Abstract
I show the two central techniques of modern scientific torture as paradigmatic not only of ‘the masses’ generalized quotidian experience of globalization, but as stemming directly from the Enlightenment legacy of the conflict between faith and reason. These two torture techniques—extreme sensory deprivation and stress positions—work to generate, on the one hand, ‘disorientation’ and, on the other, what I name ‘inferred autonomy.’ I argue that Kant’s account of orientation as a mediating analog between faith and reason is key not only for understanding this tension within the Enlightenment, but perhaps even more so for articulating globalization’s own internal contestation, particularly in view of faith as ‘orientation’ and in the simultaneous drive for ‘dis-orientation’ present in the technology of speed and in the ‘science of torture.’ I continue to expand this line of inquiry through Schelling’s account of ‘temporal orientation’ in The Ages of the World, suggesting that he offers us a latent messianism that stands as a prescient precursor to Derrida’s contemporary account of the structure of messianic possibility within the contest of globalization.
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- 1.
Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2000), 57.
- 2.
Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Genzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
- 3.
The scope and task of post-Kantian German Idealism, of course, was first delimited by Kant’s critical project: one that worked to curb the excesses of reason by determining what would count as legitimate objective knowledge, while relegating the rest to faith.
- 4.
The literature is indeed vast. In fact, much of Western philosophy since the Enlightenment can readily be understood as a reaction to it. See for instance, Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (London: Blackwell, 1991).
- 5.
The Ages of the World (1813) [hereinafter cited parenthetically as AW2], trans. Judith Norman, in The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, by Slavoj Žižek and F.W.J Schelling (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 121, 123.
- 6.
See note 17 below.
- 7.
Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror [hereinafter cited parenthetically as QT] (New York: Henry Holt and Company LLC, 2006). See especially chapter 3. Torture was developed and refined over the last 50 years through scientific experiments undertaken by some of the twentieth century’s most eminent psychologists at leading university research centers. For instance, The Guardian’s investigation into these experiments from the 1950s reports that ‘early photographs show volunteers, goggled and muffled, looking eerily similar to prisoners arriving at Guantanamo’ (QT, 35).
- 8.
Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, trans. Nancy Pearson (Boston: Shambala Publishers, 1997), 11.
- 9.
Immanuel Kant, ‘What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking? [hereinafter cited parenthetically as OT],’ in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10; Ak., 7: 137. Citations of Kant provide the pagination of the English translation followed by that of the Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlichen Preußischen (later Deutschen) Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols (Berlin: Georg Reimer [later Walter de Gruyter], 1900-). References to the Akademie edition are given by the abbreviation Ak., volume and page number.
- 10.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255–257.
- 11.
Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ 263.
- 12.
Derrida writes: ‘to affirm the coming of this event, its future-to-come […] all this can be thought […] only in a dis-located time of the present, at the joining of the randomly dis-jointed time’ (Specters of Marx: the State of Debt, and the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Routledge, 1994], 19–20). For Derrida on messianism, see Specters of Marx and the essay ‘Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone [hereinafter cited parenthetically as FK],’ trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 43–101.
- 13.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 74.
- 14.
Ariel Gluckman, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 15.
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 46.
- 16.
A detailed analysis of the messianic potentiality of non-dialectical contradiction from Hegel, through Schelling, Benjamin and Derrida would no doubt be instructive, but unfortunately stands well beyond the scope of this paper.
- 17.
While it was Fichte who first invoked the phrase ‘Physicirung des Idealismus’ in his Tagebuch über den animalischen Magnetismus in his search for a material proof of idealism, the search for this kind material analog was widespread. This is clear from Schelling’s own interest in the infamous ‘balm-leaf experiment,’ in which it was rumored that Oetinger was able to materially extract the essence or spirit of the plant. For more on Schelling and this experiment, see: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke, II/4, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1856–61), 207. For more on Fichte’s search for a material proof for idealism, see my work: Matters of Spirit: J.G. Fichte and the Technological Imagination (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2010).
- 18.
See above footnote.
- 19.
In line with this materialist reading of Schelling that aligns the material and the technological, it is worth noting that he also makes reference to the ‘technicism of nature’ (AW2, 162).
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Scribner, F.S. (2016). Disorientation and Inferred Autonomy: Kant and Schelling on Torture, Global Contest, and Practical Messianism. In: McGrath, S., Carew, J. (eds) Rethinking German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53514-6_6
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