South Central Review

Rejali, Darius M.
Torture Makes The Man
South Central Review - Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp. 151-169

The Johns Hopkins University Press

"Torture Makes the Man": This essay explores why we might think violence, and torture in particular, requires and generates a kind of manly strength. Briefly put, this is the view that only a real man knows what needs to be done and doing torture is the evidence that one is a real man. To understand the logic of this relationship, I go through some literature, now forgotten, about torture and manhood during the Franco-Algerian war, as well as some earlier nineteenth century discussions of torture and manhood. I argue in particular that Jean Lartéguy decisively modernized the theme of torture and manhood, particularly in his famous ticking time bomb example, and he set the terms in which most people now understand the relationship. Lartéguy thought that indeed torture made the man, but the point is that torture does not and cannot make the man—it leaves behind broken victims and burned out and traumatized interrogators, and that is all that it leaves behind.