Torture exists to demonstrate physically that human freedom is impossible.

Evidence

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, 330

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Reads torture’s purpose not as extracting confession but as inscribing the supremacy of practical purposes onto the body — a compressed theory of domination worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s recurring thesis that instrumental reason reduces subjects to objects; also to Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ via Adorno’s reading of Kafka cited earlier.