Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency

Series Editor's Preface

Series Editor’s Preface Gerard A. Hauser’s study in Prisoners of Conscience of what he terms the “thick moral vernacular of human rights” is a work of erudition, scrupulous theoretical reasoning, patient critical analysis, and profound moral seriousness. In his 1999 book Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, also published in this series, Professor Hauser developed an account of “publics theory,” an understanding of how public opinion may be understood as a discursive process in which citizens engage in everyday talk that shapes and discloses public interests and the public sphere. Vernacular Voices has been a widely influential book, inspiring stimulating new lines of study in rhetoric. Hauser’s Prisoners of Conscience is likely to be equally influential. At the core of Prisoners of Conscience are five case studies. At Robben Island in apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela and his fellow political prisoners were subjected to intimidation and abuse; their response was to enact a practice of what Hauser, adapting the term from Foucault, terms parrhesia, a rhetorical figure of speaking the truth with frankness. The prisoners found ways to maintain and represent their humanity, and thereby their sense of self and solidarity, against a regime of total control and degradation. Next Hauser tells the story of Irina Ratushinskaya, condemned to a Soviet prison camp, in the “small zone” set aside for women prisoners , describing the enactment of a rhetoric of indirection in which prisoners performed a silent self-control in the face of indignities and reprisals—winning over their fellow prisoners to a shared sense of human agency and dignity. In his account of the hunger strike of Provisional IRA prisoners at Maze prison in Belfast, Northern Island, Hauser describes a regime of physical punishment that is met by the prisoner’s inversion of and resistance to the system by “self-induced performances of bodily pain”—passive aggression as vernacular moral rhetoric. Hauser returns his account to Robben Island for an analysis of a memoir by Indres Naidoo, Island in Chains, written after his release from a ten-year sentence, in which he depicts how even the body in pain can undermine the authority of the state and affirm an individual human identity. In a final case study, Professor Hauser examines the circulation of images of prisoner abuse by United States military guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, arguing that, despite energetic efforts at dissociation, the images came to frame and define the neoconservative supremacy of executive power. In casting blame for Abu Ghraib on x Series Editor’s Preface a few low-ranking soldiers, the administration attempted to dissociate itself and the high command from the shame. And yet Hauser does not permit his own reader the easy response of self-purification by dissociating from the neocons, feeding our sense of moral superiority by an act of pity or blame. Hauser’s nuanced and complex moral reasoning leaves us with no easy answers, but he does bring illumination and balance to a central challenge to human understanding. Thomas W. Benson ...