`Ideals that were really never in our possession': Torture,Honor and US Identity

Abstract

This article addresses how the recent US treatment of suspects detained in its War on Terror relates to the issues of US self-identity and US honor. Both the abuse of these individuals, and the shock which such abuse engenders (when revealed to the US public), are manifested by punishment drives that reinforce a nation's sense of internal honor, which is constructed and connected to a nation's self-identity. While professing commitments to human rights, on the one hand, and interrogation and torture, on the other, are contradictory practices — they are similar in the sense that both are forms of discipline which uphold internally constituted ontological visions of the US Self. Drawing upon a Foucauldian view of ethics, `the relation to oneself', the article avers that precisely because these disciplinary mechanisms are driven by self-identity and protecting the `honor' of the US nation-state, domestic and international actors can use two tactics — `reflexive discourse' and self-interrogative imaging — to stimulate US agents to reform such practices in the future.