In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek
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concealment”—introduces the typically postmodern logic of the chocolate laxative: the torture imagined here is like decaf coffee—we get the result without having to suffer unpleasant side effects. At the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, the already-mentioned psychiatric outlet of the KGB, they did invent just such a drug with which to torture dissidents: an injection into the prisoner’s heart zone which slowed down his heart beat and caused terrifying anxiety. Viewed from the outside, the prisoner seemed just to be dozing, while in fact he was living a nightmare.
There is, however, a much more disquieting prospect at work here: the proximity (of the tortured subject) which causes sympathy and makes torture unacceptable is not his mere physical proximity, but, at its most fundamental, the proximity of the Neighbor, with all the Judeo-Christian-Freudian weight of this term, the proximity of the Thing which, no matter how far away it is physically, is always by definition “too close.” What Harris is aiming at with his imagined “truth pill” is nothing less than the abolition of the dimension of the Neighbor. The tortured subject is no longer a Neighbor, but an object whose pain is neutralized, reduced to a property that has to be dealt with in a rational utilitarian calculus (so much pain is tolerable if it prevents a much greater amount of pain). What disappears here is the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject. It is thus significant that the book which argues for torture is also a book entitled The End of Faith—not in the obvious sense of “You see, it is only our belief in God, the divine injunction to love your neighbor, that ultimately prevents us from torturing people!” but in a much more radical sense. Another subject (and, ultimately, the subject as such) is for Lacan not something directly given, but a “presupposition,” something presumed, an object of belief—how can I ever be sure that what I see in front of me is another subject, not a biological machine lacking any depth?
There is, however, a popular and seemingly convincing reply to those who worry about the recent US practice of torturing suspected terrorist prisoners. It is: “What’s all the fuss about? The US are now only (half) openly admitting what not only they were doing all the time, but what all other states are and were doing all the time—if anything, we have less hypocrisy now . . .” To this, one should retort with a simple counter-question: “If the senior representatives of the US mean only this, why, then, are they telling us this? Why don’t they just silently go on doing it, as they did up until now?” That is to say, what is proper to human speech is the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and its act of enunciation: “You say this, but why are you telling me it openly now?” Let us imagine a wife and husband who coexist with a tacit agreement that they can lead discreet extra-marital affairs; if, all of a sudden, the husband openly tells his wife about an ongoing affair, she will have good reason to be in panic: “If it is just an affair, why are you telling me this? It must be something more!”50 The act of publicly reporting on something is never neutral, it affects the reported content itself.
And the same goes for the recent open admission of torture: in November 2005, Vice-President Dick Cheney said that defeating terrorists meant that “we also have to work . . . sort of the dark side . . . A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion”—was he not talking like a reborn Kurtz? So when we hear people like Dick Cheney making their obscene statements about the necessity of torture, we should ask them: “If you just want to torture secretly some suspected terrorists, then why are you saying it publicly?” That is to say, the question to be raised is: what more is there hiding in this statement that made the speaker enunciate it?
We could note (more than) a hint of what there is when, in the middle of March 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession dominated the headlines of our media. Moral outrage at the extent of his crimes was mixed with doubts. Can his confession be trusted? What if he confessed even more than he did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist Mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop being subjected to water-boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”? What attracted much less attention was the simple fact that, for the first time, torture was normalized, presented as something acceptable. The ethical and legal consequences of it are something to think about.
With all the outcry about the horror of Mohammed’s crimes, very little was heard about the fate our societies reserve for the hardest criminals—to be judged and severely punished. It is as if, by the nature of his acts (and by the nature of the treatment to which he was submitted by the US authorities), Mohammed is not entitled to the same treatment as even the most depraved murderer of children, namely to be tried and punished accordingly. It is as if not only the terrorists themselves, but also fight against them has to proceed in a grey zone of legality, using illegal means. We thus de facto have “legal” and “illegal” criminals: those who are to be treated with legal procedures (using lawyers etc.), and those who are outside legality. Mohammed’s legal trial and punishment are now rendered meaningless—no court which operates within the frames of our legal system can deal with illegal detentions, confessions obtained by torture, and so on.
This fact says more than it intends. It puts Mohammed almost literally into the position of the living dead, occupying the place of what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer: legally dead (deprived of a determinate legal status) while biologically still alive—and the US authorities which treat them in this way are also of an in-between status which forms the counterpart to homo sacer: acting as a legal power, their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law—they operate in an empty space that is sustained by the law, and yet not regulated by the rule of law.
So, back to the “realistic” counter-argument: the “War on Terror” is dirty, one is put in situations where the lives of thousands depend on information we can get from our prisoners. (Incidentally, the torturing of Mohammed was not a case of the “ticking-clock” situation evoked by the advocates of torture as the reason for its legitimization: Mohammed’s confession saved no lives.) Against this kind of “honesty,” one should stick to the apparent hypocrisy. I can well imagine that, in a very specific situation, I would resort to torture—however, in such a case, it is crucial that I do not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle. Following the unavoidable brutal urgency of the moment, I should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very impossibility of elevating what I had to do into a universal principle, do I retain the proper sense of the horror of what I did.
In a way, those who, without outrightly advocating torture, accept it as a legitimate topic of debate, are in a way more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It only thrives if it is sustained by what Hegel called “objective spirit,” the set of unwritten rules which form the background of every individual’s activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. For example, the sign of progress in our societies is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is “dogmatically” clear to everyone that rape is wrong, and we all feel that even arguing against it is too much. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, it would be a sad sign if one had to argue against him—he should simply appear ridiculous. And the same should hold for torture.
This is why the greatest victims of publicly admitted torture are all of us, the public that is informed about it. We should all be aware that some precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.
Nowhere is this clearer than in a significant detail of Mohammed’s confession. It was reported that the agents torturing him submitted themselves to water-boarding and were able to endure it for only ten to fifteen seconds before being ready to confess anything and everything, while Mohammed gained their grudging admiration by enduring it for two and a half minutes, the longest time anyone could remember someone resisting. Are we aware that the last time such statements were part of public discourse was way back in the late Middle Ages when torture was still a public spectacle, an honorable way to test a captured worthy enemy who gained the admiration of the crowd if he bore the pain with dignity? Do we really