Torture aimed to bind victims to practical purposes, not merely extract recantations.

Evidence

Pain calls us back into the present (think of the various ways of waking people from sleep!), and reduces people to defensive reactions, to seeing an escape from pain as being their one goal, it binds them to that purpose. The notion that heretics ought to recant was only the rationalization for torturing them. In a much deeper sense, they were to be made the equals of their tormentors: in the sense that they were to experience physically, in their own bodies, the supremacy of practical purposes. Again and again, it was to be shown that freedom is not possible. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1285

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that torture’s real function was to make the heretic experience the supremacy of practical purposes — that freedom is not possible — is a dense, paradigm-shifting read on the sociology of pain.
• XREF: Connects to Michel Foucault’s account of the public spectacle of punishment and the body as site of power in Discipline and Punish. — connects to: Torture sought to force heretics to experience the supremacy of practical purposes. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1285; Torture is distinguished from brutality by its systematic purpose of extraction; Judicial torture was a quantified technique, not lawless rage — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 83 (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: Directly theorizes the role of pain in sacrifice and the binding of victims to worldly purposes, extending the ritual-sacrifice article’s analysis of how sacrificial violence stabilizes social orders.

Broader Connections

• Judicial torture was a quantified technique, not lawless rage #corroborates (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 83
• Public torture was spectacle designed to display sovereign power publicly #contradicts (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 83
• Torture is distinguished from brutality by its systematic purpose of extraction #complicates (0.78)
• Secret torture merged with information extraction becomes a form of policing, not sovereign display #corroborates (0.75) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 506