Parallax Effect: Liberal Accommodation or Post-liberal Enjoyment? Lokaneeta's Transnational Torture

Jinee Lokaneeta's Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and Indiais a comparative case study of the persistence of torturous practices in two liberal democracies—the United States and India. Through her close attention to court cases, legislation, and popular culture, Lokaneeta persuasively argues that Giorgio Agamben's paradigm of state power, elaborated in such works as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Lifeor State of Exception, by conceptualizing the exercise of state power in terms of states of normality and states of exception or emergency, does not allow us to appreciate how instances of excessive violence cannot be contained within the discrete category of an "exception" in liberal democracies (25-27). Calling torture "exceptional" serves to legitimize the state as a liberal democracy because torture is thereby marginalized (as an "exception") compared to the state's normal, liberal democratic patterns.

In this review, I concur with Lokaneeta's important criticisms of Agamben. Moreover, there is much to appreciate in Lokaneeta's insightful presentation of torture's persistence within liberal democratic states. Using the richness of the material presented in Lokaneeta's study, however, I will suggest the events under discussion create a parallax effect upon the reader. On the one hand, insofar as liberalism instantiates itself as a state formation, Lokaneeta's argument is compelling that the liberal state must continuously grapple with the ambiguous line between legitimate exercises of power and where the exercise of power crosses over to become torturous. Lokaneeta observes how liberal regimes justify torturous acts by seeking necessary intelligence, rather than outright cruelty, and by sanitizing brutality through the mediation of health professionals, in order to salve the liberal conscience and to backfill the legitimacy lost by the liberal state that has engaged in such practices. On the other hand, insofar as liberal democracies find torture to be completely, if not constitutively impermissible, the reader is left with a nagging doubt (31; 218, n. 158). In light of the legal justifications of torturous treatments, or the celebration of torture in the television program 24, can the United States and India continue to be called liberal democracies? In other words, is Lokaneeta adding to our understanding of the liberal democratic state, or is she identifying attributes of an emergent trajectory representing a post-liberal, post-democratic state? If liberal institutions and liberal legal discourse are producing and justifying illiberal practices of torture, then a parallax effect is an apt metaphor to describe this development, and it is a testament to the power of Lokaneeta's achievement that her book cultivates such a parallax experience in her readers.

In contrast to an approach indebted to Agamben's paradigm of sovereign power, Lokaneeta contends that in liberal democracies, there is a persistent, if not inevitable, negotiation with excess violence (17). The law's struggle with violence is not extraordinary, but routine in liberal democracies (35). In making this argument, however, Lokaneeta does not follow the work of legal scholars Robert Cover or Austin Sarat, for whom violence is constitutive to the law (27-28). Instead, she concurs with Jonathan Simon and Jeremy Waldron who find, beginning from the assumption that violence is immanent to law, we can be discouraged from attending to important variations in state practices, such as the distinctive relations that the state may take to torture at different times (27-28). For those inclined to accept a relation of necessary and essential identity between the law or state and violence, the image of "hooded man" from the systematic use of torture at Abu Ghraib by the United States during its military occupation of Iraq, or the scene of torture opening the movie "Slum Dog Millionaire," can become one or two more examples of state business as usual. This blasé attitude toward revelations of torture does not allow us to appreciate the peculiar legitimation problem that torture presents liberal states...