘bookshops’ on ‘Huérfanos street’. The reference is appalling, since (1) it is
incomprehensible for those who are not familiar with the geography of the centre of Santiago,
and (2) for those who can recognize the reference, there is little more than the feeling that the
experience of the street has been profoundly betrayed.
12. Of course, Latin American theatre and literature have known other representations of the
convergence of confession and truth. Although it sets out from less odious and reductive ethical
and narrative premises, Mario Benedetti’s theatrical works about torture share with Dorfman’s
work the naive and romantic belief in truth as something that can be uttered in confession, and
in the awfulness of torture as something that can be negotiated discursively. See Pedro y el
capitán.
13. Amongst the many examples cited by DuBois, see especially Antiphonus (6.23, 6.25).
14. Against Lycurgus, p. 32. For this text, and for all the other quoted Greek sources, we
refer the reader to the virtual library Perseus, an already considerable archive of Classical
works in the original and in English translation, run by Tufts University. See http://
www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Five Theses on Torture 271
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