INTRODUCTION: TORTURE AS THE ORIGINARY LANDSCAPE OF THE POLITICAL

In the previous chapter, I examined the problem of slave-speech under the heading of the ‘Aesopic’: how a slave, whose speech can only have public standing when it is extracted through legal torture, can nonetheless transform the obscenity of such restrictions into inventive utterance. I also argued that psychoanalysis was the contemporary discourse that affirms the speech of slaves, against the depredations of authoritarian dispensations. Yet, by this very affirmation, psychoanalysis should also alert us to the centrality of torture in the formation and maintenance of human polities. Torture is historically variable in its means and uses, and, if I have already briefly invoked its relations to the origins of antiphilosophy in a particular antique context, I wish to turn now to its reapparition in the contemporary situation. In doing so, I seek also to show both the power and the limits of psychoanalysis as an antiphilosophy, by extending the account of Giorgio Agamben's work offered in Chapter 4. In the terms of this book, Agamben is a philosopher, but one who, having taken psychoanalysis utterly seriously, has gone beyond a limit that inheres in the general antiphilosophical project as such.