Judicial torture was a quantified technique, not lawless rage
Evidence
What is a supplice? ‘Corporal punishment, painful to a more or less horrible degree,’ said Jaucourt in his Encyclopédie article and added: ‘It is an inexplicable phenomenon that the extension of man’s imagination creates out of the barbarous and the cruel.’ Inexplicable, perhaps, but certainly neither irregular nor primitive. Torture is a technique; it is not an extreme expression of lawless rage. To be torture, punishment must obey three principal criteria: first, it must produce a certain degree of pain, which may be measured exactly, or at least calculated, compared and hierarchized; death is a torture in so far as it is not simply a withdrawal of the right to live, but is the occasion and the culmination of a calculated gradation of pain: from decapitation (which reduces all pain to a single gesture, performed in a single moment – the zero degree of torture), through hanging, the stake and the wheel (all of which prolong the agony), to quartering, which carries pain almost to infinity; death-torture is the art of maintaining life in pain, by subdividing it into a ‘thousand deaths’, by achieving before life ceases ‘the most exquisite agonies’ (cf. Ollyffe). Torture rests on a whole quantitative art of pain. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 83
Categorization
- DEFINE: Foucault defines supplice precisely: a regulated, quantified, ritualized production of pain — not arbitrary cruelty.
- XREF: The ‘quantitative art of pain’ as a measurable grid prefigures the later disciplinary machinery that measures bodies and behaviors on a graduated scale. — connects to: Torture was a genuine contest in which a resisting suspect could legally win — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 91; Public torture was spectacle designed to display sovereign power publicly — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 83; Torture and semi-proofs scandalized justice only when the power to punish required certainty — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 158 (+4 more)
Related
- Torture was a genuine contest in which a resisting suspect could legally win (similarity 0.87)
- Torture persisted because it revealed truth and displayed power (similarity 0.81)
- Public torture and execution was among the most popular spectacles of eighteenth-century France. (similarity 0.80)
- Routinized supplementary torture accompanied nearly all serious penalties (similarity 0.79)
- Torture and semi-proofs scandalized justice only when the power to punish required certainty (similarity 0.79)
- Torture aimed to bind victims to practical purposes, not merely extract recantations. (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Torture was a genuine contest in which a resisting suspect could legally win
#corroborates(0.92) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 91 - Torture is distinguished from brutality by its systematic purpose of extraction
#corroborates(0.90) - Public torture was spectacle designed to display sovereign power publicly
#complicates(0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 83 - Horne distinguishes physical brutality after arrest from systematic torture aimed at extracting information
#corroborates(0.85) — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 581 - Torture and semi-proofs scandalized justice only when the power to punish required certainty
#qualifies(0.82) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 158 - Torture persisted because it revealed truth and displayed power
#complicates(0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 110