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IrrevocableA Philosophy of Mortality$
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Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality

Alphonso Lingis

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780226556765

Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2019

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226557090.001.0001

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PRINTED FROM CHICAGO SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Chicago Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CHSO for personal use.date: 03 June 2020

The Future of Torture

The Future of Torture

Chapter:
(p.123) The Future of Torture
Source:
Irrevocable
Author(s):

Alphonso Lingis

Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226557090.003.0016

What is called physical torture comprises methods of producing severe pain. What is called psychological torture comprises methods to produce exhaustion, fear, anxiety, hopelessness, desperation, psychic disorganization, loss of control of mental states and acts, and extreme dependency. Physical torture aims to arouse intense fear. Psychological torture is the torture of the future, not only because it is “no marks” torture but also because its aim is different from physical torture and more radical. The victim is not simply reduced to impotence, helplessness, but to a state of ever-greater dependency on his or her torturer. We have to distinguish between informed and deliberate conversion of a detainee’s political convictions, through a kind of hard bargaining that appeals to the detainee’s rationality; inducing a detainee to betray his or her convictions and his or her community and bringing that about by deceit and deception; and inducing a detainee to betray his or her convictions and his or her community by the deliberate destruction of the detainee’s identity and sanity.

Keywords:   physical torture, psychological torture, destruction of identity, efficacy of torture

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