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  • Imagining Extraordinary Renditions:Terror, Torture and the Possibility of an Excessive Ethics in Literature
  • Nathan Gorelick (bio)

What the beast senses in the distance -- that monstrous thing which eternally approaches it and works eternally at coming closer -- is itself.1

-- Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

I. Hearts and Minds

On April 28, 2004, the popular television news program "60 Minutes 2" aired a report on the United States military's abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.2 The perverse and disturbing photographs which accompanied the story set off an explosion of international and domestic outrage and incited a collective demand that the soldiers and officials responsible for this egregious betrayal of the U.S. mission -- in Iraq in particular and in the so-called war on terror writ large -- be brought to justice and made to account for themselves. For some, photographs of American troops electrifying hooded prisoners and dragging naked men and women on dog leashes revealed a shameful aberration in an otherwise well-meaning project of democratic expansionism; for others, these images simply revealed what many suspected had been the horrible underside of this project from the beginning. The point, however, was that the invisible had been rendered visible, and in so doing had demanded both acknowledgement and explanation by the various government institutions undeniably responsible for these visions of (excessive) inhumanity. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could not, as he had in response to concerns about civilian casualties in the American bombing of Afghanistan, dismiss the Abu Ghraib victims as "collateral damage."3

What had been revealed in these images was what J.M. Coetzee has famously called "The Dark Chamber," the prison, the torture room which, shielded from the public gaze, "becomes like the bedchamber of the pornographer's fantasy, where, insulated from moral or physical restraint, one human being is free to exercise his imagination to the limits in the performance of vileness upon the body of another."4 This dark space maintains for its agents an unrestrained authority over its victims precisely because of its darkness, because it is beyond representation. The paradox, as Coetzee rightly emphasizes, is that the solidification of the entire authoritarian state apparatus nonetheless requires a knowledge of this dark chamber; it requires the social space over which this authority claims jurisdiction to be totally saturated with this strange representation of non-representation. In this way, "relations in the torture room provide a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims."5 To expose the dark chamber, to shine the harsh light of undisavowable truth into the secret cells of Abu Ghraib, is to spark a delegitimizing outrage surrounding the violation of the very ideals that the authority in question purports to protect. All the dejecta, the waste, the "dirty work" in the war on terror is laid bare in the image of an American soldier giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up to a pile of bloodied Iraqis. The countervailing metaphor of the tumbling statue of Saddam Hussein -- representing the triumphant liberation of an innocent, repressed people -- cannot hold.

It is, however, necessary to distinguish the context in which Coetzee invokes this idea from the political situation elaborated by the war on terror. His essay "Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State" was written in 1986; Coetzee thus occupied the particular position of the participant observer, ruminating on the crisis in representation endemic to the apartheid state especially as it sat poised on the precipice of collapse. Here, as in the war on terror, this crisis can be understood not as a constraint against politics, nor as a hiccup in the otherwise smooth functioning of a violent totalitarian regime; rather the crisis in representation is constitutive of politics as such. Political legislation comes to be entirely preoccupied by the necessity to articulate and stabilize the limits of representation: "The response of South Africa's legislators to what disturbs their white electorate is usually to order it out of sight.... If the black townships are in flames, let cameras be banned from them. (At which the great white electorate heaves a sigh of relief: how much more bearable the newscasts have...

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