Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare

Front matter

Elisabeth Weber

J X

Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare with an afterword by Richard Falk

Table Of Contents

Introduction: Shocks of recognition

I. Torture

1. Torture was the essence of National-Socialism: Reading Jean Améry Today

Chapter 1

“Torture Was the Essence of National Socialism”: Reading Jean Améry Today'

Commenting on “a newspaper page with photos that show members of the South Vietnamese army torturing captured Vietcong rebels,’ Jean Améry, the Austrian-born essayist and survivor of Nazi torture and death camps, wrote in 1966: “The admission of torture, the boldness — but is it still that? — of coming forward with such photos is explicable only if it is assumed that a revolt of public conscience is no longer to be feared. One could think that this conscience has accustomed itself to the practice of torture”?

Alfred McCoy has compellingly argued that Tv series like 24 have, more than four decades later, contributed to create a broad consensus on the acceptability of torture. In February 2007, 24’s executive producer Howard Gordon announced that the show would “have fewer torture scenes in the future,” but this decision was not made because of the complaints he had received from several high-level military and FB1 officials and interro-

1 Originally published in Speaking about Torture, eds. Julie Carlson and Elisabeth Weber, 83-98 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

2 Jean Améry, “Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne,” in Werke, vol. 2, ed. G. Scheit (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), 57-58; Améry, At the Mind’ Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 22-23.

3 McCoy, A Question of Torture, 190-96.

gators, who had expressed their concerns over the effects 24’s depictions of torture had on us military personnel in Iraq and elsewhere.*

Rather, the reason for the shift was, in Gordons words, that “torture ‘is starting to feel a little trite. [...] The idea of physical coercion or torture is no longer a novelty or surprise?” The title of Rosa Brooks’s February 23, 2007, editorial in the Los Angeles Times aptly summarized this state of affairs: “America Tortures (Yawn).°

The military order issued by the us president in November 2001, which authorized the “indefinite detention” and trial by military commissions of foreign combatants suspected of involvement in “terrorist activities,’ in fact erased, as Giorgio Agamben put it, “any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being.’ The detainees of Guantanamo Bay don’t have “the status of pows as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws.” They are “subject now only to raw power; they have no legal existence?” Even after two habeas corpus decisions by the us Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008 and under the Obama administration they fit the paradigm of the “homo sacer; who finds himself, in Agamben’s formulation, as “bare life,’ subjected to

4 The group that met with Gordon included the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, General Patrick Finnegan, and three of the country’s most experienced military and FBI interrogators.

5 Jane Mayer, “Whatever It Takes,” New Yorker, Feb. 12, 2007. The typical “dilemma’ with which the viewer of 24 is presented is well-known: “a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process — allowing a terrorist plot to proceed — or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. [...] With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused: almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.”

Rosa Brooks, “America Tortures (Yawn); Los Angeles Times, Feb. 23, 2007.

7 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2005), 3; Ulrich Rauff, “Interview with Giorgio Agamben — Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life; German Law Journal 5 (May 2004). On the current status of the prison camp, see below, chapters 3 and 4.

the sovereign’s state of exception.’ The fact that many “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo and elsewhere have been tortured seals their extra-legal status, insofar as the cra sees them, in Mc- Coy’s words, as “too dangerous for release, [and] too tainted for trial.”

Agambens book Homo Sacer is best known for his analysis of another “legally unnamable and unclassifiable being,’ the Muselmann of the Nazi death camps, to whom Agamben dedicated his important book, Remnants of Auschwitz.’° Given the vast differences between the historical and political contexts, it would be devoid of sense to simply juxtapose or compare the victims of us-endorsed torture and those men and women Primo Levi called the “drowned, the “anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men (non-uomini) who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer" However, one of Améry’s assertions creates a link between the two contexts. Torture, Améry writes, was “the essence of National-Socialism.” To understand this categorical assertion, it is helpful and even necessary to reflect on the absence of legal existence inflicted on Muselmänner of the Nazi death camps and on torture victims. The category of “unlawful enemy combatants” used by the us administration in its so-called war on terror, to designate the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, for example, reflects the legal void analyzed by Agamben. Such absence of legal existence was even more

8 On March 7, 2011, President Obama signed a new executive order, one that stands in stark contrast to the executive orders he signed a day after taking office, to “create a formal system of indefinite detention for those held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who continue to pose a significant threat to national security” (Peter Finn and Anne E. Kornblut, “Obama Creates Indefinite Detention System for Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay,’ The Washington Post, March 8, 2011).

9 McCoy, A Question of Torture, 195. McCoy continues: “The ideal solution to this conundrum, from a CIA perspective, is extrajudicial execution”

10 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

11 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz [Se questo è un uomo (If this is a man)], trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 90.

flagrant for a smaller group of men whose status can only be properly referred to by using a word created during Argentina's “Dirty War”: the disappeared. These detainees were held in so-called “black sites,” secret us-run prisons whose locations were unknown to anyone but cra operatives.” The name given to those highly secret prisoners points to an ordeal that forms a certain link between Muselmänner and torture victims: the men who had been disappeared into cıA black sites were referred to as “ghost detainees.”

In Levi's account, the Muselmänner are walking dead, “non-men, ghostlike beings, whose overwhelming majority did not survive the camps.” The question of why they were called Muselmänner—an antiquated word for “Muslim” in German—has been met with different hypotheses, most of which focus on the widespread assumption in early-twentieth-century Europe that Muslims were people “of unconditional fatalism?”*

12 The prisoners had no registration numbers, no access to lawyers or visits from the International Red Cross, and their families had no knowledge of their whereabouts. The very existence of these prisons was first revealed to a larger audience through an article by Dana Priest: “cra Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons,” Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2005, Aoı. In 2006, Dana Priest won the Pulitzer Prize for this article and others she had written on the cra and the “War on Terror.” In one of his first executive orders, given on Jan. 22, 2009, President Obama ordered all us personnel, including the CIA, to conduct interrogations in compliance with the Army Field Manual. The same day, the president also ordered the secret c1A-run prisons closed; see President Obama's “Executive Order 1349 — Ensuring Lawful Interrogations,” Jan. 22, 2009.

13 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 90: “Their life is short, but their number is endless: they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men [non-uomini] who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.”

14 Giorgio Agamben, quoting Eugen Kogon in Remnants of Auschwitz, 45. Agamben mentions the controversy surrounding the term; see ibid., 44- 48. “There is little agreement on the origin of the term Muselmann” (44). Through a study of the history of the word in Occidental thought and literature, Gil Anidjar proposes what he calls a “genealogy of a figure of absolute

In the Nazi camps, not only Muselmänner were irrevocably marked by death. Based on his clinical experience, the psychiatrist William Niederland describes the survivors of the death camps as frequently marked by a “deep psychic trace [psychische Tiefenspur] that results from the encounter with death in the latter's most atrocious forms.’ Niederland calls this “trace” a “death-engram,’ using a term from neuropsychology that designates memory traces, which as a result of external stimuli have triggered biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain or other neural tissue.” In Geoffrey Hartman's words, the “Nazi machine” tried to ensure that “even in their afterlife, once out of the camps, [the survivors] would not escape the fate of the Muselmann?"‘ As a consequence, many survivors’ appearance and behavior, in Niederland’s words, are “shadow-like” and “ghost-like?”

On the side of torture victims, it should be noted that “ghost detainee” was an “official term used by the us administration to designate a person held in a detention center, whose identity has been hidden by keeping them unregistered and therefore anonymous” The term was, for example, used, and the practice condemned, in the courageous report written by Major General Antonio Taguba in early 2004, documenting the now infamous abuses of Abu Ghraib prison.” Another neologism was formed subjection” (The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003], 119).

15 William G. Niederland, Folgen der Verfolgung: Das Uberlebenden-Syndrom Seelenmord [Consequences of persecution: the survivor-syndrome soul-murder] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 232. The term “death-engram” was coined by early twentieth-century German biologist Richard Semon.

16 Geoffrey Hartman, Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 88.

17 Niederland, Folgen der Verfolgung, 232; see also Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 47-48, and passim.

18 “Ghost Detainee,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_detainee; see also McCoy, A Question of Torture, 115.

19 See Lisa Hajjar, “Our Heart of Darkness” Amnesty Now 30, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 5.

in this context: the act of making someone disappear at a secret site was called “ghosting.””°

These linguistic creations, intended to refer to the victims’ invisibility from public witnessing or scrutiny, contain a proposition about torture that is, of course, unintentional, but for that matter all the more telling, and which is central to Amery’s reflection: in Améry’s text, as well as in other texts on torture, such as Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, the torture survivor is described as dead while still alive, or alive while already dead. In other words, while there is no doubt that “ghosting” is done in order to torture, torture, in other ways, is also a practice, and determined pursuit, of “ghosting”

Before approaching the issue of torture, Améry reflects on what he suspects is routine in most police stations in most countries: the beating of people in custody. With the first blow received from an agent of the state, a person’s “trust in the world breaks down” irreparably. “The expectation of help, the certainty of help, is indeed one of the fundamental experiences of human beings, and probably also of animals [...] with the first blow from a policeman’s fist, against which there can be no defense and which no helping hand will ward off, a part of our life ends and it can never again be revived” (67/28-29). Already in this first-degree experience of state-sponsored violence, one that happens daily in countless places around the world, “a part of

20 Josh White, “Army, cra Agreed on ‘Ghost’ Prisoners,’ Washington Post, March 11, 2005, A16.

21 In the following, Améry’s text will be quoted by first indicating the pagination of the German edition (Werke, vol. 2), followed by the pagination of the English translation, here 65/28. The lost “trust in the world” ( Weltvertrauen) has been commented on by a number of scholars. For example Siegbert Wolf, Von der Verwundbarkeit des Humanismus: Uber Jean Amery (Frankfurt: Dipa Verlag, 1995), 67; Thomas Mavridis, “Wer der Folter erlag, kann nicht mehr heimisch werden in der Welt’: Vom verlorenen Weltvertrauen Jean Amerys,’ Fussnoten zur Literatur 38 (1996): 73.

our life ends and it can never again be revived.” Torture, Améry writes, “contains everything” that he “ascertained” in “regard to beating by the police: the border violation of my self by the other, which can be neither neutralized by the expectation of help nor rectified through defending oneself [Gegenwehr]. Torture is all that, but in addition very much more” (74/33, trans. slightly modified).

In formulations that have strongly influenced Agamben’,

Amery provides a glance into facets of the psychology of “bare life”:

If from the experience of torture any knowledge at all remains that goes beyond the plain nightmarish, it is that of a great amazement [große Verwunderung] and a foreignness in the world [Fremdheit in der Welt] that cannot be compensated by any sort of subsequent human communication. Amazed [Staunend], the tortured person experienced that in this world there can be the other as absolute sovereign, and sovereignty revealed itself as the power to inflict suffering and to destroy [zu vernichten; literally: to annihilate]. The dominion of the torturer over his victim has nothing in common with the power exercised on the basis of social contracts, as we know it. It is not the power of the traffic policeman over the pedestrian, of the tax official over the taxpayer, of the first lieutenant over the second lieutenant. It is also not the sacral sovereignty of past absolute chieftains or kings; for even if they stirred fear, they were also objects of trust at the same time. The king could be terrible in his wrath, but also kind in his mercy; his autocracy was an exercise of authority [seine Gewalt war ein Walten]. But the power of the torturer, under which the tortured moans, is nothing other than the

It is noteworthy that Darius Rejali starts his monumental Torture and Democracy with the account of police brutality, the Rodney King beating; Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 1.

Améry might be alluding here to Walter Benjamin's “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,’ in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2.1, ed. R. Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 203.

triumph of the survivor over the one who is plunged from the world into agony and death. (84/39-40)

The German is here even more emphatic: The “power of the tormentor [Peiniger], [...] is the limitless triumph of the survivor over the one who is pushed out of the world into agony and death [der schrankenlose Triumph des Überlebenden über den, der aus der Welt in Qual und Tod hinausgestossen wird]” (84/39- 40). Améry’s qualification of this “triumph” as “limitless” is decisive; omitting it as the English translation does deprives the text of one of its furthest reaching argumentative moves.

In what follows, it will thus be necessary to pay close attention to the formulations chosen by the English translators of Améry’s text. The intent is not to criticize an overall excellent translation, but to point out specific word choices that, if not taken literally, or, as in this case, if omitted, substantially alter Amery’s argument. In a text on Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida observes that “all responsible witnessing engages in a poetic experience of language”? In bearing witness to the torture he underwent, Améry engages in this singular experience of language by creating language. Since this creation of language enacts, in Dori Laub’s formulation, the “creation of knowledge de novo” that can occur during the process of bearing witness to massive trauma, it is the reader’s responsibility to listen to the uniqueness of that language, including its rawness in German, even if this comes at the cost of elegance in the English translation.” Ameéry continues:

Astonishment [Staunen] at the existence of the other, as he boundlessly [grenzenlos] asserts himself through torture, and astonishment at what one can become oneself: flesh and

24 Jacques Derrida, “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing; in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, eds. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 66.

25 Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57.

death. The tortured person never ceases to be amazed that all those things one may, according to inclination, call his soul, or his mind [seinen Geist], or his consciousness, or his identity, are destroyed when there is that cracking and splintering in the shoulder joints. (85/40)

This is a reference to the torture he suffered: at Breendonk, the main interrogation center in Nazi-occupied Belgium, “torturers suspended victims from a hook-and pulley system” while their hands were tied in the back.” Améry concludes: “That life is fragile is a truism that he has always known [...]. But only through torture did he learn that a living person can be transformed so thoroughly into flesh [verfleischlichen] and by that, while still alive, be partly made into a prey of death” (85/40).”

The most famous line of Améry’s text summarizes his analysis: “Whoever has succumbed to torture | Wer der Folter erlag] can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased” (85/40). Again, the German is stronger: “Die Schmach der Vernichtung läßt sich nicht austilgen,” which translates literally: “The ignominy (or infamy) of annihilation cannot be erased.” The one who has “succumbed” to torture has been annihilated, even though he or she is still among the living.”

In perhaps one of the best texts on Améry, G.W. Sebald pointed out the necessity of replacing the “abstract discourse about the victims of national-socialism” with Améry’s essays “on his personal past and present” because they provide the “content-heaviest insights into the irreparable state of the victims, out of which alone the true nature of terror can be extrapolated with

26 Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 101.

27 The frequency of the word Staunen, astonishment or amazement, in this passage may indicate how philosophy, which is said to have had its beginning in astonishment (Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger) is here unfounded, if not demolished, in a very different “astonishment” or “amazement.”

28 See also Siegbert Wolf’s commentary: Von der Verwundbarkeit des Humanismus, 68.

some precision.” I will attempt a patient reading of substantial passages of Améry’s text, listening to it as closely as possible, including to the semantic fields of the original German words, in order to amplify the voice of someone who not only underwent torture, but also had the strength to bear witness to it with breathtaking lucidity.

One of the words used by Améry stands out: the word rendered in the English translation as “transformation of the person into flesh.” Other than in theological debates about the incarnation of Christ, it is a word used rather rarely in German: Verfleischlichung (77/33). In German, the word means, indeed, the utter transformation, through and through, into flesh, and there is, most likely, no alternative to the choice in English. Even though the word is not a neologism, Améry’s use of it arguably gives it an entirely new meaning, thereby exemplifying the assertion by Derrida mentioned above, that all responsible witnessing engages in a poetic experience of language.

Among several meanings the German prefix ver- can have, one indicates the pursuit of an action to the end, until the fulfillment of a goal (as in verrichten, accomplish). Another meaning is the intensification of an action and the pursuit of something beyond a goal, such as verschlafen (oversleep) or versalzen (oversalt).° A third meaning is the negation of the verb that follows the prefix ver-, such as in bieten (bid/offer) and ver-

29 G.W. Sebald, “Mit den Augen des Nachtvogels,” Etudes Germaniques 42 (July-Sept. 1988): 314. For Sebald, such “content-heaviest insight” is possible “not in the willingness for reconciliation, but only in the unceasing denunciation of injustice [Unrecht]” (320). In a similar vein, Améry asserts, for example: “The piles of corpses that lie between them [sc. my torturers] and me cannot be removed in the process of internalization, so it seems to me, but, on the contrary, through actualization, or, more sharply stated, by carrying-out the unresolved conflict in the field of influence [ Wirkungsfeld] of historical practice” (129/69; trans. modified).

30 Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Munich: DTV, 1984), vol. 25, s.v. “ver”: “neben der bedeutung des zu ende führens entwickelt sich der begriff über das ziel hinaus’: verschlafen, versalzen.” In the latter sense, it is an intensification of the action, but with the result of turning the intended goal into something negative.

bieten (forbid). Verfleischlichung is, in a way, an intensified incarnation — but an incarnation out of which any spirit has been driven. The German Fleisch can mean both “flesh” and “meat.” Christ’s incarnation, for example, is usually referred to in German as Fleischwerdung, becoming flesh (of God), or, as John put it in the Gospel, the word become flesh. Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch has “Verfleischung” for the incarnation of Christ.” The “transformation into flesh” of the English translation of Améry’s expression would correspond more to such Fleischwerdung. By contrast, Verfleischlichung through torture drives the word and all spirit out of the flesh. In Améry’s redefinition, the expression comes to stand for a boundless intensification of the physical existence of a being, to the extent that the torture victim's “flesh becomes a total reality in self-negation” (74/33, trans. modified).

Amery’s German is of exceptional perspicuity and elegance, and he frequently comments on the semantic field of a word or its components.” Listening to a word such as Verfleischlichung, whose semantic field he actually remapped, is, thus, not only legitimate, but also necessary, because it exemplifies the irreplaceable singularity of testimony. In Améry’s usage, Verfleischlichung, the “fleshization” — if I may—of the torture victims, their utter reduction to flesh in pain, makes them experience death while still alive. “Whoever is overcome by pain through torture experiences his body as never before. In self-negation, his flesh becomes a total reality. [...] [O]nly in torture does

31 Ibid., s.v. “Verfleischung”

32 See for example, Améry’s reflections on the etymology of the word “torture” (73/32), the emphasis on the prefix mit- (74/33), and the reflections on the hostility of the persecuted person’s mother tongue (103-6/51-54); see also Petra S. Fiero, Schreiben gegen Schweigen: Grenzerfahrungen in Jean Améry’s autobiographischem Werk (Hildesheim: Olms, 1997), 62-63.

33 While many commentators quote this “transformation into flesh” (for example, Marianne Hirsch, “Editor’s Column: The First Blow — Torture and Close Reading,’ PMLA 121, no. 2 (March 2006): 361-70, I have not yet found a commentary that listens to Améry’s specific use of the word “Verfleischlichung.’ Two books in German on Améry are no exceptions: Fiero, Schreiben gegen Schweigen, esp. 48-54, and Wolf, Von der Verwundbarkeit des Humanismus, esp. 69-70.

the transformation of the person into flesh [Verfleischlichung] become complete. Frail in the face of violence, howling out in pain, awaiting no help, capable of no resistance [Notwehr: legitimate defense], the tortured person is only a body, and nothing else beside that” (74/33).

Verfleischlichung is “fleshization,” but can also be “meatization, becoming meat. Even though Améry was a fierce critic of French thinkers of the 1960s and ’7os, such as Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, one is here reminded of Deleuze’s commentary on Francis Bacon’s paintings, where Deleuze observes “such convulsive pain and vulnerability [...]. Bacon does not say ‘Pity the beasts; but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat [de la viande]. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility. [...] The man or woman who suffers is a beast [une béte], the beast that suffers is a human being?”

34 See Jean Amery, “Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre; in Werke, vol. 2, ed. G Scheit (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 2002), 324, 329; Améry, Aufsätze zur Philosophie, in Werke, vol. 6, ed. G. Scheit (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 2004), passim. Against Foucault, see esp. in vol. 6 of the Werke the essays “Michel Foucault’s Vision des Kerker-Universums,’ 205-18, and “Michel Foucault und sein ‘Diskurs’ der Gegen-Aufklärung,” 219-31. The criticism against French thinkers of the 1970s as the “new irrationalists” (6:163) characterizes most of the essays collected in vol. 6; against Deleuze, specifically 6:148-51, 165, 190, 197, 206; against Roland Barthes, ibid., 141-42; see also Hans-Martin Gauger, “Er fehlt uns, er ist da: Uber Jean Améry,’ Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift fiir Europdisches Denken 59, no. 671 (March 2005): 254.

35 “[L homme qui souffre est une bête, la bête qui souffre est un homme” (“The man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man”) (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002], 22; Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation [Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1981], 1:20- 21). Roberto Esposito writes on Bacon's images in the context of the abovequoted commentary by Deleuze: “I don’t know if flesh is to be related to the Nazi violence, as Deleuze would have it in his admirable comment (though the horror of that violence always remained with Bacon). The fact is that in no one more than Bacon is the biopolitical practice of the animalization of man carried out to its lethal conclusion, finding a reversed correspondence perfectly in the disfigured figure of butchered flesh. [...] That the painter always saw in animal carcasses hanging in butcher shops the shape of man (but also of himself) signifies that that bloody mount is the condition today

In Améry’s text, this “zone of indiscernibility” becomes manifest in the scream. Améry describes “my own howling that is strange and uncanny to me [mein eigenes, mir fremdes und unheimliches Geheul]” And he continues: “There is howling-out under torture. Perhaps in this hour, this second” (59/23-24, trans. modified). Améry does not say “someone is crying out under torture,’ as the English translation reads. Again, the choice in English is appropriate, guided as it is by the requirements of idiomatic word usage and elegance. The reason it needs to be changed is that in German, the grammatical structure enacts what is at stake: the sentence is formulated in the impersonal passive voice: “Es wird aufgeheult unter der Tortur. Vielleicht zu dieser Stunde, in dieser Sekunde” (“There is howling-out under torture. Perhaps in this hour, this second”). There is no longer a somebody. There is a body that is only flesh, and it howls in the “zone of indiscernibility” of becoming meat.

In his novel Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee describes the same torture Améry underwent, and here too, the screams are the howling of an animal: “my arms come up behind my back, and as my feet leave the ground I feel a terrible tearing in my shoulders as though whole sheets of muscle are giving way. From my throat comes the first mournful dry bellow [...]. I bellow again and again, there is nothing I can do to stop it, the noise comes out of a body that knows itself damaged perhaps beyond repair and roars its fright.’*

“Fleshization” is indiscernible from becoming “meat” while still alive. “Flesh” is here what Roberto Esposito calls “an abject material,” because “it is intrinsic to the same body from which it seems to escape (and which therefore expels it).” This “flesh [...] does not coincide with the body; it is that part or zone of the body, the body’s membrane, that isn’t one with the body, that exceeds its boundaries or is subtracted from the body’s of a large section of humanity” (Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008], 169). 36 J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin, 1982), 118-19.

enclosing”? The flesh in Amery’s “fleshization” is truly one that, according to Merleau-Ponty, whom Esposito quotes here, “has no name because no philosophy has known how to reach that undifferentiated layer [...] in which the same notion of body, anything but enclosed, is now turned outside [estroflessa] in an irreducible heterogeneity”

The “irreducible heterogeneity” manifests itself as pain of the flesh that breaks the path to an experience of dying that, according to Améry, is, under other circumstances, radically impossible:

Pain [...] is the most extreme intensification imaginable of our bodily being. But maybe it is even more, that is: death. No road that can be traveled by logic leads us to death, but perhaps the thought is permissible that through pain a path of feeling and premonition [gefühlsahnender Weg] can be paved [or carved out: gebahnt] to it for us. In the end, we would be faced with the equation: Body = Pain = Death, and in our case this could be reduced to the hypothesis that torture, through which we are turned into body by the other, blots out the contradiction of death and allows us to experience our own death. (75/33-34, trans. slightly modified)?

This is why Améry calls torture “indelible”: once this “path” has been carved, it cannot be undone. For Améry, there is no path back from having experienced death while alive. Torture dissolves the limit between life and death. The tortured one, “while still alive,’ has been “partly made into a prey of death.” Part alive, part dead, neither dead, nor alive, the torture victim occupies a zone in-between in which torture never ends. Three times, Amery returns to the indelible character of torture: “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably [unaus-