Guan­tanamo torture

We do not need to define torture. We do not need to under­stand torture. We do not need to say that torture is bad, or unlawful, or cruel, or against the dec­la­ration of human rights, or… We do not need any of that. We do not need to say that regardless of the times we repeat those things both in public and in private, torture occurs. It occurs in the state of exception and in its many legal and illegal labyrinths. It occurs in the everyday busi­nesses of a regular, even boring, state of legal things, here, behind our noses, in the US, as much as in many other places in the planet –what is dif­ferent is that when it happens in the US, it is our direct respon­si­bility to do some­thing about it. We do not need to enu­merate all the cases of torture and related vio­lence that are sup­posed to extract truth, or intel, or some­thing, or that are simply pun­ishment, gra­tu­itous vio­lence against somebody who has been con­sidered guilty before –and even after—a trial. Not that the trial is a guar­antee of any­thing, perhaps it is only a pro­cedure. Not that “guilt” means some­thing –no more like “inno­cence”, for that matter, as they are simply remainders of a lan­guage in which the­o­logical con­cepts lurk around and col­onize the legal institutions.

I am not sure I want to enter the ter­ritory of the political the­ologies. The dis­cussion could easily slip into a dif­ferent terrain I don’t want to pay attention to right now –the con­ceptual, intel­lectual history of a series of white right-wing men cre­ating the concept and mod­elling it. But it is dif­ficult to think of torture without thinking of religion –and, ulti­mately, of the­ology. How to think of it? Once upon a time, it was quite clear how to think of it: since infidels, heretics, and pagans could not speak truth, let alone think truth, or believe truth, the author­ities pro­vided them­selves with all the coercive means to impose this truth, and to even extract it from those same indi­viduals. The process of purifi­cation involved the con­struction of the ecclesia, that is the one-minded, con­cordant uni­verse of believers. Truth and con­fession allowed those in the margins of the ecclesia to rec­oncile with the ecclesia itself, or else be relaxed to the puri­fying fire –either dead or alive.

Reading the Guan­tánamo Diary is, in this sense, extra­or­di­narily familiar. As if the text came from the depths of the lit­erary tra­dition inter­con­necting the dif­ferent stages of auto­bi­og­raphy that pervade the long history of the Inqui­sition. When we say “From the Inqui­sition to Guan­tánamo” we do not intend to present a his­torical nar­rative, but rather some sort of back and forth trans­lation of models to express this kind of vio­lence. Philol­o­gists all over the world were no long ago in the business of estab­lishing the textual sources of the dif­ferent texts they edited. Every­thing came from some­thing else, and this, in a sense, had the power to de-activate the political or legal or social effec­tiveness of a given text: not that the text became pre­dictable, but that the very words, expres­sions, metaphors, and rhetoric of the text were rec­og­nizable in pre­vious ones, so that the act of reading led the reader away from the text in front of the reader’s eyes, in order to pay attention to the tradition.

Of course writers use tra­dition too. They use it to build a case. Slahi’s book is a case-construction of sorts. The kind of auto­bi­og­raphy that intends to have a juridical effect. Inquisi­torial detainees (so to speak, because the name does not make then justice) were not allowed to have writing instru­ments in their cells, but, at the same time, they were required to give an account of them­selves in front of a notary. This account became part of the case. Of course, we did not only listen to the voice of the subject, the inmate, the accused –rather than the defendant. We lis­tened to the voice of the notary, who tran­scribed the agram­matical, trem­bling voice of the accused into a notarial lan­guage that could be under­stood as a piece of dead voice –that is, a doc­ument com­plying with all the formal require­ments for a trial and its pro­ceedings. Tra­dition becomes inscribed within the text as a writing tech­nique, and this way of artic­u­lating tra­dition is also a way, for the inquisi­torial notary, to erase affects, emo­tions, pain. Tra­dition does that, some­times: it makes you feel that what you are reading has been written before many times, and has anes­thetized you.

Slahi’s Diary is a dif­ficult reading, among other reasons, because of the dif­ferent voices that interfere in the pro­duction of the text, including the per­vading voice of tra­dition. We do not need to insist on how the jour­nalist doubles as a philol­ogist: he edits the text, makes it more readable, iden­tifies sources and textual issues, debates and problems of inter­pre­tation, etc. He is, as as well, a notarial voice. The editor is the one pro­ducing the piece of dead voice, that is, the juridical pro­ceedings, so that it can work in another kind of trial –the trial of history, the trial of feelings, the trial of political activism, etc.

There is some­thing remarkably dif­ficult to talk about: indi­vidual pain, violent pro­ce­dures expe­ri­enced in the first person, the auto­bi­og­raphy of sen­sa­tions. There, tra­dition becomes espe­cially visible: it becomes visible in the reartic­u­lation of the ways in which poetry, jour­nalism, history, music, visual culture in general (including the one hanging on the museums walls), or even popular culture, have estab­lished the dis­course on pain –how to say some­thing that cannot be said, that triggers inef­fable expe­ri­ences of pain. Look at the paintings from Abu Ghraib by Fer­nando Botero: they depict the actual expres­sions of pain from the pic­tures that were released after the facts were known, and then, they convey already what Costas Douzinas called an “iconomy”, a certain admin­is­tration of the iconic power to transform per­cep­tions and feelings. But not only: they also dig deeper in the history of art, in the very tra­dition of pain, by con­veying the volup­tuous but mus­cular bodies in the moment of the scream, showing expres­sions and con­vo­luted bodily posi­tions rem­i­niscent of Michelangelo or the Laocoon sculp­toric group.

Slahi’s editor, Larry Siems, mea­sures the number of words used by Slahi, com­paring them to the number of words used by Shake­speare. When talking about the style, he high­lights the uses of for­mulae, likened with Homer’s uses in his epic poems. This is a “lit­er­ature human­ities” approach, so to speak: Siems needs to make it closer to the Western canon. He could have men­tioned the poetry of for­mulaic diction in Arabic poetry, or even in the Qur’an; he could have pointed to the maqamat  of al-Hamahdani or al-Hariri, or the fertile field of the muwashshahat, he could have referred to clas­sical poets in the Maghreb, including Ibn Hazm, as examples of extremely rich lin­guistic cre­ativity, or just to some of the Mau­ri­tanian poets like Ahmedou Ould Abdelkader. Instead, Shake­speare and Homer are there in the surface, as the points of ref­erence for this auto­bi­og­raphy of pain and injustice. Those details delve even more into the tra­dition: they may attract some readers, but then these readers will react poorly to the text itself.

The Guan­tánamo Diary was received with great expec­tation and was reviewed by the NYT, the New York Review of Books, Times Lit­erary Sup­plement, Mag­azine Lit­téraire, and many other major journals of lit­er­ature and theory. What nor­mally happens in these cir­cum­stances is that indi­vidual readers also react. In the expos­itory society, being a reader is a com­pletely dif­ferent business than before: in your kindle, you can pub­licly high­light and annotate, will­ingly exposing not only yourself, but also your intel­lectual side, your very own ethics of reading –as it was con­cep­tu­alized by John Dagenais. It is very unusual to find a single high­light, nor­mally tens or even hun­dreds of readers end up high­lighting the same pearls of wisdom from the books. Reading is not only reading your text, but also reading the mar­ginal inter­ac­tions from other readers, and they make you feel that you belong in the same Republic of letters. The reac­tions from indi­vidual readers in front of Slahi’s book are tepid: there are only ten pas­sages high­lighted; the most high­lighted passage only has 43 hits: “The gov­ernment is very smart; it evokes terror in the hearts of people to con­vince them to give up their freedom and privacy.” (92); and the fol­lowing one has 42 hits: “The inter­ro­gation methods worsened con­sid­erably as time went by, and as you shall see, those respon­sible for GTMO broke all the prin­ciples upon which the U.S. was built and com­pro­mised every great prin­ciple such as Ben Franklin’s “They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little tem­porary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”” (42) Just a few pas­sages coming from a very flat ethics of reading, or a pol­itics of reading, not ter­ribly “twit­table” (a function now embedded in the kindle reading devices).

There is another passage that is striking. 35 people high­lighted it. It happens at the moment in which Slahi is landing in Senegal, and he is reading his Qur’an in peace. This is what he says about the country: “You could clearly tell that the country had no sov­er­eignty: this was still col­o­nization in its ugliest face. In the so-called free world, the politi­cians preach things such as spon­soring democracy, freedom, peace, and human rights: What hypocrisy! Still, many people believe this pro­pa­ganda garbage.” p. 85 Like in the pre­vious passage, or in other pas­sages when he talks about Cuba, or about Guan­tánamo and the excep­tion­ality of the place, there is another tra­dition that is playing a central role in this text: a the­o­retical tra­dition, a series of readings, words, ideas, or ref­er­ences about the state of exception, colo­nialism, sov­er­eignty, and other con­cepts that have been used to crit­icize the GTMO, Abu Ghraib, or other USA or allies bases around the world, where the detainees cannot claim any right, neither local nor inter­na­tional. Slahi uses this tra­dition as part of his legal case. He is not writing only an auto­bi­og­raphy of pain, he and his editor are pro­ducing an account of the pun­ished person, pushing all the buttons that have become part of the op-edification of modern society in the social media.

Is there any­thing that somehow escapes tra­dition in this heavily edited and redacted text, in this legal auto­bi­og­raphy of the con­demned? What are the parts where one can try at least to listen to the voice of the detainee? Are these parts that can become somehow the­o­retical vantage points, a theory of a vision? It’s not easy. One needs to get rid, so to speak, of the voices around the voice we would like to listen to. One needs to get rid of the burden of the tra­dition. And then, imagine that one can indeed find such theory. Because if one finds this theory, the whole nar­rative of torture, the whole nar­rative of unlawful detention, the whole nar­rative of pain, and vio­lence, and law-infringement, the nar­rative of the US as uni­versal police mass-incarcerating across the globe, will make some sense.

But I don’t know whether this is pos­sible. Perhaps one of them occurs at the very beginning of the book, where, Slahi feels, he says, as if his whole body was con­spiring against him. It’s a shackled body, dia­pered body, a body that cannot actually fulfill the most basic bio­logical func­tions, and yet he finds that it is his own body con­spiring against him. What is a body? How does it con­spire against oneself? One may imme­di­ately think of Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphors we live by, those metaphors that they call alive, because they are not rec­og­nized as metaphors at all: the body as the state; the body as the legal system (corpus iuris); the body as the aggre­gation of knowledge; the body that you have to bring in front of the judge so that this body may claim its rights in a case of illegal detention –habeas corpus. How do those bodies con­spire against them­selves, about some­thing in them that is not their body but is still them­selves –Slahi body is not con­spiring against his body, but against himself? In Roman and Medieval Law, the very concept of maiestas is a body; a body, indeed, that can be aggressed, can be hurt and wounded –in Latin this pain, this wound is called a laesio, and that is why when the body con­spires against “himself”, the lawyers call it laesa maiestas.

It’s the cor­po­rative –bodily—conspiration what needs to be under­stood. How it acts from the body, from the dif­ferent bodies that are sup­posed to work in favor of the person, against it –as oneself is here the subject of the con­spir­ation, a juridical person, a persona ficta, as medieval law puts it, an arti­ficial person that has been created specif­i­cally with the purpose of being at the receiving end of the cor­po­rative complot.

We think of torture as tra­dition, as a catalog of for­mulae, objects, prac­tices, explo­rations of pain that exist in history and have existed forever. Torture as an eru­dition, if you wish, a knowledge. Tra­dition is its external appearance, the reason why it does not need to be defined or under­stood; tra­dition makes it under­standable. But in fact torture is some­thing entirely dif­ferent: a body con­spiring against oneself. Spinoza, in a cel­e­brated passage of his Ethics, said that nobody has got to know all the things that a body can do only according to the laws of nature. He did not even mention the body of pos­itive laws.^[1] Well, there is one more thing in this catalog: the body can con­spire against oneself.