From 86817b97e7f40d6a7c062c0cd34e343b31098942 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Silvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2019 16:56:53 -0300
Subject: Adds some partial book reviews: death of nature and torture and truth

---
 books/philosophy/torture-and-truth.md | 956 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 956 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 books/philosophy/torture-and-truth.md

(limited to 'books/philosophy/torture-and-truth.md')

diff --git a/books/philosophy/torture-and-truth.md b/books/philosophy/torture-and-truth.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4dcb3a6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/books/philosophy/torture-and-truth.md
@@ -0,0 +1,956 @@
+[[!meta title="Torture and Truth"]]
+
+* [Torture and Truth](https://www.worldcat.org/title/torture-and-truth/oclc/20823386).
+* By Page duBois.
+
+## About
+
+    First published in 1991, this book — through the examination of ancient
+    Greek literary, philosophical and legal texts — analyses how the Athenian
+    torture of slaves emerged from and reinforced the concept of truth as something
+    hidden in the human body. It discusses the tradition of understanding truth as
+    something that is generally concealed and the ideas of ‘secret space’ in both
+    the female body and the Greek temple. This philosophy and practice is related
+    to Greek views of the ‘Other’ (women and outsiders) and considers the role of
+    torture in distinguishing slave and free in ancient Athens. A wide range of
+    perspectives — from Plato to Sartre — are employed to examine the subject.
+
+## Topics
+
+* Example of actual tortures that took place: see defense of Andokides. Footnote 6.
+
+## Excerpts
+
+### Machine atroci
+
+    Inside sat other devices. The iron maiden of Frankfurt, a
+    larger-than-life-size female body, cast in iron, strangely reminiscent of one
+    of those Russian dolls, a rounded maternal peasant body that opens horizontally
+    to reveal another identical doll inside, that opens again and again until one
+    reaches a baby, perhaps, I can’t recall, in its deepest inside. This body,
+    propped open, had been cast with a vertical split, its interior consisting of
+    two sets of sharp iron spikes that, when the maiden was closed on a captive
+    human body, penetrated that body, trapping it upright as it killed in a
+    grotesque parody of pregnancy made a coffin.
+
+    [...]
+
+    For me, the pear was not the most compelling “machine” on display. There
+    sat, on one of the tables inside the Quirinale Palace, a simple modern device,
+    looking something like a microphone, with electrodes dangling from it. The
+    catalogue acknowledged that critics had objected to the inclusion of this
+    instrument in the exhibit.
+
+    [...]
+
+    As I recognized what it must be, pieced together an idea of its functions from
+    recently read accounts of refugees from the Argentinian junta and from Central
+    America, recalled films of the Algerian war, news stories of the reign of the
+    colonels in Greece, this instrument composed of the only too familiar elements
+    of modern technology defamiliarized the devices on exhibit; removing them from
+    the universe of the museum, it identified them with the calculated infliction
+    of human agony. It recontextualized all the other objects, prevented them from
+    being an aesthetic series, snatched them from the realm of the commodified
+    antique, recalled suffering.
+
+    The ancient Greeks and Romans routinely tortured slaves as part of their legal
+    systems. So what? Is the recollection of this fact merely a curiosity, a memory
+    of the “antique” which allows us to marvel at our progress from the past of
+    Western culture, our abolition of slavery? Some of us congratulate ourselves on
+    our evolution from a barbaric pagan past, from the world of slave galleys and
+    crucifixions, of vomitoria and gladiatorial contests, of pederasty and
+    polytheism. But there is another, supplementary or contestatory narrative told
+    about ancient Greek culture—a narrative about the noble origins of Western
+    civilization. This narrative has analogies with the Quirinale exhibit—it
+    represents the past as a set of detached objects, redolent with antique
+    atmosphere. This alternate and prejudicially selective gaze at the high culture
+    of antiquity, the achievement of those ancient Greeks and Romans to whom we
+    point when we discuss our golden age, produces an ideological text for the
+    whole world now, mythologies about democracy versus communist totalitarianism,
+    about progress, civilized values, human rights. Because we are descended from
+    this noble ancient culture, from the inventors of philosophy and democracy, we
+    see ourselves as privileged, as nobly obliged to guide the whole benighted
+    world toward Western culture’s version of democracy and enlightenment. But even
+    as we gaze at high culture, at its origins in antiquity, at its present
+    manifestations in the developed nations, the “base” practices of torturers
+    throughout the world, many of them trained by North Americans, support this
+    narrative by forcing it on others, by making it the hegemonic discourse about
+    history. So-called high culture—philosophical, forensic, civic discourses and
+    practices—is of a piece from the very beginning, from classical antiquity, with
+    the deliberate infliction of human suffering. It is my argument in this book
+    that more is at stake in our recognition of this history than antiquarianism,
+    than complacency about our advances from barbarism to civilization. That truth
+    is unitary, that truth may finally be extracted by torture, is part of our
+    legacy from the Greeks and, therefore, part of our idea of “truth.”
+
+### Sartre
+
+    "Torture is senseless violence, born in fear. The purpose of it is to force
+    from one tongue, amid its screams and its vomiting up of blood, the secret of
+    everything. Senseless violence: whether the victim talks or whether he dies
+    under his agony, the secret that he cannot tell is always somewhere else and
+    out of reach. It is the executioner who becomes Sisyphus. If he puts the
+    question at all, he will have to continue forever."
+
+### Tradition, secrets, truth and torture
+
+    The Gestapo taught the French, who taught the Americans in Indo-China, and
+    they passed on some of their expertise to the Argentinian, Chilean, El
+    Salvadoran torturers. But this essay is not meant to be a genealogy of modern
+    torture. Rather I am concerned with what Sartre calls “the secret of
+    everything” with the relationship between torture and the truth, which “is
+    always somewhere else and out of reach.”
+
+A crucial point (an "crucial" also in the sense of the crucified, tortured body):
+
+    I want to show how the logic of our philosophical tradition, of some of our
+    inherited beliefs about truth, leads almost inevitably to conceiving of the
+    body of the other as the site from which truth can be produced, and to using
+    violence if necessary to extract that truth.
+
+    [...]
+
+    I want to work out how the Greek philosophical idea of truth was produced
+    in history and what role the social practice of judicial torture played in its
+    production.
+
+    I don’t want to suggest that the ancient Greeks invented torture, or that it
+    belongs exclusively to the Western philosophical tradition, or that abhorrence
+    of torture is not also part of that tradition. But I also refuse to adopt the
+    moral stance of those who pretend that torture is the work of “others,” that it
+    belongs to the third world, that we can condemn it from afar. To stand thus is
+    to eradicate history, to participate both in the exportation of torture as a
+    product of Western civilization, and in the concealment of its ancient and
+    perhaps necessary coexistence with much that we hold dear. The very idea of
+    truth we receive from the Greeks, those ancestors whom Allan Bloom names for
+    us,3 is inextricably linked with the practice of torture, which has almost
+    always been the ultimate attempt to discover a secret “always out of reach.”
+
+    [...]
+
+    The ancient Greek word for torture is basanos. It means first of all the
+    touchstone used to test gold for purity; the Greeks extended its meaning to
+    denote a test or trial to determine whether something or someone is real or
+    genuine. It then comes to mean also inquiry by torture, “the question,”
+    torture.4 In the following pages I will discuss the semantic field of the word
+    basanos, its uses in various contexts, both literal and metaphorical. [...]
+    This analysis will lead me to consideration of the idea of truth as secret in
+    ancient Greek thought, in literary, ritual, and philosophical practices
+
+    [...]
+
+    The desire for a reliable test to determine the fidelity of a suspect
+    intimate recurs in Greek poetry, and later poets often employ the metaphor of
+    the testing of metal to describe the necessity and unreliability of testing for
+    the fidelity of friends.
+
+    The Lydians of Asia Minor had invented the use of metal currency, of money, in
+    the seventh century B.C.E. The polis or city-state of Aegina was reputed to be
+    the first Greek city to establish a silver coinage; in the classical period
+    several different coinages circulated. By the fifth century B.C.E. coins of
+    small enough denominations existed to enter into the economic transactions of
+    daily life. In Euripides’ Hippolytus the Athenian king Theseus, bewildered by
+    contradictory accounts of an alleged seduction attempt by his son against his
+    wife, uses monetary language to convey his confusion about the mysteries of
+    domestic intimacy:
+
+    [...]
+
+    Theseus employs the language of the banker, of the money-lender, to suggest
+    that one of his friends, that is, of those dear to him, either his son or his
+    wife, is false and counterfeit.
+
+    [...]
+
+    pollution is a religious term, connected with the impurity of blood shed,
+    of unclean sacrificial practices or murder.10
+    In the archaic period, the state of freedom from pollution is sometimes
+    connected with notions of inherited purity, of uncontaminated descent from the
+    generations of heroes, from the gods, ideas of inherited excellence through
+    which the aristocrats justified their dominance in the archaic cities.
+
+### Governing, the steering of a ship in the hands of the aristocracy
+
+    The very last lines of the poem echo the concerns of Theognis, a recognition of
+    the political disturbances of the ancient city, and the desire of the
+    aristocratic poet for a steady hand, sanctioned by blood and tradition, at the
+    city’s helm: 
+
+        Let us praise
+        his brave brothers too, because
+        they bear on high the ways of Thessaly
+        and bring them glory.
+        In their hands
+        belongs the piloting of cities, their fathers’ heritage.
+        (68-72) [poet Pindar, in Pythian 10]
+
+    This last phrase might be rendered: “in the care of the good men [Theognis’s
+    agathoi, a political term] lie the inherited, paternal pilotings, governings
+    [following the metaphor of the ship of state] of cities.” The city is a ship
+    that must be guided by those who are capable by birth of piloting it, that is
+    to say, the agathoi, the good, the aristocrats. The basanos reveals the good,
+    separates base metal from pure gold, aristocrat from commoner.
+
+### A change of meaning
+
+    The Sophoclean language, and its ambiguity, reveal the gradual transition of
+    the meaning of the word basanos from “test” to “torture.” The literal meaning,
+    “touchstone,” gives way to a figurative meaning, “test,” then over time changes
+    to “torture,” as the analogy is extended to the testing of human bodies in
+    juridical procedures for the Athenian courts. Is the history of basanos itself
+    in ancient Athens a process of refiguration, the alienation of the test from a
+    metal to the slave, the other? Such a transfer is literally catachresis, the
+    improper use of words, the application of a term to a thing which it does not
+    properly denote, abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor (OED); George
+    Puttenham, the Elizabethan rhetorician, calls catachresis “the figure of
+    abuse.” The modern English word touchstone is similarly employed by people who
+    have no idea of the archaic reference to the lapis Lydius, also called in
+    English basanite . The figurative use of the word touchstone has taken the
+    place of the literal meaning.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The forensic language of Oedipus Rex fuses heroic legend with the poetic
+    representation of the city’s institutions. The mythic narrative of Oedipus’s
+    encounter with the Sphinx, set in the most remote past, and the struggle
+    between Kreon and Oedipus over the investigation of an ancient and mythic
+    homicide, here meet the daily life of the democratic polis. The language of
+    Sophokles’ tragedy might be said to exemplify not only the contradictions
+    between the tyranny of the fictional past and the “secret ballots,” alluded to
+    disparagingly by Pindar, of the audience’s present, but also to represent
+    dramatically, in an almost Utopian manner, a synthesis of the Greeks’ legendary
+    origins and their political processes. The chorus’s attempt to judge Oedipus
+    resembles the aristocratic reveler’s testing of his fellow symposiasts, using
+    as it does archaic, lyric language; it is also like the democratic jury’s
+    testing of a citizen on trial, alluding obliquely at the same time to the
+    juridical torture of slaves in the Athenian legal system, a process which by
+    this time was referred to as the basanos.
+    
+    Some of the semantic processes that transformed basanos as touchstone into the
+    term for legal torture can be seen in the use of the term in the Oedipus
+    Coloneus. This tragedy is only obliquely concerned with the process of
+    democracy, with the new institutions of the mid-fifth century which mediated
+    between the city’s aristocratic past and its democratic present. It speaks
+    instead of the exhaustion of the political, of disillusionment with parties and
+    with war, of metaphysical solutions to problems too bitter to be resolved in
+    mortal agones. 
+
+    [...]
+
+    The basanos, no longer an autonomous, inert, inanimate tool for assaying
+    metal, has become a struggle between two forces, a contest that assumes
+    physical violence, a reconcretizing of the “touchstone,” which is neither the
+    literal stone nor a metaphorical ordeal. Hands, pitted one against the other,
+    rematerialize the test. The touchstone sets stone against metal; the test of
+    friends sets one against another; here the agon, the contest implicit in the
+    notion of basanos, takes on a new connotation, one of combat between enemies.
+    
+    Some historians of the ancient city believe that the word basanos refers not to
+    physical torture, but to a legal interrogation that does not involve violence.
+    Others claim that the threat of torture may have been present in the word, but
+    that there is no evidence that torture was actually ever practiced.16 It seems
+    to me very unlikely , even though the ancient evidence does not describe
+    directly any single case of torture, that the frequent mentions of basanos in
+    contexts of physical intimidation can refer to anything but the practice of
+    torture. The accidents of survival of ancient material may mean that we have no
+    single documented instance of torture having been applied, but the many uses of
+    the term, not only in the context of the law court, suggest a cultural
+    acceptance of the meaning “torture” for basanos, and an assumption that torture
+    occurred. For example, the historian Herodotos, in recounting an incident that
+    took place during the Persian Wars, in the early years of the fifth century
+    B.C.E., describes the Athenian hero Themistokles’ secret negotiations with the
+    Persian emperor Xerxes after the battle of Salamis: 
+    
+    Themistocles lost no time in getting a message through to Xerxes. The men he
+    chose for this purpose were all people he could trust to keep his instructions
+    secret [sigan], even under torture [es pasan basanon].
+
+    [...]
+
+    This passage suggests not only that basanos was not merely interrogation, but
+    that with the meaning torture it formed part of the vocabulary of daily life,
+    and that torture figured in the relations between ancient states as well as in
+    the legal processes of the democratic city. Themistokles had to take into
+    account the ability of his emissaries to resist physical torture, pasan
+    basanon, “any, all torture,” when deciding whom to send to the Persian emperor.
+    He required silence under extreme interrogation, since he was claiming falsely
+    to have protected Xerxes from the pursuit of the Greeks after the Persians’
+    defeat. And Herodotos uses the word basanos as if the meaning “torture” were
+    common currency.
+    
+    As do Sophokles’ Oedipus plays, Herodotos’s text offers a double vision,
+    providing further evidence about the place of torture in the democracy and in
+    its prehis-tory. Sophokles writes from within the democracy about episodes from
+    the archaic, legendary past of the city. Herodotos writes from the world of the
+    mid-fifth century, the time of Sophokles and the great imperial age of Athens,
+    looking back half a century. The victories of Athens in the Persian Wars had
+    enabled and produced the great flowering of Athenian culture and ambition in
+    the middle of the fifth century. Herodotos’s retrospective gaze at the origins
+    of the democracy and its empire paints the portrait of Themistokles, one of the
+    great aristocrats whose power and vision shaped the evolution of the democratic
+    city. His encouragement, for example, of the policy of spending the city’s
+    mining wealth on its fleet, rather than distributing of monies to the citizens,
+    meant that the poorest citizens in Athens, who manned the fleet, participated
+    actively and powerfully in the political and military decisions of the
+    following years. In the incident Herodotos describes, Themistokles takes care
+    to ensure that his self-interested machinations not be known by the Athenians
+    he led. Themistokles, like Oedipus, has become a creature of legend.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Silence under torture may be coded as an aristocratic virtue. [...] it
+    indicates the degree to which silence under pain is ideologically associated
+    with nobility. The slave has no resources through which to resist submitting to
+    pain and telling all. In contrast the aristocratic soldier, noble by both birth
+    and training, maintains laconic silence in the face of physical abuse.
+
+### Comedy and inversion
+
+    We find a comic parody of the use of basanos for the courtroom in Aristophanes’
+    Frogs.20 The comedy is devoted to themes of judgment, discrimination, and
+    evaluation . Dionysos and his slave Xanthias have set off on a journey to Hades
+    to retrieve the tragic poet Euripides, but end by choosing Aeschylus to bring
+    back with them, claiming him over Euripides as the superior poet. Dionysos had
+    dressed for the trip as Herakles, who had once successfully entered and, more
+    importantly, departed the realm of the dead, but when he learns that Herakles
+    is persona non grata in Hades, he forces his slave to trade costumes with him.
+    When Xanthias is mistaken for Herakles and about to be arrested as a
+    dog-napper, for the stealing of Kerberos, the slave offers to give up his own
+    supposed slave, really the god Dionysos, to torture
+
+    [...]
+
+    The result is a beating contest in which Xanthias seems sure to win, accustomed
+    as he, a real slave, is to such beatings. The beatings constitute not
+    punishment but torture, and the language of the comedy reflects this fact. The
+    torture will reveal the truth, show which of the two is a god, which a slave.
+    The comedy works on the reversal of slave and god; Xanthias claims a god would
+    not be hurt by a beating, but the slave, the lowest of mortal beings, might in
+    fact be thought, because of experience, most easily to endure a whipping.
+    Dionysos begins to weep under the beating, but claims it’s due to onions.
+    Aiakos is finally unable to decide which of the two is divine.
+    
+    In the parabasis, the address to the audience, that follows, the theme of noble
+    and base currency emerges once again, as if connected by free association with
+    this scene of torture, of the basanos or touchstone. The chorus appeals to the
+    Athenian populace, complaining that Athenians who had committed one fault in a
+    battle at sea were to be put to death, while slaves who had fought alongside
+    their masters had been given their freedom. This seems to the chorus to be a
+    perversion of traditional hierarchical thinking:
+
+    [...]
+
+    The comic beating is quite hilarious, of course. But it does not put into
+    question the reality of torture. The exchange has a carnival quality, Dionysos
+    masquerading as slave, slave masquerading as Dionysos masquerading as Herakles,
+    the god beaten like a common slave. The slave remains uppity and insolent, the
+    god cowardly and ridiculous. Comedy permits this representation of the
+    quotidian reality of the polis, the exposure of what cannot be alluded to
+    directly in tragedy, the violence and domination implicit in the situation of
+    bondage. Comedy allows the fictional depiction of the unspeakable, the
+    representation of the lowly slave, the allusion to ordinary cruelty, a
+    commentary on the difficulty of perceiving the essential difference between
+    divine and enslaved beings.
+    [...] If Aristophanes is so iconoclastic as to mock the gods, and to treat
+    the slave as if he were a human character, he does not go so far as to question
+    the institution of the basanos. 
+
+### Testing
+
+    The slave on the rack waits like the metal, pure or alloyed, to be tested.
+    [...] The test assumes that its result will be truth; [...] The truth is
+    generated by torture from the speech of the slave; the sounds of the slave on
+    the rack must by definition contain truth, which the torture produces. And when
+    set against other testimony in a court case, that necessary truth, like a
+    touchstone itself, will show up the truth or falsity of the testimony. The
+    process of testing has been spun out from the simple metallurgist’s experiment,
+    to a new figuration of the work of interrogating matter. It is the slave’s
+    body, not metal, which receives the test; but how can that body be demonstrated
+    to be true or false, pure or alloyed, loyal or disloyal? The basanos assumes
+    first that the slave always lies, then that torture makes him or her always
+    tell the truth, then that the truth produced through torture will always expose
+    the truth or falsehood of the free man’s evidence.
+
+### Athenian democracy and torture
+
+    Yet the Athenian democracy was at best a sort of oligarchy, one that denied
+    legal and political rights to all women, even daughters of citizens, and to
+    foreigners and slaves residing in Attica. The practice of slave torture is
+    consistent with the democracy’s policies of exclusion, scapegoating, ostracism,
+    and physical cruelty and violence; to overlook or justify torture is to
+    misrecognize and idealize the Athenian state.
+
+    MacDowell describes the place of torture in the Athenian legal system: 
+
+        A special rule governed the testimony of slaves: they could not appear in
+        court, but a statement which a slave, male or female, had made under torture
+        (basanos) could be produced in court as evidence.3
+
+        The party in a trial who wished a slave to be tortured would put his questions
+        in writing, specifying which slaves he wished to have tortured and the
+        questions they were to be asked, and also agreeing to pay the slave’s owner for
+        any permanent damage inflicted on the slave. Athenian citizens could not be
+        tortured.
+
+    MacDowell reasons as follows about the rule that slave’s testimony could
+    be received in the courtroom only if the slave had been tortured: 
+
+        The reason for this rule must have been that a slave who knew anything material
+        would frequently belong to one of the litigants, and so would be afraid to say
+        anything contrary to his owner’s interests, unless the pressure put on him to
+        reveal the truth was even greater than the punishment for revealing it which he
+        could expect from his master.4
+
+    A. R. W. Harrison believes that the right to testify freely in court may have
+    been seen as a privilege, perhaps because witnesses who appeared in court were
+    once thought of as “compurgators,” witnesses who swore to the credibility of a
+    party in a law suit. “Torture must therefore be applied to the slave as a mark
+    of the fact that he was not in himself a free agent entitled to support one
+    side or the other.”5 Since the slave was a valuable piece of property, liable
+    to damage from torture, she or he could not be tortured without permission of
+    the owner.6 If that permission were denied, the opponent often claimed that the
+    evidence which would have been obtained under torture would of certainty have
+    been damning to the slave’s owner.
+
+### Slavery and freedom
+
+    Jean-Paul Sartre’s [...] says: “Algeria cannot contain two human species, but
+    requires a choice between them”.1 The soldiers who practiced torture on
+    Algerian revolutionaries attempted to reduce their opponents to pure
+    materiality, to the status of animals.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Free men and women could be enslaved at any time, although in Athens the
+    Solonian reforms of the sixth century B.C.E.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the Politics Aristotle claims that some people are slaves “by nature”
+
+    [...]
+
+    The discourse on the use of torture in ancient Athenian law forms part of an
+    attempt to manage the opposition between slave and free, and it betrays both
+    need and anxiety: need to have a clear boundary between servile and free,
+    anxiety about the impossibility of maintaining this difference.
+
+### Tendency of suspend democracy protections (coup) during crisis
+
+    [The] incident of the mutilation of the herms shook the stability of the
+    Athenian state, but also points to the future tendencies among the aristocratic
+    and oligarchic parties to suspend democratic protections in a moment of crisis.
+    The logical tendency would seem to be either to extend torture to all who could
+    give evidence, or to forbid torture of any human being. The instability of the
+    distinctions between slave and free, citizen and noncitizen, Greek and
+    foreigner, becomes apparent in these debates on the possibility of state
+    torture of citizens. Athenian citizens treasured the freedom from torture as a
+    privilege of their elevated status; Peisander’s eagerness to abrogate this
+    right is a premonition of the violence and illegality of the oligarchic coup of
+    411 and of the bloody rule of the Thirty after the defeat of the Athenians by
+    the Spartans in 404.5
+
+### Truth-making and the secret of everything
+
+    Another kind of truth, what Sartre calls “the secret of everything,” is named
+    by many Greek writers as the explicit aim of judicial torture. [,,,] 
+    In the Greek legal system, the torture of slaves figured as a guarantor of
+    truth, as a process of truth-making.
+
+### Secret ballots and lawyers
+
+    Jurors received pay for their service in the courts [...] A case was required
+    to be completed within a day at most; several private cases would be tried
+    within a single day. The time alloted for arguments by the opponents in a trial
+    was measured by a water-clock; the amount of water allowed for each side was
+    determined by the seriousness of the charges. After each of the litigants
+    spoke, brought forward witnesses, and had evidence read, the jurors placed
+    disks or pebbles into urns to determine the winner of the suit. 
+    [...] At the end of the fifth century it became customary to employ professional
+    writers to compose one’s speech for the court.
+
+    Thus the scene in the court resembled the great assemblies of the democratic
+    city, with up to six thousand men adjudicating disputes. [...]
+    In this context, the evidence from the torture of slaves is evidence from
+    elsewhere, from another place, another body. It is evidence from outside the
+    community of citizens, of free men. Produced by the basanistês, the torturer,
+    or by the litigant in another scene, at the time of torture, such evidence
+    differs radically from the testimony of free witnesses in the court. It is
+    temporally estranged, institutionally, conventionally marked as evidence of
+    another order; what is curious is that speakers again and again privilege it as
+    belonging to a higher order of truth than that evidence freely offered in the
+    presence of the jurors by present witnesses.
+
+    [...]
+
+    There are many such passages. The slave body has become, in the democratic
+    city, the site of torture and of the production of truth.
+
+    The argument concerning the greater value of slave evidence frequently occurs
+    in accusations against an opponent who has refused to allow his slaves to be
+    tortured. The speaker claims then that this failure to produce slave witnesses
+    proves indirectly that their testimony would condemn their owner.
+
+### Slaves are bodies; citizens possess logos
+
+    Lykourgos argues against Leokrates [...]:
+
+        Every one of you knows that in matters of dispute it is considered by far the
+        just and most democratic [dêmotikôtatori] course, when there are male or female
+        slaves, who possess the necessary information, to examine these by torture and
+        so have facts to go upon instead of hearsay, particularly when the case
+        concerns the public and is of vital interest to the state.
+
+    He argues that by nature the tortured slaves would have told the truth; does
+    this mean that any human being, when tortured, will produce the truth, or that
+    it is the nature of slaves to tell the truth under torture? Free citizen men
+    will be deceived by clever arguments; slaves by nature will not be misled
+    because they think with their bodies. Slaves are bodies; citizens possess
+    logos, reason. [...] This appeal to the practice of torture as an integral
+    and valued part of the legal machinery of the democracy points up the
+    contradictory nature of Athenian democracy, and the ways in which the
+    application of the democratic reforms of Athens were carefully limited to the
+    lives of male citizens, and intrinsic to the production and justification of
+    this notion of male citizenship.
+
+### Notions of truth and the real of the untorturable, the dead
+
+    In another speech attributed to Antiphon, this one part of a case presumably
+    actually tried, torture again plays an important role in the defense of a man
+    accused of murder, Euxitheos [...]
+
+        Probably both of these considerations induced him to make the false charges
+        against me which he did; he hoped to gain his freedom, and his one immediate
+        wish was to end the torture. I need not remind you, I think, that witnesses
+        under torture are biased in favour of those who do most of the torturing; they
+        will say anything likely to gratify them. It is their one chance of salvation,
+        especially when the victims of their lies happen not to be present. Had I
+        myself proceeded to give orders that the slave should be racked [strebloun] for
+        not telling the truth, that step in itself would doubtless have been enough to
+        make him stop incriminating me falsely. (5.31-32)
+
+    The speaker, because for once forced to confront the evidence of a tortured
+    slave, rather than bemoaning the lack of slave evidence, here points out the
+    absolute unreliability of slave evidence, based as it is on the will of the
+    torturer. Bizarrely, however, he ends by claiming that the true truth would
+    have emerged, another truth truer than the first, if he himself had been the
+    torturer. If so, it is interesting that the defendant distinguishes between
+    an essentialist notion of truth and a pragmatic notion of truth in the case of
+    the slave, but not in the case of the free foreigner, where a reversion to the
+    essentialist notion appears to occur. And the logic he exposes, that the slave
+    will say anything to gratify his torturer, is dropped as soon as he himself
+    becomes the torturer. We can imagine the body of the slave ripped apart in a
+    tug-of-war between two litigants, in a law case in which he was implicated only
+    by proximity.
+
+    This very slave, who had been purchased by the prosecution, in fact later
+    changed his testimony, according to the speaker because he recognized his
+    imminent doom. Nonetheless the prosecution put him to death. The defendant
+    continues: 
+    
+        Clearly, it was not his person, but his evidence, which they required; had the
+        man remained alive, he would have been tortured by me in the same way, and the
+        prosecution would be confronted with their plot: but once he was dead, not only
+        did the loss of his person mean that I was deprived of my opportunity of
+        establishing the truth, but his false statements are assumed to be true.
+        (5.35)
+    
+    All of the prosecution’s case rests on the testimony of the tortured and now
+    dead slave; the defendant claims to be completely frustrated, since now the
+    truth lies in a realm inaccessible to him. He cannot torture the dead man and
+    discover the “real” truth. Even though the slave had at first insisted on the
+    defendant’s innocence, he had under torture called him guilty: 
+    
+        At the start, before being placed on the wheel [trokhon], in fact, until
+        extreme pressure was brought to bear, the man adhered to the truth [alêtheia]
+        and declared me innocent. It was only when on the wheel, and when driven to it,
+        that he falsely incriminated me, in order to put an end to the torture.
+        (5.40-41)
+    
+    The persistence of the defendant’s desire himself to torture this slave claims
+    our attention; even after the inevitability of false testimony under torture
+    stands exposed, he bemoans the retreat of the slave into the realm of the
+    untorturable, of the dead.
+
+        I repeat, let no one cause you to forget that the prosecution put the informer
+        to death, that they used every effort to prevent his appearance in court and to
+        make it impossible for me to take him and examine him under torture on my
+        return.… Instead, they bought the slave and put him to death, entirely on their
+        own initiative [idia], (5.46-47)
+
+### Reasoning attributed to a free man, but foreigner
+
+    The free man knew that the torture would end; he also could not be bribed by
+    promises of freedom for giving the answers the torturers desired to hear. In
+    this case, the defendant gives priority to the free man’s unfree testimony;
+    unlike the free testimony of an Athenian in a courtroom, this evidence was
+    derived from torture, but the defendant seeks to give it the added authority of
+    the free man in spite of its origin in this procedure tainted with unfreedom,
+    because it supports his view of the case.
+
+### Truth even if it cost lives
+
+        You do not need to be reminded, gentlemen, that the one occasion when
+        compulsion [anagkai] is as absolute and as effective as is humanly possible,
+        and when the rights of a case are ascertained thereby most surely and most
+        certainly, arises when there is an abundance of witnesses, both slave and free,
+        and it is possible to put pressure [anagkazein] upon the free men by exacting
+        an oath or word of honour, the most solemn and the most awful form of
+        compulsion known to free men, and upon the slaves by other devices [heterais
+        anagkais], which will force them to tell the truth even if their revelations
+        are bound to cost them their lives, as the compulsion of the moment [he gar
+        parousa anagkê] has a stronger influence over each than the fate which he will
+        suffer by compulsion afterwards. (6.25)
+
+    That is, the free man is compelled by oaths; he might lose his rights as a
+    citizen if he lied under oath. The slave, even though he will certainly be put
+    to death as a consequence of what he reveals under torture, will nonetheless,
+    under torture, reveal the truth. The two kinds of compulsion are equated, one
+    appropriate for the free man, one for the slave.
+
+### Torturability
+
+    Torture serves not only to exact a truth, some truth or other, which will
+    benefit one side of the case or the other. It also functions as a gambit in the
+    exchange between defendant and prosecution; if for any reason one of them
+    refuses to give up slaves to torture, the other can claim that the missing
+    testimony would of a certainty support his view of things. And as I argued
+    earlier, torture also serves to mark the boundary between slave and free
+    beings. Torture can be enacted against free, non-Greek beings as well as
+    slaves; all “barbarians” are assimilated to slaves. Slaves are barbarians,
+    barbarians are slaves; all are susceptible to torture. Torturability creates a
+    difference which is naturalized. And even the sophistry of the First Tetralogy,
+    which wants to create a category of virtually free in the case of the slave who
+    would have been freed had he lived, seeks to support this division of human
+    beings into free, truth-telling creatures, and torturable slave/barbarians, who
+    will only produce truth on the wheel.
+
+### The Slave's Truth
+
+    Torture performs at least two functions in the Athenian state. As an instrument
+    of demarcation, it delineates the boundary between slave and free, between the
+    untouchable bodies of free citizens and the torturable bodies of slaves. The
+    ambiguity of slave status, the difficulty of sustaining an absolute sense of
+    differences, is addressed through this practice of the state, which carves the
+    line between slave and free on the bodies of the unfree. In the work of the
+    wheel, the rack, and the whip, the torturer carries out the work of the polis;
+    citizen is made distinct from noncitizen, Greek from barbarian, slave from
+    free. The practice of basanos administers to the anxiety about enslavement,
+    hauntingly evoked in the texts of Athenian tragedy that recall the fall of
+    cities, particularly the fall of Troy, evoked as well in the histories that
+    recount Athenian destruction of subject allies.
+
+    [...]
+
+    But the desire to clarify the respective status of slave and free is not the
+    motive, never the explicit motive, of torture. Rather, again and again, even in
+    the face of arguments discounting evidence derived from torture, speakers in
+    the courts describe the basanos as a search for truth. How is this possible?
+    And how are the two desires related? The claim is made that truth resides in
+    the slave body.
+
+    [...]
+
+    That is, the master possesses reason, logos. When giving evidence in court, he
+    knows the difference between truth and falsehood, he can reason and produce
+    true speech, logos, and he can reason about the consequences of falsehood , the
+    deprivation of his rights as a citizen. The slave, on the other hand,
+    possessing not reason, but rather a body strong for service (iskhura pros ten
+    anagkaian khrêsin), must be forced to utter the truth, which he can apprehend,
+    although not possessing reason as such. Unlike an animal, a being that
+    possesses only feelings, and therefore can neither apprehend reason, logos, nor
+    speak, legein, the slave can testify when his body is tortured because he
+    recognizes reason without possessing it himself.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Thus, according to Aristotle’s logic, representative or not, the slave’s truth
+    is the master’s truth; it is in the body of the slave that the master’s truth
+    lies, and it is in torture that his truth is revealed. The torturer reaches
+    through the master to the slave’s body, and extracts the truth from it. The
+    master can conceal the truth, since he possesses reason and can choose between
+    truth and lie, can choose the penalty associated with false testimony. His own
+    point of vulnerability is the body of his slave, which can be compelled not to
+    lie, can be forced to produce the truth. If he decides to deny the body of his
+    slave to the torturer, assumptions Will be made that condemn him.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Aristotle advocates the pragmatic approach; one can argue either side concerning
+    the truth of torture.
+
+    [...]
+
+    As Gernet says, “Proof is institutional.” Proof, and therefore truth, are
+    constituted by the Greeks as best found in the evidence derived from torture.
+    Truth, alêtheia, comes from elsewhere, from another place, from the place of
+    the other.
+
+### Torture and Writing
+
+    The tortured body retains scars, marks that recall the violence inflicted upon
+    it by the torturer. In part because slaves were often tattooed in the ancient
+    world, such marks of torture resonate in the Greek mind with tattoos, and with
+    other forms of metaphorical inscription, in Greek thinking considered analogous
+    to writing on the body.1 I have discussed the topos of corporeal inscription
+    elsewhere. The woman’s body was in ancient Greece sometimes likened to a
+    writing tablet, a surface to be ”ploughed,” inscribed by the hand, the plough,
+    the penis of her husband and master.2
+
+The famous case of the tatooed head:
+    
+    One especially intriguing mention of slave tattooing occurs in Herodotos’s
+    Histories, in a narrative in which the possibility of torture remains implicit.
+    Although I have discussed this episode elsewhere, I want here to draw out its
+    implications for a consideration of the relationship between torture and truth.
+    Histiaios of Miletus sends a message urging revolt to a distant ally by shaving
+    the head of his most trusted slave, tattooing the message on the slave’s head,
+    then waiting for the slave’s hair to grow back. He sends the slave on his
+    journey, ordering him to say at the journey’s end only that the “destinataire,”
+    the receiver of the message, should shave off his hair and look at his head.
+    The message reaches its goal, and Aristagoras the receiver revolts (Herodotos,
+    Histories 5.35).
+    
+    The tattooed head is a protection against torture. If the slave were captured
+    and tortured, he would not himself know the message of revolt. He could not
+    betray his master if questioned and interrogated specifically about his
+    master’s intentions to rise up against those who have enslaved him. He did not
+    know the content of Histiaios’ communication with Aristagoras. But he did know
+    the instructions he bore to Aristagoras, to shave his head and read the message
+    inscribed there. The ruse only displaces the discovery of the message’s truth
+    by a single step, but in this case it succeeds in protecting the message. Here
+    the tattooing, the inscription on the slave’s body, subverts the intention of
+    torture to expose the truth.
+
+"Branding":
+
+    In other contexts in ancient Greece, slave tattooing serves as a sort of label.
+    It is as if writing on the slave body indicated the contents of that body. Such
+    a function of writing recalls the work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who argues
+    that writing originates in the markings on the outside of packages recording
+    their contents.3 Aristotle points out in the Politics, as we have seen, that
+    the slave body ought to reveal its truth, ought to be immediately perceptible
+    as a servile body to the eye, but in fact sometimes it is not. A tattoo on a
+    slave reveals his or her true status. In Aristophanes’ Babylonians, of which
+    only fragments remain, we learn that prisoners of war were sometimes branded or
+    inscribed with a mark indicating the city they served.4
+
+    [...]
+
+        though he is a human being, he does not know himself, soon he will know, having
+        this inscription on his forehead. (74_79)6
+
+    Herodes invokes the inscription at Delphi, also cited by Plato: gnôthi seauton,
+    “Know yourself.”7
+
+    [...]
+
+    This placement of the “epigram,” whatever it is, if it is that, on the metope,
+    the forehead of the slave, makes the inscription a sign. The message of
+    Herodotos’s slave was concealed by his hair, directed to a specified other, the
+    recipient who received the slave as a vehicle for his master’s words. The
+    communication was not directed to the slave himself. In the case of Herodes’
+    slave, the man named “Belly” would bear a sign meant to remind him of his
+    humble status.
+
+### Buried Truth
+
+    If torture helped to manage the troublesome differentiation between slave and
+    free in the ancient city, it also served as a redundant practice reinforcing
+    the dominant notion of the Greeks that truth was an inaccessible, buried
+    secret. In his valuable book Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque,
+    Marcel Detienne describes a historical shift in the Greeks’ ideas about truth
+    that corresponds to the historical shift from mythic to rational thought.1
+    According to Detienne, Alêtheia is at first conceived of by the Greeks in an
+    ambiguous relationship with Lethe, forgetting; truth is the possession of the
+    poet and the just king, who has access to this truth through memory. Alêtheia
+    is caught up in a relationship of ambiguity with Lêthê because, for example,
+    the poet who speaks truth by using memory also confers truth’s other,
+    forgetfulness, oblivion of pain and sorrow, on his listeners. His
+    “magico-religious” speech, as Detienne calls it, which exists in an ambiguous
+    relationship with truth, persists as the dominant form in the Greek world until
+    the speech of warriors, the citizens who form the city’s phalanxes, a speech of
+    dialogue, comes to dominate the social world in the time of the polis. Detienne
+    associates a resultant secularization of poetic Alêtheia with the name of the
+    poet Simonides. Doxa, seeming, becomes the rival province of sophistic and
+    rhetorical speech, while Alêtheia comes to belong to an unambiguously
+    “philosophico-religious” domain. In this field of discourse the logic of
+    ambiguity typical of the Alêtheia-Lêthê relationship is replaced by a logic of
+    contradiction, in which Alêtheia is opposed to Apatê, deception, as its other.
+    The common use of memory provides a link between these two stages of thinking
+    truth; the secularization of speech marks a break between a mythic and a
+    rationalist semantic field in which the term Alêtheia persists.
+
+### The modern word Tortura
+
+    A word used in addition to alêthês in the Odyssey is atrekês, real, genuine,
+    with a connotation perhaps of that which does not distort or deviate. The Latin
+    word torqueo means “to twist tightly, to wind or wrap, to subject to torture,
+    especially by the use of the rack.” This word may come from the root trek-,
+    also occurring in Greek, which may give us atraktos, “spindle,” and also
+    “arrow.”6 (Tortor is used as a cult title of Apollo, “perhaps”, according to
+    the Oxford Latin Dictionary, “from the quarter at Rome occupied by the
+    torturers.”)7 Our English word “torture” is taken from this Latin root. The
+    Oxford English Dictionary defines “torture,” an adaptation of the Latin
+    tortura, in the following way: 
+    
+        The infliction of excruciating pain, as practised by cruel tyrants, savages,
+        brigands, etc., from the delight in watching the agony of a victim, in hatred
+        or revenge, or as a means of extortion; spec. judicial torture, inflicted by a
+        judicial or quasi-judicial authority, for the purpose of forcing an accused or
+        suspected person to confess, or an unwilling witness to give evidence or
+        information.8 Although the writers of the dictionary list first tyrants,
+        savages, and brigands as the agents of torture, the first entry in their
+        citations of the use of the word in English refers to the Acts of the Privy
+        Council of 1551. This set of connotations, to return to the point, links the
+        English word torture with the twisted, the distorted, and suggests that the
+        truth gained as a confession is in English not conceived of as a straight line,
+        but is rather bent, extorted from time on the rack.
+    
+    In Greek, however, not passing through Latin into English for our etymology
+    (etumos is another word used for “true” in Greek), we have, parallel to
+    atrekês, the word alêtheia with its suggestion of hiddenness and forgetting.
+    The connotations of the alternative words nêmertês and atrekês are respectively
+    “not missing the mark”, and “not deviating from an existing model”; the weight
+    of alêthês rests instead on the trace of something not forgotten, not slipping
+    by unnoticed.9
+
+    [...]
+
+    Even in the texts of the Hippocratic tradition, the body is seen to contain
+    secrets that must be interpreted, elicited by signs that emerge onto the body’s
+    surface, as the emanation from the earth arises to possess the Pythia.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Each of these sites of meaning in ancient culture—the epic, oracles, sacred
+    buildings, the medicalized body—lay out a pattern of obscure, hidden truth that
+    must be interpreted.
+
+### Heraclitian truth differs
+
+    The works of the pre-Socratic philosophers (even to presume to call them
+    philosophers may be to presume too much) present problems of reading for the
+    historian of philosophy, for the literary and cultural critic. Even the problem
+    of who is disciplinarily responsible for these texts is insoluble. And the
+    incompleteness of many pre-Socratic texts causes unease. How can one speak of
+    philosophical development when only one line, one metaphor, one aphorism
+    remains, torn out of context, lines repeated to illustrate a well-known point?
+    The ellipses in the published pre-Socratic fragments recall stopped mouths,
+    messages gone astray, the utter failure of communication across a distance of
+    centuries.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The very search for integrity and indivisibility in all things has been called
+    into question by the heirs of Nietzsche, among them those feminists who see the
+    emphasis on wholeness and integrity, on the full body, as a strategy of
+    scholarship that has traditionally excluded the female, who has been identified
+    as different, heterogeneous, disturbing the integrity of the scholarly body,
+    incomplete in herself. Aristotle describes the female as a “deformed”
+    (pepêrômenon) male (Generation of Animals 737a), and argues further that her
+    contribution to reproduction lacks a crucial ingredient, the principle of soul
+    (psukhe). The project of scientific textual studies has been to supply the
+    text’s lack, to reduce the fragmented, partial quality of embodied, material
+    texts, to reject the defective text as it rejects the defective female. Like
+    the slave body that needs the supplement of the basanos to produce truth, the
+    female body and the fragmentary text are both constructed as lacking.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Elsewhere Herakleitos seems to argue against an innate hierarchy of mortal
+    beings: “War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others
+    men; he makes some slaves, others free” (fr. 53). Mortal and immortal status
+    depends on human history, on events. There is no essence, no absolute truth in
+    the differences among beings. Circumstances, history, time affect relations of
+    difference and power.2 This relativism establishes a ground for the vision of
+    equality among citizens in ancient democratic ideology, and even further, a
+    point from which to examine the commonly held view that some human beings are
+    slaves by nature.
+    
+    Herakleitos represents an alternative to the essentializing concept of truth as
+    a buried, hidden substance; he offers a temporal notion of truth, that the
+    basanos of the physician is good at one time, at another time bad, that war
+    creates slaves and free, a relative notion of truth. [...]
+    Herakleitos’s relationship to time, change and process prefigures values of the
+    democracy and of the pre-Socratic sophists whom the aristocratic philosophical
+    tradition despised: “As they step into the same rivers, different and (still)
+    different waters flow upon them” (fr. 12); “we step and do not step into the
+    same rivers; we are and are not” (fr. 49a). His is not a doctrine of
+    superficial appearance and deep truth, but rather a celebration of the
+    mutability and interdependence of all things. The Heraclitean truth, read
+    within his words, fragmentary as they are, celebrating flux, time, difference,
+    allows for an alternative model to a hidden truth. [...]
+    for him truth is process and becoming, obtained through
+    observation, rather than a fixed, divine and immutable truth of eternity.
+
+### Truth and memory
+
+    The word anagkê, “constraint,” is associated with the yoke of slavery.10 All of
+    human experience suffers from its subjection to necessity; the slave offers an
+    extreme example of the general human condition. In one of her many forms the
+    goddess who instructs the youth, the Kouros, is mistress of “brute force,” or
+    of the bonds associated with enslavement, and is therefore binding the
+    “what-is,” the “true,” in captivity. Like the slave who yields the truth to the
+    torturer, the “what-is” is bound in domination, and delivers up its truth under
+    necessity.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Does truth as eternally located elsewhere, either hidden in the body, or hidden
+    in the earth, or hidden inside or beyond human existence, in some realm
+    inaccessible to ordinary consciousness, lead by some tortuous path to the
+    necessity for torture? Can we posit a truth of process and becoming, and
+    another truth of eternity? If so, the word a-lêtheia seems to carry buried
+    within it support for the view of hidden truth, of truth brought up from the
+    depths. The possibility of forgetting leads to the imagination of a buried
+    realm, the realm of forgetting, of Lethe, which can be represented either
+    positively or negatively. It is good to forget suffering and pain, regrettable
+    to forget a message, to forget crucial information that must be transmitted to
+    a listener; in either case Lethe—or, to coin a word, “letheia”—remains a domain
+    beyond consciousness.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The dominance of a notion of truth as alêtheia, not forgetting, he attributes
+    in part to the gradual shift to literacy taking place in the fifth and fourth
+    centuries.14 The legal corpus reflects the state of the problem of truth in the
+    fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. Charles Segal has discussed eloquently the
+    ways in which growing literacy affects concepts of the self and truth in Greek
+    tragedy.15
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the dominant literary and philosophical paradigm, the truth is seen to be
+    forgettable, slipping away from notice, buried, inaccessible, then retrieved
+    through an effort of memory, through the invocation of divine possession,
+    through the interrogation by a privileged seeker of some enlightened source;
+    seeking the truth may involve a journey, a passage through a spatial narrative
+    of some sort, a request, a sinking down into the past, into the interiority of
+    memory. This model of truth seeking is consistent with other such paradigms
+    already suggested earlier, in the law courts, where, as we saw, the violence of
+    the torturer is thought to be necessary to enforce the production of truth from
+    the slave, either to force him or her to recall the truth, or to force him or
+    her to speak the truth for the benefit of the court.
+    
+    The slave’s body is thus construed as one of these sites of truth, like the
+    adyton, the underworld, the interiority of the woman’s body, the elsewhere
+    toward which truth is always slipping, a Utopian space allowing a less
+    mediated, more direct access to truth, where the truth is no longer forgotten,
+    slipping away. The basanos gives the torturer the power to exact from the
+    other, seen as like an oracular space, like the woman’s hystera, like the
+    inside of the earth, the realm of Hades, as other and as therefore in
+    possession of the truth. The truth is thus always elsewhere, always outside the
+    realm of ordinary human experience, of everyday life, secreted in the earth, in
+    the gods, in the woman, in the slave. To recall it from this other place
+    sometimes requires patience, sometimes payment of gifts, sometimes seduction,
+    sometimes violence.
+
+### Torture and commodification
+
+    Does it have to do with the invention of coinage, with the idea of abstract
+    exchange value, and the slave as an exchangeable body, a thing to be tested
+    like a coin, like a marker for exchange? In the Laws the Athenian says men are
+    like puppets with strings, and that they should follow the soft, golden string,
+    the “golden and hallowed drawing of judgment which goes by the name of the
+    public law of the city” (644-45).
-- 
cgit v1.2.3