Torture and Hyperbole

Abstract

There is something about the topic of torture that makes discussion of it tend toward hyperbole. In this regard, such discussion mimics in an unsettling way the drive toward absoluteness or hyperbole that animates the practice of torture itself. Analyses of torture that inflate the clash of bodies and interests in modern societies into something ascribable to quasi-subjects who approach power and powerlessness asymtotically remain entangled in the very fantasies about soverigns and victims that underpin torture itself as a symbolic practice. The result is a “left anti-humanitarianism” that, by exaggerating the co-implication of sovereign and victim, ends up condemning the victim along with his torturer.