Tortured Subjects

Tortured Subjects PDF Author: Lisa Silverman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226757528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
At one time in Europe, there was a point to pain: physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In Tortured Subjects, Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period. Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice.

Tortured Subjects

Tortured Subjects PDF Author: Lisa Silverman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226757528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
At one time in Europe, there was a point to pain: physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In Tortured Subjects, Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period. Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice.

Pamphlets and Parodies on Political Subjects ...

Pamphlets and Parodies on Political Subjects ... PDF Author: William Hone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Divine right of kings
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description


Tortured

Tortured PDF Author: Justine Sharrock
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 047059313X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
An eye-opening exposé of America's torture regime Myths about torture abound: Waterboarding is the worst we've done. The soldiers were hardened professionals. All Americans now believe that what we did was wrong. Torture is now a thing of the past. Journalist Justine Sharrock's reporting reveals a huge chasm between what has made headlines and what has actually happened. She traveled around the country, talking to the young, low-ranking soldiers that watched our prisoners, documenting what it feels like to torture someone and discovering how many residents of small town America think we should have done a lot more torture. Tortured goes behind the scenes of America's torture program through the personal stories of four American soldiers who were on the frontlines of the "war on terror," including the Abu Ghraib whistleblower. They reveal how their orders came from the top with assurances that those orders were legal and how their experiences left them emotionally scarred and suffering a profound sense of betrayal by the very government for which they fought. Based on the firsthand accounts of young, working-class soldiers who were forced to carry out orders crafted by officers, politicians, and government lawyers who have never answered for their actions The Department of Justice may still launch an investigation into torture under Bush—and Sharrock argues it must be done Describes how it feels to torture, and how people back home reacted to the soldiers' revelations If reading Tortured doesn't make you angry, nothing America does to tarnish its reputation as a beacon of fairness and freedom ever will.

Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights

Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights PDF Author: Juliet Rogers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134097239
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Scenes of violence and incisions into the flesh inform the demand for law. The scene of little girls being held down in practices of female circumcision has been a defining and definitive image that demands the attention of human rights, and the intervention of law. But the investment in protecting women and little girls from such a cut is not all that it seems. Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh considers how such images come to inform law and the investment of advocates of law in an imagination of this scene. Drawing on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, and accompanying ideas in political theology, Juliet Rogers examines the language, imagery and excitement that accompanies recent initiatives to legislate against what is called 'female genital mutilation'. The author compliments this examination with a consideration of the scene of torture exposed in images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Rogers argues that the modes of fascination and excitement that accompany scenes of torture and female circumcision betray the fantasy of a political condition against which the subject of liberal law is imagined; this is subjectivity in a state of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non-castration. To support the fantasy of this subject, the mutilated subject, the authors suggests, is rendered as flesh cut from the democratic nation state, deserving of only selective human rights, or none at all.

Tortured Artists

Tortured Artists PDF Author: Christopher Zara
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1440532117
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Great art comes from great pain. Or that's the impression left by these haunting profiles. Pieced together, they form a revealing mosaic of the creative mind. It's like viewing an exhibit from the therapist's couch as each entry delves into the mental anguish that afflicts the artist and affects their art. The scope of the artists covered is as varied as their afflictions. Inside, you will find not just the creators of the darkest of dark literature, music, and art. While it does reveal what everyday problem kept Poe's pen to paper and the childhood catastrophe that kept Picasso on edge, it also uncovers surprising secrets of more unexpectedly tormented artists. From Charles Schultz's unrequited love to J.K. Rowling's fear of death, it's amazing the deep-seeded troubles that lie just beneath the surface of our favorite art. As much an appreciation of artistic genius as an accessible study of the creative psyche, Tortured Artists illustrates the fact that inner turmoil fuels the finest work.

Trials of the self

Trials of the self PDF Author: Elwin Hofman
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526153130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This highly original study brings together the disparate histories of murder and enlightenment, prostitution and the cult of nature, sodomy and sentimentalism in order to retell the story of the making of the modern self. It suggests that the history of the self needs to attend more to its class dimensions, and puts this insight into practice by examining the influence of the criminal courts in spreading and negotiating changing ideas of the self. Using criminal interrogations and witness statements, Trials of the self shows that an increasing stress on psychological depth in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not only important for elites, but also for common and illiterate people – sometimes even more so.

Tortured Logic

Tortured Logic PDF Author: Joseph K. Young
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548095
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Experts in the intelligence community say that torture is ineffective. Yet much of the public appears unconvinced: surveys show that nearly half of Americans think that torture can be acceptable for counterterrorism purposes. Why do people persist in supporting torture—and can they be persuaded to change their minds? In Tortured Logic, Erin M. Kearns and Joseph K. Young draw upon a novel series of group experiments to understand how and why the average citizen might come to support the use of torture techniques. They find evidence that when torture is depicted as effective in the media, people are more likely to approve of it. Their analysis weighs variables such as the ethnicity of the interrogator and the suspect; the salience of one’s own mortality; and framing by experts. Kearns and Young also examine who changes their opinions about torture and how, demonstrating that only some individuals have fixed views while others have more malleable beliefs. They argue that efforts to reduce support for torture should focus on convincing those with fluid views that torture is ineffective. The book features interviews with experienced interrogators and professionals working in the field to contextualize its findings. Bringing empirical rigor to a fraught topic, Tortured Logic has important implications for understanding public perceptions of counterterrorism strategy.

The Subject of Torture

The Subject of Torture PDF Author: Hilary Neroni
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231539142
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Considering representations of torture in such television series as 24, Alias, and Homeland; the documentaries Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), and Standard Operating Procedure (2008); and "torture porn" feature films from the Saw and Hostel series, Hilary Neroni unites aesthetic and theoretical analysis to provide a unique portal into theorizing biopower and its relation to the desiring subject. Her work ultimately showcases film and television studies' singular ability to expose and potentially disable the fantasies that sustain torture and the regimes that deploy it.

Understanding Torture

Understanding Torture PDF Author: J. Jeremy Wisnewski
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748643303
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Despite Victor Hugo's 19th-century proclamation that torture no longer exists, we still find it even now, even in those nations that claim to be paradigms of civility. Why is it that torture still exists in a world where it is routinely regarded as immoral? Is it possible to eliminate torture, and if so, how? What exactly does it mean to call something 'torture', and is it always morally reprehensible? Arguments in favour of torture abound, but in this important new book, J. Jeremy Wisnewski examines and explains the moral dimensions of this perennial practice, paying careful attention to what lessons torture can teach us about our own moral psychology. By systematically exposing the weaknesses of the dominant arguments for torture, drawing on resources in both analytic and continental philosophy and relevant empirical literature in psychology, Wisnewski aims to provide an over-arching account of torture: what it is, why it's wrong, and why even the most civilized people can nevertheless engage in it.

The New Normal

The New Normal PDF Author: Swatie,
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9390077311
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The New Normal explores the relation between the subject and the state after the events of 9/11 that left the world stunned. It looks at this relation through the lens of trauma for the mind, biopolitics for the body and visuality for the body politic. This interpretive frame helps examine how the 9/11 violence created a moment where the mind, body and body politic could be redefined after 9/11. In an important theoretical intervention into 21st-century American Studies, it asks what the relation between the state and those it expels from its citizenry is. It makes a special mention of sites of incarceration such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as 9/11 phenomena. While referring to sources as diverse as 9/11 poetry, political and presidential speeches, journalistic accounts, atrocity photographs, and theories of trauma, biopolitics and visuality, the book argues for the presence of a new normal.