Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty

Conclusion: Torture, Terror, and Sacrifice

CONCLUSION: TORTURE, TERROR, AND SACRIFICE because symbolic systems—including that of the political—are only partially self-conscious, there is no reason to expect a direct relationship between the forms of self-presentation and the forms of experience . We know this directly in our personal experience of ourselves and others. What we say about ourselves tells us—and others—something , but we would often be mistaken were we to take that expression as an accurate representation. The deeply insecure person may proclaim his attachment to others. The person who always feels guilty may express his innocence. One who is falling out of love may proclaim his or her love all the more. Deeply worried about death, I may throw myself into life. These tensions, in which one value is powered by the suppression of its opposite, are entirely familiar. The same sorts of tensions are found in a community’s self-understanding . A religion that proclaims love to be its ‹rst principle may be quick to turn to the sword. A polity committed to slavery may proclaim “all men are created equal” as its ‹rst principle. One divided by distinctions of inheritable wealth may maintain an ideology of individual merit. One that harbors deep racism may proclaim itself color-blind. If 170 expressions of this sort were mere hypocrisy, then critical arguments based on such norms would have little effect. But slavery is indeed a problem for a society committed to equality, just as racial division is a problem for a society that believes it should be color-blind. These expressions of self-understanding can become points of leverage precisely because they capture some partial truth. The task of critical inquiry is not to hold the community or the individual to these express values but to bring to the surface that which is hidden behind them. We meet just this problem when we examine political violence. The use of force in general, not just torture, is a problem for the liberal state, for there is nothing liberal about killing and being killed. Liberalism is a family of normative political theories all set in opposition to violence. This does not mean that liberal states cannot defend themselves or enforce their laws, but it does mean that reciprocal recognition , not sacri‹ce, must be the fundamental value—the ground norm—of political order.1 Of course, no state ever went to war declaring anything but a peaceful intention: modern wars are always intended to “end war.” Liberal states, including our own, will try to explain the use of force in terms of acknowledged values—for example, making the world safe for democracy. Peace, freedom, and democracy, however, are not the explanation for war. To understand the use of force, including torture and terror, we have to turn to other elements of the imagination. We must begin with that most elemental of all forms of symbolic violence, sacri‹ce. The philosophically compelling question is not the elaboration of liberal principles nor the critique of illiberal practices but the elaboration of the phenomenology of modern political experience. How is a world of law and sovereignty, of well-being and sacri‹ce, constructed and maintained in the social imagination? For Americans at least, this is the world that spills forth as we analyze the ticking time bomb and the hand grenade hypotheticals. It is a world of acoustic separation and rituals of recovery, of memorials and scapegoats. It is a world in which terror is met by torture. Torture and terror are reciprocal political phenomena. This has little to do with the effectiveness of torture as a countermeasure to terror, although that is the only argument with which liberalism can approach the problem. That attitude gives us the endless variations on the ticking CONCLUSION 171 time bomb problem.2 No, to understand the turn to torture we need to understand the symbolic matrix of political violence: How exactly does violence work in the construction of political meaning? Like every other cultural form, the political must be approached as a network of meanings, images, and rituals within which practices and beliefs make sense to us. This is, in part, a psychological question—How does the individual imagine violence?—and, in part, an institutional question— How do various civil and political elements, including the military, place themselves in relationship to that imagination? These have been the central inquiries of this book. Central to both torture...