Cruel Indignities: Animality and Torture 1

In the first few pages of Joseph Puglieses State Violence and the Execution of Law:
Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones, there is an important reference to
Emmanuel Levinas, and his conceptualisation of useless suffering (Pugliese 2013, pp. 23). For Levinas pain is always excessive, and rendered without essential meaning. It is as
such, absurd: The evil of pain, the harm itself, is the explosion and most profound
articulation of absurdity (Levinas 1988, p. 157). For Levinas, this meaninglessness that
applies to all suffering, its absurdity and implicit excess, presses upon the Other as a form
of politico-ethical responsibility. I cannot escape the fact that I personally do not want to
suffer. This reality generates an ethical call to attend to the suffering of the Other, and
provides a relational meaning for this suffering:
in this perspective a radical difference develops between suffering in the Other,
which for me is unpardonable and solicits me and calls me, and suffering in me, my
own adventure of suffering, whose constitutional and congenital uselessness can
take on a meaning, the only meaning to which suffering is susceptible, in becoming
a suffering for the sufferingbe it inexorableof someone else. (Levinas 1988, p.
159)
Following from this relationship between suffering and responsibility, Pugliese draws
careful attention to the overt Levinasian dynamics which circulate torture practices, in
particular the uselessness of pain, the passivity it produces in its object and the political
problem of signifying the pain generated by torture (Pugliese 2013, pp. 2-4). Definition,
meaning and signification are vitally important here, since law and meaning collaborate to
generate subjects of violence and modes of violent action simultaneously. As Pugliese
highlights in State Violence and the Execution of Law, the definitional contest over the
meaning of torture generated by the so-called United States Torture Memos (see
Greenberg and Dratel 2005) in particular the 1st August 2002 Memoranda (Bybee 2005;
Bybee 2002; Yoo 2005), eventuated in the sculpting of legal norms that set the standard so
low for what would constitute torture that it effectively sanctioned a broad range of violent
practices (Pugliese 2013, p 164). As such, Pugliese extends Levinas intuition that an
ethical responsibility to attend to the suffering of the Other is confounded, at every turn, by
institutional and legal regimes which are premised upon the infliction of suffering as a
technology and rationality of domination: the social utility of suffering is necessary to the
pedagogic function of Power in education, discipline and repression (Levinas 1988, p.
160).
The agreed definition of torture imposes, at least at face value, a negative rather than
positive duty. This means that what we understand as torture negatively authorises
regimes of suffering, at least in so far as what is not considered torture at any given
historical momentfor example, forcibly sterilizing a person with disability, or permitting
corporal punishment of children, or allowing for the use of capsicum spray in policing
might be a tolerated practice within law. In this sense torture is always political in its
definition. What constitutes torture, and what does not, is deeply structured by global
1

Published as Wadiwel, D. (2014). Cruel Indignities: Animality and Torture. Borderlands E - Journal: new
spaces in the humanities, 13(1), 1-9.

geopolitics, sovereignty and social institutions. International norms do not necessarily help
here. The current definition of torture in international law, articulated in Article 1.1 of the
United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment, has its inherent limitations. 2 The Convention definition does not
identify as torture all forms of State and other violence; it is carefully prescriptive on this
front. Torture is regarded as only applicable as a descriptor for some practices, particularly
those that satisfy the criteria of being intentionally inflicted by a public official or other
person acting in an official capacity and, ominously, excluding pain or suffering arising
only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions (Article 1.1). The problems
inherent in the definition of torture in international law have been subject to critique.
Feminist scholars, notably Catherine A. MacKinnon, have drawn attention to the fact that
the definition of torture fails to account for manifest sexual and domestic violence
experienced by women; as such, Mackinnon wryly observes, mens suffering has the
dignity of politics and is called torture (MacKinnon 2006, p. 22). Recently, attention has
been drawn to forms of systemic violence against people with disabilityviolence that
includes medical treatment without consent, forced sterilisation, restrictive practices and
use of solitary confinementpractices which for all intents and purposes could, and should,
be considered techniques of torture (see Nowak 2008). Indeed, given that torture has
historically been discriminatorily used to determine between citizen and non-citizen, human
and slave as a civic marker (see Rejali 2003), it probably always has had a distinctly
biopolitical dimension in its selectivity with respect to population groups.
Taking all of this in mind, I am interested in the dynamics of torture as a legalised category
to describe a particular set of pain-invoking practices, and its relationship to other forms of
suffering that remain to be signified or memorialised. In particular, I am interested in how
law proscribes a set of practices as torture; a process which assumes and
epistemologically generates a hierarchy of violences (between torture and non-torture
practices), simultaneously establishing dignity in relation to whose suffering is recognised,
and formulating terms for how this dignity is recognised. 3 If naming as torture assumes that
the torture victim has an inherent dignity which is being violated through specific acts of
violence, what can we say about tolerated suffering that apparently does not violate inherent
dignities (forms of violence that are not granted signification as torture) and
simultaneously, what can we say about subjects of violence who apparently do not have
dignity to violate; subjects who do not rise to any status by which we might recognise their
extreme suffering? In the latter case, I explicitly refer to the suffering of non-human
animals, which are almost always rendered according to a radically different economy of
signification and non-signification.
It is telling that Levinas, in his identification of the uselessness of suffering and the ethical
responsibility it evokes, explicitly applies an anthropocentrism as a way to limit the extent
of his framework:
2

The Article provides the following definition for torture: any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether
physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third
person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected
of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on
discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent
or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or
suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
3
I thank Danielle Celermajer for a recent seminar paper on torture prevention practice, which amongst other
things highlighted for me the function of dignity in regulating the discriminatory application of torture
(Celermajer 2013). I also acknowledge here Darius Rejali for entertaining a number of thought-provoking
conversations around torture and violence during 2012.

it is this attention to the Other which, across the cruelties of our centurydespite
these cruelties, because of these crueltiescan be affirmed as the very bond of
human subjectivity, even to the point of being raised to a supreme ethical
principlethe only one which it is not possible to contesta principle which can
go so far as to command the hopes and practical discipline of vast human groups.
(Levinas 1988, p. 159)
The human evoked here is a specific and exclusory concept; as Pugliese makes clear in
State Violence and the Execution of Law (Pugliese 2013, p. 121), and others have observed
and similarly problematised (see, for example, Atterton 2004, Calarco 2008). Levinas was
explicit that his ethics did not extend to recognising ethical responsibility towards animals.
The forgetting of the suffering of animals conveniently conforms to an erasure and schism
that is reflected in our everyday systems of violence. In the language of the welfare offered
to animals in industrialised food production, or animals subject to experimentation, one
should avoid unnecessary suffering. This is a category of suffering, following the same
logic of the conceptualisation of torture, which at the moment it communicates a set of
limit practices (those which generate unnecessary suffering) simultaneously authorises as
humane practices that inflict necessary sufferings, which are legitimated on the basis of
a human prerogative for the utilisation of animals: practices that extend to lifelong, closespaced incarceration, controls over reproduction, movement, nutrition and sexuality, forms
of suffering and death implicit to production and slaughter; and in the case of experimental
animals, forms of pain-inducing experimentation, as these animal bodies are asked to
respond to induced manipulation, pathogens and chemicals, all for apparent human benefit.
These practices apply to literally billions of animals: just in relation to human consumption,
recent United Nations data suggests that over 60 billion land animals were used for food in
2010 (UN FAO 2012). Robert Nozick describes the schism between our principles for the
treatment of animals, and our treatment of humans with the phrase utilitarianism for
animals, Kantianism for people (Nozick 1999, p. 39). If we take Levinas at his word that
ethical responsibility begins with human sufferingWe do not want to make an animal
suffer needlessly and so on. But the prototype of this is human ethics (Levinas 2004, p. 50;
see also Pugliese 2013, p. 121)then we might describe this economy of hierarchical
ethics as follows: useless suffering for humans; unnecessary suffering for animals. The
dignity of humans, the dignity which generates cognizance of human pain, the dignity
which when infringed allows us to see torture and realise the possibility that perhaps all
human suffering is useless, is structured by the knowledge that some suffering is deemed
necessary for animals, indeed it is precisely useful for humans; it has inherent utility value
and is needful(We do not want to make an animal suffer needlessly and so on)
(Levinas 2004, p. 50)). 4
The strength of Puglieses State Violence and the Execution of Law is the sustained
commitment to understanding forms of violence by humans against human populations,
while holding in view the reality of human violence against animals. I have encountered
few analyses of human violence which have so fervently kept violence towards animals
within the analytic frame. Throughout the book systemic industrialised violence against
4

It may be worth noting that Levinas offers us an innovation over Jeremy Benthams utilitarianism in
identifying not merely a human preference to avoid suffering but a simultaneous obligation to attend to the
suffering of others. Yet the anthropocentrism of Levinas ethical response reveals that the ethico-political
responsibility that is described is premised on the exclusion of animals from a community of ethics and
recognition. Benthams model, though beginning with rational self-interest, has, at least to its credit, an
immediate adaptability to consider and weigh the suffering of animals (see Bentham, XVII, n122) which
Levinas explicitly excludes.

animals continue to re-emerge and haunt the technologies of violence that are described: for
example the reminders of the holding pens at Abu Ghraib and their resonance with the
holding pens of industrialised animal containment (Pugliese 2013, p. 68); the use of animals
in psychological and physical torture in Guantnamo (Pugliese 2013, pp. 92-7); and the
transformation, through circuits of violent exchange, of the living body into the corpse
(Pugliese 2013, pp. 168-9). Pugliese establishes an effective frame of analysis in Chapter 1,
through a close examination of the intersecting histories of violence towards animals,
human slavery and racism: Racism is predicated on speciesism. At every turn in the
documentary history of racism, the spectre of speciesism has always-already inscribed the
categorical naming of the racialized other (Pugliese 2013, p. 41). Where Agamben
describes biopolitics as essentially a contest of hierarchisation between human and animal
(see Agamben 2004), Pugliese provides texture to this analytic frame, by examining in
closer detail the relationship between forms of violence, the subjects and objects these
technologies of domination create, and the forms of hierarchy that are generated, which
allow us to recognise the distinction between animal, racialised slave and human.
It is the latter set of problemshow we disentangle human histories of domination,
violence and racism, from histories of how we treat animalsthat is of particular interest to
me, and I believe connects closely to the problematics of dignity and its relation to
violence. Pugliese makes the following observation in State Violence and the Execution of
Law:
The difference between animal and human animal on the slave plantation hangs
singularly on an intra-species prohibition that is animated by the most fragile of
anthropocentric invocations: the only quarter granted to black slaves is to allow
them a circumscribed space in which their fungibility encompasses everything but
being served up as dinner on the masters dinner table. This intra-species,
anthropocentric prohibition operates as the term that cuts animals off from human
animal-slaves, while articulating the entry of human slaves into a political life
constituted by only one non-negotiable claim to the human: they could not be eaten.
(Pugliese 2013, p. 45, emphasis in original)
The section is remarkable in its clear articulation of the careful need to track different
histories for humans and animals and the role of status differentiations in producing
distinction between species. While forms of extraordinary violence towards humansin
concentration camps, in war, in slaverymay appear outwardly as similar to that exercised
towards animals in industrialised containment and slaughter, care must be taken to
understand the important differences, including the inescapable fact that annually billions of
animals are bred, contained and slaughtered precisely to be eaten. Indeed there is a whole
different political economy to describe here, which calls for a more detailed analysis of the
way that, for example, if we consider the operation of use and exchange values, supply and
replacement costs, there is obviously a radically different set of economies at stake between
human slavery and animal consumption for food. 5

5
The mere fact that the food animals body becomes commodified and exchanged in a particular way (as meat)
when it is translated into a corpse already indicates that we are dealing with different systems of violence and
economy. The dead body of the human slave, on the other hand, does not strictly assume an exchange value,
since it no longer has utility from the perspective of labour value. In thinking through these questions, I am
indebted here to work of Jan Dutkiewicz who is exploring in more detail the process of animal commodification
in food production (see Dutkiewicz, 2013).

However I wish to focus here on the way in which dignity might operate within this
economy of biopolitical heirarchisation. I have been drawn to a footnote in Karl Marxs
Capital Vol. 1, which amongst many curious footnotes in that work beckons much deeper
analysis. It is known that Marx observes that classical slavery is inefficient; capitalism
proves much more effective in containing and precisely controlling inputs to production,
including alienated productive labour, and therefore maximising potential surplus.
However, while slavery may have been inefficient, this does not mean that slavery was not
useful in generating status differentiation between different entities within the production
process that served a generalised function within social relations:
This is one of the circumstances which make production based on slavery more
expensive. Under slavery, according to the striking expression employed in
antiquity, the worker is distinguishable only as instrumentum vocale from an
animal, which is instrumentum semi-vocale, and from a lifeless implement, which
is instrumentum mutum. But he himself takes care to let both beast and implement
feel that he is none of them, but rather a human being. He gives himself the
satisfaction of knowing that he is different by treating the one with brutality and
damaging the other con amore. (Marx 1986, n18, pp. 303-4)
As Marx indicates here, status orientations and benefits are mutually co-productive through
violence. One beats the otherworker beats slave; slave beats animal and happily destroys
the toolto maintain a lodging place in the hierarchical roles attributed to, and generated
by, entities within productive processes. Status distinctiondignityis generated and
maintained through the use of hierarchically downward forms of violence. This downward
violence is inefficient from the standpoint of money profit: it damages stock, compromises
surplus, and is therefore, for Marx, a threat to productivity: this explains the success of
capitalism and its use of free labour. However this violence served a different purpose
within the context of social relations, in stratifying access to rights and privileges, and
differentially exposing living labourhuman, slave, animalto an arbitrary and violent
precarity.
There is a useful dynamic here to explore in our own situationality with respect to human
dignity. Dignity as a form of status differentiation creates an economy in generating
regimes of scarcity. The value of the human dignity within this economy rests upon its
relative scarcity; that is, the bare fact that not all living animals can claim humanity,
therefore humans can claim a dignity above other living animals.6 If our own dignity rests
upon the continual expression of violence towards other entities in order to maintain our
particular place within a biopolitical hierarchy, then to what extent do we fail to appreciate
the source of the problem by simply asking for dignity to be extended to those entities that
have missed out? Indeed, Ranjana Khanna poses this very question in relation to how
dignity might be understood in relation to its colonial and anthropocentric
conceptualisation:
If dignity is the category through which bodies attain humanness, how does that
concept shape the way alterity is understood? And if dignity is implicitly
maintained through wealth and predicated on the poverty of some, what kind of
violations have been (or will be) conducted in the attempt to maintain it as the core
category of humanness? What are the inevitable failures of understanding justice to
be achieved through the granting of dignity? If dignityinherent and
6

Aristotle proclaims in Logic, as if it were simply a matter of logic, that: Not every animal is a man; but every
man is an animal, (Aristotle 1952, p. 40 [25a]).

incommensurable value and autonomy, as opposed to value, means,

instrumentalisationis at the core of Kantian notions of humanness, it does not
follow that it is an undeconstructible guarantor of justice. To measure dignity as the
ground of moral action, or indeed of any notion of the subject and ontologization,
is, rather, to perpetuate a fundamental problem in the concept of responsibility in
the face of indignity. (Khanna 2008, pp. 43-44)
This might suggest a different project for analysis. Rather than seeking out ways to extend
dignity to animals, perhaps we need a closer analysis of the way in which dignity operates
as a regulatory norm for the conduct of violence, generating an economy of suffering and
non-suffering, useless suffering and unnecessary suffering. This process creates arbitrary
distinctions between generated categoriessuch as human and animal, worker and slave,
able and disabled, man and womanas artefacts of this applied violence. It is perhaps
telling that Pugliese closes State Violence and the Execution of Law, not with the humanist
project of extending rights to those who have been denied them, but with a more far
reaching challenge to the construction of the human as a transitory concept, by seeking to
open the possibility to establish ethical relations with those very subjects and entities that
have been outlawed from the ground of the ethical (Pugliese 2013, p. 226). I would suggest
that an ongoing project for torture researchers should surely be to understand not only why
torture against human populations persists, and the forms it takes, but simultaneously, why
it is that forms of violence towards animals, violence that might easily be rendered as
torture when applied to a human, lack any signification, and occur with such an intense
commonplace frequency that they appear as barely imperceptible to our ethical
frameworks? What is it about our conceptualisation of human dignity that has regulated and
given licence to this intense and relentless governmentality of violence?

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