Totalitarian Lust: From Salò to Abu Ghraib

"Totalitarian Lust: From Salò to Abu Ghraib": As Dahlia Lithwick expressed it recently, the purpose of our open torture camps, scientific torture methods and torture laws is not to manipulate or destroy people, nor to win a war against a conceptually volatile representation of terrorism. The rationale of torture precisely in its most arbitrary, irrational and useless forms, as shown in Abu Ghraib or in Guantánamo, is the spectacle of an absolute power. This explains why torture nowadays (as it was in the era of the Inquisition under Spanish-Christian imperialism) has become a public fact, a media show, and even an academic debate (unlike other even more lethal topics such as the use of depleted or enriched uranium in postmodern missile warfare). Spectacle is not just a system of representations, as cultural studies scholars believed. Its function is the constitution of hard facts, powerful realities, and new orders. My essay points out the mere fact that in the history of modern civilization, as defined by the Christian theology (Eymerich), or by enlightened secular philosophy (Sade), torture has had and still has a moral and political function constitutive of any rational system of totalitarian power.