Promotional Information

The essays here speak from a conviction that torture does not work to elicit truth, secure justice, or maintain security

Table of Contents

Introduction Julie Carlson and Elisabeth Weber: For the Humanities I. America Tortures Lisa Hajjar: An Assault on Truth: A Chronology of Torture, Deception and Denial Alfred McCoy: In the Minotaur's Labyrinth: Psychological Torture, Public Forgetting, and Contested History II. Singularities of Witness Reinhold Gorling: Torture and society (translated from German by Glenn Patten) Susan Derwin: What Nazi Crimes Against Humanity Can Tell us about Torture Today Elisabeth Weber: "Torture was the essence of National Socialism". Reading Jean Amery today Sinan Antoon: What did the Corpse Want? Torture in Poetry III. Graphic Assaults, Sensory Overload John Nava: Thoughts on the making of "Signing Statement Law or An Alternate Set of Procedures" ("America tortures") and "Our Torture is Better than Their Torture" Abigail Solomon-Godeau: Torture and Representation: The Art of Detournement Stephen Eisenman: Water-boarding -- A Torture both Intimate and Sacred Hamid Dabashi: Damnatio Memoriae Viola Shafik: Rituals of Hegemonic Masculinity: Cinema, Torture and the Middle East Peter Szendy: Music and torture: the stigmata of sound and sense (translated from French by Allison Schifani and Zeke Sikelianos) Christian Gruny: The language of feeling made into a weapon. Music as an instrument of torture IV. Declassifying Writing Julie Carlson: Romantic Poet Legislators: The Ends of Torture Darieck Scott: The fine details: Torture and the Social Order Colin Dayan: Reasonable Torture, or the Sanctities (Gaza, September 2009) Richard Falk: John Yoo, the Torture Memos, and Ward Churchill: Exploring the Outer Limits of Academic Freedom

About the Author

Elisabeth Weber is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books include Verfolgung und Trauma: Zu Emmanuel Levinas’ Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Passagen Verlag, 1990), Das Vergessen(e): Anamnesen des Undarstellbaren, coeditor (Turia and Kant, 1997), and Questioning Judaism (Stanford, 2004), a collection of interviews with Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and others. She has also edited several works by Jacques Derrida. Her edited volume Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace is forthcoming from Fordham University Press.

Reviews

"This richly variegated volume gathers together bracing and often brilliant analyses of matters one wishes were not so timely: the practices of torture and how people speak, lie, and obfuscate about them. It opens our eyes and keeps them open wide." Ian Balfour, York University