How can writing do justice to the sheer violence of torture while in-vestigating its interlocking meanings at a particular historical junc-ture? It is striking to note how often in literature the bodily encounter of torture gives rise to the allegorical imagination and its displace-ments: Kafka's executionary harrow, the scarred body pf the barbarian at the heart and margins of Coetzee's Empire, or as I shall suggest in this essay, the allegorical registers in Sartre's neglected play, The Condemned of Altona. Of course," speaking otherwise" about torture may be the only way to speak of it at all under regimes of censorship, where only the ruses of allegory can convey the state's dirty secret. Yet, at a structural level, there is a disquieting kinship or complicity between torture and allegory. For if torture,(from torquere," to twist, turn, wind, wring, distort") is a process that twists and turns the body and psyche of its victims into distorted signification, allegory is a rhetorical figure that similarly disfigures or twists bodies and objects into emblems whose meanings shift according to different historical horizons. Indeed, allegory necessarily betrays the singularity of an experience by invoking it through substitution and analogy, a gesture that is particularly fraught when addressing historical events considered unique in the magnitude of their destruction, such as the Shoah. Yet despite the potential complicity (at the level of form) between a violent historical event and its evocation through the mode of allegory, the traumatic nature of experiences such as detainment, torture, and extermination often prompt the displacements of allegorical inscrip-tion in order to become legible and transmissible. More pertinent to this inquiry is that, while the allegorical mode could not be further