Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma, and Affect in Literature 9781501315800, 9781501315831, 9781501315824

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Gesturing the Unrepresentable
1. Tortured Bodies
2. Reading Torture
3. Seeing Torture
4. Writing Trauma
5. Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma
6. Writing Torturous Affect
Conclusion: Speaking Beyond Words
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Gestures of Testimony

Gestures of Testimony Torture, Trauma, and Affect in Literature Michael Richardson

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Michael Richardson, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Richardson, Michael, 1980- , author. Title: Gestures of testimony : torture, trauma, and affect in literature / Michael Richardson. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015046296 (print) | LCCN 2016009283 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501315800 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501315817 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501315824 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Torture in literature. | Psychic trauma in literature. | Affect (Psychology) in literature. | Torture in motion pictures. | Psychic trauma in motion pictures. | Affect (Psychology) in motion pictures. | Literature, Modern--History and criticism. | Motion pictures--Social aspects. | Torture--Moral and ethical aspects. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory. Classification: LCC PN56.T62 R53 2016 (print) | LCC PN56.T62 (ebook) | DDC 809/.933552--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046296 ISBN:

HB: PB: ePub: ePDF:

978-1-5013-1580-0 978-1-5013-3940-0 978-1-5013-1581-7 978-1-5013-1582-4

Cover designer: Liron Gilenberg/www.ironicitalics.com Cover image © Getty Images Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Where is the world to save us from torture? Where is the world to save us from fire and sadness? —Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, Guantánamo detainee #156, from his “Hunger Strike Poem”

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Gesturing the Unrepresentable

1

1 2 3 4 5 6

Tortured Bodies Reading Torture Seeing Torture Writing Trauma Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma Writing Torturous Affect

25 49 75 99 119 137

Conclusion: Speaking Beyond Words

159

Notes Bibliography Index

167 193 209

Acknowledgments Much of this book was written and researched at the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. My deepest thanks go to Anna Gibbs, who led me to affect and whose own writings on the subject are among the most insightful, embodied, and innovative going around. Along the way, many Writing & Society colleagues offered insight, comment, or support: Maria Angel, Jesse Blackadder, Felicity Castegna, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Milissa Deitz, Chris Fleming, Suzanne Gapps, James Gourley, Ivor Indyk, Melinda Jewell, Gail Jones, Nick Jose, Sara Knox, Annee Lawrence, Walter Mason, Matt McGuire, Rachel Morley, Irini Savvides, and Claire Scobie. I am also indebted to Anthony Uhlmann, the Centre’s Director, for his assistance in connecting me with Bloomsbury. Magdalena Zolkos introduced me to thinkers who have proven deeply influential in my work, and, along with Dan Binns, read and commented insightfully on the chapter “Seeing Torture.” Meera Atkinson, with whom I co-edited the collection Traumatic Affect, could not have been a more generous interlocutor, friend, and comrade in affective arms. Many thanks to Bloomsbury for their wonderful support. Haaris Naqvi was enthusiastic from the first moment and Mary Al-Sayed’s swift and detailed advice made all the difference. Thanks as well to the design team for a stunning cover, and to production and marketing for doing the hard work of turning a manuscript into a book people buy and read. I am most grateful to Jean Maria Arrigo from the Project on Ethics & Art in Testimony in Irvine, California, and Ion Iacos from the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims in Copenhagen, Denmark, for their assistance in the early stages of research. John Frow and Stephen Muecke challenged me to be more nuanced and focused. One of the readers for Bloomsbury led me to the intersection of human rights and literature, which strengthened this book immeasurably. In earlier academic lives, Sue Kossew, Bill Ashcroft, Bruce Johnson, and Barry Buzan were crucial teachers. More recently, Andrew Murphie, Rachel Morley, Katrina Schlunke, and Anna Gibbs have been invaluable mentors. Family and friends in Australia and Canada were immensely supportive and, most importantly, offered an escape from thinking about unpleasant things. While Mortimer never expressed much interest in torture, affect, or trauma,

x Acknowledgments

he was a constant and consistently snoring companion for much of this book’s writing. Thanks to my father Sandy, brother Daniel, and especially my mother, Catherine Camden-Pratt, who read and commented on multiple drafts. This project would never have begun, let alone been completed, without the love and unwavering belief of the very brilliant Zoë Horn. Parts of this book were previously published in different forms and I am grateful to the publishers for granting permission to reprint. The chapter “Writing Trauma” amalgamates material from “Writing Trauma: Affected in the Act” (2013) in New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice & Theory of Creative Writing, 10:2, and “Who Speaks? Torture and the Ethics of Voice” (2012) in TEXT, 16:1. The chapter “Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma” appeared as “‘Every Moment is Two Moments’: Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma in Anne Michaels’s ‘Fugitive Pieces’” (2015), in Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, 3:1. An earlier version of “Writing Torturous Affect” was published as “Torturous Affect: Writing and the Problem of Pain” (2013), in a collection I co-edited with Meera Atkinson, Traumatic Affect, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and is published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. My thanks to Taylor & Francis, University of Nebraska Press, and Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Thank you also to the University of Iowa Press and Marc Falkoff of the Center for Constitutional Rights for the epigraph to this book, from “Hunger Strike Poem” by Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, and “Death Poem” by Jumah al-Dossari, reprinted in full in the chapter “Reading Torture.” Permission to use material as chapter epigraphs was kindly granted by Penguin/Random House and Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency (Tony Lagouranis, epigraph to Chapter 2), Duke University Press (Anne McClintock, epigraph to Chapter 3), Zone Books (Giorgio Agamben, epigraph to Chapter 5), and Bloomsbury (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, epigraph to Chapter 3, and Anne Michaels, epigraph to Chapter 5). Finally, I want to acknowledge the known and unknown detainees of the war on terror, those who have written or spoken of their experiences, and those who have not and will never have the chance. Sadly, there are too many to name them all, but the writing of Murat Kurnaz, Moazzam Begg, David Hicks, Jumah al-Dossari, and Sami al-Haj figured largest in my world. I also want to pay my deepest respects to the lawyers, activists, and dissenters within the United States military and government who sought justice against the odds. A different kind of price was and continues to be paid by interrogators, some of whom became torturers, and that too deserves acknowledgment.

Introduction: Gesturing the Unrepresentable

September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday. On the following Sunday Vice President Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press, the preferred talk show of Washington insiders. “We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will,” he said. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.”1 Even now, well over a decade after Cheney spoke those words, the full extent of their meaning remains out of reach. Even after the images of Camp X-Ray and the macabre brutality of Abu Ghraib, after the countless articles, books, and films, what the dark side wrought cannot be known completely. Neither the top-secret Torture Memos, first leaked under President Bush and then released by order of the Obama Administration, nor the various investigations of generals, nor even the declassified executive summary of the 6,700-page report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Detention and Interrogation Program convey in full the price paid for that time in the shadows. Testimony of detainees and interrogators, of prisoners and guards, of victims and perpetrators, tells much but not all. Or, rather, their testimony tells us everything—but not always in ways that we can grasp. It speaks as much in silence as in words. But there are things we know all too well. We know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of 9/11, was strapped to an inclined board with cloth wrapped across his face and water was poured onto his face to simulate drowning. He was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 alone. We know that at Bagram Air Base, a taxi driver named Dilawar was struck with batons until his legs were jellied pulp and his heart stopped. He was innocent of any crime. We know that a man named Gul Raman died in the CIA’s “Salt Pit” prison just north of Kabul and that the intelligence agents responsible for his death were promoted, not punished. We know that others died at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, across Afghanistan and Iraq, and at CIA “black sites” scattered across the globe. We know that untold numbers were beaten, forced into stress positions, deprived of sleep, assaulted by loud music, stripped naked and humiliated, and threatened with worse. We know others were rendered to Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere

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to be tortured. We know that certain acts were authorized by a series of secret memoranda drafted and signed at the highest levels of the Justice Department, while others were not. We know practices euphemized as “enhanced interrogation” and intended for a handful of CIA “High Value Detainees” soon surfaced at military sites across Iraq and Afghanistan, passed on by word of mouth, copied from Special Forces troops or intelligence agents, and taught, craft-like, to new interrogators and guards. We know that states around the world, from democracies such as the UK, Germany, Canada, and Australia to dictatorships across the Middle East and Central Asia, aided, abetted, and even carried out terrible acts as partners in the all-consuming, all-justifying war on terror. We know that even before the Abu Ghraib photographs appeared on 60 Minutes on April 28, 2004, the United States was well and truly a torture nation. What we don’t know is what literature might tell us about the tortures of the war on terror. Literature and humanitarianism share an interwoven history, and storytelling is inseparable from the testimonial narratives at the heart of human rights work. Yet literature offers something different to such testimony; literature is less definitive, more loaded with potential meanings. Not immediate, but eventual. Not concrete, but gestural. This book inquires into the experience of torture, its relation to language, power, and the world. It asks how literature might bear witness to the tortures carried out in the wake of 9/11, how it might gesture the unknowable, how it might enact the unrepresentable. How, paradoxically, literary writing might convey more of experience than words can represent. Torture proves a slippery concept, especially for law. For an act to be torture under the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT), it must meet certain criteria, but to do so it must bring the pain of torture and the intention of the perpetrator into language. Law wants language to be more precise than it can be, particularly when it comes to describing and determining experience. Article 1.1 of the CAT defines torture as: Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an



Introduction: Gesturing the Unrepresentable

3

official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Ambiguities abound. What makes pain and suffering “severe”? How can pain be measured? Can one pain, perhaps the most intensely personal and particular of experiences, be compared to another with any certainty? How can intention to intimidate or coerce information or confession be proven? Where can evidence be found in the chaos of war and the dark places of warzones, authoritarian regimes, and secret prisons? This is not, of course, to say that convictions for torture are impossible. Far from it. But these ambiguities expose the limits of language to represent experience in one of its most extreme forms. Writing in secret for the Bush Administration, the authors of the Torture Memos exploited these ambiguities to define certain coercive acts as something other than torture and, in doing so, to define torture into near non-existence. Even the so-called Senate Torture Report, the declassified but significantly redacted executive summary of the “Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” displays considered ambivalence. Chairman Diane Feinstein notes in her foreword that, while it is her “personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured,” the report itself is careful not to assert torture but rather excess in the use of coercive interrogation techniques and unacceptable conditions of confinement.2 Definitions are also found outside the law. In his encyclopedic 2007 book Torture and Democracy, Darius Rejali describes torture as “the systematic infliction of physical torment on detained individuals by state officials for police purposes, for confession, information, or intimidation.”3 He cautions against a too-broad definition, since this risks conflating torture as an instrument of institutionalized authority with the acts, for example, of homicidal psychopaths. Edward Peters, who wrote one of the first extensive histories of torture, shares Rejali’s concerns. He notes that the word can easily become “a moralsentimental term designating the infliction of suffering, however defined, upon anyone for any purpose—or for no purpose.”4 While Rejali’s definition carefully refers to “physical torment,” others have sought to emphasize the psychological dimensions. Linguist Almerindo Ojeda defines psychological torture by cataloging various techniques, for instance; an attempt at a definition by extension.5 While there are clinical and therapeutic reasons for distinguishing between psychological and physical torture, Rejali points out that “the fact that a

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physical technique leaves no marks does not make it a psychological technique.” Sleep deprivation, for instance, has “specific effects on the body’s physiological processes” and stress positions, including forced standing, cause immense physical pain.6 Purely psychological tortures might include sexual humiliation, for example, or threats of pain, but rarely are such acts isolated from more physical tortures: beatings, stress positions, or sensory assault with strobe lights and deafening music. Yet this distinction between the psychological and the physical has minimal currency in considering the relation between torture and language more deeply—and especially not once the body is understood in terms outside clinical or medical discourse. By contrast, Rejali distinguishes between clean and scarring techniques.7 Clean tortures leave the body unmarked; scarring ones do not. Typically, clean tortures might include submersion in water or sleep deprivation, while scarring might encompass whipping, heavy beating or cutting. In this distinction, the emphasis is on what torture leaves behind, on the evidence it leaves visible upon or within the body. By contrast, “physical” and “psychological” draw a categorical distinction based on both the technique (it must fit one category or the other) and its target (problematic, because body and mind are impossible to untangle). Crucially, the clean/scarring distinction allows similar acts to slide across the contestable categories of “physical” and “psychological.” Thus the blows from a fist delivered just so might leave no marks, while intense electrocution might burn the skin and leaving lasting remains. Marks left on bodies provide evidence of torture—skin left clean carries no such trace. Not surprisingly, the tortures employed by the United States since 9/11 have, for the most part, been clean rather than scarring. Yet in not leaving marks, such tortures take up the body whole and make the entirety of being their victim. Why torture in this way? What was its purpose? Was it solely used to extract information or confession, or to intimidate enemies? Did the United States torture only to prevent future attacks and to capture those who orchestrated 9/11? Torture, as Rejali shows, can effectively intimidate and produce false confessions, but is far less reliable in producing useful information, particularly in the short timeframes that emergency situations often require.8 As the Senate report into the CIA program shows, torture failed to produce reliable and timely intelligence and instead often resulted in false or misleading information. While the torturous regimes of the last century rarely publicly admitted to their acts, torture was almost always an open secret, a tool of population control and repression of dissidence. US torture was far more secret than open, as the



Introduction: Gesturing the Unrepresentable

5

intense care taken to both write and conceal the Torture Memos demonstrates, but its use was so widely presumed that the prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq expected to be tortured, and many feared Guantánamo in particular. Noam Chomsky, among others, is right to identify intimidation as one purpose of US torture, but this played a smaller role than for most other torturing states.9 But the tortured bodies of the war on terror can be read as more than subjects of a vast policing operation, victims of coercion, intimidation, and forced confession. Their bodies are the intimate sites on which the American state writes and re-writes its own insecurity, its desire to vanquish threat and to be made, once again, invulnerable. Torture was neither a deviation from the path followed after 9/11, nor an aberration. It was the consequence of choosing to wage a war not against al-Qaeda, not against terrorism or the states that sponsor it, but against terror itself. Waging war on an emotion as much as on specific enemies or practices gave the global expansion of the security apparatus of the US and its allies a fundamentally excessive structure: excess fear, excess threat, excess security. Excess is visible in the ceaseless expansion of the war under the Bush Administration: conflicts that began against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan quickly spread to Iraq and then, in different forms, to Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula. But excess was not just extensive but also intensive. It is present in the US tortures, in the documented willingness of CIA officers to exceed defined limits of coercion, and is nowhere more manifest than in the Abu Ghraib images, a perverted mirroring of the techniques set out so meticulously in the Torture Memos: nudity, stress positions, sexual humiliation, forced standing. This is the contagion of torture in mutated form: naked men forced to masturbate, piled on top of one another, terrified of dogs, masked in women’s panties, cowering at the end of a leash. To view these images ethically is to be met with horror, to feel it bodily. Horror at what was done to these prisoners, but horror too at how one could become capable of such actions. Their visibility is a call to respond, a plea repeated emphatically by the accounts of current and former detainees of that prison and others scattered across the globe. Organizations such as the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have collected testimonies, while lawyers acting for detainees at Guantánamo have obtained many more.10 Testimonies such as these—remarkable, brave, invaluable—are not the subject of this book, although they enter the frame at times. Such testimony plays a crucial role swaying public opinion and shifting the views of policymakers; delivered at courts martial and

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depositions, it has changed the legal playing field and limited the capacity for further abuse. In the interdisciplinary subfield of literature and human rights, scholars such as James Dawes have shown how important literary approaches to storytelling have been for such testimonial work, and how the practices of human rights testimony in turn inform literature, especially in countries with direct experience of colonial violence, dictatorship, and humanitarian crisis.11 Stories, as Dawes writes, “can short-circuit the mechanisms of cognitive consistency and make us have experiences, make us interiorize rather than simply consider the identities of others.”12 This book responds to the demand of the images of Abu Ghraib, of Afghanistan and the black sites, of the testimony of detainees, and of the enduring injustice of Guantánamo, by exploring torture in literature and practices of writing fiction. Art, film, journalism, activism, law, and even politics have met this injunction to action in different ways—literature, so far, has done so less substantively. This lack is a strange one. As Joseph Slaughter, Julia Stone Peters, Lynn Hunt, and others have persuasively argued, literature in general and the novel in particular played a crucial part in constructing the concept of rights and humanitarian norms, as well as in the emergence of human rights within international law.13 Such research makes the case that the realist novel—and for Slaughter, the Bildungsroman specifically—co-produced the individual, liberal subject. With its construction of the subject as cohesive, self-contained, and inviolable, the novel was so co-extensive with rights discourses that delegates to the Third Social and Humanitarian Committee of the United Nations discussed Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to conceptualize what constituted the human personality as they drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).14 Through the Cold War and decades of decolonization, literature proved an important vehicle for articulating subjection, liberation, and violence. Indeed, some of the most celebrated postcolonial fiction has grappled with torture, including J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000), and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014). The critical and commercial success of these and other works suggests that fiction willing to confront gruesome realities will find receptive readers, even if the ethics of its reception are complex.15 Why literature has not dealt more directly with contemporary American torture is difficult to state with any certainty. In part, it may simply be that not enough time has passed since Abu Ghraib made so viscerally clear the



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terrible reality of American torture. Writers may need time to process such events, a working through analogous to that of the trauma survivor who is only belatedly and slowly able to piece events into narrative and give them voice. Running counter to such a claim, however, is the relative speed with which some of the most celebrated contemporary American writers sought to make sense of the traumatic aftermath of 9/11, such as Don DeLillo with Falling Man (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005).16 Enough fiction has been written on that subject that “the 9/11 novel” is almost a genre in its own right. Another argument might suggest there is little commercial appetite for literature addressed to torture and detention, although the success of the problematic film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and the even more dubious television series 24 (2001–10) and Homeland (2011–) suggests otherwise.17 Of course, those examples tend to see torture as the necessary means to the virtuous end of keeping America safe, but the success of bestselling non-fiction on the subject, such as Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side and Seymour Hersh’s Chain of Command, and the burgeoning field of fiction on the Iraq War, work that begins the slow process of making sense culturally of heedless, futile death, and military adventurism, indicates that market considerations are unlikely to be the answer. To date, most of the sustained narrative accounts of the war on terror’s prison camps and torture come in the form of prisoner memoirs, including those of Moazzam Begg (2008), David Hicks (2010), and Murat Kurnaz (2008), and of guards and interrogators, such as Tony Lagouranis (2007), Chris Mackey (2006), Eric Saar (2006), and Glenn Carle (2011).18 Often written with the aid of a ghost writer and, in the case of most guards and interrogators, vetted by the US military, these memoirs reveal much yet remain inherently wedded to the factual, to the verifiable and definitively knowable. In the absence of truth commissions or perpetrator trials, texts such as these are crucial to supplement the testimony given to courts martial, military tribunals, and human rights organizations in constructing literary, narrative accounts of interrogation, detention, and torture since 9/11. More literary in nature and even more imbricated in violence and subjection, the powerful collection Poems from Guantánamo (2007) presents extraordinary verses written by detainees inside the prison and in which literature, experience, and witnessing are fused.19 In a perceptive essay, Stephanie Athey shows how “fiction is already woven deeply into the public discourse and US torture policy,” identifying the fictive hypotheticals and fanciful notions within texts that shaped understandings of torture and those to whom it would be applied.20 While American novelists

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have written books during the war on terror that deal with torture, they have largely focused on past events in other nations—Korea, China, Haiti, Latin America. Few have sought to address the post-9/11 US detention and torture; one that has, Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost (2007), will be discussed in the final chapter of this book.21 For the writers of mass-market thrillers, the war on terror has simply become the backdrop for action and intrigue, much like those of earlier decades used the Cold War to provide weighty scenery and the appearance of moral depth.22 So too the genre of “human rights bestsellers”— books such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and Ayan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography Infidel (2007)—which reaffirm humanitarian ideals, Western values, and liberal subjectivity, rather than critiquing or questioning their constitutive role in the war on terror.23 Yet there may be something inherent to torture itself, a denial, or resistance of representation in language. Its “pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it,” writes Elaine Scarry in her groundbreaking literary study The Body in Pain.24 Torture performs the subjection of the body to power from which, perhaps, speech or representation become a near-impossible task. For the tortured, their sense of self is shattered, the event makes no sense and cannot be known or put in chronological order. It returns in fragments, shards of the past that cannot become memory, only slip into the body and work their way deeper. Few traumas compare to torture in their catastrophic nature: to bear witness to torture is to confront the failure of representation and language to do justice to experience. A straightforward, blow-by-blow description of torture might describe its external actions exactly—and yet fail to account for its fundamental violence. This problem faced writers after Auschwitz: how could literature bear witness to the impossible horror of the camps and the crematoriums? Works by some of the great writers of the last century, such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Albert Camus, suggest that literary witnessing is possible and necessary, for both the eyewitness and the bystander.25 Indeed, literary witnessing of the Holocaust has become one of the crucial ways in which the event itself can be understood. It is too vast, too catastrophic, and too incomprehensible to be grasped otherwise, according to influential scholars in trauma and Holocaust studies. There is, I believe, an urgent need for torture and the war on terror to enter more fully into literature. Torture should be known, not simply in the abstract— as something that happens over there, to someone else—but as an experienced event, one with a terrible and traumatic aftermath. As the intertwined history



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of the emergence of human rights norms and literature shows, fiction does not reside in a realm distinct from political action and social change. Novels obtain readers that eyewitness testimony cannot. Their capacity for experimentation, fragmentation, multivocality, and authorial interpretation enables a kind of intimacy, a freedom from constraint in the examination of torture in all its intimate brutality, its violent imposition of state power upon the human body, its enduring trauma. With the reliance of human rights discourse on a selfenclosed subject, its approach to torture has often been to seek to restore that subject—something that cohesive, orderly narrative often signals.26 Yet there is a tension between the supposedly recuperative power of narrative and the emergence of the unrepresentability of trauma as a trope. Survivor testimony is often expected to conform to narrative criteria, but how does this respect the apparent refusal of torture to enter language? Some have argued that the problem lies less with the capacity of survivors to speak torture than in the social and political willingness to hear.27 Fiction has the capacity not only to speak in different ways, beyond the trope of unrepresentability, but also to be heard differently too. Even when fiction is tied to historical facts, it can offer a relation of experience to events that is distinct from memoir, testimony, and history. While the constraints of coherent narrative frameworks, juridical norms, singular experience, and potential empirical verification give legal and other factual testimony their force, they also ensure that such accounts cannot imagine that which has not been seen, felt, or perceived. Fiction has the capacity to reform arguments, changing the terms of debate and the very ground upon which it is fought. Stephanie Athey explains this fictive power beautifully: As laboratories for language and narrative strategy, they can derail the political, historical, and emotional cliché, bypass cul-de-sacs of logic, and supplant alluring tales with new ones. Novels can make historical antecedents relevant and new arguments vivid with a graphic compression that amplifies their force and extends their reach. As importantly, they can identify and then unsettle reader fascinations and expectations. In doing so, they can forge new emotional, intellectual, and political investments.28

This is not, of course, to claim that fiction possesses more power or is more important than the testimony of survivors. Rather, it is to recognize that making sense of the impossible and the unknowable demands both the factual and the imaginary. If the history of the rise of humanitarianism and the end of colonization teach us anything about literature, it is that political and social progress

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can be shaped and even motivated by the writing of action. Thus, the question of how the literary testimony might meet and do its own justice to the tortures of the war on terror drives this book. In his essay “Into the Dark Chamber,” J. M. Coetzee argues that sites of torture should exert a “dark fascination” on writers for two reasons. First, because relations between tortured and torturer “provide a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims.” Second, because “the torture room is a site of extreme human experience, accessible to no one save the participants.” Coetzee’s injunction is not simply moral, but also artistic. Certainly, the novelist should seek to work against the violence of the state. More than this, however, the novelist should also be drawn to torture out of a desire to understand the human condition in extremis. This “dark, forbidden chamber is the origin of novelistic fantasy per se” and thus cannot but be addressed.29 The problem is how to do so without allowing the state to establish the terms on which representation is possible. If torture grounds the very project of the novel in the power of the state, how can it be written in a way that critiques not only the state but also that grounding itself? That question is at the heart of this book. Neither philosophy nor literary criticism, this book is a thinking-in-theory, scaffolded by readings of poetry, memoir, legal memoranda, and fiction. I aim both to read torture and, elaborating theories of power, affect, trauma, and testimony, to speculate on the possibility of its writing. More than simply analysis of what has come before, this book takes seriously both the charge of radical empiricist philosophers to create the new and the belief of human rights and literature scholars that fiction can prove help achieve justice. Gestures of Testimony is thus both critique and manifesto. Torture has been intimately related to Western law, culture, and politics since its early beginnings. From the eighth to the fifth centuries bce, the Greeks moved from archaic communal laws based on the outcome of household feuds to an abstract, codified system of law, or nomos.30 With this shift from agon to trial, they identified various forms of evidence and laid the foundations for European legal procedure. As Aristotle argued, torture was necessary to ensure the truthful statements of non-citizens: while free citizens were bound by honor to speak truth before the law, slaves were thought to be under no such compunction and thus had to have veracity tortured from them. But torture also played an important rhetorical role in ancient texts, from Sophocles’ tragedies Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus to the work of the Roman



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Christian writer Prudentius.31 Demanding both an empathetic and aesthetic response from its witnesses, whether characters, readers, or audiences, torture reproduced the body as a legal, political, erotic, and moral figure affirming of existing social and political structures. Oedipus, for instance, stabs out his own eyes to signify the fundamental truth of his own violation of law, and in doing so asserts its necessity.32 Building on Greek foundations, Roman law initially restricted torture to non-citizens, but freemen were soon able to be tortured in cases of treason, and this was later extended to a wider array of offenses.33 Torture became enshrined in the large and influential body of jurisprudence produced and passed on by Rome. Although its prominence would shift at various times over the next eighteen hundred years, torture remained entrenched in European legal procedure until the Enlightenment. Christian iconography played some part in this: from the figure of Christ himself to the early martyrs to the suffering of souls condemned to hell, torture occupied an important aesthetic and religious position. Once the legal revolution of the twelfth century took hold, aided and abetted by the emergence of the Inquisition, torture became part of typical legal practice across much of Christianized Europe. Following defined criteria, magistrates issued warrants permitting specific tortures to extract confessions as evidence in legal proceedings, or sentences were rendered to include torture as part of punishment. Representing these practices and in affirmation of the authority of state and church, countless paintings and prints from medieval Europe depict gruesome tortures used in legal and religious trials or as punishment meted out by kings. So too Dante’s sinners with their poetical and just tortures in the circles of the inferno, each representing the inevitable, inescapable price of transgressing God’s law. In a pattern repeated throughout the twentieth century and in the years after 9/11, torture proved remarkably self-justifying and self-replicating right up until it became self-defeating. Heretics were its first target, then defenders, and eventually witnesses. Yet while this expansion normalized torture, it also made clear its fallibility. While Enlightenment humanists such as Voltaire and Cesare Beccaria campaigned heavily to halt the use of juridical torture, its abolition had more to do with the evolution of jurisprudence on proof, evidence, and the unreliability of confession.34 Once torture lost its centrality within legal and political practice, so too did its role within cultural representation shift. For the Marquis de Sade, erotic tortures expressed a radical break from social and political, as well as sexual, convention; torture functioned

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rhetorically for de Sade precisely because it was rejected politically and juridically.35 For Dostoevsky, writing on the cusp of modernity, Alyosha’s refusal to torture one innocent infant in exchange for paradise in The Brothers Karamazov (1880) represents the best potential of a new world founded in Enlightenment humanism. Sadly, however, his Notes from Underground (1864), where the protagonist torments a prostitute to affirm his own power, proved more fitting for the emerging modern age and the structure of contemporary torture outlined by Elaine Scarry and others.36 While torture no longer had a place in European legal processes or punishment from roughly the time of the French Revolution, replaced by the disciplinary system of schools, prisons, and militaries, Victor Hugo’s 1874 pronouncement that “torture has ceased to exist” could not have been further from the truth.37 Torture became a method of state control, a tool of intimidation and confession to secure against perceived threats, while literary accounts completed their shift from affirmation to staunch critique. During the last century, torture was deployed in various extra-legal forms by the British and French, adopted by regimes throughout Latin America, and institutionalized in Nazi Germany and the USSR. Living under or in the shadow of repressive regimes, some of the great Western writers of the twentieth century turned their pens against torture, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Koestler, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, and J. M. Coetzee.38 As torture proliferated in current and former European colonies, writers in Africa and Latin America, in particular, sought through allegory, magic realism, memoir, theater, and other genres to interrogate disappearance, torture, and regimes of fear.39 Some literary works played an important role in shifting public opinion against torture, such as The Question (1958), Henri Alleg’s memoir of his torture in Algeria. Others, such as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), became watchwords against authoritarianism and acquiescence to the state increasing power over everyday life. For many, writing against torture was an imperative, the necessary response to state repression, injustice, and violence. How significant a role these writers and their works played in the development of the 1975 United Nations Declaration Against Torture and the subsequent Convention signed in 1984 deserves further research. However, to vastly over-simplify a very complex history, writers, journalists, survivors, and Amnesty International all helped raise public awareness of torture in Algeria, Northern Ireland, Latin America, and elsewhere, which in turn helped bring the CAT into being.40



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Popular mythology associates modern torture with Nazi Germany, but their practices were far more medieval: whipping, cutting, molten metals.41 Hitler’s men had little fear of legal or public retribution, but the same can’t be said for most other states. Rather, “clean” or “stealth” tortures are the modern norm, used everywhere from prisons and police stations from the United States to French Indochina, Argentina to the USSR, the Middle East to East Asia. Techniques tend to cluster around the zones of influence of particular states: electrocution and water for the French, stress positions and non-marking beatings for the British. Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers shows these French techniques in some detail, but also makes clear how their use hardened opposition in Algeria and led to the war’s deep unpopularity in France. Despite torture’s widespread use, its practice has hardly guaranteed survival, as the collapse of torturous regimes in Algeria, South Vietnam, Latin America, Greece, and, occasionally, the Middle East attests. Aside from drawing international condemnation, torture alienates the populace, hardens resistance movements, and almost always has a deleterious effect on police and military discipline.42 Once a state begins to torture, it cannot contain the violence. As the Abu Ghraib images and the Senate Torture Report make clear in different ways, no matter how strictly its use is meant to be confined or how narrowly its official sanction is articulated, torture rapidly escapes those limits. While Noam Chomsky and others have argued that the United States or some other “universal distributor has spread modern torture,” Rejali shows convincingly that clean tortures were chosen to avoid the monitoring systems that emerged after the Second World War and with the Geneva Convention, international human rights codes, and the CAT.43 Similarly, while there is no doubt that the CIA conducted ethically bankrupt research into torture and brainwashing, the techniques made famous by the United States since 9/11 have far stronger antecedents in practices common to police and security forces around the world.44 Many techniques were even reverse engineered from the torture resistance training programs to which fighter pilots, Special Forces, and Marine Corps officers were subjected.45 Waterboarding was used by Teddy Roosevelt’s Roughriders in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, and by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Stress positions and non-marking beatings were common practice by the British in Northern Ireland. Sleep deprivation was used by domestic police forces in the United States until 1941, sensory assault—such as the blasting of loud music—can be found in every corner of the globe. And while the United States certainly trained South Vietnamese torturers as part

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of its notorious Phoenix Program, the cadres frequently employed far cruder techniques drawn from their own early and colonial history. But the idea that contemporary torture—and American torture in particular— is backed by nefarious scientific research has had enormous cultural currency. Scenes of apparently brainwashed Soviet officials confessing to all manner of reactionary treasons and American fighter-pilot POWs professing loyalty to the enemy in the Korean War have had a strong pull on the popular imagination. So too the revelations of the Church Report into CIA research programs ranging from using LSD and other drugs on soldiers and citizens to funding sensory deprivation research at Canadian universities. Since 9/11, these mythologies have gained renewed prominence. Jack Bauer, the hyper-macho, whatever-ittakes hero of the Fox counterterrorism series 24, repeatedly and often blithely uses injections of colored liquids to torture enemies who almost always quickly relinquish whatever information they possess. Left without such tools, Bauer will swiftly and successful resort to more brutal methods. In this, at least, 24 “captured the Zeitgeist of at least part of the early twenty-first century’s reaction to terrorism.”46 Similarly reproduced in films such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), which presented torture as an effective and crucial tool in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, these mythologies have surely contributed to the rise of torture to majority support in the United States since Abu Ghraib. Of equal concern, the idea that certain tortures are grounded in science took hold within the military and intelligence institutions conducting the war on terror. Follow the right formula, push the right buttons and crucial intelligence will be obtained, or so the argument went. In his memoir, interrogator Chris Mackey has a long and rather naïve section on exactly this subject, although he refuses to give the name “torture” to any of the techniques he describes.47 This veneer of scientific authority is one key legacy of CIA research programs, giving sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and sensory assault an aura of respectability or clinical certainty. If intimidation had been ruled out as an official objective, science afforded certain torture techniques the allure of efficacy—if hard choices must be made, then they would be made to work. In keeping with this recourse to scientific certainty was the cloak of legality provided by the Torture Memos drafted by zealous lawyers within the Bush Administration. However, these attempts to define torture out of existence, particularly in the context of certain “high-value detainees,” paradoxically offer remarkable insight into the techniques themselves, and the radical extent to which torture became imbricated within the very center of American power.



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Torture, however, is more craft than science. Torturing regimes often look for a combination of devoted support and minimal education, such as the young men recruited from remote villages by the Greek junta. For these recruits, training is often brutal and many are subjected to similar techniques to the ones they will later employ.48 This aims to “erode the identity” of future torturers “by systematically humiliating them and stripping them of their normal domestic identity.”49 For democracies, torture training can never be institutionalized and thus emerges far more informally. In the United States, Army interrogators undergo training in a range of techniques before being certified to practice in the field, but none of these could be classified as torture. Rather, they combine interview strategy with techniques for reading and reacting to the psychological state of the subject. Once interrogators are in the field, however, techniques that cross the line into torture are often passed on informally; under immense pressure to produce results, interrogators can easily slide into what Cheney called “the dark side.” In his haunting investigation into American soldiers serving in Iraq, Josh Phillips shows how most copied brutal techniques from others, or were taught by longer-tenured veterans.50 As Errol Morris’s documentary Standard Operating Procedure makes clear, particularly with its face-to-face encounters with Lynndie England, Charles Graner, Sabrina Harman, and other Abu Ghraib perpetrators, soldiers can quickly become torturers when subjected to a system they are ill prepared to navigate intact. Nor were the supposedly expert agents of the CIA immune, as the Senate Torture Report shows: many were untrained for interrogation, inexperienced in the field or possessed records of violent behavior, while the agency itself demonstrated poor management, documentation, and effectiveness evaluation. Since 9/11, torture has been seen on the screen far more than encountered on the page. That this should be the case is hardly surprising. From the first moment, 9/11 was a spectacle: still and moving images of one tower burning and the second plane a speck in the air, smoke billowing, the first figures leaping into space, the towers falling, pluming clouds of dust, the Pentagon burning. Later it would be orange jumpsuits in the first cages of Camp X-Ray, the horrors of Abu Ghraib. As E. Ann Kaplan notes, September 11 was “perhaps the supreme example of a catastrophe that was experienced globally”—an experience that was almost entirely mediatized.51 Thus, one of the questions I take up in this book is what literature might learn from the visual in bearing witness to torture. Cinematic images, diegetic sounds, and musical scores allow modes of expression for torture and its effects on the body that are non-linguistic, slipping

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free of the constraints of bringing into language forms of experience that are inherently resistant to it. This may be another part of the answer to why little of the intense literary activity in the wake of 9/11 has addressed torture in a substantive way.52 But this book is not really about the lack of literary attention to the tortures of the war on terror, although this forms the cultural backdrop to my research. Rather, it brings events, texts, and analysis of the post-9/11 world into dialogue with some of the powerful literary testimonies to torture of the last century. From a methodological standpoint, Gestures of Testimony shares much with work in the sub-discipline of literature and human rights, which emerged in the shifting social, political, and cultural climate after 9/11. As Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore write, this new landscape “seemed suddenly both to obviate and to render imperative the connection in relation to changing understandings and practices of war, imprisonment, torture, and immigration.” Scholars such as James Dawes, Joseph Slaughter, Elizabeth S. Anker, and Stephanie Athey have developed interdisciplinary strategies for “reading literary texts for the ways in which they represent and render intelligible the philosophies, laws, and practices of human rights from multiple, shifting cultural perspectives and considering how stories, testimonies, cultural texts, and literary theories contribute to the evolution of such philosophies, laws, and practices.”53 Specific strategies vary, from Anker’s “embodied politics of reading” rights and their subjectivities in fiction, to Dawes’s literary readings of human rights texts, to Slaughter’s “narratological approach,” which seeks links and correlations between literary and human rights texts.54 However, work in the field is united by an interest in the intersection of fiction, oppression, and progress. Recognizing the complexities of experience, identity, and subjectivity, these scholars often adopt a constructively critical standpoint toward human rights discourse and its inclusions and exclusions. Eschewing the notion that literature occupies a space separate from the wider world, work in this area has shown how varied conceptions of subjectivity have practical, political implications for human rights. Theories that uncover the workings of different subjectivities “deepen our understanding of the relationship between literary forms—in their ability to envision and inscribe such complex identity formations—and the poetics of and political responses to suffering.”55 Thus, while this book is not explicitly concerned with human rights texts or discourse, it shares the analytical strategies and political intent of work in this emergent field. It



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embraces paradox as both a practical problem—aesthetic language can celebrate human dignity, but also conceal violence; witnessing can liberate the other, but also take their place—and as the site from which new thought can arise. “If we recognize paradox’s figurative role in human rights,” argues Slaughter, “instead of treating it as a shameful limitation of human rights discourse and practice, then we can attend to its productive possibilities.”56 From within the paradox that torture both demands and destroys speech, this book rethinks the relation between literary language, traumatic violence, and the body subjected to power. Thus grounded by the notion that fiction and political progress are intertwined, Gestures of Testimony moves within the field formed at the intersection of three trajectories of theory. The first is the imposition of power on the body; the second is the experience of tortured and torturing bodies in the act itself; the third is the apparent unrepresentability in language of torturous trauma. Their site of intersection is not always stable, nor do they intersect neatly at a singular point, but rather enfold one another in unexpected ways that produce varied conceptual terrain. Nor is this terrain necessarily immediately congruent; a Deleuzian conception of affect does not fit neatly with theories of trauma grounded in Freudian psychoanalysis. But congruency is not my purpose. I am instead interested in productive tension, the spark of movement in the encounter between ideas chasing insight into similar events. Paradox offers the potential for new thought, it is “the rhetorical form of self-contradiction that challenges received opinion and disturbs the hermeticism of tautological selfevidence to report that, despite appearances, man may not in all cases be man.”57 This is not to say that my choices of theory are made lightly, nor do I wish to elide the important distinctions between varied bodies of work. At issue is the failure of any one approach offering a sufficiently full account of torture and its relation to literature. Michel Foucault’s famous account of the end of juridical torture as a public spectacle of monarchic power provides an entry point into theorizing the relationship between torture and authority in the contemporary world. But Discipline and Punish also signals Foucault’s own shift into critique of the emergence of modern state apparatuses designed to control life, a set of practices that he came to call biopower.58 His account of torture thus offers a way into considering how torture might be understood in biopolitical terms. Taking up Foucault’s ideas, Giorgio Agamben examines the nature of state sovereignty in relation to law and the body. In his book State of Exception, he extends this analysis to the detainees of the war on terror and the camps at Guantánamo

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and elsewhere.59 Working within this trajectory but with different emphases, Judith Butler considers the vulnerability exposed by 9/11 and the relation of torture and war to its trauma. These and other theorists offer a starting point from which to develop a cohesive understanding of the central role that tortured bodies play within the structure and dynamics of the war on terror itself.60 By contrast, the second theoretical trajectory concerns the relations between tortured and torturing bodies, and between those bodies and the world. Pivotal to efforts in the humanities to understand this in textual terms, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain addresses torture through the lens of linguistic and literary theory, deconstructing the effect of torture on the speaking subject.61 Particularly influential is her recognition of torture’s paradoxical demand that the victim speak even as it reduces language to a scream, a process that asserts the reality of power on the tortured body. In a literary counterpoint to Jean Améry’s account of the phenomenology of his own torture, Scarry reveals the inextricable relationship between the torturer and the tortured, while her wellknown claim that the pain of torture unmakes the world shows how vital it is to understand torture in its connections to bodily experience of the world. However, her work neglects the affectivity of the experience of torture. Torture, particularly in the war on terror, is not solely predicated on pain—fear, anger, hate, shame, and disgust all figure too. Tortured and torturing bodies always form a relation in their encounter—even when that relation is one of negation, destruction, or rupture. These relations can be understood through affect theory, which enables a more fluid, dynamic, and relational understanding of the act of torture than, say, a psychoanalytic approach. At its core, affect refers to relations between bodies, and between bodies and worlds, but affect theory is a minefield of competing and complementary concepts. Recognizing the tension this sometimes produces, this book navigates and builds upon ideas from three broad approaches: first, the conception of affect as an intensity of encounter and capacity to act that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari derive from Spinoza; second, the more biologically specific conceptions of affect developed by the American developmental psychologist Silvan Tomkins; third, Sara Ahmed’s work on the sociality and cultural circulation of emotions. Taken as starting points, these approaches to affect enable me to rethink Scarry’s approach to literary representations of torturous pain and offer a fuller account of the tortured body. Weaving through these two theoretical trajectories is the third: the literary witnessing of catastrophic trauma. Trauma theory has its origins in Freudian



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psychoanalysis, as Ruth Leys shows, but it gained literary and cultural currency through efforts to conceptualize the various forms and modes of testimony by survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust.62 Scholars such as Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub brought this emergent interest in trauma to bear on literature in ways that expanded understanding of its operation.63 Broadly speaking, these thinkers see trauma as the later manifestation of a psychic wound experienced during an event that could not be processed at the time of its occurrence. They also share an interest in the tension between what is known and not known for the subject of trauma, and the deep challenges in speaking or bearing witness to the traumatic event. In their influential book Testimony: Crises of Witness in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Felman and Laub mix psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches to texts to explore the intricate dilemmas, indeterminacies, and impossibilities in bearing witness to the Holocaust effect. Like Scarry, however, they do not consider what might occur beyond the textual limits of representation. These influential conceptions of trauma rely on a unitary, coherent, and rational pre-traumatic subjectivity.64 In my work, I propose a conception of subjectivity founded in an inherently diffuse, fluid, and permeable body. This more radical understanding of embodied experience enables new ways of thinking about trauma and its relation to literary practice. Converging upon torture from the perspectives of power, affect, and trauma enables its relation to literature to emerge in three dimensions. This threedimensional conception does not produce a solid object of analysis, or indeed a sequential argument driven from chapter to chapter by internal necessity. Rather, it forms a gesture: the meaningful movement of a body through space and time. This gesture possesses a different quality in the two halves of this book. The first three chapters give shape to torture within the context of the war on terror, reading fiction, poetry, memoir, legal memoranda, photographs, and films to theorize torture in the war on terror and torture in literature. Resonating with these readings, the second half turns speculatively outward—it provokes and proposes practices of writing the tortures of the war on terror into literature. To an extent, each chapter can be read independently, but progressing via the order presented here offers the most cohesive, structured movement through the book. Readings of torture in Kafka, Orwell, Koestler, and Coetzee open the first chapter, “Tortured Bodies.” These fictional texts are points of entry into the complex relationship between the state, torture, and the bodies of victims and

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perpetrators: power writes itself into being on the victim; sovereignty seeks to subsume the individual; torture targets not simply the flesh but the capacity for the body to experience the world; modern torture operates within the site of law’s suspension. From these entry points, I argue that US torture marks its victims’ bodies with the driving impulse paradigmatic of the war on terror: the desire of the state to “make survive” and in doing so to re-inscribe the invulnerability rendered false by 9/11. Crucially, however, torture is not described completely by sovereign power and institutions of state: it always involves relations between bodies in the torture chamber. These relations are best understood affectively, as encounters constituted by both embodied experience (of fear, shame, disgust, and so on) and abstract intensity. Bringing together biopolitics and affect, I show how Abu Ghraib’s tortured bodies become the necessary but insufficient embodiments of threat that the war on terror can never eliminate, making them inseparable from its very existence. With this framework of biopower and affect sketched with reference to fictive writings of torture, the second chapter, “Reading Torture,” probes the Torture Memos of the Bush Administration, the memoirs of detainees and interrogators, and the works collected in Poems from Guantánamo for the interplay of pain, affect, and power. To illustrate how essential pain is to the exercise of power in the war on terror, I unpack the Torture Memos’ reliance on the unknowability of the other’s pain, and reveal that pain to be contingent upon the torturer, even as its meaning is erased. In their necessarily slippery articulation of pain, the Memos show torturous pain to be both relational in formation and inextricable from the juridical architecture of the war on terror. Moving from memoranda to memoir, I explore this relationality of torture in the accounts of detainees and interrogators from the war on terror. Read alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four, these writings show the inescapable, enduring connection formed between tortured and torturer: how the bodies of both are irreparably changed by their encounter. Yet despite this, as the poems by Guantánamo detainees show, it is possible for creative expression to escape the full force of sovereign power. Remarkably, the impossibility of constraining affect—even when it is exploited by torture— reveals the potential for writing against sovereignty and testifying to torture. Yet text has not been alone in seeking to account for torture. “Seeing Torture” argues that visual representations of torture are most powerful when affect, narrative, and aesthetic resonate with one another. The chapter begins with the production of affect in the images of Abu Ghraib and the dampening of its intensity when contextualized and explained in Errol Morris’s documentary



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Standard Operating Procedure (2008). From there, I analyze the role of affect and claims of veracity in aesthetic and narrative of the classic refutation of torture, The Battle of Algiers (1966), and a contemporary apology for it, Zero Dark Thirty. Turning from ambiguous relations with facticity to the purely fictional, I argue that the allegorical film Incendies (2010) deploys the face as a powerful visual metaphor for torture’s violence, trauma, and temporal rupturing. Despite their differing affective and political registers, the visual manifestations of torture examined in this chapter reveal the significance of the gestural, affective, and non-verbal to testimony. From reading torture on page and screen, the second half of the book turns to the problem of bearing literary witness to torture. Bringing trauma and testimony onto center stage, “Writing Trauma” speculates on the necessity, ethics, and potential cost of writing the tortures of the war on terror. My own experience writing torture in fiction provides the backdrop for theorizing the transformative force of affect in the encounter of body and text in the writing of torture, offering an embodied illustration of potentially abstracted theory. Writing, I argue, is an affective process in which words resonate with the writing body; writing entails the experience of affect as well as its expression. With violent trauma, this opens up creative possibilities even as it exposes the writing body. Rather than analyzing specific texts, this chapter proposes that bearing literary witness to torture calls for a writing practice that recognizes its own affectivity and exposure to power, the complex relationship between time and trauma, and the visceral intensity of its manifestation in literature, films, and images. “Writing Torture” seeks not only to explore theoretical possibilities but to produce an affective resonance within the theorizing of torture itself. An affective mode of testimony is the focus of the next chapter, “Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma.” This chapter reads the novel Fugitive Pieces (1996) by Anne Michaels as both the performance and theorizing of witnessing through the poetics of trauma. While not about torture itself, I argue that Fugitive Pieces employs a lyrical aesthetic that bears witness to catastrophe by gesturing to its traumatic depths, even as it enacts the impossibility of bearing witness to its totality. Michaels uses affective resonance to convey the passage and transformation of trauma over time, and how the novel involves movements of layering and traumatic affect. Revealing that to bear witness is, paradoxically, to speak in the name of not being able to speak, Fugitive Pieces employs an affectively charged mode of writing in which testimony depends on what occurs beyond

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the page, affective gestures that reveal the shape, force, and effects of trauma that cannot be directly brought into language. Having considered practices of writing and the affectivity of gesture, the final chapter brings together the three theoretical trajectories traced throughout the book. Composed of a series of accumulating meditations that respond to writing on torture by Jean Améry in At the Mind’s Limit and Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, “Torturous Affect” opens new understandings of the relationship between pain, language, and literary testimony that contain the potential to speak beyond the page.65 Building on arguments developed throughout the book, the temporality of trauma provides the potential for writing torture’s pain. Reading the over-signification of torturous pain in Janette Turner Hospital’s war on terror novel Orpheus Lost (2007) against its psychoanalytic embodiment in Arthur Koestler’s Arrival and Departure (1969), I propose that writing torture is most powerful when it gestures beyond words—relating the form and force of the unknowable and unspeakable to the movement of the body. Conceived as artistic semblances that refuse fixity and instead occur through encounter, literary testimony founded in affective gesture can bear witness in new and productive ways to the tortures of the war on terror. Returning to the political and cultural dynamics that enabled the tortures of the war on terror, the conclusion argues that how writers, poets, filmmakers, artists, and others write torture, drone strikes, surveillance, and targeted killings will depend in part on how they view the possibilities of cultural representation and resistance. Turning outward from torture, I suggest that gesturing beyond the limits of representation can give shape to the most radical traumas of this new century in which state power increasingly penetrates our lives. Before turning to the opening chapter, three final points deserve brief attention. First, this book is deeply indebted to a number of remarkable investigations of torture. Before 9/11, the study of torture was a niche field. Reliable histories of wide scope were rare, with John Langbein’s 1977 Torture and the Law of Proof and Edward Peters’s 1985 Torture notable exceptions, while others were important but either flawed or too selective.66 More common were focused studies, and others dealing with specific eras, states, and cases.67 Rarer still were accounts that sought to theorize torture within the wider context of political power—the essays in The Politics of Pain edited by Ronald Crelinsten and Alex P. Schmid form the most substantive such work of which I am aware.68 Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004, far more has been written. Renowned



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journalists Seymour Hersh and Jane Mayer have written influential books on how the Bush Administration came to authorize torture, while others have collated and commented on the various Torture Memos, military reports, and associated documents.69 Recent histories have sought to put post-9/11 torture into historical context, while various anthologies have tried to both deepen the knowledge underpinning public debate and recover older writings.70 Alongside these cultural and historical accounts, there emerged new clinical studies seeking to understand what torture does, as well as the psychology of those who practice it. Most heart wrenching, however, are the accounts of tortured detainees from the US prison system compiled by investigative journalists Andy Worthington and Stephen Grey, as well as the stories of soldier-perpetrators sensitively but unsparingly chronicled by Josh Phillips.71 On the legislative side, the staff of the United States Senate Select Committee deserve much respect for dealing with political and bureaucratic pressure over their six-year investigation into CIA torture (even if they could not formally name it such). This book does not have the space or scope to properly recognize all of this important work, but could not have been written without it. I urge anyone with an interest in how torture ruins lives and a desire to see it exposed to delve into some, or all, of these writings. Second, while this is not a book about the ethics of torture, it is one that contains an overriding ethical view: torture is always wrong. This view is not universally held. Recent polling of the American public shows that a majority support torture in certain circumstances, up from less than 40 per cent when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.72 Determining causation for this change is difficult, but no doubt media cheerleading and depictions of torture on television shows like 24 played a part.73 Proposing torture—whether euphemized or not—as a serious and even moral option to the threats of the day does much to normalize it, and this was the case in academic circles as much as in The New York Times and The Washington Post or on CNN and Fox News. Most proponents of torture rely on some form of the “ticking bomb” argument to support its use, a scenario familiar to even a casual viewer of 24 and similar shows.74 Briefly, the ticking bomb argument proposes the authorization of torture in a specific scenario: a detained suspect has knowledge of an imminent threat (a bomb in Times Square) and will not reveal what he knows. Torturing one villain, goes the utilitarian argument, is a fair price to pay to save innocent lives. As many ethicists have shown, the ticking bomb argument is readily defused on both moral and practical grounds.75 On moral grounds, torture is an unjustifiable

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assault on human dignity, since there is always the possibility that the bomb will not go off (or does not exist), or that a non-torture means of stopping it will be found. Practically, numerous problems exist: the non-existence of realworld “ticking bomb” examples; the unreliability of confession under torture, particularly when time-limited; determining with certainty the guilt of the “terrorist”; knowing when to stop torture, since if it is authorized it must be justified by the extraction of information; and the near impossibility of knowing everything about a scenario except where the bomb is. Beyond all this, torture simply constitutes an unacceptable violation of the body, being, and freedom of another: to so thoroughly abuse the capacity of a person to exist within the world is, in my view, utterly unjustifiable.76 Third, thinking drawn from the catastrophe of the Holocaust must be applied carefully to other traumas and political practices. I do not wish to suggest equivalence between the Nazi camps and the war on terror, its sites of detention, or its tortures. Nor do I wish to collapse all traumas, collective or individual, into that of the Holocaust. Yet there is a marked distinction between using such theory as a paradigm for all political violence or trauma on the one hand, and, on the other, making it so singular that thought arising from it cannot be put to other uses. It is also the case that much of contemporary theory on trauma has its roots in studies of the Holocaust. In drawing on theory emergent from the Holocaust to understand the war on terror, then, I do not wish to propose that they are of the same order. To do so would not do justice to survivors, witnesses, and even perpetrators of violence in either event. Rather, there are similarities of form and dynamic in how power subjects bodies. With the above in mind, this book offers a small contribution to the impossible task of making sense of the terrible things that humans do to one another. Literature offers no salvation, but it can and must deepen our knowing and feeling.

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Tortured Bodies

The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. Nowhere should the midnight knock foreshadow a nightmare of state-commissioned crime. The suffering of torture victims must end, and the United States calls on all governments to assume this great mission. Statement of President George W. Bush on the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, June 26, 2003 Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (1914) illustrates a liminal moment in the evolution of torture as a technology of control. An officer introduces a voyager, newly arrived in an unnamed penal colony, to a “peculiar kind of apparatus” for the punishment of condemned men.1 Composed of wheels, gears, and rods, sunk deep into the ground and mounted by ladder, the punishment the apparatus metes out is terrible: a “sentence” is deeply engraved on the body of the condemned over twelve excruciating hours until death. The condemned man is strapped to a bed, above him looms the designer into which the sentence is fed, and between bed and designer hangs the brutally sharp harrow that writes the punishment. Special needles squirt water to clean the skin so that the sentence is always visible to onlookers, and once the people of the colony formed in great crowds to witness each execution. As the condemned body is slowly torn to ribbons, claims the officer, a state of ecstasy is entered: an utter acceptance of submission. All distinction between law and body collapses: the body is sentenced to be inscribed with its verdict, the sentence of power written into flesh. For this death, however, the only witness beyond soldier, victim, and officer is the nameless voyager—punishment by the apparatus has fallen out of favor in the colony with the arrival of the new commandment. Torture is no longer the spectacle it once was, much to the officer’s dismay. After the voyager refuses to give his endorsement of the punishment and without willing

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witnesses to the death of those for whom “guilt is always beyond question,” the officer condemns himself to the apparatus.2 His self-inflicted punishment is not only too much for the worn-out device to handle without self-destructing, but also fails to achieve that ecstatic realization of the state’s power for which it was designed. For the voyager, bloodied bodies are signs of barbarism, the apparatus an emblem of debased justice. Despite its violence, the story is almost positive by Kafka’s standards—when he leaves the island, the voyager refuses to take soldier or condemned man with him, as if unwilling to risk infection from the taint they both must surely carry. Far more advanced tortures occur in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four (1949); their purpose is not punishment, but subjection. Having fleetingly escaped his circumscribed existence under Big Brother in a furtive but glorious romance with Julia, the freethinking Winston Smith must be re-inscribed as a compliant and loyal subject of the state. Winston’s torture in Room 101—the pain inflicted by the slow turning of a dial, the conjuring of the rats of his greatest fear, the assault on his love for Julia—leaves his body utterly changed, a mere shell of what he once was, but more importantly it changes his very being and renders him inseparable from O’Brien, his torturer. O’Brien’s long disquisitions on authority, war, and history function like an evolved version of the apparatus of the penal colony: a scaffold that gives meaning to the subjugation of individual bodies. Unlike the sentence written in the bloody flesh of Kafka’s condemned men, this rewriting of subjection targets the whole of Winston’s being-in-the-world. Torture occurs as the natural extension of the pervasive authority of Big Brother, the constant surveillance and control over every aspect of life. It is torture to erase dissidence in the form of difference and doubt; torture to affirm that any mediation of power can be stripped away at the slightest provocation and individuality sublimated into conformity with the state. The potentially violent incompatibility of this relationship between the individual and state power is at the heart of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1946). Rubashov, one of the last remaining intellectual architects of a communist revolution, has been imprisoned after falling foul of Number One, the Stalin-like figure who has gained control of the Party and the revolution. Deprived of sleep, food, and cigarettes, blinded by lights while relentlessly questioned, Rubashov finds the state incontrovertible, irresistible, and even moral in its erasure of difference, rewriting of history, and expansion of control. Intellectually, Rubashov knows that the collective takes precedence over the



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individual, even if he grapples with flights of egotism and bouts of regret for his Party-ordered betrayal of loyal subversives in a neighboring bourgeois nation. But where torture leads Winston Smith to declare his love for Big Brother, Rubashov is tortured to perform the end of individuality itself, even at the very level of language. Even after recognizing a “tangible component in [the] first person singular,” he cannot see the self as anything but a “grammatical fiction,” meaningless before the march of history embodied by the state.3 Far from producing silence or blind subjection, Rubashov’s torture leads to an outburst of writing. Rather than erasing individuality, his writing paradoxically marks its presence. His long confession, an introspective analysis of the state and his relationship to it, carries an inexorable logic: if past, present, and future reside in the state, then before it the human body is meaningless; sovereign power is all. Yet, in instantiating and expanding power, torture is all too often predicated on, or enables, the suspension of law. J. M. Coetzee demonstrates this powerfully in his allegorical novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1982), which tells the story of the Magistrate of a far-flung border outpost who refuses to comply with the imperial center in demonizing a “barbarian” threat beyond the borders of Empire. Attempting to understand the outsiders, he brings a traumatized young woman into his chambers and collects archaeological fragments of pottery inscribed with a strange language. Found wanting by the Colonel who arrives from the imperial center, he is cast out of his position, tortured, and left to wander broken and begging through the streets of the town. “Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt,” says the torturing Colonel, and in pain citizenship slips easily away, and legal authority with it.4 For the fearful townsfolk and soldiers, the Magistrate is suddenly as much outside the state as the wretched handful of captive barbarians who have the word “ENEMY” written on their bodies before being beaten.5 This similarity before power between the Magistrate as a symbol of the law and the barbarians against which the Empire defines itself is telling. In the tortured body of the Magistrate resides the suspension of law itself, or more precisely the embodiment of the sovereign’s capacity to suspend the law. In his elegant essay on torture, Coetzee calls this “a twilight of legal illegality,” a paradoxical image which captures both the terrible potential of power and the unexpected fragility of law before its might.6 To recognize that torture involves both exercises of power and ambiguities of law is hardly revelatory, yet as human rights and literature scholars have shown, reading literature for the workings of power, violence, and law can be revealing. What these brief forays into writing torture make clear is the inescapable

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trajectory of sovereignty towards ever-increasing penetration of the tortured body—and the fragility of the subject co-produced by liberalism and literature. Kafka’s apparatus inscribes the sentence of the law on the body. Big Brother demands not only intellectual but also emotional submission. Rubashov must erase the self in his very imagining of language, as well as in word and deed. Coetzee’s tortured Magistrate becomes the very figure of law’s suspension. If the tortures of the war on terror bear any direct resemblance to these accounts, it lies somewhere between the endless interrogation of Rubashov and the breaking of Winston Smith. But within their dynamics can also be found the absent presence of the law envisioned by Coetzee and the brutally visceral writing power described by Kafka. Beyond a keen awareness of power, law, and the tortured body, these four texts share a keen awareness of torture’s excess—its continual capacity to exceed bounds, debase law, consume its perpetrators, and erase its subjects. When Foucault charts the end of torture as a public spectacle intended to exhibit the sovereign power of the king in the eighteenth century, he does so to show how “the body as the major target of penal repression disappeared.”7 In the next chapter, I will consider what happened to the tortured body and to its spectacle. Here, I want to begin where Foucault finds the body becoming the intermediary for the punishment and disciplining of the subject. But as Foucault described in detail in his late-career lectures at the Collège Française, discipline was only one part of the emerging regime of control he called governmentality. Transforming the body into a useful economic unit—into a productive body, as well as a subjected body—required a “political technology of the body”8 composed of disparate forces, institutions, practices, customs, rituals, laws, and so on. In the contemporary world of the war on terror, this subjection of life to power has taken on new forms, structures, and circuits. Tortured bodies all too often reside at the center of these new dynamics—and thus it is vital to understand their relations to the world, to other bodies, and to their torturers. What, then, is sovereign power and in what forms is it exercised in the war on terror? What constitutes a body, how is it changed by torture, and what relations are formed in such a process? What is the structure of the war on terror and what role do affected and affecting bodies play within it?



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Sovereignty, biopower, and the state of exception If the power of the monarch over death was no longer to be made manifest in the public spectacle of torture, a new political practice needed to take its place. While Foucault identifies discipline as the emerging rule in the penal field, he gives the name biopolitics to the wider set of practices accompanying the rise of liberalism as the dominant philosophy of governance in Europe. Faced with an increasingly complex array of problems stemming from the French and Industrial Revolutions, as well as the seismic shifts to religious order at work since the Reformation, ruling authorities ceased to be about glorifying and enriching divine royalty and instead became concerned with population, territory, and security: the constitutive elements of modern government. Biopolitics emerged to address and even produce the population as not only the subject of power and politics, but a biological problem. Where monarchy required royal subjects and discipline individual bodies, biopolitics “succeeded in covering the whole surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between body and population.”9 Once-distinct boundaries became blurred or erased as the limited institutions of monarchy were replaced by expansive new apparatuses for control, from departments of health to city planning to professional militaries. Everyday life was abstracted to form populations. In the process, biological life entered more fully into the realm of governance in the form of census statistics, birth rates, health codes, and other such mechanisms of knowledge. These first techniques of biopower endure, but were only the beginning of its expansion. Today, biopower extends to everything from human rights codes to the genetic databases of law enforcement agencies, from euthanasia laws to the fingerprint scans required for entry to the United States. Even freedom is continually reproduced by the biopolitical state.10 As Giorgio Agamben describes it, biopower is “the concrete ways in which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life.”11 Biopower thus resides outside morality as such, since it refers to no particular good or evil. Rather, it is simply the incorporation of the natural, biological dimension of human life into the practices and apparatuses of authority. Human rights codes and public health infrastructure are beneficial, yet their adoption substantially broadened the extent to which state apparatuses were able to codify, regulate, and control life. Humanitarian law played a particularly important role in defining life and contextualizing the individual within social relations that determined his or her status—within torture and genocide, for example, the individual becomes

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a synecdoche for the social, ethnic, cultural, or religious group which in turn produces him or her.12 Biopolitics thus incorporates not only the group and the individual, but also the relations between them that are constitutive of social existence. While Agamben owes an immense debt to Foucault in his work on power, the Italian philosopher identifies a far earlier origin for biopolitics. Foucault saw biopower as new to the “juridico-political theory of sovereignty” underpinning the modern state, but for Agamben “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.”13 Rather than signaling the arrival of a new form of power, the modern state reflects a tipping point after which that original relation ceases to be hidden and becomes dominant. Agamben draws on the ancient Greek notions of zoë (simple living) and bios (political living) to distinguish between bare life and political life, between sheer biological being and living within a political community. Bare life enters the realm of politics through the ancient Roman figure of homo sacer, “one who may be killed and yet not sacrificed.”14 In other words, the law accounted for a kind of existence in which biological life might be extinguished, and yet be unable to have any sacrificial value: which is to say, no communal, political, and religious meaning. Thus, bare life enters into politics but does not become political life in doing so. It is simply bare life rendered subject to political power. Designating a person homo sacer represents the “originary figure of life” taken into sovereign power, while the indistinction inherent to being able to be killed but not sacrificed is constitutive of the “paradox of sovereignty” which “consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order.”15 To put it differently, sovereignty resides in the capacity to determine when the law does and does not apply, and is precisely that which cannot ever be subject to the law: the sovereign is the figure who cannot ever be homo sacer. Or, in the definition Agamben takes from the German philosopher of totalitarianism Carl Schmitt, the sovereign is “he who decides on the state of exception.”16 The state of exception is thus that condition which prevails when the juridical order is suspended but the force of law remains. Kafka’s The Trial (1925) illustrates this notion: K is abandoned to the power of law and yet he has no code or ordered practice on which to depend.17 Law is all around him, and yet nowhere to be found. Kafka’s genius was to show K’s futile struggle not simply in an abstract sense, but in the condition of living within physical space stripped of the order normally enabled by law. K is not, however, in a Hobbesian state of nature: the state of exception is “not the chaos that precedes



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order but rather the situation that results from its suspension.”18 It marks that point at which inside and outside lose distinction and blur into one another. K might at any moment encounter once again the rule of law in codified, addressable form, but that moment is repeatedly deferred. Such a state of being is impossible without the presence of sovereignty; its terribleness resides exactly in the simultaneous immediacy and inaccessibility of sovereign power instantiated through the suspension of law. While K can be read as emblematic of the modern human condition, Agamben traces his roots to the earliest codifications of Western law. Contra Foucault, he argues that an old form of sovereignty was not superseded by the emergence of biopower, but rather that modernity unleashed the biopolitical potential latent within sovereignty since the very beginning. According to Agamben, modernity achieved its most extreme manifestation when the state of exception became the permanent rule in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, “the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation.”19 Here, he overstates his case somewhat—perhaps in part due to a philosophical tendency toward absolute abstractions—because certain mediations, however thin, were clearly present: from the Jews who shaved the new prisoners to the guards who maintained order to the Sonderkommando who disposed of bodies from the gas chambers. Yet his larger point retains its potency. While those sent to the camps “were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life.”20 Even those that survived or the meager few who escaped became bare life—if only for the time in which they were held in the camps. This absolute form of the camp occurs recursively and with varying similarity throughout the modern world: Australian offshore detention centers holding asylum seekers indefinitely and in near secrecy, illegal settlements of migrant workers in South Africa, even the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in which the whistleblower Edward Snowden spent thirty-nine days before being granted temporary asylum. Not simply an imagined notion of philosophy, the essential dynamics of which are not divorced from everyday practices of state power: there are lines of flight between institutionalized practices of organ donation, for example, and the limit zone of life and death that is the camp. Organ donation need not—and surely will not—lead to extermination camps. Rather, the potential of the camp is inherent in the power and politics of the contemporary world. “If today there is no longer

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any one clear figure of the sacred man,” writes Agamben, “it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri.”21 Few are rendered closer to bare life than those held in spaces deliberately designated as outside legal norms, yet within the full force of US military power. Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply “detainees,” they are the subject of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight.22

While the US Supreme Court later overturned many of the legal assumptions on which Guantánamo was structured, the prison none the less operated for years as a state of exception in which detainees were rendered as bare life. For many, their experience with the law through Guantánamo’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals echoes that of Kafka’s Joseph K. In his memoir Five Years of My Life, Murat Kurnaz describes a farcical series of tribunals in which his military “attorney” refuses to ask questions on his behalf and a verdict is handed down declaring him to have been captured in Tora Bora in Afghanistan, fighting for al-Qaeda, even though he had spent five years in US custody since his arrest in Pakistan.23 Like the various legal memoranda authorizing brutal interrogation that I will examine in the next chapter, these tribunals perform a charade of legality. This mimicry of the juridical processes called for by humanitarian law speaks to the way in which the state of exception operates via paradox: the law must be performed or acknowledged, even as it is suspended. This façade accentuates the degree to which the practices of the war on terror deviate from the normal legal order, while also sketching the contours of that order. In addition to whatever proximate causes or personal ideologies were at play in the Bush Administration’s decisions, torture enacts the re-inscription of the biopolitical sovereign on subjected bodies, which become little more than objects for the enactment and display of United States sovereign power. Derek Gregory argues that this “was sovereign power at its most naked, and when the first prisoners from Afghanistan arrived at Guantánamo Bay in January 2002, it was viscerally clear that they were to be reduced to bare life.”24 But as I will discuss in the next chapter with regard to the relationship between tortured and torturer, Gregory goes too far when he claims that detainees “mattered only as bodies: as biopoliticized bare life.”25 Such an abstraction—the conceptualizing of bodies as pure philosophy—elides their significance as both the product and project of the war on terror, and their specific, individual experiences of



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detention and torture. Reduced to bare life, yes, but also and at once embodiments of secured threat, muscular power, and crimes avenged. With the Abu Ghraib scandal, the security apparatus of the war on terror was revealed as a performance of power enacted on detained bodies, one that demonstrates how law has ceased to give meaning to the emotion and sensation of life and now merely regulates it.26 This is bare life before sovereign power, but complexly—if at times thinly—mediated by techniques of torture, prison structures, legal pantomimes, rendition processes, and so on. Understood as producing bare life, these American tortures should occasion little surprise—the extent of democratic torture catalogued by Rejali in Torture and Democracy suggests that such practices are an always-present potential within the biopolitical apparatus of modern democratic states. In contrast to the Nazi camps, the camps of the war on terror and the torture that occurs there are not concerned with death but survival. This detainee survival fulfills a necessary dual purpose: it affirms that the American state is (at least minimally) life-preserving and thus retains intact its core principles, even as it ensures that those bodies survive only as signs of sovereign power. The victim lives but their voice is erased and spoken over by the state’s assertion of just cause, of potential threats, of securing society. Claims of abuse are either contested, or co-opted as the necessary price of this security. America’s “clean” tortures have far more in common, in both practice and purpose, with the pain inflicted on Orwell’s Winston, who ultimately lives as a symbol of the futility of resistance, than those of Kafka’s apparatus for execution-by-torture. If the torture Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish reflects the pre-modern sovereign’s power to make die and let live, in contrast to the make live and let die of biopolitics, then the tortures of the war on terror embody the defining characteristic of contemporary biopower: to make survive.27 As Agamben writes, the “decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival.”28 Taking up this idea, Judith Butler identifies survivability as the contemporary ground for moral action, and argues that action begins with the recognition of precariousness as the general condition of humanity.29 The detainees of the war on terror are among those who experience this in its most extreme form. In a sickly revealing joke, a guard tells detainee Murat Kurnaz, “‘Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews? … That’s exactly what we’re going to do with you.’”30 While there are no crematoriums at Guantánamo, Bagram Air Base or the CIA black sites, a similarity of form is discernible; an echo that speaks to the

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enduring place of the camp within modern sovereignty. Reverberating with that maximal manifestation of power, the torture chambers of the war on terror can be read as a kind of camp writ small: it is this body here subjected to sovereign power in this moment now. More, it is this body encountering power through specific techniques wielded by particular persons in an all-too-real prison. Before moving to analysis of tortured bodies themselves, I want to tease out three brief propositions that might not be immediately evident from this discussion of biopower, sovereignty, and the state of exception. I will not give them full voice here, but they are threads that run through the fabric of this book, visible and formative in various places. First, the establishment of sites of detention as geographical zones within which the state of exception rules is perhaps not so much an effect of the war on terror as it is a necessary condition of its structure. Second, the very notion of the biopolitical body means it cannot be extricated from power but is always caught in its deployment. As such, the body alone cannot be the sole foundation from which to resist sovereign power—it will be always already implicated in the continued instantiation of sovereign power. Consequently, some existence of the body as more than its biopolitical existence is necessary. Third, if the state of exception within the camps of the war on terror subjects bare life to power, and biopower is the constitutive form of contemporary state control, then detainees are conjoined with all manner of political apparatuses, from the military prison to the acquiescent citizenry. Yet detainees are not alone in being caught at the heart of biopower. Their interrogators, who are too often also torturers, also reside within and are subsumed by the state of exception.

Bodies and affects What constitutes a body? Gilles Deleuze describes bodies as “relations of motion and rest, speeds and slowness between particles” and the “capacity for affecting and being affected.”31 At first this might seem an unnecessary abstraction, but what he reaches for in this definition is a conception of bodies that both encompasses and moves beyond flesh and blood. Bodies as cultural and political, textual and visual, corporeal and abstracted—and all of these things, at once and potentially. Bodies in this reading reside on a spectrum between relative fixity and radical flux. It is tempting to think of fixity as the ideal state, bodies at their most body-ness, but this would be a mistake. Rather,



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it is in change—in transition from one state to another, in movement—that bodies are most intensely realized. Such change is not necessarily concerned with transformation of form, but rather with an openness to potential that generates and activates the body’s relations to the world. Thinking the body in movement, writes Brian Massumi, “means accepting the paradox that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, but not it. Real, material, but incorporeal. Inseparable, coincident, but disjunct.”32 Or, to put this differently, in the transition from one state or position to another, the body carries with it the potential of its becoming something new. And the vectors of that potential— the lines that connect what is now and what could become—are affects. Affects can be understood in many ways, but always involve some force of relation. They constitute the way in which the body relates to itself and the wider world, as well as its capacity for both acting and being acted upon. Affect moves bodies; moving bodies are affected bodies. As such, it is that which occurs not in one thing or another, but in the relationship between things, between bodies and worlds. In their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth argue that affect “arises in the midst of in-between-ness” and “resides as accumulative beside-ness.” It is relational and abstracted, occurring between bodies but also penetrating them. It moves at quantum speed yet also lingers, sticks, slides. It is pre-subjective, but also, in certain circumstances, enduring. Affect, then, is not simply something that bodies possess but what defines them. Bodies are determined “not by an outer skin-envelope or other surface boundary but by their potential to reciprocate or co-participate in the passage of affect.”33 It makes little sense to speak of affect without bodies, or of bodies without affect. To exist meaningfully in the world is to interact with it, to affect and be affected by it. Thinking the body—political and biological, individual and collective—in terms of relation is to see it as always implicated in others, and the world. Bodies are thus sites of potential unlocked in encounter, in the collision of surfaces, in the affects connecting body to world and world to body. Encounters between bodies constantly occur, but not all encounters are equally affective. Certain encounters can change bodies radically, can cause them to grow, enlighten, transform, strengthen them—or mutate, freeze, rupture, break, traumatize. Such change is shaped by intensity, by the depth, volume, and velocity of the vectors between one body and another. This intensity is not simply a quality of affect but constitutive of it. Rather than residing in specific sequences, narratives or bodily functions, such intensity operates independently

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from expectation, cognitive control, or the properties of a given entity. This is what Massumi means by his well-known formulation the autonomy of affect: a forcefulness that is owned by neither one body nor another but both constitutes and is constituted by those bodies. It is that unquantifiable, excessive dimension of affect that spills over bodies, defies order, and makes encounters fluid and unfixed. Yet if affects are the relational substance connecting body and world, it is important to think of affect at work on and in this body here. Drawing a distinction between affect (autonomous force), sensation (bodily feeling), and emotion (affect recognized, owned, and categorized), Massumi’s conception of affect sees it very much as an undifferentiated force of relation. Other approaches define these categories somewhat differently. According to Gregg and Seigworth, there are at least eight distinct approaches to affect ranging from the SpinozanDeleuzian to the neuroscientific.34 One influential approach is that of the developmental psychologist Silvan Tomkins, who conceives affect as inherently biological and specific. For Tomkins, affects are not just the Deleuzian acting and being acted upon but “the primary motivational system in human beings” and “the primitive gods within the individual.” Rather than an autonomous force of encounter, Tomkins’s affects are discretely identifiable: shame, anguish, fear, joy, excitement, disgust, love, interest, and anger.35 However, these affects are not quite the emotions with which they share names but pre-cognitive and visceral experiences that shape and change bodies. They are felt on the surface of the skin, in the movement of the face, the set of the shoulders, the widening of the eyes. Yet, significantly, they do not occur in isolation—they are always relational; they are involuntary bodily responses born of particular encounters. In other words, they are the embodied and nameable experiences of autonomous intensity. Yet in distinction from sensation as such, they occupy the body with the moment of encounter in specific ways. Tomkins’s work suggests, to employ a Deleuzian phrase, lines of flight between the lived experience of a body and its relation to the world. Not only this, Tomkins shows in specific and intense detail how discrete affects, fluctuating in intensity and form, come to habituate, condition, and change the human body on, in, and from which they work. Reading Tomkins alongside Sara Ahmed’s work on the sociality of emotions, however, reveals affect as present on the surface of bodies and in-between bodies, shaping and forming them. While she largely refers to emotions, Ahmed’s conception of their sociality shares the embodied, involuntary quality of Tomkins’s affects and the fluid, forceful autonomy identified by Massumi. For



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Ahmed, “emotions are not ‘in’ either the individual or the social, but produce the surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and social to be delineated as if they are objects.”36 Emotions are messy, sticky, visceral: they exist not only in the body but also in the dynamic encounter between one body and another. “Emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well as through orientations towards and away from others.”37 Despite the differences in terminology and conception, a provocative formation emerges: the lived bodily-ness of Tomkins’s affects; the shaped and shaping sociality of Ahmed’s emotions; and the dynamic, intense changeability of Massumi’s model. There are, of course, disjunctures and discontinuities between these approaches. Deleuzian capacities for acting and being acted upon do not sit entirely comfortably with named biological manifestations of experience. Nor should the very real distinctions between and differences of definition regarding affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation be ignored entirely. However, I wish to take seriously Deleuze’s and Guattari’s suggestion in What Is Philosophy? that it is better thought of as a practical matter: the thinking of new constellations of concepts that do something for our understanding of, working with, or relation to, the world.38 Throughout this book, I slip between conceptions of affect and bring them together in ways that purists may find uncomfortable. While I am aware of the rough edges and potential contradictions in this approach, it allows me to focus on the productive potential of affect conceptualized within, between, and around bodies. Friction produces energy. Holding both the abstracted, relational force of encounter and embodied experience within the space analytical space affords radical new potentials for creative understanding of torture. What, then, are the specific affective relations that flow between those bodies? Between tortured and torturer? Beyond the broad biopolitical drive of sovereign power, what, in a narrow sense, structures the encounter of bodies in the torture chamber? Consider the detainee at Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, or one of the CIA black sites scattered around the globe. Waterboarding works on and through fear: in the first instance a fear of death and then a fear of the event itself, a fear of fearing death. The muscles contract, spasm. The victim chokes, heaves up water. The body shrinks away yet is bound in place. The torturer fears too. Fear of what the other might know fuels the desire to break the victim, and yet the torturer fears failing, falling short, never knowing. Detainees stripped naked feel shame and humiliation. Not only is the naked

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body exposed to the gaze of others, it is helpless before that gaze. The victim tries to turn away, to hide the shame, but cannot. There is no place to turn in a tiny cell, interrogation booth or wire cage. The attempt to turn away creates a further exposure. Or, worse still, the detainee may be shackled naked in place, overcome by the desire to hide and yet utterly unable to do so. If the guard or interrogator is female and the detainee a Muslim male, there is a further intensity to that shame.39 As Moazzam Begg writes, there is shame, too, in “witnessing the abuse of others, and knowing how utterly dishonored they felt.”40 Forced for hours into stress positions, the detainee defecates and urinates on himself, feels these excretions on his skin and cannot pull away. Disgust, as well, in the moment of confession—the self-disgust of the detainee who has betrayed friends, or lied to end the torture. Torturer and jailers look on, lips curling at the abject victim, humanity stripped slowly away. Then there is the impression in the detainee’s face from an open hand slap, just hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to signal anything other than contempt. Pain is present too. Bursting lungs that fill with water. Feet and ankles swelling while the back aches, jabs shooting through muscle. A sting in the cheek where the hand has struck. None of this occurs in isolation. Pain and shame suffuse one another, fear slides into disgust. Events affect one another. Affects resonate and amplify across and between moments, bringing the body in all its fullness and knowledge of the world into the ambit of torture and into inextricable relation to the torturer. In the shifting and violent encounter of torture, intensities form between tortured and torturing bodies, implicating each in the other. Such bodies, writes Anna Gibbs, “can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear—in short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion.”41 This contagion does not simply flare up and then vanish without a trace: it lingers, it clings to the skin and slides into the blood, it infects institutions and contaminates government practices. Survivors may continue living, but their sense of a continuity of self is often fractured, if not shattered. The vestiges of torture cling not only to the victim, adhering to their own efforts to move forward, but to the State, and to the torturer. This can occur only because affect is both embodied—fear, shame, disgust, anger—but also autonomous, a forcefulness that shapes institutions as much as individuals, and reshapes the surfaces of social bodies. As interrogator and self-professed torturer Tony Lagouranis puts it, “in the small and very personal interaction of



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torturer and prisoner, we can see an inevitable escalation that bleeds over into the world outside the interrogation booth.”42 Escalation is founded in torture’s relationality: it cannot occur without the presence of another. Claims in the CIA’s Kubark manual and elsewhere that the torture victim can be made to feel that they are torturing themselves through techniques such as stress positions and sleep deprivation are simply false veneers designed to hide the high price paid by the torturers—and, of course, to limit accountability. Torture targets exactly the body’s relation to the world and to the body of the torturer. “In torture,” writes Judith Butler, “the body’s vulnerability to subjection is exploited; the fact of interdependency is abused.”43 While the sociality of bodies both on their surfaces and at their depths makes us human and produces the very possibility of survival in the world, it also exposes us to potential destruction—including by forces that purport to protect us. Few conditions enact this doubling of the body’s survivability more than torture. Attention, then, must be given to the torturer too, and their position is a theme to which this book will often return. The torturer, writes Améry, “has control of the other’s scream of pain and death; he is master over flesh and spirit, life and death.”44 This other, the torturer, cannot remain unaffected either. Jean Maria Arrigo of the Project for Ethics and Art in Testimony has engaged in correspondence with an American military intelligence liaison officer for a number of years, a man who spent large parts of his career working with foreign services that torture on behalf of the United States. This correspondence, held privately by Dr. Arrigo with selected documents also in the Hoover Intelligence Archive and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, cannot be quoted and cited in detail for reasons of confidentiality. But reading through hundreds of emails written over multiple years—a privilege for which I am most grateful to Dr. Arrigo—offered fascinating insight into interrogation and torture. This officer deflects inquiry away from himself, retreats into the supposed clarity of national security ideology, and seems to slip unaware over his own emotional silences. His communication skills are outstanding, his capacity for analysis clear, but a paucity of reflection reigns when writing of witnessing trauma. He seeks to limit affect by compartmentalizing those horrors, an attempt to prevent affect being amplified in a positive feedback process. Not displaying affect means not being exposed to self-revelation and hence to the cost and consequence, at the level of selfhood, of his actions. As he is quoted as saying in one alreadypublished article, “You do not need touchy feely people in interrogations.”45 To survive torturing another, or even complicity in the use of torture, requires the

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deadening of affect, the distancing of the self. But of course this affective dulling can never be complete. In certain acts of torture, in singular moments or over long hours, violent affects—alone or in shifting complexes—reach a feverish intensity. Such heightened affects do not occur then vanish away. They linger, stick to skin, and slide between changed and changing bodies, eliciting what Tomkins calls “scripts for their own containment.”46 More than endure, affects can resonate, sediment, mutate with the passage of time. Fracturing experience, they become the very stuff of trauma—making time and duration a crucial subject for analysis, and one to which this book will return. My aim here has been to offer a multifaceted account of affect, disparate and yet productively in tension. If the torture chamber is to be opened and the encounter of bodies within it understood, then affect is crucial. Torture is more than simple violence; it does more than inflict pain that makes the victim into mere flesh. Specific and bodily affects are provoked and incited, amplified and modulated in the in-between of bodies in relation. It infects institutions and reshapes social bodies as readily as it destroys lives. In the movements from the first authorization of so-called “enhanced interrogation” to the grotesque displays at Abu Ghraib, what it means to be an interrogator, how military operations occur, and the very fabric of the war on terror were changed. In the next chapter, I will focus in more detail on the role of pain in all this, but first I want to consider the structure of the war on terror itself.

War on terror For the state of exception to obtain an apparently permanent geographic presence in the prison camps of the war on terror, fear of threat had to heighten security to a fever pitch. International relations theorists Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde describe “security” as a specific act of speech that enables the state to do what would otherwise be rejected by the population.47 They call this speech act securitization. An actor, such as the United States, designates something—in this case terror(ism)—as an existential threat that requires emergency measures in response. When an appropriate audience accepts this designation, the threat becomes securitized, effectively removing from normal politics any serious debate on the legitimacy of the state’s response. Securitization is typical of state practice, not exceptional to it. As such, securitization can be found across the



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globe, from Israel’s figuring of Palestinian self-governance to the drug trade in South America. However, the war on terror constitutes a particularly cogent and long-lived form of securitization, one capable of forming “a dominant, unifying idea that would enable [the US] to reassert and legitimize its leadership of global security.”48 Previously, the Cold War had functioned as an enduring, macro-level securitization that provided the overall structural framework of international politics. After the Cold War, the United States became the sole superpower but in doing so ceased to have an easy other against which to define itself. Attempts to cast Japan as an economic threat during the 1990s became untenable once that nation drifted into stagnation. The post-Cold War uncertainty over the foreign policy in the United States ended with 9/11, which also provided an opportunity for Washington to legitimize its hegemonic position, even as it tied together “several longstanding security concerns arising within the liberal order, most notably crime and the trades in drugs and the technologies for weapons of mass destruction.”49 Conveniently enough, doing so would also knit together ever more tightly the biopolitical strands of the state. Securitization, however, could not occur without social, cultural, and political histories of fear that play upon and shape identities. The war on terror built on state manipulation of American public fears going back to expansion into the West and the various “red scares” of the last century.50 Adopting a similar approach to that of David Campbell in his work on the construction of identity through security, Richard Jackson argues that the war on terror’s discursive formation helped solidify a politically useful sense of American-ness at the expense of a barbarian other.51 Seen in this light, post-9/11 demonizing of Islam and venerating the flag share an uncomfortable likeness with identity formation in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.52 Drawing on these affective histories, the war on terror enabled what Agamben calls the “unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.”53 Securitization, then, can be read as a specifically biopolitical technique to expand state power over life and bring the state of exception more fully into being. Declaring “security,” however, demands a threat that must be secured against, and for that threat to carry sufficient weight to be readily sustained. September 11, with its tragic loss of life, visceral horror, spectacular imagery, and exposure of vulnerability provided fertile ground for threat to take root. Fed by historical and fictive precedents from the Lockerbie and 1993 World Trade Center bombings to the stereotyped villains of action films such as 1994’s True

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Lies, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda made for readily acceptable enemies. But while such long-standing cultural tropes helped to embed the terrorist threat, its power also lay in its self-perpetuating quality. Faced with an enemy willing to ignore every humanitarian norm in the conduct of war, the US would not always be able to conform to the niceties of international law. Actions, practices, and responses to the perceived threat worked to maintain it—vastly expanded state power through legal vehicles such as the Patriot Act could not be justified unless the threat remained, and so it had to be made to. So too the continued existence of Guantánamo, home of the “worst of the worst” terrorists, asserts its own necessity. Securitization is thus self-referential, with no necessity for the presence of actual existential dangers. It constructs issues as threats then legitimates their threat status by securitizing against them. If the world is so dangerous as to require geographical spaces in which sovereign power operates on bodies with such intimate violence, then surely such sites must remain— suspending the law contains its own logic of self-perpetuation. More than simply self-causing, threat, sufficiently articulated, is sustained by its temporal structure. “Threat is from the future,” states Massumi. “Its eventual location and ultimate extent are undefined. Its nature is open-ended.”54 This unfinished and unfinishable quality allows threat to be continually present, and this ever-presence is crucial to sustaining the war on terror. So too its continual deferral. Threats never disappear; they simply fail to arrive in a way that is never over. This iterative structure of futurity makes threat enduringly powerful; its power resides in its not occurring even as all manner of acts to secure against it continue. If threat is never over, the only way to lessen it is to continue to secure more of life within the institutional apparatuses of the state. Threat enables a mode of politics legitimized by the paradox that action taken to prevent a threat that never arrives is always made necessary by the very never-happening of the threatened event. Rather than being an origin of new threats per se, 9/11 enabled a threshold for the role of security within politics. It continued a series of prior attacks characterized as terrorist, but its scale, site, and circumstance meant that it could tip politics further into a paradigm in which security is the normative practice of governance. After the towers fell, the apparatuses, structures, and techniques that constitute contemporary governmentality came to be shaped by the logic of threat. This enabled biopower to stake a wider claim over future life, as well as present life. Control over bodies thus extends not only in breadth within any given moment, but also into potential future threats and thus future possible existences.



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For all that threat contains its own logic of futurity and self-perpetuation, generating fear that reaches a fever pitch—the kind of fear necessary, paradoxically, to fight terror—calls for real objects. September 11 happened. Three thousand innocents lost their lives. Al-Qaeda exists. If figures of threat secured can be pointed to even as inexhaustible threat remains, all the better. Those figures are, in the war on terror, the tortured bodies indefinitely detained at Guantánamo, Bagram Air Base, and “black sites” of the CIA gulag—bodies and sites of imprisonment that became the true front lines of the war on terror. Shackled inside razor-wire cages, detained bodies became the present presence of the future, embodying both threat contained and threat to come. Their very being makes legitimate certain acts of violence. As Butler points out, violence “renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object.”55 What the sovereign demands from the state of exception is that certain bodies, rendered bare life, become signs of the threat that legitimizes its own continued expansion. In the war on terror, this always-incomplete securing against threat by the United States relies on the subjection of certain bodies at particular sites and with specific techniques. Those bodies were not the only ones to occupy a central role in the formation of the war on terror. Its ongoing legitimacy was also founded on the traumatic exposure of susceptibility to the kind of violence normally reserved for those outside the industrialized West. Thus, the war on terror is inseparable from the sudden recognition of vulnerability engendered by 9/11. The United States was meant to be safe from such assaults, impervious to the violence of actors from outside the state. With the attacks, the US lost what Butler calls “a certain horizon of experience, a certain sense of the world itself as a national entitlement.”56 What the US experienced was the violent dispelling of its illusion of invulnerability. People who had felt themselves secure from political violence were revealed to be anything but. Threats that were the stuff of fantasy occurred in actuality. Vulnerability is inherent to human experience, but “takes on another meaning at the moment it is recognized, and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability.”57 Thus in the socio-political context of the war on terror, including its incarnations in Iraq and Afghanistan, “the US subject seeks to produce itself as impermeable, to define itself as protected permanently against incursion and as radically invulnerable to attack.”58 To be made vulnerable is to be affectively exposed, and not in some finite way—it is to be exposed to an excess of negative affect. Above all, it is to be affected by terror, taken over by it for a time that cannot but feel infinite, an unending fearfulness.

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“War on terror”: the phrase contains the conditions of its own potential infinitude. President Bush first used the phrase in his speech to a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”59 Already the potential for both an open-ended and amorphous conflict is evident, a war encompassing far more than al-Qaeda and of an indefinite duration. In 2003, the Bush Administration’s “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism” widened its objectives to include ending “state-sponsored” terrorism.60 As Jackson writes, “officials have created a new social reality where terrorism threatens to destroy everything that ordinary people hold dear—their lives, their democracy, their freedom, their way of life, their civilization.”61 Legitimated by the terrorist threat and the wider logic of the war on terror, the Bush Administration launched conventional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, expanded intelligence, border security, and domestic spying powers, and established geographic sites around the globe at which the state of exception became the rule. Perhaps when President Bush first gave the war its name he intended “terror” to be a shorthand for “terrorist groups” or “terrorism.” But language has its own power—and its own fluidity and capacity to slip the bounds of intended meaning. Terror, spoken in the context of threat and war, said as a securitizing speech act, cannot avoid a kind of affective excess. Fear not only becomes the raison d’être of war; it is always that which the war cannot banish. Fear circulates across the globe in complex economies, particularly since 9/11, proliferating spatially, culturally, and politically through and between bodies. Indeed, the futurity of threat on which the war on terror relies flourishes most when given both frightened and frightening bodies. Without an object of fear or the approach of that object, fear has no value, no affective currency. “Although such fear sticks, it also slides across such bodies,” argues Ahmed, “it is the structural possibility that the terrorist may pass us by that justifies the expansion of these forms of intelligence, surveillance and the rights of detention.”62 This simultaneous sliding and sticking is essential to the affective structure of the war on terror. Fear of threat remains, even as it slides past—unrealized, but no less real for its non-occurrence. “Just because the menace potential never became a clear and present danger doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there,” writes Massumi. “The threat will have been real for all eternity. It will have been real because it was felt to be real.”63 This affectivity is what gives threat its reality. If it came to pass, it would no longer be a threat but a happening, an event. Disaster. The power of



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threat resides in that it is an affective fact. To feel the presence of a threat is to produce threat in an affective and actual sense: threats are self-constitutive in the first instance. The trick is to encode and regulate that affectivity, to direct it to political purposes. One such effort emblematic of the Bush Administration’s practices more generally was the March 2002 introduction of the Homeland Security Advisory System, a color-coded threat alert chart: severe (red), high (orange), elevated (yellow), guarded (blue), low (green). Until it was discontinued in 2011, the alert was never set to blue or green. Its scale instrumentalized the fear of threat, encouraging a continual background hum of fearfulness as a means of regulating the affective state of the public, particularly its anxiety. With its widespread promotion and construction of threats capable of refiguring life entirely, the spectrum made fear the self-perpetuating basis for life in the contemporary world.64 Here, the co-constitution of affectivity and biopolitics in the war on terror becomes doubly clear. Not only did its expansion of power occur through the affective contagion of terror, the very techniques of security were aimed at both controlling and generating that fear. While security as the normal mode of politics requires the affective fact of the unrealized-yet-real threat, affect is always in excess of actual happenings, an excess that both perpetuates and overloads this technique of biopower. The war on terror maintains its enduring affective structure through the continued production of threat. Even though very few actual incidents occurred after 9/11 and these were largely thwarted, facts succumb to the overwhelming affective force of the threats felt as impending potentials by the populace. Those rarely materialized instances of danger only amplify the affective atmosphere of fear. Yet the biopolitical apparatus falls short of complete governance of this affectively experienced threat-potential. Threat might be contagious, but contagion by nature also resists containment or control. Subjecting detained bodies to torture performs an attempt to contain excess affectivity. Tortured bodies stand in for threat both realized and contained—for the containment of excesses of fear gives the affective fact of future threat its necessary intensity. Waging a war on terror demands an affective facticity to the fear of fear itself—but it also demands that this fearing of fear be containable. But it is not. Terror spills into populations, infiltrates military and intelligence practices, shapes policy. Terror engenders torture, even as it is proclaimed that torture is necessary to contain terror. It is tempting to imagine a world full of Kafka’s voyagers, ready to cast a steely gaze over torturous acts and pronounce them unjust and unnecessary. Yet for

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all the outrage over Abu Ghraib, torture continued. Given the scenario of a ticking bomb and captive terrorist, many would choose torture—no matter the non-realities of such fictive scenarios. Despite the broken, ruined bodies against which humanitarian law constructs the rational, unitary liberal subject, there have been no prosecutions for torture beyond the military police of Abu Ghraib.65 On 9/11, Coetzee’s barbarian threat did break the boundaries of the American empire; patrolling soldiers were not enough and the brutal Colonel from the imperial center did not arrive in time. By then, it was too late for the law—like the Magistrate, it would be thrown beneath the harsh wheel of security. But nearly a decade of torture did little to find or defeat the enemy; no matter what apologist films, politicians and intelligence agencies would have the world believe. At the end of Nineteen Eight-Four, Winston’s torture produces four final doublethought words: “He loved Big Brother.”66 Surely no equivalent words have passed the lips of the detainees of the war on terror, for all their suffering under an Orwellian logic of power for power’s sake. Nor can one imagine the detainees who arrive in the camps with no allegiance to the United States finding the solace of Rubashov, loyal servant of the state, in Koestler’s novel. This kind of acquiescent death, willing self-erasure, lies outside the bounds of the war on terror. Throughout this book, I ask instead whether the tortures of the war on terror produce something in between: an always-indefinite transformation of the detained, surviving body into sovereign power. If torture is latent within biopolitical practices of governance, then the war on terror gave it the necessary force to emerge from within the contemporary United States. Yet torture had never been far from the surface. Counterinsurgency training at the infamous School of the Americas, the Phoenix Program targeting the Viet Cong, electric shock used to elicit confessions in Chicago’s Police Area 2—torture and the United States were hardly strangers. What changed in the war on terror was that torture became institutionalized within the security apparatus, and with its broken, subjected bodies, became constitutive of the war on terror itself. Of course, the US did not admit to torture at an institutional level—only in occasional incidents such as Abu Ghraib, which various official investigations described as “abuse” and “acts of brutality and purposeless sadism” that were the work of “a few bad apples.”67 But the legal documents of the Bush Administration that became the Torture Memos refute such attempts to cauterize torture from the wider fabric of the military, the intelligence services, and the state more broadly. So it is to these memoranda that the next chapter first turns.



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In the war on terror, detained bodies are bodies of fear—both feared as terrorist threat, and fearful of the violence visited upon them. This violence can be physical but also affective: it assaults the very ways in which the body relates to others, to itself, and to the world. To understand bodies as affected and affecting and to read the tortures of the war on terror in their affective dimensions is to insist upon an ever-present relationality within torture. An affective circuit between tortured and torturer always emerges, charged with the make survive of the biopolitical apparatus of the war on terror. What power cannot contain, however, is the wildness of affect—its capacity to exceed regulation, to change bodies, and to reshape the relation between bodies and world. If literature is to give testimony to the tortures of the war on terror, it will need to embrace this messy affectivity.

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Reading Torture

I’d never interacted with someone on such unequal footing, and here I held pretty much absolute sovereign power over them. US Army interrogator Tony Lagouranis, Fear Up Harsh Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely. Send them to the world, To the judges and To the people of conscience, Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded. And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world, Of this innocent soul. Jumah al-Dossari, from “Death Poem,” Poems from Guantánamo: the Detainees Speak1 Few words describe pain directly. Most are metaphors—burning, searing, or stinging, for instance—or reliant on objects external to the body—cutting, piercing, crushing. Putting pain into language frequently calls for simile: pain must be likened to razor blades or needles. In the medical world, various techniques of describing and measuring pain have been developed to try to systematize vocabularies. Often, as in the groundbreaking McGill Pain Questionnaire from 1971, these methods try to order language based on likeness, and to fit descriptors of the patient’s pain into models that in turn tie into known symptoms and characteristics of illness and injury. These efforts can be compared to zeroing a rifle on a target—a sequence of linguistic shots intended to give doctors the best possible chance at identifying and addressing the patient’s ailment. If nothing else, medical models of pain point to the impossibility of bringing pain fully

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into language. In the clinical and scientific context of health care, this presents practical problems for research and treatment. Within human rights work, this becomes a problem of an entirely different order as the necessity of translating pain into language is amplified by both the complexities of torturous pain and the organizational and even legal requirements of the language used.2 In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry famously describes the pain of torture as “world-destroying.”3 She argues, “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”4 Helpless before the torturer and inflicted with intense pain, the victim cannot speak and instead cries out, guttural noises or terrible screams from the depths of which no words are possible. Torturers seek this pain of wordless intensity quite deliberately to set up the impossible paradox of being exhorted to speak (to inform, to confess) even as pain overwhelms the mind’s capacity to form words. Words matter because they are what make sense of experience, forming subjects into objects that become both knowable and shareable. Physical pain of any kind makes speaking difficult: the pain of torture often renders it impossible. Speech cannot issue from within the moment of a violent blow, or shock of electrocution, or lungs on the verge of bursting under water. When torture removes the capacity to speak, it unmakes the world because its victim can no longer describe his or her surroundings—there is only pain. However, Scarry’s account is limited in a range of ways that will be developed at various points in this book, not least its privileging of a rational, world-doubting subject free of privation over the meanings that such experiences of suffering can accumulate. Being made radically aware of the body as a corporeal entity is the foundation of violation, suggesting that in her conception the embodied experience of being human is somehow lesser than reason and speech.5 Despite the violence done to language, the capacity to speak, or at least the potential, almost always returns after torture ends. Thus, its destruction is never quite complete. As Darius Rejali, a leading scholar on torture techniques and their history, points out, simply describing this as the destruction of language does not tell the whole story: Being unable to express pain does indeed have political consequences, but it would be a mistake to confuse the empirical inability to say or think when one is in pain with a philosophical claim that pain is a preverbal sensation, a sensation that has some quality that, in principle, makes it inexpressible.6



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Thus while torture might result in periods of inexpressibility, it cannot erase language at an ontological level—the victim of torture can still speak, still be aware they are in something called “pain,” still attempt to describe that pain once it has receded. It is this that makes the testimony of survivors possible. And, as I showed in the last chapter, more embodied and less linguistically dependent means of understanding experience—and with it pain—can be found by recognizing its affectivity. To read torture is to encounter pain, and in encountering pain to come into contact with the limits of language, but also with the contingent complexity of bodily experience. In this chapter, I build on the earlier analysis of biopower, affect, and the war on terror to read not only the pain of torture but its embodied relationality. I begin with the Torture Memos of the Bush Administration and their incorporation of pain into the very center of United States power. I ask how pain destroys worlds and language, and how it does not. Working from the notion that pain is contingent, I show how it possesses a degree of radical uncertainty in the context of juridical rationalizing that enables the double movement of its exploitation and erasure by sovereign power. Deeply implicated in the biopolitical and affective dynamics of the war on terror, the pain of torture cannot readily be isolated. It is necessarily embedded in a wider set of relations. Next, I read torture in the memoirs of detainees and interrogators— persons who are at times tortured and torturer. Both victim and perpetrator emerge as marked by the act—not only separately, but joined together by an enduring intensity of relation. Finally, I turn to Poems from Guantánamo: the Detainees Speak, a 2007 collection of poetry by detainees held in the prison camp on Cuba, to consider how sovereign power and torture’s affectivity mark writings from within the depths of the state of exception.7 Startling in their raw force and improbable existence, these poems show not only how language grapples with torture, but how poetry can resist power even from within almost complete subjection.

Pain Pain swiftly found its way to the heart of the American state in the days after 9/11. Vice President Cheney’s comments on Meet the Press about working “on the dark side” were revealing. As Jane Mayer shows in her fearless investigative account, Bush Administration lawyers soon went to work on mechanisms to

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sidestep and, if necessary, subvert laws against torture.8 Collectively the various documents they produced would become known as the “Torture Memos,” but the full extent of the torture program and its legal justifications remained secret until the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. The first of the Memos was written primarily (although not solely) by John Yoo, an ardent believer in executive power, and lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel, an obscure but influential bureau within the Justice Department. Marked for the attention of then White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, Yoo’s memo was signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee on August 1, 2002, and is now commonly referred to as the Bybee Memo. Secret until it was leaked during the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Bybee Memo was the first documentary evidence of the extent to which torture had been authorized—or, to be more exact, brought into a gray zone of non-occurrence by the careful elision of the possibility of its definition ever being met. In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib and amid widespread condemnation, the Bybee Memo was withdrawn and replaced in December 2004 by a more nuanced document that avoided the worst excesses of its predecessor. But this apparent softening of policy was largely cosmetic: the December memo was soon superseded by others that reinstated torture but remained secret until declassified and released by President Obama. Accompanying the original Bybee Memo was another memorandum, one that also remained secret until 2009. Issued to the CIA by the Office of Legal Counsel, the memo authorized the use of ten specific interrogation techniques on the recently captured, high-level al-Qaeda operative Abu Zabaydah. Despite its narrow focus, the CIA Memo proved incredibly influential. By specifying particular acts as harsh or enhanced interrogation rather than torture, it allowed techniques such as waterboarding to obtain the veneer of legal, if secret, respectability. This initial approval facilitated their spread through military and intelligence operations. If certain acts were appropriate for Abu Zabaydah, the logic went, then they might also be applied to other so-called “High-Value Detainees,” including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Once within the system torture spread rapidly—whether named as such or hidden behind various euphemisms. Both the CIA and Bybee Memos reveal the extent to which the tortured body was incorporated into the essential structure of the war on terror, and the complex relationship to law that this necessitated. Rather than attempting to objectively determine the limits of interrogation practices, both the Bybee and CIA Memos were designed to widen the options for brutal treatment of



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prisoners by defining torture almost out of existence. Whether or not their architects and authors intended the emergence of a torture regime is a question for historians, just as the sophistry of the juridical arguments is best left to legal scholars. My interest here is to examine how pain emerges textually, how it slides into indistinction, and how its very existence as torturous pain becomes contingent on the intention of the torturer. In what follows, I read passages from both Memos in terms not of their enunciation of law, but rather of sovereignty’s impingement upon the bodies of those detainees who came to embody the unvanquishable threat constitutive of the war on terror itself. The crucial question for the Bybee Memo was to determine what might be an act “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”9 This is the phrase that defines torture in the United States Code, written into domestic law as part of the ratification process for the CAT. As the legal scholar David Cole points out, the crucial word here is “severe” and, in deciding what it meant, the authors chose to “disregard basic dictionary definitions and instead invoke an arcane and irrelevant source,” a statute relating to federal health benefits in emergency conditions.10 Cole speculates that this source was cited as it provided the most amenable definition—certainly, it was not chosen for its relevance to torture. Yet the meaning arrived at by Yoo and his collaborators, whatever its spurious legal reasoning, constitutes the foundational notion of pain for detention and interrogation in the war on terror: Each component of the definition emphasizes that torture is not the mere infliction of pain or suffering on another, but is instead a step well removed. The victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.11

Pain in this account contains a radical undecidability that depends in part on the impossibility of objectively gauging its severity. More problematically, this undecidability is produced precisely by the inexpressibility of pain, its resistance to direct language—“of the kind that is equivalent” and “would be associated”— that so frustrates the medical profession with its ambiguity. Elaine Scarry describes this as the “as if ” structure of similarity and likeness that signals the inability of language to accurately account for pain.12 But where Scarry finds this failure tragic, Bybee and his fellow travelers see an opportunity for justifying the infliction of pain without it ever becoming torturous.

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Typically, pain is understood as a sensation that arises from damage to the body, but it is more than this. Ahmed argues that the recognition of pain “as pain involves complex forms of association between sensations and other kinds of ‘feeling states’.”13 Thus, pain cannot be isolated—it always occurs within a host of related sensations and feelings, themselves shaped by individual memories and subjectivities, such as differing pain thresholds. While for Scarry the pain of torture is utterly isolating and incommunicable, it is also still relational: the torturer inflicts it, and always does so via a weapon, even if that weapon is metaphorical or figural. As much as the metaphors and similes deployed to describe pain show how far language must bend to account for it, they also point to its indeterminacy, its inherent slipperiness. Pain fractures the already unstable relationship between language and sensation, leaving language far too inadequate to give an account of pain sufficiently proximate to experience. Thus, the “severe pain” of statute becomes precisely the fracture between language and experience exploited by the Torture Memos. Yet the Bybee Memo relies on more than pain’s radically uncertain relationship to language; it also employs both intention and duration to enable the pain of torture to ghost through the law. Intention emerges in the claim that the law “requires that a defendant act with the specific intent to inflict severe pain, the infliction of such pain must be the defendant’s precise objective.”14 In other words, torture is only torture when the torturer precisely intends for it to be torture. To avoid guilt, an alleged torturer can always claim that they acted in good faith with the aim of minimizing pain and maximizing the extraction of essential information. Surrounded by the paradox that only the torturer can decide if their act constitutes torture, the “severe pain” that is necessarily constitutive of torture materializes within the memorandum only to immediately diminish into near impossibility the capacity for it to legally occur. This argument about intention constructs what I call a relation of intentionality between interrogator and detainee, such that a detainee’s experience of pain is dependent on the intention of the interrogator for its very status as torturous pain. But while the sensation of pain remains within the victim’s body, something else escapes it to forge a circuit between interrogator and detainee. Ahmed writes of how “the experience of pain does not cut off the body in the present, but attaches this body to the world of other bodies, an attachment that is contingent on elements that are absent in the lived experience of pain.”15 She calls this the “contingency of pain,” its dependence on the presence of another as witness or perpetrator. The Bybee Memo constructs torturous pain as the



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ultimate contingency, but, in doing so, it also reveals—inadvertently, or perhaps unconsciously—that pain is never solely contained within a distinct body. This contingency is tied to “the sociality of being ‘with’ others, of getting close enough to touch.”16 Such proximity—touching or close to it—is exactly that occurrence to which the Memos are addressed. But pain is not always worlddestroying. Rather, pain can call us to attend to our bodies, to their surfaces and contact zones with others. Pain is thus relational, contingent on the other and upon the world in which it occurs. Second, duration forms part of the definition of “psychological” torture in the United States Code: “prolonged mental harm” is a necessary component of the “severe mental pain or suffering” that is constitutive of psychological torture. According to the Memo’s authors, this “mental pain or suffering” must endure for months or years before qualifying as the result of torture.17 Or, to approach this notion from a different angle, whether or not “severe mental pain or suffering” has occurred depends on something that happens in the future. Non-touch techniques, such as sleep deprivation, cannot be torture in the moment in which they occur. Their status as torture is always already deferred to a future potentiality. Much like the terrorist threat, this potential future may never arrive—and indeed once futurity and intention are combined, its arrival as torturous pain can only ever be actualized by the intention of the perpetrator. Once again, torture becomes radically indeterminate—not only in present experience but also in future meaning. Examining waterboarding in the light of how pain and its relationality occur within the Memos is revealing. While the Bybee Memo set out in-principle arguments, the CIA Memo of August 2002 outlines and authorizes specific techniques. The following forms part of its long account of waterboarding: In this procedure, the individual is bound securely to an inclined bench, which is approximately four feet by seven feet. The individual’s feet are generally elevated. A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner. As this is done, the cloth is lowered until it covers both the nose and mouth. Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers the mouth and nose, air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds due to the presence of the cloth. This causes an increase in carbon dioxide level in the individual’s blood. This increase in the carbon dioxide level stimulates increased effort to breathe. This effort plus the cloth produces the perception of “suffocation and incipient panic,” i.e., the perception of drowning.18

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By bringing the detainee to the point of apparent death but simultaneously ensuring survival, waterboarding enacts the biopolitical impulse of the contemporary state: to make survive. In the leaked report of the ICRC on the treatment of high-value detainees, Abu Zubaydah describes his waterboarding in the factual, straightforward language typical of human rights testimony. I was put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds caused severe pain. I vomited. The bed was then again lowered to a horizontal position and the same torture carried out with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled without success to breathe. I thought I was going to die.19

Having thought he would die, Abu Zubaydah lives. Slipping between states, he has been made to survive. While the CIA memo recognizes “that the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death,” it goes on to state that no “prolonged mental harm” and thus no “severe pain or suffering” is inflicted by the act.20 In fact, the memo slips easily from “the perception of drowning” to “relief [that] is almost immediate when the cloth is removed from the nose and mouth.”21 Waterboarding thus relies on a paradox: it is an experience of imminent death so terrible as to make the victim speak, and yet so readily overcome that it produces no lasting damage, has no enduring price. For each of the ten techniques authorized by the memo—sleep deprivation, stress positions, and facial slapping among them—pain or “prolonged mental pain” is carefully excised from the analysis. These are techniques somehow harsh enough to force their victim to speak, yet which produce no trauma. From within this paradox of terrible acts that none the less carry no enduring price, the memos use indeterminacy, deferral, and intention to cleave torture from the very possibility of its own occurrence. If the United States has created geographic zones in which the state of exception operates, why are such memoranda necessary? First, there is the necessity of cloaking the state of exception within the appearance of law—indeed, the legitimacy of the sovereign depends on precisely this move. Otherwise, sovereign power is mere despotism and the United States cannot retain its logical coherence if it rejects the very ground of law. Rather, law must be made



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to perform in the sovereign’s service. In this sense, the Torture Memos are of a piece with the military commissions and Combatant Status Review Tribunals, both designed to give the semblance of juridical order to Guantánamo. Second, as I have shown, articulating the body in pain within a legal discourse actually, paradoxically, enables its erasure. By constructing an argument in which pain is transformed linguistically and legally, the state recognizes the conceptual possibility of tortured bodies, even as it makes their legal reality a near impossibility. Worse, it directly takes up the most significant legal articulation of torture—the definitions contained in the CAT—and re-reads them as thresholds almost impossible to cross. In this sense, the Torture Memos secretly sought to rewrite human rights law. While their exposure and disavowal undid this effort, their capacity to hold interpretative force over a number of years points to the potential fragility of humanitarian norms and their legal codification. Despite the best efforts of the authors of the memoranda, however, the tortured body is never fully erased; even in the act of erasing it from interrogation practices, these legal fictions are haunted with its potential within the authorized techniques. Jean Améry, writing of his own torture by the Nazis, states that torture’s pain “is the most extreme intensification imaginable of our bodily being. But maybe it is even more, that is: death.”22 This proximity to death is what makes the pain of torture so devastating and totalizing, yet also contains its political risk. For the state that has no regard for the death of its victims this is of far less concern than it is to the state that writes legal memoranda designed to define torture out of existence. For the United States, the survival of its detainees was (and is) crucial. Death provides no benefit and produces only condemnation and lost prestige; thus deaths were kept as secret as possible whenever they inadvertently occurred. This desire to ensure survival is one crucial reason why the tortures of the war on terror so rarely work through pain alone. As the CIA Memo makes clear, the purpose of certain techniques was not pain at all. For example, “the purpose of the facial slap is to induce shock, surprise and/or humiliation.”23 Still more tellingly, the memo proposed an act designed specifically for its highvalue subject, Abu Zubaydah. Confined in a box, his phobia of insects would be exploited by introducing them into the constrictive space. Even waterboarding was apparently intended to force the victim to “experience the fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning” rather than inflict pain per se.24 As Rejali makes clear in his comprehensive study, torture is not solely concerned with pain: techniques designed to disturb someone’s sense of self to the very core can be torturous too.25

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What many techniques relied upon was the anticipation of pain. Its threat, its imminence. “That was the worst thing,” writes detainee Murat Kurnaz, “knowing that the pain would come again, until you thought there was no way you could take it any more.”26 According to interrogator Tony Lagouranis, “Torture victims don’t break on the pain they’re experiencing, they break on the fear of more and worse pain to come.”27 Pain, then, is intimately related to the affectivity of torture. Exactly this is revealed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, when O’Brien tells Winston that “pain is not always enough. … But for everyone there is something unendurable—something that cannot be contemplated.”28 In Room 101, O’Brien exploits Winston’s greatest fear: rats. Annihilated by terror, Winston comes “out of the blackness clutching an idea” to “interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats.”29 Knowing there is only one choice, he screams, “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia!”30 Here, the complex assault via affect (terror) on affectivity (desire and love) serves only power. Similarly, Rubashov, in Darkness at Noon: “every known physical pain was bearable … Really bad was the unknown … and the worst was the fear that one would then do or say something which could not be recalled.”31 This is fear caught up with pain, and pain that resides only in fearful imagining. But here too is the terror of what torture may do to the self, what might be said or done that would shake one’s very being-in-the-world. Thus, pain and affect are both employed by the biopolitical state with the imperative to make survive. But in doing so, the state itself becomes entangled in indeterminacy and relationality—and finds that it cannot ever fully master their excess.

Tortured and torturer Foucault’s Discipline and Punish begins by documenting the brutal public torture and execution of the regicide Damiens. His flesh is torn from his body, the hand with which he committed the act burnt away with sulfur, and a boiling brew of wax, lead, and oil poured over his body. Only then is he drawn and quartered by four horses, and his remains burnt to ashes and scattered to the winds. As Foucault points out, Damiens’s torture was designed to be a public spectacle. Any of the tortures visited upon Damiens would have been enough to kill him, but their excess had a purpose beyond the infliction of pain. Their meaning was symbolic. Punishment for offenses against God and King were to be written on the very body of the perpetrator—and read by the crowds that



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gathered to witness the spectacle. Their very excess cried out the magnitude of the crime. Execution—the spectacle of the scaffold—was the inevitable and necessary endpoint of this penal torture. In his book, Foucault charts the disappearance of torture as spectacle and its replacement with imprisonment as the preferred mode of penal repression and the disciplining of the body as the means of ensuring conformity to rules laid down by state and society. Broken, bloodied bodies vanished from view— consigned to battlefields and the aberrant violence of the depraved. In their place emerged the disciplined bodies of armies, prisons, schools and countless other institutions. Of course, this was merely concealment, not the end to torture sought and proclaimed by the humanist campaigners of the eighteenth century. Torture as public spectacle ended, but its afterglow never truly faded— even the most casual glance at the history of violence in the twentieth century attests not only to the use of torture, but also to the necessity that populations knew of its occurrence. As surely as the subjects of the ancien regime, citizens of Greece or Argentina or Chile knew all too well the violence of torture. Its disappearance from view erased only its ritual quality—its terrifying force remained just as potent, if not more so. After all, if torture is to control populations, it must be at once secretly conducted and widely known. If the primary concern of the post-9/11 US torture regime was to obtain a legal cloaking that defined torture into an impossible indeterminacy, then a close second was that its victims survived. Instances in which they did not— the famous body in the bag from the Abu Ghraib photographs, the tragedy of Dilawar the taxi driver mistakenly detained in Afghanistan, the known and unknown dead of the black sites of the CIA—were mistakes. If torture is to reside in indistinction, then it cannot lead to death. Survival testified to the not-ness of torture, its non-occurrence. Yet this very survival contains within it a ghostly vestige of torture’s disappeared public face: it is the spectacle of an absolute sovereign power defined by its capacity to make survive. Who exactly constitutes the audience for that performance is complex. On the one hand, images for public consumption tended to represent detention more than the spectral traces of torture. The body that lashed out against the King was torn to pieces; those deemed enemies of the US state are shackled and hooded, kneeling prostrate in their orange jumpsuits behind the razor wire of Camp X-Ray’s cages. Rather than spectacles of torture embodying divine retribution, their spectacular role is to be threat secured. Crouched in the gravel on his arrival in Cuba, Turkish-born German citizen Murat Kurnaz is more than aware of his

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own symbolic value: “Suddenly I realized something. Just as they had repeatedly called us terrorists during the flight, they were taking photos to depict us as terrorists to the world.”32 Before Abu Ghraib, those photographs of Camp X-Ray were the emblematic images of the war on terror: the terrorist threat kneeling before the might of the United States, erased of all individuality and potency by the guns and cages, the hoods and shackles and orange jumpsuits. As Judith Butler writes, those photographs “make known that a certain vanquishing had taken place, the reversal of national humiliation, a sign of successful vindication.”33 Like the barbarians of Coetzee’s novel, made to crouch in the dirt as the soldiers scrawled ENEMY on their backs, the shackled figures were a message for the citizenry, re-inscribing the distinction between them and us. How else is the populace to know who to hate and fear unless they are set before them? How else to know that the state will prevail? These were feared bodies performing a spectacle of submission. Yet while these images lend authority to articulations of threat, they also serve another spectacular function, a self-referential one. They exhibit to the security apparatus of the state the extent to which threatening bodies are controlled, dominated, subject—and simultaneously re-inscribe both their status as threat and the necessity of their brutal treatment. As a Turkish agent who interviewed Kurnaz at Guantánamo said, “‘If you weren’t a terrorist, you wouldn’t have ended up here. You’re all terrorists in here.’”34 Here again is that doubling logic at the heart of the Torture Memos, yet another reflection of the indistinction at the core of the state of exception. Moazzam Begg, the British Pakistani detainee released from Guantánamo in 2005, writes that he “soon began to see that here nothing was consistent—except inconsistency.”35 Kurnaz concurs that following the rules was impossible, since they were “constantly changing anyway, and you’d get punished for breaking them.”36 It would be easy to blame this on the caprice of guards and commanders, but to reduce responsibility exclusively to individual action is to erase context and absolve the state: by creating a space in which law was suspended yet its power present, the United States allowed bodies, both detained and military, to collide unmediated within the heart of sovereignty. If vestiges remained of the torture spectacles described by Foucault, then so too could remnants of Bentham’s Panopticon be seen, that pivotal symbol of the disciplinary authority to which Discipline and Punish immediately turns after the chapters on torture. Kurnaz:



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Camp X-Ray had been built especially for us, and true to its name, it was supposed to be a prison in which everything was completely transparent … There were no cells where you could be alone … An animal has more space in its cage in a zoo and is given more to eat. I can hardly put into words what that actually means.37

Later, when Camp Delta was built and X-Ray decommissioned, detainees were moved to cells modeled on domestic Supermax prisons—but stripped of access to books, TV, music, and family visits, not to mention the law itself. These physical structures, ever-changing rules, brutal enforcement of discipline, and, of course, torture, all aimed at one thing. “I had begun to realize the power and rigidity of the US military system, and its ability to consume any individual,” writes Begg. “Me, in this case.”38 Echoing those words almost note for note, Kurnaz writes, “I’d understood for quite some time what this camp was about. They could do with us what they pleased.”39 Even if the outward justification for the camp was securing against threat, the detained were under no illusions. Subjection was everything: political life made bare. Subjection began with the desire to maintain “shock of capture,” a notion set out in detail by the infamous Kubark and Human Resource Exploitation Training manuals of the CIA and propagated by soldiers, interrogators, and intelligence officers from Guantánamo to Afghanistan to Iraq. Being seized and imprisoned by military or intelligence forces was meant to shock the detainee deeply, and if this shock could be maintained the captive might then become malleable. Thus, the goggles, hoods, gloves, and other restraints used in transport were intended to instill fear and disorientation, and maintain their reeling state of shock. Once in the camp, beatings, particularly by the Initial Reaction Force40 tasked with maintaining detainee discipline, left detainees battered and bruised. Alongside this, the constant deprivation of sleep, blankets, warm clothes, food, and even air was intended to make prisoners “feel as miserable and desperate as possible every single moment of their lives—this, as the Americans would say, was ‘maximum discomfort.’”41 From within such helplessness the only release is submission, or so the theory goes. In the previous chapter, I considered how the tortures of the war on terror employ, exploit, and are even constituted by affect, while so far here I have examined their complex relation to pain as articulated by the Torture Memos. But these tortures also need to be understood as embodying biopolitical practices of control. Stress positions assert mastery over the capacity to move, to experience the body as an active part of the world. Not only must the detainee

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stay in place (standing, crouching, sitting, leaning), the smallest movement is prohibited, such that instincts to flinch, fall, or shift must be overcome. Sensory deprivation and assault intervene between body and the world so that power dictates how the world is known. Sleep deprivation, combined with abruptly shifting meal, shower, and toilet schedules, seeks to reshape and control the temporal relation between body and world. Waterboarding brings the body to a moment of simulated death. In this, it is the paradigmatic torture of the war on terror: holding the detained body on the threshold between life and death, to which can be given the name survival. In each instance, power—instrumentalized in the torturer and situated in cells, interrogation rooms, and razor-wire cages—insists on violently occupying that space between body and world. Crucially, the body is meant to survive unscarred: the tortures of the war on terror make the whole of being, of the body-in-the-world, their target. Their intent is not simply to cause pain in the subjected body, but to move the living body into the liminal space of survival. Detainees were not alone in being subject to sovereign power. Some of the guards at Guantánamo were friendly, says Kurnaz, but not permitted to talk. “‘Sorry,’ those guards would say. ‘I can’t talk to you. They’re watching me.’ They were under surveillance … They weren’t allowed to treat us like human beings.”42 For guards and interrogators alike, this combination of constant monitoring, dehumanizing practices, and pressure to produce cooperation could have powerful effects. Lagouranis writes of being pushed to the brink of horrific violence: “A thought flashed through my head: Chop his fucking fingers off.”43 He doesn’t, but ever more eagerly and reflexively places detainees in stress positions, blasts them with loud music, forces them awake. As the actions of the French in Algeria, the British in Northern Ireland, the junta in Argentina or any another torturous environment make clear, torture breeds torture—it is a “poison,” a Brazilian officer told Lawrence Weschler, a “sort of gangrene” that rots the system.44 This passing on of craft occurred through folklore rather than official channels: mythologies about the CIA and Special Forces, “informal asides about torture during training and the braggadocio of veteran interrogators facing wide-eyed new initiates.”45 Lagouranis, for instance, describes a newly deployed interrogator who was “using harsh, physical tactics on everyone, guilty or not. What we’d started as a set of special treatments had become routine.”46 Even Chris Mackey, whose defensive memoir strenuously avoids the word “torture,” describes how “monstering” of detainees—“keeping prisoners in the booth until they or their interrogator broke”—rapidly became the norm.47 It



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is as if torture were contagious, infecting those who came into contact with it. “Torture cannot be contained,” writes Lagouranis, referring to its proliferation across the war zones and prison sites of the war on terror. “It is not something you can do once and then go back to your regular routine … It is simply too large and too powerful to contain.”48 Worse still, the structures established by the military often enabled rather than deterred abuse, as intelligence ethicist Jean Maria Arrigo and former interrogator Ray Bennett make clear.49 So too in the CIA, where the failure to assign appropriate personnel, provide training, follow established guidelines, or keep diligent records combined to ensure the tortures quickly exceeded the already-brutal set of approved techniques.50 For Lagouranis, reaching that zone of brutality within himself has an enduring cost. He becomes depressed, gets into fights, and abuses alcohol and painkillers; torture has irrevocably affected him too. To seriously contemplate chopping off the fingers of another is to enter into a relation with that body from which full withdrawal might never be possible. If the affective force of torture changes tortured bodies, it transforms torturing bodies too. As the contagion spread, torture increasingly sought confession as much as information, justification of its own occurrence as much as security. To selfperpetuate, torture must self-justify. Just as the tendency of biopower is always to self-expansion through the biopolitical state, so too the tendency of torture is always toward the affirmation of power: It was as if the domination we exercised over our prisoners was not complete until they admitted what they had done. This was the most frightening change that came over us, because it signaled a shift from torture for an intelligence purpose to torture for the sole purpose of controlling another. We all know from 1984 why Winston Smith wasn’t simply killed when he was captured. The state could only consider itself dominant if it tortured this man until he confessed and renounced his crimes.51

There is little surprise that Lagouranis, who describes himself as a torturer in his memoir, should recognize precisely the dynamic of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his own experience of torture in the war on terror. Orwell’s novel imagines the biopolitical state in extremis: regulation of sex, physical exercise, facial expressions, and even emotion, via the rabidly animalistic outpouring of the “Two Minutes Hate” against subversives. Similarly, technologies enable continual disciplining of the body, such that citizens “could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda,”

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the purpose of which was “complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects.”52 Winston’s sexual encounters with Julia constitute a kind of “victory” because “the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.”53 Deleuze and Guattari recognize this power of desire to assemble forces, to create the new or upturn the old in unpredictable ways.54 This undifferentiated desire could be thought of as an unconstrained affectivity—as those affects able to escape power. Its inherently chaotic intensity threatens the state precisely because it refuses fixity—it cannot be readily known, defined, owned. But some means must be found to regulate desire, and for Big Brother that tool is torture. As O’Brien says, Winston is tortured because he is “a flaw in the pattern … a stain that must be wiped out,” and so that “never again will [he] be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity.”55 Torture seeks the containment of excess affect, and the individuality that comes with it. Paradoxically, to contain affect, the state must also exploit it—to end affect as a weapon of liberation, it must become a tool of control. Torture thus not only acts out the violent potential of the biopolitical, but also fuels its expansion. “We convert,” says O’Brien, “we capture his inner mind, we reshape him … We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it might be.”56 The shift in the intention and practice of American interrogation from information to confession marks a shift toward a similar dynamic: confirmation of the authenticity of power rather than some tactical or strategic purpose. What Big Brother demands is that Winston’s subjection be acted out: the public need not know, but the sovereign requires that it occur. Torturing Winston performs a crucial function. It renews in an immediate and vital way the sovereign’s power over bare life, and it does so by working on his relations with other bodies and the world. In such an act, just as in the camps of the war on terror, two bodies are required: the tortured and the torturing. Their crucial relation is prefigured in Orwell’s novel by Winston’s dreams of O’Brien, and its intensity and complexity deepens once his torture begins: “He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.”57 Such intimacy between tortured and torturer cannot readily be washed away—a notion that I will return to in later chapters. In the war on terror, the experience of torture is written over by the national security apparatus, affirming from multiple perspectives the singular narrative of American power. Psychiatric and medical evaluations provide a veneer of



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care that often simply grants permission to torture.58 News reports, investigations, and statements from the government and military readily elide torture, assert its ambiguity, or slide it into the uncertain realm of “abuse.” Interrogation logs record in minute detail the daily experience of the detained with every abuse minimized and words like torture entirely absent. In the log of Detainee 063, published in Newsweek, life outside interrogation disappears into repetitive notation: 1700: Detainee returned to booth 1725: Detainee refused MRE [Meal, Ready-to-Eat] 1755: Interrogation session ended 1800: Shift 3 began interrogation 1920: Detainee refused food 1935: Detainee used latrine 1940: Detainee exercised 2100: Detainee used latrine 2105: Detainee refused food and water 2145: Detainee exercised59

Yet while this writing over of experience might seem overwhelming or difficult to contest, accounts of both detainees and interrogators reveal a sharp dichotomy between the biopolitical impulse and the actual capacity of the state apparatus. Error infected the system as deeply as brutality. Layers of bureaucratic reporting forced interrogators to fit within arcane and archaic structures for the submission and analysis of information.60 Reports of prisoner abuse and obfuscation by superior officers disappeared: investigations were launched only to be erased from the record (the CIA was just as deliberately blind, obstructing of Congressional oversight and even White House inquiries).61 At macro and micro scales, among leadership and on the ground, the military system fell short. Commanders knew nothing about abuse and torture, concluded numerous reports, while for years Murat Kurnaz tried to get the authorities at Guantánamo to spell his name correctly. After the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo’s military tribunals were unconstitutional, hundreds of prisoners were released without charge. Yet torture, for all its radical instantiation of power and subjection of life, has not endured under President Obama, at least not as an authorized and sanitized governmental practice— now drone strikes and civilian collateral damage enable sovereign violence to expand. In torture’s falling short there may lie some possibility of hope. Hope that biopower has its limits, that the state apparatus will always prove inadequate to the task of

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erasing the human—of simply and always making survive. Hope that there is a deep human capacity resistant to dehumanization, one that demands to be more than bare life. A force for betterment found to possess immense vitality even in that most unlikely of capacities, that remarkable fact of the tortured body that speaks from within subjection.

Writing from the state of exception The first poems written at Guantánamo were scratched into Styrofoam cups, shared at meals, and passed cell to cell before ending up in the trash. Most lasted less than a day. Later, the detainees were given pens and paper, and wrote thousands of lines of poetry. Attorney Marc Falkoff, who compiled the twentytwo texts by seventeen detainees published as Poems from Guantánamo: the Detainees Speak, describes the “efforts to squirrel away cantaloupe and tomato seeds from their meals,” knowing they wouldn’t be able to nurture them and yet making “an effort to stave off despair, and a gesture of hope.”62 He suggests that the detainees “turned to writing poetry as a way to maintain their sanity, to memorialize their suffering, and to preserve their humanity through acts of creation.”63 In this the poems join a tradition of prison poetry, particularly that by Muslim figures such as Sayyid Qutb, the pioneer theorist of radical Islamism, who spent much of his final decade in Egyptian jails before his execution in 1966. What makes these Guantánamo poems different to memoir, legal testimony, and even letters home is that they were written without purpose beyond the camp. They do not reassure, conform to court norms, or reflect upon an ended imprisonment: they are simply writings from and for the state of exception. Many were destroyed, acts that seem childishly malicious in their intent to hurt. As detainee and poet Abdurraheem Muslim Dost asks, “Why, did they give me a pen and paper if they were planning to do that? Each word was like a child to me— irreplaceable.”64 Whether Dost believed his poems would ever be read outside the wire fences of Guantánamo is unknown, but there must have been a comfort in knowing that something beyond himself existed—just as their destruction reflects the logic of subjugation. These were poems never meant to see the light of day, only rarely and reluctantly given to the detainees’ lawyers to read. Those in the Falkoff collection represent just a tiny fragment of the detainee writings, the bare few declassified by the military. Many more remain classified, deemed “a special risk” to national security because of their “content and format,” which



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might “smuggle coded messages out of the prison camp.”65 This too has an air of vindictive smallness; that the poems might contain secret missives for the US’s radical enemies strains credulity. Yet this much is certain: the poems— whether published in the collection, destroyed by the military, or kept unread in some classified no-place—offer a rare body of text written within the sphere of unmediated power. Erin Trapp urges an aesthetic reading of the poems, not a human rights one, arguing that politicized readings tend to elide or gloss over literary and aesthetic qualities in favor of asserting symbolic arguments.66As I have already argued, however, scholarship in the field of human rights and literature shows persuasively that poetics and practical politics are not so readily separated. Their relationship is far from simply symbolic, whether in postcolonial fiction that articulates complex subjectivities outside the normative liberal form analyzed by Anker or in the imbrication of the Bildungsroman and the development of personhood within human rights discourse described by Slaughter. In these poems the aesthetic is inescapably political, and political resistance enacted aesthetically; moreover, the poems are more concerned with affectivity than narrative. One reviewer’s call for the poems to be “liberated” from their context—which is to say, depoliticized—seems an act both impossible to perform and an injustice.67 Here, I want to explore what the poems reveal about those human bodies detained and tortured in the war on terror, and about the capacity to write from within that experience. There are two crucial ways in which the poems, as a body of work, are marked by sovereign power. First, the state of exception provides the conditions for the poems’ circulation. Most exist—written and read, then kept or destroyed—within the undecidable geographical zone of the state of exception. Those available to be read “outside the wire” lack reference to the larger body from which they come: whether they are representative is indeterminable. The few who might offer answers, such as attorneys, intelligence analysts, and military translators, are bound by law not to speak.68 Joseph Pugliese, writing of Gul Rahman, an Afghan detainee killed at the infamous CIA “black site” prison in northern Kabul known as “The Salt Pit,” argues that the redaction of certain passages in files on the investigation into his death amounts to a kind of “juridicide,” a legal erasure of death.69 Dispatched to an unmarked grave, Rahman’s body only reappears in a footnote to a report signed by Assistant Attorney General Bybee—and then only to immediately have his torturous death rendered impossible, victim of the ambiguity of intent enshrined in the Torture Memos. Murder by torture is elided into accident and then doubly erased by

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the heavy redaction within the CIA report of the events leading to his death. Yet this juridicide performs its own inadvertent gesture of witnessing; shadows cast against a wall, unable to reveal their contents but none the less giving shape to what has occurred. As Pugliese writes, these “black zones of occlusion” in the redacted pages form their own “convoluted testimony, evidencing what has been secreted and obliterated.”70 The destroyed and classified poems might be thought of in a similar way: as bearing witness to the totalizing drive of power, but also as testament to voices raised in protest. In this sense, the available poems are always already marked by the radical absence of the body of texts from which they are excised and sanitized. Second, power mediates the language—the very words themselves—in which almost all the poems appear. A few were originally written in English, but most were composed in Arabic or Pashto and translated by security-cleared military translators, presumably as a precaution against messages coded into the poems in their original tongue. These translators were part of the bureaucratic apparatus of the state, with their task determined by intricate security regulations. It is impossible to know who exactly the translators were or what personal interpretations have been brought to bear upon the poems, shifting meaning symbolically, aesthetically, and literally. An unknown gap divides the act of writing and the text of publication. Thus, the translated poems are also marked linguistically by their being written within, and having to cross the borders of, the state of exception. This practice of translation leaves little opportunity for what Walter Benjamin describes as “finding that intended effect upon the language … which produces in it the echo of the original.” Nor does it “lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.”71 By both determining the circulation of the poems (inside or outside “the wire” of Guantánamo’s boundaries) and rupturing the relation between translation and original, sovereignty brings the published poems into a zone of undecidability, of absolute indistinction. For all we know, the poems collected and published were chosen for declassification by chance. Yet the very fact of their publication suggests something quite profound: life and voice can find a way to speak, even from the most absolute sites of power. One of the most starkly beautiful works in the collection, “Death Poem” by the Bahraini detainee Jumah al-Dossari, is also a nuanced witnessing of the subjection of body to power, and defiance toward that subjection. Never charged with any crime, Al-Dossari was finally released from Guantánamo in



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2007 after nearly five years of imprisonment, three and a half of which were spent in solitary confinement. Al-Dossari was, according to both his own testimony and that of other detainees, subject to particularly brutal treatment at Kandahar, Bagram, and Guantánamo.72 He describes being repeatedly beaten, forced to walk on barbed wire and broken glass, burned with cigarettes and boiling liquid, exposed to intense cold and loud music, deprived of sleep, made to watch the Koran be defiled, wrapped in an American and an Israeli flag, and even smeared with what a female interrogator claimed was menstrual blood. During his imprisonment he “tried to commit suicide on at least 13 occasions.”73 This torture haunts “Death Poem,” reprinted here in full: Take my blood. Take my death shroud and The remnants of my body. Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely. Send them to the world, To the judges and To the people of conscience, Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded. And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world, Of this innocent soul. Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history, Of this wasted, sinless soul, Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the protectors of peace.74

Tortured, physically infirm, and suicidal, this is what al-Dossari imagines will outlast him: mere remnants of his body, all that might be salvaged from his “wasted, sinless soul.” As a complete being he will be lost, but what is left will testify in his place: his blood, his death shroud, “photographs of [his] corpse at the grave, lonely.” After unceasing brutality and, by his count, over 600 interrogations, al-Dossari writes himself into mere biological matter. It is “the remnants of [his] body” that bear witness, not his words—as if these were all that might be salvaged from within the state of exception. Yet the poem is also an urgent plea for justice, for the “people of conscience” to “bear the guilty burden before the world, / Of this innocent soul.” Here, the poem performs a distancing move. What had been “my blood” becomes “this soul,” loosed from the remnants of his body and, sinless, freed from torment. That the remnants of his body might be all that is left to do so reveals the state of exception in

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action: bare life rendered into the force of law yet without the ordering codes that are supposed to ensure justice. Judith Butler writes that the poems—through their connectedness, their push for justice, their affectivity—pose “an incendiary risk not only to national security, but to the form of global sovereignty championed by the US.”75 For detained bodies held for years without legal rights or their day in court, the poems “bring their suffering out of the darkness” and “affirm their essential humanity.”76 Deeply marked by that power, the poems are figures of both resistance and subjection—subjection that enables resistance. They testify to the terrible futility of residing within the force but not the code of law, even as they speak to the failure of sovereign power to contain their voices and their lives completely. That hard, violent thrust down onto the body falls short of its apotheosis—it fails before the human that writes. “They are artists of torture, / They are artists of pain and fatigue, / They are artists of insults and humiliation,” writes the detainee poet Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif of his jailers, and his own artistry, his poem, stands in opposition. Yet as much as the poems are revealing of the state of exception, they also attest to that recurring double of the war on terror: the exploitation of affect by biopower and the impossibility of fully regulating affect, even in the torture chamber. Butler argues that the poems powerfully manifest affects of longing and rage. She quotes “I Write My Hidden Longing” by al-Noaimi: “The tears of someone else’s longing are affecting me; / My chest cannot take the vastness of emotion.”77 Relationality is evident here. Someone’s tears affect him; the vastness of that affecting cannot be contained within his body alone. But where Butler identifies a fellow feeling with the other detainees in the camp, I want instead to point to a certain excess in the writing: My rib is broken, And I can find no one to heal me. My body is frail, And I can see no relief ahead. Before me is a tumultuous sea; The land continues to call me. But I am sailing in my thoughts.

Broken rib and frail body, his chest cannot take the vastness of emotion, but the tumultuous sea works, here, to suggest the over-spilling of that emotion. It is not



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simply that al-Noaimi feels what others feel. This co-feeling constitutes a relation between bodies within a state of utter subjection, but also a relation of resistance. It is exactly this longing that cannot be overcome. It swells too large even for the poet to contain; it becomes the tumultuous sea on which his mind already sails, unable to come to rest on the land that calls to him. Such affective excess resists consignment to the status of detainee, and suggests that no matter how much the biopolitical apparatus seeks to regulate affect, it cannot do so completely. As discussed in the last chapter, the United States did not simply seek to regulate affect—to control that undifferentiated desire so feared by Big Brother—but to exploit it as well, to turn the vitality of the body into the weapon of its undoing. As the Torture Memos make clear, shame was to be one of the primary affective techniques and it is this that Sami al-Haj captures in his poem “Humiliated in the Shackles.” Unknowingly, the poem resonates with the Memos, webbed in unexpected relation with the legalistic articulation of the tortures of the war on terror. I was humiliated in the shackles. How can I now compose verses? How can I now write? After the shackles and the nights and the suffering and the tears, How can I write poetry?78

Butler notes that “the very line in which he questions his ability to make poetry is its own poetry. So the line enacts what al-Haj cannot understand. He writes the poem, but the poem can do no more than only openly query the condition of its own possibility.”79 Here, then, is the fundamental refutation of the notion that the poems can be read either as human rights testimony or as aesthetic pieces. In these lines, the poem links the experience of detention explicitly to poetry, to the aesthetic. Al-Haj’s poem is at once testimony to his detention and to the problem of writing in the face of catastrophe. His poem echoes Theodor Adorno’s much cited (and often misinterpreted) remark that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” but in doing so transforms it into a question—one that is simultaneously embodied and rhetorical within the poem but also answered by the sheer facticity of its existence.80 If, as Scarry maintains, the pain of torture is language- and world-destroying, then that capacity can also be fleeting. Out of humiliation and suffering, al-Haj produces a simple but beautiful poem. His writing resides in that space between the erasure of the capacity to speak and the possibility of poetry; this is testimony beyond the narrative structures that dominate the accounts collected by human

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rights organizations. The poem’s questions that query the condition of its own possibility also do something else: they exhibit amazement at the capacity to write poetry despite utter catastrophe. This is the ambiguity that resides in the lack of answer—while the poem itself bears witness to the possibility of its own writing, it wonders at that very writing. It speaks to the fragility of testimony, but also its unexpected force. Thus, the poem is neither an articulation of despair nor a peon of hope. It is both of these at once. In utterance and gesture, it embodies the bursting desire of the affected and affecting body to bear witness to its own suffering and its refusal to be only that suffering. It displays a kind of awestruck wonder at the capacity to give shape to torture through a gestural testimony—to write the violence that power does to the body, flesh and blood, affected and affecting. Torture, writes Scarry, is “experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.”81 In Scarry’s formulation there is no room for anything but pain and the incommunicability of its singular experience; an impossible distance divides tortured and torturer, even as both self and world are destroyed. But this is not the only way in which torture might be read. With the contingency of their articulation of pain revealed, the Memos make clear that there is an affective dimension to the pain of torture, and of the tortures of the war on terror in particular. This affectivity is inescapable, since torture is always relational: someone inflicts pain, someone witnesses humiliation, someone is feared. While it might seem obvious that a torturer be required for torture, many of the acts defined by the Torture Memos neatly seek to excise that necessity—who tortures the detainee forced to stand for hours? Who inflicts his pain? No one touches him; it is his own body that tortures him—or so goes the specious logic of the Memos. While this argument can be readily dismissed, its mere existence points to the necessity of understanding the substance of the relation between tortured and torture. That substance, as I have shown, is affect—intense, bodily, enduring. In the memoirs of detainees and interrogators alike, exposure to unmediated sovereignty renders certain lives both bare and precarious within the state of exception. But in doing so it reveals a fissure between the raw urge of biopower and the state apparatus that seeks to master it, a fissure through which the poems of Jumah al-Dossari and others were able to escape. This fissure is an affective one, constituted by the between-ness of relation and the contingency of pain.



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Universe contracting to the body, body swelling to fill the universe—what is this but an excess of that affect? An intensity of experience that knows no bounds and cannot be contained. A force that flows in multiple directions at once, and yet cannot quite be captured. Brought within the tortured body, this affective intensity produces fear, shame, disgust, contempt—and, of course, pain. These embodied affects are instantiated separately and together; they are at once singular and multiple. Yet it is not only the tortured body that cannot contain this excessive affectivity. Torture and state alike, and the assembled layers of institutions and apparatuses between them, cannot quite escape the force of its intensity.

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Seeing Torture

We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. Anne McClintock, “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib” There’s only so much you can do, or so much you can feel. Specialist Sabrina Harman, Standard Operating Procedure The face, what a horror. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus1 From the crucifixion of Jesus to the grotesquery of the Hostel or Saw horror film franchises, images of torture abound in Western culture. Given the destructive force of torture upon spoken language, it is perhaps unsurprising that it appears visually far more frequently than in literature. Images do not depend on words for their force: torture’s capacity to destroy language cannot foreclose the visual. Images tend to produce intensities, to thrive in affect, and this inclines them to more readily escape or exceed the limits of referential representation—an image is more readily experienced as possessing its own force, distinct from what (if anything) it “represents.” As Laura Marks writes, “images are always both multisensory and embodied.”2 Images are thus worlds—they produce generative slices of experience through movement, time, and the evocation of sensation.3 Without recourse to words, images exceed themselves; they not only show but also produce intensities and provoke bodies. Images of torture call the viewing body into relation to them through the capacity to affect. Analyzing the barbershop scene from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Magdalena Zolkos points out that a key moment in the scene involves the interviewee, Bomba, replacing his incapacity to speak with a small hand gesture. This filmic “testimonial gesturality” refigures both silence and embodied presence: “the gesture is a marker of the non-oppositional

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relationship between communicability and non-communicability of language.”4 Story and narrative can shape the meaning of images, but the force of the image can exceed verbal language and amplify its affectivity. How images testify does not translate inevitably or smoothly to the operation of language. Deleuze, for instance, resists the assimilation of the image to the utterance, of the film to the language system. Images are things in themselves, not reducible to signifiers of something outside or elsewhere. Even once the verbal elements of cinema are taken into account, “this is neither a language system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically and pragmatically.”5 Yet his account also makes clear that there is a relation between image and words: they share or can at least operate through similar qualities. Words cannot carry meaning and be a-signifying, but they can affect as well as represent. Within the larger project of this book, images of torture provide a way into the gestural dimensions of torture. As this chapter will show, if torture and its trauma are to be brought into cinema, then time and gesture need to meet aesthetic and narrative. There are no definitive “lessons” for literature to be found in visual representations of torture. Rather, this chapter seeks in photographs and films the gestural, affective, and non-verbal elements of testimony. Each operates at its own affective register and within distinct political projects; each represents torture in differing ways and to differing ends. I have no desire to elide those differences. Tracing the varied workings of affectivity across these aesthetic disparities shows that affect is not unique to particular images of torture, but differences in genre and aesthetic lead to variations in emergence and manifestation of affect. Moving from documentary to historical fiction to fictive allegory, I track the role of affect in relation to narrative and aesthetic. Beginning with the most inescapable images of the war on terror, I consider the Abu Ghraib photographs in conjunction with Standard Operating Procedure (2008), the documentary about their perpetrators, to explore the relation between the photographs’ affective force and the contextualizing and narrativizing demands of the documentary. I then explore two controversial films that deploy a documentary aesthetic to fictional ends that none the less lay claim to a kind of veracity: Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and The Battle of Algiers (1966). Both films present torture through visceral imagery, but only the latter engages with its traumatic consequences and their narrative and aesthetic effects. Finally, Denis Villeneuve’s fictional film Incendies (2010) reveals how resonance



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between the seeable, sayable, and sensible enables something of the traumatic affect of the impossible event to emerge on the cinematic face.6 Each of these has its own relation to the war on terror, from the most direct in the case of the Abu Ghraib photos, Standard Operating Procedure, and Zero Dark Thirty to the more hidden and resonant in that of The Battle of Algiers and Incendies. What becomes clear is that, despite torture’s resistance to language and narrative, the visual can dampen, distort, and amplify its affectivity in powerful ways, and this has implications for testimony.

Image and affect On the day the Abu Ghraib photographs became public, President Bush spoke in the White House Rose Garden. “I shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated,” he told the assembled reporters. For Butler, his choice of words is suspect. What exactly disgusted Bush? Was it the “homosexual acts of sodomy and fellatio” or the torture itself? If, she writes, “it was the torture that was disgusting, then why did he use that word, rather than wrong or objectionable or criminal?”7 While a firm declaration of illegality would have been powerful, the notion that disgust is an insufficient response elides the forcefulness of both the affect and Bush’s naming of it. Encountering disgusting objects, Sara Ahmed argues, “bodies ‘recoil’ from their proximity, as a proximity that is felt as nakedness or an exposure on the skin surface.”8 Disgust both makes and unmakes boundaries: by pulling away from that which disgusts, the body experiences a visceral reminder of the risk of its incorporation. As President, perhaps Bush rarely encountered the abject, what we know from Julia Kristeva as the outside that threatens in so far as it is already within, yet here was abjection—sadistic, pornographic, textural, bodily—within the heart of his great project of liberation. It may be the homosexual imagery from which Bush recoils, but it might also be the certainty that these abject images will stick, contaminate the Presidential body, the military body, the body politic of the United States. For Ahmed, such stickiness is characteristic of disgust—it is the affective quality it grants objects. It may well be that this sticky disgust opens onto the ethical response called for by Butler. For the Abu Ghraib images are disgusting, as well as criminal: these are images of bodily surfaces, of dirt, and orifices, of abjection.9 Both the sacred military and sacred human dignity are violated profanely. To be disgusted by the photographs is to feel the distinction

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between one’s own subjectivity and the object itself collapse. Naming all this “disgusting” does affective work: it grants the disgusting object stickiness, from these images of torture it “generates a set of effects, which then adhere as a disgusting object.”10 The gesture of pulling away cannot rid Bush or the United States of the images; they and we are stuck with them. Recoiling only pulls the stickiness with the body, intensifies the blurring of subject and object. Yet nothing definitive about the images or their meaning can be drawn from Bush’s brief utterance. Certainly his was not the only possible response. Many who saw the images were instead shocked, outraged, or horrified, others aroused or bored. Affect is always indeterminate, which is why responses to the images are messy and complex even before they become questions of ethics or law, before the juridico-ethical designation of wrong or criminal. My purpose here, however, is not to read the images themselves, or consider how their depiction of suffering mediates the real, or to think through their capacity to lead to political action or produce an ethics of responsibility. Butler, Susan Sontag,

Figure 1  Lynndie England with “Gus,” Abu Ghraib, October 24, 2003



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Roger Luckhurst, and others, have dealt with those weighty concerns at length and with keen insight.11 In keeping with this book’s task of asking how literature might bear witness to torture, my interest here is in what happens to the images once they are positioned within narrative and crowded by context. This is the problem confronted by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris in Standard Operating Procedure: the tension between making sense of what happened and retaining the affective testimonial force of the images.12 Take the infamous photograph of Lynndie England with a leash in one hand, face following its line to the neck of a naked man hunched on the floor. Behind the figures is a corridor of open prison cells, barred doors draped in sheets. As Alex Danchev points out, the prisoner the guards called “Gus” has become like a dog, an echo of the prisoner of Kafka’s penal colony, who even when freed hovers nearby.13 Yet something about the image strikes the body before the equation “man made to become dog” can be resolved: England stands while the man huddles; her gaze controls, the leash marks out the line of that control in space; his naked flesh before her uniformed figure signals the absolute distance between the two; the poor quality of the image gives it a familiar tactility. “The photographs promised to memorialize, in the fixity of the image, what was ephemeral in the realm of power,” writes Anne McClintock. Digital cameras became “a means for performing rituals of recognition of the soldiers’ brief but absolute dominance over their prisoners.”14 As acts of performance, the images revealed the theatricality of the torture undertaken at the prison—photography performed the dominance and control of the soldiers, as well as the subjection of the prisoners. Yet the frame also enfolds both into the same world, entangling England and “Gus” as surely as the leash does. Framing “does not simply exhibit reality,” writes Butler, “but actively participates in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality.”15 To name just some of what the frame excludes: life under mortar attacks, the pressure from superiors, the permissive environment, the intelligence agents who ghost in and out of the prison, the dehumanizing spaces in which the soldiers themselves lived.16 Out of the blue, seen on 60 Minutes or somewhere online, the images disgust or shock, but encountered in documentary context, that intensity is limited by unfolding contextual knowledge. Explaining, categorizing, and narrativizing the images cannot but interrupt their forcefulness. In this sense, Morris’s film examines the photographs’ capacity to bear witness, the acts of the perpetrators and the ambiguities of responsibility produced by the operational environment. Re-presented in the documentary, the photographs break

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from their frame, to borrow Butler’s formulation, and resituate their meaning. But within the affective architecture of the war on terror, the film must wrestle aesthetically with the dilemma of giving torturers the opportunity to linguistically reframe the images, an opportunity not afforded to the detainees, while retaining that visual capacity to intensely affect. Otherwise, it risks excusing as well as explaining, lessening the significance of the suffering of the prisoners. Consider how the film depicts the investigator’s reconstruction of the chronology of the Abu Ghraib photographs via time and date metadata. Photographs flash onto the screen and are then ordered into strips, one for each of the three cameras, which scroll in alternate directions until images from the same event align. Such graphical effects make sense of the images without addressing their content or their affective force: enmeshed in law they must be reducible to words, dates, culprits. Yet while the claim of the photograph to show the real depends on fixing what it represents to a specific instance, “the indefinite circulability of the image allows the event to continue to happen and, indeed, thanks to these images, the event has not stopped happening.”17 Abu Ghraib’s visual archive circulated—and continues to circulate—in complex, increasingly untraceable movements, beginning with their distribution among soldiers stationed at the prison, then to investigators, news networks, and the free flow of the internet. They came to occupy a double status: legal evidence

Figure 2  Decoding the photograph chronology, Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008) © Sony Pictures Classic



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but also emblems of the excesses of the war on terror itself.18 For Gibbs, the image is “both formative and transformative,” not simply figuring relations but forging them too. This forming and transforming of relations between viewer, event, and photograph is where affect intensifies, “arising in the loop of interaction” and, as such, continually produced and reproduced.19 Like the images of jumpsuited, shackled, and caged detainees at Guantánamo that preceded them, the Abu Ghraib photographs are more than part of the visual record of the war on terror: they constitute vital producers, transformers, and amplifiers of its affective architecture. For Morris, the sense-making of the documentary cannot be disentangled from this circulation of images and affect—his film is always already affectively mixed up with prior encounters with the photographs. Images are always entangling us in this way. As Maria Angel puts it, “the image sees the world in us—in other words, images are not solely the visible features of objects that fall before our eyes, but are inflections of the outside world incorporated and transformed by the body of the viewing subject.”20 Images work on us, their viewers, in a process of bodily imbrication that comes prior to cognitive decoding. In the words of Anna Gibbs, they “do not stand apart from reality in order to represent it, either objectively or subjectively: rather, the image is already enmeshed with the world in such a way as to dissolve the absolute distinction between objective and subjective realities.”21 Images enable experience; the experience of an image is an experience of its abstraction, the world mediated but not absent. Incited bodily responses can continue over time, layering affect upon affect such that the event itself changes even as it endures. Affective response precedes cognitive recognition. “We have felt the horror of the Hooded Man image before we have time to make sense of what we have seen, never mind analyze it as an iconographic artifact,” writes Gibbs.22 Metaphors for seeing point to this bodily experience of the visual. An image can stab, pierce, wound, and strike; it can be drunk in, devoured, consumed. It is as if language itself strives to express the embodied quality of experiencing an image. Images of horror, such as those of Abu Ghraib, can be among the most violent in producing sensation, a visceral churning of the gut that calls for metaphors of bodily degradation—sickening, shocking. Yet when England discusses the infamous leash photos on camera, she relates the abuse in bare, flat tones and with minimal expression, as if medicated into an affectless state.23 Edited with repeated cuts that jump her face around the screen, England’s lack of affect sparks anew with each reframing. Morris then inserts an artistic, non-documentary piece of footage: segments of a naked, male body glide

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below the camera as haunting music plays. The contrast with England’s voice is powerful: here is the missing affect, rendered in aesthetic gesture. Yet the need for such atmospheric images also points to the way language and narrative can diminish affect’s embodiment. Throughout the film, face-to-face participant interviews and shots of the photographs are interspersed with these surreal, color-saturated recreations, fragments in which the camera lingers on bodies, or figures ghost in and out of frame, or violence occurs in slow motion. These scenes contain no verbal content but repeatedly aestheticize the relationship between the torturous images and the film’s interviews and narrative, as if surrounding the photographs with so many words risked stripping away their affectivity. These aestheticized sequences amplify and maintain the sensory response of the images themselves, countering the explanatory, de-affecting effects of the contextual work of the film. Color, space, and bodies swell into one another, temporality becomes unfixed; these shots are affect-full, returning bodily sensation to the testimonial work of the documentary and humanity to the dehumanized figures in the photographs. Seeing torture should affect us intensely, viscerally. Perhaps like Bush we should be disgusted, penetrated by what we have seen, or we should be shocked, or horrified, or angered. Overlaying the photographs with narrative and captioning, Morris’s documentary risks reducing their intensity. To return that force to their affect, Morris offers artistry—a body slamming into the wall in slow motion, an egg cracking on glass, a helicopter exploding in the sky. Breaking the frame, these sequences shift the visual relation between torture, time, and representation. Testimonial fragments, they resonate as a third pole

Figure 3  England’s lack of affect when interviewed, Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008) © Sony Pictures Classic



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Figure 4  Still from aestheticized sequence, Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008) © Sony Pictures Classic

in relation with the photographs and to-camera interviews. If Abu Ghraib is to be fully witnessed, this confluence suggests, it must be both cognitively grasped and affectively felt. It should impinge on our bodies, not simply signify something that happens elsewhere. As Jill Bennett writes in her book on art and trauma, “the affective encounter becomes the means by which thought proceeds and ultimately moves towards deeper truth.”24 Affect enables a move to witnessing that materially imbricates the viewer. This affectivity may well be part of what enables the image to assert veracity—the very indeterminacy of affect, the non-specificity of its intensity, forges an intimate relationship between viewer and image. If language and narrative overwhelm this affectivity, then testimony has fallen short of its potential.

Affective veracity While the very form of documentary makes claims to truth-telling, historical fictions such as Zero Dark Thirty and The Battle of Algiers operate in a more ambiguous, liminal relation to veracity. While making Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were given CIA access and their retelling of events was given the agency’s approval. Bigelow describes the film as taking “almost a journalistic approach” and Boal calls it a “hybrid of the filmic and the journalistic.”25 As Jane Mayer pointedly states, the filmmakers “want it both ways: they want the thrill that comes from revealing what happened behind the scenes as history was being made and the creative license

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of fiction, which frees them from the responsibility to stick to the truth.”26 Small surprise, then, that the film depicts torture as both effective and necessary in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a claim contradicted by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in its report on CIA detention and interrogation. Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers also fictionalizes histories of torture in its account of the early years of the Algerian Revolution (1954–62).27 While the film shows the French use of torture to crush the resistance, the film’s coda explains how torture transformed an underground force into a successful national independence movement. Since its release in 1966, insurgents, states, and militant groups have watched the film for tactical insights into resistance.28 In 2007, the Pentagon screened the film to show military planners how the use of torture “succeeds tactically, but fails strategically.”29 While both films present a fictionalized narrative, they are very much concerned with retelling history, and as such, the way in which they establish veracity matters for their capacity to witness. Zero Dark Thirty opens by claiming testimonial power. On a black screen, white text appears: “The following motion picture is based on first hand accounts of actual events.” Recordings from 9/11 play against a black background. Stripped of the spectacle of the towers, the raw voices of emergency operators, air traffic controllers, and trapped victims calling loved ones cannot but affect. With the visual displaced, the bodies of 9/11 are returned aurally to the event. Then the first scene of the film depicts torture: an American interrogator threatens, beats, and suspends by ropes a bloodied detainee. With the move from a claim of (partial) veracity to 9/11 to repeated torture, the film constructs its violence as inevitable and necessary, the affective consequence of the anguished voices of 9/11 victims. This reference to the real is reinforced stylistically by the use of hand-held cameras, which roam across spaces and bodies, establishing an uneasy, restless intimacy. Referencing embedded reportage, such cinemato­ graphy meshes neatly with the rigidly chronological ordering of the narrative to present the film as truth. The Battle of Algiers similarly references the aesthetics of reportage, deploying a “deliberate visual roughness” to give the appearance of documentary footage.30 This “documentary realism” is enhanced by the use of non-professional actors in most roles. Having lived through the violence of the independence struggle, they embody the contagion of torture and traumatic affect.31 As the film’s Algerian patron Saadi Yacef notes, “It helped that the war had finished so recently; the wounds of the war were still raw.”32 Rather than focusing on the



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narrow story of individuals as Zero Dark Thirty does, Pontecorvo subordinates individual stories to larger social forces, in keeping with principles from neo-realist cinema. Rioting and striking crowds contrast with empty streets and the fortifications erected by the colonials, while crucial events are narrated by voiceovers quoting from French and National Liberation Front (FLN) communiqués. Fictional resistance leader Ali La Pointe (Brahim Hadjadj) and French commander Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) provide dramatic focus, but some of the most striking sequences feature nameless characters, such as the Algerian women silently making themselves up to appear French before sneaking through checkpoints to bomb civilian targets.33 Yet the film’s documentary aesthetic is repeatedly exposed by moments of artifice, the camera granted access to shots, spaces and faces that no documentary maker could achieve. Both films thus lay claim to a particular form of veracity, a truth-telling through fiction that is bound up with their aesthetic as much as their content. Within these roughly similar frames, both films represent torture with shocking immediacy, but its affectivity and narrative effects are rather different. Torture in Zero Dark Thirty is brutally visceral, yet the film elides its consequences, reducing its violence and trauma to an instrument for narrative progression. Its torture scenes are affecting. Swift cuts of the camera, herkyjerky movements between bodies and close-up faces, tighten the chest, shorten the breath, turn away the gaze. Visually resonant with the familiar shaky movements of the smartphone camera, Zero Dark Thirty brings the viewer brutally intimate with torture in the event of its occurrence. Focalizing the film through CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain), writes Robert Bourgoyne, “registers the experience of violence as a direct, intimate witnessing, a witnessing that sutures her to the larger social and historical world the film portrays.”34 Yet Maya becomes not only an intimate witness but a perpetrator. Paraded naked before her like a dog, her gaze humiliates the detainee Ammar (Reda Kateb), just as the guards at Abu Ghraib sought to shame Muslim men by keeping them nude and subservient to women. Later, a look from Maya is enough to order blows and waterboarding. Such scenes are disturbingly affecting, yet the film cuts off any enduring force by justifying and normalizing torture within the narrative. Maya herself performs this process of presenting torture without trauma. Watching endless DVD footage of torturous interrogations replete with images familiar from the Abu Ghraib photographs, her face stays impassive. While scenes of torture shock, the narrative limits their aesthetic force: torture keeps working, while its victims lose distinction. Only after the final torture is Maya shown to

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be affected, shaking and gasping in a washroom, but the moment is fleeting, an unfocused and isolated blur. Where Standard Operating Procedure testifies to the messy complexity of Abu Ghraib and its affective atmosphere, Zero Dark Thirty exploits the ambiguities of the war on terror and the difficulty of truth-telling to render torture at once necessary and lacking in enduring consequences. Torture only appears on screen in The Battle of Algiers in a short, staccato sequence, a minute-and-a-half montage that further destabilizes the newsreel aesthetic by using intense close-ups, stylized angles, and a musical motif from Bach.35 Its violence can only be grasped in fragments, accumulating affective splinters, without narration or explanation. Hidden until now, the violence behind Mathieu’s meticulously completed organizational chart of the FLN ruptures the narrative, even as it folds it back into the moments before the film’s opening scene.36 Each image is momentary, focused on faces, gestures, and flesh, or the oozing of blood, spit and water. A man has water forcibly poured into his throat, the camera pushing in through the arms of the torturer to capture the violent shock of his body bent back, convulsing. Another’s head is pulled gasping from a barrel of water, the shot from below showing his pain, the fury of the soldier and, on a balcony above, the man’s watching family. A third is suspended by ropes in a crucifix pose. Soldiers lounge against the walls, while one reaches for a blowtorch and applies it to flesh. A bloodied body dangles from a wooden bar roped between his knees, the position often called the parrot’s perch, and spins beneath the camera, face dark with blood. A blank-faced man has alligator clips applied to his ears and the voltage cranked. He convulses, foaming at the mouth. Witnessing eyes in interspersed shots provide a countering rhythm, faces affected by what they have seen: a soldier lighting a cigarette, a woman’s tear streaked face, a wide eye peering past a soldier’s shoulder. Contrast sharpened by the footage’s rough texture, shadows, blood, and contortions emerge in stark relief and fracture the frame. There is too much to take in, the rush of violent images cascading on top of one another. Each face affects. Torture is reduced to visual fragments, fleeting shots in which the camera moves unsteadily or allows bodily spasms to be the only movement. By not showing extended, enduring shots of torture, the film heightens the affectivity of each image and enables the intensity they produce to amplify sharply as the montage cuts again and again. As Anne Rutherford argues, “A close-up is not only a zoom into a detail of a sequence, it is a shift in registers: it brings to life a certain kind of encounter, draws the spectator into proximity, into a close encounter with the image or sound.” In this way, the close-up works as a kind of



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Figures 5–8  Torture sequence, The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) © Rizzoli, Rialto Pictures

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“mimetic hook” that “blurs the boundaries between self and other … inside and outside of the image.”37 Each brutalized face is held just long enough to induce an affective response. With no way to place each act in time, temporality breaks down—just as it does in the experience of the tortured. Each shot functions as a close-up of the larger brutality, the wider violence done to untold others. These close-ups are abstracted from specific spatio-temporal coordinates, freed from narrative specificity. Tortured bodies become the potentiality of the sensation of violence; witnessing eyes become the necessity of feeling the visual force of torture’s brutality. What the montage evokes is the violent intensity of torture: assault on language, debasing of the human body, shattering of time and, in the tearstreaked face of the female witness, the demand for a moral response. As Tomlinson points out, the music suspends informing voices and screams alike. “If much of the ‘truth’ of the Algerian war resides for this film in the body of the informer, the body coerced, the body effectively eroded, that ‘truth’ will also remain there.”38 Cutting between images of witnesses, perpetrators, and bodies in pain, the montage demands recognition of the beyond language, of intensities of affect and sensation. Without dialogue or narration, the unsayable, languagedestroying aspect of torture becomes both visible and sensible. Yet even so, what is visible can only be seen in fragments, as if through the cracks between fingers held over the eyes. The seeable, sayable, and sensible approach one another only asymptotically.39 Films such as Pontecorvo’s amplify, rather than dampen, the resonance between them. In doing so, this resonance unites the tension in the aesthetic of the film between art and documentary, between fictive narrative and historical veracity. Where The Battle of Algiers shows torture to be fracturing of experience, unable to be rendered in the same form as the rest of the film, Zero Dark Thirty continually constructs torture as necessary, effective, and able to be placed in narrative. Insistently chronological, passing time marked by title cards, the film offers no opportunity to look back. What was done in the past produces no price in the present.40 When Maya is warned against further torture forty-five minutes into the film, the audience can let go with her. No more need be said or seen of broken bodies. Beyond questions of ethics and efficacy, Zero Dark Thirty generates torturous intensity aesthetically only to suppress it narratively. Where Standard Operating Procedure introduces abstract sequences of affective intensity to balance the de-intensifying force of explanatory language, Zero Dark Thirty cuts off the affect of its torture scenes. Bigelow’s film works



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to regulate the affectivity of torture, to limit the disgust or shame or outrage it might engender: such responses framed out of the film, torture reduced to a necessary episode in a heroic quest. Or, as President Obama put it, “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”41 Unlike the trauma of 9/11, which can be called back to the body by the voices of the dead, in Zero Dark Thirty torture simply vanishes. Only read against the grain does the film truly bear witness, but then only to the desire to banish torture and its consequences, to erase its traumatic affectivity. By contrast, torture structures the narrative of Pontecorvo’s film. Soldiers surround a broken man in the film’s opening scene. It is 1957 and an act of torture has just concluded. At the address extracted from the tortured man, Mathieu delivers an ultimatum to the hidden Ali La Pointe: surrender or die. Secreted inside a compartment within the wall, Ali and his companions are harshly lit faces floating against black. Confronted with this choice, Ali’s face fills the screen and then, to the sound of discordant strings, lap-dissolves to a panning shot of the city, overlaid with the words “Algiers 1954”. This close-up on Ali is what Deleuze calls an “affection-image,” an image that occupies the gap between action and reaction, precipitating movement.42 Here, the affection produces the gap into which the duration of the film slides: the narrative builds toward the torture that has occurred in the moments before the film began. Even while torture remains off-screen, the certainty of its coming haunts the unfolding events. When the torture sequence occurs towards the end of the film, the narrative has returned to its beginning. Unlike Zero Dark Thirty, the film enacts its ethics in both aesthetic and narrative; it suggests that the veracity of history must be made, not simply claimed, and that that making is affective as much as representational. Faces of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses recur in both films, but only in The Battle of Algiers do faces bear the affective marks of what they have encountered. Blood and bruises speak to the occurrence of violence, but traumatic affect manifests in the face—a notion that the final section of this chapter will take up in the film Incendies.

Facing torture Freed from the demands of history by its setting in an unnamed Middle Eastern nation, Denis Villeneuve’s 2010 film Incendies works on and through faces and faciality to explore the intimate, aesthetic, and temporal effect of violence. Based

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on the haunting play of the same name by Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad, the Quebecois film presents a far more fictive aesthetic than those discussed to this point.43 This insistent distance from history enables the film to concern itself imaginatively with how violence plays out across families, generations, and societies. Temporal fluidity is marked by ambiguous transitions between time frames, while the camera’s obsessive tracking of faces performs the expressivity and affectivity of cinematic violence. Incendies offers a fictive aesthetic and narrative for the expression of violence, torture, and trauma. Incendies repeatedly blurs boundaries to bring the viewing body into an affected state. Events are set in motion when twenty-something twins hear their mother’s will. Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal) asks to be buried “without a coffin, naked, and without prayers” and refuses a tombstone, since “no epitaph is deserved for those who do not keep their promises.” Something terrible has happened: something traumatic, unsayable. Simon (Maxim Gaudette) and Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) are charged with delivering two letters: one to their father, who they do not know, and another to their brother, who they did not know existed. Taken together, this pair of scenes sets up the relation between an aesthetic founded on embodied affect and a narrative that seeks to recover the past in such a way as to make lost relations visible. A mathematics instructor at a university, Jeanne imagines the problem as a kind of formula. She finds an old photo of their mother, Arabic writing on the wall behind. Establishing an aesthetic of transition, of affection into action, she leaves the photo for her brother Simon to find. The camera tightens slowly on the photo, drawn to their mother’s face, only for it to cut to Jeanne, outside somewhere, and pull close to her at the same steady speed. Another cut and the camera follows her gaze, then lifts up and over a chicken-wire fence to a public pool emptied for the winter. White light consumes the screen then dissolves into a body slicing through water. Time has folded back; Jeanne is swimming. She emerges from the water, eyes searching. Then she sees her mother, sitting frozen on a deck chair. Nawal’s face appears for the first time: stilled, lined, focused on a distance beyond the camera. Yet faces are never really stilled, not completely. Deleuze: “the face is this organ-carrying plate of nerves which has sacrificed most of its global mobility and which gathers or expresses in a free way all kinds of tiny movements which the rest of the body usually keeps hidden.”44 For Nawal, those tiny movements have become too minute for the viewer to decode, markers of colliding traumatic fragments of the past that have rendered her silent. The task of their decoding becomes the aesthetic and narrative work of the film.



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Villeneuve divides the narrative of the film between the present day search of the twins and the story of their mother’s youth. In the latter, having shamed her family by becoming pregnant to a Muslim (presumably Palestinian) youth, Nawal is forced to give her son up for adoption. When civil war breaks out, Christian militia stop the Muslim bus on which she is traveling to search for him and only her Christianity saves her from being killed in the ensuing massacre. Unable to find him, she assassinates the militia leader responsible for the bus killings. In jail, she becomes known as “La femme qui chante,” the woman who sings. Unbroken by years of imprisonment, she is raped by the executioner Abu Tarek (Abdelghafour Elaaziz) in a final torturous bid to break her will, a rape that leaves her pregnant. Both threads reference the Orpheus myth in their narration of journeys into underworlds—Nawal to rescue her son, the twins to make known their mother’s history. However, I am less interested in the film’s symbolism than the interplay between aesthetic and affect. More precisely, my focus is on how the face in Incendies functions not as referential or representational icon, but as the affected and affecting site of temporality and violence. There is no fixed relationship between what a face displays and the thought that resides behind it. What might be going on “within” Nawal cannot be made directly visible; what matters is how her faciality is affected in the film’s images, and how it in turn affects what follows. The cinematic face can be “accompanied by a more radical reflection expressing a pure quality, which is common to several different things (the object which carries it, the body which submits to it, the idea which represents it, the face which has this idea …).”45 Here, I want to trace how faces in Incendies affect the perceptions and actions of both the aesthetic form and the narrative content of the film. While the movement of crowds and swirling social forces are the organizing motifs of The Battle of Algiers, Incendies coheres around faces. As Jeanne or Nawal wander by themselves through bleak and war-ravaged country, the camera follows them and keeps their faces at its center, even when it circles or shifts angle. After a young Nawal is forced to give up her son, the camera stays with her visage as she walks anxiously away, the village falling behind her until the camera cuts and a similar figure—dark hair, dark clothes, anxious expression—strides down a city street. Nawal and Jeanne meld into one another. While the cut punctuates the transition, their similar control over the attention of the camera arrests recognition of the shift momentarily, the camera’s gaze producing ambiguity of both identity and time. Such transitions occur throughout the film, repeating the framing of images but also differentiating

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them. Nawal walking from the village effectuates the film’s movement in time, but the pairing of the images (Nawal-Jeanne) also produces an unusual instance of what Deleuze calls a crystal-image, a mirroring form of the time-image, the direct image of time rather than time conveyed via movement. While Deleuze locates the affection-image within the realist tradition, whereas the crystalimage emerges from his account of neo-realism after the war, films such as Incendies deploy these image forms in mixed and varied ways. These are not mirrorings where one thing refers back to another, but rather the emergence of time’s passage and the marks of that passage. “What the crystal image reveals or makes visible is the hidden ground of time, that is, its differentiation into two flows, that of presents which pass and that of pasts which are preserved.”46 While the pairing of shots in the film shows the flow of past into present, it is the affect of the stilled face that sets the past into this new relation with the present. That affectivity is what enacts memory: “it is in the present that we make a memory, in order to make use of it in the future when the present will be past.”47 Faces are thus the imagistic force uniting aesthetic and narrative, content and meaning. But their aesthetic centrality is inextricable, too, from the violence that is at the heart of the film. Among many acts of violence, two scenes warrant particular attention: the birth of Nawal’s son and her torture by rape. With her boyfriend murdered by her brother, Nawal is confined to the family home. Short, fragmented shots

Figure 9  Nawal, crystal-image, Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010) © Sony Pictures Classic



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Figure 10  Jeanne, crystal-image, Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010) © Sony Pictures Classic

convey the birth: a flashlight on a blanket, blood on a white sheet, sticky baby held to her chest, scissors cutting the umbilical cord. Close-ups alternate between Nawal’s exhausted face, her grandmother’s determined one, and the tiny heel of his foot onto which the grandmother tattoos the three dots of the film’s opening scene. While the grandmother’s calm impassivity reflects the intensive micro-movements of distress that play across Nawal’s face, the pricks that mark the baby’s skin produce an intensive series of their own, one that takes up both Nawal’s distress and the grandmother’s calm. For something to become faceified, argues Deleuze, it need not be an anatomical face, but can be a reflective surface marked by micro-movements, such that “it looks at us … even if does not resemble a face.”48 Cutting between faces, each affection-image gives rise not to action as such but to more reflection, more intensity. While the dots are markers of identity, their tattooing also builds towards the paroxysm of violence that will be the child’s removal—they are violent acts themselves, just as the birth itself is rendered violent. Resonant with the image of the tattooed heel from the opening scene, this series of close-ups positions the face and the movement between faces as the aesthetic form violence takes within the film, as well as its narrative impulse. Intimate violence melds with the political violence of the bus massacre and assassination in Nawal’s rape by the executioner Abu Tarek. Rape, of course, has a long history as a torture technique; for Nawal, it is the tool her captors use to

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Figure 11  Nawal torture scene, Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010) © Sony Pictures Classic

break her will, to complete her subjection. Like the prisoners of Guantánamo who write poems as resistance to their biopolitical submergence, Nawal sings against the torture around her, sings against the tight walls of her cell, and, like Orpheus, to assert her life against the death of the underworld. Her torture begins with the obscuring of her face by a cloth bag; she must be defaced to enter the torture chamber. In the bare room to which she is taken, a tall man circles her: his face in close-up, then hers, then her seated with him standing behind. This movement from him to her, to the pair of them, with the empty, almost placeless chamber as backdrop, suspends the violence in the same way that a dam holds back a flooding river. Again, her face and then his. Next, his boots step towards the door, cut, and he turns to her: “Sing now.” Sprawled on the ground, face pale and wet, Nawal struggles to pull her pants back up. Violence has occurred between the shots—the rape is not shown, an event splintered from experiential time, an enactment of trauma in the cinematic cut. Its occurrence is suspended, not only in the perception of the viewer and the film-world, but in the perception of Nawal herself. In other words, the rupturing of trauma is rendered as relational by its very non-occurrence on the screen: its image is contained only in the in-between of multiple perceptions. Deleuze calls this a mental image, the image of relation itself, and in Incendies that relation is of torturous trauma.49 This suspended splinter means only her face, pressed into the floor, can mark its occurrence. Such obscuring of the face, as Abel points out



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out, can be violently territorializing: the structure of the prison itself instantiates the confluence of political and intimate violence.50 Rape is specific and personal, but also within the logic of subjection to state power. It thus at once inverts and melds the intimacy of her forcibly removed child and the random brutality of the bus massacre. Nawal’s face both rejects itself and prefigures its later stilling. As the film will soon reveal, this aesthetic rendering performs the very making visible that is the endpoint of the narrative: her rapist is both her lost son and the father of her twins. This excision of specific torture and rape from the screen contrasts with the climactic torture sequence in The Battle of Algiers, yet their absence means that the events themselves do not overshadow their traumatic consequences. Just as torture permeates The Battle of Algiers even before its occurrence on screen, so traumatic affect saturates Incendies until the film returns to the Montreal pool that first brought the past into the present. In the scene prior, Simon has returned from meeting with a militia warlord who tells him the truth about both his father and missing brother. As yet unspoken on screen, this knowledge has reduced Simon to a deadened face, not unlike his mother’s stillness. “One plus one makes two,” he tells Jeanne. “You can not make one.” Concerned, she moves closer and he turns to her directly so that they gaze on one another, her face to the camera. “Jeanne,” he says. “One plus one, does it make one?” Her desire for a logical equation has collapsed. At first, her face betrays nothing, involuntary movement playing across her skin, then his words strike. Rasping, harshly drawing breath, her face pulling back before falling into her hands, Jeanne performs a gestural gag: she cannot speak and performs that inability with the movement of her body.51 This withdrawal marks the moment of return to the scene beside the pool, as if the capacity of faces to become one another across time that sustained the affective relays of the film has finally collapsed. At the pool, mother and daughter enter and swim, Nawal moving slowly across the surface toward the camera at the edge of the pool. “Faces are maps,” writes Abel, “or surfaces,” on which affective violence plays out.52 Now, faces map onto one another, intensifying affect between them. Nawal’s eyes slide across the camera to fix on something just past the lens. A reverse shot shows the object of her gaze: she has come face-to-face with the tattooed heel. Slowly, she makes her way out of the pool, eyes darting and skin trembling. She walks towards the man and he turns to look at her: it is her rapist, Abu Tarek. Finally, the face that is the heel and the face of violence are conjoined, rendered into a singular body that is both loved and hated. Her own face betrays little at first,

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as if this impossible melding were also impossible to know. She walks away and sits, but her gaze returns to him, then falls away, before the camera cuts to the earlier image of her face still. Here, the close-up tears “the image away from spatio-temporal co-ordinates in order to call forth the pure affect as the expressed. Even the place, which is still present in the background, loses its co-ordinates and becomes ‘any space whatever.’”53 Her face exceeds the setting of the pool, even the moment of revelation. Featureless concrete of suburbia, blasted barren land—these become spaces of resonance rather than specificity. Without words and with the face keeping its interiority to itself, there are only the film’s accumulated layers of faces, their affects, and temporal disruptions. Not that her expression represents this as such, but rather that the affectivity of the film’s aesthetics—its saturated color, its repeated and differentiated faces, their resonance across time—collides with the violence that has cloven the narrative. The intimate violence of her son’s removal and the political violence of her torture by rape do not receive any resolution; the traumatic return consigns her to stillness, her only remaining words are the instructions that set the twins on their Orphean quest. Nawal falls silent, but this silence does not reflect a failure to testify. Rather it shows how testimony can function, as Zolkos argues, across and between the “linguistic, visual, affective, kinetic and gestural.”54 As a coda to Nawal’s story, the twins deliver her letters to her son and rapist, opening the possibility of breaking the chain of violence and simultaneously foreclosing

Figure 12  Stilled face of Nawal, Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010) © Sony Pictures Classic



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it, just as the aesthetic force of faces both fractures and impels narrative. But because the film refuses to limit its faces and their faciality, they call forth the trauma of lost children and torturous rape without demanding that affect give itself over to representation. As such, Incendies allows trauma to reside in the intensity of images that are both affective and crystalline, things in themselves and images of fractured, broken time. By attending to the affective aftermath of torture, the film suggests that a willingness to allow the interplay between images to speak enables narrative and affect to amplify one another. Writing on trauma and art, Jill Bennett argues that “affective responses … are not born of emotional identification or sympathy; rather, they emerge from a direct engagement with sensation as it is registered in the work.”55 Across the films and photographs discussed here, sensation registers in the viewing subject to enact varying forms and intensities of testimony. While the Abu Ghraib images themselves are affecting—disgusting, shocking, angering—the move to explain, contextualize, and narrativize that occurs in Standard Operating Procedure risks stripping that affectivity in the juxtaposition of photographs and words, reducing the images to symptoms of institutional and systemic disorder. The fragmentary and almost surreal scenes that Morris interweaves throughout the documentary recirculate affectivity that might otherwise be diminished. Emerging from within an otherwise conventional documentary, these sequences hold the rupturing force of trauma within the testimonial mode. For all the sense-making work of the film, Morris makes clear that some part of bearing witness to torture must remain sense-less, pre-cognitive, affective. In the shift from documentary to fictionalized history, Zero Dark Thirty and The Battle of Algiers deploy very different aesthetic and narrative strategies to establish and maintain veracity. But where Bigelow’s movie bears neither aesthetic nor narrative marks from torture despite its intimately brutal depictions, moving unwaveringly forward in time shot by shot, Pontecorvo’s film so enfolds torture into the content, structure, and visual elements that its contagious, contingent, and enduring effects are viscerally present despite its limited time on screen. In keeping with the resistance to language of trauma in general and torture in particular, much of the affective intensity and temporal disruption in Incendies occurs without linguistic framing. In this sense, the use of the face to affect and reflect violence, to produce crystalline images of broken time, offers no easy means of escaping the limits of representation. Rather, the film coheres the referential quality of representation—the face that stands in for

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the traumatic return—with the intensity of traumatic affect. Signification and representation alone fall short. When faces and faciality connect one image to the next, when they abstract affect to an intensity of the anywhere, when they entangle aesthetic and narrative in gestures that imbricate the viewing body in the image, a certain kind of visceral testimony becomes possible. Torture presents less of a representational challenge for the visual than it does for language. Language is inherently signifying and, while images certainly signify, they are more inclined to indeterminacy, to produce fluidities of meaning and affective force. Seeing torture imbricates the body with an immediacy that is not always or necessarily present in reading. Towards the beginning of this chapter, I said that it would not contain any lessons for literature as such, yet there are resonances to recognize as this book pivots from reading and seeing torture to consider its writing. Just as the Torture Memos, detainee and interrogator memoirs, and Guantánamo poems reveal the affectivity constitutive of torture itself, the images analyzed in this chapter show how powerful the evocation of that affectivity is for bearing witness to torture. To bring this into some relation with literature, it suggests that fragmentation, a-signification, and rupturing are important not only because they enact linguistic violence, but because they do affective work to embody torture. Incendies demonstrates the forceful presence of the face. Not just as a metaphor for trauma, but as a site of traumatic affect, of relationality itself—literature too might ask how it can face torture. If torture is to enter literary language, then the affectivity of its visual presence must find a way in too. To write torture calls for a deeper understanding of literary testimony and of the relation of writing to trauma, the task to which this book now turns.

4

Writing Trauma

Haunting this book—largely silently until now, but not without affect—is my own fictive writing of torture. While researching and writing this book, I was also writing fiction that sought to address the tortures of the war on terror, to bear some form of literary witness, and to answer, perhaps, the call of that “dark fascination” with the torture chamber identified by Coetzee. Thinking and theorizing torture in academic terms thus occurred in tandem with creative practice. Reporting directly on my creative writing is of little value to the present project, but to explore how fiction might bear witness to torture without acknowledging this writing experience would be disingenuous. To approach torture and its relation to language in both creative and critical terms is to map its terrain from different yet interrelated perspectives. Thus, in the speculative thinking that follows, my creative practice appears fleetingly at the interstices, emerging at connective points within the movements that make up this chapter. When I tell people that I am writing a novel about torture their reaction is often the same. Raised eyebrows, a pause before a retreating, noncommittal response. I struggle to explain myself. Words like fascinated and attracted stick in my throat, and those without moral complication tumble forth: outraged, disgusted, necessary. There is a visceral difficulty, a bodily complexity of answering that signals the fraught ethical space of voicing torture—particularly as neither survivor nor perpetrator.

Prologue: Affected in the act Writers of fiction seek the affective force of words, as much as function and meaning. “When the writer makes choices,” writes Marcelle Freiman, “it is the affective response in the word choice and its resonance for the text’s forms and

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patterns, and other words around it, that determine language use.” Freiman goes on to set out how affect influences the interest and excitement of a writer toward their text, arguing that in instances of intense experience “writing is affective expression.”1 Writers respond bodily to the words they write—catching breath, tensing muscles, shifting facial expression, drawing in of shoulders. Writing thus entails not only the expression of affect, but its feeling. This is an important insight. Lips curl and nostrils flare while writing disgust, shoulders slump inwards writing shame, hearts race in periods of intensity, and language falls into rhythm with breath, as the distinction between words and body fades. This is precisely Tomkins’s affect—involuntary, relational, bodily. And yet here too is ­in-between-ness, a felt force between body and word, relationality emergent in process. Recall that earlier account of bodies: relations of motion and rest, capacities for affecting and being affected. For writing bodies, this capacity to affect and be affected extends into language and beyond it, from and through words, and across and within the flesh. What Massumi writes of bodies in general resonates powerfully for writing bodies: “The body is as immediately abstract as it is concrete; its activity and expressivity extend, as on their underside, into an incorporeal, yet perfectly real, dimension of pressing potential.”2 It is precisely within the movement of writing—reaching into the past and simultaneous thrusting into the future, into an incorporeal, yet perfectly real, dimension of pressing potential—that affect resides. Body open to possibility yet always already responding to what will be, discrete affects taking hold in muscles and nerves before awareness strikes. Thus, “abstract means: never present in position, only ever in passing. This is an abstractness pertaining to the transitional immediacy of a real relation—that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise than it is, in any here and now).”3 Writing plumbs this indeterminacy, and can never quite shake it. Even when the word is decided, placed in the sentence, printed and bound, and published, something between a flicker and a conflagration of indeterminacy are carried with it. But this indeterminacy is most radically constitutive of the act of writing itself. Anyone who has written, and particularly anyone who has written creatively, will know intimately this indeterminacy: pen in hand (or keyboard under fingers) there is a suspended moment of indeterminate potential. A moment that is always finite, always passing, and yet always recursive. A moment at once abstracted and intensely lived. Body already responding to what is not yet. Skin thrumming, breath stilling, vision tunneling. What is fiction writing



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if not openness to an elsewhere and otherwise than it is, in any here and now? This openness acquires vibrancy, maximizes its potential for newness, in the intensity of affect of which it is capable of transporting bodies (of writing, of text, of reading). Affect, then, points to the way that which might be and that which is are co-constitutive of one another, how the virtual and actual are complexly entangled in one another’s emergence. Here, the virtual is that which is not yet but might be (or not), as well as that which might have been. It is the always-present potential for movement—not unlike the taut pause of two dogs before they burst into play, or the fall of sunlight on ocean, or the strangeness of the sudden recall of unexpected memory. The virtual cannot be excised from the actual, or vice versa. Writing thrives where the two intersect—that radically entangled zone of virtual and actual is where potential resides. Or, put differently, the affectivity of writing for body, text, and their relations occurs most intensely, most full with possibility, within the dynamic space where accumulations of the virtual press upon the actual. Think of the act of writing as a circuit—writing body and body of text. Affect is the animating current, what makes the circuit live. Yet this writing circuit is not linear. It is characterized by resonation and feedback, mutation and amplification. Not a simple circuit, then, but complex, self-reflexive, evolving; what Deleuze and Guattari call an assemblage. On one level, “it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another.” That is, the coming together of bodies, tools, words, texts, thoughts. On another level, “it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies.”4 That is, the emergence of meanings, poetics, aesthetics. In one dimension, content, and in the other, expression. Machinic assemblage: the bodies generating words, the body affected by words. Collective assemblage of enunciation: the emerging text, the affected body. There is, then, a structure of relations instantiated in the act of writing—a set of assemblages, systems interlinked and resonant with one another. More, this assembling and resonation occurs in time; it is an event composed of encounters. When I write, I become part of this event, full with the virtual becoming actual—writing is eventfull. To occupy the fullness of the writing event is also to encounter affects propelled by past words. Affective encounters are not entirely open but rather shaped by pre-existing tendencies, by accumulated elements of the past that feed into the unfolding future to give it coherence and the illusion of continuity. Newness occurs in the interruption of chronological linearity: past into

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future, future into past; always in transition in the present. In other words, the emergence of newness involves the recursive imbrication of past into future and future into past. This folding of time that occurs in the act of fiction writing— the emergence of a future-past and a past-future—is crucial. The continual movement of writing, its necessary relentlessness of affective interest, cannot leave unchanged any bodies within the assemblage of machine and enunciation, body and text. Time passes, the position of the present shifts, the writing body reaches forward and back and, in doing so, changes. Ceaseless change at varying intensities, change that might be held and released yet never fully vanish. It is not only the body of the work, the text, which is made new. Affects actualized in the act of writing leave their mark on and in writing bodies. What, then, of writing torture? What of the relation between fiction and testimony? What ethics does such writing entail? What risks does it bear? What are the potential consequences of writing torture and its traumas? In Scarry’s classic conception of the pain of torture, the terrible paradox of the act is that even as the torturer’s voice demands answer, the infliction of pain seeks to reduce the voice of the victim to a wordless and world-destroying scream—even when the victim wants nothing more than to confess, inform, or invent a response simply to make the pain cease. Beyond this, as Kafka reveals so viscerally, from the perspective of the state the act of torture can be an affirmation, one that seeks a kind of euphoric subjection. Such writing over the body inverts the destruction of language; the experience of the victim disappears utterly, language suffers no crisis. Yet what of those tortures that are as much affective as pain-inducing? What of the uses of fear and shame, disgust and contempt in the war on terror? How might those be written? The Latin root of “torture” is torquere, “to twist”: a beautiful yet forceful word. It carries within it both elegant movement and the grinding of joints: to twist the body and through it the voice. Yet there is more here: the twisting of ethics, rupturing of experience, and fracturing of lives. Torture is concerned not only with speaking, but with movement, with force and constraint—not only of physical bodies but of relations between them. With the heightened intensity of writing, with its necessary openness to affect, the body might well be placed in precarity. To write torture is, perhaps, to risk exposure to something of its dynamics. Taking its cue from the word torture itself, from its origins in turn and torque, this chapter undertakes three twisting movements through the terrain of torture, affect, and testimony.



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First movement: Of literature, testimony, and the right to write I have never been tortured. Nor have I tortured another. Yet I write—and write creatively—of these things. The possibility that this distance is unbridgeable presses upon me. I want to slip away, escape into writing something else. But I can’t. I am compelled. Why? The desire for justice, a naïve belief in the power of literature, a fascination with dark places—does it matter? Folded into this question, hiding behind it, is another: by what right do I write? Literature matters. Shoshana Felman, in her book with Dori Laub, writes that we live in an age of testimony, “an age whose writing task (and reading task) is to confront the horror of its own destructiveness, to attest to the unthinkable disaster of culture’s breakdown, and to attempt to assimilate the massive trauma, and the cataclysmic shift in being that resulted, within some reworked frame of culture or within some revolutionized order of consciousness.”5 While Felman is writing of the Holocaust and literary responses to it, in the wake of 9/11 and widespread American torture, with Guantánamo still open and the war on terror still raging, testimony remains an essential task of contemporary writing. Memoirs from detainees, guards and interrogators, prisoner poetry and Red Cross and Amnesty International reports—in different ways, these modes of testimony draw on the strategies and techniques of literature. James Dawes shows how storytelling and linguistic practices drawn from literature form part of the testimonial work of human rights activists and organizations, and how those seeking human rights protections adopt and deploy those same practices, but he also asks how fiction might have a moral force that matches its aesthetic power. In part, this is a question of ethics and of the contradiction within the work of human rights “between our impulse to heed trauma’s cry for representation and our instinct to protect it from representation—from invasive staring, simplification, dissection.”6 Working similarly at the intersection of literature and human rights, Elizabeth Anker deploys an “embodied politics of reading” to show how fiction can produce subjectivities that are more visceral, messy, and socially entangled than rights discourses typically admit.7 Rather than reading existing fiction, I want to ask how literary witnessing as a practice of writing might do something similar: how might it offer ways of understanding the experience of the dark places of the war on terror and its tortures that are not accounted for in other forms of testimony.

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For its victims, torture endures, broken free from time and unable to be erased. Yet, as I showed in the first two chapters, the survival required by America ensures that, while the narrative of each victim is ruptured, such rupturing lacks finality. Subjected bodies live with narratives contaminated by torture: their veracity uncertain, their morality problematic, and their ordering fragile. The rupturing of narrative remains, the experience of torture is unable to take its place in the past: Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect.8

A sense of self is fractured, rendered unstable. Familiar affective patterns are disrupted; continuity and psychic cohesion are destroyed or deeply wounded; agency is radically limited. Trauma is thus inseparable from the tension between the event itself and its haunting return; trauma is never in the past, it is rather the continual presence of the past in the present, impinging on the future. In this, trauma shares a certain affinity with writing itself—a point to which I will return in due course. What literature offers, in Cathy Caruth’s famous formulation, is an interest “in the complex relations between knowing and not knowing” at the heart of trauma.9 Literature, then, has the potential not only to narrate what is known and identify absences but to express the shifting, uncertain, and non-narrative relations between the two. This does not mean that literature should transform trauma into coherent narrative and make it comprehensible. Human rights stories at times risk an uncomplicated, overly neat pattern of crisis leading to clarity, action, rescue, and, eventually, healing and justice. “Atrocities get turned into something else,” notes Dawes, “something lesser, when put into words.”10 Unconstrained by facticity or the necessity of a restorative narrative, literature can imagine into the unknown and its complex relation to the known. As Felman puts it, the “question for contemporary testimonial narrative is, then, how can it bridge, speak over, the collapse of bridges, and yet, narrate at the same time the process and event of the collapse?”11 Literary testimony thus entails a doubling movement: a narration of collapse that somehow reaches across it to narrate the enduring force of its aftermath. Not every witness to terrible events is an eyewitness. Primo Levi’s witnessing of the camps of Nazi Germany does not preclude Albert Camus, in novels such as The Plague or The Fall, from bearing witness to the tragedies of the



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Holocaust. Nor do Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s accounts of Soviet repression reduce the allegorical force of the critique of totalitarian authority and torture in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon or Arrival and Departure, or, for that matter, Orwell’s novel. Such literary testimony performs an important task, namely “to open up in that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imaginative capability of perceiving history—what is happening to others—in one’s own body, with the power of sight (of insight) usually afforded only by one’s own immediate physical involvement.”12 Literary testimony thus exceeds the immediacy of the event, but by doing so imaginatively it affords different forms of knowing and not knowing. This imaginative capability of perceiving history is precisely not what eyewitness testimony, in the juridical sense, provides. The woman at the window who sees a murder gives one perspective, the crime author who takes that murder and crafts a narrative around it offers another. If the value of the eyewitness resides in the correspondence of their testimony to evidence, then what matters in literary testimony is what the text does. Genre is not the issue here, nor is quality as such. Literary testimony need not seek the verisimilitude that is the ambition of the realist tradition; it might instead deploy allegory, experiment with form, or even engage in play. The ethical practice of literary testimony, then, might be said to reside in its affect rather than any right per se. The writer takes on the task of translation, shifting history, politics, and violence into the literary imaginary. The question of the right to write cannot be extricated from what is written; it is not a question of who writes but rather of what it is that writing does. Literary testimony is thus crowded by urgency. This urgency takes the form of an obligation, but an obligation that always falls short of fulfillment—the literary work can never match the participant’s experience of the historical event. What literature can do is narrate the falling short itself, write the forceful absence of knowing. Felman suggests that literary testimony has the capacity to “speak beyond its words.”13 That is to say, literary writing can somehow bridge the impossible gap of experience between victim, perpetrator, and bystander. However, the witnessing that Felman offers up in the latter stages of Testimony is not literary, but musical—the singing voices of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Here, Agamben diverges from Felman. By not directly addressing this gap, he argues, by declaring it incommensurable but accessible via the metaphor of song, Felman and (by proxy) Laub “aestheticize testimony.”14 For Agamben, testimony is the voice of the subject from within the intimate indistinction of being both able to speak and not. This indistinction between speaking and not is embodied

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by the absolute witnesses of the Holocaust: those lost to the gas chambers. But it occurs, too, in the words they left behind, in those survivors who descended most deeply into states of numbness and incomprehension only to return. Testimony cannot, of course, be said to take place only in such extreme circumstances, but also manifests in the cultural echoes of that indistinction. Thus, “with its every word, testimony refutes precisely this isolation of survival from life.”15 Literary testimony, then, can contribute to the struggle of modern life: resistance to biopower and the reclamation of life from mere survival. None of which is to say that Felman’s account lacks significance. Far from it. If the problem is with stopping at an ineffable something to speak beyond words, I want to ask what that something might be. How might the stuff of relation between victim and perpetrator, witness and bystander, speech and silence, power and its lack, be understood? So far, this movement has been a turning outward—I want now to continue further, to make the necessary countermove and twist inward. A necessarily dangerous movement, since it risks both exposure and entrapment. Theorizing literary testimony in this way has couched the right to write as being bound up with both the need and capacity to do so. How can any writing do justice to its subject? How can any writer know that the act they engage in is ethical? For me, at least in part, what resides here is shame: the shame of faking it, of exposing my writing as inadequate, of a profound and unbridgeable lack of authenticity (whatever such a thing might be). This shame holds me back, stays my hands on the keyboard, and impels me to avoid the subject of my writing in conversation. I feel it, bodily, in my continual encountering of torture through text. The very otherness of torture implicates me. “Shame,” writes Elspeth Probyn, “is an affect that crosses many different orders of bodies.”16 In this, shame at once transgresses and draws into relation—it implicates the experience of an individual into the gaze and presence of another, even when that other is the doubting voice of the self. Is this, perhaps, what can connect my writing to my subject? It is tempting to think that because affect is intensity and relation, it is necessarily fleeting. But “shame and other affects can seem to get into our bodies, altering our understanding of our selves and our relation to the past.”17 Here Probyn describes a specific affective relation to writing that she calls writing shame. This is not writing of shame, but rather the experience of shame in the act of writing—the shame of falling short, of not being up to the task, of failing the subject of the text. Discussing an eclectic mix of writings, Probyn shows how “writing shame is a visceral reminder to be true to interest, to be honest about



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why or how certain things are of interest.”18 Something like this writing shame emerges in the anxieties of the human rights workers and memoir writers, in relation to their capacity to tell stories within the paradox of speaking out about atrocity and yet speaking over the voices of its victims.19 For writers of fiction, writing shame is also a call for an embodied ethics in the practice of authorship. Writing shame brings my own writing body proximate to the torture chamber. It is along this affective line of flight that my capacity to speak finds its first deeper relation to my subject: those bodies caught up in the biopolitical imperative of the war on terror. This writing body becomes a site of contestation between experiences, ideas, and possibilities. It holds the potential to produce new life on and beyond the page. Life—traumatized, written over, affected—that still gestures across the void towards what might otherwise be mere survival.

Second movement: Of writing the torturer’s voice I began writing thinking I would tell a singular story: that of the victim. But as I wrote, this felt too simple, too readily fitting the words that tumbled from my lips— outraged, disgusted—and not those that stuck in my throat: fascinated, attracted. Sympathy for the victim—a position without complication. What I was trying to do, I now realize, was to write torture without the twist, the tightening inward, the descent into dark places. Without the torturer. Four encounters. Reading in the ersatz college town of Irvine, California, the correspondence of an American military liaison officer, a man who tells Uzbeks, Egyptians, and others who torture on behalf of the United States which questions to ask.20 Finding that moment in Fear Up Harsh when interrogator Tony Lagouranis contemplates chopping off a detainee’s fingers. Fixating on Lynndie England’s blank recital of what happened at Abu Ghraib in the documentary Standard Operating Procedure. Watching the scene in another documentary, Your Neighbor’s Son, in which Michalis Petrou sits in the kitchen of his family home, his wife cooking in the background, and describes how he became one of the most notorious torturers of the Greek junta.21 Each encounter brings home the intimate subjection to power of those who torture, the intensity of their experience and, perhaps above all, their sheer ordinariness. The victim’s story often resides somewhere between tragedy and triumph; the torturer’s story is frequently more ambiguous.

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The first half of this book proposed a conception of the encounter of bodies in the torture chamber: affect proliferating, mutating, penetrating the very particles of bodies, exciting some and forcing others into stasis. Deleuze and Guattari call this change becoming. Becoming is itself and nothing else, a “verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or ‘producing.’”22 Becoming is without closure and without product: Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which the becoming passes.23

Becoming concerns the change in the composition of bodies themselves. It is dynamic, continually enacted, dependent on relations and intensities of affect— and thus free of moral constraint. What shape that becoming takes depends on the particularities of the encounter between bodies, and on its context, location, and form. Where being is static, “a line of becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two, it is the in-between, the border or line or flight or descent running perpendicular to both.”24 Thinking in terms of becoming means rejecting stable identities, both philosophically and practically. Philosophically, this means embracing change, fluidity, flux, affectivity—potentiality. Practically, it can mean thinking beyond claimed or asserted identities to consider durational happenings—the way bodies change form, status, and relation to the world.25 Within every body, virtually, resides the potential not only for becomingtortured but becoming-torturer. Kafka enacts this in “In the Penal Colony.” The torturer-executioner catches himself (deliberately, inevitably, yet unexpectedly) within the logic of the environment he has constructed: strapped into the apparatus he maintains and operates, he is at once both becoming-torturer and becoming-tortured. So too the logic of many of the tortures of the war on terror. As Jane Mayer shows in The Dark Side, her investigative account of US torture policy, many of the techniques deployed and empirical data used to justify them were reversed engineered from the SERE school, part of the Navy’s training program for officers at risk of capture.26 SERE—Survival Evasion Resistance Escape—emerged from the rash of secret programs prompted by fears about communist brainwashing in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the control of Vietnam veterans and military psychologists, trainees were subjected to the



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kinds of techniques the enemies of the US might employ—and exactly those that appeared in interrogation rooms throughout the war on terror. In part, graduates of the program simply took up practices to which they had been subjected and applied them to others. But after 9/11, SERE instructors also taught CIA and other interrogators how to use various techniques, not simply how to resist them, and the “expertise” and “research” conducted at the school gave its practices a veneer of respectability that appealed further up the chain of command. SERE also marked its graduate-survivors; their experience of becomingtortured could not but change them. David J. Morris, a former infantry officer in the Marines, describes how after just a few days his “mind quickly disintegrated” and he “became convinced that [he] was being held in an actual prisoner-of-war camp.” He writes of how the outer world “stops utterly,” and of the helpless terror of being “an unwilling citizen of an independent republic with an inscrutable body of laws, a body of laws whose logic is never explained to you and seems to evolve moment by moment at the whim of your captors.” He would, he says, rather commit suicide than be captured in combat. Having completed their classes, on a bus to their week in the field, each “could only stare desolately out the window … wearing the faces of the condemned.” After, Morris is haunted by his experience, carrying it through his service in Iraq, but cannot speak of it. He is “not permitted to remember,” he has “lost sovereignty” over certain parts of his mind.27 Is it any surprise that having experienced becoming-tortured, some number of those who went through SERE would be swept up by the opposite dynamic? Or that the school itself should come to symbolize the power of the dark arts of interrogations, its very secrecy amplifying its authority? Yet SERE’s influence should not be overstated. Torture’s logic is more compelling than any institution, even one operating at a crucial place within the US military. Essential to that logic is the capacity to justify its own necessity. Previously, I discussed the role science played in legitimizing torture. Myths of the psychological impact of torture played a part—especially those that said the victim of ‘no-touch’ tortures would come to blame not their torturers but themselves, and indeed their very bodies, for their anguish. For instance, those stress positions in which it is imagined that, since no one is physically touching him, the victim will blame himself for the pain. When accounts of these tortures appear in texts as propositions, whether in the Torture Memos, the Kubark Manual and its successors, or elsewhere, they postulate the victim as both becoming-tortured and becoming-torturer. Of course, this contradictory

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and doubled becoming is not what happens; the notion that the tortured might blame their own body provides a safety valve for the guilt of perpetrators, or an ethical fig leaf for the state. That waterboarding was inflicted on SERE trainees to harden them against the brutal techniques of authoritarian regimes fades into the background. Potentialities of becoming are rarely equivalent—but all bodies contain the possibility of subjection, or perform that subjection in different ways. In the torture chambers of the war on terror, there are two bodies changed: detainee becoming-tortured, soldier (or intelligence agent or contractor or interrogator) becoming-torturer. This is not to suggest that becoming either tortured or torturer begins anew with each encounter, but rather that such becomings are always in process. Trauma marks the victim-survivor, but so too the torturer, as the experiences of so many American soldiers attest. Becoming-torturer is not something that happens in a vacuum (and neither, of course, is becoming-tortured). In the war on terror, the subjection of bodies to sovereign power is to some extent imbricated in any becoming. It is the biopolitical geography of the modern state that implicates each of us, that creates a plane of potential between detained bodies in Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib, US Army interrogators, and even you and me. We are all complicit, all part of the same strata of knowledge(s), practices, and power—even if our complicity occurs in near infinite shades.28 As Standard Operating Procedure reveals, Sabrina Harman, Lynndie England, and the others slid both willingly and helplessly into the morass. Could that be you? Me? Someone you or I love? Becoming-torturer is not, of course, a state in which guilt can be readily absolved. But its potential is closer to home than we might hope. To twist further, beyond the act and toward its aftermath, the between-ness that defines affect does not vanish with distance, in neither space nor time. Nor is this between-ness insubstantial, a nebulous space that can only be conceived in abstraction. Rather, it is both bodies and their relation. The way one’s hand might press into the cheek of another, flesh on flesh but also the force applied. Or the way disgust at one’s own bodily filth might be amplified by the gaze of the other, that amplification binding the moment into an enduring assemblage. There is a traumatic after for the victim of torture, but that after is no less complex for the torturer—it is simply of a different order, form, and dynamic. Certainly, the camps of the war on terror are designed with the biopolitical subjection of detainees in mind. But reading the Torture Memos, it is striking the extent to which the experience of the interrogator is erased from the text: only their intention not to torture remains, whereas the subjected body of the detainee is all-too present in



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the text. Little regard is given to the affects of torture on the torturers.29 As Rejali points out, “researchers know that torture traumatizes perpetrators ‘by inducing toxic levels of guilt and shame.’”30 Some perpetrators report hurting their families and becoming dysfunctional in daily life. Marked by the state’s demands, by the toxicity of their environment, by the resonance of their own infliction of violent trauma. No matter the extent to which torturers feel their acts to be necessary and justified, “they have also performed something monstrous, become walking abominations, and no integration can remove this stain.”31 Those haunted faces from Standard Operating Procedure, the Greek torturer blank-faced in the kitchen, Lagouranis wracked by violent anger and bouts of depression, the military liaison officer who cannot turn his perception inward—their trauma is an inescapable fact of torture, of their own submission to the state, voluntary or not. So too Kafka’s torturer, consumed by his machine, or Nineteen Eight-Four’s O’Brien, far deeper in his subjection than Winston will ever be, or Coetzee’s Colonel Joll, whose tortured barbarians engender his defeat out beyond the bounds of empire. At the same time, the complexity of their enduring relation to power and to the tortured heeds Coetzee’s own warning “to avoid the clichés of spy fiction—to make the torturer neither a figure of satanic evil, nor an actor in a black comedy, nor a faceless functionary, nor a tragically divided man doing a job he does not believe in.”32 Resolving this dilemma while not falling into the trap of reproducing the imperatives of the state must lie at the heart of writing torture. The perpetrators of disaster are also its witnesses. Or, to put it differently, the uncomfortable truth is that testimony belongs not only to the victim, but to the perpetrator too. Both—in radically different yet intimately connected ways— survive. If we, the bystanders, are to be affected, if we are to know the ways in which we are complicit in others becoming-torturer and becoming-tortured, both voices must be written. The voice of the torturer in the text does not elide that of the victim—it ensures it is heard in full. More, the voices of tortured and torturer bring the bystander-witnesses more fully into relation with the terrible violence too often committed in their name.

Third movement: Writing trauma I carry a certain guilt in not allowing the victim to speak alone, that in giving the torturer voice I somehow risk legitimizing the act itself. But I also have a fear of the dark, of some awful descent into the writing self. Why is this so frightening? Why

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does part of me want to avoid the problem rather than face it? Why do people look so concerned when I tell them about my writing? It cannot simply be looking at the monstrous. It must be something more, something visceral, something changeable. A fear, of what might be taken into the body in the practice of writing torture, in the compulsion to give voice to the perpetrator. Fear of contagion. Writing is an encounter of bodies: bodies within the text, the body of the text, the writing body. I touch this becoming-torturer, write through and of him, and in so doing I feel the twist of the ethical slide. Ethics twist in the inescapable affective dynamics of biopower. These ethics do not become mine, yet I cannot be unaffected by contact with them. This being affected resonates, much like the tendency that Tomkins describes of one witnessing affective displays in another to feel the same affect in response.33 This resonance elicits sympathy, or what Gibbs describes as “corporeal mimesis,” the “direct body-to-body transmission of both affects and the attitudes and ideas for which affect may, under certain conditions, be a carrier.”34 If torture is contagious, if its affects can leap like fire from one body to the next, then might such leaps not cross from tortured and torturing bodies to this writing body? The contagious affect of Guantánamo, Bagram, the “black sites,”—working through guards and prisoners, across cages and concertina wire—works this becoming-torturer. And as it does so it catches hold of me, sparks to flame. How is it that this man’s hand can pour water on the cloth-covered face of another? Could mine, could this writing hand? This is not a contagion in which emotions or affects become properties that are simply passed around. Rather, it is the living affective connections that form and intensify as I write. It is the way in which twisting ethical practice takes hold, not through some intellectual affinity but via affect itself. The uncertainty and violence of becoming-torturer opens up a site of indeterminacy, of multiple potentials, into which other bodies—this writing body—are drawn by the affective contagion of becoming.35 The possibility of my own becoming-torturer is altered by this act of writing. Some surfacing is always possible, a turning away or untwisting from writing. I am not caged in concertina wire among the relics of Soviet machinery on the prison floor of the Facility at Bagram Air Base, nor enclosed in a military world of pressure, necessity, and dehumanizing dynamics, nor required to extract words from the detained body of another. Yet affect is powerful precisely because it involves a reordering of the body: I am changed by this writing. I encounter unjust ethics in the body of another, in a body that is both affective



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expression and affective force. A body which, in the movement of becomingtorturer within the biopolitical, stays mimetically and affectively tied to mine even as I walk away from the keyboard. What is at risk here is writing trauma. When I say writing trauma, I mean writing about trauma but also the trauma of writing, or, to home in on latter meaning, the traumatic affects that writing can generate and leave within the body. According to Teresa Brennan, negative affects are affixed to the traumatized body: “there is something in trauma that permits such affects a permanent entry.”36 One explanation for this something might be that fragment of past-ness caught continually but erratically between present and future. A continual affecting not unlike the impingement of the future on the presentpast of writing. As Gibbs writes, “when we see an action performed, the same neural networks that would be involved if we were to perform it ourselves are activated.”37 Such neural firings are not mere on/off switches: they operate at different and differently sustained intensities depending on context. When certain negative affects occur at radical intensities, their encounter with the body wreaks lasting violence. Neither time nor distance necessarily lessen trauma. Repetition in the imagination keeps its damaging structure alive within the survivor and in their relations to self, other, and world. Conceiving of trauma as affective means retaining this relationality. How is this so? Synchrony. Sediment. Strata. Affect—clinging to skin, sliding between bodies, adhering to surfaces, firing neurons, shifting particles—cannot always be readily discarded. Far from it. When the writing body moves affectively, when it is synchronous to the ebb and flow of text, the thrust and recoil of language, it cannot but accumulate more affect than it can release. Affect builds in layers and secretions. It sediments within bodies, solidifying strata, fixing constraint, limiting potential. This sedimentation is a kind of hardening, a forming of shape out of the muck of the Deleuzian encounter of bodies. It generates bodily surfaces—that text, this writer—even as the body responds involuntarily, caught up in the sensation of affect. Abstraction is felt specifically. When I write intensely I am affected intensely. We all know this. That lifting rush in the flow of words, that shortness of breath, that tensing of shoulders. To write trauma is to take up negative affect—shame and its sisters, to borrow Tomkins’s poetic phrase—and in doing so, to be affected. To repeat Probyn’s words, “affects can seem to get into our bodies, altering our understanding of our selves and our relation to the past.”38

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In the act of writing trauma, my body—its relations of speed and rest, its connection to the world, its very substance—is changed. I am affected not only in an abstracted way but by specific affects. By pride, love, disgust, fear, contempt, shame, and even pain. Writing of violence, creating tortured and torturing bodies, I cannot but be affected. This mimetic response does not involve representation, but something more like a rendering, or a relation of sudden and lived similarity. Synchronous bodily response renders the writing body into text, text into writing body. Intensities burst across neurons and fingers and keyboards, surge and slow, grip and release. This is a transitory experience, yes, but in its very rush to depart, affect leaves something behind. Pieces of itself that sediment, that shift the relations of motion and rest that constitute my body. Over time these layerings of sediment become strata, change this writing body. Writing trauma, affects arrive with startling intensity and yet never quite depart, a lingering of text within self that is inescapable and yet not without cost. I write fragmentary instances of torture, I write its living presence within the characters of my text, and my shoulders tighten, back muscles harden into inert lumps, and my face twists into something rigid and ugly—I am glad I cannot see myself. Unwinding from this writing takes time. It is hard to shake, it digs in, takes over and won’t readily relinquish its hold. There is no sudden shock, no brutally traumatic event. To write trauma is to become synchronous to its dynamics. Traumatic affect disturbs particles, only to sediment. Force-relations accrete. Strata accumulate, layer upon layer. Writing bodies are not divorced from movement, sound, or rhythm. “Writers don’t deliver messages,” suggests Gibbs, “they make gestures.”39 In gesture resides that element of language that is beyond words. Agamben notes that “what is at issue in gesture is not so much prelinguistic content as, so to speak, the other side of language, the muteness inherent in humankind’s very capacity for language, its speechless dwelling in language.”40 While to see torture is to be imbricated in the image, to be enfolded into its forcefulness, writing is subtly different. To encounter gesture in writing is to confront that point at which written word bleeds into writing body—and to enact that moment in which literary testimony falls short of the event itself yet none the less bears witness. Writing trauma does not occur in an instant. Its affective intensities are drawn out, modulated, and varied across durations. But perhaps this very drawing out, with its synchronous repetitions and entrained bodily responses, is precisely what sediments and stratifies affect. Time matters, both its passing and



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its folding. Gestures are never out of time, but always connecting past to future. Trauma in its psychoanalytic conception does something similar: it makes past and future collide without a present. Thus, the traumatic deferral of the present recalls the affective encounter of bodies in any act of writing, the recursivity that feeds at once forward and back, folding time. It is as if these conceptions of trauma and writing hurtle toward one another, eager to coalesce. Perhaps, then, writing trauma is not so much an aberration but the violent intensity possible in any act of writing. Perhaps writing is never without cost, its productive potential always containing the capacity to change the body that writes in new and dangerous ways. Perhaps to write of torture, to be most open to those traumatic affects which animate the machinic assemblage constituted by writing body and body of text within the ambit of sovereign power, is simply to give affect its most forceful rein, to radically alter the very particles and capacities of which we are composed.

Postscript: Writing torture’s remnants It would be a mistake to search the winding path navigated here for a moral code, or for absolute assurance that the writing of torture in fiction is an ethical act. Despite a thread of ethics running through this chapter, I have resisted offering any specific definition of the term. Given this, it seems facile to simply say that writing torture in fiction well is necessary to do it justice ethically, or that staying as close as possible to what can be gleaned from factual testimony and from historical records is a necessary foundation for an ethical writing practice. Literature is not the law: it is not a hunt for the Truth, but rather a searching for the capacity to speak truths. Foucault describes ethics as the “conscious practice of freedom” and the “considered form that freedom takes.”41 This chapter, with its twisting movement through testimony, trauma, and torture, has been an attempt to free writer, text, and the practice of writing from the constraints imposed by the weight and force of torture without dispensing with the moral imperative of the real suffering torture inflicts. In his unflinching, self-searching book Evil Men, Dawes articulates this problem succinctly: “We are morally obligated to represent trauma, but we are also morally obligated not to.”42 Dawes wrestles with ethical paradoxes in telling the stories of perpetrators of atrocity, the irresolvable questions about the capacity to speak and the challenge of an ethics of doing so. To approach torture in language or in image is always to

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engage in an act with ethical implications, since torture always enacts on the tortured body the possibility of the failure of ethics—or of ethics twisted by the apparent necessities of threat, of security, of power. Seeing torture can twist ethics in unexpected ways—witness the interviews of the Abu Ghraib torturers in Standard Operating Procedure or the strange lack of affective aftermath to torture in Zero Dark Thirty—but it can also call forth an ethical aesthetic that works against the biopolitical state and the traumatic remnants of torture, as in The Battle of Algiers or Incendies. Perhaps at issue, then, is not the right to write, but the fictive gesture of testifying to the drive of biopower to subjectify and dominate bodies, and the experience of those bodies. Not of whether the torturer should speak, but of the affective binding of tortured and torturer in the process of becoming-torturer. Nor, finally, of whether an unjust moral code might be convincing, but of the way in which my body, in the practice of writing torture, cannot escape affective contagion. Working from Levinas’s notion that the face of the other makes an ethical claim upon us, one that not only demands an ethical response but actually constitutes the self, Dawes arrives at the generative capacity of paradox: The encounter with the literary other is ethical knowledge because it helps us see ourselves as the other, to see how we, too, come into being through mutual vulnerability and constraint, to feel rather than simply know the debts we owe to one another. It is ethical knowledge because of what it starts, because it surprises and often confounds us, unsettles the certainties that we cling to and that limit us, opens us to difference and, ultimately, to the demands of what remains beyond us.43

Fiction that responds to suffering often takes as its task the restoration of dignity, but I want to suggest that this alone is not enough. If there is an ethics to the writing of torture, it must surely be expressed in a practice in which the dynamic of torture itself is written against. A practice in which voices are silenced by power yet somehow freed to speak. Writing this silencing presents certain dilemmas. Trauma is both the event and its aftermath. It is precisely the incapacity to know or comprehend the event in its violent occurrence that instantiates trauma. Exactly this shock—sudden violence, physical or otherwise—begins the traumatic fracturing. As with any particular trauma, the shock of torture has its own specific shape and dynamics, and thus so too its recurrence is not quite that of other traumas. In part, this has to do with its deliberate targeting of language. One task of torture is to



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transform the destruction of language into a symbol of the torturing regime’s virility. More than a symbol, however, the tortured body enacts the potential of all bodies to be utterly and violently subject to power. This translation of the body’s pain into biopower is at the un-experienced center of the act of torture. How, then, to write torture’s rupturing of experience ? How to reveal in narrative a shock to narrative? And how to perform that rupturing in the specific context of the war on terror? If the tortures of the war on terror target the body’s very relations in and to the world, this radical assault on those relations should be performed in writing the infliction and instantiation of power that occurs on and through the tortured body. According to Agamben, “the remnants of Auschwitz—the witnesses—are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them.”44 He is not writing of trauma or affect, but he might have been. This idea that what bears witness to catastrophe is not any one body or any multiplicity of bodies, but the shared relation between them is a powerful one. What remains between are fragments of experience, like broken logs tumbling in a fast-flowing river, breaking the surface to rear dangerously upwards, or striking unseen from below—remnants as affective accretions and stratifications of encounter, those sticking and sliding remainders shorn, shattered, or splintered from within the violent experience. Not dead remains but something living, capable of metastasizing or perhaps of moving through the body like a shard of glass. How might such remnants be written? How might writing speak beyond its words and bring forth something of the unrepresentable catastrophe? If the writing body, inescapably affected, brings its gestural capacity into the writing of fiction? What path might gestures of testimony trace?

5 Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers … History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments. Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces … so the speech of the witness bears witness to a time in which human beings did not yet speak; and so the testimony of the witness attests to a time in which they were not yet human. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz1 Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (1996) is not at all about torture, or even the war on terror. But it is a complex and poetic novel that responds to perhaps the most difficult (and certainly the most discussed) dilemma of literary testimony: how to bring the catastrophe of the Holocaust into language. Here the essential problem is that the Holocaust can never be fully witnessed, since no one returned from inside the crematoria to tell of the moment of their death. While this might be thought of as the limit point of witnessing—witnessing from the site of an absolute dehumanization that is also death—it is also illustrative of all witnessing. Even the eyewitness (whether victim, perpetrator, or bystander) must express their experience in some fashion and that act of expression always involves some rendering of the event that is not, and necessarily cannot be, the event itself. Bearing witness to torture, particularly in literature, confronts this problem in potent form: if the pain of torture is world-destroying and languageerasing, how can it enter into language except radically incompletely? In the previous chapter, I touched on the problem of how exactly testimony might speak beyond words and the risk of this in turn aestheticizing testimony. Here I want to show how Fugitive Pieces seeks to bear witness through aesthetics. Its poetics of witnessing is not a means of eliding catastrophe. Rather, it evokes the

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very intensity that brings catastrophic trauma into being affectively, through and beyond words. In fictive form it theorizes a poetics of trauma founded in the doubling of time: every moment is two moments. Anne Michaels’s achievement is not so much the beautiful, sparse, and haunting lyricism of her text, but rather its gestures of deferral, the quiet force of its testimonial fragments, and her complex layering of relations between subjectivity and acts of writing. Her response to the impossible task of writing the Holocaust is to find in the interplay of structure and language an affectivity that speaks beyond the limit of words. This is not to say that the novel’s meaning resides in some esoteric, abstract space outside the texts, but rather that its expression of trauma depends upon the felt force of language, its capacity for bodily intensity. To show how this is the case, I avoid the kind of poststructuralcum-psychoanalytic strategies employed in much influential trauma theory, but rather seek both to engage and evoke the text’s affectivity in the very practice of critical reading. Situated in the midst of paradox, alive with the tensions between metaphor and reality, poetry and disaster, traumatic subject and subject of trauma, past and present, Michaels’s novel does more than articulate the indistinct and undecidable. It makes them productive forces for testimony and reveals something of the depth of trauma, even as it enacts the impossibility of ever representing its totality. Fugitive Pieces attempts to bear witness to catastrophe in the very gesture of its concealment. A gesture that occurs only in the affective charge of the act of reading; an affectivity made possible by the novel’s often radically undecidable language and structure, its openness to possible meanings. Perhaps, too, this openness is why the work has occasioned such broad interpretation and inspiration. Critics and thinkers have used the novel as a point of departure for art criticism, to reconceive notions of national security, to reimagine adoption, and even to propose a reflexive and relational understanding of how social science researchers construct knowledge.2 In more direct relation to its writing of the Shoah and the survivor experience, a number of thoughtful examinations have been written on the novel’s use of elegy and the pastoral, its interrogation of masculinity and Shoah representation, its embodiment of “postmemory,” its use of place, and its dialogic relation to trauma theory.3 The novel is not without its critics, however, and the charge by Meira Cook that it aestheticizes the Holocaust is the most incisive of these. In light of Agamben’s claim that Felman and Laub are guilty of the same act, Cook’s critique deserves close examination. Much productive insight can be



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obtained reading against the grain of her and other critiques to reveal aspects of the novel that might otherwise remain obscured.4 Yet I am as much, if not more, interested in reading first and foremost the novel itself, beginning with the opening page.

Echoes across time and space First there is the ambiguous dedication: “For J.” The short prologue notes the “countless manuscripts” of World War II that were “deliberately hidden—buried in back gardens, tucked into walls and under floors—by those who did not live to retrieve them.” Still others were “concealed in memory, neither written nor spoken.” Only then does the reader learn that the poet Jakob Beer is dead, struck by a car in Athens, and that “Shortly before his death, Beer had begun to write his memoirs” (1).5 What follows is a novel in two parts, a complex work of lyric fiction, poetic in both its language and the fragmentary, recursive structure of its narrative. “Time is a blind guide,” begins the narrative proper. “Bog-boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city” (5). The seven-year-old Jakob Beer rises from the mud “like Tollund Man, Grauballe Man” (5). He carries with him an “afterbirth of dirt” (5). He surfaces into the arms of Athos, the Greek geologist, archaeologist, and paleobotanist who will adopt and raise him: “For a moment he thought I was one of Biskupin’s lost souls, or perhaps the boy in the story, who digs a hole so deep he emerges on the other side of the world” (5–6). Then time folds back on itself, Jakob the poet—the older man whose memoir this is—speaks: “Biskupin had been carefully excavated for almost a decade. Archaeologists continued to gently remove Stone and Iron Age relics from soft pockets of peat” (6). Time thrusting back, past his disappearance into mud and then hurtling forward, beyond the moment of his rebirth. “When the soldiers arrived they examined the perfectly preserved clay bowls; they held the glass beads, the bronze and amber bracelets, before smashing them on the floor … Then the soldiers buried Biskupin in the sand” (6). Biskupin is a Polish archaeological site where the Nazis sought to re-read history in their own image and claim as Aryan some of the earliest signs of civilization in Europe.6 They drowned its remains when they failed, but in seeking to destroy it managed only to preserve the fortifications for further study: memory overcame its suppression. As the site of Jakob’s rebirth into the arms of the archaeologist

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Athos, it enacts the theme of history and its meaning, tied into metaphors of burial and birth, of drowning and resuscitation. Again, time folds. “My sister had long outgrown the hiding place” but “I was still small enough to vanish behind the wallpaper in the cupboard” (6). Again, the poet-memoirist’s temporal distance asserts itself. “Since those minutes inside the wall, I’ve imagined that the dead lose every sense except hearing” (6). Then the moment returns, but in a time before the beginning of the novel. “The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under the shouts. Noises never heard before, torn from my father’s mouth. Then silence” (7). Memory can only be recovered in fragments, splinters of experience that stand in for and protect against the whole. So his mother’s death: “My mother had been sewing a button on my shirt. She kept her buttons in a chipped saucer. I heard the rim of the saucer in circles on the floor. I heard the spray of buttons, little white teeth” (7). Outside of his hiding place are the bodies of his mother and father, made alien by violence: his “mother’s face was not her own” and his father “two shapes in the flesh-heap, his hands” (7). Jakob runs into the forest, slips into a river, buries himself in the soft dirt, face hidden with leaves. “Then I felt the worst shame of my life: I was pierced with hunger. And suddenly I realized, my throat aching without sound—Bella” (9). His sister, too big for the hiding place, is gone—he can find no glimpse of her body. “I couldn’t remember hearing Bella at all. Filled with her silence, I had no choice but to imagine her face” (10). He spends days walking, nights buried in dirt. And then it strikes him: “I know, suddenly, my sister is dead. At this precise moment, Bella becomes flooded ground. A body of water pulling under the moon” (12). The next moment of narration is his rush into Athos’s arms: “I screamed into the silence the only phrase I knew in more than one language, I screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping my fists into my own chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew” (12–13). Jakob’s words radically assert historical violence as both linguistic and bodily: language and affect coalesced. When Athos can at last speak in response, his words of comfort trail off into ellipsis as if struck dumb yet desiring of language. Contained in these opening pages are the first notes of everything that the novel will seek to achieve, notes struck once but already resonating, shifting tone, changing depth and intensity. Water and dirt, surfacing and drowning—motifs that will recur, shifted and changed, throughout the text. Loss and grief, the long shock in which Jakob precisely does not know that his sister is gone—the latency of the traumatic event, its knowing and not knowing. Tensions between presence and absence, between destruction and creation, between digging



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into the ground and rising from it. Here, too, are themes that shape not only the novel but this chapter’s delving into it: time and space, speech and silence, archaeology and geology, history and memory. Perhaps most intriguing is the fragmentary structure, the way it repeats, curls back on itself, folds time both in the content, form, and tense of narration. Its willingness to reside exactly in the moment—“The burst door”—even as the poet-memoirist asserts his distance, his knowingness. Michaels’s lyricism is almost overwhelming, shockingly so with its rendering of horrific experience. But this is lyricism cut through with brutality: “flesh-heap,” “dirty Jew,” “my sister is dead.” What follows in the novel is a kind of rising, pulsating series of echoes, variations on music begun in these first pages. While the uncertainties of meaning evident here suggest that Fugitive Pieces lends itself to the kind of deconstructive reading proposed by Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading, I want to take up the threads of affect and literary testimony that my book has already woven together in different ways. For de Man, there is no meaningful relation between the inside and outside of the text—the very search for such a link is pointless. Rather, “any narrative is primarily the allegory of its own reading,” by which he means that every text contains the terms of the multiple interpretations inherent to it, such that the text “will always lead to the confrontation of incompatible meanings between which it is necessary but impossible to decide in terms of truth and error.”7 In such a reading, nothing is added to the text, it is read only against itself and against other texts to which reference might be found. So too in the work of J. Hillis Miller, whose “ethics of reading” seeks to give ethicality to deconstruction: while a text’s meaning is self-contained, its implications bear some relation to action in the world.8 In both approaches, however, what the text does to the reader—its capacity to move or affect—is rendered inapplicable. Literary theories of trauma have drawn extensively on these post-structural strategies, blending them with Freudian psychoanalysis to explore how texts enact traumatic experience. This has produced rigorously textual analysis, often breathtaking in the virtuosity of its tracing of trauma’s gaps, silences, and absences. Yet it tends to regard these as textual manifestations of trauma’s rupturing—I want to ask what these absences do. Rather than discard the undecidability and multiplicity of meanings recognized by de Man or the ethicality of Miller, I want to use Michaels’s novel to explore the outward, extra-textual manifestation of the tensions between them in the act of reading: from self-referentiality to affectivity. While the extent to which another is affected is unknowable (yet another unknowability permeating

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any attempt to write about literary testimony), the occurrence of affect is the stuff of all encounters—including that between reader and text. From being affected in the act of writing, to affected in the act of reading. In short, reading for affect is about reading for what a text does to bodies, not just what it is on the page. Fugitive Pieces is charged with a particular intensity of affect: an intensity bound up with its undecidabilities of meaning and constitutive of its poetics of trauma. If “The Drowned City,” the novel’s first chapter, sets down the first sedimentary layers of trauma, then these are immediately compacted and overlaid in the next, “The Stone-Carriers.” On the Greek island of Zakynthos, Athos hides Jakob through the Italian and German occupations, teaching him English and Greek even as slow starvation grips them. Athos’s lessons on geology, poetry, paleontology, and archaeology slide frequently into ellipsis, gesturing towards the irrecoverable gap between the world and language, or the incapacity of any theory to ever fully grasp the real. Jakob learns in precise detail those specificities Athos teaches, but such exactness is lacking in his own memories. “I tried to remember ordinary details, the sheet music beside Bella’s bed, her dresses … But in nightmares the real picture wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to look, everything melting. Or I remembered the name of a classmate but not his face. A piece of clothing but not its color” (25). And yet while events might be blurred and without meaning, the cost for Jakob is not. “When I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds” (25). Here the tension between traumatic memory—unbidden and affective—and recollected memory—the willed reach into the past—emerges. Yet in Michaels’s novel these are not binaries in tension, but rather differing dynamics between what Caruth calls “the truth of an event, and the truth of its incomprehensibility.”9 Intervening in this paradox, the novel shows that within the larger structure of traumatic experience and its aftermath, what is elided and recalled, what is outside and within narrative, can obtain a certain degree of mutability: even the traumatic past is not unrelentingly the same. This tension occurs again and again in the novel, most frequently in the relation of memory and history, of the personal and the cultural. In this instance, Jakob’s elusive yet painful specificity of memory has its surprising inverse: “We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident—or causes one. But we



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can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see” (22). Or perhaps the grand sweep of history is readily perceived, while memories of the exact moments that comprise it are always slipping from grasp. What also emerges here is the complexity of the human experience of time. Embodied time is strangely elusive, mutable and fragile, as if it is itself traumatized, while geological time is graspable. “To go back a year or two was impossible, absurd. To go back millennia—ah! that was … nothing” (30). Scientific knowledge is conceivable, but to comprehend one’s own body in time defies his capacities. Desperate to make sense of the present, Jakob describes it as “like a landscape … only a small part of a mysterious narrative. A narrative of catastrophe and slow accumulation” (48). He urgently seeks some way of unifying this radical disjuncture between immense breadth and his own lived time: “Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms” (54). But threaded into Jakob’s reflections on time is also absence. “The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing” (17). There is, here, a crucial tension: a shadow past shaped by what has not occurred, yet present in its very absence, its presence in the body that yearns. And hidden, too, among all this time is its relation to beauty, which could be read as an imperative of the novel, an instruction to the reader: “Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful” (44). An impossible injunction, perhaps, but one that articulates the ethical imperative behind the doubling movements of the text, its echoes and disjunctions. Its finding a way between the occurrence of events and the language that might address or express them. Where the most powerful echoes resonate, however, is in the relation between Jakob’s narrative and the shorter, second part of the novel. A child of survivors, Ben, narrates a reworking of the story of the child survivor, Jakob. Even the chapter titles repeat, producing a structural resonance between the novel’s parts.10 This shift—the insertion of the “of ” between child and survivor— is characteristic of the echoing that occurs in the novel. These echoes are not parallels. To run parallel is to follow the same trajectory at a specific remove. What Fugitive Pieces does is far less stable: fragments of sediment fall and settle only to be swept up by water, broken into further fragments, compressed into new forms, lost to return hardly recognizable, or bob to the surface exactly as

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they always were. For Ben, “The Drowned City” is not Biskupin but Toronto— the city to which Jakob and Athos emigrate. What has been drowned is not ancient ruins but Ben’s childhood home on the Humber River. “If you turn around to look at the muddy escarpment, or simply look down at your feet, you’ll begin to notice the Humber’s distinctive sediment, laid down in October 1954” (202) when the river burst its banks and swept away his family home. Mimicking Athos’s archaeological instincts, as well as prefiguring his later task of uncovering Jakob’s journals, Ben catalogs objects found in the bank where houses once stood. “Hidden beneath the grass, all around you, the wide, silent park is studded with cutlery” (202). These lost emblems of domesticity are allegories of familial existence torn apart by the rise of the Nazis, the passage of his parents through the camps, the impossibility of normality in the family home. So too the food Ben’s father never wastes and the identity documents his mother forever carries in her purse. The melancholic disposition of Ben’s family, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s words, “embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them” (1998: 157). Yet this redemption always falls short. “There was no energy of narrative in my family,” says Ben, “not even the fervor of an elegy” (204). Only after his parents’ death does he learn that he lost two older siblings in the camps. This unnamed loss is obscured by his parents’ fixation with the potential loss of worldly possessions—a displacement of loss, a melancholic allegory that Ben can only read too late. Part elegy to the dead poet, part attempt to make sense of the absences present in his own history, Ben’s narrative resonates with Jakob’s: Jakob is buried as a child, Ben’s childhood home is buried; parents killed by Nazis, parents whose story is truncated by the camps; a sibling disappeared and never found, siblings not known to have lived; a wife who doesn’t understand, one who understands too much; writing poetry, writing weather. These are not quite repetitions but rather shifted doublings, bodies and practices changing in time and context. Thus, Jakob’s story is not Ben’s, nor the reverse. Ben meets Jakob at a party and is then tasked, after his death, with traveling to the poet’s home on the Greek island of Idrha to find his journals, but their relation to one another is far more than this. It is not confined to the repetition of motifs and metaphors or life events. Nor is it only that the structures of their trauma share certain qualities. In the echoes across space and time that occur between the two narratives, what matters is not simply the poles between which meaning bounces—the poles between which electricity sparks—but the poles and the in-between. This both-and-between, constituted not by one surface or another, nor by the echo



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alone, but by the whole happening, is where Michaels’s text evokes that which can only become real in an act of reading in which the text both intensifies and escapes its textuality. Fugitive Pieces does its work in the affective resonance between bodies, worlds, and texts, and in the passage and variation of intensities between bodies; this is how it creates worlds. But its intensification of this both-and-between, of text and body and the production of meaning that is at once linguistic and affective, is how it brings trauma and the aesthetic into productive literary relation. To be affected in the act of reading is to encounter the gestural capacity of literature, an intensity that escapes the page to change the state of the reading body.

Archaeologies of trauma If Fugitive Pieces is to offer insight into a practice of writing that might suggest an approach to writing torture, then it is necessary to examine how it depicts trauma and its excavation. Williams and Polatinsky note that the novel “offers an apt illustrative instance of the complexities entailed in seeking to imagine the traumatic” and that the “structure of the text is, moreover, recursive and permeated by ghostly manifestations, playing out Cathy Caruth’s model of traumatic repetition.”11 But the novel has also been criticized for not giving sufficient weight to the horror of the Shoah, for aestheticizing its brutality. Meira Cook argues that Michaels’s intention is “to metaphorize history, memory, and narrative precisely in order to challenge the literal, to articulate catastrophe in language that is poetic and densely allusive.” The problem, however, is that her “lush, poetic discourse jars uneasily with the horrors she is narrating” even as “it provides a way of thinking about metaphor and metonymy as figurative devices that alternatively reveal and conceal the materiality of the event.” Cook is most troubled by the description of the Jews of Zakynthos who hide their valuables and slip into the hills to hide. “Far from remaining caught in an Ovidian state of metamorphosis,” Cook writes, “the Jews of Zakynthos were dispersed, systematically hunted, and summarily slaughtered, and in metaphorizing their fate, Michaels unwittingly conceals the decidedly unpoetic nature of genocide.”12 Historically, Cook appears to be simply wrong: the Jews of Zakynthos were not slaughtered but saved thanks to both the intervention of the Archbishop Chrysostomos and their own quick action.13 But this error of facticity does not invalidate Cook’s larger point, that when “brutality, love-making, and the

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pragmatism of daily living are all described in Michaels’ habitual mode of high lyricism, a prevailing flatness results.”14 Williams and Polatinsky note, responses such as this “seem to overlook shaping aspects of Michaels’s linguistic creativity, especially the subtly reflective subtext which traces out the contours of her overt narrative.”15 I want to move in a different direction, taking as my starting point Cook’s assertion of “the paradox that, once narrated, the horror or obscenity is no longer either horrifying or obscene: instead it is essentially narratable, representable.”16 What Cook does not recognize is that this paradox depends on textual representation as the only mode of expression. If Fugitive Pieces generates something subtly yet crucially different, which is to say affective intensity, perhaps what is revealed is a failure of representation and the necessity of gesturing beyond the limits of language. Yet the seemingly impossible contradiction of the text is that it achieves this gesture beyond language through language, including the sustained use of metaphorical layers, uncovered in archaeological excavations of time, place, identity, and language.17 Athos digs at Biskupin, Jakob uncovers fragments of his own trauma, Ben excavates Jakob’s past. Such archaeological acts provide the metaphorical-conceptual form through which the text evokes trauma. But archaeology is an inexact science, as Athos’s work on Nazi attempts to rewrite history reveals: thus trauma, too, can only be brought forth uncertainly. Ben thus promises to “excavate gently” Jakob’s home on Idrha, and in his elegiac mode he writes: “I would spend weeks inside your house, an archaeologist examining one square inch at a time” (261). Yet, despite his careful examination, Ben fails to understand the significance, or misconstrues the meaning of the numerous objects he finds.18 A plate of buttons as a memorial to Jakob’s mother, Athos’s pocket watch, Pliny’s Natural History not “obviously mislaid” on the kitchen bench but part of Jakob’s own excavation of memory, when Pliny provided recipes that helped him and Athos survive the war (265)—Ben can give none of these the meaning attached to them by Jakob. Grimwood suggests that such misreading “signals [Ben] as a failed reader, an over-interpreter” and to an extent this may be true.19 But Michaels also reveals the elusiveness of the past, its lost specificities of meaning, the tension between unbidden memory and conscious recollection. Or, as Ben puts it, “The importance not of what’s extant, but of what’s disappeared” (222). The careful reader will recognize these failures of interpretation: in so doing, past meanings come to be recognized precisely in their disappearance, in their refusal to be readily excavated. Each of these objects—like those of Ben’s childhood found buried in the banks of the



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Humber—can be read as allegorical emblems. For Walter Benjamin, “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.” That is, they are the “highly significant fragment” of something lost to time.20 The objects Ben finds stand not only for instances in Jakob’s life, but for lost meaning, unknown significance, for the always fleeting capacity to grasp meaning. Only the reader holds the capacity to know this and be affected by that knowing. Ben is no stranger to archaeology. There is his study of the Humber flood, but, more significantly, his excavation of his parents’ home after their deaths and his discovery, through an old photograph, that he had an older brother and sister who died in the camps. “Most discover absence for themselves; trees are ripped out and sorrow floods the clearing. Then we know what we loved. But I was born into absence” (233). What cuts him is not the loss of his siblings per se but rather the sudden shock of the depth of what he does not know. “How is it possible I never knew, never guessed?” (251). Yet the processes of archaeology fall short—no matter how carefully he works the site of Jakob’s island home, Ben’s systematic approach to knowledge does not uncover his memoirs. Only after Petra, a young American woman with whom he has a short-lived affair, trawls at random through the house while Ben sleeps are the missing texts discovered: “I hadn’t realized the extent of Petra’s rampage. In the space of perhaps an hour, she had pillaged every room” (283). Yet this pillaging is what lets him find the notebooks: “Not in a stack abandoned by Petra, but merely revealed by the space on the shelf beside them” (284). Sediment uncovered not by too much caution but by an excess of wildness. If Ben is the literal archaeologist, then Jakob is the literary. For Jakob, archaeology is an act of creation: writing poetry. His first collection is even titled Groundwork. There is much to be said about Jakob’s writing and its relation to history and trauma, but I want first to draw attention to the layers of writing that an archaeology of Fugitive Pieces might excavate. Almost everyone in the novel works with words. Jakob the poet, Athos the geologist and archaeologist, Ben the writer on weather and biography and war. Jakob’s first wife Alex revels in word games and argument, his second wife Michaela is a voracious reader, his friend Maurice is an academic and museum curator. Ben’s wife Naomi is an editor, obsessed by the small details of things. Of the significant characters, only Ben’s parents are not enamored with words and are, indeed, wary of them. Survivors of the camps, their unwillingness to speak contributes to Ben’s own experience of trauma as a second-generation survivor. Words and acts of writing, however, take many forms, from Alex’s palindromes to Athos’s testament to Nazism’s

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assault on history, his life-consuming magnum opus Bearing False Witness (the title a marker of the risk borne by any literary testimony to catastrophe). More significant is Michaels’s layering of the texts that comprise the narrative. Jakob’s memoir is literally discovered by Ben’s narrative; his poems never figure directly in the first part of the book and are quoted only by Ben in his narration. Even the short prologue must be read as part of this web of textual relations: only in Ben’s narrative does the reader begin to learn that it is he who has found and framed Jakob’s memoir—and that, just perhaps, it is he (and not Michaels) who has given it the enigmatic dedication “For J.” Between this layering of texts, each of which seeks in its incomplete way to engage with the knowing and not knowing of trauma, something happens. The fragmentary narratives, with their aporias and folded time, their recursivity and repetition, resonate between their many layers. In this way, Michaels’s novel gestures toward—but, crucially, does not state—the impossibility of representing trauma in its fullness, not simply within the individual text, but within any network of texts. Fugitive Pieces proposes that the reader can apprehend something of the depth, shape, and substance of terrible trauma in the interplay of incomplete attempts to write it. Not in words themselves, but between and beyond them.

Poetics of witnessing This is how Jakob articulates his theory of witnessing: “To remain with the dead is to abandon them.” So it is that Bella “whispers not for me to join her, but so that, when I’m close enough, she can push me back into the world” (170). To witness, then, is to be beside both the dead and the living. Testimony resides in something like this paradox. To bear witness is to speak in the name of being unable to speak, to speak from the paradoxical doubled position of the subject: at once subjected and sovereign. The subject has agency—the subject to whom the object is subordinate—but the sovereign also subordinates the subject. To be subject, then, is to be both subject over and subject to. Such a witness necessarily and only speaks from within that doubled position. For Agamben, “the subject of testimony is constitutively fractured; it has no other consistency than disjunction and dislocation—and yet it is nevertheless irreducible to them.”21 This irreducibility is at the heart of the paradox of testimony, that it must take place in a zone of indistinction: “Testimony takes place in the non-place



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of articulation.”22 While such statements might at times revel too eagerly in paradox and doubleness, his refusal to fix testimony absolutely produces a space within which the conception of affect I have developed can operate. What is the non-place of articulation if not the both-and-between-ness with which Fugitive Pieces resonates? Articulated precisely by the articulation of something else, given to gesture, not solely to representation. Recall the notion that closed the preceding chapter: the witnesses to catastrophe are what remains between the dead and saved. If brought to bear on Michaels’s novel, what remains between is the affective intensity between echoing fragments of text and the reader. “Precisely because testimony is the relation between a possibility of speech and its taking place,” claims Agamben, “it can exist only through a relation to an impossibility of speech—that is, only as contingency, as a capacity not to be.”23 In this sense, testimony occurs as much in the way speech gestures as in the words it contains. Testimony’s gestures are necessarily contingent: affect is always potential, indeterminate, unfixed. It can fall short, not take hold, fail to be affecting. To bear witness is always to enact the possibility of being unable to do so; witnessing is always contingent. This centrality of contingency to testimony recalls its importance in the construction of pain in the Torture Memos. But for now, this tension between speaking and not, this relationality of testimony, demands some further consideration of what, precisely, occurs at the level of subjectivity and language. Even as a young boy, Jakob “knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate” (79). Nowhere is this clearer than in his first spoken words: “dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew” (13). Here, Gubar argues, “language has become one of the casualties of the disaster, for Jakob names himself in a libel circulated to exterminate him; his self-definition proves that the sole terms at his disposal have been poisoned by the lethal culture that classified and thereby attempted to eradicate him.”24 This proto-utterance thus strips his status of ambiguity: his capacity to speak is reduced solely to this forceful assertion and is thus simultaneously an incapacity to speak beyond sheer witnessing of his status from within the trauma of his dead parents and lost sister. Language thus resides at the center of trauma, paired with the event of its occurrence by resisting articulation. On his move to Toronto, he instinctively feels that “English could protect me; an alphabet without memory” (101). Its otherness from his history offers some salvation and, walking the city with Athos, he revels in playful learning. Such play with language proves seductive: he marries Alex, “a swordswallower, a fire-eater. In her mouth English was dangerous and alive, edgy

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and hot” (132). She plays with palindromes, refuses direct descriptions, and argues politics with no relation to the real. It is as if Jakob has taken a wrong turn into language: Bella haunts him even more, the radical absence at the heart of his experience of the world—her gone-ness—opens below the playfully selfreferential textuality of the palindrome. Yet this tension between the play of language and lived absence— “Bella, who is nowhere to be found, is looking for me” (126)—confronts Jakob with the uncertainty of knowing: “I was focused on that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinity—perpetrator, victim, witness” (140). This historical split second is, for Jakob, precisely that incommensurable gap described by Felman and Laub. Imagining the dead bodies at Birkenau, he wants to know, “were they silent or did they speak? Were their eyes open or closed?” (140). He cannot know, of course. Yet the exact relations between this “haunting trinity” do not, for Jakob, remain unknowable so much as undecidable. Yet this is a productive undecidability, in keeping with the paradox of testimony occurring in the non-place of articulation. Michaels asks how the aesthetic might bear witness to what cannot be articulated—how witnessing might itself be a form of undecidable poetics founded in between-ness. Undecidability is not so much a theme of the novel as constitutive of its language and structure. There is the dedication that begins the novel: “For J.” For which J? Jakob? Someone in Michaels’s life? Or could it be “like the ‘J’ stamped on a passport” which holds “the power of life or death” (207)? Yet whether this dedication belongs to Ben, the imagined author, or to Michaels herself, or to both is unknowable. Recall Jakob’s incantation from the epigraph to this chapter: “Every moment is two moments.” Or his naming of an imagined child: “If she’s a girl: Bella. If he’s a boy: Bela” (279). This difference of a letter between Bela and Bella—one that is only read, not heard—echoes the potentialities of meaning that proliferate within the text. That “every moment is two moments” comes to constitute the language of the novel itself. “Every day before supper I walked to the edge of the cliff and back again” (159). A seemingly simple sentence from Jakob’s account of writing Groundwork—but look closer. Charged with the indistinction that suffuses the text, does Jakob write literally or metaphorically? Does he walk to a precipice of history? Of trauma? Within himself? Or is this simply a description of his late afternoon strolls? Maybe it is both: two moments. Such indeterminacies constitute the novel’s affective intensity of the knowing and not knowing of trauma; they are the very site and force of its poetics.



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Before turning specifically to what this might mean for witnessing in literary testimony, I want to consider the embodied relation of language to traumatic history. This becomes most explicit during Jakob’s long meditation on history that is at the center of the novel. “History is a poisoned well,” he says, “seeping into the groundwater” (161). This dark vision of history presents a very real threat to the future. “Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected” (161). Yet this does not mean that one should turn a blind eye to the past, or not record catastrophe, since “nothing erases the immoral act” (160). For Jakob, history—and in particular, of course, the Shoah—is inseparable from trauma. Thus it is that his meditation on history is interspersed with remembered words of Bella’s—“If I use my second finger instead, I’ll be ready for the middle voice in the next bar—” (162)—that are always cut off mid-sentence, her absence present even in her speaking. This is what he recognizes as the “bond of memory and history when they share space and time” (161). Faced with the amorality of history on the one hand and the uncertain yet ethical imperative of memory on the other, what Jakob calls for is witnessing: The event is meaningful only if the coordination of time and place is witnessed. Witnessed by those who lived near the incinerators, within the radius of smell. By those who lived outside a camp fence, or stood outside the chamber doors. By those who stepped a few feet to the right on the station platform. By those who were born a generation after (162).

Which brings him to the problem that so many have articulated in relation to the Shoah: who bears witness to the inside of the crematorium? To the living husks of the camps? To utter absence? To the disappeared Bella? And, to return to the question that is the larger theme of this book, how can tortures be witnessed in writing when their occurrence in actual practice strives to eradicate language in the victim? For the poet, of course, witnessing is a question of language, but language itself has also been a site of violence. “Nazi policy was beyond racism,” writes Jakob, “it was anti-matter, for Jews were not considered human” (165). This occurs as an act of language. “Non-Aryans were never to be referred to as humans, but as ‘figuren,’ ‘stücke’—‘dolls,’ ‘wood,’ ‘merchandise,’ ‘rags.’ Humans were not being gassed, only ‘figuren,’ so ethics weren’t being violated” (165). As George Steiner describes in “The Hollow Miracle,” his influential essay on the

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German language, “Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery.”25 Steiner’s concern is the “dead” language left behind by the war: “Something immensely destructive has happened to it. It makes noise. It even communicates, but it creates no sense of communion.”26 But while Steiner considers what has happened to the language and its capacities, Michaels’s—and Jakob’s—texts ask how violence in language can mark irrevocably those bodies upon which it works. While Jakob is able to find some critical distance through his writing, linguistic violence is inseparable from the trauma of Ben’s parents. He describes them as without the protective layers of language, as without “refuge from the blinding potency of things,” objects which “had been retrieved from an impossibility—both the inorganic and the organic— shoes and socks, their own flesh. It was all as one” (205). This astonishment at object-ness seems born of experiencing the Nazis’ desire to make humans inhuman, to turn subjects to objects; subjection to the point of desubjectification. What, for Jakob, stands in defiance of this is the sheer fact of the body: “When they opened the doors, the bodies were always in the same position. Compressed, against one wall, a pyramid of flesh. Still hope. The climb to air, to the last disappearing pocket of breath near the ceiling. The terrifying hope of human cells” (168). For Jakob, then, there is something within the human that cannot be vanquished. “The bare autonomic faith of the body” (168). In “that utmost degradation, in that twisted reef, is the most obscene testament of grace” (168). Far from retreating into lyricism or obscuring horror, Jakob’s poetry— and Michaels’s novel—is a kind of philosophy, chosen “over the brutalism of fact” (168). Bearing witness is demanded by that terrifying hope of human cells; it is a bodily necessity for Jakob and for the absent-yet-present past: “Bella, my brokenness has kept you broken” (169). In a short 2009 reflection on Fugitive Pieces, Michaels notes that all writers of the Shoah have “grappled, futilely, with this knot: the impossibility of its telling;” that despite immense research and thought, the event “will, in a fundamental way, never yield its incomprehensibility: the magnitude, quality, and profundity of its horror.” Her novel, then, is a response to this conundrum: a poetics of trauma that takes as its central subject the impossibility of a telling that nevertheless must be told. Indeed, the novel’s lyricism “is not a denial of the horrors of the Shoah so much as a lament or elegy with abiding hollowness at its core, the starkly outlined space of horror and loss.”27 Or, as Susan Gubar suggests, if “the fugitive pieces of a subjectivity based on empathic identification can only be fleetingly experienced … then the sounds of intimate voices that stop and start



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in fragmentary bits and parts may be best suited for such an undertaking.”28 If, as I have contended, Fugitive Pieces is charged with affect by echoes between moments, resonances of metaphor and event, then its re-imagining of what constitutes the act of witnessing is contained precisely in the between-ness with which the text is charged. It is not simply that fragmentation expresses the traumatic, but that the novel proposes a poetics of trauma that gives shape to incomprehensibility. Tension between lyric language and traumatic event generates an intensity of experience for the reader. Jakob’s poetry, his memoir, and Ben’s resonant response to both, are witness not only to terrible trauma—Bella gone, Jakob’s parents dead, the survivor aftermath with which Ben lives—but to its impossibility of ever being told. Crucially, however, the novel’s continual gesturing beyond language, beyond fixity, beyond the page, means that it is always already revealing the impossible depths below traumatic surfaces. Layers of past and present, of memory and history, and the resonance between them, the novel’s archaeologies, fold time and place together to gesture at that which can never be represented. Fugitive Pieces is a poetics of witnessing the Shoah precisely because it does not attempt to unknot the impossibility of such a telling, but rather reveals some small piece of the vectors and contours of its catastrophic trauma. In so doing, the novel shows that the intense relation of memory and recollection (or history), their co-implication, need not be resolved. The text’s gestures are such that the reader is affected by incomprehensibility. In an essay published while she was working on the novel, Michaels writes that “the senses bypass language: the ambush of a scent or weather, but language also jump starts the senses—sound or image sends us spiraling into memory or association.”29 Her words are revealing. Fugitive Pieces only comes into being as witness in the act of reading—it depends on the affective response in the reader. This is why Michaels’s subject so intensely embodies Agamben’s, which he describes as “a field of forces always already traversed by the incandescent and historically determined currents of potentiality and impotentiality, of being able not to be and not being able not to be.”30 Her achievement is a poetics of trauma that embraces that paradox of being and not, knowing and not, and finds in it not a non-place from which nothing but a wordless cry escapes, but rather an aesthetics charged with political potential. In Fugitive Pieces, incomprehensibility emerges—not as comprehensible, but as absence that is, in its force, present. “The closest we come to knowing the

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location of what’s unknown is when it melts through the map like a watermark,” writes Jakob, “a stain transparent as a drop of rain. On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory” (137). And perhaps, too, the water stain tells us something real: rain fell, the map was marked. Every moment is two moments. Among the many meanings that these words hold within Fugitive Pieces, perhaps the most profound is this: every moment is its occurrence and the possibility of its own telling—even if that telling is writing that gestures beyond the very possibilities of language. Torture seeks to erase this capacity to tell; it bears down on language itself and in doing so seeks to unmake the world. In this sense, torture desires to be pure occurrence—a happening that can never enter fully into language. As Chapter 3, “Seeing Torture,” showed, the tendency toward intensive affectivity in cinema enables torture to be represented without challenging or undoing this problem of language. Indeed, the failure of language is precisely that which the cinematic image shows most powerfully. Literature, of course, can fall silent and this can be a crucial tool in its expression of trauma. But writing can do more than break off—it can make that falling short do work outside the linguistic, impressing itself upon the body to produce meaning that is at once forceful, indeterminate, and loaded with meaning. Bearing witness to violent trauma not solely through representation, but through a both-andbetween-ness that only comes into being in the affective field between reader and text. If, as I have contended throughout this book, the tortures of the war on terror are radically concerned with relation and between-ness, then writing their occurrence in fiction may depend on something like the poetics of witnessing in Fugitive Pieces.

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Writing Torturous Affect

I. To bring torture into contact with language is to encounter the problem of pain: its resistance to direct expression, its tendency to enter language through likeness and metaphor, its refusal to submit to writerly desires. “It would be totally senseless to try and describe here the pain that was inflicted on me,” writes the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry of his torture by the Nazis. “Was it ‘like a red-hot iron in my shoulders,’ and was another ‘like a dull wooden stake that had been driven into the back of my head’? One comparison would only stand for the other, and in the end we would be hoaxed by turn on the hopeless merry-go-round of figurative speech. The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say.”1 Here Améry points to a double injury: representation fails, even as his pain is shown to be something he alone can experience. Or as he puts it, such feelings of pain “mark the limit of the capacity of language to communicate.”2 What Améry seems to arrive at is a kind of futility: the pain was what it was, and what it was is indescribable. This is not, of course, futility of spirit or lack of courage, but a futility inherent in the relation between language and pain. Figural language cannot do justice to his experience of torture; there remains an irreducible gap between what his body knows and what words can express. In considering the Torture Memos, I showed how this gap could be exploited to erase the pain of torture from law; here, Améry encounters this same gap in his very capacity to speak his own experience. He finds himself at the vanishing point of representation, where the signs of language cannot do justice to that for which they stand. In Elaine Scarry’s seminal account, this incommunicability or unsharability of the pain of torture is central to its catastrophic harmfulness. “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and

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cries a human being makes before language is learned.”3 This is why pain is such a radical demarcation of self and other. To lose language is to lose the common ground of humanity, at least within the experience of pain and in its narration after its occurrence. This problem of narration intensifies the challenge of witnessing to possess veracity. “To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.”4 It is what it is, at once known and unknowable. Pain is experienced with incredible bodily intensity, and yet that very intensity renders it incommunicable. More, it can undo the experiencing body’s capacity to comprehend his or her surroundings. Pain can make and unmake the world. Not only does Améry’s pain refuse description, his torture performs that very destruction of language to which he succumbs. Torture proves how absolutely real and singular his pain is. It makes him witness to the inexpressibility of his own pain. The tortured prisoner not only cannot speak, the very act of torture performs this eradication of speech; it proves to the prisoner that his or her own voice cannot ever master the torturer. Torture thus not only sharpens the distinction between self and other, it violently reasserts the unbridgeable difference between subject and object. In rendering the subject object, torture reinstates the absolute nature of each position: one can only be subject or object, signifier or signified. Torture thus targets the very capacity to be a testimonial subject: it renders the body utterly subject, but in doing so seeks to make it an object. To try to speak or write the pain of torture is thus to rage against a seemingly incommensurable gap between language and experience. Or at least this is the place at which Scarry’s analysis arrives. Her account is not without its problems. Rationality occupies a privileged position over the corporeal sensations of the body; torture causes terrible distress because, in Elizabeth Anker’s critique, “it limits the victim’s experiential universe to the body alone—imprisoning perception within the senses, cutting off the outside world, short-circuiting the foremost indicia of the human (namely, speech and reason), and ultimately shattering subjectivity.”5 Such an account of the body is limiting, not only because, as Anker contends, it upholds a narrowly liberal humanist conception of subjectivity that elides sensation and embodied experience. It is limiting because it does not allow any messiness to the body, any fluidity in being-in-the-world—it does not allow for the complex ways in which bodies might be in flux, affected and affecting one another and the world around. By foreclosing so much of what a body might be, the possibilities of expression are commensurately constrained.



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Perhaps the problem for torture and language is not simply that representation reaches its limits, but that the limitations of the figural and direct as modes of expression are exposed. Perhaps the problem resides in ontology, in distinguishing so resolutely between self and other, subject and object. Perhaps thinking both-and-between-ness instead of separateness will reveal something both of this incommensurability and of the capacity for art in general, and fiction in particular, to both say something other than “it was what it was” and avoid the hopeless figurative comparisons that so concerned Améry. At the end of Chapter 3, when this book pivoted from understanding, reading, and seeing tortured bodies to the practice of writing them, I suggested that the affective capacity of cinema, and in particular the aesthetic concern of certain films with faciality, might open avenues into writing. From there, I explored the complex interplay of trauma, affect, and ethics in the practice of writing through three twisting movements. Rupturing narrative can have powerful effects, as I will show later in this chapter, but the shattering of experience demands more than a re-performance of that breaking itself. In the previous chapter, I argued that Fugitive Pieces testifies aesthetically to this traumatic rupture. Yet the problem of torture and its pain remains to be addressed. Doing so requires that the disjuncture between pain and language identified be somehow bridged. This chapter, then, is an act of speculative thinking and a response to the notion that language must fall short before the pain of torture. It is not a denial of Améry’s contention about the limits of language; unquestionably his experience was of exactly that failure of words. Yet new theories of experience offer new capacities to consider the relationship between acts and their representation. I showed how Fugitive Pieces grapples with that moment when literary testimony reaches the apparently unbridgeable gap between victim, perpetrator, and bystanderwitness, and how it gestures beyond the page to bear witness to catastrophic trauma. I will now consider this problem of how fiction might speak beyond its words and from within the inability to speak, and in doing so write the tortures of the war on terror.

II. A body encounters itself, encounters other bodies, encounters the world. Such encounters are events. In the event, rules collapse and distinctions can be overtaken by intensities—by energetic bursts of the actual and virtual. That

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is, events are always in flux, capable of shifting and moving according to the interplay of forces and bodies, from the minute to the immense. For Massumi, the event is a way of thinking existence: Every event is singular. It has an arc that carries it through its phases to a culmination all its own: a dynamic unity no other event can have in just this way. The unity of the occasion is the just-this-way in which the phases of the arced unfolding hold together as belonging to the same event.6

Or, to put this differently, every event creates the new, even when it repeats or destroys. In repetition there is always the prior occurrence(s), and their iterative accumulation makes each repetition new: there is always a different layering of past occurrences. Repeated gestures accumulate rhythm, each one carrying the trace of prior movement. Refrains are like this too, gathering their meaning through the accrual of their utterance. Newness, in this reading, is not so much amoral as outside any order of morality. It simply is, although not is, not being— newness becomes.7 This conception of bodies encountering one another as event requires understanding bodies as I have already proposed: not as fixed and bounded entities, but as both actually existing and always potentially something else. Seeing bodies, in other words, as open to becoming something different— and to being, in part, constituted by that possibility. In short, as virtual as well as actual, since the virtual is always present: it is that which might occur in the moment to come of the body. Because bodies possess or might encounter a multiplicity of potentials, the virtual holds all of these at once— and implicates them in the actual. But this virtuality, this idea that nothing is prefigured in the event, does not mean that what bodies might become is without constraint—as I suggested in Chapter 4, becomings are always shaped by the form, location, and limits of encounters. In short, by their particular qualities and distinction from other events, by the tendencies that shape them. Tendencies are what the future makes of the past, more than the body: affect. “Actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them,” Massumi writes. “Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect.”8 As much as affect is relationality, it is also intensity; never uniform or static, the forcefulness of affect varies. Some bodies have more capacity to affect, others to be affected. Yet affect is not a synonym for communicability: a relation can negate, limit, cut off. A relation of negation is as possible as one of unification, and equally binding. Nor is affect without constraint. Potential



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is always tied to the actual, and this is why context matters. Yet affect is not simply and solely abstraction, vanishing at the point of encounter with the surface of bodies. As I have noted before, affects can manifest physiologically. If affects penetrate bodies and are enfolded by them, then they leave some bodily trace, some means by which particular bodies are marked by the experience of being affected or affecting others. People develop “scripts” for the management of affect—ways of recognizing and responding to particular affective impingements. Trauma, to run ahead of the present discussion for a brief moment, might well be understood as a script of this kind: one that isolates, confines, and radically refuses to make sense of certain violent affects, and in doing so refutes its own existence until it collapses, fleetingly or enduringly, to overwhelm the individual. Bodies entangled in encounter do not experience its event identically. Tortured and torturer affect and are affected differently. Affect’s between-ness and beside-ness, its more-than, is experienced differently by different bodies. “With heart and soul they went about their business,” writes Améry of his torturers, “and the name of it was power, dominion over spirit and flesh, orgy of unchecked self-expansion.”9 Certain bodies expanding, unchecked, to fill the world into which another is thrown. Others contracting. Affect spilling over, potential for the destruction of the world felt—bodily felt—on the skin of the tortured. Think of the tortures of the war on terror—waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, sensory assault. Think of visceral affects taking hold of the body before the brain knows, before cognition names and categorizes. In each instance, the impact of affect is amplified by the restraint of the body’s desired response. What might have been a brief expression is prolonged indefinitely. The only possibility is that affects remain, staying on and in the body. There is no turning away, no shrinking back, no recoil that can return the victim to any kind of affective equilibrium. But here, the tortured body is limited in his or her capacity to respond. Turning away in shame or recoiling in disgust might precisely be what the torture itself denies. To be affected by or affect the world is to be implicated in it. Affect becomes the world itself in the moment and site of its emergence. Bodies in event become more than themselves; move beyond the limits of the skin and the fixities of language.

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III. What happened to the subject and object in this account of the affected and affecting body? They are absent, but not quite gone. Not defined out of existence, but shifted in their ontological status. Subjects emerge from events, from encounters between bodies. Understood in pragmatic terms, the subject is what finds itself (himself, herself, itself) in the middle of the event, experiencing its occurrence. With its openness to both inciting change and being changed by the event, this conception of the pragmatic subject fits neatly with the testimonial subject defined precisely by the doubling nature of subjecthood—that is, being subject over and subject to. Objects take new form too, which is to say that object-ness is neither inherent to any entity nor granted by the subject. Subjects and objects obtain their status operatively, in the unfolding of particular events. Rather than categorical terms, they are better understood as variations of themselves and of one another. This re-situating is both more drastic and subtler than it might appear at first glance. “Thought and thing, subject and object, are not separate entities or substances,” writes Massumi. “They are irreducibly temporal modes of relation to experience itself.”10 That is, subjects and objects interweave one another, and indeed the same entity might well be capable of being one and the other simultaneously. Affect can be understood not only as a conception of relation and intensity but also as constitutive, at least in part, of a radically pragmatic ontology that shifts the locus of being from subject and object to experience itself. Relation and intensity, aesthetic and political, virtual and actual—in each, dichotomy is displaced by differential. Hence the dynamic between certain entities (words and things, being and not, knowing and not) might be better thought of as spectrums of relation rather than unbridgeable divisions. What emerges between such entities is not simply distinction, but also and always relation. Such a move matters because establishing a sharp and categorical distinction between subject and object has consequences. Beginning with a hierarchy of forms of being and knowing, it extends into the functional operation of the world itself, privileging one over the other. This hierarchy is no esoteric concern. Arriving at the same problem within affect from the rather different origin of psychoanalytic thought, Teresa Brennan argues that “whether one insists on the subjective or the objective, whether one believes that the object can be known in itself or for itself, one tacitly assumes the foundational associations between mind, form, activity, will, and the subject, on the one hand, and, on the other,



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body, matter, passivity, lack of agency, and the object.”11 In other words, radical distinctions, and especially ones that assert hierarchies, have implications beyond theory and philosophy. The subject/object dichotomy is a lived thing with significant costs that needs to be resisted. One such cost might well be how we understand the body in pain—and thus also its writing.

IV. Returning to pain, I also return to the company of Jean Améry: “Whoever is overcome by pain through torture experiences his body as never before. In self-negation, his flesh becomes a total reality.”12 Does this mean pain is utterly contained within the body that experiences it? Is the gulf between the pain you feel and I witness, or that I feel and you witness, too vast ever to know? Is it pure sensation, without affect, or is there an affective dimension to pain? Simply because the pain of torture is so frequently preceded, followed, and penetrated by other affects does not mean it is itself affective. Since pain is so often thought of as contained exclusively within the body, its affectivity is not immediately apparent. Tomkins conceives of pain as part of an intermediate system between affects and drives, which relates to learning how to manage and respond to affect. Affect can be “about pain” but, implicitly, “pain per se” is distinct from affect.13 Affects are crucial in forming judgments about how to amplify pleasure and decrease pain. Brennan notes that the experience of pain is part of the sympathetic nervous system, and that this is what produces its singularity: every individual has their own distinct nervous system. But she does suspect that pain and affect are of a closer order than Tomkins suggests: “It is well known that anxiety ‘increases’ pain, which leads me to wonder if pain and anxiety are not in some way of the same genus, both composed of the same nerve-racking stuff.”14 If there is some constitutive similarity between anxiety and pain then perhaps some aspect of pain is more than its sensual experience. Distinctions between sensation and affect can be tricky to navigate, particularly when emotion is added to the terrain. Within the heterogeneous field of affect theory, conceptual differences can at times be simply definitional, but at others the nuances of distinction can be revealing. Massumi means something quite precise when he refers to both sensation and emotion—distinct, in each case, from affect. “Sensation is the mode in which potential is present in the perceiving body,” as well as its “direct registering.”15 There is an affinity here to

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that unordered, involuntary aspect of Tomkins’s visceral affect. Its aliveness in the skin, its racing through the nervous system, always in that instant before knowing, is the unformed stuff of experience encountered at the outer reaches of perception. Emotion operates at the other end of the spectrum. It is the quality of an experience fixed by language, sociality, and personal history, experience owned by the subject. In other words, emotion is what results from bodily learning, from the playing and replaying of experience, affect complicated by cognition. Tomkins and Massumi/Deleuze present different taxonomies but both grapple with how to conceive experience beyond rigid notions of distinct subjects and objects. Massumi’s thinking, for all its abstraction, is not un-embodied—it is simply not concerned with the biological specificity that preoccupies Tomkins. What, then, of pain? Thinking of pain as an aspect of particular events, operating across multiple orders of experience offers a way forward. Such an understanding might recognize pain as occurring in different ways and at different times through the various states of affect, sensation, and emotion. Pain is usually designated as sensation, but that this is insufficient to account for it in full—pain is more than the feeling-state of a wounded body. It is also more than the limit point of language, since pain emerges from complex associations, attachments, and histories that are imbricated in the body, as well as the surfaces, objects, and other bodies it encounters. In short, pain does not reside exclusively in sensation. Rather, it involves everything from the proprioception and emergent perception to the cognitive recognition of its occurrence to the bodily memory of its passing. Pain, writes Ahmed, is “bound up with how we inhabit the world, how we live in relationship to the surfaces, bodies and objects that make up our dwelling space. Our question becomes not so much what is pain, but what does pain do.”16 The pain of drowning and the painful explosion in the lungs of a waterboarded detainee are not the same thing. It is what the pain does that is its affective quality. If I flail in the surface and begin to drown, my relation to my own body might be refigured—water as weapon, lungs as enemy. My body might be revealed in its totality, pain awakening my selfhood to specificities of form, not dividing or reducing the senses but totalizing the experience of the world. Either way, this is self-relation: the body in the event of pain cast into sudden relation with its changing experience of being, becoming newly self. Not so in torture. Waterboarding, a repeated encounter with virtual death, engenders different relations. A detainee’s body is affected by the possibility of its death, awakened to its own frailness, to pain of a similar sensation



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to drowning—choking, heaving, bursting lungs—and yet utterly different. Marched from a cell, strapped in place, a black cloth on his mouth, a hand that tips a canister barely seen against the glare of overhead lights. A voice that questions. As I showed in Chapter 2, “Reading Torture,” this is contingent pain: pain at the hands of another. What is at stake here is not the unmaking of the world from the position of the subject, but something else. Working instead from this more fluid conception of the body, subject and object can be re-situated from the primacy in which Scarry places them and viewed as modes of relation to experience, as “takes” on the event. One body tortures another and both bodies are reshaped. Tortured and torturing bodies are produced not only through certain acts, but also in the flow of sensations that emerge as pain, shame, disgust, and so on. These flows establish the very surfaces of such bodies as tortured and torturing. These surfaces distinguish one body from another, constituting the outward display of bodily transformation: becoming-tortured, becoming-torturer. Understood in this way, “the experience of pain does not cut off the body in the present, but attaches this body to the world of other bodies, an attachment that is contingent on elements that are absent in the lived experience of pain.”17 This begs the question: what is absent? Precisely both-between-ness, the virtual inextricable from the actual, but also the very coalescence and coherence of bodies that are themselves and themselves in relation. Absent, too, is the potential that it might be my body (some body, your body, even the torturer’s body) in pain soon enough. From all this emerges a messy notion: pain is not pure affect, but neither is it lacking in affective dimensions. Rather, pain’s affects are what enables it to form the body as a lived thing in pain and in the world. And this affectivity also constitutes a potential line of flight between the pain of torture and its expression.

V. Now it is necessary to consider what has haunted the periphery of these considerations of events and affects and torture: time. Not only does time matter in the occurrence of these things, it is inescapable in their aftermath. Jean Améry: “It was over for a while. It still is not over.”18 A beautifully simple statement of profound insight. Time figures here in all its folding mutability, over for an indeterminate while, still not over. Temporal aporia, slippery and

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uncertain. Torture that lives in the traumatized body. “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured,” writes Améry. “Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected.”19 This enduring quality of torture, its presence within the body outside the clinical, its incorporeal yet bodily traces, demands consideration. This is trauma, in which past and future collide, and in doing so elide the present; experience out of time, re-experienced. Caruth makes this temporal aspect crucial to her definition: “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.”20 This return of trauma has important implications for thinking the pain of torture. It is not only the event itself that assaults language: the traumatic after is constituted by an enduring falling short of language, a resistance to both symbolism and narrative. Events do not occur in an instant, but over time. Every process implies duration. Changing, writing, emergence, and becoming itself: each constituted by the folding together of past, present, and future. Trauma, then, might be thought of as an interruption in the arc of an event, the sudden overload of a circuit, an unexpected charge that transforms one becoming into another. The violence of torture leaves its mark in the relations of actual and virtual, of potential, which are always co-constitutive of the body in time. Bodies do not simply absorb various inputs and stimuli, but also enfold contexts, tendencies, drives, and bursts of cognitive knowledge into themselves. Just as there are important resonances between the problems that arise within the subject/object divide for both the abstracted and more corporeal conceptions of affect, historiographer and Holocaust scholar Dominic LaCapra makes a similar claim regarding trauma. Like some of the more biologically influenced notions of affect, LaCapra’s understanding of trauma is grounded in psycho­ analysis and inflected by deconstructionism. But the echo between Deleuzian pragmatics and LaCapra’s approach shows how congruent my argument is with existing claims regarding trauma. For LaCapra, the undecidability within trauma threatens to “disarticulate relations, confuse self and other, and collapse all distinctions, including that between present and past,” through “compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes—scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fantastically caught up in a melancholic feedback loop.”21 Thus, whether conceived through pragmatic philosophy, deconstruction, or psycho­ analysis, something happens in trauma to enfold time.



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More than simply stuttering the relation between time-of-the-body and time-of-the-world, trauma radically disrupts it. Fracturing experience so that those fragments cling to bodies, negative affects can recur ceaselessly, looped and incorporated into the psyche (for want of a better term) and the body in the traumatic event. Affect sticks to skin, fires neurons, constrains and generates potential, hardens on and in bodies. As the shared substance of the experience of the traumatic event, past and future, and perhaps even virtual and actual, should be understood not as binaries but as poles of experience between which the body fluctuates. That this dynamic coincides with that of literary testimony is no surprise; violent trauma and the witnessing of it share a sympathy of form. Trauma, then, depends on affect in time, pain in time—both its affective and qualitative dimensions. As Ahmed writes, “Pain is not simply an effect of a history of harm; it is the bodily life of that history.”22 The task of literary testimony to torturous pain is to give back to the body the capacity to move through the world, to gesture. Before turning to writing torturous affect in more detail, this complex relationship between the traumatic event and its return needs to be addressed carefully. While the psychoanalytically derived conception of trauma is open to valid critique for its privileging of ordered narrative, its binary conception of subjectivity as fractured or coherent, and its reinforcement of the rational over the corporeal, its recognition of the splintering of experience and the role of time make it a productive place from which to think further.23 Events are meant to end, but an event from which trauma arises does not: it is exactly this not ending that makes it traumatic. Rather than arising from a lost moment of reality, trauma emerges from within the delayed recognition of the experience itself, from what psychoanalysts would call its inherent latency. This is the shock, the lack of immediate recognition that this is happening, that begins the traumatic event. This delay works with the destruction of language to submerge the event and its meaning. For meaning to emerge, time is necessary, although whether this will be days, weeks or years is always unknown. The event occurs, is experienced but not grasped, and at once deferred. Even as the bare facts emerge, their meaning or the specificities of the experience may remain obscured. This does not mean that its effects are not felt or manifested symptomatically—rather, it means that those symptoms (sleeplessness, flashbacks, fits of anger or grief or paranoia) bear little or no relation to known, meaningful memory. Time allows the sediment of affect to bring out the remnants of torture on and in the body. In a very real sense, the event of torture never ends. Ahmed: “The past is living

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rather than dead; the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present.”24 Massumi: “the trace of past actions, including a trace of their contexts … [is] … conserved in the brain and in the flesh, but out of mind and body understood as qualifiable interiorities, active and passive respectively, direct spirit and dumb matter.”25 In short, trauma resides not simply in the mind, but in the extensive body, in its surfaces and their relation to other bodies, to the world around them. When trauma emerges it does so with violence, not just on the body but in and on language. Just as the traumatic event is a schism within narrative and a denial of language, so too is its return. There is a tension here between the return of the event and the capacity of language to express it, since trauma is exactly that which refuses language in its occurrence. What, then, to make of its return? In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, execution quickly follows Rubashov’s confession and torture. This is the necessary outcome of the logic of state power discussed in the first chapter of this book. His later novel, Arrival and Departure (1969), focuses more on the individual consequences of torture.26 The narrative centers on Peter, a former student leader in a resistance movement against an unnamed totalitarian regime. Having fled to Neutralia, Peter awaits permission to emigrate to a third country but is haunted by his experience of imprisonment and torture at home. One day, he wakes from a dream in which he is a “prisoner of empty time” (62) to a “queer, numb feeling in the bend of the knee, round the burn scar” (63) left by his torturers. The leg ceases to respond or have any feeling; Peter is paralyzed. He falls into a fevered sleep in which he explores in dreams and hallucinations the “forgotten islands of his past” (71), namely his detention and torture. This trauma returns only in fragmentary moments, pieces of the past that refuse to be memory—the past known as the past—and repeatedly surface to take hold of his body. Peter’s symptoms reflect those of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which, according to Caruth, “reflects the direct imposition on the mind of the unavoidable reality of horrific events, the taking over of the mind, psychically and neurobiologically, by an event that it cannot control.”27 In short, the outside of experience penetrates the inner self without having been mediated by conscious cognitive processes. PTSD didn’t enter clinical language until long after Koestler wrote his novel, but terms such as shell shock had been in the vernacular since World War I. As Benjamin so hauntingly reveals in “The Storyteller,” the mute horror that the terribleness of modern warfare could induce seemed to defy the very capacity



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of language to make sense of it.28 All those soldiers returned home from war, unfeeling and unable to articulate their experience, spoke to the radical capacity of state violence to traumatize, and in fact proved crucial to the recognition of trauma as both a clinical and cultural phenomenon. Here, Koestler dramatizes the traumatic return through a literal incapacity to both move and speak—an incapacity that occurs after the event, in its traumatic return. Yet in the narrative he presents it is not simply that the present collapses into the past, but that temporality enfolds. As LaCapra points out, in the writing or speaking of trauma “tenses implode” such that “any duality of time (past and present or future) is experientially collapsed or productive only of aporias and double binds.”29 In Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels plays with this implosion of tenses to evoke the ever-present quality of trauma—recall, for instance, the present tense through which Jacob continues to experience the death of his family. In Koestler’s novel, Peter cannot speak the event that repeatedly takes hold of his body, yet there is no distinction in language between the past event and its present occurrence. “The first three strokes seemed to split his body into two; he had never imagined that flesh could experience such mortal pain and yet survive to feel it, and feel it repeated once more, and again” (108). Peter’s paralysis and speechlessness tell, in Caruth’s well-known formulation, “the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.”30 For Peter, this crying out is bodily; his body speaks because his voice cannot. Peter is able to walk again after long sessions of psychoanalysis during which he reveals his shame and guilt at being ready to betray his revolutionary comrades—despite never actually doing so. Yet while he can walk, the wound remains, and the novel ends with the only response to it that was ever possible: Peter falling to earth, parachuting back into the country from which he has escaped. “All he could hope for was that his departure might help to bring forth that event of which one is allowed to speak only at certain moments; and this was not one of them” (190). Where the language of power and the logic of torture lead Rubashov in Darkness at Noon to see the yawning inevitability of his own death at the will of the state, Peter’s end is far more elusive. It is as if something were occurring just beyond the limits of language, an event whose shape is recognizable but which cannot fully enter into words. Representation as an expressive practice, the attempt of language to stand in for the event, appears inadequate. It is as if Massumi were writing of such limits of language, like Peter crying out against time destructively enfolded, when he says, “Language cannot

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reach this directly future-feeling limit of thought. But in imagination it can approach it. When it does, words resonate with virtual thought-events lying on the linguistic horizon.”31 Simply recognizing the enduring incomprehensibility at the core of the traumatic event offers no escape from Améry’s “nothing more to say” of torture, the “it was what it was” with which this chapter began.32 Language might return to the tortured body once pain recedes, but that does not mean language and pain are reunited. The event (the act) remains, while the language of it is erased by pain. But this reading of torture against the grain of the subject/object divide, of articulating its trauma in relation to affect, calls forth something new. What emerges is necessarily incomplete because the totality of the trauma remains unknowable. Yet, I want to suggest, this incompleteness marks out certain silences that speak through their very presence as absence. Such silences are not always negative: they can attest to a refusal to be defined, contained, or controlled by torture. In this sense, silence can empower. But it can equally mark out precisely what is terrible in torture: the destruction of voice and the refiguring of the very constitution of the body. Now, I have arrived at something of the substance of unrepresentability that is thought to confound literary representation, and in doing so reached a point at which what it can do may be (re)imagined.

VI. One novel to substantively and explicitly address torture and the war on terror is Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital (2007), an Australian-born author who has lived most of her adult life in Canada and the United States.33 The title’s mythological allusion hints at the story’s primary narrative device: the reworking of the Orpheus myth into a post-9/11 context.34 Three characters are the locus of the narrative: Leela is a mathematician at Harvard; her childhood friend, Cobb Slaughter, is an intelligence officer; her boyfriend Mishka, an Australian of Hungarian extraction, studies music and is the Orpheus figure of the novel’s title. Much of the narrative occurs in flashbacks to Mishka’s childhood in the Daintree Rainforest in northeastern Australia and Leela’s and Cobb’s childhoods in the American South. In the novel’s present, frequent terror attacks are occurring in Boston, the national security state is highly normalized (compared to the contemporary moment), and the plot centers on Mishka’s



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possible involvement in a subway bombing, his subsequent detention and torture, and Leela’s search to find him. Written in the third person with chapters that switch focus between Leela, Cobb, and Mishka, Orpheus Lost is laden with weighty themes: Mishka’s troubled and ambiguous identity as the son of a refugee mother and a not-as-dead-as-he-thought jihadist father; responsibility for the actions of parents, embodied not just by Mishka but also by Leela and Cobb, her childhood friend turned Special Forces officer and torturer; cultures of fear in contemporary America; the guilty until proven innocent paradigm of national security; and questions of violent histories and redemption. Torture first enters the text as a kind of haunting potential, a foreshadowing that is strangely lacking in affective impact. Cobb, on the hunt for the men behind a bombing on the Boston subway, anonymously snatches Leela off the street and takes her into a secret security center for questioning. Her response, however, is curiously flat. No fear, no anxiety, almost no affect of which to speak—despite being snatched and hooded, kept alone for hours. She blows kisses, gives a viewing window the finger “in a manner more flirtatious than obscene,” and is in “a perfect state of repose” (51). When Cobb enters the room, she is “startled” by his ski mask but finds his voice familiar and is otherwise “relaxed” (58). During the interview, she is frequently sarcastic and dismissive—“What have I got to be scared about here?” (67) she asks her interrogator—and is almost sympathetic to him when he finally removes the ski mask. This could be read as dissociation, reflected in her failure to “recognize any of the houses” in the neighborhood street to which she is returned (84), and in this sense it certainly prefigures the way the text later recounts Mishka’s torture. But the scene also presages a disembodied quality to the writing of torture. Mishka’s torture quickly encounters the simile and likeness identified by Scarry as indicative of the difficulty of pain entering language directly: “Mostly he was not conscious of breathing but he was conscious of something that felt like hot skewers in his shoulders. His wrists were tied together, crosswise, and held in a carpenter’s vice. Someone was tightening the vice” (245, emphasis added). The sensation of pain is immediately deferred, and what follows is bare, direct description that echoes the factual testimony found in eyewitness accounts given to organizations such as Amnesty International. “The pain came and went” (245), says the next line and those that follow carry within them something of the erasing force of pain, its collapse of past moments into the present, the body’s hunger for release.

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Almost immediately, the body in pain vanishes into dissociation, depicted as a kind of dramatized aestheticization. “The pain was like a crowded city street,” writes Hospital (245), and then simile shifts into metaphor and takes hold of the text. There is a long description of a noisy city street, imagined cars and faces, from which pain resurfaces in the most fleeting of ways: “He could identify one strand of the pain. He became conscious of a savage chafing where the hood was tied” (246). Then his imagined streetscape provides a way out: “the car can drive us away and we can leave your body behind” (246). Here the metaphors perform dissociation, displacing the pain of torture from experience. Suddenly Mishka is disembodied, in a hallucinatory world, no longer part of torture: “He joined his mother at the window and they stared at the effigy wearing the costume of his body. It was swinging by its wrists from a hook. Its feet did not quite touch the floor. Apart from the hood, it was naked. The light changed, the car moved, and Mishka left his effigy behind” (246–7). He hears screams and wonders if they are his own or from the next cell. Then he is returned to a pre-traumatic past into which the present intrudes only briefly via the questions of his torturer, and sparse and sparing glimpses of “burning shoulders” and the “tightening vice” (247). The torturer, too, is replaced by “the voice of a hostile schoolteacher and Mishka was being caned again and again,” which again defers the violent present to the remembered past (250). Torturer becoming schoolteacher—an almost impossible diminution. When Mishka returns to the present he has become something other than himself. At one point he identifies as Prometheus (252), then as Orpheus (253). His torturer, too, becomes a mythical figure. Mishka “tried to explain that he had not descended into the dark world of Cerberus to steal secrets” (253). His pain becomes the pain of mythic fantasy. “Cerberus growled and continued to tear at Mishka’s flesh. Mishka’s wings—he was suspended in flight, his wings caught in a tree perhaps, or in a net—were dislocated along the muscle where his feathered limbs were attached to his back” (253). Here, torture is over-signifying rather than destroying of signification. This is reflected by the appeal to myth, which provides an allegorical and aesthetic framework through which torture and loss can be understood. If Mishka avoids subjection to the bio­political state, he does so only through aesthetic flight—he gives names to stop the pain, names of friends and mentors, then returns to nightmares and flashbacks. This mythic section—his last point-of-view presence in the text— ends with an almost heavenly vision in which his music has tamed Cerberus



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and he wrestles with a “radiant being,” after which “the music of the spheres was all around him and he felt no pain at all” (257). The aestheticization of displaced pain completed, Mishka is not encountered again in the novel. To an extent, Hospital repeats the aestheticization of testimony for which Agamben chastises Felman: the wordlessness of music stands in for the incapacity of speech to sufficiently account for catastrophe. Mishka’s torture, then, performs a becoming-object, from which art—here represented by mythic figures that become music—affords some form of escape. It is tempting to say that the ungraspability of pain has infected the text itself, driven away the entire instance of its occurrence. But this is not quite the case. Hospital does not so much recount the unmaking of the world as its blotting out, a slide into dissociation represented by a series of metaphors— cities, mythic figures, music, one world replaced by another. In this sense, the text proposes a stylistic mode of representing the displacement of the pain of torture, but not of representing the pain itself. To write the pain itself, and the traumatic aftermath of that pain, asks for a different approach. In Hospital’s writing of torture, affect figures little. Fear, shame, disgust, contempt, and even anger slip away from the act of torture. Nor does the novel have much to say about what comes after torture, its traumatic effects/affects. Many other literary writings on torture, such as Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” similarly do not address this traumatic aspect, but in both cases the victim dies. Mishka, the reader learns, does indeed live, but in the ninetyodd pages that follow his torture he exists only as a cipher through which redemption is sought, love and faith expressed, and maternal bonds renewed. His tortured body is absent. He is disappeared—not only from the world of the characters, but from the text. Time does not enfold; the event of his torture slips away into narrative past-ness, hardly punctuated by its present violence. The virtuality of potential is nowhere to be found; there is only the Orpheus fantasy and “no pain at all.” LaCapra: “Trauma brings about a dissociation of affect and representation: one disconcertingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel.”35 Where Anne Michaels writes a poetics of trauma, in Hospital’s text dissociation of affect and representation occurs within the act itself—performed as a displacement into metaphor, art, and aesthetics.

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VII. Massumi describes seeing a mouse from the corner of your eye: you “feel the arc of its movement” even though “you don’t actually ‘see’ the vector of the mouse’s movement, or your own.”36 What you see is a semblance of movement occurring. “Semblance is another way of saying ‘the experience of a virtual reality.’ Which is to say: ‘the experience of the reality of the virtual.’”37 Thinking the fictive writing of torture and its trauma as seeking their semblance is different than trying to represent them. Nor is semblance at all the same as resemblance. The latter occurs prior to the event and overrides it, pre-structuring its meaning and asserting an interpretive framework with no generative relation to the event itself. Orpheus Lost can be read as resemblance, since its mythic metaphor predetermines the meaning of Mishka’s torture and in doing so it closes off all realms of expression that are not symbolic, not contained in figural language, not dependent on the deconstructive undoing of fixed meanings. I want to suggest that semblance offers an alternative approach to writing torture, one concerned less with displacement or over-signification and more with both torture’s traumatic aftermath and gesturing affectively beyond the page. This is how Fugitive Pieces responds to the paradox of witnessing—its poetic mode does not aestheticize the Holocaust as much as evoke its impossibilities of knowing what remains beyond the actual. Semblance concerns the virtual more than the actual, it is the virtual glimpsed within an event’s occurrence. In this sense, artistic semblances have the capacity to impart some experience of the not-yet, the could-have-been, the more-than-occurred. If the subject/object dichotomy resists between-ness, semblance embraces it by concerning itself with the relational and differential rather than the distinctive and disjunctive. Direct connection between entities is not necessary for there to be a semblance, as Massumi shows in discussing the emergence of perspective painting alongside courtly sovereignty. Perspective painting’s great innovation, the dominant vanishing point from which the structure of the image flows, enacts a semblance to that mode of power centered in and extending from the body of the king (or, perhaps, kingly power is a semblance of perspective painting). Here, royal authority and perspective painting are not the same—nor do they resemble one another. Rather, their dynamics share a kind of sympathy: a singular origin point from which all else flows. To reduce one to the other would be to erase both their distinction and their complexity. The vanishing point and the divine right are not connected as



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such. Something else joins them: “a relation of nonrelation.”38 Turning to torture, perhaps the problem is thinking that language can represent pain, when perhaps what it could strive for is something of the relation of nonrelation—the affective substance of both its ungraspability and its flow of force. If torturous affects—the shame, fear, disgust, contempt, and pain (in its affective dimensions) experienced by detainees at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere—are the relations of violent encounter, the in-between-ness and forceful dynamism of event, then their expression might call forth precisely this more than. This could be the case even with a diminishment or paucity of language—I am suggesting a more than of relationality, not quantity. Any semblance of an artifact or an event also includes the very virtuality that exceeds the actuality of the “original” artifact or event. Writing torture, its affects and its pain, could mean writing fiction that is primarily affective, rather than symbolic, figural, or concerned with linguistic play. It means writing that gestures beyond the page, beyond language even. There is no space, here, for totalizing metaphors in which the event itself falls away and only the symbols remain. Semblances possess a forceful likeness that is not reducible to reference. Their likenesses abstract new meaning, rather than resembling the already known. What can generate semblance is likeness and metaphor liberated from sheer symbolism, allowed semantic incompleteness precisely so that what is relational, what is virtual, can actually occur in the act of reading. Such writing might ask that trauma not be totalized, not shown as a complete or containable thing. That if death ends the traumatized body, torturous affect has already spilled over, exceeded limits. One novel that could be in such terms is Distant Star (2009), Roberto Bolaño’s short but complex work about the search for a skywriting fascist poet in Chile.39 Despite the central figure of the book being a torturer and serial killer, little account is given to the violence itself. Rather, its horror spills over into the capacity to write itself, corrupting poetry but also proposing that while certain things defy representation, that defiance itself can always be written. Even after the poet disappears from the text, the traumatic affects of his acts, both violent and poetic (the two are not necessarily separable), haunt in changing and diffuse ways Bolaño’s protagonist—and poetry itself. Remember Améry’s disrupted and de-structured temporality: “It was over for a while. It still is not over.”40 Semblance offers a kind of response. “A semblance is always an expression of time” and “a lived expression of the eternal matterof-fact that is time’s passing.”41 Or, its passing but not its passing-by, its ruptured fragments clinging to bodies, traumatic remnants of violence transforming

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the tortured body. The virtual actually seen, not the totality of trauma but the suddenly recognized trajectory of its enfolding of time and affect. It seems to me that if writing is to achieve this semblance, the act of torture cannot be the endpoint of narrative. Neither tortured nor torturing body should slip free. Fiction that writes torture, its pain and trauma, might seek semblance of time’s passing, its enfolding and rupturing, its sedimenting of affect, and the continuing of the event into an enduringly affected after. This after, even more than the event of torture itself, offers the capacity for written expression because it allows time itself to work on traumatized bodies.

VIII. A return to the beginning: “The pain was what it was,” writes Améry.42 But the pain also is what it is and everything that passes in the time between was and is. If the pain of torture is written, it can cease to be a thing on its own, alone and distinct, and it can be both known and unknown in relation to the affects that work with it, on it and through it to shape, define, change, and silence bodies. This requires that pain be understood as relational and contingent as well as individual. Simply because I cannot directly feel the pain of another does not mean it is theirs alone, utterly separate from me and my experience of the world. Or that it has nothing to do with affect, relation, the potential of expression. Fugitive Pieces, in its poetics of witnessing catastrophe, offers a kind of testimonial semblance, one that reaches beyond the page to affectively make manifest the impossibility of speaking. It writes the veiling of traumatic depth, and bears witness to what language cannot do. It does so neither by hunting after the never-attainable truth of what happened nor by demarcating the exact limits of knowledge, but by gesturing affectively so that its testimony speaks beyond its words. So too, perhaps, the literary witnessing of torture. To assign the pain of torture to permanent unspeakability risks—however unintentionally—repeating the original violence. This is not to suggest that all silence does so, only that silence contains a kind of ambiguity. Silence, as the refusal to speak under torture, can constitute resistance, but as not speaking after torture, it can be read, justified or not, as an impossibility or even a refusal to bear witness. More than ambiguity, then, silence can be loaded with complexity— particularly when that silence is unspeakable, a site of collision between bodies, and with power. Such unspeakability is hardly empty, hardly still—it has shape



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and content, relations of nonrelation. That it operates against language means that it must be expressed obliquely, in the effects of sedimented affect, in the changing of bodies in the passing of time. In semblance. Writing torture needs not only to write against the kind of biopolitical imperative manifest in the Torture Memos but also to grasp the potential of writing to be more than representation. This means approaching the problem of pain from the angle of its emergence into relation, into contingency. It means expressing the folding, rupturing, and fragmenting of time, not simply to replace it in narrative but to chart its affective force on bodies and worlds. It means being willing to see the unmaking of the world from the corner of the eye, a semblance of an event beyond the vast dichotomy of subject and object. It means writing—messy, incomplete, gestural—the terrible more than of torturous affect. “Semblances of a certain artistic kind make gestures of revealing a content that lies beneath their surface,” writes Massumi. “They reveal that depth in the very gesture of veiling it.”43 Sketches of aporia, glimpsed vectors of flight across caesuras. Not so much accepting the unspeakable as expressing the affective experience of its unspeakability. Gestures do not simply accompany language; language itself contains the indeterminate embodiment of gesture as a forceful quality within itself. Gesture exceeds language, but it also marks its failure or lack: the quintessential gesture is the gag, which refers both to that which blocks speech and the bodily action of the actor to enact that loss of speech.44 Gesture enacts the relationality of language to what exceeds or lies beyond it—gesture both produces and makes visible affective relations. Gestural testimony, then, is exactly that writing in which the loss of language and its force both reside, in which the force of trauma and its shape can be found, and in which the expressivity and affectivity of words work upon, through, and between bodies, texts, and worlds.

Conclusion: Speaking Beyond Words

Emerging in varying forms and intensities throughout this book, present at the interstices of theories, texts, and contexts, was the doubled figure of torture: corporeal body and textual embodiment. Between these two bodies is a gap that appears as a void, as seemingly irresolvable as that between the sign and its referent, between representation and the event, between language and the world. I have argued that while this gap cannot be closed or resolved as such, its irresolvability should not be seen as purely an epistemological question. Paradox can be productive. Across my exploration of poems and legal memoranda, fiction and memoir, cinema and images, I have asked what this gap does— what the relation between entities produces. For the problem of representing trauma, the very foundation of its study within the humanities and the core of its challenge in the struggle for social justice, this question aims at neither the event broken free of narrative time, nor its return, nor attempts to represent it (in text, on screen, in art). As the intensity and force of relation that, paradoxically, occurs in the rupturing of relation, traumatic affect offers the potential to speak, write, and think torture and other violent trauma. For literature, affect gives testimony the capacity to become gestural, to bridge spaces and produce meaning without succumbing to the collapse of language. Understanding how the tortured body might be written in fiction required grasping the dynamics of that torture, its relation to power and affective structure. But to think writing the tortured body also required conceiving in new ways its relation both to power and to other bodies—none more so than the body of the torturer. Fluidities of becoming—becoming-tortured, becomingtorturer—reflect not only the force of the state apparatus, but also emphasize the transformation across time and through the encounter of bodies caught up in the war on terror. All too often, these are bodies subject to the affective contagion of torture, its leaping like fire, spreading across the sites, spaces, and bodies of the war on terror. Rather than systematically survey torture in fiction or human rights testimony, I sought to trace and evoke torture’s effects and affects across a range of texts and cultural forms. My interest was less in identifying similarity across these various forms and more in unveiling the complex

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ways that torturous trauma—despite its seeming destruction of language and denial of representation—enters texts and images, as well as bodies and worlds. Reading and writing the tortured body are acts inextricable from one another—and from the political milieu within which they are situated. In asking how the body subjected to biopower might speak, I drew on the role of affect in instantiating, maintaining, and performing the war on terror. Delineating the affective and biopolitical structure of the war on terror, then, enabled both the necessity and the difficulty of writing its tortures to be put in the context of the imperative of the modern state to make survive. Establishing correlations between human rights, literature, and conceptions of the body connected the practice of fiction to political progress. Considering how tortured and torturing bodies relate to one another and the world helps their writing become possible. As I showed with the detainee poems, emergent within the war on terror are the conditions of textual resistance to it: the excess of affect fracturing and leaking through the state apparatus. Images of torture, both the cinematic and those of Abu Ghraib, revealed the power of affect to shape and be shaped by both aesthetic and narrative. Yet grasping the affectivity and biopolitics of torture demarcates only certain aspects of its architecture: its exterior, but not its experience. Torture is inseparable from pain, even when it takes the form of sleep deprivation or mock execution. Torture, too, is a traumatic force, shocking and overwhelming the body and psyche in the instance of its occurrence, yet carried onwards, splintered and ever-present—pieces of past-ness stuck out of time. Torture’s pain can resist or even destroy the capacity to speak, but it is also resistant to direct description in language, often relying on metaphor and simile. This difficulty of bringing pain into language is intensified by the catastrophic fracturing of trauma: its (re)experiencing of the terrible event without knowing or making sense of its place in time, its relation to narrative. This not knowing makes trauma traumatic, but also opens it to what literature can do. Yet the restoration of narrative alone can do further violence; rather than repairing damage, it can erase the injury and its meaning. Since literature is concerned with modes of truth other than (or as well as) facticity, it offers the possibility of gesturing in such a way as to bring into expression the forceful tension between knowing and not knowing constitutive of trauma itself. Addressing that relation between unrepresentability and the necessity of writing required reading pain through the lens of affect—recognizing that pain may be the defining quality of torture, but not its sole dimension. Shame,



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anger, disgust, contempt and, above all, fear work on and between tortured and torturing bodies in constellations of shifting intensity. Bodies such as these are messy, fluid, and webbed in relation, not unitary, discrete, and readily separable from one another or their context. Examining the exploitation of affectivity in the tortures of the war on terror, the affective dimensions of the pain of torture—its intentional relation with the torturer, its contingency—became inescapable and simultaneously more accessible to language. Sedimented and stratified, this traumatic affect contextualized pain within time—both time in its passage after the event, the traumatic aftermath, and time in its recursivity at the micro level. Its always-passing, thrusting forward and back, the virtual that is always present in the actual. This combination of temporality and betweenness exposed the limitations of sharply demarcating subject and object, and suggested that rethinking the limits of representation—the correlation, however unstable, of language to objects and subjects—might open the tortures of the war on terror to narration in new ways. Reflecting on practices of writing and their ethics, including my own creative practice, I argued that writing trauma necessitates an openness to the contagion of traumatic affect. Affect, which is both bodily and between bodies, bears certain affinities to gesture—to the expressiveness of the body beyond words. As I showed, Fugitive Pieces employs this affective gesturality in its poetics of testimony, its witnessing through an aesthetics that reaches beyond the page. In this, it approaches the paradox at the heart of testimony: the capacity to both speak and not, to know and not, to write and not. To bear witness, then, is both to speak that which might be spoken, and to give shape to that which cannot. This giving shape, I propose, is concerned with the force, substance, and affect of incomprehensibility—of precisely the enduring and changing, fracturing and stratifying, emergence and submergence of the traumatic event. Here, the concept of semblance opened up a new means of grasping the traumatic. How else to reach beyond the page than to allow something other than resemblance, other than representation, to evoke or embody the non-place of articulation? To write in fiction a semblance of testimony is to at once gesture to what is hidden in words, while also revealing the movement that enacts its concealment. Semblance thinks torture and its writing without representing, explaining, or totalizing its trauma per se, but rather to recognize its incomprehensibility and simultaneously to see that unknowing as changing, changeable, and capable of being written in fiction. Gestures that testify connect the revealed and concealed, the known and not, the felt and seen, time broken and repeated.

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* On the campaign trail, Barack Obama made much of his intention to end torture and close the prison at Guantánamo. On January 22, 2009, in one of his first acts in office, President Obama issued Executive Order 13491, revoking all advice to or from the CIA in the years since 9/11 that authorized interrogation and detention practices inconsistent with the CAT and the Geneva Conventions. His order banned waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and other techniques, and, at least theoretically, closed the “black site” prisons. Less positively, the President backed the CIA in the fight to keep secret the vast majority of the 6,000page Senate report into torture, allowing only a redacted version of the executive summary to be released in December 2014. Not only did the report reveal the brutal reality of CIA torture, it also exposed an inept, unaccountable, and ineffective detention and interrogation program. Yet despite the detailed evidence produced by the Senate Select Committee, along with the extensive documentation and testimony from Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, President Obama has shown no appetite for holding torturers to account, let alone the politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers who authorized, ordered, and enabled its use. Other than the bad apples of Abu Ghraib and a handful of other low-ranked military personnel court-martialed for various deaths and abuses, no perpetrators have been pursued.1 Guantánamo, despite its dwindling utility, remains open as of March 2015, and seems certain to remain so for the duration of the Obama Presidency.2 Avoiding the phrase “war on terror,” the President has none the less evolved its architecture and techniques.3 While the Bush era was defined by torture, secret prisons, and pre-emptive warfare, the paradigmatic instrument of the Obama Administration is the drone. President Bush authorized torture and detention without trial; President Obama orders assassination—euphemized as “targeted killing,” just as torture was once “enhanced interrogation.” Techniques of violence have changed, but the overriding imperatives of power remain unchanged. No longer is sovereignty instantiated face-to-face on detained bodies. Now it is brought to bear from the sanitized distance of drones and secret command centers. Life penetrated by power remains the rule and the state of exception endures, whether at Guantánamo or in those new and shifting zones of indistinction from which drone missiles fire. Agamben would not be surprised; once claimed, spaces of exception are rarely relinquished. While American torture might have ended as official policy, power expands over life undeterred. Daily, the contemporary world is presented with new



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biopolitical violence: the punitive brutality of the treatment of whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, the Wikileaks informer; the renewed occupation of Aboriginal land by the Australian military; the militarization of police forces in Ferguson and across the United States; the indefinite detention and marginalization of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe and Australia; the mass surveillance of populations across the world; the emergence of biometric tracking and management of welfare across the developed world. Our technological capacity to know injustice and violence is greater than ever, yet this also means we are endlessly confronted with events demanding that we bear witness. Human rights workers are faced with this challenge in practical, tangible ways; for fiction, the question is how it can continue to work toward justice. Writing can cut both ways. Fictions helped lay the ground for torture, alive in legal, political, and ethical calls for its use, and at work in setting the agenda in the cultural sphere through television and film. Yet fiction can help elaborate and engage the paradoxes within human rights work, the dilemmas of speaking for others, of truth, of trauma, of altruism and confession.4 Fiction can work to overcome so-called compassion fatigue and make sense of the damage done to people by power across the globe. Adapted to context, the theoretical and methodological techniques deployed in this book can offer productive insight into the challenges to rights and freedoms at work in the world around us. Opening up spaces in which bodies can speak, in which they can be embodied within discourse in ways that allow for complex identities and socialities is work that fiction can always advance. Justice demands not only wider and deeper embedding of law and rights, but also for justice itself to be able to account for and understand more varied bodies, experiences, and knowledges. Giving full accounts of bodily experience when set against the power of the state always demands calling forth that which has been denied language, denied representation. If trauma has become pervasive, it has done so in multiple forms, both individual and collective. A just response requires that those traumas be witnessed—not only in courts and by policymakers, or by those intimate to its violence, but by the world in which they are allowed to occur. To return once more to the question central to Gestures of Testimony: how, in the writing of torture, to write the shattering of language, the splintering of experience, the fracturing of time? How, in Felman’s words, to “bridge, speak over, the collapse of bridges, and yet narrate at the same time the process and event of the collapse?”5 Throughout this book, I circled back to this problem

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multiple times and from various angles because it is a practical, political, and ethical question as well as a theoretical and analytical one. To bear witness to torture by writing it into fiction is to refute that survival is the necessary mode of life in the contemporary world, and in doing so to resist, even if at the margins, the desire of the state to penetrate the body. This is precisely what the detainee-poets of Guantánamo did with such force and urgency. To write torture is to respond to its politics, to its subjection of bodies, to its instantiation of the war on terror and the forever-lost invulnerability of the United States. To write against power, and specifically to write torture, is to risk exposure—contagion. Writing trauma—trauma of writing, writing of trauma—combines an ethics of emancipation from the totalizing force of sovereignty with the very real price such power exacts. To think writing in this way is not about venerating the practice or its practitioners, but rather to grant to writing an intimacy to trauma, to the unsayable, to the potential that resides in its own limits. In the previous chapter, I explored Jean Améry’s notion that his experience of torture both ended in the moment and continued into the present. It seems to me his insight applies as readily to culture and the body politic as to the tortured individual. The act of torture might end, but its effects and affects always endure—and this lasting impact is no less deserving of response. Torture as a practice endures, it is happening now in dark places across the globe, in secret and in the open. If history is any guide, ending torture may well be fool’s gold, but bringing it into the light is a vital task. Fiction alone cannot achieve that, but it can contribute to that task in ways that other forms of action and writing cannot. Fiction helped shape the humanitarian norms and laws that have taken hold in the last half-century, and fiction can help make that regime stronger, more inclusive, and more integrated into local, national, and global cultures. Incomprehensible and unrepresentable as such events might seem on the surface, grasping the biopolitical and affective architecture of the tortures of the war on terror offers a way into its unraveling, or at the very least its exposure. Explication of context and relational dynamics, however, can only do so much. Academic theory needs to meet practice; critical theory and analysis cannot remain apart from real violence. Writing torture, in both fiction and theory, demands coming face-to-face with its trauma, the knowing and not knowing of torture’s affective remnants, its rupturing of narrative. If the fiction is to bear witness, it must speak beyond words, do something with that relation of non-relation between trauma and the



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event, between language and experience. Writing affectively and seeking a kind of testimonial semblance in gesturing beyond the page offers the potential for revealing the shifting, unknowable, and inescapable trauma of torture, including the very veiling of its totality in the act of revelation. If this is the world in which we are to live, gestures of testimony might enable literature to refuse the claims of unrepresentability and bring into writing what once seemed to deny language the very capacity to exist.

Notes Introduction: Gesturing the Unrepresentable Jane Mayer, Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), 9–10. 2 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program Together with Foreword by Chairman Feinstein and Additional and Minority Views,” (Washington: United States Senate, 2014); Diane Feinstein, “Foreword to the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” (Washington: United States Senate, 2014), 4. 3 Darius M. Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 35. 4 Edward Peters, Torture (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 2. 5 Almerindo E. Ojeda, “What Is Psychological Torture?,” in The Trauma of Psychological Torture, ed. Almerindo E. Ojeda (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008). 6 Rejali, Torture, 381. 7 Ibid., 4. 8 Ibid., 446. Torture is most useful for intimidation and extracting false confessions, as Rejali explains in the best discussion of this topic I have encountered, ibid. 446–79. A more detailed discussion of torture’s efficacy is outside the scope of this particular study. However, the weight of evidence suggests that, quite aside from its damaging effects on morale, discipline, and moral standing, torture is an unreliable way of obtaining information in a timely fashion: Jean Maria Arrigo and R. V. Wagner, “Psychologists and Military Interrogators Rethink the Psychology of Torture,” Peace and Conflict 13 (4) (2007); L. Hajjar, “Does Torture Work? A Sociolegal Assessment of the Practice in Historical and Global Perspective,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 5 (2009); Ronnie JanoffBulman, “Erroneous Assumptions: Popular Belief in the Effectiveness of Torture Interrogation,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 13 (4) (2007). 9 See, e.g., Noam Chomsky, “The Torture Memos,” May 24, 2009. http://www. chomsky.info/articles/20090521.htm 10 Far too many powerful accounts are available to list. One starting point is the influential International Committee of the Red Cross, “Report on the Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody,” (Washington, DC: ICRC, 1

168 Notes 2007). Collections of testimonies by Amnesty International include: “From Abu Ghraib to Secret CIA Custody: The Case of Khaled Al-Maqtari” (London: Amnesty International, 2008); “Below the Radar: Secret Flights to Torture and ‘Disappearance’” (London: Amnesty International, 2006); “Torture and Secret Detention: Testimony of the ‘Disappeared’ in the ‘War on Terror’” (London: Amnesty International, 2005); “The Testimony of Jumah Al-Dossari” (London: Amnesty International, 2005). Human Rights Watch has also done important work in this area: “Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2007); “Locked up Alone: Detention Conditions and Mental Health at Guantánamo” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2008); “Double Jeopardy: CIA Renditions to Jordan” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2008). The London-based organization of ex-detainees and activists Cageprisoners is wonderfully chronicled in Asim Qureshi, “Researching Rendition and Torture in the War on Terror: Lessons from a Human Rights Organisation,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 2 (2) (2009). 11 James Dawes, That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For an excellent account of the practices and concerns that compose the interdisciplinary field of human rights and literature, see Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore’s introduction to their collection Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, eds, Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013). 12 James Dawes, Evil Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 127. 13 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007); Julie Stone Peters, “‘Literature,’ the ‘Rights of Man,’ and Narratives of Atrocity,” in Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, ed. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013); Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, 1st edn. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 14 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc, 47–8. 15 For an unsparing interrogation of reading and suffering, see Dawes, Evil Men, 197–213. 16 Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007); Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2005). 17 Zero Dark Thirty. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Columbia Pictures, 2012); 24. Created by Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran. Fox, 8 seasons, 2001–10); Homeland. Created by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Showtime, 5 seasons, 2011).

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18 Moazzam Begg, Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantánamo and Back (London: Pocket Books, 2008); Murat Kurnaz, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); David Hicks, Guantánamo: My Journey (Sydney: William Heinemann, 2010); Glenn Carle, The Interrogator: A CIA Agent’s True Story (Melbourne: Scribe, 2011); Chris Mackey and Greg Miller, The Interrogator’s War: Inside the Secret War against Al Qaeda (London: John Murray Publishers, 2006); Erik Saar and Viveca Novak, Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantánamo (New York: Penguin, 2006); Tony Lagouranis and Allan Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey through Iraq (New York: New American Library, 2007). 19 Marc Falkoff, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2007). 20 Stephanie Athey, “Dark Chamber, Colonial Scene: Post-9/11 Torture and Representation,” in Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, ed. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 184. 21 Janette Turner Hospital, Orpheus Lost (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). 22 David Holloway, “The War on Terror Espionage Thriller, and the Imperialism of Human Rights,” Comparative Literature Studies 46 (1) (2009). 23 Elizabeth S. Anker, Fictions of Dignity : Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 24 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. 25 For example, see Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Random House, 1989); Survival in Auschwitz and the Reawakening: Two Memoirs, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Summit Books, 1986); Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Robin Buss (London: Penguin, 2008); The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991). 26 Anker, Fictions of Dignity, 30. 27 Athey, “Colonial Scene,” 188. 28 Ibid., 185–6. 29 J. M. Coetzee, “Into the Dark Chamber,” in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 362. 30 One of the clearest accounts of the emergence of torture in Greek law is found in the opening chapter of Peters, Torture. For more in-depth analysis, see Page DuBois, Torture and Truth (London: Routledge, 1991). 31 Jennifer R. Ballengee, The Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of Torture (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009).

170 Notes 32 Ibid., 12. 33 Peters, Torture, 18. 34 John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 35 Marquis de Sade, Justine; or, the Misfortunes of Virtue (New York: Putnam, 1966); The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1987). 36 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990 (1880)); Notes from the Undeground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Random House, 1993 [1864]). 37 Hugo’s comment can be found in Peters, Torture, 5. 38 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ralph Parker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962); The Gulag Archipelago, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (London: Fontana, 1974); Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” in Metamorphosis and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1992); George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Griffin Press, 1963); Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946); Arrival and Departure (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). 39 See, for instance, J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982); Wessel Ebersohn, Store up the Anger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina (London: Arrow, 1987), Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life (London: The Hogarth Press, 1983); Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden (New York: Penguin, 1992); Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star, trans. Chris Andrews (London: Vintage, 2009); Henri Alleg, The Question (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, trans. Toby Talbot (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); Fanon, Wretched. Of the few texts that support torture, most are self-justifying accounts, such as the writings of torture architect General Jacques Massu and torturer Jean-Pierre Vittori: Jacques Massu, Le Vraie Bataille D’alger (Paris: Plon, 1972); Jean-Pierre Vittori, Confessions D’un Professional De La Torture: La Guerre D’algerie (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1980). 40 Matthew Lippman, “The Development and Drafting of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,” Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 17 (2) (1994). 41 Rejali, Torture, 105. 42 Ibid., 454–8. 43 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, 2 vols (Montreal: Black Rose Press, 1979). Their arguments are

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problematized throughout Rejali’s book, but a brief account of his critique is on pp. 13–14. 44 Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). 45 Mayer, Dark Side, 162. 46 Donal P. O’Mathuna, “What Would Jack Do?: The Ethics of Torture in 24,” Global Dialogue 12 (1–2) (2010). There is no shortage of interesting academic critiques of 24: Klaus Dodds, “Screening Terror: Hollywood, the United States and the Construction of Danger,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1 (2) (2008); Jinee Lokaneeta, “A Rose by Another Name: Legal Definitions, Sanitized Terms, and Imagery of Torture in 24,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 6 (2) (2010); Stacy Takacs, “Terror TV: Challenging the Terror Paradigm in Post-9/11 U.S. Entertainment Programming,” in Interrogating the War on Terror, ed. Deborah Staines (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, “‘Where Is Jack Bauer When You Need Him?’: The Uses of Television Drama in Mediated Political Discourse,” Political Communication 26 (2009); Elspeth Van Veeren, “Interrogating 24: Making Sense of US Counterterrorism in the Global War on Terrorism,” New Political Science 31 (3) (2009). 47 Mackey and Miller, Interrogator’s War, 106–12. 48 Janice T. Gibson, “Training People to Inflict Pain: State Terror and Social Learning,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 31 (2) (1991); Janice T. Gibson and Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “The Education of a Torturer,” Psychology Today (1986). Torturers rarely discuss their work, which makes it difficult to know exactly how techniques are passed on at an individual level. For more detail on the training of torturers, see also Ronald Crelinsten, “In Their Own Words: The World of the Torturer,” in The Politics of Pain, ed. Ronald Crelinsten and Alex P. Schmid (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). 49 Dawes, Evil Men, 55. 50 Joshua E. S. Phillips, None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture (London: Verso, 2010). The accounts in his book echo how British soldiers in Northern Ireland learned the infamous “Five Techniques” used against suspected IRA members, see Ian Cobain, Cruel Brittania: A Secret History of Torture (London: Portobello Books, 2012); John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture (New York: Knopf, 2000). This process of learning on the job emerges in the memoirs of American interrogators, as well as the investigative accounts and official reports into the events at Abu Ghraib. 51 E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 2.

172 Notes 52 So many texts have been written since the fall of the towers that the ‘9/11 novel’ has rapidly become a genre in its own right. Examples that deal with the attacks themselves include DeLillo, Falling; Foer, Extremely; Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (New York: Random House, 2009). The post-9/11 environment is mined for material in Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2007); Ian McEwan, Saturday (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2005); John Updike, Terrorist (London: Penguin, 2006). When it comes to the Iraq war itself, fiction has not yet produced an All Quiet on the Western Front, Catch-22, or The Things They Carried. Although, as Delia Falconer notes in a recent review of The Yellow Birds and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, this is not for want of trying on the part of literary critics or, for that matter, authors. See Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012); Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (New York: Ecco, 2012); Delia Falconer, “Shot Dove’s Feathers,” Sydney Review of Books (2013). http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/shot-dovesfeathers/. Outside the Anglosphere, the novels of Yasmina Khadra, nom de plume of former Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul, offer a rather different perspective on the war on terror: The Attack (New York: Random House, 2006); The Swallows of Kabul (New York: Random House, 2004); The Sirens of Baghdad (New York: Random House, 2007). 53 Swanson Goldberg and Schultheis Moore, Human Rights and Literature, 2. 54 Central concepts in Anker, Fictions of Dignity; Dawes, That the World May Know; Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. 55 Swanson Goldberg and Schultheis Moore, Human Rights and Literature, 11. 56 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc, 13. 57 Ibid., 12. 58 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Allan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 59 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 60 Others employ related concepts in analyzng both the war and its prisons at Guantánamo and elsewhere. See, for example, Derek Gregory, “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception,” Geography Annual 88 (B) (2006); Kelly Oliver, “Bodies against the Law: Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror,” Continental Philosophy Review 42 (1) (2009); Steven C. Caton, “Coetzee, Agamben, and the Passion of Abu Ghraib,” American Anthropologist 108 (1) (2006); Steven C. Caton and Bernardo Zacka, “Abu Ghraib, the Security Apparatus, and the Performativity of Power,” American Ethnologist 37 (2) (2010); Julian Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

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2006); Anthony F. Lang and Amanda Russell Beattie, War, Torture and Terrorism: Rethinking the Rules of International Security (London: Routledge, 2010); Anne McClintock, “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,” Small Axe 13 (1) (2009); Paul Kahn, Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); M. Brown, “‘Setting the Conditions’ for Abu Ghraib: The Prison Nation Abroad,” American Quarterly 57 (3) (2005); M. Hannah, “Torture and the Ticking Bomb: The War on Terrorism as a Geographical Imagination of Power/Knowledge,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (3) (2006). Slavoj Zizek (at least somewhat seriously) also brings his Marxist-Lacanian perspective to bear in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002). Much non-clinical research on torture is indebted to Scarry. See, for instance, Elizabeth Dauphinée, “The Politics of Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery,” Security Dialogue 38 (2) (2007); M. Antaki, “The Politics and Inhumanity of Torture,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 3 (1) (2009); M. R. Monti, “‘You Will Be Like God’: Fascination of Force and Social Conformism in Two War Episodes,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50 (1) (2010); S. Levinson, “Slavery and the Phenomenology of Torture,” Social Research 74 (1) (2007). Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 18. Key works include: Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, trans. Nicholas T. Rand, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Anker writes particularly well on the relationship between trauma and the liberal subject in human rights discourse. See Fictions of Dignity, 7, 30–1. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980). Flawed: Alec Mellor, La Torture (Paris: Les Horizons Littéraires, 1949). Too selective: Malise Ruthven, Torture: The Grand Conspiracy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978). On Athens: DuBois, Torture and Truth. On torture in Latin America: Lawrence

174 Notes

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Weschler, A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990). On the use of torture in Ireland, Chicago and elsewhere: Conroy, Unspeakable. On torture in Iran: Darius M. Rejali, Torture and Modernity: Self, Society, and State in Modern Iran (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994). Ronald Crelinsten and Alex P. Schmid, eds, The Politics of Pain (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). David Cole, Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009); Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004); Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, ed. Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command (London: Allen Lane, 2004); Mayer, Dark Side. Recent popular histories of torture include Michael Otterman, American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007); Jennifer K. Harbury, Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); McCoy, Question. Prominent anthologies published in the wake of Abu Ghraib include Karen J. Greenberg, ed., The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sanford Levinson, ed., Torture: A Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); William F. Schulz, The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007); Phillips, None of Us; Andy Worthington, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2010). Paul Gronke et al., “U.S. Public Opinion on Torture, 2001-2009,” PS: Political Science & Politics 43 (3) (2010); Amy Zegart, “Controversy Dims as Public Opinion Shifts,” in Room for Debate: The New York Times. January 10, 2013. http:// www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/07/the-right-or-wrong-experiencefor-the-job/controversy-dims-as-public-opinion-shifts-5. The Washington Post, “Washington Post-ABC News Poll, December 11–14, 2014,” January 1, 2015. “https://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/12/16/ National-Politics/Polling/release_376.xml. Pal Ahluwalia, “Delivering Freedom: Australia’s Witnessing of Abu Ghraib,” Journal of Visual Culture 5 (1) (2006); W. L. Bennett, R. G. Lawrence, and S. Livingston, “None Dare Call It Torture: Indexing and the Limits of Press Independence in the Abu Ghraib Scandal,” Journal of Communication

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56 (3) (2006); Timothy M. Jones and Penelope Sheets, “Torture in the Eye of the Beholder: Social Identity, News Coverage, and Abu Ghraib,” Political Communication 26 (2009). 74 Alan M. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke, “Not Enough Official Torture in the World? The Circumstances in Which Torture Is Morally Justifiable,” University of San Francisco Law Review 39 (2005); “Tortured Responses (a Reply to Our Critics): Physically Persuading Suspects Is Morally Preferable to Allowing the Innocent to Be Murdered,” University of San Francisco Law Review 40 (2005); Torture: When the Unthinkable Is Morally Permissible (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007); Fritz Allhoff, “A Defense of Torture: Separation of Cases, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Moral Justification,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 19 (2) (2005). 75 Excellent demolitions of ethical torture abound. See, for instance, Jean Maria Arrigo, “A Utilitarian Argument against Torture Interrogation of Terrorists,” Science and Engineering Ethics 10 (3) (2004); Vittorio Bufacchi and Jean Maria Arrigo, “Torture, Terrorism and the State: A Refutation of the Ticking-Bomb Argument,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (3) (2006); Michael Plaxton, “Justifying Absolute Prohibitions on Torture as if Consequences Mattered,” in Warrior’s Dishonour: Barbarity, Morality and Torture in Modern Warfare, ed. George Kassimeris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); J. Jeremy Wisnewski, Understanding Torture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); J. Jeremy Wisnewski and R. D. Emerick, The Ethics of Torture (London: Continuum International, 2009); Anne O’Rourke, Vivek Chaudri, and Chris Nyland, “Torture, Slippery Slopes, Intellectual Apologists, and Ticking Bombs: An Australian Response to Bagaric and Clarke,” University of San Francisco Law Review 40 (2005). 76 On the broader immorality of torture, see Carlos Gonzalez Castresana, “Torture as a Greater Evil,” South Central Review 24 (1) (2007); Stanley Cohen, “Post-Moral Torture: From Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib,” Index on Censorship 34 (1) (2005); J. P. Reeder Jr, “What Kind of Person Could Be a Torturer?,” Journal of Religious Ethics 38 (1) (2010).

Chapter 1: Tortured Bodies 1 Kafka, “Penal Colony,” 126. 2 Ibid., 132. 3 Koestler, Darkness, 88, 90.

176 Notes 4 Coetzee, Barbarians, 5. 5 Ibid., 115. 6 “Dark Chamber,” 362. 7 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 8. 8 Ibid., 26. 9 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 253. 10 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 65. 11 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 5. 12 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc, 160. 13 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 34; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6. 14 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8. 15 Ibid., 83, 15. 16 Agamben, State of Exception, 1. 17 Franz Kafka, The Trial (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953 (1925)). 18 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18. 19 Ibid., 171. 20 Ibid., 159. 21 Ibid., 114–15. 22 Agamben, Exception, 3–4. 23 Kurnaz, Five Years, 198, 217. 24 Gregory, “Black Flag,” 414. 25 Ibid., 415. 26 Oliver, “Bodies,” 70. 27 See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 247. 28 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 155. 29 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 52–4. 30 Kurnaz, Five Years, 95. 31 Gilles Deleuze, “Ethology: Spinoza and Us,” in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 625. 32 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 5. 33 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The

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Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2. 34 Ibid., 6–8. 35 Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 57. For an excellent discussion of Tomkins’s model of affect, see Sedgwick and Frank’s introductory essay to that volume. 36 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 10. See the introduction to Ahmed’s book for more on the somewhat blurry distinctions she draws between affect and emotion. 37 Ibid., 4. 38 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 39 Kurnaz, Five Years, 164. 40 Begg, Enemy Combatant, 112. 41 Anna Gibbs, “Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect,” Australian Humanities Review 25 (March 2001): 1. 42 Lagouranis and Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh, 245. 43 Butler, Frames of War, 61. 44 Améry, Mind’s Limits, 35. 45 Jean Maria Arrigo and Stephanie Erin Brewer, “Places That Medical Ethics Can’t Find: Preliminary Observations on Why Health Professionals Fail to Stop Torture in Overseas Counterterrorism Operations,” in Interrogations, Forced Feedings, and the Role of Health Professionals: New Perspectives on International Human Rights, Humanitarian Law, and Ethics, ed. Ryan Goodman and Mindy Jane Roseman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 46 Tomkins, Shame, 180. 47 Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers, 1998). 48 Barry Buzan, “Will the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ Be the New Cold War?,” International Affairs 82 (6) (2006): 1102. 49 Ibid., 1104. 50 Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 114. 51 See David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Revised Edition (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998). 52 See, for instance, Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006). 53 Agamben, Exception, 14.

178 Notes 54 Brian Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 53. 55 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 33. 56 Ibid., 39. 57 Ibid., 43. 58 Butler, Frames of War, 47. 59 George W. Bush, “Transcript of President Bush’s Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Thursday Night, September 20, 2001.,” CNN.com. http://edition.cnn. com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/ 60 “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism” (2003). 61 Jackson, Writing, 1–2. 62 Ahmed, Emotion, 79. 63 Massumi, “Affective Fact,” 61. 64 Massumi, “Fear (the Spectrum Said),” positions: east asia cultures critique 13 (1) (2005). 65 Anker, Fictions of Dignity, 16. 66 Orwell, 1984, 245. 67 Danner, Torture and Truth, 27, 41.

Chapter 2: Reading Torture Lagouranis and Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh, 29; Falkoff, Poems, 32. My thanks to Penguin/Random House and Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency for permission to use this quote from Tony Lagouranis and to University of Iowa Press and Marc Falkoff of the Center for Constitutional Rights for permission to reprint “Death Poem” by Jumah al-Dossari here and in full later in the chapter. 2 Dawes, That the World May Know. See the chapter “Interrogation” for more on the challenges of language and human rights testimony. 3 Scarry, Body in Pain, 29. 4 Ibid., 4. 5 Anker, Fictions of Dignity, 30–1. 6 Rejali, Torture, 31. 7 Falkoff, Poems. 8 Mayer, Dark Side. 9 Cole, Torture Memos, 9. 10 Ibid., 21. 1

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11 Jay S. Bybee, “Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, August 1, 2002,” in Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable, ed. David Cole (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), 56. 12 Scarry, Body in Pain, 15. 13 Ahmed, Emotion, 23. 14 Bybee, “Bybee Memo,” 44. 15 Ahmed, Emotion, 28. 16 Ibid. 17 Bybee, “CIA Memo,” 49. 18 Ibid., 109. While the United States frequently claims that waterboarding was “reverse engineered” from the military Survival Evasion Response Escape (SERE) program, it actually descends from a long history of water torture—precisely those tortures the SERE program trained its participants to resist. See Rejali, Torture, 284–5. A painting of waterboarding, for instance, decorates one wall at Tuol Sleng, Pol Pot’s notorious torture centre in Cambodia. 19 International Committee of the Red Cross, “Treatment in CIA Custody.” 20 Bybee, “CIA Memo,” 123. 21 Ibid. 22 Améry, Mind’s Limits, 33. 23 Bybee, “CIA Memo,” 108. 24 Ibid., 118. 25 Rejali, Torture, 442. 26 Kurnaz, Five Years, 70. 27 Lagouranis and Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh, 95. 28 Orwell, 1984, 234. 29 Ibid., 235. 30 Ibid., 236. 31 Koestler, Darkness, 41. 32 Kurnaz, Five Years, 50. 33 Butler, Precarious Life, 77–8. 34 Kurnaz, Five Years, 167. 35 Begg, Enemy Combatant, 204. 36 Kurnaz, Five Years, 100. 37 Ibid., 99. 38 Begg, Enemy Combatant, 224. 39 Kurnaz, Five Years, 71. 40 Fittingly, the name for this force varies—sometimes it is also called the Internal Reaction Force, sometimes the Emergency Reaction Force. Former Guantánamo guard Eric Saar sets out the IRF process in some detail in Saar and Novak, Inside the Wire, 94–104.

180 Notes 41 Kurnaz, Five Years, 186. 42 Ibid., 116. 43 Lagouranis and Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh, 127. 44 Weschler, Miracle, 66. 45 Athey, “Colonial Scene,” 165. 46 Lagouranis and Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh, 93. 47 Mackey and Miller, Interrogator’s War, 289. 48 Lagouranis and Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh, 244. 49 Jean Maria Arrigo and Ray Bennett, “Organizational Supports for Abusive Interrogations in the ‘War on Terror’,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 13 (4) (2007). 50 See the summary of findings in Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Senate Torture Report.” 51 Lagouranis and Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh, 246. 52 Orwell, 1984, 169–70. 53 Ibid., 105. 54 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 399. 55 Orwell, 1984, 210, 211. 56 Ibid., 210. 57 Ibid., 201. 58 Gregg M. Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks, “Doctors and Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay,” New England Medical Journal 353 (1) (2005); Arrigo and Brewer, “Places That Medical Ethics Can’t Find.” 59 Adam Zagorin and Michael Duffy, “Interrogation Log: Detainee 063,” Time Magazine, June 20, 2005. www.time.com/time/2006/log/log.pdf. 60 Mackey and Miller, Interrogator’s War, 131. 61 Lagouranis and Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh, 161, 234–5. 62 Marc Falkoff, “Conspiracy to Commit Poetry: Empathetic Lawyering at Guantánamo Bay,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice 6 (1) (2007–8): 6–7. 63 Falkoff, Poems, 3. 64 Ibid., 4. 65 Ibid. 66 Erin Trapp, “The Enemy Combatant as Poet: The Politics of Writing in Poems from Guantánamo,” Postmodern Culture 21 (3) (2011). 67 Greg A. Mullins, “Atrocity, Literature, Criticism,” American Literary History 23 (1) (2011). 68 Begg reproduces a handful of poems in Enemy Combatant, presumably from memory.

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69 Joseph Pugliese, “Instrumental and Gratuitous Violence: The Torture and Death of Gul Rahman in the CIA Salt Pit,” Cultural Studies 27 (1) (2012). The files were only released under freedom of information laws and not voluntarily by the CIA. 70 Ibid., 87. 71 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 76, 78. 72 See Amnesty International, “Al-Dossari”; Worthington, Guantánamo Files, 134. 73 Guantánamo Files, 271. 74 Falkoff, Poems, 32. I am grateful to Marc Falkoff, the Center for Constitutional Rights and University of Iowa Press for permission to include the poem in full. 75 Butler, Frames of War, 62. 76 Falkoff, “Conspiracy to Commit Poetry,” 11, 12. 77 Poems, 59. 78 Ibid., 43. 79 Butler, Frames of War, 56. 80 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 34. 81 Scarry, Body in Pain, 35.

Chapter 3: Seeing Torture McClintock, “Paranoid,” 52; Standard Operating Procedure. Directed by Errol Morris. (Participant Productions, 2008); Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 190. My thanks to Duke University Press, Sony Pictures Classic, and Bloomsbury for the use of these quotes. 2 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 73. 3 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2005); Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989). 4 Magdalena Zolkos, “‘Un Petit Geste’: Affect and Silence in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in Traumatic Affect, ed. Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), 78. 5 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 29. 6 For more on the seeable, sayable, and sensible, see Marks, Skin of the Film, 31. 7 Butler, Frames of War, 87. Emphasis in original. 8 Ahmed, Emotion, 83. 9 A number of important works have been written on dirt, abjection, and disgust. 1

182 Notes Of particular influence on the argument presented here are Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966); William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 10 Ahmed, Emotion, 93. 11 See Butler, Frames of War; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003); “Regarding the Torture of Others,” The New York Times, May 23, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-ofothers.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm; Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 12 Standard Operating Procedure. Morris, 2008. 13 Alex Danchev, On Art and War and Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 174. 14 McClintock, “Paranoid,” 60. 15 Butler, Frames of War, xiii. 16 Along with the various official inquiries into the scandal, see Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 53, 57. 17 Butler, Frames of War, 86. 18 Images possess an outsized reputation for reliability. Much can be said about veracity and the production of images, particularly images of atrocity and suffering, however there is no space here to address these very large questions. 19 Anna Gibbs, “Horrified: Embodied Vision, Media Affect and the Images from Abu Ghraib,” in Interrogating the War on Terror: Interdiciplinary Perspectives, ed. Deborah Staines (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 130, 133. 20 Maria Angel, “Seeing Things: Image and Affect,” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2) (2009): 133–4. 21 Gibbs, “Horrified,” 130. 22 Ibid., 128. 23 England describes her reliance on medication in Gourevitch and Morris, Standard Operating Procedure, 276. 24 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 37. 25 Mark Harris, “Inside Mark Boal’s and Kathryn Bigelow’s Mad Dash to Make Zero Dark Thirty,” Vulture, December 9, 2012. http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/ mark-boal-kathryn-bigelow-on-zero-dark-thirty.html; Dexter Filkins, “Bin Laden, the Movie,” The New Yorker, December 17, 2012. http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2012/12/17/bin-laden-the-movie

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26 Unsurprisingly, critics have tended to focus on the ethics of the film’s representations, their accuracy or the CIA’s involvement in the production. See, for instance, Alex Gibney, “Zero Dark Thirty’s Wrong and Dangerous Conclusion,” Huffington Post, December 21, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-gibney/ zero-dark-thirty-torture_b_2345589.html; Glenn Greenwald, “Zero Dark Thirty: CIA Hagiography, Pernicious Propaganda,” The Guardian, December 15, 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirtycia-propaganda; Jane Mayer, “Zero Conscience in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’.” The New Yorker, December 12, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ zero-conscience-in-zero-dark-thirty; Slavoj Zizek, “Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood’s Gift to American Power,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable. At the time of writing, academic critique has been more limited, but no doubt more analysis is in progress and will emerge in due course. For the most part, existing material tends to focus on the film’s representational meaning, ethics or reception. See, for example, Breann Fallon, “Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Girard: The Fortification and Veneration of American Civil Religion in Film,” Literature & Aesthetics 24 (1) (2014); Marouf Hasian, “Zero Dark Thirty and the Critical Challenges Posed by Populist Postfeminism During the Global War on Terrorism,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 37 (4) (2013); Marouf A. Hasian, “Military Orientalism at the Cineplex: A Postcolonial Reading of Zero Dark Thirty,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 31 (5) (2014); Michelle C. Pautz, “Argo and Zero Dark Thirty: Film, Government, and Audiences,” PS: Political Science & Politics 48 (1) (2015); Agnieszka Piotrowska, “Zero Dark Thirty – ‘War Autism’ or a Lacanian Ethical Act?,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 12 (2) (2014); Younes Rashidi et al., “The Mediating Role of Cinema in Representation of Hard Power: Case Study: The Movie ‘Zero Dark Thirty’,” Research on Humanities and Social Sciences 14 (12) (2014). 27 The Battle of Algiers. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. (Rizzoli/Rialto Pictures, 1966). 28 Maj Walter A. Schrepel, “Paras and Centurions: Lessons Learned from the Battle of Algiers,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 11 (1) (2005); Amal Sedky Winter, “Battle of Algiers/Battle of Baghdad,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 11 (1) (2005). Nearly fifty years after its release, the film remains divisive in France for its depiction of military actions; see Benjamin Stora and Mary Stevens, “Still Fighting: The Battle of Algiers, Censorship and the ‘Memory Wars’,” Interventions 9 (3) (2007). Accounts of the critical commentary can be found in “How the Film Was Greeted,” Sight and Sound, June 2007; David Forgacs, “Italians in Algiers,” Interventions 9 (3) (2007). Some of the more interesting critiques concern the depiction of women, e.g. Danièle Djamila Amrane-Minne

184 Notes and Alistair Clarke, “Women at War: The Representation of Women in the Battle of Algiers,” Interventions 9 (3) (2007). 29 Michael T. Kaufman, “The World: Film Studies; What Does the Pentagon See in ‘Battle of Algiers’?,” New York Times, September 7, 2003. http://www.nytimes. com/2003/09/07/weekinreview/the-world-film-studies-what-does-the-pentagonsee-in-battle-of-algiers.html 30 Forgacs, “Italians in Algiers,” 362. On the double negative technique Pontecorvo used to achieve the grainy, high contrast final effect, see Emily Tomlinson, “Rebirth in Sorrow: La Bataille d’Alger,” French Studies 58 (3) (2004): 363. 31 Nicholas Harrison, “Pontocorvo’s ‘Documentary’ Aesthetic,” Interventions 9 (3) (2007): 390. 32 “An Interview with Saadi Yacef,” Interventions 9 (3) (2007): 407. 33 For some careful and quite brilliant reflections on this famous scene, see Nancy Virtue, “Poaching within the System: Gillo Pontecorvo’s Tactical Aesthetics in the Battle of Algiers,” Screen 55 (3) (2014). 34 Robert Burgoyne, “The Violated Body: Affective Experience and Somatic Intensity in Zero Dark Thirty,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 247. 35 Tomlinson, “Rebirth in Sorrow,” 365. 36 “Behind every link in Mathieu’s organizational chart, which allows the French to establish the relations among insurgents and crush the resistance, are inhumane acts, in which men are beaten, electrocuted, held under water until they believe they are drowning, burned, or hung like meat until the muscles pull away from the bones. Every name, every line on the chart records this brutal process. Even more inhumane, of course, are the acts of torture not represented—the indiscriminate torture of innocents that reveals no intelligence and hence finds no place on the chart.” Mark Parker, “The Battle of Algiers (La Battaglia Di Algeri),” Film Quarterly 60 (4) (2007): 64. 37 Anne Rutherford, What Makes a Film Tick? Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic Innervation (Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 29–30. 38 Tomlinson, “Rebirth in Sorrow,” 366. 39 Marks, Skin of the Film, 30. 40 The only concession to the state’s eventual rejection of torture occurs in a brief snippet of a newly elected President Obama condemning the practice. Passing papers around a table, the agents barely register the moment. 41 David Johnston and Charlie Savage, “Obama Reluctant to Look into Bush Programs” New York Times, January 11, 2009. http://www.nytimes. com/2009/01/12/us/politics/12inquire.html?pagewanted=all 42 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 89, 221.

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43 Incendies. Directed by Denis Villeneuve (Montreal, Canada: Sony Pictures Classic, 2010). The play is Wajdi Mouawad, Scorched [Incendies], trans. Linda Gaboriau (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009). While the plot of both is very similar and Mouawad consulted on the script for the film, I am not concerned here with the translation from stage to screen or script to screenplay. If the relationship between Mouawad’s play and the film is of interest, see Mary Jean Green, “Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies: From Word to Image,” Quebec Studies 54 (2012). With regard to history, the film draws on the events of the Lebanese civil war but is at pains not to specify a setting. Similarly, it draws on the story of former female militant Soha Bechara, but only emblematically. See Olivia Snaije, “Seeing Yourself Re-Made as Fiction,” The Daily Star (online) 2011. http://www.dailystar.com.lb/ Culture/Film/2011/Feb-02/120808-seeing-yourself-re-made-as-fiction.ashx 44 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 90. 45 Ibid., 92. 46 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 98. 47 Ibid., 52. 48 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 90. 49 Ibid., 207. 50 Marco Abel, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Criticism after Representation (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 2007), 153. 51 See Zolkos, “Un Petit Geste,” 78. Also the essay “Notes on Gesture” in Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 79. 52 Abel, Violent Affect, 136. 53 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 99. 54 Zolkos, “Un Petit Geste,” 72. 55 Bennett, Empathic Vision, 7.

Chapter 4: Writing Trauma 1

Marcelle Freiman, “Keeping Interest Alive: Emotion and Affect in Creative Writing,” in Margins and Mainstreams: Refereed conference papers of the 14th Annual AAWP Conference (2009), 5, 7. 2 Massumi, Parables, 31. 3 Ibid., 5. 4 Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 88. 5 Felman and Laub, Testimony, 114. 6 Dawes, That the World May Know, 9.

186 Notes 7 Anker, Fictions of Dignity, 3–4. 8 Felman and Laub, Testimony, 69. 9 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 10 Dawes, Evil Men, 30. 11 Felman and Laub, Testimony, 199. 12 Ibid., 108. 13 Ibid., 278. 14 Agamben, Remnants, 36. 15 Ibid., 157. 16 Elspeth Probyn, “Writing Shame,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 82. 17 Ibid., 86. 18 Ibid., 73. Peter Wise has done similar work, theorizing the relation between writing and melancholy. Perhaps similar lines of flight occur along other affects— anger and fear, love and joy, disgust and excitement—but also between them, a rhizomic interplay of affective intensities in the act of writing. Peter Wise, “Writing, Creativity and the World: Possibilities of Articulation,” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 1 (2) (2004). 19 See the chapters ‘Burnout’ and ‘Storytelling’ in Dawes, That the World May Know. 20 I am most grateful to Jean Maria Arrigo of the Project for Ethics and Art in Testimony for allowing me to view her privately held correspondence, unpublished and thus confidential, with an anonymous military intelligence liaison officer. Additional copies of selected documents are held by the Hoover Intelligence Archive and Bancroft Library. Due to the sensitive nature of the documents, I have not quoted from the material directly. 21 Lagouranis and Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh; Standard Operating Procedure, Morris. 2008; Your Neighbour’s Son. Directed by Jorgen Flindt Pedersen (Greece: Ebbe Preisler Film/TV aps, 1982). 22 Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 239. 23 Ibid., 238. 24 Ibid., 293. 25 Todd May, “When Is a Deleuzian Becoming?,” Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2) (2003). 26 Mayer, Dark Side, 162. 27 David J. Morris, “Empires of the Mind: SERE, Guantánamo, and the Legacies of Torture,” Virginia Quarterly Review 85 (1) (2009): 212, 213, 221, 219, 220. 28 “We Are All Torturers Now,” Mark Danner wrote in a 2005 New York Times article, reprinted in Mark Danner, Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War

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(New York: Nation Books, 2009), 416–19. Critiquing Danner, Timothy KaufmanOsborn argues that the complex structure of the national security institutions and policy in the US makes it conceptually problematic to assert widespread complicity in torture: Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, “‘We Are All Torturers Now’: Accountability after Abu Ghraib,” Theory & Event 11 (2) (2008). 29 Or, as the memos would have it, enhanced interrogation on the interrogators. 30 Rejali, Torture, 524. 31 Ibid., 525. 32 Coetzee, “Dark Chamber,” 364. 33 Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 4 vols. (New York and London: Springer & Tavistock, 1963–92), 2: 342. 34 Anna Gibbs, “Panic! Affect Contagion, Mimesis and Suggestion in the Social Field,” Cultural Studies Review 14 (2) (2008): 135. 35 Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 78. 36 Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 48. 37 Anna Gibbs, “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony and Mimetic Communication,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 196. 38 Probyn, “Writing Shame,” 86. 39 Gibbs, “After Affect,” 199. 40 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 78. 41 Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1 (New York: The New Press, 1997), 284. 42 Dawes, Evil Men, xii. 43 Ibid., 216. 44 Agamben, Remnants, 164.

Chapter 5: Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma 1 2

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996), 138; Agamben, Remnants, 162. My thanks to Bloomsbury and to Zone Books. Respectively: Shelley Hornstein, “Fugitive Places,” Art Journal 59 (1) (2000); Erin Manning, “Beyond Accommodation: National Space and Recalcitrant Bodies,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 25 (1) (2000); Barbara L. Estrin, “Ending in the Middle: Revisioning Adoption in Binjamin Wilkomirski’s ‘Fragments’ and

188 Notes Anne Michaels’s ‘Fugitive Pieces’,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21 (2) (2002); Andrea Doucet, “‘From Her Side of the Gossamer Wall(s)’: Reflexivity and Relational Knowing,” Qualitative Sociology 31 (1) (2008). 3 Respectively: Donna Coffey, “Blood and Soil in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces: The Pastoral in Holocaust Literature,” Modern Fiction Studies 53 (1) (2007); Susan Gubar, “Empathic Identification in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces: Masculinity and Poetry after Auschwitz,” Signs 28 (1) (2002); Marita Grimwood, “Postmemorial Positionings: Reading and Writing after the Holocaust in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces,” Canadian Jewish Studies 11 (2003); Dalia Kandiyoti, “‘Our Foothold in Buried Worlds’: Place in Holocaust Consciousness and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces,” Contemporary Literature 45 (2) (2004); Merle Williams and Stefan Polatinsky, “Writing at Its Limits: Trauma Theory in Relation to Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces,” English Studies in Africa 52 (1) (2009). 4 Meira Cook, “At the Membrane of Language and Silence: Metaphor and Memory in Fugitive Pieces,” Canadian Literature 164 (2000). 5 Michaels, Fugitive. Since this chapter contains a great many quotes from the novel, I have included page numbers in the text for ease of reference. 6 Bettina Arnold, “Past as Propaganda: Totalitarian Archaeology in Nazi Germany,” in Histories of Archaeology: A Reader in the History of Archaeology, ed. Tim Murray and Christopher Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131. 7 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 76. 8 J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 9 Caruth, Trauma, 153. 10 Or at least most chapter titles repeat. Three from the first part are not in the second, and one—“The Way Station”—appears at the end of the book, whereas it occurs in the middle of the first part. For more discussion of the structural echoes of the novel, see Gubar, “Empathic Identification,” 266. 11 Williams and Polatinsky, “Writing at Its Limits,” 6. 12 Cook, “Membrane,” 16. 13 Kandiyoti, “Buried Worlds,” 318. Leora Goldberg, “The Miraculous Story of the Jews of Zakynthos,” The Jerusalem Post, December 13, 2009. http://www.jpost. com/JewishWorld/Article.aspx?id=162994 14 Cook, “Membrane,” 16. 15 Williams and Polatinsky, “Writing at Its Limits,” 7. 16 Cook, “Membrane,” 16. 17 Coffey, “Blood and Soil,” 33. 18 Grimwood, “Postmemorial Positionings,” 123. 19 Ibid.

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20 Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 178. 21 Agamben, Remnants, 151. 22 Ibid., 130. 23 Ibid., 145. 24 Gubar, “Empathic Identification,” 256–7. 25 George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 99. 26 Ibid., 96. 27 Williams and Polatinsky, “Writing at Its Limits,” 11. 28 Gubar, “Empathic Identification,” 272. 29 Cited in Grimwood, “Postmemorial Positionings,” 124. 30 Agamben, Remnants, 147–8.

Chapter 6: Torturous Affect 1 Améry, Mind’s Limits, 33. 2 Ibid. 3 Scarry, Body in Pain, 4. 4 Ibid., 13. 5 Anker, Fictions of Dignity, 30. 6 Massumi, Parables, 3. 7 Deleuze discusses the relationship between repetition and singularity in detail in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004). 8 Massumi, Parables, 35. 9 Améry, Mind’s Limits, 36. 10 Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 34. 11 Brennan, Transmission, 19. 12 Améry, Mind’s Limits, 33. 13 Tomkins, Shame, 47, 53–4. 14 Brennan, Transmission, 167. 15 Massumi, Parables, 75, 97. 16 Ahmed, Emotion, 27. 17 Ibid., 28. 18 Améry, Mind’s Limits, 36. 19 Ibid., 34. 20 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 21 LaCapra, Writing History, 21.

190 Notes 22 Ahmed, Emotion, 34. 23 Anker offers a particularly concise critique along these lines. See Fictions of Dignity, 30. 24 Ahmed, Emotion, 33. 25 Massumi, Parables, 30. 26 In this section, bracketed page numbers refer to Koestler, Arrival. 27 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 58. 28 Benjamin, Illuminations. For an eloquent reflection on the relevant section of Benjamin’s essay and the wider role of silence in his life and work, see Shoshana Felman, “Benjamin’s Silence,” Critical Inquiry 25 (2) (1999). On the rise of the term PTSD, see Nigel C. Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 50. For a detailed account of the genealogy of trauma, see Leys, Trauma. 29 LaCapra, Writing History, 21. 30 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 31 Massumi, Semblance, 122. 32 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 33 Page numbers in parentheses in the following section refer to this edition of Orpheus Lost. 34 In this sense, Hospital’s book has an affinity with the film Incendies, discussed in Chapter 3. Exploring relations between the Orpheus myth and torture would be an interesting avenue of research, but is outside the scope of this book. 35 LaCapra, Writing History, 42. 36 Massumi, Semblance, 17. 37 Ibid., 15–16. 38 Ibid., 61. 39 Bolaño, Distant Star. 40 Améry, Mind’s Limits, 36. 41 Massumi, Semblance, 24. 42 Améry, Mind’s Limits, 33. 43 Massumi, Semblance, 176. 44 Agamben, Potentialities, 77.

Conclusion: Speaking Beyond Words 1

Even before his inauguration, President Obama described his “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” On August 30, 2012, Attorney-General Eric Holder announced the closure of the last two outstanding

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investigations into detainee deaths in custody. It now appears almost certain that no senior officials will be held accountable for the multitude of tortures and deaths that occurred between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009. See Eric Holder, “Statement of Attorney General Eric Holder on Closure of Investigation into the Interrogation of Certain Detainees, 30 August 2012,” ed. United States Department of Justice (Washington, D.C. 2012); Glenn Greenwald, “Obama’s Justice Department Grants Final Immunity to Bush’s CIA Torturers,” in Glenn Greenwald on Security and Liberty, August 31, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2012/aug/31/obama-justice-department-immunity-bush-ciatorturer; Johnston and Savage, “Obama Reluctant to Look into Bush Programs.” 2 By January 2015 its population had fallen to 122 detainees, from a peak of 774, with the suicide of detainee-poet Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, whose words are the epigraph to this book. Just seven detainees were convicted by military commissions, most in plea bargains. Another six await death penalty trials, including the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. The rest were released without charge or transferred to the custody of other governments. The Miami Herald, “By the Numbers,” The Miami Herald, February 21, 2013. http://www.miamiherald.com/2007/11/27/v-fullstory/322461/by-thenumbers.html; Margaret Brennan, “5 More Detainees Transferred from Guantánamo,” CBS News Online, January 15, 2015. http://www.cbsnews.com/ news/5-more-detainees-transferred-from-Guantanamo/ 3 In his first inaugural address, President Obama described a “war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” “Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address,” The New York Times, January 20, 2009. http://www.nytimes. com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html?pagewanted=all 4 Dawes’s Evil Men is a more profound meditation on these paradoxes than I can do justice to here. For a succinct account of each, see the book’s preface. 5 Felman and Laub, Testimony, 5.

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Index 24 (TV series) 7, 14, 23 Abel, Marco 94–5 abjection 77 absence 68, 104–5, 122–3, 128–9, 135–6, 150 abstraction 31–2, 81, 110, 113, 141, 144, 155 Abu Ghraib 1–2, 14, 22, 33, 45–6, 52, 110, 162 chronology of photographs 80–1 perpetrators 15, 46, 85 photographs 5, 6, 13, 37, 59, 60, 76, 77–83, 97, 160 soldier experiences 79, 116 tortured bodies 20, 155 actual and virtual, see virtual and actual Adorno, Theodor 71 aesthetics 101, 103, 139, 142, 152, 160–1 in The Battle of Algiers 85–6, 89 detainee poetry 67, 68, 71 in Fugitive Pieces 119–20, 127, 132 in Incendies 90–3, 96–8 images and film 76, 94, 80–98 in Orpheus Lost 152–3 in Standard Operating Procedure 80, 82–3 as testimony 119–20, 132, 134, 135–6 torture 11, 16–17, 20–1, 59 and trauma 127 and violence 93 affect 10, 17, 19, 20, 28, 34–40, 113, 157, 161 amplification 38, 77, 88 atmosphere 45, 86 autonomy of 36, 140 biological 36–7 cognition 81, 141 contagion 38–9, 45, 164 definition 35–7

distinction from emotion, sensation, feeling 36 exploitation of 63, 70–1, 161 facticity 42 as force of relation 35 and images 75, 77–83, 86–8 indeterminacy of 83, 112, 132 lack of display 39 and language 122 and narrative 156 and pain 72 passage of 35, 155 and poetry 70–2 practice of reading 120, 123–4, 127, 136 role in torture 18, 58, 63 scripts 40 theories of 18, 36–7 and time 37, 40, 100, 104, 113–15, 145–7, 155–6, 163–5 transmission 108 veracity 83–9 and writing 21, 99–102 see also between-ness; excess of affect; more-than; traumatic affect; writing trauma affective resonance 21, 38, 40, 82–3, 88, 96, 99–100, 112 in Fugitive Pieces 125, 127, 131, 135–6 affective violence 91, 95 Afghanistan 2, 5, 32, 43, 44, 59, 61, 162 Agamben, Giorgio 17, 29–34, 41, 114, 117, 162 criticism of Felman 105–6, 120, 153 critique 31 testimony 119, 130–1, 135–6 Ahmed, Sara 18, 36–7, 44, 148 emotion vs affect 177 n.36 on disgust 77–8 pain 54, 144, 147 sociality of emotions 36–7

210 Index al-Dossari, Jumah 49, 68–70, 72 Algeria 12, 13, 62, 83–9 al-Haj, Sami 71 Alleg, Henri 12 allegory 12, 76, 105, 123, 123, 129, 152 al-Noaimi 70 al-Qaeda 5, 32, 42, 43, 52 Améry, Jean 18, 22, 150, 164 pain 57, 137–9, 143, 156 on torturer 39, 141 trauma 145–6, 155 Amnesty International 5, 12, 103, 151 Angel, Maria 81 anger 36, 38, 161 anguish 36, 84, 109 Anker, Elizabeth S. 16, 67, 103, 138, 190 n.23 Argentina 13, 59, 62 Aristotle 10 Arrigo, Jean Maria 39, 63, 186 n.20 assassination by drone 162 in Incendies 91, 93 assemblage 64, 101–2, 110, 115 asylum seekers 31, 163 Athey, Stephanie 7, 9, 16 Auschwitz 8, 117 Adorno and poetry 71 authoritarianism 10 Bagram Air Base 1, 33, 37, 43, 112 bare life 30, 32–3, 43, 61, 63, 106 and poetry 69–70 Battle of Algiers,The 13, 21, 76, 83–9, 91, 95, 97, 116 aesthetics 84–5 affect in 86 critical commentary 183 n.28 Pentagon screening 84 role of artifice 85 torture and narrative 89 torture sequence 86–8 becoming 35, 108, 140, 146, 153, 159 becoming-torturer 108–10, 112, 116, 145 Begg, Moazzam 7, 38, 60–1 Benjamin, Walter 68, 126, 129, 148–9, 190 n.28

Bennett, Jill 83, 97 between-ness 72, 108, 139, 145, 154, 155 affect as 35, 100, 110, 141 in Fugitive Pieces 126–7, 131–2, 135–6 see also affect; relation Bigelow, Kathryn 14, 83, 97 bin Laden, Osama 14, 42, 84 biometrics 163 biopolitics 37, 41, 58, 94, 107, 110–11, 152, 157, 164 Abu Ghraib 20, 32, 37 affect 45–7, 51, 71, 112, 160 control 28, 29, 34, 42, 45, 71 violence 162–3 see also biopower; power; sovereignty biopower 17, 63, 65–6, 72, 116–17, 160 and governance 29 to make survive 33, 47, 59, 160 resistance to 106 and threat 42 and torture 32–3, 45–7, 56 see also biopolitics; power; sovereignty bios (biological life) 30 black sites, see under CIA Boal, Mark 83 body 2 8, 9, 17, 27, 28, 34–40, 77–8, 95, 136, 142–3, 163–5 in Arrival and Departure 148–50 change in 112–13, 115 composition 34, 108 fluidity 19, 35, 138, 139–41, 145, 147 in Fugitive Pieces 125, 127, 134, 136 images 15 and incorporeality 35, 146 indeterminacy 100 reading 127, 159–61 relation 35, 62, 110 and sovereign power 20, 27–8, 29–34, 37, 43, 53, 59, 62, 70–3, 110, 115, 164 surface of 35, 37, 39, 77, 145 threat 43–5 see also affect; pain; tortured body; trauma Bolaño, Roberto, Distant Star 155 Bourgoyne, Robert 85 brainwashing 14, 109 Brennan, Teresa 113, 142–3

Index pain 143 bureaucracy 65, 68 Bush, George W. 1, 25, 44, 82, 162 Administration of 5, 14, 32, 44, 45, 46, 51–8 Butler, Judith 18, 33, 39, 43, 60, 77–80 detainee poetry 70 Buzan, Barry 40–1 Bybee, Jay 52, 67 Bybee Memo, see under Torture Memos Campbell, David 41 camps 31–4, 40, 63, 66–8 in Fugitive Pieces 126, 129, 133 Nazi 17, 24, 31, 33, 104 war on terror 7, 8, 17, 24, 40, 46, 64, 110 Camus, Albert 8, 104–5 Carle, Glenn 7 Caruth, Cathy 19, 104, 124, 127, 146, 148, 149 Chomsky, Noam 5, 13 Christian iconography 11 CIA 2, 4, 5, 13, 14–15, 23, 52, 62–3, 65, 109, 162 black sites 1, 33, 37, 43, 59, 67–8, 112, 162, 167 n.10 involvement in Zero Dark Thirty 83–4, 183 n.26 Kubark manual 39, 61, 109 see also juridicide; Rahman, Gul; Salt Pit, CIA black site CIA Torture Memo, see under Torture Memos citizenship 10, 27 close-up in cinema 86–8, 90, 93, 94, 96 Coetzee, J. M. 6, 12, 19, 99 “Into the Dark Chamber” 10, 118 Waiting for the Barbarians 27, 28, 46, 60 Cold War 6, 8, 41 Cole, David 53 Combatant Status Review Tribunals 32, 57 contagion 112, 159 torture as 5, 13–15, 62–4, 84, 159 see under affect contempt 38, 73, 102, 114, 153, 155, 161

211

control, see under biopower Convention Against Torture 2–3, 12, 13, 53, 57, 162 Cook, Meira 120–1, 127–8 courts martial 5, 162 creative writing 19, 21, 37 99, 100–2, 111–15, 161, 186 n.18 Danchev, Alex 79, 103 Danner, Mark 186 n.28 Dante 11 Dawes, James 6, 16, 103–4, 115–16, 191 n.4 death 31, 33, 155 in “In the Penal Colony” 25–6 torture 29, 37, 39, 57, 59, 67–8, Torture Memos 53, 55–7 witnessing 119, 130–1, 135–6 deconstruction 19, 123, 146 Deleuze, Gilles 18, 37, 63, 75, 101, 108, 144, 146, 189 n.7 affection-image 89, 92 and body 34–5 crystal-image 92 faciality 75, 91 images 76, 94 time-image 92 de Man, Paul 123 de Sade, Marquis 11–12 desire 63, 71 Detainee 063, interrogation log 65 detainees 17, 32, 46, 65, 167 n.10 survival of 57–8 see also poetry; tortured bodies; survival discipline 12, 17, 28, 29, 59 disembodiment 151–2 disgust 36, 77–8, 181 n.9 Abu Ghraib photographs 73, 77–8, 82, 89, 97–8 homosexuality 77 torture 18, 20, 38, 73, 141, 145, 153, 155, 161 writing 100, 102, 107, 110, 114 dissociation 152–3 Dost, Abdurraheem Muslim 66 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 12 drones 22, 65, 162

212 Index emotion 36, 70–1, 97, 143 relation to language 144 sociality of 36–7 see also affect; sensation encounter 21, 83, 86, 101–2, 117, 159 bodies in 35–8, 108, 112, 113–14, 115, 139–41, 142, 144 disgusting objects 77 of ideas 17 potential in 140–1 textual 21, 22, 106, 112, 116, 124, 127 torture 18, 20, 34, 40, 51, 110 violence 34, 38, 155 England, Lynndie 15, 78–9, 81–2, 107 enhanced interrogation 2, 40, 52, 162, 187 n.29 Enlightenment 11, 59 ethics 78–9, 102, 103, 105, 107, 115–17, 164 deconstruction theory 123 and torture 23–4 Europe 10–12, 29 event 44, 80, 101–2, 139–41, 146–7, 154–5, 163–5 affect 81 duration 40, 108, 114, 146 intensity 81, 101, 114, 116, 139–41, 142, 155 subjectivity 142 witnessing 133–4 see also traumatic event excess of affect 36, 47, 63, 70–3, 82, 129, 160 experience 2, 6, 8, 10, 19, 21, 94, 141–5, 147 affectivity of 19, 21, 36–7, 45, 141, 163–4 fragmentation 147 in Fugitive Pieces 122, 125, 134–5 images 75, 77, 81, 116–17 intensity of 73 and language 16, 50–1, 65, 137–8 in literary testimony 6, 9, 105, 106–7 mediatized trauma 15–16, 43 relation to 142 of torture 3, 10, 17, 18, 20, 40, 55, 72, 104, 117, 137 written over by power 64–6 see under affect; pain; time

expression, written 21, 99, 100–1, 112–13, 119–20, 138–9, 154–6, 159–60 eyewitness 104–5, 119 faciality aesthetic and narrative 92 cinematic techniques 91–2 face-to-face encounter 95 literature 98 torture 89–97 trauma 95, 96, 98 writing 139 fear 36, 73, 111–12 affective modulation of 5, 43, 45, 47, 60, 71 histories and economies of 41, 44–5 in Nineteen Eighty-Four 26–7 torture 18, 20, 37–8, 57–8, 72–3, 102, 114, 153, 155, 160–1 and writing 112 see also terror; war on terror feeling 36 Feinstein, Diane 3 Felman, Shoshana 19, 103–6, 120–32, 163 fiction public discourse of torture 7 writers of 99, 107 Foucault, Michel 17, 28, 29–31, 33 Discipline and Punish 17, 33, 58–9, 60 ethics 115 frame 79–80, 82, 85–6 France 12, 13, 84 Freiman, Marcelle 99–100 Fugitive Pieces 21, 139, 149, 154, 156, 161 aesthetics in 119–20, 127, 132 affective resonance 125, 127, 131, 135–6 archaeology 121–2, 126, 127–30, 136 Ben and Jakob relation 126–7, 128–9 between-ness in 126–7, 131–2, 135–6 body 125, 127, 134, 136 camps 126, 129, 133 criticism 120–1, 127–8 echoes, recursivity and repetition 121, 126, 127, 130 experience 122, 125, 134–5 language 122, 129–30, 131–2 limits of knowledge 124–5, 129

Index memoir 121, 129 memory 119–20, 126, 128–9 narrative structure 121–3, 125–6, 188 n.10 poetics of witnessing 130–6 problem with deconstructive readings 123–4 silence 122–3 style 120–1, 123 subjects, objects and experience 122, 125, 130–1, 134–5 testimony 119–20, 130–1, 134–6 themes 122–3 time 121–3 trauma aesthetic and affect 119–20, 123–4, 125, 127, 131–2, 135–6 see under aesthetics; between-ness; memoir; silence; trauma futurity 42–4, 55, 100–2 see also threat; time gag 95, 157 gaze 37–8, 79, 85, 91, 95–6, 106, 116 gesture 95, 128, 130, 140 affective 19, 22, 72, 75–6, 107, 114–15, 116–17, 120, 131, 135–6, 147, 155–7 and disgust 78 see under affect; literary testimony Gibbs, Anna 38, 81, 112–14 Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson 16 Gonzales, Alberto R. 52 governmentality 28, 42, 46, 59 see also biopolitics; biopower Graner, Charles 15 Great Britain 1, 12 Greece 13, 59, 169 n.30 Greece, Ancient 10–11 Gregg, Melissa 35, 36 Gregory, Derek 32 Grey, Stephen 23 Guantánamo 6, 17, 42, 65, 81, 103 affectivity 110, 112 Camp Delta 61 Camp X-Ray 1, 59–61 closing of 162, 191 n.2 experience of detainees 5, 20, 32, 60, 62, 65, 66–72, 94, 155, 164

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law 32, 33–4, 57, 65 torture at 1, 37–8, 43 see also Poems from Guantánamo; spaces of exception Guattari, Félix 18, 37, 63, 75, 101, 108 Gubar, Susan 131, 134–5 Harman, Sabrina 15, 75, 110 hegemony, United States 41 Hicks, David 7 Holocaust 19, 24, 103, 119, 120, 127, 133, 134–5 studies of 8 witnesses 106 Homeland Security Advisory Spectrum 45 homo sacer 30–2 horror 5, 81, 82, 128, 155 Hospital, Janette Turner 8, 22 Orpheus Lost 150–3, 154, 190 n.34 Hugo, Victor 12 humanitarianism 2, 6, 8, 9 human rights bestselling fiction 8 laws 13, 29, 32, 42, 46, 57, 164 liberal subject 6, 8, 28, 46, 67, 138 literary studies 6, 9, 16, 27, 67, 103, 160, 168 n.11 narrative 6, 71–2, 178 n.2 paradoxes of 16–17, 107, 163 role of literature in codification 6 testimony 2, 5, 56, 71 working in 2, 163 identity 16, 108 national security 41 training torturers 15 image(s) and the body 75 Camp X-Ray 60 effect of context 79–81 as evidence 80–1, 182 n.18 power 79 relation to narrative 79–82 relation to words 76 sense-making 75–6, 78, 80–1, 135 September 11 15, 41 theory of 75–6, 81, 154–5

214 Index torture 20–1, 59–60, 75, 77–83, 86, 88, 97–8, 114, 115–16, 160 see under Abu Ghraib; affect; Deleuze, Gilles; spectacle immigration detention centers, Australia 31 Incendies 21, 76–7, 89–97, 116, 190 n.34 narrative structure 91 play vs film 185 n.43 rape as torture 93–5, 97 silence 90 trauma and narrative 90 see under image(s); trauma Inquisition, use of torture 11 intelligence, state 14, 44 intensity 64, 102, 113 as affect 18, 20, 101, 106, 108, 113, 114–15, 139–40, 142, 159 body in encounter 35–7 literary 119–20, 124, 127, 128, 131, 132, 135–6 pain 138 produced by images 75, 79, 82–3, 86–7, 88, 93, 97–8 torture 38–40, 50, 73, 88, 160–1 trauma 132 writing 102, 106, 113–14 see also affect International Committee for the Red Cross 5, 103 interrogation 15, 38–9, 52–3, 57, 64–5, 108–9 interrogators 15, 34, 40, 61, 62, 65, 109 Iraq 2, 5, 43, 44, 61, 162 Jackson, Richard 41, 44 juridicide 68 justice 26, 69–70, 159, 163 and literature 10, 103–4, 115 Kafka, Franz 12, 19, 102, 116 “In the Penal Colony” 25–6, 28, 33, 45–6, 79, 108, 153 The Trial 30–1, 32 Kaplan, E. Ann 15 Koestler, Arthur 12, 19, 22, 105 Arrival and Departure 22, 148–50

Darkness at Noon 26–7, 28, 46, 58, 148, 149, 153 Kristeva, Julia 77 Kurnaz, Murat 7, 32, 33, 58, 59–61, 62, 65 LaCapra, Dominick 19, 146, 149, 153 Lagouranis, Tony 7, 38–9, 49, 58, 62–3, 107, 115 Langbein, John 22 language beyond limits of 3, 88, 106, 114, 119–20, 125, 128–30, 131–6, 139, 155–6, 163–5 and the body 100 and experience 16–17, 49–51, 164–5 failure of 51, 71, 75, 97–8, 132, 137–9, 144, 146–50, 156, 159–61 and images 76, 81, 83, 98 law and 2, 52–6 power 44, 68 relation to torture 2–4, 8–9, 16–18, 27–8, 49–51, 71, 99–102, 115–17 as site of violence 122, 133–4 see also gesture; image(s); literary testimony; pain Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah 75–6 Latif, Adnan Farhan Abdul 70 Latin America 12, 13, 41 Laub, Dori 19, 103, 120, 132 law 78–9 and literature 115 suspension of 27, 31, 56–7, 60 torture 2–3, 10–12, 17, 25, 52 see also human rights; language; sovereignty; state of exception Levi, Primo 8, 104–5 Levinas, Emmanuel 116 Leys, Ruth 19, 190 n.28 liberalism 29, 41 literary testimony 2, 6, 8, 9, 18, 21, 102, 103–7, 119, 130–3 aesthetics 105, 119–20, 153 and affect 22, 98, 105–6, 114, 123–4, 139, 147 belated witness 105 beyond words 22, 106, 114, 119–20, 128, 135–6, 139, 156, 163–5

Index gestural 19, 21–2, 72, 75–6, 96, 98, 114, 116–17, 127, 130, 139, 147, 155–7, 159–61, 163–5 paradox of 104, 114, 115–17, 128, 130–1, 132, 136, 154, 159–61 reader of 9, 105, 123–4, 129, 130, 131, 135–6 see also affect; gesture; testimony; trauma; writing Luckhurst, Roger 78–9 Mackey, Chris 7, 14, 62 Marks, Laura 75, 181 n.6 Massumi, Brian 35–7, 42, 44–5, 148 on the body 100, 142 event 140 language 149 semblance 154, 156–7, 161, 164–5 sensation and emotion 143–4 Mayer, Jane 7, 23, 83–4, 109 McClintock, Anne 75, 79 McGill Pain Questionnaire 49 memoir 7, 20, 72, 58–66, 98, 103 in Fugitive Pieces 121, 129 US military vetting of 7 memory 92, 101, 104, 122, 124, 133, 136, 147 metaphor 127, 137, 154, 160 Michaels, Anne 21, 119–20, 123, 127–8, 132, 134–5, 149, 153 see also Fugitive Pieces military 14 translation of poetry 66–7 Miller, J. Hillis 123 mimesis 112, 114 Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh 1, 52 monstering 62 Moore, Alexandra Schultheis 16 more-than 141, 143, 155, 157 see also affect; relation Morris, David J. 109 Morris, Errol 15, 20, 78, 83, 97 Mouawad, Wadji 89–90, 185 n.43 narrative 20, 83, 89, 117, 148, 159, 160 fragmentation 86, 146–8, 153, 157, 164 impact on affectivity of images 82–3

215

in Incendies 89–97 relation to images 75–6, 80–2 selfhood 9 truth claims 84 see also literary testimony; trauma Nazi Germany 1, 12, 31, 57, 104 language 133–4 rewriting history 121–2 torture techniques 13, 24 neo-realist cinema 85, 92 Northern Ireland 12, 62 novel human rights 6, 9 torture 8–9, 10, 19–20 war on terror and September 11 7, 172 n.52 Obama, Barack 65, 89, 162–3, 190 n.1, 191 n.3 Administration of 1, 162 release of Torture Memos 52 Zero Dark Thirty 184 n.40 Oedipus (plays) 10–11 ontology 139, 142–3 Orpheus myth 91, 94, 96, 153, 190 n.34 Orwell, George 12, 19, 26, 33, 105–17 Nineteen Eighty-Four 12, 20, 26, 28, 46, 58, 63–4 over-signification 152–3 pain 8, 18, 20, 26, 27, 38, 40, 50, 73, 143–5, 160 affectivity of 38, 72, 143–5, 147, 155, 156–7, 160–1 as attachment 145 contingency of 54–5, 72, 161 definition of torture 2–4 duration 54–5 as event 144 human rights 50 intentionality 54–5 language 8, 22, 49–51, 53–5, 57, 71, 72, 117, 137–8, 139, 151–3 problem for law 53–5 “severe pain” legal definition 53–6 threat of 58 of torture 8, 25–8, 38, 40, 53–6, 62, 71 in Torture Memos 51–8

216 Index undecidability of 53–5 as world-destroying 18, 26, 38–9, 49–51, 55, 58, 61–2, 72, 88, 102, 119, 138, 144–5, 150, 160 see also affect; body; language; torture Pakistan 5, 32 past-ness 100–2 Patriot Act 42 Pentagon 15, 84 Peters, Edward 3, 23 Petrou, Michalis 107, 114 Phillips, Joshua E. S. 15, 23 Phoenix Program 14, 46 Poems from Guantánamo 7, 20, 49, 51, 66–72 poetry 7, 129–30, 155 by detainees 66–72, 94, 98, 160, 164 Polatinsky, Stefan 127–8 Pontecorvo, Gillo 13, 84–5, 88, 89, 97 postcolonial fiction 6 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 148 potentiality 34–5, 37, 100–1, 108, 110, 112–13, 131, 140–1, 145–7 of sensation 88, 143 in Torture Memos 5 see also body; threat; virtual and actual power 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 17, 19, 38, 40–2, 63, 159 individual and the state 26 performance of 33, 63, 79, 102, 109–10, 117, 138 state and everyday life 31 state and law 27 state apparatus 5, 17, 29, 33, 42, 45, 46–7, 60, 65, 71, 72–3, 159–60 in torture 25–6, 95 United States 14, 51, 63–4 see also biopower; sovereignty prisoners of war 14 Probyn, Elspeth 106, 113 Project for Ethics and Art in Testimony 39, 186 n.20 psychoanalysis 17, 123, 142, 146 in Koestler’s Arrival and Departure 149 latency within trauma 147 public opinion on torture 5, 23 Pugliese, Joseph 67–8

Raman, Gul 1, 67–8, 181 n.69 rape 92, 93–4 see under Incendies recursivity 161 in Fugitive Pieces 121, 127, 130 in writing 100, 102, 115 see also repetition refrain 140 Rejali, Darius 3–4, 13, 33, 50, 57, 111 relation 18, 70–1, 98, 108, 117, 136, 155, 159, 161 body and affect 34–7, 40, 100–2, 104, 106, 113–14, 142, 144–5, 146, 150 body and world in torture 39, 62, 148 image and viewer 81 textual 119–20, 130 tortured body and torturer 10, 47, 63, 72, 141, 145, 160–1 in Torture Memos 54–5, 58 see also affect; between-ness; body; literary testimony relation of nonrelation 155, 156–7, 164–5 religious art 11 rendition 33 repetition 140, 146, 189 n.7 and affect 37, 113–14 in Fugitive Pieces 126, 130 representation 10, 19, 22, 75, 82, 91, 97–8, 103, 114, 119–20, 131, 150, 159–61 failure of 8, 136, 137, 139–40, 153, 155, 157 see also image(s); language; literary testimony resemblance 154 Rome, Ancient 11, 30 Rutherford, Anne 86–7 Saar, Eric 7, 179 n.40 Salt Pit, CIA black site 1, 67 Scarry, Elaine 8, 12, 18, 22, 53–4, 71–2, 102, 137–8 criticism 138 see under pain Schmitt, Carl 30 School of the Americas 46 securitization theory 40–2, 44 security 5, 29, 40–2, 60, 63, 68 relation to identity 41 Sedgwick, Eve 177 n.35

Index Seigworth, Gregory J. 35, 36 semblance, see Massumi, Brian Senate Torture Report 1, 3, 4, 13, 15, 23, 84, 162 sensation 36, 54, 97, 138, 143–5 violent 88 sensory deprivation/assault 4, 14, 62 September 11, 2001, attacks 1, 7, 15, 20, 41, 43, 46, 150 and torture 84 sexual humiliation 4, 5, 37–8 shame 36, 37–8, 73, 100, 102, 106, 141, 155, 160–1 see also writing shame shell shock 148 shock of capture 61 silence 1, 75, 96 in Fugitive Pieces 122–3 witnessing and 106, 116, 150, 156–7 Slaughter, Joseph 6, 16, 67 sleep deprivation 14, 55, 56, 61–2 in Arrival and Departure 26 Snowden, Edward 31 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 12, 105 Sontag, Susan 78–9 Sophocles 10–11 South Vietnam 13, 46 sovereignty 17, 20, 29–34, 53, 72, 162–3, 164–5 and Guantánamo detainee poetry 67–8, 70 law 30–1, 56–7 monarch 28, 29, 154–5 paradox of 30–1, 32 power 27–8, 33, 37, 42–3, 51, 59–61, 62, 64, 109–10, 115, 130 and the self 109 United States 32, 34 see also biopower; power; state of exception spaces of exception 34, 162 spectacle 15, 28, 41, 58–60 Spinoza, Baruch de 18 Standard Operating Procedure 15, 21, 76, 78–83, 107, 110, 113, 116 aestheticized sequences 81, 97 interviews 82 vs Zero Dark Thirty 86, 88–9

217

state of exception 29–32, 40, 41, 43, 60, 69–70, 162 as geographic zone 34, 56–7, 67 as permanent rule torture in 34 see also spaces of exception; writing Steiner, George 133–4 stress positions 4, 38, 56, 61–2, 109 subject liberal 46, 138 and paradox of testimony 105–6, 142 as viewer 97–8 subject / object and the body in pain 143–4 distinction between 78, 134, 139, 142–3, 146, 150, 154, 161 as relation to experience 145 subjection 17, 51, 61, 65–6, 79–80, 94–5, 104, 110, 130, 164 desubjectification 134 in Guantánamo detainee poetry 70–2 securing of threat 43 torture as 8, 26–8, 39, 61, 64, 107, 152 writing 102 see also biopower subjectivity 8, 16, 39, 57, 77–8, 103, 131, 134–5, 142 suffering 16, 50, 53, 72, 80 surveillance 26, 44, 163 survivability 33, 39 survival 33, 56, 106, 107, 120, 164 torture 37–9, 59 see under biopower Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) 108–10, 179 n.18 tendency 101, 140, 146 terror 5, 45, 58 see also fear terrorism 5, 14, 24, 40–5, 47, 55 terrorist bodies 43–6, 60, 81 testimony 1, 5–7, 9, 10, 51, 72, 97–8, 167 n.10 and affect 83, 97, 115, 123, 131, 161 contingency 131 documentary 82 history 84 and human rights 2, 56, 103, 115, 151 images 79, 98

218 Index limits of 119, 137, 156–7 poetics 119–20, 130–1, 154, 161 poetry as 67–8, 71–2 trauma 19, 21, 103–7 witnessing and speaking for 17, 163 see also human rights; literary testimony; writing threat 5, 12, 20, 33, 40–3, 47, 60, 133 as affective fact 42, 44–5 futurity of 42, 44–5, 55 ticking bomb mythology 23 time 42, 55, 94, 108 aporia 145 breakdown of 88, 94–6, 97, 147, 156, 163 experience of 125, 133, 142, 145–7, 159–61, 163–5 folding of 90, 102, 122–3, 136, 146, 149, 156, 157 image 75–6, 80–2, 90 interruption of 101–2 past, present, and future 100–2, 113, 140, 160 relation of past and present 92, 95 trauma 7, 19, 21, 104, 113, 149, 156–7 violence 89–90 see also affect; experience; trauma Tomkins, Silvan 18, 36–7, 40, 100, 112, 113, 144, 177 n.35 pain 143 scripts 141 torquere 102 torture clean vs scarring 4, 13, 62 confession 2–5, 11–12, 24, 38, 64, 102 contagion 5, 13–15, 62–4, 84, 159 as control 4, 12, 17, 25–6, 59, 61–4, 79 craft of 2, 13–15, 62–4, 109 definition of 2–4, 53–4 extraction of information 3, 4, 24, 64 fiction 6–10 history of 4, 10–16, 22–3, 58–60, 174 n.70 images of 5, 15, 20–1, 59–60, 75–7, 77–83, 85–9, 92–6, 97–8 intimidation 3, 4–5, 12, 14, 25, 167 n.8 and language 2–4, 8–9, 16–18, 27, 38,

49–51, 63–4, 77, 99, 102, 116–17, 136, 139, 163 media 23, 65 paradox of 56, 102 psychological and physiological distinction 3–4 purpose of 3–4, 10–11, 58–60 risks in use 13, 63, 167 n.8 science myth 14, 109 self-justifying logic 11, 63, 109 threat of 4, 56, 58 use in war on terror 4–5, 20, 22, 28, 33, 46, 59–60, 103, 108, 110, 136, 139 as world-destroying 18, 26, 38–9, 49–51, 55, 58, 61–2, 72, 88, 102, 119, 138, 144–5, 150, 160 see also language; pain; representation; trauma torture chamber 10, 34, 37, 40, 94, 99, 107, 108, 110 see under Coetzee, J. M. tortured bodies 18, 25, 27–8, 33, 37–9, 63, 73, 88, 104, 110–11, 159–61 political use of 45 and war on terror 5, 52, 57, 141, 153 writing of 115–17, 139 see also biopower; sovereignty; subjection Torture Memos 1, 14, 23, 32, 51–8, 67, 98, 109–10, 157 Bybee Memo 52–5 CIA Memo 52–3, 55–6, 57 pain 14, 54–8, 131, 137 purpose of 3, 46, 52–3 reliance on paradox 56–7 techniques authorized 4, 52–6, 71, 72 torturers 37–40, 62–4, 159 difficulty of research 171 n.48 intentions of 54 and pain 50 training 15 trauma of 109 as witnesses 80 writing the voice of 107–11 see under torture torture techniques, see individual techniques; see under torture; Torture Memos; war on terror

Index Trapp, Erin 67 trauma 8, 10, 17, 96–8, 116–17 cinematic cut 94 fragmentation of experience 40, 114, 122–3, 130 history 89–90, 105, 128–30, 133, 135–6 and the image 76, 97–8 and language 8–9, 17–18, 22, 97–8, 102, 113–17, 119–20, 124–5, 127–8, 131–6, 139, 146–50, 154–7, 159–61, 163–5 and literature 6–10, 19, 27–8, 98, 103–5, 115, 119–20, 136 mutability 35, 114–15, 124–6 and narrative 7, 76–7, 82–3, 84–9, 90, 97–8, 104–5, 117, 124, 127–30, 139, 146–9, 159–60 paradox 115–16, 124, 130–5, 146, 154, 159 past into future 102, 104, 113, 133, 146–7, 150 poetics of 21, 124, 129–30, 135–6, 147–8, 157 see under Fugitive Pieces and speaking 17, 131–2, 157 symptoms 147 and time 8, 40, 125, 145–50 of torturers 109 victim, perpetrator, and bystander 105–6, 111, 119, 139 violence 17, 43, 84–5, 90, 94–7, 97–8, 112–13, 146, 148–9, 156–7 see also literary testimony; traumatic affect trauma theory 8, 18–19, 115, 120, 123–4, 127–8 and study of Holocaust 24 traumatic affect 19, 21, 84, 89, 95, 97–8, 113, 114, 115, 119–20, 153, 155, 159–61 contagion 161 scripts for containment 141 traumatic aftermath 110, 124–6, 145, 153, 161 traumatic event 8, 19, 77, 94, 104–5, 114, 116, 124, 131, 135, 147–50, 153, 160–3

219

latency of 122–3 traumatic remnants 69, 115–17, 147, 155, 164 traumatic return 104, 124, 146, 149 United States Code 53, 55 United States Supreme Court 32, 65 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 6 unknowable 2, 9, 20, 22, 123–4, 132, 138, 165 unrepresentability 2, 9–10, 17, 39, 130, 150, 160, 164–5 see under representation USSR 12, 13 Villeneuve, Dennis 89, 91 violence historical 122 and territorialization 95 see also subjection; torture; trauma virtual 140, 150, 154–6 virtual and actual 101, 139, 142, 145, 146, 147 vulnerability 18, 39, 41, 43 war on terror 5, 17, 20, 32–4, 40–5, 46–7, 86, 107, 117, 159–61 affective structure of 18, 43–5, 51, 80, 160 declared end of 162 discursive formation 41–5 importance of literature 7–10, 103 public fear 41 torture techniques 1, 4, 38, 43, 55, 141 as war on emotion 5 see also biopower; sovereignty; state of exception; torture waterboarding 13, 37–8, 52, 55–6, 57, 62, 110, 144–5, 179 n.18 fear of death 37, 55–7, 62, 144 in Zero Dark Thirty 85 Weschler, Lawrence 62 Williams, Merle 127–8 witnessing, see literary testimony; testimony World War I, trauma 148 Worthington, Andy 23 writing

220 Index on the body 102 as circuit 101 and encounter 112 and justice 106 as resistance 67, 70 state of exception 66–72 and survival 66 and torture 27, 99, 114, 116, 155, 164–5 writing body 100–2, 112–15, 136 see under creative writing; torturer writing shame 106–7 writing trauma 98, 111–15, 161 and discrete affects 114 and time 114–15, 156

Yoo, John 52, 53 Your Neighbor’s Son 107 Zero Dark Thirty 7, 14, 21, 76, 83, 88–9, 97, 116 absence of trauma 85 September 11 84 as testimony 89 torture / waterboarding 85–6 zoë (political life) 30 Zolkos, Magdalena 75–6 Zubaydah, Abu 52, 57