Folter und Zukunft - Torture and the Future

International Conference at the Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf, June 25-26, 2009

The practice of intentional violence is destroying purposefully the dynamic equilibrium of the vital forces, or, at least, it is disrupting it. Vital forces are somatic, psychic, social, cultural and political ones, they are developing in a manifold interpersonal exchange of emotions, mental representations and institutionalised cultural forms. Among practices of intentional violence torture is in an extreme position: It is an indented traumatisation that, while aiming at a single human being, is addressing the social group, even the whole social community.

Torture threatens the social grounds of our societies because the intended destruction of the integrity of a human being attacks the basis of necessary social confidence. It also has a direct destructive impact on social groups related  to the victim of torture. In its traumatic effects, in its destruction or lasting disruption of the psychic and social grounds of life the experience of torture cannot be integrated into the life of the victim. This is why torture is not only a theatrical mise en scene that inscribes itself directly into the body of the victim. It severely injures the world of the victims and their communities.  It is an experience that in its core cannot be translated into a mental representation and become contextualized or integrated into a social idea of the world. This is exactly why it is binding those involved into history, and blocks, like a repetition compulsion, our future.

Today we have to understand that the objective of torture is the destruction of mental representations and of the possibility to interpersonally experience our world. Torture does not – contrary to what transpositions of earlier contexts of legitimatisation may suggest - produce truth or knowledge, it is the destruction of truth and it means deculturalisation. Torture, in a performative way, stages the possibility of exclusion from social bonds. This, perhaps, is part of its phantasmagorical power. The silence about torture, the disavowal of the knowledge of its existence, is part of the complex communicative strategy of this violence. This can also be part of a technique of community building, even though a very precarious one.

A way of overcoming torture, of overcoming it for the victim, for the perpetrator, for the social communities involved, for the community of human beings, is probably possible only by means of talking publicly about torture, by means of trying to represent this extreme experience. This can be an act of reconstruction of the social, of regaining the cultural and social possibilities of society; and it can be giving aid to the individual. Because the destruction of representation is part of the aim of torture this is always also a political act. It intensifies the social and political pressure on those who talk about torture: Victims, physicians, therapists, human right activists, lawyers, journalists, film makers, artists, philosophers, scientists are confronted with the problem that they want to talk about something that is characterized by its objective to destroy representation and to be visible only as rumour, as vagueness, as night and fog, and to address this speech to a society which normally does not want to hear anything about it.

The conference – which will be the first in a series of conferences on torture and its cultural, medial, medical and juridical dimensions – wants to explore these relations. They are of great importance in this very moment in that the new administration in the US has just started facing the practice of torture by US military and Intelligence Services since the beginning of the so called War on Terror. But torture and the necessity to talk about its reality concern all of us. It has been coined the life of many people, even people living in countries that cannot be blamed to practice torture. It is part of their very recent history as in Germany or in France. And it is part of their present: According to statistics by the German Home Ministry, of the one million refugees currently living in Germany about 37 per cent have suffered from torture.

Participants:
David Becker (Berlin), Denis Goldberg (Kapstadt), Susanne Krasmann (Hamburg), Gabriele Schwab (Irvine), Françoise Sironi (Paris), Elisabeth Weber (Santa Barbara) et al.

For further information and proposals for papers please conact:

Prof. Dr. Reinhold Görling
Institut für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft
Heinrich-Heine-Universität
Universitätsstrasse 1
D 40225 Düsseldorf
Tel.: +49(0)211-81-15733
Fax: +49(0)211-81-15732
Email: reinhold.goerlinguni-duesseldorfde