Torture and the Search for the Unknowable Secret

The justifications of torture are many, but the most common arguments pertain to the extraction of information and its utilitarian value. In the case of Jewish people—from the Spanish Inquisition to the particular case of Jean Améry—torture has been a practice that enacts the maximum illusion of power: the imposition of the torturer’s sovereignty over the victim’s body and the simultaneous aspiration to discover a secret, which encompasses the Other’s alterity, in other words, the soul. Such aspirations have as foundation a confession under extreme physical and mental pain, which is always, regardless of form and content, part of a predetermined discourse seeking in vain to appease the torturer. The torturer’s appropriation of the word of the other human being reduces the human being to voiceless matter. To be sure, torture seeks to obliterate the soul in the effort to erase a genos, in this case, of the Jew, whose identity lies in his or her status as a “speaking being” (a medaber) and as one who is a witness to an absolute prohibition against murder and torture. Thus, the essence of National Socialism lies not only in torture, as Améry argues, but specifically in the torture of the Jew, to extract and obliterate this secret of the Jew and his or her Judaism: the absolute, divine prohibition against murder revealed by the God of Abraham.