Modern torture’s defining feature is the rhetoric of denial, not the act itself
Evidence
My argument here is that “torture” as now used in the law is a form of cruelty that liberal societies do not approve of. That’s the main reason why modern authorities typically generate a rhetoric of public denial—of disclaiming that “torture” has actually taken place within their domain of responsibility (“it was the unauthorized activity of undisciplined officials”), or of claiming that what appears to be “torture” is really something less reprehensible (“reasonable pressure”). This rhetoric is an important element in the public culture of modern liberalism, and it generates an air of secrecy around the subject—and therefore an air of “exposure” when incidents of torture are “made public.” In premodern societies of the kind Foucault called Classical, “torture” was carried out unapologetically and in public. It was the object not of exposure but of display. From the point of view of the problem I pursue, the motives of those who carried out such theatrical torture are irrelevant—even if it were possible to determine them. What matters is that the public discourse on inflicting pain on a prisoner in the two cases (modern and premodern) is quite different. The rhetoric of denial, which is the other side of a rhetoric of accusation, is typical of modern or modernizing governments, and is linked to a liberal sensibility regarding pain. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 509
Categorization
- DEFINE: Asad defines modern torture contrastively: what distinguishes it from classical theatrical display is the rhetoric of denial built into a liberal sensibility about pain.
- XREF: The denial-rhetoric mechanism (‘undisciplined officials’, ‘reasonable pressure’) parallels when state violence must be disavowed to keep public legitimacy clean — connects to how ‘secular modernity’ disavows its religio-political violence.
- SEED: Angle for an essay: the ‘unauthorized official’ formulation as a structural grammar of empire/state apology across torture, drone strikes, and rendition.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 509