PhilPaine.com

I looked for­ward to read­ing this book, which had been rec­om­mended to me. But it proved a dis­ap­point­ment. Occa­sion­ally, it laps­es into com­mon sense for a page or two, but for the most part it’s an exer­cise in regur­gi­tat­ing the tedious ortho­dox­ies of our time. Plen­ty of Fou­cault. Plen­ty of neb­u­lous and de-human­ized pas­sages like “Polit­i­cal vio­lence may have lacked sys­tem­atic­ity because juris­dic­tions con­flicted, but it retained an over­all coher­ence through its tech­niques. These tech­niques involved the inscrip­tion of signs, and it is there­fore not sur­pris­ing that the vio­lence about penal rit­u­als involved the mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of signs….The brig­and in this instance used pun­ish­ments as a tech­nique or rep­re­sen­ta­tion. He did not oblit­er­ate the sys­tem of rep­re­sen­ta­tions; he mere­ly play­fully changed what the signs meant.” That is how the author choos­es to describe some­body hav­ing nails ham­mered into his feet. We learn that “the encar­cer­ated become sub­ject to a hermeneu­tics of sus­pi­cion”, and so on.

This kind of pedan­tic triv­i­al­iza­tion is taught to under­grad­u­ates in our uni­ver­si­ties, who are made to pro­duce mil­lions of pages of jar­gon-filled, syrupy exegi­sis applied to any­thing and every­thing: the soci­ol­ogy of fash­ion run­way shows, the “dis­course” of air­port wait­ing lounges, the bak­ing of blue­berry muffins, etc. Apply­ing this kind of stuff to a sub­ject like tor­ture mere­ly wastes our time, when we need to be doing some­thing to stop tor­ture. And for heaven’s sake, when will aca­d­e­mic nin­nies stop quot­ing Marx? Marx is utter­ly worth­less garbage, of no intel­lec­tual val­ue what­so­ever. The same goes for Noam Chom­sky. When will these nerds ever grow up?

I’m per­haps a bit too harsh. There are some use­ful sec­tions in the book. The author is sin­cere, and does try to tack­le a dif­fi­cult sub­ject. No doubt he feels real com­pas­sion for the suf­fer­ings of tor­ture vic­tims, and cares about the fate of the peo­ple of Iran. But this stuff is not help­ing. It’s the fault of our claus­tro­pho­bic and back­ward-look­ing uni­ver­si­ties, which take intel­li­gent schol­ars, turn them into tire­some drones, and set them to play­ing inane word games.

What remains con­spic­u­ously absent from such schol­ar­ship is any under­stand­ing of human beings and their motives. On the first page, Rejani con­sid­ers the pos­si­bil­ity that tor­tur­ers “do what they do vol­un­tar­ily and with full knowl­edge of their sit­u­a­tion, and they enjoy a feel­ing of excess pow­er when they destroy anoth­er human being” ― and instant­ly rejects it as inad­mis­si­ble, unprov­able, and unin­ter­est­ing. That’s the last we hear of that pos­si­bil­ity. From then on, tor­tur­ers are mere­ly play­ing out abstract soci­o­log­i­cal pat­terns and exud­ing sym­bols. This is humbug.