“Living Alongside Death”: Torture,Detention,and the Intersubjective Body

Abstract

How does torture work? Scholarly consensus seems to agree that torture reaches into the body to undermine the fundamental core of the person, but rarely do we specify the mechanisms by which it achieves this effect. I propose to answer this question through a focus on the conditions of detention and the ways in which these conditions are manipulated. I examine spatial dislocation, sleep deprivation, and dietary manipulation as prominent techniques of torture. Using what I call an “improper phenomenology,” I show how these techniques work to subvert the detained person’s relationships with space, time, and community. With reference to critical and feminist phenomenologists, I argue that these relationships are what structure and constitute the subject. These ties, in other words, are not only part of what enables us to exist but part of what makes us who and what we are. The unmaking or subversion of these relationships through techniques of torture not only undermines the stable subject but also has profound effects on those “beyond” the detention center.

Introduction

The persistence of contemporary torture is routinely framed as a paradox by human rights organizations working to bring an end to the practice. Thus, to offer only one example, Amnesty International regularly pitches its reporting on torture around the pairing of two numbers: on one hand, over 170 countries are party to the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. ¹ On the other hand, they count that 141 countries, comprising three-quarters of the world, use torture. ² The pairing of these numbers is meant to imply a question, which in turn registers a moral demand: How can any state committed to the “inherent dignity of the human person” engage in torture? ³ The centrality of this perceived paradox, however, relies on a specific version of the story of contemporary torture: one in which the end of judicial torture is both a marker and an achievement of shifting conceptions of individual rights during the European Enlightenment Era. In this history, torture was decodified in Europe because individual rights became legible as a limit on what the sovereign can legitimately do to the bodies of its subjects. Thus, for example, Jay Bernstein argues that the banning of torture in Europe was coextensive with “the moral foundation of political modernity,” such that in the absence of a ban on torture, “neither the liberal state nor modern moral life is intelligible.” ⁴ From this vantage point, the persistence of torture alongside a stated commitment to individual rights is a paradox. But this is only one story; other accounts tell a story about modern torture where this paradox either does not arise or is more easily reconciled. John Langbein, for example, argued that the decline of judicial torture was more closely related to shifting standards around evidentiary procedure: if confession is not the preferred form of evidence, judicial torture (which can be expensive and labor-intensive) is not worth the cost. ⁵ From this perspective, the decline of judicial torture is related to questions about judicial process, which means that the shift away from judicial torture does not tell us something generalizable about the way the state might resort to torture for other purposes. A third view, advanced most prominently by Darius Rejali, argues that there is a relationship between the rise of the individual rights paradigm and contemporary forms of torture, but this relationship cannot be straightforwardly defined in terms of prevention or suppression. ⁶ Instead, Rejali argues, when the state assumes a liberal democratic position, the mandate to uphold a particular presentation of these values gives rise to “stealthy” forms of torture; thus, “clean torture and democracy appear to go hand in hand.” ⁷ In this view, the persistence of contemporary torture is not a paradox but an adaptation.

The divergences between these accounts are important, but here I want to read across them in order to tell a slightly different story of torture. It is a “modern” story of torture, insofar as it takes place after the decline of formal judicial torture, but I do not aim to explain the shifting historical patterns in torture. Instead, these shifts form an important starting point for my argument. As Michel Foucault noted in Discipline and Punish, in the era of judicial torture, torture was “a regulated practice, obeying a well-defined procedure; the various stages, their duration, the instruments used [. . .] all this was, according to the different local practices, carefully codified.” ⁸ Torture, in other words, was limited—not necessarily in its brutality, but in its temporality. Interrogatory torture followed a schedule, which ended in a finding of innocence or guilt. Torturous punishments, too, were both extensively predefined and limited by the horizon of death. Modern torture, no matter the origin story we tell about it, is not circumscribed in this way. Possibilities like cyclical interrogations, interrogations detached from inquest, and indefinite detention arise from this shift. Torture appears as part of a system—not a legal system, but what Marnia Lazreg described as “structured environment with a texture of its own.” ⁹ In light of this shift, I will argue that the conditions of detention come to play a significant role in the experience of torture. When we focus on the conditions of detention, we encounter a version of modern torture characterized by significant continuity across moments, regime types, and state formations. In focusing on detention, I propose that a closer consideration of these continuities helps us answer the question: How does torture achieve its effects?

To answer this question, we must first ask what torture’s effects are. Here, there is significant convergence between how torturers describe their projects, torture survivor testimony, and scholarly accounts. This is especially true when we focus, as I do here, on what torture does to the tortured rather than what torture does for the state (to the extent that these two questions can be separated). For the remainder of this section, I briefly address the effects of torture as they are described across these three “archives.” I then sketch out a methodology for investigating how torture produces these effects.

The internal documents used to instruct and guide torturers offer a window into both the favored techniques of a given regime and the purposes that torturers themselves ascribe to their “work.” While I will address the question of specific techniques, here I want to focus on the goals that they describe. Thus, the S-21 Interrogator’s Manual from the Khmer Rouge emphasized beating as a torture method but insisted that the goal was “to make [the tortured] lose their will.” The point was “absolutely not to kill them” but rather to “bring them to death.” ¹⁰ The CIA’s 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, on the other hand, focuses on “clean” or “stealth” torture methods. This document—which remains the bedrock of American “enhanced interrogation” practices—explains that its goal is to teach “methods of inducing regression of the personality . . . regression is basically a loss of autonomy.” ¹¹ The manual goes on to explain that its methods are designed to destroy “man’s sense of identity [which] depends upon a continuity in his surroundings, habit, appearance, actions, and relations with others.” ¹² We might read this as an elaboration of S-21’s paradoxical claim that subjects should be “[brought] to death” rather than killed; although torture undoubtedly sometimes kills, these articulations seem to share the assumption that the goal of torture lies in the destruction of something besides biological life. Of course, there are good reasons to be skeptical of these documents’ claims: they do not offer us unmediated access to a “truth” about torture, or even about torturers’ intentions. Nevertheless, it is striking how closely survivor testimonies sometimes echo the terms laid out in these manuals. ¹³

Survivors describe, for example, being caught on the margin between life and death such that the very substance of their life and reality has fractured and fragmented. Jean Améry, tortured by the SS at Breendonk, summarized his experience this way: “Only in torture does the transformation of the person into flesh become complete . . . the tortured person is only a body, and nothing else beside that.” ¹⁴ Torture, he concludes, is the singular process by which the human is degraded into the nonhuman, cast out of human society, and stripped of the full range of human agency. His description of the tortured person as “only a body” recalls KUBARK’s emphasis on producing the “loss of autonomy” via the destruction of relationships. Through this process, Améry explains, “trust in the world” is irreparably damaged: in losing a part of themselves, the tortured also lose access to the world that once sustained them. ¹⁵ Thus, Dr. Norberto Liwsky, tortured during the Dirty War in Argentina, testified: “I began to feel that I was living alongside death. When I wasn’t being tortured I had hallucinations about death.” ¹⁶ These recurring hallucinations about death suggest a seeping slippage between reality and delusion and echo Améry’s conclusions: some part of reality seems to be lost to him.

Given these convergences, it is perhaps unsurprising that the scholarly literature on torture also contains a kind of consensus about its effects on the subject. Elaine Scarry’s highly influential account, for example, argued that “the created world of thought and feeling, all the psychological and mental content that constitutes both one’s self and one’s world [. . .] ceases to exist” when confronted with torture. ¹⁷ Ñacuñán Sáez similarly argues that contemporary torture renders the subject as a kind of caesura: “Pain, the pain inflicted by contemporary torture, does not break down a pre-existing subject. It does something more and something less than that: paradoxically, it produces the subject as already (or still) absent.” ¹⁸ Jeremy Wisnewski gives yet another close account: “Torture systematically removes the layers of meaning that make human life what it is; it destroys the trust we have in each other.” ¹⁹ Though rendered in slightly different terms, there is an obvious family resemblance between these accounts. Placing these scholarly accounts in conversation with the primary source accounts I describe previously, two main effects of torture emerge consistently. Put in the bluntest terms, they jointly argue that torture destroys a person and torture destroys a world.

The accounts on which I have drawn previously largely focus their analysis on pain and the scene of interrogation. However, as I noted, the place of interrogation in contemporary torture is unstable. The experience of this kind of torture is not predominantly organized around, for example, the dyadic relationship between interrogator and interrogee that Scarry emphasized. Examining the conditions of detention enables us to attend to the more diffuse set of relationships that constitute this system: the disembodied hand that delivers meals, the unseen officer who controls the lights on the block, the guard whose whims determine whether or not you will leave your cell today. Moreover, the effects of torture indicate the importance of taking these relationships seriously as constitutive of the experience of torture: If torture is indeed the loss of the world, we must ask what makes that world. Moreover, why would this loss of world also entail a loss of self? Centering these questions not only tracks the shift in emphasis from interrogation to the conditions of detention; it also suggests a methodology for analysis.

I propose that phenomenology offers a framework that is animated precisely by these questions about the co-constitution of the body, subject, and world. More specifically, I develop what I call, paraphrasing Sara Ahmed in another register, an “improper phenomenology” of torture. ²⁰ There are two major reasons I consider this phenomenology to be “improper.” First, I am taking phenomenological insights more literally than perhaps they were intended. I move back and forth between the destruction of the “material” body and the body schema in ways that might make a “proper” phenomenologist uneasy. I have argued elsewhere for the value of using such a strategy to examine forms of extreme violence. ²¹ Second, I am explicitly offering a political phenomenology: My focus is not on what torture can tell us about the structure of consciousness (as classical phenomenology might do) but rather on what the structure of consciousness might tell us about the political effects of torture. In this respect, my approach has strong affinities with critical and feminist phenomenology. Indeed, I will draw on both these literatures to lay out what phenomenology offers this analysis. However, I part company with most critical and feminist phenomenologists in that I will not focus on the body as the grounds for difference. Instead, I deploy phenomenology to emphasize that which is broadly shared across bodies.

Most centrally, I draw from critical phenomenology an emphasis on the constitution of the self as an ongoing and never-finished process of synthesis and integration. Frantz Fanon described this process as the “slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of the spatial and temporal world . . . a definitive structuring of the self and of the world.” ²² This structuring takes place through bodily movement, touch, and perception at every moment. It sediments (though never fully stable) into “implicit knowledge”—a kind of mapping out of the world relative to my body that enables me to be in the world. Thinking, as Fanon does, about the ways in which small and everyday movements are fundamental to the construction of “my self as a body” draws our attention to the destructive potential that attends the disruption of the actions that make up everyday life; we are constituted by the small gestures of living just as much as, if not more than, the seemingly dramatic ruptures.

Drawing on the work of Paul Schilder, Gayle Salamon notes that “the sensory impulse of the body [is] necessary but not sufficient for the production of the body schema.” ²³ Instead, the body schema also concerns the ways in which the body and the subject are mutually constitutive and inextricably interdependent. Furthermore, this relationship also points to ties extending beyond the body. Thus, the body schema “relies for its coherence on a vast storehouse of past impressions, sensations, fantasies, and memories” derived from the world in which it is embedded. ²⁴ Ahmed describes this process in terms of orientation, arguing that we are constituted not only by contact but also by the things that “pull” on us affectively: “bodies take shape,” she points out, “through trending towards objects that are reachable.” ²⁵ In this sense, we could say that an improper phenomenology is the study of the relationship between the body and its possibilities. By extension, it is also an examination of that which is rendered unreachable, and the consequences of these disruptions and limitations.

As this brief overview has already shown, many of the interlocutors on whom I draw identify the contingent and unstable entity that is generated in this dialectic between the materiality of body and world as the “body schema.” The term “body schema” emphasizes the ways the body itself is produced by and through the world beyond it rather than being defined and confined by the boundaries of the skin. However, I will more often use the feminist phenomenological language of intersubjectivity to describe this concept. The term intersubjectivity points in a slightly different direction; it emphasizes that insofar as the body schema is produced relationally, it is necessarily constituted by a relationship with something or someone else. Thus, while I understand the two terms to name inextricable aspects of the same phenomenon, they differ in emphasis: while “body schema” draws us inwards toward the structure of consciousness, the language of “intersubjectivity” insists forcefully on recalling the many other objects and bodies on which subjectivity depends. In doing so, it offers two crucial resources to this project. First, thinking intersubjectively illustrates how the loss of our relationships to other people has a pernicious effect on the subject. Second, the concept of intersubjectivity offers a framework for thinking about the effects of torture on the community beyond the detention center as intimately linked to the specific processes of torture. It reminds us that every person who is tortured and detained is not only constituted by their relationships outside the detention center—they also play a role in constituting the fabric of other people’s worlds.

In the sections that follow, I bring this methodology to bear on three of the techniques that prominently characterize detention. In the terms that torturers use to describe their methods, we might call these “spatial disorientation,” “dietary manipulation,” and “sleep deprivation.” I focus on these methods because of how prominently they appear in survivor testimony and torture manuals across cases. While I cannot substantively address each of these cases and the archives they produce here, I have chosen a “sample” of cases that cuts across many of the most common “typologies” of torture. ²⁶ For example, I incorporate cases from before and after the advent of the American War on Terror (which is sometimes treated as a watershed event in the history of modern torture). Likewise, I include states with and without liberal democratic pretentions. Furthermore, I include cases where torture was deployed against “internal” enemies and “external” enemies. In doing so, I hope to give some sense of the scope and prevalence of these methods.

As I will show in more detail below, these three tactics target some of the very ties that I will argue connect and thereby constitute body, world, and subject. Briefly, we might describe these ties as those to space, time, and community. For example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains that “I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them.” ²⁷ Space and time, in other words, are not only part of what enables us to exist but part of what makes us who and what we are. From a phenomenological perspective, they are uniquely essential to the constitution of the subject: if we do not “have” space and time, then we cannot have anything else, including a self. Likewise, the very premise of intersubjectivity is that relationships with other people are necessary for the constitution of subjectivity.

My central argument, then, is twofold. First and most importantly, I offer one answer to the question of how modern torture destroys both the subject and their world: the techniques that characterize detention work to interrupt, strain, or derange the always-ongoing process of intersubjective constitution by which the body serves as the basis for subjectivity. These techniques target the relationships that comprise the body schema in ways that destabilize both the constitution of the tortured subject themselves and the world that constitutes them. The second and relatively more modest claim is that an improperly phenomenological approach can help us trace these processes. Below, I lay these arguments out through a consideration of each of these tactics in turn.

Spatial Disorientation: Unmaking the World of the Everyday

The most blatant manifestation of torturers’ investment in spatial disorientation comes from the modes of sensory deprivation that they use during transportation to the detention center. Torturers work hard to prevent their prisoners from knowing exactly where they are being detained. For example, the chronicle of torture under Brazil’s military dictatorship, Brasil: Nunca Mais, summarizes:

Those who did survive their passage through the “aparelhos” [torture and detention centers] found it very difficult to identify them later, since hoods were placed over their heads during their stay . . . fewer still were able to commit to memory details such as access roads or time elapsed between geographical points en route. ²⁸

Survivor accounts describe the impression that they were being driven along circuitous routes, or even quite simply in circles. There may be some “practical” benefits to these tactics, especially when detention centers are situated in familiar urban geographies that the detainees might use to identify their captors. However, this practical concern does not account for the extent of the commitment to making this journey disorienting. For example, the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay dictated that detainees be transferred and processed into the detention center wearing blackout goggles, noise-blocking earmuffs, and mittens to forbid touch. ²⁹ But Moazzam Begg, transferred from Kandahar to Bagram and then to Guantánamo Bay, described how the detainees at Bagram could clearly see the whiteboard that tracked and announced detainee transfers. Moreover, far from being a secret location, guards at Bagram routinely threatened detainees with the possibility of transfer to Guantánamo Bay. As a result, when Begg himself was eventually transferred, he knew exactly where he was going. Nevertheless, he was forced into goggles, earmuffs, and a facemask for the journey (in addition to three-point restraints). Begg described this procedure as creating a suffocating feeling of being pressed from all sides:

The earmuffs pressed really hard against my ears, I found it very difficult to breathe through the facemask, and of course I couldn’t see. With the din of the engines, the pressure of the shackles around the waist, and the handcuffs, I felt I could not last long. ³⁰

Space collapsed around him, producing a form of disorientation that is quite different from the experience of being lost in the purely geographical sense. As Merleau-Ponty describes it, “What protects the sane man against delirium or hallucination, is not his critical powers, but the structure of his space.” Conversely, subjectivity is undermined by “a shrinkage in the space directly experienced, a rooting of things in our body, the overwhelming proximity of the object.” ³¹ By making every object imperceptible, sensory deprivation both brings every object too close and renders every object as inaccessibly remote. From a phenomenological perspective, this destructuring of space is profoundly destabilizing to the possibility of subjectivity. Indeed, the tortured recognize the stakes of the “structure of [their] space” to be exceptionally high. Jacobo Timerman, tortured and detained in Argentina, wrote that the experience of pain paled in comparison to being “deprived of a sense of distance and proportion.” ³² He was willing to subject himself to pain—“I must lean my face against the ice steel door . . . the cold becomes unbearable . . . the cold makes my head ache”—in exchange for the opportunity to look out into the hall of his cell block and “fill [himself] with the visible space.” ³³ He described this opportunity to reorient himself in space as revelatory and life-affirming, working powerfully against the threats to his sense of self.

At the other extreme, the “shrinkage in the space directly experienced” produces an almost parasitic relationship between the body and space. “I am the nucleus of a cube made of concrete,” wrote Branton Noojin, an American prisoner subjected to solitary confinement and sensory deprivation. Prolonged sensory deprivation collapsed the distinction between self and world. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, the cell became “root[ed]” in his body such that he perceived no existence separable from it. The result undermined his sense of the very possibility of living: “This cell,” he concluded, “feeds on my heartbeat.” ³⁴

Sensory deprivation is not the only technique that manipulates spatial relations in this unmooring way. The forceable imposition of certain sensory experiences (i.e., the creation of undesirable relations with other objects) can mirror and exacerbate this effect. Therefore, while my focus here is not on interrogatory torture, a brief digression into one aspect of interrogatory torture is instructive: torturers commonly deploy everyday objects in the process of torture. In his vast accounting of torture methods, Rejali argued that these methods catch on in part because they are either easy to transport to, or readily available in, any location. They are also easily excused, in the case of any unexpected oversight: How can the presence of a bathtub be called evidence of torture? ³⁵ The use of everyday objects thus protects the anonymity of torture units. But viewed through the framework I have proposed, it becomes clear that there is far more than convenience at stake in the use of seemingly innocent household items for inflicting pain. This kind of torture resignifies these objects to create an enduring sense of being out of place. Each encounter with these everyday objects is a reminder of suffering, and these encounters are almost impossible to avoid. These recurring reminders condition the way that torture survivors can (and cannot) interact with the world around them. Scarry described this process as the “de-objectifying” of objects:

Made to participate in the annihilation of the prisoners, made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no bed . . . the de-objectifying of the objects, the unmaking of the made, is a process externalizing the way in which the person’s pain causes his world to disintegrate. ³⁶

Once these objects are repurposed for torture, they effectively cease to exist; when doors become a source of pain, rather than arbiters of safety, privacy, and possibility, they cease to be doors. These objects are, as Scarry puts it, de-objectified. But the loss of the door is bigger than the loss of a single object, because the door (or window, wall, bathtub, refrigerator, chair, or bed) is not just an object. As everyday objects—objects that are ubiquitous and seemingly essential—these objects constitute space. Put another way, these objects are part of what turns space into place: they condition and enable our relationships to space and give those relationships meaning and substance. When these objects are corrupted, stripped of their purpose, and converted into objects of pain, we are not instantaneously freed of our relationships to them. They still condition our relationships to space, but the effect is now quite different.

Mauricio Rosencof, a Tupamaro captured and detained by Uruguayan security forces for nearly fifteen years, described how the experience of torture left him paralyzed when confronted with ordinary, quotidian objects:

“Once we got out, we were suddenly confronted with all these problems,” Mauricio Rosencof commented, “Ridiculous problems – doorknobs, for instance, I had no reflex any longer to reach for the knobs of doors. I hadn’t had to – hadn’t been allowed to – for over thirteen years. I’d come to a closed door and find myself momentarily stymied – I couldn’t remember what to do next. Or how to make a dark room light.” ³⁷

To use Fanon’s terms, detention has replaced the forms of “implicit knowledge” that are available to him. Years in confinement erased the automatic reflexes used in free movement; years in darkness forbade the muscle memories of flipping a light switch. As Rosencof’s implicit knowledge was distorted, his motion through space was arrested. The detention center has been integrated into his body schema, continuously forbidding the motion that his predetention implicit knowledge enabled. In the absence of these reflexes, Rosencof’s world has been remade. If, as I have argued, our relationship to space is one of the fundamental ties that constitute us, then this destruction of space is also necessarily destabilizing to the subject. The ongoing dialectic between body and space, required for the constitution of the subject, does not “break” in the sense of disappearing altogether but rather becomes corrosive and destabilizing. Clearly, then, this kind of disorientation also has a temporal component: by integrating the conditions of detention into the body schema, torture stays with the body. Other aspects of detention prefigure and extend this temporal warping. It is to these conditions that I now turn.

The Time of Torture: Circadian Rhythms and Sociality

Recounting his experience of detention, Timerman described the sense that time itself had become an object that filled his cell: “only time remained, all of time, time on all sides and in every cranny of the cell, time suspended on the walls, on the ground, in my hands, only time.” ³⁸ This description bears a striking resemblance to accounts of sensory deprivation. Experienced as nearly material, time presses in, leaving him no room to move and breathe. At other moments, however, he describes time as a vacuum; a void that demanded to be filled, and one for which he had only one solution:

suicide was the only thing that could share the long endless stretch of time, made up of time and more time, of interrogation and time, of cold and time, of hunger and time, of tears and time. How to fill those orifices of time if not with the preserved fruit of suicide? How to modify the rigid endless structure of time if not with the unforeseen originality of suicide? ³⁹

Despite the stark divergence between these two descriptions, they have a great deal in common. Most obviously, in both cases time is experienced as destructive. More specifically, time is tangible. Its impositions are sensible, felt at the point where body and world meet. Furthermore, in both cases the site of harm is a kind of perversion in the relationship between time and the body such that time destroys the body rather than synthesizing with it. Time threatens to undo the body, whether by crushing it or by demanding self-destruction. Timerman ascribes this effect to prolonged detention itself. However, torturers also use more explicit strategies to disrupt the relationship between the body and time. ⁴⁰

KUBARK and its inheritors offer virtually identical descriptions of the techniques for enforcing temporal disorientation: dietary manipulation and sleep deprivation. ⁴¹ The Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for Camp Delta explained the purpose of these techniques concisely:

The point of the Behavior Management Plan is to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process. It concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering the dependence of the detainee on his interrogator. ⁴²

This claim (which strongly echoes the arguments raised in both KUBARK and elsewhere in the “torture memos”) lays out a presumed chain of causes and effects: sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation will produce disorientation, disorientation will produce a sense of isolation, and this sense of isolation will “break” the detainee, enabling the interrogator to present themselves as the only “anchor” that might hold the world together. It is not immediately clear, however, why the disorientation caused by sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation would induce a sense of isolation. This presumed link implies that straining relationships with time will degrade (or at least, render inaccessible) one’s sense of connection to other people.

In the following section, I trace the ways in which dietary manipulation and sleep deprivation enact the promised disorientation while also identifying a wider array of what we might call intersubjective harms associated with these techniques. In particular, I argue that these two tactics both strain relationships to time through disorientation and strain the relationships between people, thus forming the missing link in the chain of effects the SOP describes. A phenomenological account elucidates how these techniques intervene in both these kinds of relationships, as well as how these forms of relation are themselves interlinked.

Sleep Deprivation: The Phenomenology of Night

Sleep deprivation seems to occupy a special place in the torturer’s arsenal. The Office of Legal Counsel memorandum outlining the CIA’s War on Terror interrogation plan, for example, lauds sleep deprivation as “the most indispensable [technique] to the effectiveness of the interrogation program.” In fact, the memo goes on to assert that sleep deprivation is absolutely essential to interrogation, since “its absence would, in all likelihood, render the remaining techniques of little value.” ⁴³ What is behind this exorbitant praise? What precisely does sleep deprivation achieve that makes it so essential?

Sleep plays two essential roles in the constitution and stabilization of the subject. The first corresponds to the phenomenological understanding of sleep as a necessary source of respite and distance from the world—a distance that enables the subject to exist. The second concerns what we might think of as the regulation of “internal clocks.” Previously, I quoted Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the “overwhelming proximity of the object” was destructive of stable subjectivity. A necessary corollary to this claim is the idea that the stable subject (what Merleau-Ponty called “the sane man”) has ways of maintaining their distance from other objects and thereby upholding the sanctity and structure of their space. Sleep is perhaps the paradigmatic example of how this distance is maintained. In sleep, we exist untethered from the world beyond us, or perhaps more precisely, we exist temporarily in a world that is entirely self-generated: “I hold the world present to me only in order to keep it at a distance, and I revert to the subjective sources of my existence.” ⁴⁴ Lisa Guenther argues that these moments of self-containment are necessary for the subject. ⁴⁵ To sleep is to be able to withdraw from the world and into one’s self while still being connected to the world, knowing it is there, and being prepared to resume active engagement with it. Sleep, in other words, both mimics and enacts the structure of sanity. We need the distance that night provides—and the knowledge that it will end—to understand ourselves as subjects that are constituted by the world rather than overwhelmed, and therefore unmade, by it.

The process of alternation between sleep and waking, between night and day, is key here. In this cycle of the world being lost to me and then rematerializing intact, the body becomes attuned to a kind of rhythm. This is one of the bodily processes that calibrates our “internal clocks,” keeping track of both the passage of time and our own position within it and storing that information within the body itself. Studies on blindness and circadian rhythm disorders usefully illuminate this relationship. These studies argue that humans do not only sleep because they are tired but at least in part because the body recognizes a particular time as “night”—the time for sleeping. ⁴⁶ This is not an intellectual recognition but a sensory one: the turn from light to darkness that we experience every day calibrates one’s internal clock and allows us to identify the appropriate time for sleep. Deprived of this sensory information (not only by blindness but also through interventions like exposure to constant light or darkness), the body doesn’t “know” when to sleep, even if it is tired. Indeed, when fatigue cannot be confirmed by—or worse, conflicts with—impressions about the right time to sleep, the body is thrown into chaos. Sleep becomes strained, disrupted, or even impossible. Even predictable fluctuations in the body’s cycles, such as those caused by the transitions between day and night shifts, are incredibly disruptive. ⁴⁷ Thus, making the provision of sleep unpredictable threatens to dismantle this internal clock. Effectively, the body loses “touch” with time. From a phenomenological perspective, the loss of contact with time is not only the loss of one of the body’s anchors but the loss of one of its constitutive parts. The results of sleep deprivation—delusions, hallucinations, suicidal ideation—emphasize this point. These symptoms mark the destabilization of the subject that takes place when the bonds between body and world are strained or broken.

Dietary Manipulation: Taste, Time, Community

Food, like sleep, provides a point of contact between the body and time. As the KUBARK manual explicitly notes, food is directly related to one’s bodily regulation, which means that the irregular provision of meals can easily desync the body from the world on which it relies for its intersubjective constitution. But the timing of meals is not the only aspect of dietary manipulation. The substance, and even the flavoring, of these meals are also subject to manipulation in ways that are consequential for the stability of the detainee’s sense of self, of agency, and of situatedness. The OLC-CIA memos’ prescribed method for dietary manipulation involves replacing a prisoner’s food with a diet of bland, gray, calorically dense liquid in quantities measured to maintain predetermined target weights. ⁴⁸ On its face, this may not sound like torture. According to the memos, these detainees are getting enough calories to sustain themselves. This liquid diet, however, does not supply the embodied experience of eating. This distinction is phenomenologically important. Like watching daytime darken into night, the act of eating is a way that the body experiences and recognizes the passage of time. Calories may provide the body with the energy to undertake its basic functions, but eating is part of the infrastructure that directs the body to recognize what those tasks are and when to perform them. The CIA’s liquid diet does not appear to fulfill this requirement. Although the specific biological effects of this liquid diet are difficult to ascertain, many detainees reported dramatic declines in their health, including weight loss far beyond the parameters the memo defines as acceptable.

This unexpected weight loss is a reminder that food must be something more than calories to fully and truly sustain human life. Food is a manifestation of both personal and community identity. It is both a symbol and a material manifestation of care, which means that it can reinvigorate intersubjective ties as well as strain them. For example, Sergio Hugo Schilman, detained and tortured in Argentina, related in his testimony an instance when he “received something from home; a plate of food.” ⁴⁹ Despite his incredibly bleak situation, he described that “this calmed me down a bit because then I knew that both my family and friends were doing something.” The plate of food not only nourished him but revived his connection to the outside world and his sense of identity. Put in phenomenological terms, we might say that food is an object that carries and communicates to us the “impressions” of other bodies—of the other people with whom we are or might be in relation. We can “sense” these other bodies through this material manifestation of their act of care, even when we cannot see them. In other words, this plate of food works directly counter to the interrogator’s goals of “cut[ting him] off from the knowledge and the reassuring” and “plun[ging] him into the strange.” ⁵⁰

Thinking about these aspects of dietary manipulation through a phenomenological lens helps us see how what we might call the biological and social facets of food are interrelated, and how they are both potential points of vulnerability before the torturer who aims to use dietary manipulation to undermine a detainees’ subjectivity. We can examine these links more closely by turning to an example that may be somewhat surprising in its importance: the use (or misuse) of salt. Consider the testimony of Reverand Patrick Rice, tortured by Argentine security forces in 1976. Reverend Rice was an Irish Catholic priest who was seized off the streets and tortured over the course of two months, until intervention from the Irish government secured his release. He was subjected to the extensive use of the picana, a six-pronged cattle prod used for electrical torture. On top of his own pain, he felt responsible for the torture of a young woman picked up along with him, who he suggests may have also been raped in captivity. His testimony details this abuse at length, describing its excesses and lingering effects. But in the midst of all this, he also described in detail the food his captors provided at each detention center where he was held:

The food in Coordinación Federal consisted of mate tea without milk or sugar, and a little bread in the morning, boiled pasta, sometimes without salt, and bread at mid-day, and polenta (also without salt), and bread at night. Sometimes, they added salt and sauce, but very rarely [. . .] The food in Devoto was very bad and very greasy. In La Plata, it was much better and was adequate. ⁵¹

In fact, his report is representative of a broader trend. CONADEP included an entire section on food in their report on the Dirty War, explaining that much as Reverend Rice described, in the detention centers “[t]here was no meat and the food had no flavour at all; sometimes it might be very salty, other times without any salt.” ⁵² The commentary on salt stands out in these accounts for its specificity and the frequency with which it occurs. Equally striking, packets of salt are listed in their own category as a “comfort item” that is “authorized for detainee possession as a reward for positive behavior” (and conversely, which is denied to “noncooperative prisoners”) in Camp Delta’s written procedures for fostering detainees’ psychological dependence on their captors. ⁵³ What is at work here?

Recipe writer and chef Samin Nosrat explains in her highly influential cooking and food science book, Salt, Fat, Heat, Acid:

[Salt] is one of several dozen essential nutrients without which we cannot survive. The human body can’t store much salt, so we need to consume it regularly in order to be able to carry out basic biological processes, such as maintaining proper blood pressure and water distribution in the body, delivering nutrients to and from cells, nerve transmission, and muscle movement. In fact, we’re hardwired to crave salt to ensure we get enough of it. The lucky consequence of this is that salt makes almost everything taste better to us, so it’s hardly a chore to add it to our food. In fact, by enhancing flavor, salt increases the pleasure we experience as we eat. ⁵⁴

Although we may not recognize it as such, the craving for salt is not merely a matter of preference. Living organisms have a biological need for a certain amount of salt. Salt regulates the body and makes it work properly. What this means is that salt not only enhances the pleasure we might derive from eating, but a lack of salt may well cause us pain, even if we are not easily able to identify its absence as the culprit. And because “the human body can’t store much salt,” salt serves a kind of time-keeping function in the body as well. Our supplies regularly run out and need to be replenished. This need for frequent replenishing also positions salt as a kind of social object. There is no way to “hoard” salt within one’s own body; we must constantly seek it from without, and most likely that will involve collaboration or exchange with other people.

In his multidisciplinary account of proverbs and traditions in Salt: Grain of Life, Pierre Laszlo arrives at a similar conclusion. He finds that salt frequently serves as a sign and site of human connectivity: “salt being given and received is an indicator of the rich social relations by which outsiders integrate themselves into a gathering or, at the very least, are able to strike up an acquaintance.” ⁵⁵ Salt, in other words, is a way into community: a starting point or building block for a relation of mutuality. From the vantage of improper phenomenology, we can see how biological imperative and social meaning are woven together: salt works on what bodies have in common at the cellular level, and thus acts on the limited but fundamental sameness between them. At the same time, as an object which can be used, given, exchanged, and withdrawn, it works within the distance between bodies—the separation that is necessary for relationships to exist. Lazslo concludes that salt “symbolizes social harmony,” ⁵⁶ but in fact, we might go one step further: salt materially manifests the possibilities of human interconnectedness. The disruption, absence, or misuse of salt, therefore, has broader-reaching consequences than flavor alone: it signifies a disruption in the possibility of connection and sociality. The use of salt for dietary manipulation, therefore, disrupts two crucial components of the subject: it distorts both the body’s relationship with time and its feeling of being in (at least potential) relation to other people.

All of these techniques, then, have aligned effects when examined through the lens of an improper phenomenology. The intersubjectively constituted body takes shape through the relationships that substantiate it. Not every relationship is equally essential to the constitution of this body, but phenomenologically, we can identify certain ties or anchors that are absolutely fundamental to it. The destruction of these ties may not materially destroy the body, but by disrupting the dialectic between body and world, they undermine the body’s capacity to serve as the foundation for subjectivity. Among these essential relationships, we find the relationships to space, time, and communities of care. This list is not exhaustive, but it does name an important set of constitutive relations. As I have demonstrated previously, these are precisely the relationships that are targeted by these conditions of detention. Moreover, the techniques I outline here frequently disrupt these relationships in complex and overlapping combinations. Thus, the de-objectification of objects is both destructive of space and has a distorting effect on temporality; dietary manipulation strains the body’s relationships to time and sense of community alike.

The relationships that constitute the body, and through the body enable the subject, are always tangled, unstable, and multivalent. These qualities are a source of vulnerability, but they are also potential sources of resilience. Nothing, including torture, can fully fix these relations in place, which means that possibilities of reconsolidation and repair remain open even when they are fraught. By way of conclusion, I want to briefly address these possibilities and their limitations. In doing so, I also address at greater length the ways in which torture’s effects can extend beyond the detention center.

Torture and Repair Beyond the Detention Center

The lingering effects of the techniques I have described here are clearly specified in survivor testimony and post-release medical documentation. For example, a post-release medical report on a woman who survived long-term detention and torture in Brazil noted that she presented:

an acute confused state, temporal disorientation, loss of sense of reality, and ideas of self-extermination. [. . .] she was unable to distinguish the real from the imaginary, and could not say precisely for how long she remained in that state. ⁵⁷

These symptoms contain clear echoes of the tactics described previously: the woman’s sense of time, space, and her place within them have been destabilized. She is plagued by thoughts of “self-extermination”—a fantasy of completing the undoing of the subject that began in the detention center. Indeed, medical testimony describes an extremely high incidence of suicidal thoughts, fantasies, and tendencies among these survivors, who are trying to make lives after the “loss of sense of reality”: they are trying to rebuild themselves after the intersubjective ties that both constituted and stabilized their subjectivity were violently undermined. How, then, can we think beyond the confines and the consequences of the detention center?

The framework that I offer here enables us to think beyond the detention center in two ways. First, it elucidates a method for thinking through the ways that torture affects those who never directly experience it: if torture targets the intersubjective ties that constitute the tortured person’s subjectivity, then we should consider those on the “other end” of these intersubjective ties to be objects of torture, albeit in different ways. Second, it points us toward a frame for thinking about recovery and repair, which aligns with and reinforces the ways in which trauma-focused analyses have understood the possibilities for individual and collective healing in the aftermath of torture.

First, what effects does torture have on those who never directly experience it? Lawrence Weschler describes a conversation with a group of psychoanalysts in Montevideo, Uruguay, who had survived the military dictatorship without being detained and tortured. One of them, Ricardo, explained the transformation that he underwent as friends and family members disappeared all around him:

[I]t wasn’t just that you stopped talking about certain things with other people—you stopped thinking them yourself . . . The suspicions of everyone else, the sense that they were monitoring everything—or else just reflex of self-protection, how it was better not to extend one’s affections to people who might at any moment be picked up and taken away. ⁵⁸

Ricardo’s recollections illuminate some of the mechanisms by which this subject-undermining effect extends beyond the torture chambers. Certainly, the dictadura severed relational ties by eliminating (or exiling, or disappearing) the objects of those ties. If, as I have argued, these relationships are part of what constitutes the self, then their loss is itself a violation of the subject. Furthermore, Ricardo notes that they were unable to supplement these broken bonds with new connections, since suspicion and the mandates of self-protection forbade the trust needed to forge new relationships. These suspicions of strangers and fears that new friends “might at any moment be picked up and taken away” are direct consequences of living alongside torture. But perhaps more pressingly, the presence of torture in the community also threatened subjectivity in more subtle ways. As Ricardo described, “it wasn’t just that you stopped talking about certain things with other people—you stopped thinking them yourself.” This is not merely a breakdown in the prospects of communication but a fracturing of something interior to the subject. One is compelled to constrain one's sense of the possible by limiting one’s own ideas and desires. Salamon argues that “withdrawing from desire, attempting to stage its death, inevitably involves a truncation of one’s own capacities to exist outside oneself.” ⁵⁹ If desire is part of what constitutes the self by orienting it toward the other, to “kill” these desires necessarily entails mangling some part of the self. In Ricardo’s account, then, it appears that those outside the detention center were paradoxically compelled to participate in a kind of self-destruction precisely as a form of self-defense.

Living alongside torture also changes the way each subject relates to time. Ricardo concluded his reminiscences by saying, “That was then and this is now—and the two seem utterly divided one from the other. Today, I cannot even remember what it was like then. Then I could not even dare to fantasize what it might be like now.” ⁶⁰ In some ways, this remark reflects the unimaginability of the future in a society marked by torture: it is difficult to imagine a world free from the threat of violence when violence is intrinsic to the structures of everyday life. What is more striking, however, is the persistence of this divide between “then” and “now.” Even after the violence has passed—violence that never touched him directly—he cannot knit past, present, and future into a continuous narrative. The temporal warping enacted by torture, therefore, seems to exceed the confines of the detention center in more ways than one.

Attending to the ways that torture reaches beyond the detention center, however, also begins to illuminate some pathways for repairing the specific kinds of violence that torture enacts. Torture is traumatic in the classical sense, and like with other modes of trauma, there are possibilities for “re-integrating” the self that has been fractured. The subject that has been damaged or denied through torture is never a foregone conclusion. If torture undermines the subject by damaging the intersubjective bonds that constitute it, it follows that rebuilding and reinvigorating these bonds might work to restabilize this subject within its network of relations. After all, the bonds between people are not merely fodder for the torturer’s violence. The tortured person, too, may “reach” through these bonds as a means of survival, and even of self-assertion. Detainees at Guantánamo Bay, for example, proved to be startlingly prolific poets—etching their verses into Styrofoam cups when denied access to pen and paper. Ariel Dorfman interpreted these poems as “breathing in and breathing out. . . . Poetry as a call to those who breathe the same air and to also breathe the same verses, to bridge the gap between bodies and between cultures and between warring parties.” ⁶¹ In this interpretation, these poems worked to establish a field of relations within the detention center itself that might refuse the conditions of disorientation and atomization that detention aimed to create. Similarly, in his study of violence in Northern Ireland, Allen Feldman argued that the creation of oral history pushed back against “the shrinkage of the space of political enactment” that violence performs. Through this process, “the body fragmented is reassembled, and this act, the weaving of a new body through language, as much as any act of violence, testifies to the emergence of political agency.” ⁶² In the act of extending oneself toward others and finding that extension affirmed, the ties that substantiate the body are reconstituted, with the result that a “new body” can coalesce as the foundation for agency and subjectivity. Clearly, these forms of self-assertion and repair are not individual endeavors but rather work precisely on and through the ties between bodies. Community, including community beyond the detention center, therefore, has a necessary role to play. At the collective level, forms of “memory work” can rebuild communities in ways that reintegrate the tortured by recognizing rather than abandoning or covering over the losses they have been made to endure. ⁶³

Still, I think it is important to be careful here: healing and resistance alike are always possibilities to some extent, particularly insofar as the body provides the foundation for each of these ways of mitigating, undoing, or redefining the effects of torture. Precisely because the intersubjective constitution of the body is always ongoing, it remains possible that the ties strained or destroyed by torture could be reconstituted, or at least constituted differently. But these possibilities are elusive and often ambivalent. Part of what animates this inquiry is my disquieting sense, having read both torturers’ accounts of their own activities and many thousands of pages of testimony from torture survivors, that torture might do what it promises (or threatens) to do. It is for precisely this reason that I argue it is essential to understand the mechanisms by which torture operates. Thinking phenomenologically about torture enables us to read torture’s effects as simultaneously constitutive of individual subjects and of collectives. It also helps us attend to the multiple and sometimes nonlinear timelines that characterize both torture’s violence and efforts at repair. In doing so, we are able to move between questions of individual rehabilitation, community repair, and political agency without minimizing torture’s destructive effects. In this sense, a phenomenological framework offers a way of taking seriously the harms of torture without ceding the last word to the torturer.