Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There

This paper performs, in three movements, an exploration of the ethics not of torture itself but of writing it creatively. First movement: of the right to write. This first movement considers ethical questions of authorship in the fictional narration of the trauma of torture. It employs Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopower and testimony to position the act of writing creatively about torture in relation to torture’s political project and the subjection of the body to sovereign power, along with a reading of torture as affective encounter, to suggest the necessity of writing literary testimony to it. Second movement: of writing the torturer’s voice. The second movement draws on Deleuzian affect theory to articulate a relational conception of this trauma that suggests, however distasteful, the need for the torturer’s voice to be heard beyond the torture chamber. Third movement: of being affected by unjust ethics. This third movement draws on concepts of affective contagion to gestures back towards the experience of being affected by writing unjust ethics. With their twists and turns, their connections and discontinuities, these movements navigate – necessarily incompletely – the messy complexities of the ethical space of voice in the writing torture.

2016

This paper explores the ethics of archival research by reflecting on the challenges of doing research with highly descriptive and gruesome archived testimonies of torture. This reflection leads me to unpack the character of archives and research as power/knowledge devices that at their very core imply violence: a violence of representation enacted in the representation of violence. I propose that the inseparable representation-violence relationship requires that we situate ourselves in the narrow, hazardous, and ever-shifting space between violence and its representation in order to turn representation into a performative, discursive, and self-constituting ethics in which we can engage in political and strategic practices of representation.

Orbis Litterarum, 2017

This essay examines a subgenre of the Human Rights novel, the torture novel, devoted to the social ontology of the human. In the HR torture novel embodiment is rendered ‘abject’ and the subject ‘unmade’, through dehumanization and debasement. The abject embodiment is the consequence of institutional precarity and collapsing social apparatuses. Tortured subjects acquire membership of a collective memory of pain, a trauma-memory citizenship, made possible through the articulation of memories of torture, bringing together fellow sufferers, former perpetrators and witnesses.The essay concludes that the torture novel is integral to the project of Human Rights because it demonstrates how broken bodies are produced in eroding social conditions, driven by state policy, state indifference or state oppression

This paper explores the ethics of archival research by reflecting on the challenges of doing research with highly descriptive and gruesome archived testimonies of torture. This reflection leads me to unpack the character of archives and research as power/knowledge devices that at their very core imply violence: a violence of representation enacted in the representation of violence. I propose that the inseparable representation-violence relationship requires that we situate ourselves in the narrow, hazardous, and ever-shifting space between violence and its representation in order to turn representation into a performative, discursive, and self-constituting ethics in which we can engage in political and strategic practices of representation.

Peace Review, 2008

Speaking the Unspeakable, edited by Catherine Anne Collins & Jeanne Ellen Clark, 2013

Writing about torture and its traumatic affects is made difficult by torture’s assault on subjectivity, language and narrative. In its obsession with not piercing the flesh, American renders bodies in their entirety – social and political, flesh and blood – utterly subject to sovereign power and makes precarious the very possibility of a speaking subject. For both tortured and torturer, narratives are ruptured and produced; after, the event remains without closure, unable to become memory. This chapter explores the problem of writing the traumatic remnants of American torture during the war on terror. Agamben’s understanding of sovereignty and biopower is used to show how bodies become wholly penetrated by American power, while the work of Massumi and others underpins a conception of the war on terror as discursive and affective structure. Affect theory, following both Ahmed, Deleuze and Tomkins, provides the conceptual apparatus for an expanded understanding of bodies and for exploring relations between tortured and torturing bodies. The author’s own fictional work-in-progress on detention and torture during the war on terror frames both the challenges and possibilities in the practice of writing the consequences of torture. The work of Felman and Laub on testimony and that of Agamben on what he calls ‘neither the dead nor the survivors’ but ‘what remains between’ provide the basis for an ethic of writing built on the traces of trauma, the remnants of torture that are ever-present in bodies, yet to become memory.

European Journal of International Relations, 2021

Existing studies on democracies' involvement in torture emphasise how governments have been able to circumvent the international anti-torture norm and shape public discourse on the issue through powerful rhetorical strategies of denial and exception. Less attention has been paid, however, to the rhetoric of opponents of torture and how it impacts on governments and security agencies. This article proposes a typology of four common arguments against torture, which make use variously of ethical, utilitarian and 'shaming' rhetoric. These arguments often take a narrative form and are extensively contested by governments. Drawing on the literature on rhetorical coercion, I argue that anti-torture narratives can play an important role in constraining democratic states and significantly reducing their perpetration of torture. Yet the multiplicity of narratives at play opens up opportunities for governments to accept some messages against torture while simultaneously contesting others in a way which enables them to continue their involvement in torture. I develop this argument through a comparative analysis of the role of torture in two British counterterrorism campaigns-against Irish republican terrorism in the 1970s and against jihadist violence after 9/11. Differences in the content and salience of the narratives advanced by critics of the government during the two time periods explain much about why the British government contested some arguments against torture, but accepted others. This variation helps to explain in turn why British security agencies carried out coercive interrogations on a wide scale during the 1970s, while their perpetration of torture was significantly reduced in the post-9/11 case.

2016

2016

After 9/11, the United States became a nation that sanctioned torture. Detainees across the globe were waterboarded, deprived of sleep, beaten by guards, blasted with deafening music and forced into obscene acts. Their torture presents a profound problem for literature: torturous pain and its traumatic aftermath have long been held to destroy language, shatter experience, and refuse representation. Challenging accepted thinking, Gestures of Testimony asks how literature might bear witness to the tortures of a war waged against fear itself. Bringing the vibrant field of affect theory to bear on theories of torture and power, Richardson adopts an interdisciplinary approach to show how testimony founded in affect can bear witness to torture and its traumas. Grounded in provocative readings of poems by Guantanamo detainees, memoirs of interrogators and detainees, contemporary films, the Bush Administration's Torture Memos, and fiction by George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Arthur Koestler, Anne Michaels, and Janette Turner Hospital, Michael Richardson traces the workings of affect, biopower, and aesthetics to re-think literary testimony. Gestures of Testimony gives shape to a mode of affective witnessing, a reaching beyond the page in the writing of torture that reveals violent trauma - even as it embodies its veiling. http://bloomsbury.com/9781501315800

Contesting Torture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2022

This chapter explores the complex and ambiguous entanglements that exist between torture and death. Surprisingly, as we show, death remains a marginal topic in torture debates. Existing accounts also tend to frame violent power imbalances between torturers and the tortured as insurmountable and fixed. While powerful, these arguments contain blind spots. Throughout this chapter, we engage with debates taking place around death and dead bodies to cast a different light on what torture is and how it works. In part, we detail how the fear of death can be employed as a torture tactic. We also argue that in some instances tortured people have managed to overcome fear, thereby defying their captors and the act of torture. These discussions bridge into our exploration of alternative sites of contestation. Ultimately, we suggest that people who die from torture can be 'brought back to life' through processes of civic resistance. We close with some incomplete endings and invitations.