Nothing Cures Malaise Quite Like Torture

Abstract

This chapter takes up the phenomenon of “earned opposition,” the role of torture and sacrifice in legitimizing speech, arguing that the desire for proof of suffering also inflects the political terrain in which demands for change are pressed. It puts forth the claim that these attempts to authenticate via suffering arise in the wake of the failures of the procedures of the regime of inquiry, on the one hand, and inflationary pressures affecting the visual in the regime of examination, on the other.